Part Two – Why Clergy?
Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them… Any Christian gathering, small as much as large, is a valid worshipping and witnessing community. It is not a fraction of some greater entity. It is not a subdivision or shopfront for some global institution. It is the whole of the whole in that place. It is fully supplied by the Holy Spirit, and so fully able to be the body of Christ in that place.
So why does this local church need a bishop? Why do we need clergy? Why do we need a priest? Let us start with the issue of the clergy.
The point about clergy is that they have been given the skill of reading and of writing. Clergy are clerks. They read. A reader is someone who read aloud to a group of people listening. Earlier Christians practised memorising, and so they developed their powers of recall. They not only listened to what was read, but they intended to memorise it so that they could reproduce it when there was no book and no reader available. This is how we should read the Scripture in our service, slowly and deliberately enough that others can commit it to memory. What is read is also expounded so that its sense becomes clear.
Our clergy read books. By reading books they have access to a time other than the present. The past is a walk-in storeroom, and reading is the key to the door. As they read they are mining different lower strata of Christian experience, strata that are out of reach of most of us most of time. They trawl through the records of other centuries and come up with things that we have never seen before. We learn that previous generations of the Church valued practices that we don’t immediately see the point of, but which we should note, in case we ever need them. If we read about them, perhaps we would find out why earlier generations of Christians insisted on the goodness of practices, like fasting and celibacy, which we assume we can do without. The reader is the man who comes out of his storeroom bearing treasures old and new. Old treasures may be new to us, but bring exactly the experience and insight we need now.
If you can read, you can do what earlier generations of clergy hoped to do, to bring out of store resources which may be useful either now or in the future. If you read what other generations wrote down for you, you have something to give your own church. But you have nothing to bring your fellow Christians if you do not bring it supplies from earlier generations. The contemporary church has nothing to offer the world if it does not bring it news from other generations. If we confine ourselves within the mind-set of our own generation, and we elect ourselves officers who are equally confined, how will we help each other and how will they help us? Why do we need them, if they can only contribute what we all already know?
So it is the job of every Christian to encourage one another, and in particular to encourage the clergy, to read the books written by other generations and so to discover what they intended to communicate to us. We must encourage our clergy to persevere with reading and learning from all generations of the Church even if this is difficult and demanding effort, and even if it brings us up against the prevailing wisdom of our own age. What we receive from the generations before us, so that it reaches the generations that come after us. We must therefore withstand and defy our own generation. You can be sure that bravery will be required, for we will receive derision and condemnation from the leaders of our own generation. If we don’t, this may be because our clergy has become so conformed to them that they have no effective gospel to give.
What we need then is a Christian from outside, who can what we lack and give it to us. What we need is a bishop….
