A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Michael Green, pictured on the cover, is Professor of Evangelism at Regent College. This article first appeared as a chapter in Freed to Serve, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1983, and appears by permission.
There are few aspects of Christianity which need a more radical reappraisal than the purpose and function of its ministry, if we are going to be obedient to the call and commission of Christ in a fast-changing society. The trouble is twofold: we are disobedient to the directions Christ has given us about ministry, and we are failing to meet the needs of contemporary society. We are missing out at both levels.
Consider the image of the Christian minister in the modern mind. It is perhaps a bit better in America [compared to England] where there is a high level of churchgoing and a great deal of vital Christianity, but in many parts of the Western world the image is deplorable. The Christian minister is thought irrelevant to ordinary life. He is involved in protest marches. He keeps an ancient building going. He recites services on Sundays but nobody knows what he does for the rest of the week. He is seen as a figure of fun, a meek and mild little fellow attempting to teach Christianity to middle-class women and children but steering clear of the real world of men. He seems to be. and often is, a man unsure of his role in a society that has left him behind.
If Christian leaders are on the whole not very successful at relating to modern society, they are even less successful at implementing the teaching of the New Testament on Christian ministry. There is no single area where we have departed more signally from the indications given in these foundation documents of the early church. Here are a dozen or so of the more obvious contrasts.
1. In the New Testament, ministry had to be received before it was exercised. You had to let Christ serve you before you attempted to do anything for Christ. Simon Peter learned this lesson at the foot washing. He was most indignant at the suggestion that Jesus should wash his feet: thoroughly embarrassing. But he had to learn that unless he allowed Jesus to wash his feet he could have no lot or part with him. This passage (John 12:8ff) enshrines the first basic principle of ministry in the New Testament. Nobody can serve Christ until he first lets Christ serve him. We all have to undergo the humbling, embarrassing business of being washed and cleansed by Jesus. Until then we are useless. But in most churches of the Western world it is perfectly possible to get yourself ordained without having had any vital experience of the cleansing of Christ. You can become a minister of the grace of God without every having experienced it. No wonder such ministry is ineffective.
2. In the New Testament, all Christians were called to ministry, not some. That is astonishing to us! We have grown used to the idea that there are the ordinary Christians, who sit in the pew on Sundays, and the extra-special Christians who become missionaries or clergy or somehow they are different. They, and not the rest of us, are the ones called to serve. When we think of Christian ministry today we instinctively think of a man ordained to the ministry of the word and the sacraments. So you either are a minister or you are not.
It was very different in New Testament days. They knew nothing of any such distinction. All Christians are called to serve Christ, all are commissioned for ministry. For the New Testament writers the Christian ministry is coextensive with the Christian Church.
3. In the New Testament, ministry was a function, not a status. It was a verb, not a noun. We have got ourselves tied up in talk about indelible character in ordination and the like: they spoke of the need by love to serve one another, to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ. Jesus had drawn the contrast between the world’s ideas of leadership and his own. “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them … But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves … I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:25-27). It is not the status of the agent but the nature of the action which constitutes Christian ministry.
4. In the New Testament, ministry was something corporate and shared. With us it is nearly always exercised singly or at best in pairs. We never find a presbyter in the singular in the New Testament. Always he is a member of a team. This was true of the apostles themselves; the twelve functioned as a team, and they set up local leadership in the same way. We refuse to follow their example, and then complain because our minister fails to be omnicompetent. This is a serious situation. It is bad for the man himself to be made to feel he is the sole minister. It may lead to despair, arrogance, blindness to the realities of a situation, or inhibiting the gifts of others. It is bad for the church members. They may well become critical and lazy. When the different limbs in Christ’s body are not allowed to exercise their Godgiven ministry, they are harmed and their gifts atrophy. Team leadership is much harder to achieve, but much more fulfilling for one and all when it is achieved. It is, moreover, practical politics in any church, however small.
5. In the New Testament authorization followed ministry rather than preceded it. We tend to think of ministry as something exercised in and for the church only after proper authorization. The early Christians saw all ministry as a gift from the ascended Christ for his Body through one of its members; the authorization followed once a person had shown that he had received the gift. If we think about it at all, we assume that the ordination will convey the gift. All too often it does not!
6. In New Testament days, character, not intellect, was the most important condition. If you look at the qualities laid down for those who would exercise oversight in Christian assemblies (Titus 1:5-9; 1 Tim. 3:1-13; 1 Pet. 5:1-5) you will find that they do not concentrate on passing examinations and collecting an adequate amount of book learning. Instead they are much more concerned with the person’s maturity, his control of temper, his family life and sex life, whether or not he drinks a great deal, and whether he has a gift of shepherding others humbly and tenderly.
7. In the New Testament, they selected their leadership from men of experience. No young man, no novice was considered. We ordain young men with no experience. We pay comparatively little attention to a candidate’s morals. Provided he passes his college examinations he can be a drinker, bad tempered, greedy, taciturn and solitary: there is still room for him in the ordained ministry. The selectors do not even interview his wife and family, let alone discover whether or not he can manage his own household before being let loose on the household of God. And practically no attempt is made to find out whether or not the candidate enjoys a good reputation among unbelievers – something the early Christians found important.
This is of course because we see the ordained ministry as a career structure. Should we be doing anything of the sort? Is ministry much to do with books and memory’, as we emphasize? Or is it more a matter of life and people, as the ancients thought? The question is at least worth asking. It affects training fundamentally.
8. In the New Testament, men were trained on the job as apprentices, not in a college. To be sure, colleges were not available to But college training did not come in until the nineteenth century. Was nobody properly trained until then? In the New Testament days, and for much of Christian history, men were trained on the job, in the fires of controversy, in the stress and strain of life. We take young men away from their natural milieu into semi-monastic institutions based on secular models, give them book learning for three years, and wonder why they find it hard to fit in when we return them, not to their own area but to some quite different part of the country.
9. In the New Testament, leaders were of two kinds, local and circulating. The local ministry consisted of presbyters or bishops or shepherds (all, it seems, synonymous) assisted in administrative tasks by deacons, male and female. It might well contain men or women with outstanding gifts in prophecy, exorcism, healing or The circulating ministry would consist, in the early days, of the apostles and prophets moving round form place to place, evangelizing, setting up churches, encouraging them and seeking to maintain their unity. Apostolic delegates like Timothy and Titus continued this role, which in the second century devolved upon the newly emerging monarchical bishops. But not only on them. We still find in the third and fourth centuries itinerant teachers, theologians, evangelists and prophets moving round the churches in an encouraging and supervisory function, enlarging horizons and preserving catholicity. It would appear that the effective combination of the settled and the mobile ministry might still have a great deal to offer the church.
10. In New Testament days, local ministry consisted of people called to serve and lead in their own locality. It did not consist of ministers from outside the community who came in for a spell of years and then departed. Once again it is not hard to see the value of the local man, well known and respected in his community, exercising the leadership of the local church in the company of other leaders, one or two of whom might well be from outside, so as to stimulate fresh ideas.
11. In New Testament days, leaders were normally not paid. They generally exercised a ‘tent-making’ ministry, thus solving at a stroke the financial problems that often today centre round the leadership of the Of course, they might on occasion be paid: St. Paul contends eloquently in 1 Corinthians 9 for the principle that this could be proper: but equally eloquently he makes it plain that he rarely availed himself of the privilege of being supported by the churches he came to serve.
12. In the New Testament, the leaders saw theirs as an enabling ministry. This is rare When an ordained man comes to a church he expects to do a great deal of the work. The congregation expects that he should. It is the exception, rather than the rule, to find him exercising a ministry of equipping the saints for the work of ministry, as Paul put it in Ephesians 4:12. The leaders task in the early church was not to do all the ministry himself, but to help other members of the Body of Christ to find out what their contribution to the service of the whole should be, and then do it.
13. In the New Testament doctrine was important. Two qualities were looked for outside the character qualifications we have already glanced at. The candidate must be “apt to teach” and must be noted for “holding fast the faithful word”. He must be sound in the apostolic faith and competent in helping others to understand it and live by it. Nowadays, in contrast, one can be ordained in most denominations with the haziest notions about the existence of God, the deity of Christ, the role of scripture or the way of salvation. And men are ordained from some of the theological colleges without having ever preached a sermon under supervision, let alone having spoken on closed-circuit TV, or to a non-captive audience in the open air or taught in a school or on a factory floor. The ability to communicate is not rated highly in our training institutions. Is it any wonder that the common man regards the church as not for the likes of him?
All Christians are called to serve Christ, all are commissioned for ministry.
14. In the New Testament, ministry was seen in terms of people, not buildings. Naturally, that is how we would all like it to be today. But the fact remains that many clergy are condemned to be the custodians of ancient buildings with insufficient resources for their upkeep. As a result, most of their effort inevitably goes into upkeep rather than mission. The whole thrust of the ministry in the early church, when they had no buildings to maintain, was flexible and designed to build up congregations so that they could grow and spread the gospel elsewhere. Mission is nowadays in bondage to maintenance.
Of course it is proper to ask in what way we are entitled to turn to the New Testament for guidelines, so different were the men of the first century both historically and culturally from ourselves. We could not, even if we would, return to their situation. Their preoccupations – circumcision, meat offered to idols, and women’s heads veiled in worship – are not ours. Not that those New Testament issues have nothing to teach us: they have. The abiding principles of equal acceptance of all believers before God, of refusal to compromise with evil, and of modesty, remain to guide us when the circumstances in which those principles found flesh and blood in New Testament days have faded away. But we should be foolish to look to the New Testament as a blueprint for ‘the ministry’. For one thing, those pages tell a story of staggering diversity. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Brethren and Roman Catholics can all point to some element in ministry in the New Testament as justification for their own brand of ecclesiastical polity. Pentecostals can find all they need in Acts and 1 Corinthians, and Quakers can turn with some propriety to the Johannine corpus where no form of ordained ministry is apparently envisaged. For another thing, the New Testament does not give the impression that nothing should be done for the first time. On the contrary, most of the advances in definition of specific ministries recorded there seem to derive from the needs of the situation rather than from any preconceived normative plan: for instance, the appointment of the seven, often called “deacons” in Acts 6, the initiatives of the first missionary journey in Acts 13, the appointment of presbyters in every city evangelized in that journey (Acts 14:23) and the establishment of the Apostolic Council in Acts 15.
No, if we are prepared to take the scriptures seriously as foundation documents of our faith, it does not mean that we shall follow them slavishly irrespective of context and culture. But it does mean that we will face the challenges and opportunities of our own generation with a good deal more attention to the precedents afforded by church history, and the principles and precepts of the New Testament from which we have so markedly turned away.