Greg Ogden - Unfinished Business: Returning the Ministry to the People of God

S INCE THE RELEASE OF The New Reformation some thirteen years ago, much has happened to confirm the prophetic message of this book that we are living in the time when we would see the promise of the Reformation fulfilled. It has been broadly observed that the first Reformation of the early 1500s placed the Bible in the hands of the people and that the Second Reformation will place the ministry in the hands of the people. I thought I was being daringly prophetic in my predictions that we were in the midst of a new Reformation. In retrospect, I see that I greatly under estimated the change that was happening in the church, which is in major part a reflection of the shift that is taking place in Western culture.

What I now see is that this shift to a people-centered ministry is part of the seismic Western drift from a Christendom to a post-Christendom model of the church. For some 1,600 years, from the reign of Constantine in the early fourth century to somewhere in the 1960s, Christianity existed at the very least in a supportive and favored place in those nations with European roots. Though the climate has been changing slowly over the last two to three hundred years, only in the last decade has it dawned on church leaders and Christian academics that we are now in a new missional environment. The church of Jesus Christ has been largely marginalized and rendered powerless. We no longer enjoy a respected and favored position in Western culture.

This relatively recent setting has caused us to ask: Who are we as the church of Christ? What is our identity? How are we to navigate these waters where the surrounding culture is now a mixture of some indifference, some supportiveness, and some hostility? In many ways this new context makes an updated version of this book all the more relevant. We live in a time of transition, in the overlap of paradigms. The Christendom paradigm viewed the pastor primarily as the chaplain or caregiver. It assumed a maintenance setting. The task of the church was to pass on the faith intact from one generation to the next in a church supported by a friendly culture.

Over the centuries, the roles of pastors in the Christendom model were finely honed. The pastoral office was highly regarded and clearly understood. The people of God knew what a pastor was supposed to be and do. The pastoral role under Christendom was to be a teacher/caregiver. To be successful as a pastor you needed to fulfill four roles fairly effectively, and the people of God would be content.

1. Teacher of doctrinal tradition There was a time in the not-too-distant past when pastors chose to be ordained into a denomination based on its distinctive theological heritage. It was the pastors responsibility to keep those distinctives alive through their teaching and preaching ministry. This was the time when denominations had a theological heritage of which they were proud and clear. Presbyterians had a Reformed tradition; Lutherans looked to Luther as their theological father figure; Methodists were Wesleyans; Baptists and other Anabaptist groups were proud that they truly saw the implication of the Reformation.

Not only did pastors do an effective job in preserving their theological and worship distinctives, but people actually identified with their tradition. So if a Lutheran family moved, the first thing they did was to look for a Lutheran church in their new community. Not just any church would do, but a Lutheran church was where they felt comfortable. They would leave their tradition only under dire circumstances. It sounds like a quaint holdover to institutional loyalty, but this was not too long ago. It was the job of the pastor to bear the weight of that tradition.

2. Caregiver Being a pastor is associated with pastoral care. Pastors are to be present in peoples lives at the times of crisisillness, grief, and quality-of-life-threatening incidents such as unemployment or divorce. Gods people have come to expect that there is no one like the pastor who can tend to their needs when life turns south. If there is an emotional contract that people have with their pastors, it is that they show up in times of crisis. Only the pastor is qualified to meet their caregiving needs. Gods people can help, but they do not match up to the pastor.

3. Public symbol of the sacred The clergy represented the institution of the church in public life. They were public symbols of the sacred. Loren Mead writes about the symbol of being an Anglican priest in England just a generation ago: