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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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May 2005
Bishops: A ministry of prayer and doctrine
Oliver O'Donovan
“It is not right that
we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. ...We
will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”
(Acts 6:4)
Why did the pastors that Jesus charged to “tend my sheep” insist on exercising their pastoral rule by prayer and the word? Why not decision-making? How could they simply leave the burden of church family life to the deacons to administer, and, as it could seem, turn their backs on practicalities? It is because they knew that the Church of Jesus Christ lives upon the twofold word that God has authorised: the word of prayer and the word of doctrine, the speech of man to God, and the speech of God to man.
For “God’s word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path” (Ps 119:105). No practical decision can be quite that. Practical decisions are particular, and always ambiguous: they make perfect sense here and now, but not necessarily there and then. Something may be decided on and undertaken, and its meaning seems transparent to those who decide it; but, lo and behold! everybody else takes it in another way, quite contrary to their intentions. But to speak the word of Christ is to shed the light that others may decide by; it provides the coherent matrix for all decisions.
Bishops cannot escape the making of decisions. Decisions, indeed, are the lot of every believer, lay and ordained; and for every believer we seek the grace of the Holy Spirit in the act of confirmation for the making of them. But it is precisely not to authorise decision-making that we consecrate a bishop. What we have in view is the special work of a bishop, the work of prayer and doctrine.
The interesting thing about the ministry of prayer and doctrine, is that although it seems to be two different ministries, its two aspects keep on melting into one. To pray for the congregation in the congregation, to pray just the right thing that the congregation needs to pray, and not to pray for all the things the congregation thinks about a little too much, what greater work of teaching could there be than that? To teach just what the faithful need to understand at this point, to lay out God’s promises before them for their comfort: what more powerful way of interceding could there be, pleading with God that they may be ready for the day of his coming?
That two-way speech, God to man and man to God, is authorised and authoritative. This God who has spoken to us and bidden us believe in him, bids us speak to him. His speech to us carries the whole authority of the divine being; our speech to him carries the authority of his saving purpose for us. In serving this two-way speech the bishop has authority. No other authority could any bishop, or indeed any apostle, have than this. No other authority can even be imagined in Christ’s church, for any other authority would be an imposition, unchurching the church by tyrannising over its Gospel freedom. But this authority guarantees the Gospel freedom of the community, for through it God enables us to call on him and serve him without fear.
Frank Weston, former Bishop of Knaresborough, on leaving his role as Archdeacon of Oxford, joked that he was “surrendering the reality of archdiaconal power for the fiction of episcopal authority”. Fortunately, he didn’t take his joke seriously; but you can see the point. The archdeacon’s powers are such as St. Thomas the doubter would wish to see them: plain and evident, cut and dried, founded in the working of the institution, defined in statutes and by-laws. The bishop, though not without such legal powers, needs to be able to call upon an authority with deeper springs than any statutory power. He needs an authority that comes straight from the presence and working of God the Holy Spirit in our midst. His is an altogether less predictable, more exposed role. Nobody can say in advance, when he opens his mouth, whether we shall hear the word of God and obey it.
But when that happens, deep speaks to deep. The words he brings us carry authority because we recognise our own authority there - the authority that God has given us to be his Church - safeguarded, protected, secured by God’s promise. In the bishop’s ministry we are brought alive to grasp hold of our own ministries together in Christ’s body. Our prayer for our bishops, then, is also a prayer for ourselves: “Quicken us, according to thy word!”
Let us apply this directly to the role of the bishop in controversy. God has not promised us that there will be no controversy in the church. When it arises we should not dismiss it impatiently as an aberration, caused solely by the dullness of heart and dimness of wit of those who don’t see things from the right point of view. “There must be divisions among you,” St. Paul tells us, “in order that those who are genuine may be recognised” (1 Cor. 11:19). We must recognise God’s will in this, and accept the challenge. The apostles were responding to controversy in the institution of the deacons; and in their response they not only talked about their ministry of prayer and teaching, they exercised it. They taught and they prayed: taught about the shape of ministry, prayed for those whose ministry was to be different from their own. In controversy what is needed is precisely the ministry of prayer and the word.
It is, of course, tempting to approach it in a different way. A decision is taken, which upsets people. For argument’s sake, let us suppose that the decision was not a good one and there are grounds to be upset. It is not in being upset, at any rate, that we go wrong, but in what we do next. We challenge the decision; we try to overthrow it. And then, predictably, those who were not upset before become upset, and try to frustrate us. Everyone is sure they have the last word to speak on how that decision should have been made, or should be re-made. The decibel level increases. But it was not the decision that everyone should have been concentrating on. It was the doctrine.
“Doctrine divides, service unites” an earlier generation used to say, getting it exactly the wrong way round. Very busy people doing important and valuable things always get cross with one another. Only the Word can hold them together, teach them to see their different tasks coherently as facets in the many-angled ministry of Christ’s people. And doctrine unites at any rate when it is ministered concretely, as the Good Shepherd’s word to his flock in its moment of crisis; for “the sheep hear his voice and the sheep follow him” (John 10:3f.) The church needs episcopal authority not to impose decisions or change decisions, but to draw the flock together, speaking the words of Christ as they bear on the point at issue. It is the riskiest and the greatest of all ventures of authority, but the one that most attests the nature of the church.
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So the
apostles spoke, defining their own wholly important and not to be
neglected ministry over against the other ministry of the church,
also wholly important and not to be neglected: the ministry of the
deacons. Ministry has a twofold shape, and many of us engaged in
ministry are constantly aware of the fact as we experience a kind of
tug-of-war on our attention. Our traditional threefold pattern, of
bishops, priests and deacons, grows out of this twofold pattern. The
bishop, as Hooker quaintly put it, is entrusted with a “chiefty in
government” among those who minister the word and sacrament. He is
to guide their ministry and take responsibility for it.|
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2005 |