The Starting Point for a Theology of Ministry

The Catholic Church in the United States experienced Vatican II as an event and catalyst for change. Parishes rapidly caught fire as the optimism and enthusiasm of a church responding to the times were transmitted from the debates in Rome and circulated in the council documents. At the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII spoke of the need to "shake up" the church (he used the word aggiornamento) — to bring the church up to date — while at the same time maintaining faithfulness to its deepest traditions.

After the close of the council, the Catholic Church in the United States experienced its own aggiornamento. The new vision of community offered by Vatican II combined with the social and political upheavals of the 1960s to shape for American Catholics a new understanding of the church's mission. Prepared by their involvement in earlier groups like the Catholic Worker Movement and the Catholic Interracial Council, active laypeople and involved clergy immersed themselves in the peace and social justice movements of the day. Activism was in the air. Daniel Berrigan was jailed in protest of the war in Vietnam, while the Catholic Workers helped organize mass demonstrations in New York City. Fr. Theodore Hesburgh served as a charter member of the United States Civil Rights Commission, while countless individuals involved in the Christian Family Movement marched in Selma and Montgomery.

Catholic activism not only touched society's issues of war, racism, and social injustice, but also extended into the life of the church community. As priests, women religious, and parishioners took up the social causes of the 1960s, the laity entered the churches actively serving the community. Once confined to a "lay apostolate" that involved a limited and ambiguous Christian witness in the workplace or to volunteer services like coaching parish sports teams, collecting clothes for charity, and cleaning church premises, the laity took up new roles in religious education and liturgy and, for the first time, called their work "ministry."

The transformation of parish ministries brought on by increasing lay involvement has called into question patterns of ministry and ways of understanding the church that extend back centuries. A paradigm shift — a transformation of the basic images and understanding of ministry — is underway, led not so much by ideas as by pastoral change. This change can be seen in parishes around the country where laypeople have taken up tasks formerly reserved for the priest (such as visiting the sick on behalf of the parish, administering communion, overseeing parish finances, leading prayer groups and prayer services) and created positions in ministry unimaginable before Vatican II (the parish director of religious education, the liturgy coordinator, the social justice coordinator, and so on). The theologian reflects on issues raised by new experiences and searches for models to match a reality already taking shape. Where does one begin? In tackling any of a host of hotly debated issues surrounding ministry today — the accountability of bishops to their dioceses, mandatory celibacy for priests, the possibility of laypeople functioning as pastors or exercising sacramental ministries traditionally reserved to the ordained — the specific position taken or the arguments advanced are not as important as the unspoken assumptions that guide the discussion. Where one begins often determines where one ends, for differing theological premises can contribute to very different conclusions about ministry.

Two Doors into Ministry

Reflecting on his own changing theology of ministry, the French Dominican and theological advisor at the Second Vatican Council Yves Congar remarked: "In general terms it may be said that the door whereby one enters on a question decides the chances of a happy or a less happy solution." Con-gar described two starting points that illustrate two different approaches to ministry. If we enter the discussion on church and ministry through the door of the hierarchical priesthood and consider the bishop or presbyter as exclusive recipients of a direct call from Christ and as paradigmatic for all ministry, then it is difficult to see the layperson as anything more than a helper or participant in work that properly belongs to the ordained. The men of the hierarchy become the sacred ministers, while the laity serve Christ in the world — not passive, but somewhat secondary. On the other hand, if we enter the discussion through the door of the community, then we are better equipped to describe the whole church as receiving a mission from Christ, and we are able to affirm a diversity of active services within this community: one mission, many ministries. Congar admitted that his early writings on the laity followed the first path; only later did he see the necessity of the second, of starting with the community: "It would then be necessary to substitute for the linear scheme a scheme where the community appears as the enveloping reality within which the ministries, even the instituted sacramental ministries, are placed as modes of service of what the community is called to be and do." Starting points imply presupposed frameworks, models for understanding church and ministry.

A generation later, Thomas O'Meara observed the development of Congar's theology and described the shift from a dividing-line model of church to a model of concentric circles. According to O'Meara, a fellow Dominican and theologian, "Congar sketched a model which would replace the bipolar division of clergy and laity: a circle with Christ and Spirit as ground or power animating ministries in community."

Many, if not most, of the disagreements over ministry in the church today have their foundation in different visions of what the church is and ought to be, for these two models continue to exist and exercise their influence. Parishioners, pastors, and professional theologians argue little over ancient doctrine. Differences often lie at the level of the imagination, that is, how we imagine or envision this community of which we are a part.

Debate often concerns how specific actions or concrete structures bring into existence (or continue to frustrate) our mental picture of what church and ministry can be. This discussion reflects on two models which are not rigid systematic categories but instead are "imaginative constructs," or simplified pictures of two definite tendencies in the theology of ministry today, two different starting points: the dividing-line model and the model of concentric circles.

The Limitations of a Dividing-Line Model

While the first model, with a line dividing a sacred clergy from a secular laity, was recognized as inadequate by Congar even before the Second Vatican Council, it still influences the church's official statements on...