Review for Ministers-at-Work by John F. Smith July 2006

In this lively work Paul Avis attempts to reshape the concept of ministry and mission. In so doing he intuitively touches on the distinction between lay and ordained ministry, preferring to turn upside down the three-ordered ministry of deacon, priest and bishop so that we have a view “looking outwards” rather than “looking inwards”. In some ways he views the church as a stately ship sailing along in a troubled sea of adverse criticism, and the way to put this right is to stop looking at the diaconate as the ministry of a faithful servant and start looking at it as one that enables others to be beacons to the outside world.

How is it that we’ve got such a bad press? Is it that we are out of touch with twenty-first century reality or are we just plain bad? Well, my rhetoric is a bit beyond the pale, but it serves to highlight the plight we as a church are in. If we are perceived to be irrelevant, then it’s our fault. Getting back a degree of relevance seems to be a major feature of this book. So how does Avis suggest we go about it?

Well, for a start, “mission is the task entrusted to the whole Church.” (p2). This means that we have to be enablers of ministry, not try and shoulder the whole job ourselves (speaking from the point of view of the ordained!). We all have to have “an overpowering consciousness of being sent”. Avis sensibly points out that we do not need to “import Christ into a situation, for he precedes every action of the Church”. (p3). But, of course, we do have to make him known—because people of their own accord are not very good at seeing the work of the Spirit. This is probably because to a great extent they are blinkered by the consumer society in which they exist. I was speaking to the father of my godson a little while ago and he was saying “oh, Kurt is changing his apprenticeship to be a plumber, but of course he still wants to be a paramedic”. My instinctive reaction was that was excellent, he would volunteer his services as an ambulance officer. Not a bit of it: he was going to moonlight to earn more money!

It’s this kind of attitude that we’re up against. Avis points out that the mission of the Church is really about leading people into a greater wholeness by “drawing them, through the extended process of Christian initiation, into the life of the Christian community as the Body of Christ. It ministers among them and to them in the personal mode, in a relational framework”. (p4). But to see the sort of rôle we ought to be thinking about, Avis illustrates his point with this story: “When a parish priest with a special ministry to prostitutes in London’s East End was asked recently whether he managed to talk to them about God, he replied, ‘No, they talk to me about God.’ “ (p7). We have to start looking from a different point of view: it’s not a question of us taking the gospel to others, but more a question of us helping them to see the gospel in their lives. In this sense, the mission of the Church is grounded in the Trinity (p11). This echoes the words of Robin Greenwood “The simple Trinitarian dynamic – of diversity in unity – releases the energies of the Spirit within all Christians to find our special calling and to follow it in daily life, at home in the community, in the local church and in the wider world”. You could also say that here is the relevance to members of CHRISM.

Avis also warns us that we need to be sensitive to cultural issues: “True mission considers humankind, not as a collection of souls, disembodied spiritual essences, but as an embodied social, cultural and historical reality”. (p19). Bearing this in mind, how should we go about our ministry with this sense of mission? The story about the parish priest in the East End gives us a clue: “Both listening and response should be marked by pastoral sensitivity, empathy and respect. If this is the posture that the Church as a whole should adopt, it should filter through to every particular concrete instance of preaching and teaching.” (p27). The keyword again is listening. Perhaps it is because we are not good at listening that we find it difficult to hear the plight of others. Avis asks some interesting questions following on from the previous quote: “The spoken or unspoken questions that arise in this context are: Does this make sense to you? What does your own experience tell you about that? Can you agree with this? What would help you to receive what the Church is saying? Where do the stumbling blocks lie? How would you put it yourself?” Reading this, I realise that I don’t ask myself these questions enough.

In Fremantle, we have a rather eccentric Franciscan who likes to walk around in his habit and help out in a couple of cafés in Essex street (part of the cappuccino strip), this enables him to listen and talk to people. The fact that he’s in his habit means that people immediately know where he’s coming from. Avis reminds us that English Franciscans “threw in their lot with down-and-outs and in their religious houses they offered ‘a parish for the parish-less’. They well understood that pastoral care is the heart of evangelism and that to stretch out the hand of friendship predisposes hearts to receive the gospel”. (p39). If we are to be “physicians of the soul” then we need to brush up our listening skills.

To delve deeper, it is difficult for us to know what our ministry is: “we need the Church to help us to understand the ministry to which we are called”. (p46). We cannot be a loose cannon (nor even a loose canon!). “Much ministry is self-authorised: on my view, that disqualifies it as ministry. Ministry is not whatever an individual feels moved to do for the Lord or to offer to the Church, whether it is needed or not. That way of looking at the matter seems to have things the wrong way round. Ministry is something public and representative, rather than private and individual”. (p47). So where does this leave the “priesthood of all believers”? Avis believes that it’s all a question of discernment. There is a difference between ‘gifts’, ‘ministries’ and ‘activities’. (p51). He goes on to say: “My contention is simply — and radically — that this equation of gift and ministry is not automatic and should not be presumed in the case of every individual Christian.”

What Avis would like to do is to “emphasise the element of commissioning and responsible agency”. This is where the concept of us being enablers of ministry comes in. He sees this as the true meaning of diakonia. This concept leads seamlessly on to the idea of ministering communities, which Avis does not enumerate specifically, but whose characteristics he describes: “The scenario to strive for, I believe, is where every active member of a Christian community has a defined rôle within which they exercise their God-given gifts and this is recognised, tacitly or explicitly by the Christian community. Then St Paul’s image of the body working together in every limb and organ becomes a reality. (1 Cor 12:12 – 31; Eph 4: 4 – 16)” (p53). The implication is the ministering community reaching out into the public domain. We deny this at our peril, indeed we are in danger of becoming “fewer and fewer clergy rushing about faster and faster for more and more congregations that are getting smaller and smaller … We sense that this is a seriously deficient ministry, one that has become distorted and one that is in danger of becoming futile”. (p59) theological standpoints influenced Church thinking and methodology. The documentary extracts are deployed to expand on and support the narrative, and are effective in doing so. The result is not a history as such, which would probably require

So how can we achieve this goal of commissioning and recognition? Well, for a start, we need a “spirit of quiet competence and of steady dedication to the task” (p61) and thus we need to imbue others with these characteristics — again, a fine example of the work of CHRISM. Avis encourages us to look towards ecumenical dialogue in order to see ourselves “more honestly and to learn from each other’s strengths and weaknesses”. (p84). If we do this, we can be more effective in the world, and thus foster the growth of Local Ministry Teams. The heart of commissioning and recognition is the “need for public discernment of gifts and callings and public recognition of them by constituted authority”. (p102). Public discernment really means the joint work of parish priest and congregation in fostering the recognition of gifts in the individual. This emphasis is far different from the usual process of “self-discernment” leading to testing of that call before a tribunal, which happens in the formation of stipendiary clergy.

Now, to that re-appraisal of the rôle of the diaconate. Avis has a few salvos to fire on this score. On page 104 he says:

The standard line makes great play of the fact that a deacon serves and helps those to whom he or she is sent. It sounds very impressive to say that deacons spend themselves in selfless service to the poor, the marginalised and the weak. It is this fundamental assumption that is now being called into question — and no wonder. If service is the defining characteristic of deacons, how does this distinguish them form all lay and ordained Christians and why do they need to be ordained? It is almost as though, in the case of deacons, ordination is a sacramental sign of a morally virtuous disposition, a fruit of the Spirit, humility. That is not what ordination is for. Churches have been agonising about the diaconate, but their perplexity is created by theologising on a false premise.

This is probably the most controversial part of the book, but is it not necessary to stir up opinion on such matters? Avis argues that this was not the original Greek meaning of diakonia and summons various authorities to his cause, principally among them various works by J.N.Collins. As I have mentioned earlier, his approach is that “[diakonia’s] connotations are rather of commissioned, responsible agency and authoritative embassy. Of course, service remains fundamental, but the service involved is primarily the service of the one who sends or commissions, that is, ultimately God”. (p105). So this new sense of diakonia is an empowering one, not a passive, submissive one. This may be a threat to the powers-that-be! In this sense, deacons “model the gospel commission that gives the Church its raison d’être” (p112) and thus that diakonia is the work of CHRISM. I commend this book to your further consideration.

See also the review of: Paul Avis, A Church Drawing Near: Spirituality and Mission in a Post-Christian Culture (London and Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003), xii + 227 pp. Pbk. £16.99. ISBN 0–567–08968–1, by Wesley Carr at http://ecc.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/1/1/114.pdf [Ecclesiology Journal, January 1 2004, Volume 1, No. 1]