I ONCE invited a friend, a GP, to my institution service. Although unfamiliar with Anglican worship, she found it profoundly moving: the presentation of a Bible, eucharistic elements and keys, all communicated the meaning of the role. What she found bewildering was the nomenclature pertaining to my new ministry: priest, clergy, pastor, ordained minister, rector, incumbent, and that was only me, let alone the archdeacon, rural dean and bishop involved. Why not just call us all ‘ministers’? The first part was easy to explain: all baptised people have a ministry, so we need some other words to designate the particular ministry of administering Word and Sacrament: an ordained minister called a priest or presbyter. I further suggested that it’s analogous to her world of medicine. Once they graduate medical school with the title ‘Dr’, medics become residents, then registrars and consultants: cardiologists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists. A GP may be a partner, associate or locum. But whichever body parts they deal with, and whoever issues their payslip, they remain doctors. Concerning ‘Ordained Local Ministry’ (OLM) in the Church of Ireland, a priest is a priest just as a doctor is a doctor, regardless of how, when, where and even whether we work. It’s who I am. As a specific designation, OLM involves a particular way of exercising priestly ministry, one that is different to curates, rectors, deans, chaplains and the mythical ‘part-time charge’. Most noticeably, OLMs are entitled to retain their previous weekday employment after ordination, in which case they are not expected to give priority to church ministry during the week. Similarly, training requirements for OLMs take account of the ordinands’ regular secular responsibilities. In what follows, I will show how on the one hand ‘ordained’ and ‘local’ have belonged together since the apostolic age, and on the other how this new ministry pathway has come about with its hallmark characteristics, followed by some personal remarks based on my past year’s experience as OLM coordinator. The local aspect of priesthoodIn important ways, the recent development of OLM is in continuity with the tradition of ordained Christian ministry, from apostolic storming to episcopal norming. Indeed, since the first generations following the apostolic age, presbyteral ministry has had a local emphasis and has adapted according to the state of the Church and its mission. The New Testament witness reflects the apostolic era, including Paul’s missionary journeys around the Mediterranean and the founding of the earliest Christian communities. In Paul’s time, the normative order of ministry was ‘first apostles, second prophets, then teachers’, followed by other diverse charisms (1 Cor. 12:28). Later, in the transition to a more settled ecclesial situation, the itinerant apostle conferred on Timothy and Titus the responsibility to appoint stationary, that is, local ‘presbyteroi’ (elders, presbyters) or ‘episkopoi’ (overseers, bishops) in the towns. This stationing was a mission strategy: permanent urban hubs serving regional networks, an ecclesial structure pragmatically mapped onto a civil one. Even though at this early stage ‘presbyter’ and ‘bishop’ are used interchangeably (e.g. Titus 1:5, 7), nonetheless a seed of distinction is discernible with Timothy and Titus as quasi-apostolic, proto-episcopal ‘transition managers’, charged with appointing local ministers for the next phase of ante-Nicene Christianity, one of consolidation and growth. Alongside presbyter-bishops, there was a second order, the diaconate. With the former based in cities, deacons were often sent out to rural areas, for example to distribute communion. But those places had growing churches too, and the rural base needed local priests to stay put so they could be fully eucharistic communities. So the remit of deacons waned in prominence, and the distinction grew between overseeing bishops with an urban cathedra, and their clergy, notionally gathered around them in a diocesan structure but ministering day-to-day in a local mission unit that we today call a ‘parish’. Thus, within just a few generations, the church had moved from an ‘apostles-and-prophets’ form of ministry, to a twofold ministry of presbyter-bishops and deacons, to the threefold order of deacons, priests and bishops that the Church of Ireland is bound to maintain ‘inviolate’ in the 1870 ‘Preamble and Declaration’ (BCP, p. 776). So we might say the traditional model is already one of ordained local ministry in the sense the norm has long been a geographic place with a resident priest, who has cure of all the souls resident within its boundaries, and possibly with special responsibility to any school, hospital or prison in it too. The Church of Ireland is committed to this historic threefold ministry, but that doesn’t preclude theological reflection on the essence of these forms and how they might be expressed in a modern Irish context. We did so, for example, when we rightly decided to ordain women. Today, the idea of ‘local’ has changed. There are gathered congregations where on a Sunday morning many in the pews have driven past several other churches of the same denomination to attend this one, perhaps on the basis of churchmanship or age profile. Returning to the doctor-priest analogy, a priest is a priest is a priest, but we might have to rethink some of the other words that qualify conditions and responsibilities in light of shrinking congregations, fragmenting societies and fewer free will offering envelopes on the collection plate. OLM is one such attempt at making priesthood fit for mission in these challenging times. OLM in the Church of England: a failed experiment?If OLM in the Church of Ireland stands in continuity with the historical and theological understanding of priesthood, then it also stands in relation to a rather unsuccessful Church of England precursor‘Ordained local ministry’ was developed in the Church of England during the 1990s. There were already forms of ‘non-stipendiary’, ‘auxiliary’ and ‘self-supporting’ ministry, mainly fitting into a parish or chaplaincy model. Around the same time, there was also the ‘Fresh Expressions’ movement, around networks that people naturally already gather in: football clubs, cafés, motorcycle clubs, Goths. (Many self-identifying ‘fresh expressions’ turned out in fact not to be ‘mission-shaped church’ so much as just ‘church with...
