Ministry and Mission

Every congregation in the world is governed somehow, and three main answers have been given about where final authority under Christ actually rests. Each is argued from scripture by serious people; each has held for centuries; and each has a question it finds hardest to answer. Before the three, note the common ground, which is considerable: all three affirm that Christ is the head, that the New Testament names overseers or elders and deacons, that leaders are qualified by character before ability, and that authority in the church is service and not mastery, 1 Peter 5:3 and Mark 10:42-45.

The episcopal answer. Authority is carried by bishops, in a distinct order above presbyters and deacons, who continue the apostolic ministry of oversight over a region. Its texts begin with the translocal authority the apostles delegate: Titus is left in Crete to set in order what was unfinished and appoint elders in every town, Titus 1:5; Timothy receives accusations against elders, rebukes those who persist in sin, and is warned not to lay hands hastily on anyone, 1 Timothy 5:19-22. Neither man is the pastor of a congregation; both exercise authority over congregations and over their elders. James presides at Jerusalem and delivers the judgement in Acts 15:13-21, and Paul reports to him in 21:18. The historical argument is heavier still. Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to martyrdom about 107 to 110, already assumes everywhere a single bishop with a council of presbyters and deacons, tells the Smyrnaeans that where the bishop is, there the congregation should be, and does not argue for the arrangement, which suggests it was not new to his readers. 1 Clement, from Rome about the year 96, argues that the apostles provided for succession in the ministry. By the late second century Irenaeus can answer the Gnostics by reciting lists of bishops. Episcopalians conclude that the church universally adopted this order within living memory of the apostles and kept it everywhere for fourteen centuries, which is not the profile of a mistake. The practical argument is that doctrine and unity need a personal custodian who can be identified and held responsible, and that assemblies without one drift.

The presbyterian answer. Authority is carried by elders, always in the plural, governing the local congregation as a session, and gathered in graded assemblies with real jurisdiction over wider areas. Its texts start where the episcopal argument is weakest. Every New Testament church with named leaders has several: Paul and Barnabas appoint elders, plural, in each church, Acts 14:23; the Philippians are greeted with their overseers and deacons, plural, Philippians 1:1; Paul sends for the elders, plural, of the one church at Ephesus, Acts 20:17. And the words overseer and elder describe the same men in Acts 20, Titus 1 and 1 Peter 5, so the New Testament knows two offices and not three. 1 Timothy 5:17 says elders lead, and singles out those who work hard at preaching and teaching (older translations say rule), which is the basis of the distinction between teaching and ruling elders. Ordination is by a body of elders: 1 Timothy 4:14 speaks of the laying on of the hands of the elders, in Greek the presbyterion, a body of elders. And Acts 15 supplies the wider structure: a question arising at Antioch is not settled at Antioch but referred upward, decided by apostles and elders with the whole church, and the decision is then delivered to congregations that were not present, Acts 16:4. Presbyterians conclude that scripture shows shared rule locally and connected rule regionally, which guards against both a bishop who cannot be corrected and a congregation that has no recourse beyond itself. The Westminster Assembly set out the system in its Form of Presbyterial Church Government of 1645.

The congregational answer. Authority under Christ rests finally with the gathered members of the local church, who call and may remove their leaders and who hold the last word in discipline. Its texts are the ones where an assembly acts. Matthew 18:17 makes the church the final step, and Jesus says it to a group with no bishops and no presbytery in view. In 1 Corinthians 5:4 Paul instructs the whole body, when it is assembled, to act, and in 2 Corinthians 2:6 he calls the result a punishment by the majority. In Acts 6:3-5 the apostles tell the congregation to pick the seven and the choice pleases the whole gathering. In Acts 15:22 the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, decide to select men to send. Galatians is addressed to churches, not to their leaders, and holds the congregations responsible for the gospel they tolerate, 1:6-9. 2 Corinthians 8:19 has a brother chosen by the churches to accompany Paul with the gracious offering. Congregationalists conclude that the New Testament makes the local assembly the responsible body, that this is what the priesthood of all believers means institutionally, and that autonomy is a safeguard: a congregation that goes wrong damages itself, while a hierarchy that goes wrong takes everyone with it. The position is confessed in the Savoy Declaration of 1658 and in chapter 26 of the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, and it is the polity of most Baptist, Congregational, Anabaptist, Pentecostal and independent churches, which together are a very large share of the world's Protestants.

Now the hardest question each has to answer, stated without softening. The episcopal answer must explain why the New Testament uses overseer and elder of the same men in three separate passages, and why the single bishop over a college of presbyters appears clearly only in the second century. Jerome said as much himself, in his commentary on Titus and in his letter to Evangelus, observing that among the ancients presbyters and bishops were the same and that at Alexandria the presbyters chose one of their number and called him bishop. Episcopalians answer that a development under apostolic sanction is not an innovation, and that the Pastorals already show a translocal office in Timothy and Titus. The presbyterian answer must explain how one episode, at which apostles were present and in which the resulting letter claims the Holy Spirit's agreement, establishes a permanent court of appeal, and how much weight the single verse at 1 Timothy 5:17 can bear for a two-class eldership. Presbyterians answer that Acts 15 exhibits a principle of connected accountability rather than a one-off, and that the alternative leaves an abused member with nowhere to go. The congregational answer must explain Hebrews 13:17, which tells readers to obey their leaders and submit to them, and 1 Thessalonians 5:12-13 and 1 Timothy 5:17, and it must explain why the New Testament's fullest picture of a congregation exercising its own judgement is Corinth, which got nearly everything wrong. Congregationalists answer that elders genuinely lead while the assembly remains the last human court, which is how most Baptist churches now actually describe themselves, and that the record of unaccountable hierarchies is not obviously better.

One observation from practice, offered to all three. The labels describe where final authority is located, not how decisions are usually made. Most congregational churches are in fact led by their elders most of the time; most presbyteries rarely overturn a session; most bishops govern by persuasion. A student who judges these systems only by their constitutions will misjudge all three.

The New Testament describes setting apart with prayer, fasting and the laying on of hands. The seven are set before the apostles, who pray and lay hands on them, Acts 6:6. The church at Antioch fasts, prays and lays hands on Barnabas and Saul before sending them, Acts 13:3. Paul and Barnabas appoint elders in every church with prayer and fasting, Acts 14:23. Timothy's gift came through prophecy at the laying on of the hands of the elders, 1 Timothy 4:14, and through Paul's own hands, 2 Timothy 1:6. Timothy is told not to be hasty in the laying on of hands, 1 Timothy 5:22. That is the whole of the evidence, and everything that follows is an interpretation of it.

Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology treat ordination as a sacrament, holy orders, in three degrees: bishop, presbyter and deacon. It confers a permanent configuration to Christ, what the Latin tradition calls an indelible character, so that the ordained man acts in the person of Christ the head when he presides at the sacraments, and so that the ordination cannot be repeated or undone even if the man is suspended or laicised. Trent's twenty-third session and the Catechism at 1582 and 1583 state it. In Orthodox practice the ordination happens inside the liturgy at the hands of a bishop, and the people present shout Axios, he is worthy, which is not decoration but their part in the act. What is conferred, on this account, is not a licence to work but a standing, which is why questions about the validity of another communion's orders matter as much as they do.

The Lutheran and Reformed confessions deny that ordination is a sacrament and deny an indelible character, and then say more than the denial suggests. Augsburg XIV insists that no one should teach publicly or administer the sacraments without a regular call, rite vocatus, and Lutherans understand ordination as the church's public calling of a man into an office Christ himself instituted; Melanchthon, in the Apology XIII, allows that ordination could be called a sacrament if it is understood as the ministry of the word, which is a considerable concession. Calvin, in Institutes 4.3, treats the ministry as a divine institution, the calling as the church's act under Christ, and the laying on of hands as apostolic, useful and not empty, while refusing to make it a channel of an indelible grace. Anglicans are internally divided here, with the Ordinal and Article XXXVI on one side of the range and a robustly sacerdotal reading on the other, which is why the question of Anglican orders has been contested for a century and a half.

Free church practice puts the weight on recognition: the congregation discerns that God has already gifted and called a man, and ordination declares it publicly and commissions him. Some Brethren assemblies and Quaker meetings do not ordain at all, on the ground that the New Testament knows a gifted body and not a clerical class, and their argument is worth meeting rather than waving away, since hiereus, the word for a sacrificing priest, is never used in the New Testament of an individual Christian officeholder.

On the question of who may be ordained, this school argues the case somewhere else and says so plainly rather than half-treating it here. The Hermeneutics track, in the lesson Which Commands Are Culture-Bound, sets out the complementarian and egalitarian cases at full strength from their own texts, gives each side a named weakness and an argument its own scholars have abandoned, and declines to hand down a verdict. That is where this course does its work on the question. Go and read it before you form a settled view, and do not accept a summary of either position, including a summary from someone who agrees with you.

The texts are few and strong. 1 Peter 2:5 says believers are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:9 calls them a royal priesthood. Revelation 1:6 says Christ has made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, and 5:10 and 20:6 repeat it. Hebrews 10:19-22 says believers have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, and tells them to draw near. The veil that kept people out is gone, and the access every Israelite lacked now belongs to everyone in Christ.

Luther drew the conclusion in 1520, in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, where he attacked what he called the first of the three walls, the claim that the spiritual estate is a higher order than the temporal. All Christians, he wrote, are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except of office; baptism consecrates us all alike as priests. The practical consequences he drew were: that every Christian has direct access to God without a human mediator; that every Christian may pray and intercede for his neighbour and speak God's word to him; that ordinary work and civil office are not second-class callings; and that a council of the church may be summoned by someone other than the pope.

Now what he did not mean, because this is where the phrase is most often misused today. He did not mean that the ordained ministry is unnecessary. He argued the reverse, and argued it from the same premise: precisely because all are priests, no individual may take the public office on himself, since what belongs to everyone belongs to no one in particular, and therefore the community must call a man to exercise publicly what is common to all. He set this out at length in Concerning the Ministry in 1523 and never withdrew it, and the Augsburg Confession's insistence on a regular call is the same thought in confessional form. He also did not mean that every Christian's private judgement is a final authority in doctrine; he spent the last twenty years of his life arguing against people who thought it was.

The modern misuse runs in two directions. In one, the phrase becomes every member a minister, used to mean that no particular training, calling or accountability is needed for anyone to teach anything, which is close to the opposite of Luther's argument. In the other, it becomes a licence for private interpretation that no congregation may correct, which the Hermeneutics track has already dealt with under reading in community. The genuine content of the doctrine is access and vocation: nobody stands between you and God, and your work, your household and your neighbour are the place your priesthood is exercised.

Finally, the phrase is not the property of Protestants, and a student should know how the other traditions hold it. Lumen Gentium 10 teaches a common priesthood of all the faithful, grounded in baptism, alongside the ministerial priesthood, and says the two differ essentially and not only in degree while being ordered to one another. Orthodox theology says something structurally similar through chrismation, which makes every baptised Christian an anointed member of a royal priesthood who offers the liturgy together with the clergy. The disagreement between the traditions is about the relation between the two priesthoods, not about whether the laity are priests at all, and a Protestant who uses the phrase as a weapon has misunderstood what he is attacking.

Matthew 18:15-17 sets out a procedure of deliberate slowness: go to him privately; if he does not listen, take one or two others so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses; if he refuses them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, regard him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. Read the last clause in the mouth of the man who ate with tax collectors before deciding what it licenses. 1 Corinthians 5 is the worked example, with the assembled church acting in a case of public, unrepented and notorious sin, and Paul's stated aim in verse 5 is that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord.

The purpose is restoration, and the New Testament says so wherever it discusses the aftermath. 2 Corinthians 2:5-8 tells the same church that the punishment by the majority is enough, and that they should now forgive and comfort the man and reaffirm their love for him, so that he is not overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. Galatians 6:1 says that if someone is caught in a trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him with a spirit of gentleness, and watch yourself. 2 Thessalonians 3:15 says do not regard him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother. A discipline that has no procedure for the return has not understood what it is doing.

Then the thing that must be said and is usually left out. Church discipline is among the most abused practices in Christian history, and the pattern of the abuse is consistent: it runs downwards easily and upwards rarely. The New Testament anticipated exactly this. 1 Timothy 5:19-21 is not about ordinary members; it governs charges against an elder, requires that a charge be heard when there are two or three witnesses, orders that those who persist in sin be rebuked in front of everyone so that the others will stand in fear of sin, and charges Timothy before God to maintain these principles without bias and to do nothing out of partiality. A church that disciplines the powerless while protecting the powerful is not being cautious. It is disobeying a specific text, and the recent record of congregations and denominations of every kind on the concealment of abuse is the reason this paragraph is in the lesson.

The marks of a true church are a Reformation question, asked because the Reformers had to answer where the church was once they were outside the communion they had been born in. The Augsburg Confession VII gives the classic two: the church is the assembly of saints in which the gospel is purely taught and the sacraments rightly administered. Calvin says the same in Institutes 4.1.9, and adds that where these are seen, no church is to be rejected even if it swarms with many faults. The Belgic Confession 29 adds a third, church discipline, and so does the Scots Confession, which is why many Reformed churches speak of three marks rather than two.

The Roman Catholic and Orthodox answer is not a longer list but a different question. They do not ask which assemblies qualify as churches by a test; they ask who is in communion with the visible church that has continued, and answer in terms of valid orders, sacraments and communion with the episcopate, which is the material of lesson 3. So when a Protestant asks a Catholic what the marks of a true church are, the two are not disagreeing about the answer. They are asking different questions, and noticing that is worth more than winning the exchange.

The anchor verse gives the church its reason for existing in one sentence. As the Father has sent Me, so also I am sending you. The Latin for sending is missio, which is where the English word comes from, and the twentieth century recovered the point in the phrase missio Dei, usually credited to Karl Hartenstein and made current after the International Missionary Council's conference at Willingen in 1952: mission is first God's own sending, the Father sending the Son and the Spirit, and the church is sent because it has been caught up into that. The consequence is not sentimental. A church does not have a mission department; it is what the sending produced, and John 20:21 makes the pattern of its sending the pattern of Christ's, which in that Gospel runs through obedience, servanthood and a cross.

Now Matthew 28:18-20 read in its context, because it is quoted more often than it is read. Verse 16 puts eleven men on a mountain in Galilee. Verse 17 says they worshipped him, but some doubted, which means the commission is given to a group that is not uniformly sure. Verse 18 grounds everything in a claim made before any command: all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Then the command: go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. Then verse 20 closes with a promise of presence to the end of the age. Authority before the task, presence after it, and doubters included in the middle.

Two exegetical notes, one against each of the usual overstatements. The single main verb is make disciples; baptizing and teaching are participles describing how it is done, so the commission is not satisfied by conversions without formation, and a church that baptises without teaching all that Christ commanded has done half of what it was told. But the popular correction, that the opening word is merely a participle and should be rendered as you go, is an overcorrection that Greek grammarians reject: in this construction the participle carries the force of the imperative it is attached to, which is why translations render it Go. The BSB prints Therefore go and make disciples, and its footnote gives the Greek literally as Having gone, therefore, make disciples, which shows where the as you go reading comes from. The nations, panta ta ethne, means the peoples and not the modern nation states, and the promise goes back to Genesis 12:3, where all the families of the earth are to be blessed in Abraham, and runs through Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6, where the servant is a light for the nations. In the BSB, 49:6 prints You and Servant with capitals, which is the translators' reading of the Servant as Christ; the Hebrew has no capitals, and 49:3 names the Servant Israel, the point the lesson on Israel and the church took up. Luke's version at 24:46-49 and Acts 1:8 add the geography and the power, and Mark 16:15 sits in a passage whose textual standing is disputed, which a careful teacher mentions rather than leaning on.

Then the argument about proclamation and mercy, which is real and is narrower than it sounds. Nobody in it denies that Christians must feed the hungry, and nobody in it denies that people must hear the gospel. The dispute is about what belongs to the mission of the church as such, and about priority. The first position holds that the church is sent to do the one thing no other institution exists to do, which is to proclaim Christ crucified and risen, to baptise and to teach, and that this is what Matthew 28 and Acts 1:8 commission. On that account Christians are commanded as neighbours and citizens to do justice and love mercy, and the church forms and sends them to it, which its defenders take to raise the dignity of ordinary Christian work rather than lower it. Their historical warning is the agencies that took up development work and within a generation had stopped preaching. Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert argue this in What Is the Mission of the Church? The second position is partnership, stated in the Lausanne Covenant of 1974, which affirms in its fifth paragraph that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of Christian duty and in its sixth that in the church's mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary; the Grand Rapids report of 1982 worked out three relations between them, social action as a consequence of evangelism, as a bridge to it, and as its partner. John Stott argued the case at length in Christian Mission in the Modern World, where he takes the sending of John 20:21 rather than the commission of Matthew 28 as the governing text. The third is integral mission, misión integral, developed by René Padilla and Samuel Escobar and the Latin American Theological Fraternity and stated in the Micah Declaration of 2001, which holds that proclamation and demonstration are one gospel, that a deed is itself a form of witness and a word itself a form of service, and that separating the two distorts both. Its defenders read Luke 4:16-21 and the shape of Jesus' own ministry as the pattern, and hold that the priority question is a question about a church's resources rather than about the gospel. Their historical warning is the mirror of the first position's: a gospel preached in places where the preachers did not notice the poverty around them.

The rest of the church frames it differently again. Roman Catholic teaching in Evangelii Nuntiandi, Paul VI's exhortation of 1975, ties evangelisation closely to human liberation while insisting that it is not reducible to a temporal project, and the whole body of Catholic social teaching stands behind that; the preferential option for the poor, given its sharpest formulation by Latin American liberation theologians and by Gustavo Gutiérrez in A Theology of Liberation, was criticised in part by two instructions from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1984 and 1986 which nonetheless affirmed the option itself. Orthodox mission theology begins from the liturgy and works outward, in the phrase the liturgy after the liturgy associated with the Romanian theologian Ion Bria: the eucharistic community is sent into the world as the world's transfiguration, and Orthodox writers are correspondingly wary of proselytism among the already baptised. The World Council of Churches has its own stream, from its 1982 affirmation on mission and evangelism to Together towards Life in 2013. Learn the positions by their own names and their own documents, and notice that the caricature of each, a church that only talks and a church that only feeds, is what almost nobody actually holds.

What you can do now that you could not at the start of this module. You can state the person and work of the Holy Spirit from texts rather than from a grammatical trick, distinguish regeneration, indwelling, sealing and filling, and give four accounts of baptism in the Spirit in forms their holders would recognise. You can lay out the cessationist and continuationist cases from their own texts, name a weakness each has to live with and an argument each side has given up, and name the middle positions without sneering at them. You can explain what ekklesia meant, what each image of the church contributes and what it cannot carry, and how Rome, the East and the Reformation read the four marks of the creed, especially apostolicity. You can give the covenantal, dispensational and new covenant accounts of Israel and the church, and handle the word supersessionism carefully enough not to do damage with it. You can state the two baptism cases and five accounts of the Supper from their texts. And you can describe three forms of government with the hardest question each faces, say what ordination is thought to confer, and set out the main positions on mission.

One thing to carry out of the module. Every subject in it is one where Christians who love the same Lord have divided, sometimes bitterly and sometimes for centuries, and where the person you disagree with has usually read more than you assume. The discipline this module has tried to train is not indecision. It is the habit of being able to state the other view so accurately that its holder would say yes, that is what I believe, before you say why you think otherwise. A student who can do that will be trusted with harder questions than one who cannot, and will do less harm with the answers.