What justifies our existence? By this I don’t mean our individual lives as human persons, but our continuing as priests, little sacramental Christian communities, or whatever. We often find ourselves in impossible situations like a boat in rough sea. There is always a way to survive… As priests, what have we to offer? This is a question I have been asking myself for the past couple of years. Will people go to hell without my saving them? I hardly think so. But, I might bring some consolation or happiness in a special or painful moment of life.
I wrote in Sessio and Missio that some Church bodies spend their time justifying their existence by trying to prove their canonical legitimacy in relation to the mainstream church that, in the Continuers’ estimation, lost that legitimacy. It is what some would call institutionalism. I believe we have to move beyond that vision of ecclesial existence to a more sacramental and spiritual basis. We often get so lost in technicalities, theological, liturgical or whatever, that people seeking the basics of Christian living get alienated.
Those of us who are married priests have only to ask our wives what they think!
Why be a priest? One is a priest for others, a pastor of souls. But there is not only the traditional parish ministry. There is also teaching, writing, blogging, taking part in ordinary life and trying to maintain a discreet Christian leaven. There is also the ministry of intercession through the Office and the daily Sacrifice of the Mass. The communal meal aspect of the Eucharist has been neglected in the past, but that doesn’t mean we have to abolish the Mass as a Sacrifice that metaphysically reconciles creation with the Creator. The sacrificial dimension of the Mass is enough to justify daily celebration, even if the priest has no congregation most of the time. The sacrifice and the community meal should be complementary rather than in opposition.
I read a lot about inclusiveness, for example of those some of us might consider marginal, but that alone is not enough. Inclusion has to be for a reason. I am opposed to churches being told they have to include this or that because it is someone’s political agenda. The Church is about spirituality and the common pilgrimage to the Kingdom. I am very concerned about ecology and doing something about the sea being polluted, but church is not the place for that. A part of our sailing club work is bringing people to appreciate the sea for sport, exploration, fishing or whatever – and then to participate in activities to promote environmental friendliness. Yes, it’s good for priests to get out of the sacristy and take part in life through work, play and social connections.
Like the sea for our sailing club, the metaphysical reality of God and our spirituality are for our churches. We can be relevant and justified in doing what we are doing insofar as we offer the spiritual and the transcendent as well as the immanent God. That is what I believe many people are looking for and don’t find in many of the mainstream parishes they look into on their way.
At one time, humanitarian work and the combat for human rights were the work of the Church. Not any longer. The Welfare State, public health services and social security have taken over. The system is highly bureaucratised and wasteful of resources, but it works better than the Church ever did. The churches no longer have the respectability they once had. They are starved of justification on the humanitarian and social front. Speeches about these matters by churchmen sound so hollow and devoid of meaning!
I think that independent sacramental churches have the relevance of being “pre-Constantinian”, relying solely on spirituality and the liturgical / sacramental life. No politics, no support from the secular authority, no way to force people to do or believe anything. One can try offering entertainment, but the TV does it better, and in the comfort of people’s own homes! The only way truth can be believed is by being credible. If this aspiration to the transcendental is not met, then people will not be interested.
If we are justified in continuing as priests outside the official canonical churches, themselves closing down at a rate of knots here in Europe (and I suspect elsewhere too), it is because we offer bread instead of stones, eggs instead of scorpions. If we cannot do that, then we might as well join the hundreds of thousands of laicised RC clergy, bitter souls for the most part. If we welcome the wounded, we have to do more than share their anger, but rather help them and ourselves to turn over a new page.
A fact we have to accept is that lay Christians find it much easier to stay in the mainstream than us clergy. That is why independent sacramental churches have higher numbers of clergy or candidates for ordination than laity. Is our purpose seeking out those who have canonical impediments in the mainstream churches? We have to remember that people can be wrong and justly punished for an offence against the Christian community. Having more open criteria for ordination cannot in itself be a justification for a church, for the obvious reason that some candidates for ordination are truly unsuitable.
One possible justification for the independent sacramental community is being a kind of “palliative ward” for clerics waiting for reconciliation with the mainstream Church they left. It takes a long time to get a response to one’s letter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, endless wranglings with canon lawyers to get them to plead mitigating circumstances, and so forth – yada yada. In the end of the day, if being in the official Roman Catholic Church is truly an imperative, you just go as a layman and do what they say (or don’t bother saying). We have indeed to ask ourselves why we got ourselves into the situation we are in. Were we looking for God’s Kingdom or something else? This is how I have been made to think it all out through my experience with Archbishop Hepworth and the TAC.
The experience some of us go through, at least those who resist the temptation to bitterness, brings us to consider that Christianity has diversified over the centuries for a good reason. There are the sacramental Churches and the ecclesial communities of the Reformed tradition in its myriad interpretations. I begin to see this diversity positively. My father is deeply agnostic and critical of religion, but he has befriended a Unitarian minister. My father speaks very highly of their universalism and openness, as well as their sincere spirituality. I have had wonderful conversations with Methodists and with a few of the more open-minded Evangelicals. In the independent sacramental world, I discover a new tendency, the resacramentalisation of the Unitarians, Methodists and Congregationalists. In the contemporary world, there are so-called emerging churches, à la McLaren. I have read McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy, and find real inspiration and sincerity in it. After all, it is a Catholic movement as happened in the Church of England, the Lutherans and even some of the Swiss Reformed churches.
It is a wider vision of the Oxford Movement, as it reaches beyond the national church and its institutions and embraces the diversity that was born of necessity in different times of history. Some speak of Free Catholicism as a reflection of the free churches of the Reformation. The great figure is this tendency was Ulrich Vernon Herford (1866-1938). He had been a Unitarian minister, and thus brought his experience and theological perspectives into a Catholic vision. I have been writing about Christian Anarchism recently, and this is all part of a new post-modern inspiration.
What I see in this is an aspiration to freedom, freedom of the spirit as Berdyaev put it. The emphasis is shifted from authority and jurisdiction to the shared belief in the sacraments as vehicles of divine grace. It is a spiritual approach of those who are for so many reasons alienated from the mainstream church, which are in the process of closing down though being unable to afford to maintain their infrastructures and institutions.
If a church bases is communion on relationships and friendship rather than laws and official agreements, we go some way to presenting something up to the aspirations of our contemporaries who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.
Many of us have been concerned for church unity and looking to the See of St Peter. What is the nature of this Unity for which Christ prayed. If it is getting people back into the ship, it is a futile exercise. Ecumenical dialogues have been going on for more than a century, and hardly any progress is made. The unity is situated elsewhere – because it already exists. This unity is supernatural, not material or a matter of horse-trading between career bishops. There will never be a united independent sacramental church any more than a single Continuing Anglican jurisdiction. That is one thing we have to accept, and the unity attempts can be more discrediting than the division. I have come to believe that the diversity is the strength of Christianity, not its weakness that impedes its credibility in a sceptical world.
We take our place in this enormous diversity, some of us in utter obscurity and confronted with the frustration of there being little or no demand to correspond with our offer. Indeed, I may be more of a priest at the sailing club than in chapel!
The Blue Flower 
Father, A thoughtful and thought-provoking post. I checked out MacLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy on Googls Books and read several of the readers’ reviews and my original enthusiasm was muted.
That’s why I have always said that there are some intuitions in the “emerging church” idea, but there are also deficiencies and fallacies. Of course, the uber right-wing conservative Evangelicals hate McLaren! I’ll read the book again (I last read it about 4 years ago and have forgotten a lot of it) and I’ll do a write-up.
I’ve been wrestling with this question for several weeks, and trying to come up with a way to phrase it that doesn’t sound offensive. I can’t think of a way, so I’m going to ask the question anyway and hope that no offence is perceived.
If for the sake of argument one takes as read the need for sacramental service to be offered by the “spiritual caretaker” of an independent community, then why not deacons or bishops? I have always understood the priest to derive his existence and function from his bishop (who is the true pastor of the community), and therefore has no meaning without him. I think this is seen to a degree in the RCC, where a priest will normally spend his life serving the see of the ordaining bishop. It is perhaps more obvious in the OC where a priest who transfers between jurisdictions is technically no longer a priest in the intervening period – although the normal practice is that the receiving bishop accepts him immediately through economy.
We only really see the development of what we understand to be priests (as distinct from bishops – who are icons of the Great High Priest) only began to appear when the Christian communities began to grow so vast and spread so wide that the bishops simply could not be everywhere at once and appointed deputies with limited authority to make their jobs manageable.
I can understand that a community which was Rome- or Constantinople- (or elsewhere) bound would restrict the number of bishops to make that process easier, but there are many communities who are not on that journey and may never be.
So, to those who have no link with their bishop, or only a tenuous one at best, why a priest?
Again, please forgive the poor phrasing of this question. I am seeking understanding, not a fight.
No, you don’t offend me. I’m not entirely clear in my own mind, but I am observing a few constants. One is that of seeking out “the true church” and some persons unable to identify with what they in good faith thought they had embraced. Another is what seems to be an excessively defensive attitude on the part of the mainstream churches. Another is that the Roman Catholic Church is becoming increasingly elitist and is retreating to the cities, leaving the countryside a spiritual desert. The Orthodox Church can only be of appeal to those western Christians who live in cities and have a certain theological culture.
We can try to deceive ourselves and seek stability in the RC Church, for example, but we still have to face the reality of the local parish except in a very few places where there is something very good.
For some of us, the choice is some kind of survival with what little we have, or to abandon Christianity as something that was never viable by its own merit and only ever depended on coercion and politics. If the second, we have only to rally to atheism and face the “reality” of non-existence after our death and therefore the meaninglessness of life.
But, I have to admit that much of the independent sacramental world has no credibility and is often characterised by human pathologies of various types. But yet, we are all weak, inadequate, and fall short of what we expect of ourselves if there is any idealism in us. Does it have to be all or nothing?
Sorry Father, I think you misunderstand. It’s not the viability or trajectory of these movements and communities that I am questioning (I wouldn’t be so presumptious). I’m asking why they are led by priests and not bishops. I’ve read some community websites where they describe themselves as “modelled on the Early Church”, and are still led by priests. Taking “modelled on the Early Church” at face value for a moment, why are they not led by bishops?
To use a very poor analogy: why create a community with a middle-management structure, when there is no senior management?
Yes, I’ve got your point. That is why there are so many bishops in the independent churches, and most are led by bishops. The episcopate confers sacramental autonomy and is exercised (ideally) in a very humble and simple way, so the man concerned will often style himself a simple priest except when specifically episcopal functions are needed. Remember, the earliest explicit distinction between bishops and priests came in the 2nd century with St Ignatius of Antioch. Before him, things seem to have been fairly vague, even considering the disciplina arcani.
But there is a stigma attached to the episcopate, especially if it is expressed like 19th century Roman Catholic prelates!
Thank you Father. That’s a very helpful way of looking at it.
On the other hand, a bishop without the support of elders (presbyters – priests) sitting with him would seem to be something of an anomaly, something other than the polity reflected and assumed in the Acts, in the Epistles, and in the Revelation. It may indeed be so that the offices of episkopos and presbyteros are not clearly defined in Scripture; it may also be true that there is generally an assumption that there is (locally) a leader or overseer spoken of in the singular (the bishop), the frequent reference to ‘elders’ in the plural seems to call into question our expectation of a monarchial episcopate, or, for that matter, of a monarchial pastorate such as is nearly universal among Christians today. God is our only King, but even He does not present a monarchial face. He is Trinity in unity, modeling in part the collegial approach. As for His Church among humanity, well, I see neither justication for an authoritarian centralization or for what is known as autocephaly or self-rule. I’m not sure what a truly scriptural polity would look like in practice, but it would surely not look like the bureaucratic centralization of the RCC, nor would it look like the atomization of the ISM. As I think of it, both of these extremes have in common the assumption that the church is primarily defined by the clergy. I consider this to be false at the core. The church is the body of Christ and clergy only exist as a result of the existence of that body and clergy are no more than laity entrusted with a specific role.
Just for the sake of argument, does a priest who no longer has a parish ministry lose the priestly character? In Professor Cyrill Vogel’s famous book about the inamissible (not inadmissible, the spelling is correct) character, a priest who is no longer under a bishop and ministering to a congregation loses the priesthood ontologically. However, by a quirk of contradiction and cognitive dissonance, he would not have to be reordained on being reconciled.
Is it normal for a priest to put his priestly character away in the closet with his cassock and think nothing of it? Is the priesthood something you just switch on and off. Perhaps it is, but don’t ask people to think about vocations to the priesthood.
This is one consideration that could give credence to a renewed form of Catholicism emerging out of non-conformist Protestant denominations that acquire the Apostolic Succession and the Sacraments. After all, Anglicanism until the mid 19th century was pretty “Protty” outside university divinity faculties. Perhaps the key is the model of the non-conformist congregational church and the early monastic communities.
Should we just do away with sacramentalism and join a nice friendly Mennonite or Quaker community or stay “home alone”? Just for the sake of argument???
What do you think?
The “problem” of understanding priesthood is complicated once we start talking about it as something ontological. Of course, everything is ontological, in the sense of it being able to be understood under the aspect of distinct “being”, and so in a sense, priesthood is neither more nor less ontological than anything else. But the issue is, does a person ordained “become” something enduringly special and distinct at the moment of ordination? Or is ordination primarily to be conceived of as a “commissioning”? Or something of both?
I often find it useful to look closely at the roots of words to orient ourselves in questions of this kind. It is interesting that we use the word “priest” in English for someone who ministers ‘sacraments’ and celebrates Mass. The word “priest” is derived, as we all know from the Greek ‘presbyteros’ which is turn appears to be composed of a root or element “pres” which has something to do with “old” or “aged” or “ancient”, and “bē” which has links with the concept of “life”, “force”, “strength” etc from “bia”. Thus we understand that “presbyter” meant primarily “old man” or “elder” or “senior-to-be-respected”. However we use the word today mainly in the sense of “sacerdos”, from the root “sac” for “dedicated”, “devoted”, or “holy” so that it means “dedicated person” (man or woman), “consecrated person” or even “person-dedicated-to-holy-things”. I wonder why we did not use a word derived directly from the latter?
I think it leads to various spiritual problems if one thinks ordained persons are “different”. I think it is much healthier to see priesthood as “action”, not a “state”. In other words, a priest is someone who is commissioned and is dedicated to act as a sacramental channel of grace, but it is in sacramental grace-channelling that we see “priesting”. We do not see it when the priest is sitting down watching TV. Priesthood is not therefore something that is capable of being spoken about as something one can put on or take off, for it is a ‘happening’. Or, put another way, to say priesthood is something a person who is ordained “has” is to commit a kind of category error.
I am inclined, myself, to think that a call to priesthood is a subjective desire and conviction to act as a channel of grace to others, and that whilst it becomes a deep existential movement within a person, it does not create a sub-special, or new kind of, Christian, let alone human. All Christians are called to be grace-channellers, but few “dedicate themselves” to the call. Ordination is a public act of dedication that in reality began as a process when the future “sacerdos” commenced their special formation. In this way, the call to priesthood is what is capable of being enduring, renewed through the continuing nourishment of desire, love of God and fellow. In a sense, this does not require the enduring ecclesial structure in which they might first have pursued the calling. I do not myself see that it necessarily requires an ‘episcopos’ (“over-seer”) because ultimately the call to channel grace is a response to conviction about God, not to a Church; ‘grace’ is another word for “God”, and a priesthood consists of channelling God, not Church.
Moreover, in my thinking, an ordained person never ceases to be an integral, evolving human, first and foremost, and if they decide to no-longer “dedicate” themselves to holy things, it seems quite healthy and coherent to me that they can cease to think of themselves as “priests” without punitive baggage being imposed on them.
This is a subject of much interest and various tangents and worthy of a lot of reflection, so I offer these thoughts as a purely personal take on the topic. I’m interested in how others view the historical way we have tended to talk about priesthood and the place of bishops and its implications for the way we view the internal divisions within churches and traditions and the problems of religious dislocation and alienation we are all capable of suffering.
…does a priest who no longer has a parish ministry lose the priestly character?
No, But is the priestly character appropriately exercised without a congregation? Under what conditions and for what purpose? Or is it perhaps the character which makes him able to fulfill his role IN the congregation?
Is it normal for a priest to put his priestly character away in the closet with his cassock and think nothing of it? Is the priesthood something you just switch on and off.?
The question is whether and when one’s priesthood has a legitimate expression. IF (and I am only tentatively answering the “if”) it is properly exercised only in a congregation, then it is not switching it off or thinking nothing of it to lay the practice aside until one can find the proper expression of it, in which case being mindful of ones priestly character should be a motivation to find such an avenue, a congregation, or a relationship with one. (In all this I’m not speaking to the issue of “private” Masses – that’s another question entirely – but to the issue of relationship to the Body)
Perhaps it is, but don’t ask people to think about vocations to the priesthood.
Yes, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I think it has been a mistake to talk so much about a vocation to the priesthood, but rather about a vocation to service. One does not need to be a priest to fulfill a vocation, and, as I believe, a priest does not need to do specifically priestly things to fulfill his divine calling. Your comment that you are as much (perhaps even more) a priest at the sailing club as in the chapel certainly resonates with me.
Should we just do away with sacramentalism and join a nice friendly Mennonite or Quaker community or stay “home alone”? Just for the sake of argument???
Sacraments are, of course, at the heart of the Gospel, but to what extent are they valid or licit outside a visible body of believers? Many Orthodox simply deny that there is grace in Mysteries celebrated outside what they see as the Church. Augustinian theology makes validity to be a matter determined by external factors other than communion with the Church — BUT Rome has always said (and still does. though with less force) that sacraments outside what they see as the Church are illicit. I think there is much legitimate to be said about both views, but not about the narrowness of the respective definitions of “Church”.
Dear Ed, I thank you for your two contributions, to which I have not been unsensitive. I’m not sure whether some of the things you write are “Orthodoxy for Anglicans and Roman Catholics” or “old high-church” Anglicanism. Anyway, I won’t dispute you for expressing what you believe to be right.
I am still influenced by medieval Catholic notions of the priesthood and monastic spirituality. Whether or not it is possible to extend monastic spirituality to those who are not monks is a question that needs thought and study.
I would like to quote from an independent bishop’s pastoral letter to add to this conversation:
John P. Plummer, The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement, Dallas 2004, p. 115.