Let us dream of a church…

Let us dream of a church…

Let us dream of a church

with a radically renewed concept and practice of ministry and a primitive understanding of the ordained offices. Where there is no clerical status and no classes of Christians, but all together know themselves to be part of the laos, the holy people of God.

A ministering community
rather than a community gathered around a minister.

Where ordained people, professional or not, employed or not, are present for the sake of ordering and signing the church’s life and mission,
not as signs of authority or dependency,
nor of spiritual or intellectual superiority,

but with Pauline patterns of ‘ministry supporting church’ instead
of the common pattern of ‘church supporting ministry.’

Where bishops are signs and animators of the church’s unity,
catholicity and apostolic mission,

priests are signs and animators of her Eucharistic life and the
sacramental presence of her Great High Priest,

and deacons are signs and animators — living reminders — of the church’s servanthood as the body of Christ who came as, and is, the servant slave of all God’s beloved children.

A church

where each congregation is in mission
and each Christian, gifted for ministry;
a crew on a freighter, not passengers on a luxury liner.

Quoted from Reshaping Ministry, Essays in Memory of Wesley Frensdorff, Josephine Borgeson and Lynne Wilson, eds., Jethro Publications, 1990.