A Lot of Water Under the Bridge

It was thirty-one years ago today that I was ordained a pastor of the Moravian Church, Northern Province. A lot has happened in those years (how’s that for a cliché?) and things keep right on happening. As I look back, perhaps the biggest change for me is the major shift I have had in my view of the “ordained” or “professional” ministry. I am not sure I even understand it anymore.

The professional position of “minister” or “clergy” or “pastor” has received a great deal of mixed reviews over the years. Yet it has maintained a position of prominence in the church. The cynical side of me likes to say that this is because the clergy have kept the church in need of them. The other part of the cynical side says that many lay people like it that way since it means they don’t have to do it themselves.

But cynicism usually gets one nowhere. Perhaps there are still clergy around because the human psyche/spirit/soul needs spiritual guides in human flesh to walk with them and help them. While we may misuse and abuse those positions and our opinions of them, they speak to a necessity. All cultures have had their “holy ones” whether they be shamans or gurus or clergy or priests. All cultures for some reason or another elevate a particular group of people to a spiritual status of some type. It must be an important need for it to cross cultural lines as broadly as it does.

But one does not have to be “ordained” by a particular “official” religion or religious group to have the characteristics of the “spiritual holy one.” In fact, some of the every day powerful spiritual leaders are the people we meet in our lives who have that special spiritual quality. Many of them are not ordained. We may work with them, be a student of theirs, visit them in a nursing home. They may be young or old, male or female, of any race or clan. They may or may not be “religious.” But they will be spiritual. And we can know that when we see it even if we can’t define it.

Well, today, thirty-one years after ordination, I am ending my second full year outside the church’s ministry. Even there things are changing for me and I will fill you in on that as it happens. I guess ordination is still necessary for the organized church to have its ability to say who is and who isn’t appropriate. But today I also look more widely and deeply for the spiritual people. They aren’t as common as clergy…

No, I think they are more common. It’s just that we haven’t been willing to let them guide us since they are not ordained.