Sarx

Continuing in the serialised posting of Rick Fabian’s Worship at St Gregorys

A few reformed churches (Anglicans, Swedish Lutherans) kept the monarchical episcopate and the aristocratic Roman ministry chain, though now on a local level, and much simplified. Some churches (including the American Episcopal Church) even began electing their bishops and presbyters locally once again. In these bodies, however, the ordained diaconate remained a mere step toward the presbyterate, and ordained ministries still excluded women. Other reformed churches revised the traditional pattern more radically: deacons and presbyters became temporary rather than lifetime officers, and the monarchical episcopate vanished. Yet amid so many changes, the reformed denominations — including the Roman Catholic denomination, which reformed more conservatively the following century— still kept Cyprian’s view of the bishop’s role. They kept, too, the medieval misunderstanding that bishops contract apostolic succession from each other’s hands, like a benign virus, instead of inheriting it through the church they served, like a new graft on the local Christian vine. Even those denominations that dropped monarchical bishops reckoned they had dropped apostolic succession at the same time: a misapprehension that has bedeviled ecumenical discussion ever since.

Twentieth century ecumenists and liturgical reformers have taken a more functional approach, honoring the common work of ancient institutions, rather than championing their disparate forms. Modern study of Old Testament thought, and the New Testament thought based on it, has opened all churches’ theories of ministry to review. Meanwhile, historical scholarship suggests that diversity, rather than uniformity, is our authentic inheritance from the early Church, and flexibility may be our most faithful response to tradition. We may rejoice, therefore, that even churches that boast of preserving “the ancient threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons” in fact continue to develop novel variations.

In the American Episcopal Church, for example, where the diaconate was until recently only a vestige, it has revived in two thriving forms: one a lay ministry and one an ordained vocation. The Episcopal Church created a lay order of deacons in the 19th century: inaccurately called “lay readers,” as they were expected to “read” the Prayer Book offices when no priest was available, in fact they now do deacons’ work in nearly all Episcopal parishes—the Byzantine diaconal pattern—far outnumbering ordained deacons.

Gender and denominational walls surrounding both lay and ordained liturgical ministries have widely leaked and crumbled. Within many protestant churches, including at least five Anglican provinces, women now serve in all liturgical ministries including the episcopate. A growing number of ecumenical covenants —with Mar Thoma, Lutheran, and Philippine Independent churches, for example— have produced formally shared eucharistic ministries; while informal sharing ranges wider still, often including Roman Catholics.

To skeptics such ecumenism may look like rationalizing bureaucracies only, through a shallow kiss-and-make-up after long entrenched religious warfare. In practice, however, it is likely to change the internal workings of every church, because modern ecumenical co-operation has set us on a different course from previous reforms. Far from shuffling lay and clergy prerogatives in renaissance fashion, the present ecumenical reform movement aims to empower every ministry and church authority within the diverse apostolic tradition—the tradition this whole messianic body inherits as a gift of Jesus Christ’s royal and priestly Spirit, which brings new life to the world.