The Professional Ministry

I

THE professional ministry has its problems, — for example, the scarcity of candidates presenting themselves for the office, or the imposition of theological tests, — but it is not commonly perceived that itself also is a problem. To reflect on the great army of bishops, clergy, ministers, missioners; upon the enormous volume of preaching which is emitted week by week; upon the innumerable sacramental celebrations, ceremonial observances, to say nothing of the multifarious subsidiary organizations of which the professional minister is supposed to be the presiding, inspiring, sustaining genius; to ask what it all amounts to; and, in part answer to the question, to be confronted with a diminishing and decaying institution from which power and authority in the world are swiftly passing, — an institution which no longer leads the thought or wins the interest or directly influences the lives of the vast majority of the men and women of even western civilization, — is to conceive a suspicion that something is wrong, or wanting.

In a previous article, the present writer suggested certain fundamental considerations which might account in large measure for the ‘failure of the Church’; the purpose of this article, which must be regarded as supplementary to that, is to examine in a general way the position of the professional ministry in order to see if something is lacking here, —some quality of spirit, or some condition of its manifestation and utterance, — which may act as a contributory cause of this failure.

Nothing will be said here to give any encouragement to those facile faultfinders who, in any particular instance of breakdown or non-success, lay the blame upon the paid official. Most often this is egregiously unjust and obviously untrue. It may safely be said that no institution is better served than is the Christian Church by the devotion, generosity, and enthusiasm of its salaried or beneficed leaders. The additional virtue of ‘competence’ might have been placed to the credit side of their account; but this is a complicated matter, for the elucidation of which this article is partly written. Competence is related to function; and before it can be said that a man is competent, it must be asked, What is he supposed to do?

The prophetic note is largely lacking in the professional ministry, — the prophetic note, not necessarily the prophetic spirit; that is to say, the latter may be present, but the right conditions for its utterance do not prevail. By the ‘prophetic note’ is meant, in simplest terms, the human voice as the organ of the God-consciousness. It would be absurd to say that this is altogether absent from the modern Church. It is not. It is to be heard in the Roman Catholic Communion, in which there are special preaching orders, ‘schools of the prophets’; but the sacramentarian and institutional aspect of religion dominates, and he is something less than a prophet who prophesies by sufferance under ecclesiastical license.

In the Anglican Communion the situation is similar; the importance of preaching is commonly regarded as secondary; the priest puts the prophet in the shade; the witness of the institution as such is accounted more valuable and effective than that of the living, spontaneous utterance of the God-inspired, God-saturated personality; here and there, parochial and diocesan duties are so arranged as to give opportunity to the man of prophetic gifts to concentrate upon his vocation, but these are confessedly special cases; in the Episcopal Church the prophet is sporadic, and since the institutional demand is weak, the supply is occasional, chanceful, uncertain.

It would be in accordance with expectation to find a prophetic ministry flourishing as a natural and a native growth in the nonconformist communions; for the prophet is essentially nonconformist in spirit, and the ‘liberty of prophesying’ was one of the resounding claims put forward by the first English Nonconformists; moreover, among these sects the pressure of institutionalism is less heavy, and consequently it would seem that there should be more scope here for the mystical, personal, spontaneous, creative elements of the religious life. As a matter of fact, however, it is here that the chief disappointment lies. Freedom from sacerdotalism, gained at considerable cost, has not been turned to advantage in the interests of the prophetic spirit; it has been made almost of none effect through sectarian rivalries, denominational propagandism, entanglement with political movements, the necessity of raising money, anxiety to attract adherents, concern for success. The exhausting effect of these centrifugal activities is felt particularly by the minister, upon whose shoulders the whole burden and responsibility of the church organization presses. The emphasis has been withdrawn from the sacrament, the rite, the ceremony, and placed upon the preaching; but the situation as it stands does not afford the conditions of true preaching. A minister, occupied through the week in many varied labors, — most of them pleasant and useful in their way, — may go up into the pulpit on Sunday, and he may talk, expound, explain, theologize, argue, discourse, but rarely if ever will he preach. That unillumined, uninspired, unoriginal, ineffective preaching should be common in Episcopal churches, where preaching is not looked for, does not matter much; that it should be common in Nonconformist churches, where preaching is regarded as the central and most vital part of public worship, is a defect so serious that nothing can counterbalance it.

II

It is no disrespect to those communions in which the institutional and sacramentarian elements predominate, to say that the crux of the problem lies outside their borders. The arising of a truly prophetic ministry might go far to redeem the Christian Church from the evil days that are upon her; but that arrival can be reasonably expected only where the bonds of creed, formulary, dogma, sacrament, and ecclesiastical authority generally, are loose. The future of the religious institution may rest with the conformist; the future of religion as a progressive, creative, selfrenewing thing rests with the nonconformist, — using the word in the broad Emersonian sense.

At this point, therefore, the examination of the situation may become more minute. The problem for the moment may be allowed to formulate itself in the question, — Is a prophetic ministry on any considerable scale possible?

It may be stated baldly and bluntly that it is not possible for a professional ministry to be a prophetic ministry. There are those who ‘ enter the Church ’ with precisely the same feelings and ambitions with which others enter the medical or the legal profession: they look forward, legitimately, to success, to promotion, and to occupying a higher and more useful position in society than would otherwise be possible to them; it is their chosen profession, and they prepare themselves for it studiously and at considerable expense; there are some who take Holy Orders under pressure of personal or family circumstances; some are born into benefices; some buy them. We may take for granted the good character of such men; that, they are of ‘clean hands and a pure heart’; and if all that is chiefly demanded of them be the administration of the sacraments, the performance of rites, the exposition of doctrine on authoritative lines, parish work, and the maintenance of the dignity of the office, it is indisputable that the Church may be as well served by them as by any other class or type of high-minded, industrious, loyal, presentable person. The duties which fall to them do not require necessarily any special quality of religious consciousness or high spiritual endowment. They make admirable priests, pastors, teachers, organizers. They belong to an exceedingly honorable profession; and are entitled to whatever emoluments and dignities such a career offers.

But here is a man (let us say) with whom — in the fine Old Testament phrase —the Spirit of God has clothed Himself. He is under immense inward pressure. It is as if vast areas of virginal power were upthrust to a breakingpoint, an outcrop, in his soul. He realizes it as vision and enthusiasm. He knows both the joy and the terror of the saints. It may be assumed that he will submit himself to a period of physical, emotional, mental discipline, that he may be a clean-lipped, finely framed, sensitive, vibrant instrument for the breath of God; but there will be no question of his choosing anything: he has been chosen. He can have no profession ; he has a vocation. This man is, at least potentially, prophet and ‘man of God.’ He is by no means so rare a type as many may imagine. He is to be found in the churches, usually beating his wings against prison bars; more numerously he is to be found in the colleges which precede the churches; most numerously of all in that company of youthful eager souls whom the colleges and the churches, with much effort and patience, will fashion and train into professional ministers.

It is not difficult to determine, a priori as it were, the conditions under which the prophetic gift must be exercised and developed. They may be summed up in one word, — freedom. The Man of God must be free; and chiefly in several respects, the naming of which will go far to justify the suggestion already made, namely, that the conditions of a prophetic ministry do not prevail in the Church as at present constituted and organized.

He must be free from worldly ambitions, and from all the clinging apparel of worldly prosperity. He must have nothing to gain, and nothing to lose save his life. He must be poor. All poorly paid ministers are not prophets, but the prophet must be a poor man. He must be entirely above any chance of the suspicion of making personal profit or advantage out of his gift and the mission with which it entrusts him. He must have, of course, the necessities of decent living (physical and mental), — it is not essential to a prophet to be down-at-heels, insanitary, or an ignoramus, — but for these he should be dependent upon the loving charity of friends, or upon the work of his own hands in the original apostolic fashion. A man with a vocation should have an avocation, and the nearer it places him to raw material and the earth the better. Luxury and affluence (within limits) may be incompatible with a professional ministry, but certainly not with the circumstance and errand of a prophet. Even if the intuition of the saints on this matter is discounted, the example of Jesus should be final. To say that ‘times have changed’ is not an argument, but a subterfuge.

The prophetic soul must be free, also, from domestic and social encumbrance. He must be celibate. It is not a question of a celibate community, but of a celibate man, — a man absolutely free to be at the disposal of the ‘wind that bloweth where it listeth,’ free even from the dear distractions and the beautiful engrossments of family life. To the argument that this is to cut him off from some of the deepest and most intimate of human experiences, it can only be answered that Jesus (and many others) did not seem to labor under this disadvantage. A fortiori, he must be free from engagement list and pocket-book. To think of this man’s gift, his function, the solemnity of his call, the God-ferment in his soul; and then to imagine him paying rounds of visits, ‘looking people up,’ being dined here and entertained there, caught up in the respectable dissipation of social life, is to perceive a situation which would be ridiculous were it not treacherous. Further, he must be free to be often alone. The Man of God must live an essentially solitary, wild life. He must be ‘girt about with silences.’ He must be often at the upland wellsprings, which are as far removed from the commercial business, as they are from the intellectual talk, of the world. The continual supply and reinforcement of his power requires deeply withdrawn communion, meditation, self-emptying, vacancy, divine idlesse; mirror-like stillness of soul, that he may see therein the image of the overbending God; the silencing of thought, that he may catch the veriest whisper of the Invisible Companion; passivity, so that he may feel not only the pressure, but the direction of the pressure, of the Spirit. The scene of his actual ministry may be a city, but he ought to live in the open country where a man has still the chance of natural, free companionship with God. He must be free to home himself where ‘the great Visions and the great Voices’ dwell. He need not always be mingling with people that he may know their private needs; his business is to mediate that Eternal Word which, when implanted in the heart, is the Grace which is sufficient and adaptable to every kind of need.

Still further, the Man of God must be free from the imposition of external authority, be it of Pope, Bishop, Synod, Conference, creed, dogma, or any such person or thing. He must be free to announce his Soul, which is God moving to manifestation and new creation in him. Who, or what, shall limit or canalize the Holy One in him? To whom shall he do obeisance? What license shall he require who is under divine necessity, and who shall license him without impiety? What institution shall dare to claim and brand as its propagandist him who is God’s herald? Who shall put a hand to his mouth, or tune to another key the instrument which is already set to the lips of God? Quite clearly, the Man of God cannot put himself in such a position.

III

Do the conditions of such a ministry prevail even in the nonconforming section of the Church?

Before turning to examine the situation from the side of the Church, a parenthesis is necessary in order to avoid misunderstanding. Use has been made several times of the phrase ‘Man of God.’ It has been used in a specialized, narrow sense; the sense in which it could be used of John the Baptist, for example, and not of the Scribes; or of Jesus, and not of the doctors in the Temple. The phrase may be employed with a much wider reference; and since ‘all service ranks the same with God,’ the designation could not be refused to any faithful, sincere, pious man. Professors of theology, pastors of churches, class-leaders, parish priests, denominational secretaries, are all men of God in the broader sense. Yet none of them may be men of God in the narrower sense. Here is a professional minister who is so full of occupations, who is in such demand for lectures, speeches, articles, that it is necessary for him to use a dictaphone and employ a secretary; is he a man of God ? In the broader sense, undoubtedly; in the narrower sense, no; the Man of God does not talk nearly so much as that. Here is another who to already onerous pastoral, institutional, denominational duties adds those of a member of the national legislature, and dies an untimely death from overwork; is he a man of God ? In the broader sense, unquestionably; in the narrower sense, no; the Man of God never dies from overwork. Another, cultured, learned, literary, is a great teacher, and writes volumes which could not be absent from the library shelves of any self-respecting student of theology; his expository lectures are crowded; his apologetical arguments appear to be unanswerable; surely he is a man of God; and yet, as Whitman reminds us, there is another type and quality of man on whose appearance the argument about the soul stops; or, as Edward Carpenter has it in ‘Towards Democracy,’ this one comes,—

Unlike the pastor, he will be aloof, strange, austere, almost unknown; unlike the minister or parish priest who is always on the spot, he will come and go, appearing out of the silence and vanishing back into it, as if he himself were the drawing-aside of the veil, — which he is; unlike the organizer, he will be a ferment, a challenge; unlike the teacher, he will announce himself; unlike the successful pulpiteer, he will be poor and without organized backing; unlike the missioner, he will come without observation, and will not be concerned about saving souls, — for it is a good thing to save souls, but not a good thing to be anxious about saving them.

The differentia of the Man of God is a certain quality of the religious consciousness, difficult to define, but immediately recognizable whenever and wherever it may be manifested; ‘never man spake like this man’; ‘with authority, and not as the scribes’; ‘virtue is gone forth from me’; ‘this is a hard saying, who can hear it?’; ‘from that time many turned back and walked no more with him’; ‘come, let us kill him.’ He is a voice, not an echo. He is a revealer, not an interpreter. He creates, he does not reproduce. He does not hand on a gospel, himself is the gospel. He has life in himself. He is less a messenger than he is himself the message. He is so highly charged with spiritual vitalities, that his presence is electric, his very body magnetic, his ideas are explosive, his passion is a consuming flame, his gestures are the thrusts or the caresses of the Eternal. He is filled with the Spirit to the point of saturation. There is something about him that suggests, makes palpable, that Bigger World which is the Other World, the Infinite Life, the Universal Soul, the All-embracing Harmony, the Reality of God, and the Rest which ever ‘ flows around our restlessness.’

This is the Man of God in the narrower sense of the phrase. To confine the title to him is not to derogate from others who are loyal servants of truth and goodness. To exalt Amos is not to despise the quiet and godly folk of the land. To praise the pioneer is not to detract from the recognized value of the road-maker or the bridge-builder. To acclaim the pathfinder is not to decry the organizer who brings civilization laboriously along in his wake, up to the discovered place. To cry aloud for a prophetic ministry is not to dismiss a professional ministry as futile. There are diversities of gifts, each of which signifies a certain differing measure and quality of the same Spirit. The complaint is, that the Church, mindful more of organization than of life, anxious to preserve itself rather than eager to create, has practically organized the prophetic gift out of existence so far as its ministry is concerned.

For let us now imagine a man with this prophetic possibility within him, an embryonic or just nascent Man of God, offering himself to the Church. He takes this course because it is the obvious one; it is natural for him to imagine that here is a ready, indeed anxiously waiting, platform for his selfannouncements. Let us imagine that, under that demand for freedom which has already been indicated, he selects a nonconformist communion in which the institutional and credal bonds are less heavy and exacting, in which therefore he thinks, — with some reason, — that he will find an ampler opportunity. Let us further imagine that he passes through the four or six years of collegiate seclusion and discipline with success, — that is to say (since any other kind of success apart from this is failure), with the inward flame still pure and bright and strong. He enters the ranks of the professional ministry, and, full of prophetic fervor, accepts the invitation of a church. His zeal, the strength of his desire, blinds him at first to the precise nature of the situation to which he has committed himself; or, if he is not altogether ignorant of the difficulties and risks, he believes in his ability to rise above them. Ultimately — not seldom too late — he discovers that he has become the paid servant of an organization. What does this involve?

Among the things which are chiefly required by an organization are an organizer and money. The latter is not the less important. Church organization centres on the treasury. It may not be true of churches which are endowed or which happen for the time being to be flourishing, but the majority of unendowed churches are not flourishing, and of these it is true that the treasury is, if not the centre of interest, the centre of concern. A minister’s happy tenure of office is very largely determined by the seat-rents and collections. A minister is ‘called’ in the hope that he will ‘ fill the church ’; other things are, of course, taken into consideration, but when a church committee is discussing an invitation to the pastorate the question of the possibility or otherwise of success in outward things looms very large. When the income begins to fall away, whispers soon arise as to whether ‘he is quite the right man,’ or, perhaps, that ‘ he has finished his work among us.’ In deacons’ meetings finance occupies the major portion of the time. Anniversary services, and the like, are but thinly veiled methods of securing a handsome collection; the ‘special preacher’ is chosen almost entirely with this object in view. The subsidiary organizations of the church — and the more of these there are, and the more vigorously they are carried on, the healthier and the more prosperous is the church accounted to be —are a kind of net spread out to get as many persons as possible into attachment. Some churches go very near to touting for adherents; and that delicious bit of pungent criticism in the second chapter of the Epistle of St. James about the ‘man with a gold ring’ is by no means out of date. Still with a view to the treasury, advertisement in a cruder or more refined form is largely resorted to; a church has its private hoarding with its alluring posters, and the title of the preacher’s sermon is frequently dangled as a bait.

If such efforts are successful, the phenomenon of a ‘live church’ appears. In the vast majority of cases, the largest single item on the debit side of church accounts, often itself exceeding all the rest put together, is the stipend of the minister. To the inquiry as to why this is so, the answer seems to be that he has a right to it so long as he is worth it; that is to say, so long as he can earn it, and as much more as is necessary to keep the organization going. The query is common enough, ‘Will he come for what we can afford to pay?’ and from this it is only a step to an illuminating question and reply made not long ago in the hearing of the writer: ‘Can we afford to give him so much?’ ‘Oh, yes, he will soon make it up.’ When church funds are low, a minister feels very uncomfortable ; and he may be forgiven for feeling that he is not doing all that is expected of him, and that it is somehow up to him to improve matters, or take less, or go. Few persons, perhaps, are so brutal or so undiscerning as to suggest that a minister’s salary is a real quid pro quo; but any one familiar with the inside working of a ‘free’ church knows that the facts, stated here perhaps somewhat nakedly, are true.

Our Man of God, then, finds himself in the position of the leading responsible official of an organization which exists in a constant effort to raise money, the larger portion of which is paid to him.

He discovers a further fact, namely, that, — as is almost inevitable, — the church requires him as an organizer. This works in two directions, both of which militate against the development and expression of his prophetic gift. There is as much divergence between the peculiar gifts of a prophet and those of an organizer, as there is between a mystic and a machinist. A prophet will be much more likely to turn out a disorganizer. He represents the forward movement of the creative life rather than the status quo. He is the ferment, to which Jesus likened the Kingdom of Heaven ‘which is among you,’ The aim of an organizer is security and establishment; a prophet, on the other hand, is almost necessarily a dangerous, if not a violent, man. His objective is the kingdom of God, and conceivably that may be something other than the church as organized. All attractive preachers are not prophets, any more than all successful rhymesters are poets; but should it so happen that this Man of God draws the multitude, —as Jesus did to begin with, — all will go well; the treasurer will have nothing to do but to count the money and bank it; and the subsidiary organizations of the church will have all the workers and all the material they want. Should his preaching bring, however, not peace but a sword, should he utter hard, harassing, bewildering sayings, overturn tradition, shock respectability, make the foundations of moral and religious life shake so as to threaten the structure within which conventionally good people find shelter and refuge, announce new values, and so disturb, grieve, vex, alienate the people who invited him (not knowing what they did), then it will be clear whether the organization desired a prophet or no; the organization will have a possibly polite and sympathetic, but a very firm, word to say to him in its own way.

If this hazard lies in the more external circumstances of the situation, one more subtle and perilous lies within the man’s own heart. There will be strain and conflict between the loyalties. He will feel the awful, austere, silent, unrelenting pressure of the Spirit; and he will recognize the natural, inevitable, understandable requirement on the part of the organization that it should be nursed and edified. He will feel the influence of the general expectation that his preaching should ‘play up’ to the organization. Why should he distress, shock, alienate the people whose invitation he has accepted, and who — pay him his living? Why should he announce himself in defiance of institutional tradition and authority, when he owes to the institution the platform on which he stands ? Why not confine himself to the things commonly believed? Are not these people babes who want milk and not meat? How dare he be an offense to the least of the little ones? Can he not use equivocal language, placing his private interpretation on a word upon which the hearers are at liberty to place their own? Besides, if he loses this platform, what are his chances of finding another? And so Prudence hammers at the door, and Sympathy turns devil’s advocate. Ideally, his choice is easy; practically, it is terribly hard.

The church’s requirement that its minister shall further the interests of the organization militates in another direction against the mission of a Man of God. It embroils him in multitudinous activities which withdraw his energy from the centre and dissipate it. He must keep the people together, shepherd the flock, and originate new plans which will be likely to attract others from outside; he must visit the homes of his people and make himself pleasant; bring around the disaffected, stimulate the slack; stimulate the ‘staff’ by his example; attend upon the sick, comfort the dying; preside over all kinds of gatherings, from a prayer-meeting to a pipe-parliament; be able to speak out of hand on almost every subject under the sun; take several kinds of classes; initiate good works; run this and that, from a concert to a crèche; represent his congregation in denominational assemblies. He must be a preacher, a pastor, the secretary of a company, the managing director of a thriving business, and (as often as not) his own commercial traveler to boot. In addition to this, he must keep up a style consistent with his position, and suffer all the social entanglements connected therewith, whether he likes it or no. He must also be a credit to his church in local public affairs. This, which is here set down, is perhaps the minimum which is expected of the professional ministry. It is not to be wondered at that there are, in the ranks of such a profession, some in whom the prophetic spirit still pulses, — so tenacious is it, — who are beginning to feel that it is impossible to exercise the vocation of a Man of God and continue to be entangled in organization at all.

IV

‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest the prophets.’ The Church is wilting, withering, perishing for lack of a baptism of the Spirit. She herself confesses it; her ministers confess it by their periodical conventions for the deepening of the spiritual life; her congregations confess it by their call for the services of the evangelistic missioner; she confesses it by attempting to counterbalance her defect in real spiritual authority and prophetic power with a display of reforming zeal in the social order. In spite of all this, the weakening and decline continue; and will continue so long as she kills her prophets by making them subserve the organization. The baptism of the Spirit does not come out of the clouds, or the invisible heaven; it is mediated through souls God-sensitive, God-attuned, God-possessed, to a high degree; and these men, from whose uplifted hands and unbosomed hearts the waters of this baptism might copiously fall, the church keeps at committee-tables, and among the wheels of the machinery.

If it is asked, Where are such men? Are there any? — these are the questions of traitorous doubt and atheism. Did divine inspiration run into a cul de sac two thousand years ago? If it is asked, How can the Church discover them ? — the practical reply is, by making possible the necessary conditions of their manifestation and functioning. The conclusion to be drawn from the facts as stated here is that the conditions of a prophetic ministry do not prevail in the Church as now ordered. Can she make room for a new order? Can she take the risk of the prophet? Can she take the tremendous hazard of a whole order of prophets?

It may be admitted that organization is necessary. So far as it is necessary, it should be thorough; it should be conducted with business acumen, professional skill, and by trained expert men; the leadership of this side of the church’s life should not be intrusted to a man trained for a different service, consecrated to a different end, a man who may be a mystic, a visionary, a recluse, a fool to the world. Let the Church get its organizer; let him be called pastor, minister, secretary, superintendent, overseer (bishop), or whatever title is most suitable; let him be the professional man; let him be paid for his services, — and it will scarcely be possible to pay him too highly. But the Man of God must be outside the organization; he must be as free and as independent as the spirit that moves him; he ought not to be ‘attached’ to one congregation, so that his particular church,—after our modern fashion, — becomes one of the ‘show places’ of a city; he might minister chiefly to several congregations, to a district of congregations; it would mean less preaching, — an excellent thing. Let him preach when he will and where he will. Let him issue out of the wilderness, and come to the people, gathered to meet him, with all the freshness, power, eternity of the wilderness upon him. It does not require much imagination to overhear a busy, careworn, weary, world-entangled people saying to each other in anticipation of such an assemblage of themselves together, ‘The Man of God will be with us’; and they would say it with a strange throbbing expectation in the heart and a lighting up of the eyes which does not characterize the usual modern worshiper as he thinks of the Sunday morning service.

You smile at the idea of this. Your smile means a non possumus. There is no place for the prophet; he must take his chance in the organization. Then you had better get the chalk, and write ‘Ichabod.’

If it has come to this, if the church does not, and cannot, provide the conditions necessary to a prophetic ministry, then it is time that those who find the professional ministry incompatible with the vocation which still remains, though so long thwarted, the power, light, joy that is in them, should come out of the organized Church, give up all that they have, find the ‘way of downgoing,’ pass from the notice of men, bury themselves in the secret places of the land, fulfill their mission on the lines that Jesus, the Master, by his example showed them, die like seeds fallen into the earth, and make possible the resurrection of the Spirit whose Presence suffices to create the only Church that is, and the only ministry that truly serves and saves.