On the Meaning of Ministry

Several recent occasions have prompted reflection upon how we should understand the word “ministry.”

In theological terms, all ministries in the Church serve and mediate the continuing ministry of Christ our Lord. The risen Lord is present and active at all points in his people’s history by the power of his Spirit which he receives from the Father. He ministers in and through the Church, his body, which he further governs, inspires and binds in unity, and it is our Lord who sends us out to build the Kingdom. 

When we think about the roots of the actual word “ministry” itself, we have to go back, as so often, first to Latin and then to Greek, for it was in early Latin translations of the New Testament that the word ministerium and its cognates were used to translate the Greek words διακονία (diakonia) and its cognates, as well as λειτουργία (leitourgia) — which incidentally brings out an important link between ministry and liturgy.

In English, diakonia is often rendered by the word “service.” And in the New Testament, this word is the one often used for activities in the Church which issue from the graces of the Spirit and build up the body of the faithful, while the rarer leitourgia is used for those activities that bear the character of true worship in which God is glorified.

The famous passages in 1 Corinthians about the gifts of the Spirit (charismata) makes clear that the Spirit gives different gifts to all in the community, gifts that are for service and not for self-improvement; these gifts are not mere personal abilities. At all times, it is the Lord’s presence and action that is primary, as he embodies his action in ours, which never becomes wholly our own, at merely our own personal disposal.

It is a good test for seeing when gifts are authentically exercised in ministry, to see that they build up our community of faith and never merely we ourselves. Authentic ministry is always exercised in unity with the community of faith and cannot be autocephalous: self-headed.

The gifts of the Spirit never become the possession of anyone, however eminent, as powers to be passed on, or to be withheld. Hence, even the office of a bishop is misunderstood if it is spoken of as having power like some possessed commodity to be used or transmitted. Ultimately, all power is God’s, something of which we are reminded in the Mass, where it is ultimately the Lord himself who celebrates the eucharist in his body the Church — hence the sense in which the priest or bishop celebrating a Mass does so in persona Christi.

Those chosen for responsibility within the church, which is to say those chosen to have ministries and to be ministers, should be so chosen by the church because they are deemed to have the qualities needed to fulfil the responsibility within the obedience of faith. Christ gives gifts to all in his body, and it is these gifts which are primarily for the health of the body and not for the advantage of the individual, even though these are mutually related. St. Paul repeatedly insists, since his primary concern is with the painful divisions manifest within the church in Corinth, that these bestowed gifts are for the building up and unity of the community (1 Cor 12:25; 14:3, 4, S, 12, 26, 33) which is to say within the bonds of charity (or love). This is why he introduces the hymn to charity, opening with the famous words:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, 

and have not charity, 

I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And closing:

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; 

but the greatest of these is charity.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector