The Clergy of God

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Christianity was not designed for a Christian world. It is the divine strategy intended to probe and penetrate a pagan culture and to bring it into voluntary subjection to the Prince of peace. When it was originally introduced it motivated a group of nameless slaves and frightened fishermen with such a dynamic that they were transformed, and this message proclaimed in the inner city areas of great metropolitan centers brought thousands to the foot of the cross as believing penitents. And this was accomplished without gimmicks or gadgets, and with none of the devices and appliances which are available to us through science and technology.

     Even the most optimistic proponent of the Way must admit that we can more honestly boast of the glories of the past than of the conquests of the present. After twenty centuries of possession of "the faith once delivered" Christians form a minority group which grows proportionately less with each passing year. Even those places which report marked gains confess that many of their "converts" are apathetic, indifferent and generally unconcerned. They do not add real hard muscle to the body, but are flabby tissue which must be pampered and endured. Frequently a congregation gets numerically larger and actually becomes weaker. We must never confuse blubber with muscle!

     Is there any hope of reversing the trend? The disciple of Christ can have but one answer, for hope is one of the three abiding values in his life. It is his helmet, which therefore protects the seat of his intellectual powers and rational processes. If he once admits that what he has is powerless to change men when brought to bear in all of its force, he has already fled the field of battle, for he has nothing left with which to fight. The only question with which he can possibly deal is how to meet the forces of crisis effectively and responsibly.

     It will probably not be disputed that, in our day the body of believers must be transformed before the world can be. This means that we must discover a principle of such tremendous vitality as to completely re-make our approach to life. But is there such a principle? I think there is, and I also think it was the secret of the electrifying results of the primitive saints. It is altogether possible that we have mistaken ideas about what made the ignorant and unlearned fishermen so effective, and we may seek eagerly to recapture some aspect of their witness which was purely secondary.

     We may become obsessed with the sound of rushing winds, with flaming tongues of fire and supernatural phenomena, and forget that it was a Message which was the dynamic to save, and it was faith in that Message, even when unaccompanied with any overt demon-

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stration except the conviction of the speaker, which caused kings and governors to tremble. Testifying about the horsepower under the hood will achieve little if one allows the family to starve because he does not know how to drive the car to market and "bring home the bacon." The Christian Way must be the most practical approach to life on the human level, or it will be nothing. Men do not live in the clouds except in dreams.

     The primitive saints were living reproductions of Christ. They were not merely members of a society or organization, but each one of them was the living, vital word made flesh. As Jesus was the word made flesh to dwell among men, during His earthly sojourn, so every disciple became like his Lord. Before there was a compilation of epistles into the New Testament scriptures, the apostle wrote to the saints, "You are all the letter we need, a letter written on our heart; any man can see it for what it is and read it for himself. And as for you, it is plain that you are a letter that has come from Christ, given to us to deliver."

     The living letters were the saints themselves, and men read their lives like the pages of a book. Those lives reflected the very essence of the teaching of Jesus who said, "The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give himself a ransom for many." So the disciples did not come to be ministered unto. Rather they also served and gave. We can never make an impact on the world so long as we must minister unto the church. An army which must spend the major part of its money and time entertaining its own soldiers will never make an effective fighting force. Those who must be petted and pampered are too soft to fight the world, the flesh and the devil.

     The early disciples heard the call of the Captain and they followed him wherever He led. They had no concept of the boredom and spiritless routine attendant upon "going to church." Instead, they were a part of a great adventure. Theirs was a struggle for survival "against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens." When they met in a bivouac in a cavern or an upper room it was not to listen to a carefully prepared address or an after-dinner speech delivered by one of their number for a fee or offering, but it was to swap stories of actual engagements on the hottest front.

     They reported assaults on the centers of pagan opposition, recounted what had happened when they encountered enemy ambush units and snipers, and told of victories achieved when gates were flung open for their triumphal entry. "When they arrived and had called the congregation together, they reported all that God had helped them to do, and how he had thrown open the gates of faith to the Gentiles." And always they went back to the battlefield, back to the thick of the fight.

     Today we number in the millions those who profess to be following Christ, but they are fooling themselves, and we are helping to dupe them. The devil has deceived us into making and projecting an image of the body of Christ in the form of the institutional church, a great organization, with programs, charts and graphs, with executive assistants to manipulate it, with financial devices and schemes to perpetuate it, and offering security for a price. We have confused enlistment in the army with enrollment in a mutual insurance company, and we no longer enter the fray with its blood and sweat and tears. We gather only as stockholders in an air-conditioned central office building, and after learning about our current status, we do not go back into the conflict, but to our living-room with its television set. And Satan cautions his demons not to interfere, or allow us to become disturbed. The church has come between us and Christ, and nothing else so obscures and hides him as what we call "religious organizations."

     What can be done to transform the modern "church" into a hard core fighting force? Probably very little with the

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current membership. These did not enlist to fight. Suppose we illustrate with a huge football stadium on a rainy afternoon. On the muddy field the small knot of players is engaged in a struggle which has left their uniforms sweaty, grimy and dirty. The sheltered stands are packed with a crowd dressed fashionably, many of them fat and paunchy. They are enjoying the spectacle below. If the announcer would invite them, over the amplifying system, to come down and get into the game, how many would respond? Perhaps an occasional show-off would work his way down to the field, but the multitude would remain unmoved, except to joke with one another about the absurdity of the announcement. They did not come to participate but to watch. They are paying observers. If you tried to force them to become a part of the action they would take their blankets and thermos bottles and head for the gates.

     Our hope does not lie with the unconverted mass who call themselves "Christians." But in every group there is a small pocket of the concerned ones. These may not always be identical with those who are designated "the faithful few." We tend to equate faithfulness merely with showing up at meetings, giving money or volunteering for organizational projects, such as chaperoning youth meetings. All of these are important but the motivations for doing them may frequently keep them from being demonstrations of real faith.

     One may be deeply concerned while pressed down with the burden of making a living and supporting his family until he cannot attend many of the regular meetings. It is a commentary on our distorted sense of values that we count as "faithful" those who grumblingly attend all of the meetings out of a sense of compulsion, while we discount those who are saddened by the fact that they cannot come.

     The concerned ones are those who are distressed by the differences between profession and practice, and who have come to see that the Way does not consist of the recitation of ritual, or of presenting religious performances. Instead, it is a vital relationship with God through Christ which touches every avenue of earthly existence and changes one's entire approach to life. There is a great temptation to one who comes to such a realization. He immediately wants to associate with those who share his vision, and often he widens the gap between himself and those who tend to place their trust in merely "belonging to the church," or supporting an institution.

     But this becomes in itself a symptom of unconcern. When the "fellowship of the concerned" becomes concerned only for its own, it simply reproduces in another party what it has previously condemned. It becomes Pharisaical, thanking God it is not like other men, and especially like publicans. The concerned ones must become leaven. They are God's yeast cakes. But there is nothing more useless or ineffective than a gathering of yeast cakes. All of them have the potential to create an uprising or a rising up, but all of this is lost when the yeast cakes form their own heap. A faction of concerned ones is no better than any other faction.

     Leaven achieves life by losing it. It penetrates the mass at the expense of its own existence. Jesus entered the world knowing that to provide life for others, he must give his own. And he said to his disciples, "Whoever cares for his own safety is lost; but if a man will let himself be lost for my sake, he will find his true self." What is true of leaven is also true of salt. It must lose itself in that which it is to season or preserve. Salt achieves nothing while in the shaker. And we are to be the salt of the world, not the salt of the saved!

     Wherever the unleavened, or untouched substance is, there must the leaven be found. Jesus did not commission us to call the unleavened mass unto ourselves, or to our structures, but commissioned the leaven to go. "And he called to him his twelve disciple...These twelve Jesus sent out" (Matt. 10:1, 5). The purpose of Jesus in calling any-

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one to him is to send him out. Those who come in but never go out, miss the whole point of the Christian life.

     Unfortunately we have been victimized by the Enemy into dividing our forces into priests and people, or clergy and laity. The former are considered to have a vocation for soul-winning. This has been developed into a fine art, to be carried out by trained professionals. In the Roman Catholic party those who have taken special vows are actually called "the religious." The clergyman is supposed to act, talk and behave in a manner different from the rest of the saints. He has a "divine calling" or a "high calling."

     Such an idea is absolutely foreign to God's program. The very thought of it automatically de-salinizes the salt, and unleavens the yeast. If the leaven is useless unless it comes in a special package, then every yeast cake which is unable to secure the required wrapping will remain on the refrigerator shelf and make no attempt to contact the mass. The clergy system operates to convince the soldiers that they cannot fight, and the athletes that they cannot run. The motto is, "Find a seat and leave the driving to us!" There is nothing left for the "average Christian" to do except to sit in the grandstand and watch the performance and pay the performers. Baptism is not a door to Christ but a turnstile!

     We are not being anti-clerical when we insist that every grain of God's salt has a responsibility to bring its strength to bear on the mass. We would defeat God's purpose if we reduced all of our "clergy" to the status of "laity." What we must do is exactly the opposite. We must elevate all of the "laity" to "clergy" status. This does not imply that we should do away with public proclaimers, but rather that we should recognize that this is only one form of ministry. And like any other, it may or may not be effective, depending upon how it is carried out. It is not the only form of ministry because every child of God is a minister.

     The doctor who is a Christian has an enviable place as God's minister, for he contacts people at a time of need, when they are sick, frightened and often losing hope. If we could get Christian physicians to pray with their patients before surgery, it would be much more effective than sending for "a preacher" to come in and "say a prayer."

     The Christian nurse has a tremendous opportunity to serve as a minister of God. If hospital rules forbid her offering a prayer with the patients on the ward, she can say to each one as she tucks him in, "God bless you and give you a good night's sleep, and I will be praying for you." Of course, when she returns to the nurses station she must pray for guidance and understanding in ministering to each need, for it would be hypocritical to tell the patients you'd pray if you did not do so.

     I know a firm of Christian realtors, the members of which believe that God wants them to minister to their clients for good. Each morning they gather for prayer before they open for the day. Frequently they pray with a client in their inner offices. It is no wonder that all of them bear a real witness outside of the office. They are active in the Christian Businessmen's Fellowship, in evangelical outreach to the Jews, in Bible distribution work, etc. They are God's ministers to the realty profession.

     The universal ministry of the saints is the dynamic which can change our modern world. This is not, however, "the ministry of the laity," about which we read so much in this day. The term

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"lay ministry" still implies that this is a separate ministry, another kind of ministry. But "laity" is from laos, which means "the people." The preacher is also one of the people of God and when he serves he does so because of this.

     There is no other ministry than "lay ministry" for it is "people ministry" and preachers are people. So long as we talk about "the ministry of the laity" we are still thinking in terms of a clergy, and unconsciously we equate their service with a professional, skilled and craftsmanlike job as opposed to the work done by good-natured, willing, but unskilled and bumbling laborers. The man who talks about "my laymen" missed his calling. He should be a Roman Catholic priest.

     Why should any child of God send for a preacher to pray in a time of crisis or emergency? This would be like children in a family sending for an attorney to draw up a petition every time they wanted to ask their father for a favor. If all of the saints become ministers as God intended, there will be no "minister shortage." The early church knew nothing of such a problem. There was a shortage of saints in the world, but there was never a shortage of ministers among the saints, for there were no non-ministering saints. To talk about a nonministering follower of Jesus would be the equivalent of talking about a "nonserving slave." Imagine the apostle Paul writing about "a church without a minister." To him this would have been exactly like saying "a congregation without a member" or "a flock without a sheep."

     A recapture of the divine dynamic universal witness will not offset the need for men of ability to train the soldiers and to help plan the strategy. But it will free them from the onerous duty of spoon-feeding perpetual infants and liberate them to go into the world and share the message with every creature.