A people ordered for faithfulness

In the previous essay, I argued that Baptism and Holy Communion belong together as the sacramental shape of Christian life. Baptism joins us to Christ and his Body; the Eucharist nourishes that Body through common participation in Christ. Yet this sacramental communion does not remain an undifferentiated gathering. The Church must proclaim and teach the faith, administer the sacraments, care for the people entrusted to her, discipline those who harm them, and remain joined across congregations and generations. If the faith is received rather than invented, the Church must also receive an ordered way of guarding and handing it on.

These questions can seem merely institutional. Every organization eventually needs leaders, rules, and some means of making decisions. But ecclesial order is not simply the religious version of practical administration. It concerns what the Church is, where her life comes from, and how a local assembly remains part of the one Body of Christ rather than becoming the possession of its present members or leaders.

Simon Chan, a Singaporean Pentecostal theologian and Assemblies of God minister, is especially helpful here. He approaches these questions from within evangelical Christianity rather than assuming a traditionally catholic account of the Church. In Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community, he argues that much evangelical ecclesiology begins too readily with individuals who gather around shared beliefs, spiritual experiences, or a common mission. The Church can then appear to be a voluntary association that helps Christians worship, grow, and serve, but whose particular form is largely determined by effectiveness or preference.

Chan asks us to begin elsewhere. The Church is first a worshiping communion called into being by the triune God. God gathers a people, gives them his Word, joins them to Christ, and draws them into his own life. This means that the local congregation does not create the Gospel it proclaims, the sacraments it celebrates, or the worship it offers. These are gifts received from a Church extending beyond the congregation in both time and place. If the Church’s common life is received in this way, the ministries that serve that life cannot finally be self-created either.

The New Testament begins the question of ministry with Christ’s gift. St Paul writes that the ascended Christ gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12, NRSV). The purpose of these ministries is not to reserve the Church’s work to a spiritual class, but to enable the whole people of God to grow into unity and maturity. The passage ends not with a few members acting on behalf of a passive body, but with the whole Body “joined and knit together” and building itself up in love as each part works properly (Ephesians 4:16).

Paul gives a similar account in 1 Corinthians 12. There are varieties of gifts and services, but one Spirit and one Lord. The members differ precisely so that they may belong to one another and serve the common good. Ordained ministry therefore cannot be understood apart from the ministry of the whole baptized people. Bishops, priests, and deacons do not possess the Church’s apostolic calling in place of the laity. Their ministries gather, teach, feed, coordinate, and send the people so that the gifts of the whole Body may serve its common life and witness.

At the same time, spiritual giftedness does not make a person self-authorizing. The New Testament speaks of ministers being appointed in the churches, of gifts recognized through prayer and the laying on of hands, and of apostolic teaching entrusted to faithful people who will be able to teach others (Acts 14:23; 1 Timothy 4:14; 2 Timothy 2:2). It also attests bishops or overseers, presbyters or elders, and deacons, charged with guarding teaching, shepherding communities, and serving the Church’s common life (Acts 20:17, 28; Philippians 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:1–13; Titus 1:5–9). Vocation is a gift of God, but it is ordinarily discerned and received within the Church rather than declared by the individual alone.

Article XXIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles gives this conviction concise Anglican form: no one should take upon themselves the office of public preaching or administering the sacraments before being lawfully called and sent. The Ordinal of the 2019 Book of Common Prayer makes that calling visible. Candidates are presented and examined. Their doctrine and manner of life are tested. The people are given an opportunity to name an impediment, then asked to assent to the ordination and uphold the new minister. The whole assembly prays before the bishop lays on hands. Scripture is placed into the hands of the newly ordained as both gift and charge.

Ordination is therefore neither private spiritual certification nor ecclesiastical hiring. The Church receives a minister through public prayer and places that person under the Word of God, the promises of the office, and the discipline of the Church. Personal gifts remain important, but they are received within a form that does not belong to the minister. Authority comes with an office whose purposes and limits precede the person who holds it.

Anglicanism receives these scripturally attested ministries in the historic threefold order of bishops, priests, and deacons. These are not ascending degrees of Christian importance, but differentiated forms of one service. Deacons proclaim the Gospel and keep before the Church the needs of the poor, the suffering, and those otherwise overlooked, helping to turn the gathered Church towards the world Christ loves. Priests pastor local congregations through Word and sacrament, teaching the faith, declaring forgiveness, offering intercession, and caring for the people entrusted to them. Bishops exercise oversight across congregations by guarding the apostolic faith, ordaining and sending ministers, administering discipline, and sustaining communion across place and time.

The roles are distinct, but they do not become self-contained. Priestly ministry does not cease to be diaconal service, and episcopal ministry does not leave behind the proclamation, pastoral care, and sacramental life entrusted to the other orders. Each exists for the building up of the same Body. Their relation gives ordered form to a Church in which authority is exercised personally, yet never privately.

This still leaves an important question, especially for Christians formed in congregational or low-church settings. Why is a bishop needed? Why should a faithful local pastor and congregation not be sufficient to order their own common life?

The Anglican theologian Michael Ramsey, who would later serve as Archbishop of Canterbury, approaches that question by refusing to treat episcopacy primarily as a legal requirement or an ancient arrangement that must be defended because it is ancient. In his 1936 book The Gospel and the Catholic Church, he asks instead what truth about the Gospel the episcopate declares. His answer begins with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through union with the crucified and risen Lord, Christians are made members of one Body in which no individual and no local community possesses life in isolation. The Church’s outward order should express this inward dependence upon Christ and upon the whole people joined in him.

For Ramsey, the apostolic ministry serves precisely this purpose. St Paul’s authority did not rest finally upon eloquence, personal distinction, or success. As an apostle, he represented to local churches their dependence upon the Gospel they had received and upon a Church larger than themselves. The episcopate continues this apostolic function, not by reproducing everything unique to the apostles, but by giving the Church a personal and visible focus of continuity in teaching, sacramental life, pastoral oversight, and mission. In Ramsey’s compact formulation, “the structure of Catholicism is an utterance of the Gospel”.

Apostolic succession is therefore more than a chain of hands extending backwards through history, although the laying on of hands matters. It belongs within the succession of the Church’s whole apostolic life: the same Gospel proclaimed, the same faith confessed, the same Baptism and Eucharist received, the same pastoral charge handed on, and the same mission continued. The bishop stands within this larger succession as a sign that neither congregation nor minister begins the Church anew.

Here Chan and Ramsey reinforce one another. Chan shows why the local Church cannot be understood as a religious community constituted chiefly by the intentions of its members. Ramsey shows how episcopal order makes visible the local Church’s dependence upon the one historical and universal Body of Christ. A bishop serves as a visible bond linking a congregation and its ministers with Christians elsewhere and with those who received and handed on the faith before them. This trans-local authority matters when a congregation faces doctrinal conflict, pastoral failure, or misconduct: neither the local minister nor the congregation is the final court in its own case. Episcopal authority should therefore make the Church less captive to the personality of a local leader, not more.

The Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral places the historic episcopate alongside Scripture, the Creeds, and the dominical sacraments as a basis for the visible unity of the Church. Its description is important: the episcopate is to be “locally adapted” to the needs of the peoples called into that unity. Anglican confidence in this gift does not require us to deny the faithfulness or fruitfulness of Christians whose churches are ordered differently. It does require us to say more than that bishops are one permissible administrative preference. The historic episcopate is a gift Anglicanism has received as a sign and instrument of apostolic continuity and communion.

No account of that gift can separate authority from the manner of Christ. Jesus contrasts the rulers who lord authority over others with the life of his disciples: “But it is not so among you” (Mark 10:43). The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life for many. St Peter makes the same demand of those who exercise oversight. They must tend the flock willingly, not for gain, and not by domineering over those entrusted to them, but by becoming examples to the flock (1 Peter 5:1–4).

This is why episcopal authority cannot faithfully be exercised as solitary command. The Porvoo Common Statement, an ecumenical agreement between Anglican churches in Britain and Ireland and Lutheran churches in northern Europe, describes oversight as personal, collegial, and communal. It is personal because a bishop is publicly entrusted with responsibility that cannot dissolve into a committee. It is collegial because bishops act with fellow bishops and with the priests and deacons who share the Church’s ministry. It is communal because oversight remains rooted in the life and participation of the whole Church, ordinarily finding expression through councils and synods in which clergy and laity share responsibility for discernment.

Accountability is therefore not an alien restraint placed upon spiritual authority. It belongs to the authority’s Christian form. Bishops and other ministers remain under Scripture, under the promises they have made publicly, under ecclesial discipline, and under the judgment of the wider Church. The office is not validated by the minister’s claim to sincerity or divine calling, nor does ordination turn personal judgment into the voice of God.

Article XXVI holds together two truths that are especially important here. Because Word and sacrament belong to Christ, their grace does not depend upon the personal holiness of the minister. The sins of a bishop or priest cannot make Christ unfaithful to his people. Yet the same Article insists that accusations be investigated and that ministers found guilty be justly removed. Confidence in Christ’s action cannot become an excuse for institutional passivity or self-protection. An office given to guard the flock contradicts its purpose when it conceals harm or places the reputation of the institution above the people entrusted to its care.

Anglican order is therefore neither a guarantee of faithfulness nor a merely practical arrangement. It is a received form through which the whole Church seeks to remain accountable to the Gospel, held in communion, and equipped for mission. Its differentiated ministries exist to build up the baptized people in the gifts Christ has given them.

The point is not the preservation of an ecclesiastical system for its own sake. It is that no minister, congregation, or generation possesses the faith as a private inheritance. We receive the Gospel through ministries whose authority is itself received and answerable, in communion with those who came before us and with Christians beyond our local community. Christ orders his people so that the Body may grow into maturity, speak the truth in love, and be sent into the world. The order we receive is meant to serve the faithfulness of what we give.