Congregational ordination and the call to ministry.
This is a short pice delivered as a sermon, oddly, at at ordination, which directly criticizes the association's soon-to-be new policy of allowing congregations to ordain so-called "community" ministers.
The speaker first gives a high-level overview of the evolution of the relationship between the professional ministry and the congregations they serve. In this overview, he rightly seats the power to ordain with each congregation as a recognition of the individual's call to serve (God). He also rightly criticizes the institutionalization that lead to fellowship having primacy over ordination.
Where he goes off the rails a bit is when he makes the jump that this power of fellowshipping over ordination is what is empowering "community ministry". His claim seems to be that congregations would not have any grounds or reason to ordain a community minister. This is puzzling to me. I would hope that if my ministry is so weak that I can't convince a congregation to ordain me in its name to do my work and to share in my work with me, then maybe I should consider whether or not my call is really a religious call.
I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is responding to some cultural trend at the time (1991) that may be foreign to me or possibly foreign to my times. But if his point was the congregations have no place in ordaining community ministers, then I disagree with him.
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