Priest and Prophet: The Challenge of Ministry
By Jimmy R. Allen
[Dr. Jimmy Allen is Chaplain at the Big Canoe resort community in the Georgia mountains north of Atlanta. This is his Commencement address given to the spring graduates of Mercer University`s McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta.]
- The Priestly Privilege of the Minister
- The Priestly Responsibility of the Minister
- The Prophetic Responsibility of the Minister
I was pleased at the response when I inquired about the basic mission of the James and Carolyn McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University. I was told that from the beginning the focus has been on equipping students to be ministers in local congregations. It is a worthy mission and greatly needed in our confused ecclesiastical world. The role of minister has been so ill-defined and so over-defined that ministers today are in danger of missing the essence of our call from God. We neglect the fact that following the family, as God`s first institution, the fellowship of believers is God`s primary institutional means of accomplishing his work on earth.
In our day of job descriptions, mission statements, and management manuals, it is frustrating to some that a minister`s task is still quite difficult to define. Ministers have to be able to live without a sense of closure much of the time. Some of us, however, find the very nature of the task liberating. We can set a pace, which fits us, and find the freedom to be what our gifts permit us to become. What we must not do, however, is to miss the essentials of our task. I want to define that task as being both Priest and Prophet.
The scriptures today come from two embattled veterans of God`s service in the final stages of their journeys. They lived centuries apart, but stand like towering peaks on the horizons of God`s Revelation. One is John, the Apostle of Love. He discovered that path out of a high-strung personality and quick temper that had earned him the nickname of a Son of Thunder. The transformation wrought by the touch of Christ in his life is reflected in his epistles of love. He is heart-broken by his separation by the Sea from his people in Ephesus during his lonely exile on the Isle of Patmos. He is Priest talking to God about men and to men about God, and he is Prophet in writing a book of Prophecy describing in picture language the message of God`s judgment. In his Doxology at the beginning of Revelation (1:5-6) he says:
Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood,
And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be
glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.
The other passage describes Moses, the Liberator and Lawgiver, who has come away from his burning bush encounter with God as the first human being to know the name of God. Deuteronomy 34: 10 says, "And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face." Moses was not only a prophet. He was also an intercessor, a priest. In Exodus 32: 31-32 Moses says to God: "Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet, now, if thou wilt, forgive their sin-and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou has written." The time came when word was brought to him that others were prophesying. His reaction is told in Numbers 11:27-29:
And there ran a young man, and told Moses, and said, Eldad and Medad do prophesy in the: camp. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Moses, one of his young men, answered and said, My lord Moses, forbid them. And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD`S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!
The Priestly Privilege of the Minister
I remember the day I discovered the high calling involved in speaking about God to others. I was a preacher`s kid. We were in a mission church, meeting in a house in the inner city of Dallas. We also lived in that house. I was never really ashamed of my Dad, but I wasn`t very proud of him either. It was surely more a burden than a privilege to be his son in that neighborhood. He took me with him to a Pastor`s Conference meeting in Ft. Worth. I was sitting in the balcony. The speaker was George W. Truett, a man who was selected in a recent Texas Baptist Poll as far and away the most influential Baptist of the Twentieth Century. White haired, black bushy eyebrows, deep voice, he rose to speak as a hush fell. I was captivated. In the middle of his message he said, "I would not step down from the pulpit to the position of President of the United States." My Dad grew ten feet tall in my eyes! I can tell you that I have tested that treasure numerous times over these years. It is not counterfeit. There is a privilege in the sense of the call of God, in the sense of instrumentality as God flows through you, which is beyond description.
The Priestly Responsibility of the Minister
With privilege there goes responsibility. Your presence in this Seminary says that you are aware of that. We need to give God the sharpest instruments we can become to be his communicators. Loving God with our minds is a part of that command. Spending time becoming saturated with his Word so that we can be discerners able rightly to divide the Word of Truth is a lifelong challenge. We live in a world that is filled with resources for pastoral care. We have learned to map the roads of grief and pain, to delve into the interactions of human personality in relationships, to discover methods of group support for persons plagued with addictions, and to refer to experts those beyond our limitations.
However there is no way to bottle "RESPONSE-ABILITY". Our ability to respond with authenticity is both a gift of God and a product of our own attitude. The danger is that in that kind of professionalism in which persons become prospects, clients, and units, ministry becomes duty to be fulfilled. And we can tell–those of us who have walked with pain, been rejected out of fear, and devastated by life–we can tell when you are just doing your job of performing your priestly functions or are communicating God`s presence.
In one of the many hospitalizations that have plagued our family, Wanda, my wife, said as the minister left the room, "Well, I have just become a statistic." "What?" "I could almost hear the pocket counter go off as he clicked off visit number 5 and I became a statistic."
There is a virus moving through the body of ministers called Careerism. It infects us almost unconsciously. It can be rationalized easily as a desire to serve God more effectively in a place of greater influence. It shows up in our natural competitiveness as we compare our work and ourselves with our peers. It is devastating to effectiveness in our true priestly function. My own most dramatic moment of struggle with it came at the time I was faced with the challenge of accepting the leadership of the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Controversy and career success did not seem compatible as I grappled with that virus. To my surprise and ultimate delight, when I decided that a CAUSE was more important than a CAREER, God gave me both. I wish that moment were the only encounter in my life with this deadly virus. But alas it was not.
We are priests with the responsibility to explain God and God`s Word to a world of biblically illiterate people. We are challenged in a brief-attention-span world to translate that Word in understandable ways. It is a challenge "par excellence!" We are helped by the fact that this is a day of spirituality with a thirst and a widespread urge to fill the aching void of empty lives. It is a time intrigued by the mystical. In short, it is your day! Seize it. Strive to achieve the excellence of translating spiritual truths while the time is ripe.
A vital part of the priestly function is to heal the broken hearted. We live in a world of profound grief and great loss. It is a world of pain and suffering. It is a world of bewildering want in the middle of plenty. It is a time when words-only communication is inadequate. It is also a world wrapped up images, but image-only communication is also inadequate, and it is unreal. Body language, however, is loud and clear. Actions of compassion, concern, and assistance not only communicate God`s love, but they also create God-listeners.
The Prophetic Responsibility of the Minister
As challenging as it is to fulfill our priestly calling, the challenge to fulfill our prophetic calling is more daunting. We are to be spokespersons who apply the ethical principles of God to life both personal and social. We are to perceive the damage done by injustice, racism, greed, sexual misbehavior, misuse of power. Evil is entrenched in a society with an appetite for consumption reminiscent of ancient Rome. The times cry for an answer to the question voiced by King Zedekiah to the prophet Jeremiah during the siege of Jerusalem, "Is there any word from the Lord?"
Alas, the answers have been inadequate or non-existent. In an attempt to avoid controversies with powerful people with vested interests who people our pews, there has been an ominous sound of silence from the pulpit. I am reminded of Franklin Littell`s story of the German Christian visiting America for the first time shortly after World War II. He was amazed by the fact that our churches had cushions in their pews. He said, "I have noticed that your sermons have cushions in them also."
Over fifty years ago that masterful scholar James Adams reminded us that the Priesthood of Believers, which is so dear to Baptist insights and so threatened in our day needs to be matched by the Prophethood of the Believers. He calls for thinking in terms of where these patterns are leading us or what he terms as "epochal thinking."
We have long held to the idea of the priesthood of all believers, the idea that all believers have direct access to the ultimate resources of the religious life and that every believer has the responsibility of achieving an explicit faith for free persons. As an element of this radical laicism we need also a firm belief in the prophethood of all believers…in which persons think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in the light of their faith….Only through the prophetism of all believers can we together foresee doom and mend our common ways.
We need to remember, however, that prophets cannot remain prophetic when they turn themselves into politicians. The so-called Religious Right has deeply damaged the role of the prophet by creating a "Christian" label for just another political group jockeying for position and political power. Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, part of the original team setting up Jerry Falwell`s Moral Majority, have chosen an apt name for their recent mea culpa book. It is called Blinded By Might. In it they say,
Religious conservatives have heard sermons that man`s ways are not God`s ways (Isaiah 55:8). In politics they have fused the two, causing damage to both church and state. The damage to church is caused by those who appear to the `unchurched` to be interested in ushering in the kingdom of God by force. The damage to the state is that at the precise moment when government needs the moral principles the church can offer, too many in both conservative and liberal wings of the church have deserted their primary territory and gone lusting after temporal power associated with the kingdom of this world (p 188-189).
I close with the reminder that the tension between being priestly or prophetic must not be allowed to paralyze us. Remember John`s Patmos cry which says God has already made us kings as well as priests. Kings take charge of something. We are to be God`s instrument to forward his reign within our own lives and with everything we touch. It is a joyous and exciting journey.
And as the man said when he jumped into the pool of crocodiles, "Come on in. One thing about it, you`ll never die of boredom."
