Concluding Remarks From a Critique of the 2018 UCC Manual on Ministry

Concluding Remarks From a Critique of the 2018 UCC Manual on Ministry

In late 2018 a national entity of the United Church of Christ known as MESA (Ministerial Excellence, Support, and Accountability) issued a new Manual on Ministry. For several decades at least the UCC has used an older Manual on Ministry as a guide for authorization of ministry in the denomination. In the UCC authorization for ministry is handled not nationally but regionally by Committees on Ministry of the regional bodies known as Associations. Each Association is autonomous, and the Manual on Ministry that comes out of the denominations national offices is not mandatory for any of them. Nonetheless, most if not all of them have used the Manual on Ministry that the new one seeks to supersede as their guide for making decisions on authorization issues of numerous sorts.

I serve on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, a Conference (a larger regional body) that also functions as an Association. I have been studying the new Manual on Ministry, at first in earlier draft forms, for well over a year. When MESA issued what it considers to be its final version of the Manual, I spent a good deal of time with it. I have written a rather long critique of that Manual that concludes that I cannot support my Conference adopting it as our guide on ministerial authorization. I present here a slightly edited version of my Concluding Remarks from that critique.

Before I get to stating my major remarks from that critique I need to explain some background. For a long time the UCC has had three forms of ministerial authorization. They are ordination, licensing, and commissioning. All three of them are established in the Constitution and Bylaws of the United Church of Christ. In its earlier drafts of the new Manual MESA reduced the forms of authorization essentially to one, ordination. MESA clearly would do away with licensing and commissioning altogether if it could. Objections from UCC people to that reduction led MESA to include in the new Manual something called Lay Ministerial Standing, a type of authorization that corresponds closely with what we used to call licensing. The new Manual has nothing that corresponds to what we called commissioning. Licensing and Lay Ministerial Standing are both intended to apply when a particular ministerial setting, usually a local church of the denomination, cannot for whatever reason call an ordained person to fill a ministerial opening. Commissioning was a type of authorization for ministry in which the UCC has an interest and wishes to support but that does not fit the traditional definition of an ordainable call. It has been granted to spiritual directors, for example. Our Pacific Northwest Conference has commissioned a woman to a national ministry related to the Our Whole Lives curriculum, the UCC’s study program on human sexuality.

We used to define an ordainable call as primarily a ministry that involved word and sacrament. That is, a person was ordained, with a couple of minor exceptions, only to a ministerial position in which the ordained person would preach and teach the word of God and preside at the UCC’s two sacraments, baptism and Eucharist. Eligibility for ordination used to require that the candidate have received an M.Div. degree from an accredited seminary. Some years ago the denomination’s General Synod, it’s national gathering, created something called alternative paths to ordination that sought to authorize ordination of persons without an accredited M.Div., but getting an M.Div. was still the primary way in which a person became eligible for ordination.

The new Manual replaces licensing with Lay Ministerial Standing. That’s not what this kind of authorization is called in the denomination’s Constitution and Bylaws, but MESA mostly ignores that reality. MESA clearly wants to do away with commissioning. Yet because commissioning too is established in the UCC Constitution and Bylaws it can’t write it out of the denomination’s practice altogether. The new Manual mentions both licensing and commissioning but says that new licenses and commissions are not expected after 2018. MESA wants us to replace licensing with Lay Ministerial Standing and to replace commissioning with ordination.

I have many objections to the new Manual on Ministry. It is badly written and edited. I point out some of those flaws in my larger critique of the Manual. It makes some unfounded theological assumptions about the faith of  all ordained people in the denomination. I point that error out in my longer critique too. Here I will discuss only my two major objections to the new Manual on Ministry. They are:

First, in my opinion the new Manual on Ministry's handling of the ordainability of a call is woefully inadequate. It represents a major departure from traditional UCC practice. Its discussion of ordainability is vague at best, but it clearly greatly expands the nature of an ordainable call beyond ordainability’s traditional definition. Ministry of word and sacrament, the traditional markers of an ordainable call, are mentioned in the manual’s discussion, but they are only small parts of much broader considerations with regard to a call’s ordainability.

The only reason I can see for this broadening of the definition of ordainability is the manual’s dismissal of commissioning as a type of authorized ministry. As I said, in its handling of licensing and commissioning the new MoM runs afoul of the UCC Constitution and Bylaws, which specifically provide for those types of authorization. Its (mis)handling of ordainability is one of the new manual’s major faults. It along with its dismissal of other types of authorization (other than Lay Ministerial Standing) are a major reason why I do not support our Conference accepting it as our standard for authorization.

Second, there’s how the manual handles to ordainability of persons. In the past a person obtaining an accredited M.Div. degree was the major and preferred way for a person to satisfy most of the criteria for ordination. The new manual makes no mention of an M.Div. degree, not even as one path to ordination. It does mention seminaries in its discussion of theological education, but the manual’s clear intent is to make what we used to call alternative paths to ordination the primary path to ordination.

The manual calls for COMs to assess eligibility for ordination by evaluating a person’s qualifications by holding them up to the Marks of Faithful and Effective Authorized Ministers. Those Marks list a large number (although not as large as the first edition of the Marks) of characteristics and abilities a “faithful and effective” authorized minister should possess. The manual is vague at best as to how a Committee on Ministry is supposed to do that. It says nothing about how many Marks a person must satisfy or about how a Committee on Ministry is to assess a person against the Marks. The manual’s provisions with regard to the Marks are vague at best.

Assessment against the Marks is simply no substitute for seminary education. Yes, I know. Seminary education is immensely expensive. Seminaries are closing, so there are fewer local or regional options for seminary education. Nonetheless, I believe the seminary experience to be irreplaceable. I cannot imagine being as prepared as I was for ordained ministry without my seminary experience at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry. The learning I received in the classes, the interactions I had with faculty and fellow students, the field work I did with corresponding classes at school, all of these things formed me for ministry in ways I would not have been without them. Similar seminary experiences have formed women and men for professional ministry for a very long time.

Going to seminary is inconvenient for many people, but then it has always been inconvenient for many people, and it cannot be denied that the cost of seminary has created a crisis in seminary education. I am convinced however that the UCC would be much better advised to develop ways of making seminary more affordable through tuition assistance or subsidies to our seminaries than we are to abandon seminary education as the primary path to ordination. Because the new Manual on Ministry does precisely that, abandon seminary education as the primary path to ordination, I cannot support our Conference adopting it as our guide for ministerial authorization.