Notes toward an Order of Ministry
An Ohio view on a general problem for Disciples of Christ ministers
Historically, in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) the role of ordained minister is intentionally weak, in terms of authority within the congregation they serve, or any weight to ministerial status in the wider church other than having a vote where other individual members do not, such as at General Assemblies.
Our weakness in how we understand ministry in the Disciples of Christ is essentially baked into our ecclesiastical cake.
Thomas & Alexander Campbell both saw excessive clericalism, or dependence on an order or class of ministers, as the heart of what had gone wrong in much of Christendom of their day, c. 1800. While they’re better known for their opposition to the use of creeds, catechisms, and confessions as tests of fellowship, in their day it was also their rejection of the role and authority of ordained ministers that set them apart.
Their “Restoration Movement” tried to form an early alliance with frontier Baptists, but from the outset the question of authority beyond the congregational level complicated and ultimately ended that alliance. Alexander was ordained January 1, 1812 by his father’s congregation, the Brush Run Church originally known as the Christian Association of Washington; when later that spring the decision was made by their leaders to seek believer’s baptism by immersion as the best expression of “Scripture alone” for their guidance, they found a Baptist minister, Matthias Luse, to do the baptisms . . . but it took a long night of discussion to get him to do them without first asking of each candidate to testify to their “religious experience,” and also their acceptance of the Philadelphia Confession of Faith, which was at that time the Baptist standard of belief and practice. The Campbells requested that they be baptized simply on their confession that “Jesus is the Son of God” and be baptized “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” which ultimately Luse did (some texts spell it Luce, but Luse is what’s on his tombstone & that of his wife as well as other family).
One aspect of the Campbell approach to baptism that still has resonance among today’s Disciples is they strongly argued, father and son, that a believer was baptized into Christ’s Church as a whole, not into any one congregation. This is why in many Baptist traditions, such as the Southern Baptists most common in the U.S., a new member may be rebaptized into each church they join, even if they’re moving from one SBC congregation to another . . . I know some military families who laugh about how many baptisms they’ve had even though they’ve been Southern Baptist their whole lives. Some accept letters of transfer, but rebaptism is not unusual. Restoration Movement churches in general see baptism as an act of the universal church, and so avoid rebaptism as general rule — although one marker between Disciples and more conservative Restoration Movement groups is that Disciples tend in the last 50-75 years to accept infant baptism without requiring immersion, while independent/Church of Christ congregations will require immersion of a new member who was “sprinkled” as a child — and before 1970 or even later, that was fairly common among Disciples churches.
Here’s where my thinking on the utility, and even necessity, of an Order of Ministry for the Disciples of Christ starts to develop. In our branch of the Restoration Movement (or RM in future uses), since 1968 we’ve had a formal, stated understanding of baptism as being into the universal church for which Jesus prayed in John 17:21. The other RM traditions began moving apart between 1890 and 1926 over so-called “open membership,” the practice of accepting un-immersed believers as full members of the body of Christ. The debate began in the mission field around work alongside Presbyterian and Methodist groups in places like China and India, but quickly came home to local churches, as in the question of whether a cradle Congregationalist (such as my father, baptized in 1934 shortly after his birth) would have to be re-baptized by immersion to come into church membership and eligibility for leadership positions like deacon or elder (which he was, in my childhood Disciples church, on Maundy Thursday of 1966, but he was very happy to be chair of the elders and of the constitutional revision committee which changed that in 1977).
So a Disciple, born and raised in our tradition, might be baptized around age 11 or 12, often around Easter or Pentecost, and then grow up and move and transfer to another Disciples congregation, but they simply would come forward to “place their membership” in a new local church, and at most that congregation would ask the previous church home for a letter of transfer. No rebaptism involved.
For all that I’ve written about baptism so far here, the sticky place in our polity where I believe an Order of Ministry can most clearly be seen as needed has to do with membership. Over the last twenty years, I’ve had the honor of teaching Disciples of Christ history and polity in a number of settings and for two seminaries, and this issue is the one that’s the most confusing for ordination candidates. When you are baptized as a Christian, we believe you are baptized into Christ’s universal church. As youth, we tend to not even notice much that church membership is simply “part of the deal” by which we become fully vested members of our congregation, by having been baptized there. Some, but very few congregations, will include in their membership or “pastor’s class” a discussion of church membership, but the tradition of calling our baptismal prep meetings a “pastor's class” is itself a reminder of our historic relative indifference to membership as a category, overshadowed by the weight we have put on baptism. Southern Baptists and other Reformed churches have had and are in modern active debate over how significant church membership is, and how to manage it (especially when to terminate it: try searching “regenerate church membership” and you’ll see quickly what I mean), but we have historically subsumed membership under the to-us more important question of baptismal status. “Open membership” was a pivotal debate in the 1920-1926 major split within the RM, but it was much more about the meaning and efficacy of baptism than to do with membership per se.
Ordination, though, is even more overshadowed . . . in part, because we have such strong roots in anti-clericalism. Early Alexander Campbell writings (mostly his “Christian Baptist” periodical materials, 1823-1830) are opposed to seminaries, Bible societies, and collaborative work in general: each local church calls and affirms their own plurality of elders, and sets apart by their own action from among that plurality their “preaching and teaching elder” (I Timothy 5:17). From at least 1820, it became a regular practice for RM districts to hold annual “minister’s meetings” where all the preaching elders, or “ministers” would deliver a sermon, and the others in the district would comment or reply, with a steadily increasing audience listening in of general church members. These also were called “School of Preachers” meetings, and soon became annual or even more frequent district events which Mr. Campbell, father or son, would often come and participate in, then deliver the closing sermon.
We had in those earliest days of the Mahoning Baptist Association, and later the state missionary societies, the role of “evangelist,” a person called or set apart by the association or district or society, to preach in a variety of locations — so by definition, outside of their home church. But fairly quickly, between 1820 and the founding of Bethany College in 1840, churches found themselves looking for preaching that went deeper, and could be listened to over a year and more with edification, than most locations could find among their own numbers. It’s said almost anyone has three sermons in them, but the test of a regular preaching minister is whether you still have a word worth sharing a month into your service. And in the spirit of I Timothy 5:18, local leaders started thinking if they were going to compensate preaching and teaching elders, they best find preachers worthy of the paying.
When Alexander Campbell founded Bethany College, he very intentionally did not include a Bible department let alone a ministerial training school. The “priesthood of all believers” meant that his educational aims were to train as many men, AND women (quite unusually for his day) in Christian leadership. But specialized ministerial training, let alone status outside of the Biblical offices of elder and deacon, he wasn’t interested in. Even the slightly earlier Bacon College in Kentucky was organized simply as a liberal arts institution, as was the somewhat later North Western Christian University, later Butler University. Bacon was established in 1836, closed in 1858, but was instrumental in the development both of the University of Kentucky and what is now Lexington Theological Seminary, the latter having roots to 1865; Butler’s charter was issued in 1850, began meeting regularly for classes in 1855, while its School of Religion wasn’t founded until 1924, becoming Christian Theological Seminary in 1966.
In that dense thicket of dates, the point is during the entire duration of the RM founding era — call it 1804 to 1866 — Colleges of the Bible or ministerial training institutions were emphatically and intentionally shunted aside. They were not a priority, and if suggested, they tended to be shouted down quickly.
The end of the founding era and the development of the institutional era that followed were when the saying became popular “we don’t have bishops, we have editors.” But when it came to looking for a good preacher we had not only editors, but college presidents (a couple dozen of them by 1900) and what we called then state secretaries, the administrative and judicatory role we call regional ministers today. In 1870 or 1890 or 1910, if your church was looking for a minister, and none of your local elders was ready or willing to fit the bill, you wrote letters to RM editors, college presidents, and state secretaries, asking “do you know any likely candidates for our pulpit?”
In a highly compressed form, this is how we “developed” our ministerial placement system. People who in most cases weren’t formally trained were not formally placed through a process that didn’t formally exist, because we still organizationally held onto a model of church that said we didn’t need what most congregations were looking for: a trained preacher with skills and qualities that would commend them to the church at large, or what other adjoining Protestant traditions called “ordained ministers.” To be fair, Methodists were going through their own version of this un-process with itineration and the post-Asbury development of a cohort of preachers who, unlike their forebears, wanted to get married and have families, so the Methodist ministerial process did some backflips to not do what it was, in fact, doing. We Disciples aren’t the only ones with denial issues!
That Order of Ministry idea, though. You see, when a Methodist feels a call to ministry, and the wider church represented by the annual conference accepts and affirms and formalizes that calling, to compress their process quite a bit, the ordained elder as a local church minister becomes a member of their annual conference. And for the rest of their life, in most cases, that’s where their membership in “a church” resides: with the annual conference. They may itinerate from charge to charge, serving a dozen churches in two dozen years, but they are never members of that local church. They are members of the annual conference.
In our institutional era, for the RM in general and Disciples in particular between 1866 and 1968, ordination to the role of minister, or “preaching & teaching elder” as commonly understood, was done on the local church level. Only from 1935 did the Disciples of Christ branch of the RM began to strongly recommend a post-graduate degree, aka seminary, and there’s a whole historical piece to be written on how A.B.s and B.D.s for a person aiming at ministry developed from an associates degree type two-year program to a full four year bachelor’s around 1900 at most Disciples colleges, and on into the Masters of Divinity (M.Div.) norm of the post-war era. But well into the 1960s and even beyond, even with a seminary training the ordination process was largely a congregational experience.
I’ll get personal here: my home congregation was and is very strongly “co-operative” in its history from the 1830’s founding right down through when we were preparing for my ordination in 1989. It’s a Disciples congregation through and through. But the idea that after “Restructure” in 1968, and the formalization of regions and standing and Yearbook status, that regions had a role in ordination, let alone a central place in the process, was a complete surprise to the elders in Valparaiso. As far as they were concerned in 1989, THEY were deciding whether or not to ordain me, and the fact that the regional Commission on Ministry was doing “nurture and certification” was just fine, but somewhat beside the point. And to their credit, they took the ordination interview process quite seriously.
What I’m pointing out here is that they weren’t that unusual at least in . It would be less likely to be the case with a congregation that has affiliated itself as a Disciples of Christ church since 1968 in today’s context, but I suspect it could still come up in some congregations. That’s our DNA: congregations ordain ministers. The regional role is more accepted and understood (and some churches left after 1968 in part because regions would not ordain their candidates), with the congregation participating in the process. Most Disciples churches affirm that a regional and even general role in setting standards and reviewing preparation for ministry makes for stronger members of the clergy.
The hole that’s left in our understanding is something my wife and I experienced in reverse, in a sort of positive way, when we went to the first church I served after our marriage, and as I began seminary. After the call was extended, and the first Sunday we were both present for worship, we came forward to place our membership . . . and the response was surprisingly tearful and appreciative. When we asked why people were getting so emotional, we were told “we’ve never had a minister put their membership here.”
In fact, we went through versions of that in the next two churches I served, where our initiative to join the congregation was received with a mix of delight and puzzlement, since it was so unusual. Why? Because for generations, a Disciples preacher left their membership with the church they were ordained by. Remember, before 1968 the norm (you can never say always or everyone with Disciples!) was that the congregation ordained you. So it almost stood to reason that your membership would stay on those rolls, and clergy who would die after 60 years of service would have in their obituary that they were a member of Suchandsuch Christian Church (where they were ordained) and attended South Succotash Christian Church (where they’d been living and worshiping for years).
Thirty-plus years later, I’ll admit that ministers placing their membership where they serve is now a norm, but that opens up a new problem, one where I also have a personal stake in the story. If you resign or retire into the community where you last serve, where does your membership . . . go? In our Ministerial Ethics, it’s generally understood that for no less than a year (and some regional ministers recommend longer than that) you don’t attend or participate at all where you last were called. And in our “Policies and Criteria for the Ordering of Ministry of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)” it is expected in general, and in most regions very specifically, that to have standing as a minister you have membership in a Disciples of Christ congregation.
So for me, I’m reminded of this betwixt and between status for ministers in that I have my membership, officially, with a church I can’t attend (at least for a while yet). And if I move my participation to another congregation in my community that’s, say, Methodist or UCC, technically I void my standing. Which means I stay legit on paper by maintaining a non-membership where I don’t go rather than carrying my active Christian witness into a congregation that might be aligned with our regional mission, but isn’t a DoC church.
Obviously, Methodists don’t have this problem because serving or inactive or retired, once ordained to ministry in the United Methodist Church (UMC) you are a member of the Order of Ministry and part of the Annual Conference (West Ohio in my neck of the woods). The nascent Global Methodist Church preparing to branch off from the UMC I think is going to find they will miss this ordering structure, as they move from itineration and guaranteed appointments to a more (if I may say it out loud) competitive structure echoing our own, and not the better parts of it. Being a member of an Order of Ministry I think they will find is different when you’re more directly competing for possible pulpits, but that’s also a post for another day.
Clergy gatherings, I hope I’ve made clear, have been part of our polity and culture from the earliest days of the RM. And I believe ministers need them on a local or district level (though in places like Ohio, where the district boundaries haven’t been redrawn since the Great Depression, some new mapping might be good). What we also have long had in a de facto sort of way, more in some regions than others, is an informal “order of ministry” where we show up for each other’s ordinations, weddings, or funerals. It may take the form of just a cluster of folks in red stoles who process in together, but that’s the visible form of a needed quiet coherence. And in some regions, less so in Ohio as was the case a few decades back, we may be competing against each other for open pulpits, but even then a healthy fellowship of preachers, a functioning Order of Ministry, can still provide mutual support as well as criticism, offered in love for the Body of Christ and to the sister or brother in faith, just as they were doing in those “School of Preachers” meetings back on the Western Reserve in the early 1800s.
Our de facto Order of Ministry used to consist largely of district meetings monthly, an annual clergy dinner for the region in January and a clergy luncheon every other year at regional assemblies, and showing up for fellowship times for various trainings or events at Camp Christian (plus not a few serving as counselors or assistant directors there, a collegial role that carried no small weight “back in the day”). If you had standing, and attended most of those twelve to fifteen occasions a year, let alone served on the Commission on Ministry or Regional Church Council, you knew you were a part of a group, a fellowship, a particular body: call it our Ohio Order of Ministry.
Today, if you serve part- or full-time an Ohio congregation, you may not have occasion or opportunity to do more than a couple of such gatherings, even pre-COVID. The question “how do I know I’m part of the ministerial fellowship in Ohio” for commissioned or ordained clergy is something the Commission on Ministry has tried to help patch over by asking their members to make at least annual contacts with a subset of listed clergy with standing — I’ve been blessed by a couple of such calls in the last year and a half — and the regional staff, starting with Alan Dicken and continued with Allen Harris, have tried to hold near-monthly Zoom clergy meetings.
What we don’t have is that sense of belonging, I fear. There’s a sort of inwardness we all want to avoid that can be seen in some clergy associations, a turning in if not a setting apart in an unhealthy way, but we all also have a need to know we have a spiritual hook to hang our hats on. Membership, for local churches, has become a very unpopular concept on social media in discussions about newer forms of congregation, and even longer standing churches have started to downplay the importance of membership as a standard for calling people to local leadership offices. And to be true to our Campbellite roots, there’s really not that much Biblical basis for “church member” all the regenerate church membership debates to the contrary.
But the expectation is still there in our “Policies and Criteria” and I believe the question justly still hangs in the air: where is a minister’s membership to be placed? Does commissioning or ordination put our formal membership status implicitly in a middle judicatory of the church, in a region or some other form of church beyond the congregational? And if we really aren’t quite members in our local church when we are serving them (think about all the documents that make the minister ex officio but never really a member or voting part of so many local churches), where are we directly connected to Christ’s universal church, the one into which we were baptized?
I believe we are moving into a period of change and adaptation in our church structures where it would make a great deal of sense for Disciples of Christ regions to form, formally, an Order of Ministry. The term or label can be various, and being Disciples I know they will indeed vary, but as far as our polity goes, I think we should make official what we’ve backed into, which is also a good Disciples way of being: those who are called into preaching & teaching eldership, Christian ministry in our tradition affirmed and set-apart through commissioning or ordination, should become members of a wider expression of Christ’s church. This might even be a group of the district or association expression in some regions, but as I’ve written elsewhere, I think part of the “period of change and adaptation” I reference above will be marked by the merging of regions into inter-regional fellowships and structures, the size and shape of which might more accurately reflect our numbers and economics.
But a Disciples Order of Ministry could be a form of “the church of Christ upon earth” that, as Father Thomas said, is also “essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one” (1809). One with the regional church and the local churches in Lord, faith, and baptism, but in its diversity as an expression of the Body of Christ it might not have formal worship together more than once or twice a year, it might or might not have roles and offices to govern their unique common life, but it could and should be a “membership” in at least a Wendell Berry sort of way; a place where all ministers know that their heartfelt expression of “here am I, send me” can be heard and shared by others who have had the same vision in ministry, of how God is calling each of us to have a place in an unfolding plan, where ministers might also have a place to rest and seek restoration ourselves — a place in our polity where with Jacob we might say “Surely the Lord is in this place. . . How awesome is this place!”