If you have a tough session or other ecclesiastical "board" that tends to hold your feet to the fire, you may have let out a loud laugh at the title of this piece. But explore it a bit with me here. Way back when Christianity was beginning, to be a minister did not require one to earn an advanced degree and go through years of discernment and ordination standards as candidates and so forth. There was no special status associated with the ministry during the primitive house church phase in the nascent stages of Christianity. There are social and cultural reasons for this.
The socio-cultural reality is that it was an alternative community broken off of the main body of Judaism and later a small subset of the Gentile communities in the middle of a massive, pluralistic empire. These small communities were covert and had to avoid persecution not for their religious beliefs, but because of the political implications of their beliefs. Jesus was crucified as a King and folks were calling him the Lord. Caesar was never a big fan of that kind of language regardless of who assumed the throne. So they were poor, marginalized, persecuted, and covert. They had to meet in small groups, systems of communication were not all that good so various codes were needed. Pauls mission was unique in that he had the guts to go out and visit many communities to help them get organized.
What develops out of social diffusion is some system of hierarchy. It can be a weak one such as we see among the Baptists, or a strong one as with the Catholics. But as groups get bigger, more and more social organization is needed. The role of the Jewish High Priest who was the only one allowed near the Holy of Holies takes on a feudal character with the development of the Catholic church that would fuse the relationship of humanity to the sacred in Jewish reality present in Scripture with a medieval feudal system which focused on human social power and control. This was a power held by a monarch at the top and then distributed by that monarch to others to wield.
The Reformation sought to politically break apart this political structure and eventually this was made apparent in the United States primarily among Calvinists and Puritans. There the entrepreneurial spirit of the American revolutionary ethos fueled by the notion of individual conscience and the freedom to self-organize roots that Reformation idea in new soil unfettered by the baggage of monarchs and lords of the past.
But something else happens to re-assert social control and systems of power: social differentiation and the emergence of the professional church organization which found its origins in Europe, but takes on vastly different significance in the New World. As churches and ecclesiastical organizations expand, and as more professions emerge out of the entrepreneurial fusion of hard work and salvation evidenced by opportunity to be successful, the ministry gets into a bind where it needs to compete. To live, one must work. To minister, one must hold gainful employment. And so, the ministry becomes one profession among many that must maintain competitive market-share for candidates. Seminaries divide off of universities as graduate programs, Divinity degrees take on market significance to compete with the emergence of advanced degrees in areas like theology and biblical studies, and yet another structure is built into the system in order for religious organizations to draw the smartest and brightest people to lead them.
What happens is that the professional minister becomes part of a socially differentiated market culture where the church functions like a market driven professional bureaucracy requiring all of the same organizational structure other organizations require to function and be efficient. The church looks just like the culture it is trying to change with a now elite group of people deciding who can be ordained, whose calls to ministry are legitimate, and reinforce the correct teaching that buttresses the bounds of the organization. The socio-cultural environment fuels an already more robust organizational structure.
But why? The answer is social control. The goal of the professional ministry and the church on a social scale is that of maintaining the organization and to control the members of that organization just enough to keep things stable. Those who bring too much instability and problematize the system are rolled up by those who are in power at the top structures of the elite. If you want to peel away the layers of grace in any professional ministry setting to reveal these hidden power structures that mediate social control, start talking about ordination standards. It is clear that these various denominational discussions and arguments in our day are not simply about what to do with those pesky "gays", but about how to maintain social control as a means of maintaining social identity in a given organization.
Mega-churches have been aware of this problem. To survive what they have had to do is develop less diffuse structures with small groups that find themselves getting most of their spiritual food in homes and small gatherings outside of the church building itself. There is thus a certain irony here and a sign of what works. Small groups create stronger personal ties to others and eliminate bureaucracies as a means to maintain those relationships. So social control must come through other means, and that usually is in theology. If it is not hell or confession and the Eucharist in order to avoid damnation, it is the form of self-help and personal wealth that can be attained if you understand the "special" message given to the preacher and give back to the church on Sunday morning. Social control in the latter is more of an accounting process like paying taxes in order to stay in your home or not go to jail!
The point is that in any human structure of organization, there will be social control from someone or some group – even if they are the very ones who are arguing that hierarchies are bad. If they are coming with a certain framework of knowledge that seems more learned, more intelligent, or simply more interesting and compellingly presented, the content is irrelevant to social control. However, the persons who dispense that knowledge are the very keepers of social control. If the medium is indeed the message as McLuhan asserted, the message here is social control, and not necessarily the liberation of all humanity from the shackles of sin in a new life that by nature rejects human structures of social organization. I am not saying this is bad if directed properly and with enough corrections built in that those who hold most of the shares of power are held in check. But it is a fact of how human beings behave.
The issue is how a church or other gathering of Christians can organize themselves with enough of a democratic tension to balance where the most shares of power in the design of social control will rest.
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