Unordained

Last weekend I attended a national gathering of my church. It was an ordination service – a consecration of people to ministry within my corner of the Christian faith.

I found myself amongst my colleagues. Here, amidst the greetings and the reunions, I discovered our deconsecration. We were the Presbyters – those appointed to lay hands on the Ordinands. But in between laying on hands and taking Holy Communion we spent the afternoon comparing financial statistics and numerical attendance; we dropped names and compared influence; we gossiped shamelessly; we wore the clothes of royalty, and left the event in cars of luxury. And I felt……deconsecrated.

Today I found another pastor who is as distressed as I am: Eugene Peterson, writing in Working the Angles, tells of pastors who have become

"a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper's concerns--how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money. Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists”

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You see – I discover these things in my heart too. I am seductively distracted by these things. But I am determined to be different. I see how this church is turning me into something that I do not want to be. And so if being an ordained minister is about church politics, status and power, then I do not want this. So I hereby declare myself ‘unordained’…..cut off from this kind of church practice.

But there is a glimmer of hope: those who made their ordination vows last weekend bring a breath of fresh air with them. I celebrate new colleagues such as Ecclesia, and Hilton, and Delm. They seek to be different. And I look to them to keep reminding me that the pastoral ministry is a response to the call of God, and not of this deeply flawed institution. Pray for me, that I may respond to life with a God pleasing integrity.