are words that were to keep reappearing in the ordination prayers of the churches, so it is worth spending some time with them. The predominant image is pastoral – pastoral, that is, in the sense of the shepherding that was familiar to first-century people and which fills the biblical use of any pastoral metaphor: a demanding life dedicated more to developing health than maintaining comfort, more used to keeping them on the move than finding spuriously safe places to hide, committed to building up the life of the whole flock so that it is strong, energetic and generative, able to grow in quality and quantity. Paul would not have seen any opposition between the pastoral and the missionary. The Church of his day was missionary. The effectiveness of its mission required presbyters who could preserve its missionary character as a body in continual motion towards God’s purposes. Presbyteral ministry therefore clearly involved oversight. Paul even calls the presbyters ‘overseers’ – episcopoi in Greek, often translated as ‘bishops’. By the middle of the second century the ministry of the episcopoi became distinguished from the ministry of the presbuteroi but at this stage they appear to be two ways of describing the same ministry. In fact, for some time after the second century their ministries were closely identifiable and certainly much of the work of a bishop up to at least the fourth century was very similar to work of many parish priests today. Teaching was a key element in the presbyter-bishop’s oversight of the life of the people. With a ‘firm grasp of the word’ (Titus 1:9) they were to ‘labour in preaching and teaching’ (1 Timothy 5:17). They were to keep watch over, look after, oversee the life of Christ’s people, working with other ministries to ensure that the Church in that place is deeply rooted in the word and life of Christ, so that the body can ‘build itself up in love’ (Ephesians 4:16).
Paul knew from his own experience that ‘keeping watch’ involved protecting the people from danger, even the danger that might erupt from within (Acts 20:19–20) and supporting the weak, especially the poverty stricken (Acts 20:35). He commends the presbyters to follow his example. The ease with which Paul encourages them to look to his example signals another theme that consistently reoccurs not only through the biblical witness but also in the liturgies of the churches and other repositories of the Church’s wisdom about its ordained ministries. As well as his compassion for the weak and his commitment to the health of the Church, there are at least three other features of Paul’s style of ministry that deserve attention. The first is simply that his ministry was genuinely ministry or, in Greek diakonia, meaning service: ‘You yourselves know how I lived among you . . . serving the Lord with all humility’ (Acts 20:19). His ministry was rooted in an incarnational identification with the people and demonstrated itself through faithful evangelistic preaching and catechetical teaching in the most difficult and life-threatening of circumstances. All ministry is diaconal, earthed in a consistent, committed care of the Church after the manner of Jesus, the homeless rabbi who redefined leadership in terms of service, made the towel a symbol of authority and lived as the servant who gave his life as a ransom for many. So intrinsic was diakonia to the identity of the Church that its first ordination service was for seven people, ‘full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom’ appointed to serve the Jerusalem church by taking a particular responsibility for the care of its widows (Acts 6:1–6). And from the fourth century it became increasingly normal for presbyters to be first ordained deacons, underlining that service remains the basis of all ministry.
The second feature of Paul’s time in Ephesus that is worth noting follows as a natural consequence of his dedicated diakonia: his tears. Paul had ministered with tears (Acts 20:19, 31). It had been painful to build the Church in Ephesus, there were dimensions of its culture that were deeply unaccommodating to the gospel. And after all they had been through together it was a painful process for Paul and the elders to bid their farewells to each other (Acts 20:37), intensified by the uncertainty that faced them all. Again the example of Jesus was the backdrop to their ministry. His self-depiction as a servant of others was a conscious adoption of the suffering servant motif in the Isaianic prophecies. Jesus knew that to serve the people in the messianic ministry of God’s new order carried with it the mantle of suffering. Servanthood and suffering were yoked together as surely as motherhood and the pain of labour in the birth of God’s kingdom.
When the Polish priest, Maximillian Kolbe, confessed to a crime he had not committed to save another person from death in a Nazi concentration camp, he was stepping into the footprints of Jesus, the suffering servant, and joining the many martyrs of every century who have been ready to follow the logic of Christian diakonia.
Third, Paul shows a radical dependence on the Holy Spirit. We saw earlier how his time in Ephesus was marked by dramatic activity of the Spirit. Now, in his farewell to the elders, he describes himself as ‘captive to the Spirit’ (Acts 20:23), hints at his attentiveness to the voice of the Spirit guiding and leading him to new opportunities for ministry and reminds them it is the Holy Spirit who has made them overseers in the Church. I remember speaking to John Wimber, another extraordinary church planter, about the dynamic of the Church’s ministry. Describing the way that throughout the book of Acts the Spirit guides, enables and orders the life of the Church, he said, ‘we need an ecclesiology that recognizes the Spirit as the true administrator of the Church’. Sitting in St Paul’s Cathedral some years later while attending a consecration of a bishop, I was reminded of our conversation and his challenge when I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury quote from Acts 20:28 in the ordination liturgy as he handed the new bishop his pastoral staff: ‘Keep watch over the whole flock in which the Holy Spirit has appointed you shepherd’. At its best, Anglican ecclesiology is profoundly pneumatological, and its liturgy prays what it once agreed in dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, ‘the Church is that Community which lives by continually invoking the Holy Spirit’.8 Only ministry that is empowered by the Spirit can claim to be sharing in the ministry of Jesus the Christos, the anointed one.
The exhortation in 1 Peter 5 to the presbyters in other churches in Turkey is remarkably similar to Paul’s advice to the Ephesian elders. They are instructed to ‘tend the flock in their charge (kleros)’, to exercise ‘the oversight’ and to be ‘examples’ to those in their care. The mention of the kleros is interesting. It is the word from which we derive our word clergy, which is generally but quite unhelpfully used to distinguish the ordained from the laity. Of course, the presbyters were as much a part of the laos as every other member of the body of Christ. Laos simply means ‘people’ and strictly refers to all God’s people, whatever their particular ministry. The kleros of the presbyters is not a right of privilege but a rite of responsibility. Within the laos, the people of God, the presbyters are given a particular kleros, a charge or responsibility, literally a ‘lot’. As Acts 20:28 reminds us, it is a charge of immense value, it is the care of ‘the Church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son’. Presbyters are not a caste outside the laos, they are a category within the laos. They are members of the laos who are placed in a particular pastoral relation to other members of the laos. It is not a position that gives them any right to ‘lord it over the people’ (1 Peter 5:3), rather it places on them the pattern of the ‘chief shepherd’ (1 Peter 5:4) Christ’s servanthood. The spirit of 1 Peter 5 and Acts 20 is well expressed in the bishop’s words to those about to be ordained priest in the Anglican Ordinal (1550/1662):
Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his Spouse, and his Body.9
We said at the beginning of the chapter that Christian identity is fundamentally relational. We concentrated on the believer’s relation to Christ and on the calling to follow him in ministry. The place of the presbyters in the people of God helps us to see the interrelationality between all the members of the body and its different ministries. Presbyters are defined by their relationship to other members of the laos. Their calling by Christ and their appointment by the Holy Spirit into this ministry among the people is an ecclesial event. It happens as the Church recognizes its need and discerns the call of God upon these people. Their ministry is given to them and
