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The Director of the Trinity College Theological School of the University of Melbourne, Reverend Dr. Andrew McGowan. And Andrew, of course, commenced his work as director of that particular institute in early July 2004.

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Andrew was previously the Associate Professor of Early Christian History at the Episcopal of the Trinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he has a PhD degree in Christianity and Judaism in antiquity, of course, from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. And Andrew comes to us with a warm and gentle heart and a disciplined scholarly theological

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mind, and we are very grateful to him for his willingness to take the trip from Melbourne to us to engage in this very significant, I think, issue and debate for us in the Australian Church as it is in terms of the whole concept across the world. Andrew has had a recent bereavement, he has just been perturbed to be a part of the funeral

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of his wife's father, Nicole's father, and we offer him our sympathy as we do to Bruce Paul, who's here, whose father died two weeks ago. So Andrew, welcome, and we are particularly grateful to you for your presence with us and we look forward to what you have to say.

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That well-known sacramental theologian Mark Twain was once asked a question concerning a highly controversial matter of appropriate liturgical practice and participation. Did he believe in infant baptism? The answer was characteristically pity.

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Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it. Now, this piece of common sense sacramental realism is worth bearing in mind. Of course, as we face the question of what has been referred to as lay presidency or lay

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administration of the Eucharist in our church. As you've already heard, we are not dealing here with a purely hypothetical question that we could debate as though decisions were really yet to be made. Statements that have come to us from the diocese of Sydney and reports such as those we've

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already heard imply that decisions have been made and that the remaining issues are really more about how we're and when rather than weather. It suggests that under certain circumstances lay persons have and do preside over the great thanksgiving of the Eucharist in certain settings already.

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Now we might have assumed from other experience that leaders of those diocese which are reflecting on such possibilities, primarily as I understand it, Sydney and Armadale, might well not see others of us as full participants or stakeholders in a conversation that of course affects them far more directly even if we feel it impinge upon us all.

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Even without the question of whether our diverse views on the use of scripture and other matters of authority allow us to qualify as serious theological dialogue partners. This is of course all the more reason to be grateful to Dr. Jensen for his presence and the careful and open and genial spirit of his presentation.

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He has been willing to face an audience that granted your diversity might still have constituted one, I think, not too friendly to his position. My own dilemma is different. Just with whom am I speaking and why?

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You see, we could engage in some sort of process up here and I could therefore cast myself as a kind of theological king Knut seeking pointlessly to turn back the waves of lay administration as they begin to lap over us from the diocese of Sydney. But what would the point of that be?

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Anglicans of Catholic mind and practice sometimes do find a little reassurance in establishing common cause about the things we're all against, don't we? Sometimes it's hard these days, isn't it? To find something we actually agree upon opposing can be vaguely reassuring.

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But as the Prime Minister has put it in his recent book, we should be grateful, whatever we think about this issue, to those in the diocese of Sydney who have raised the question since it forces us all to re-examine our inherited tradition. And while of course I do want to engage with Dr Jensen about many of the arguments and

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presuppositions of these proposals, I want just as much to be engaging with all of you so that we can actually think carefully about what the real challenges for our own situation are going to be. It is no good for us to simply lapse into a kind of sloppy postmodern pluralism and say

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when you can have your position and we can have ours and that's fine. This does actually provide us with an opportunity to think hard, not just about what we're against, but what we're actually for and why. So what are we really talking about?

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The formal proposal, such as the question that was put to the Appellate Tribunal of the National Church in 1977, and the most public rebuttals of this proposal, such as appears in Archbishop Kahnley's book, continued to present this as a question of who may preside at the Eucharist or if you prefer who may administer the Lord's Supper.

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I would like to suggest that this is not actually what the issue is about. And I have to do so with some attention to key documents that have emerged from the Sydney diocese since this issue has raised its head. Although I understand that the question of quote licensing lay persons for the Ministry

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of Words and Sacrament was raised in Sydney Synod as long ago as 1977, we've actually heard this morning that it was even earlier than that. The first document that has crossed my desk is where is a doctrine commission from the dioceses of Sydney, a doctrine commission report from 1983 that issued a report highly

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favorable to the notion of what was still then being called lay presidency. That report, which drew on discussion papers by PTO Brian and PW Barnett, concludes that lay persons could and should be authorised to preside at the Eucharist primarily because of a conclusion that in the New Testament Church, presbyters or elders usually presided

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at church meetings, and that quote, a rector in the Anglican polity is actually the senior presbyter among the permanent local presbyters in a congregation. The basic argument here is that therefore that a corporate local eldership is the biblical model.

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And that of course is a familiar claim in a long debate over the appropriate forms of ministry and churches of the reformation, and which Anglicans have of course been characterised by a different position. Since the New Testament documents actually seem to me to envisage and assume a variety

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of situations and models, I would have to say that neither the traditional Anglican position nor the traditional Presbyterian position appealed to me as somehow self-evident. Rather we have to acknowledge I think that the New Testament itself reflects a plurality of forms of order and that clear answers cannot be determined purely by reading the documents

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themselves in isolation. However I will, having said that, take my life in my hands in a few minutes and try to come back to questions of what a New Testament witness to leadership should lead us to conclude about Presidency and Word and Sacrament.

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In any event, there is a consistent thread through a number of other papers and statements that I have seen since, which emanated from the Diocese of Sydney, which hold the view that in a local church community, a group of authorised leaders, not lay persons in general, not lay persons in general, it must be emphasised.

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Shares in Ministries of Word and Sacrament under the supervision of a rector. In an earlier version of the paper that the Archbishop just shared with us, he himself argues for a reading of the Book of Common Pairs on Ordering of Priests, which seems to me to work in similar terms, as granting, this is the ordinal, granting recognition

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and authority to exercise a pastoral as opposed to a sassadotal ministry of Word and Sacrament in a community setting, that is to say that the particular role of the ordained Presbyter among a group of local presbyters is what the role of priest is in the Anglican polity, the role of an incumbent.

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So in this view, the office of rector, rather than the identity of priest, a political identity rather than a vocational one, is given an inherent significance. Although the three orders of ministry of Bishop Priest and Deacon are not so clearly aligned with this view of what the ministries of the Church really constitute.

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So it seems to me that the proposal to change the authorised pattern of presiding at the Eucharist stems fundamentally from this conception of the local congregation and its ministry, which is not really one of lay participation as such, not participation of the last, the whole community of the gathered Church, but rather of the establishment

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of a new order of ministry alongside the three of Catholic order, that is to say a collective eldership at Presbyter it. These prospective lay presiders of the proposals we are hearing about are arguably not lay at all in the perspective of the proponents.

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Let me offer a couple of further points from the Sydney documents which seem to me to clarify this. The first of these is the belief that ordination itself requires no visible signs such as the laying on of hands, a visible or otherwise.

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In the paper that Dr Jensen presented to the New South Wales Bishops last year and of which we heard parts in a new form today, he argued that ordination consists of the recognition by Bishop and people of the gifts of a person suitable to be chief pastor of a Church. The recognition by the Bishop and that theoretically ordination by the laying on of hands is not

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essential even for Presbyteral or Episcopal ministry. He does go on to add, I should say, that he regards that sign as an edifying one which has biblical precedent, but that it is not strictly necessary. Of course, what this means is that what other Anglicans might refer to as licensing has

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nothing essential in this view to distinguish it from ordination other than perhaps permanence. Another leading intellectual in the Sydney diocese, R.C. Doyle, put it more starkly in an article ten years ago, saying that the generation of Sydney clergy trained by Dr Broughton Knox at more college and presumably those trained under his successor as well, although he

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can speak for himself and correct me, of course, if this is not accurate, that that generation of clergy, quote, "do not regard themselves as clerical in any sense of the word, but as laypeople who have the enormous privilege of being paid so that they may teach the Bible full time."

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Yet, the same 1983 Sydney Doctrine Commission report had referred to the local laymenisters of the Eucharist as actually permanent local presbyters, which suggests that such local elders are in the view of the proponents of these reposals, just as much ordained or is it more ordained than are those who are ordained priest, bishop or deacon according

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to the ordinal of the Book of Common Prayer. Those of us, and I include myself, who are left leaning enough to momentarily get excited about the sort of attractive democratic impulse in the word lay ministry, need to scratch the surface of these proposals fairly hard, and in particular the word lay.

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Of course, these proposals don't mention democracy, and neither should they, for the proposal is not for a new form of empowerment of the laity, it is for a new level of hierarchy. It is for the establishment of a local oligarchy that consolidates its own power and that of the Rector and the incumbent, in a quite specific, authorised and public sort of fashion.

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That in itself may not make it any better or worse, by the way, than the traditional Catholic Order of Bishop Priest and Deacon. So this is not lay ministry as such. What is really at issue here is the creation or solidification of a local system, not

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of lay persons, but of elders, exercising political and pastoral power along with ministries of word and sacrament. So it is something of a red herring, I believe, to speak of this as a debate about either lay presidency or lay administration.

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It seems that proponents of this move already regard the priests of the book of a common prayer as lay people who have happened to be paid, and lay people as permanent presbyters in a local congregation. The differences between various ministries in this view are purely functional, but above

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all they are political. I must say that I do suspect, and this is more an aside, this isn't the kind of thing that interests me most directly, that I do suspect that this means that these proposals do contrast not only with Christian tradition and the threefold Order of Ministry, which

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is obvious, but also with the fundamental declarations of the Anglican Church of Australia, the most basic elements of our constitution. Although it is true that the Appellate Tribunal ruling of 1997 did find that there was no necessary conflict between lay presidency and these declarations, it did so by answering

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the question of whether a dignified lay person could or should ever preside at the Eucharist, which is a question without context necessarily addressed to exceptions and marginal cases. It did not address the question of whether a permanent local presbyterist should be created as a Fourth Order of Ministry in the church.

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So the real issue, I think, is whether the church should be led by a local presbyterist, urban by an incumbent, whose distinguishing features individually and collectively are probably going to be education, professional status, and simplest and most fundamentally power.

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Of course, the Catholic Order of Anglicanism, the structure of Bishop Priest and Deacon as ordained ministers with distinct identities that are immediately related to the Ministry and the policy of the church. This is not removed or reformed even in these proposals, this is what makes this a sort

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of 21st century post-modern version of the 17th century attempt to establish Presbyterian government in the Anglican Church. So in the post-modern view, you don't actually have to force everyone to agree with your point of view.

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It's an open market, something Milton Friedman would have been happy about, more than Charles or Cromwell in the 17th century. You just set up a different version of government alongside it within the old one and see which wins.

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Just as Protestant ecclesiology often tends to relativise the institutional churches of visible community distinguished by particular practices, this view of ministry tends as it were to create another community alongside the other one, just sort of a shadow version of it out of phase with the visible institutional community.

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But why this revival, why this revival of an old but not ancient alternative model of church policy that we are, in fact, dealing with? This is not a simple question. And perhaps in the process of dialogue, Dr Jensen will be able to say more to us about this.

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But I have to admit, hard not to suspect that I think admittedly and professedly Calvinist leanings of your neighbours to the south, it is hard not to suspect that these have led them to favour a model which is already well known in other churches of the Reformation which share the theology of Calvinism.

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Now this of course doesn't make it good or bad either, but I think there is a question here of telling the truth about what it is that we are really describing and advocating within the structure of the church. At a somewhat broader level, I have to say that the historian in me sees the echoes

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of the 16th and 17th centuries here, sort of as modernity rearing its head belatedly. And by modernity here, I don't mean just whatever is up to date in 2004, I mean rather that set of sensibilities that tended to emerge around the time of the Reformation of which the Reformation was a key element, where propositions are favoured over symbols, function

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is favoured over tradition, and in political terms of course what was going on was that the newly emergent ruling classes representing professions and capital were flexing their muscles to displace the old feudal order. Not a bad script for the 17th or 18th centuries as a way of bringing the church up to date

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and getting it to address the modern world, but what about the postmodern world? Is it really going to help us to unsackle the power of the educated privileged elites in local congregations and have a sort of Christian bourgeois revolution a few hundred years too late?

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Are they not equal if distinct dangers in this new order? Now, it may be that for some of us the identification of lay administration as a kind of Presbyterian plot is enough to settle the matter since the proposals are clearly not Anglican, but I would beg to differ, and I think I would have to agree with a number of things that Archbishop

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Peter spoke to us about how Anglicanism can mean different things to different people. This is true. I never think that it's enough for us to stand on precisely what is Anglican to justify anything we do.

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Anglicanism has many virtues and attractive qualities that need not detain us here. We all agree about that, even if we disagree about which are the attractive qualities and which are the highly unattractive ones. But I suggest that characteristic Anglican virtue has always been most apparent when Anglicans

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have sought not to establish an act upon what is specifically Anglican but what is authentically Christian. I think this is true of Kranma, I think it's true of Hookah, I think it's true of Wilberforce, it's true of the fathers of the Oxford movement, although here of course we're going to start

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to get divergences of opinion, it's true of Huddleston and it's true of Tutu as well. Anglicans are best at being Anglican when they don't talk about it quite as much, they talk about the gospel and about the truth and about charity and the church and Christian faith.

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So I think that we must grant that these current proposals do meet the condition of seeking to ask what is an authentic and appropriate form of Christian order in the church. And I do not think that a set of counter-proposals which simply rest upon what a supposedly Anglican order would be for the church, constitute an adequate response to those proposals.

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If we're going to have something better or alternative, it is going to be this is how we think that Christian church should be ordered in conformity with the gospel as we have received it. If Anglicans of other opinions cannot do better than this, then we will not succeed even

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in our own terms, in our own local mission and ministry. Let alone will we have any capacity to engage seriously in a dialogue with those who are going in another direction. And this it seems to me places us in a kind of crisis, when I say so, I guess I'm speaking

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to those of us who do not find these proposals for the creation of a local presbyterid or lay administration or whatever we should call it, especially compelling. Because those of us who are especially of a more ecumenical mind have often tended to become rather complacent, rather sloppy, about articulating and understanding what ordained

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ministry in particular and the threefold order of ministry in particular is for. There are various reasons for this. Overall, ecumenical experience has opened many of us to a sort of pluralism about ministry and orders that may make it seem ungenerous implicitly to devalue the orders of our Protestant

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ministerial colleagues without a fiscal ordination. Those of us who are ten ministers for journals and have good relationships with our, you know, uniting church sisters and brothers most obviously will find ourselves in that situation. I mean, are we actually going to say, no, I don't think that you're a validly ordained

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person because of the apostolic succession. Some will say yes, but others will be much more hesitant to do that, and I think we should be more hesitant to do that, frankly. Many of us, free of the from our past experience or our existing ecumenical commitments, have

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experiences of grace and authentic discipleship and church life outside Anglican or other episcoply-ordered circles that mean that we are perfectly well aware that the Holy Spirit is capable of working independently of the apostolic succession narrowly understood. I for one standing here to argue against what I see as a quasi-presbyterian polity and

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litiging, know from experience that the Eucharist can be celebrated by communities without Episcopal order in ways that seem to me to communicate the grace that the Eucharist does involve. I'm not particularly interested, therefore, in a discussion that proceeds from the language

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of the validity or the legality of such moves or of different ways of celebrating Eucharist. Once a valid Eucharist, well, a valid Eucharist is one where you have bread and wine in a Bible, that's one of my Jesuit colleagues would have put it. Or a little more seriously, a valid Eucharist is that where in charity, thanks is given

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to God for Jesus Christ over bread and wine. The rest is important, but is a matter of how adequately the meal is celebrated, given the example of Jesus, the demands of the gospel and the experience of the church. Those things may yet lead us to lay down further and more specific conditions for the way

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in which the Eucharist fought to be celebrated, not because of validity but because of adequacy and the demands of the gospel and our faithful discipleship. Why then the Anglican polity in which the threefold order should be more than a sort of shell within which some other system might operate?

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But a living reality directly related to the Eucharistic life of the church. This seems to me the key issue that remains for the rest of us. Not why we are externally constrained by legal niceties to live and minister to us. But why we are inwardly so driven, believing in our own experience that while the Holy

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Spirit is bigger than our own particular church structures, that nonetheless the grace of holy orders really does say and affect something significant about what it means to be church. I can only begin to address this because I need to come over to other things that relate

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more to this particular issue, but it seems to me absolutely crucial for us that ministry be about more than power, and I think that this is perhaps the greatest of the dangers in the proposals that we are considering today. While Catholic order has also, of course, proven capable of terrible abuse, there is an

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important resource for the church, the historically formed church, in the notion that ministry is not merely about function and about power but about character and about persons and about being. That is to say that it is not merely a qualification or a duty or even a privilege involving professional

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support, but a lived reality in some way to which we commit ourselves personally and permanently, that there is a necessary connection between who we are and what we do. In Catholic order where it is possible to think about sacraments in a systematic way without even necessarily binding ourselves dogmatically to particular views of how the ontology of the

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sacraments work, we can nonetheless agree to say that even persons themselves can be signs, just as bread and wine can, just as water can. I think it is essential, however, that the connection between being and function is based upon the common Christian call to such a connection.

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Why should ministry be based on a call to be a different kind of person? Because the Christian discipleship is based on such a call to be a different kind of person. And at this point, I have to admit that I must part company, I'm really getting into trouble here.

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Not only with the Archbishop of Sydney, but with the Archbishop of Perth, who has carefully articulated in reflections in glass, the notion that ordained ministry has a sort of independence and even priority over the ministry of the church collectively, or belongs, as he approvingly quotes the archic final report, saying, "It belongs to another realm of the

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gifts of the Spirit." It seems to me, however, as to some of those other authorities whom Dr. Kahnley criticises, that the carisms which are reflected in ordained ministry within our church are those of the whole church embodied in specific individuals, in whom the church has discerned and formed

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and recognized the gifts necessary for particular forms of service. Now, there are various reasons for arguing in these terms, but I think that I would have to show my cards here as a critical historian of the early church and its liturgy. I think one of the interesting little meta narratives of this discussion is the degree of emphasis,

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which my colleague as a scholar of the English Reformation places upon that particular era, and my own training, as well as some of my theological pre-elections, would lead me to put the same sort of emphasis upon the fourth century, the age of the creeds, the formalization of the canon, and the clear emergence of the threefold order and so forth.

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It does seem to me that the threefold order and the liturgical practice of the church, as we have inherited it, are outworkings of the Spirit over time in the church. I also believe this is true of the scriptures themselves. I do not think that it will do, as Dr. Carly does, simply to point to Morni Thursday as

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a sort of Arkham adian point for the creation of Eucharistic ministry in the church. When we know full well that that event was not necessarily originally fully understood in those terms. In particular, I would take issue with a view often expressed by the present hope that

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we're getting into easy comment here, I'm sure, aren't we, right? The present hope often expresses in his addresses to his clergy on Holy Thursday when they go for the chrism, Eucharist, that the ministerial priesthood is founded at the last supper. I think this is very problematic.

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I suppose the reason is clear enough, isn't it, because if your apostles hadn't been ordained by this point, then Eucharist wouldn't have been valid, because we know that Jesus himself was just a Jewish layman after all. Now, the term priest came gradually to be used by Christians of their ministers, as well

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as of themselves, although we all know, and I grant very freely and enthusiastically, that the only fundamental unconditional priesthoods in which we participate are that are priced and that of the whole church. But Christians in Catholic order do use the language of priesthood about particular individuals

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and ministers in our tradition. And for me, this is more than just a matter of passing note, even though it is not an absolute fundamental. But it's interesting, you know, that the ways in which originally in a general metaphorical

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way, but gradually more and more specifically, the church came to refer to its ministers as priests, was in relation to the celebration of the Eucharist. But this meant, of course, given the pattern of ministry in the early church, that it was not the members of the Order of Presbyter, who were first referred to as priests, but

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rather members of the Order of the Episcopate. The fact that in English, we have this interesting confusion about the word priest, as both derived from the Greek Presbyteros Elder, but translating the Greek Heres priest, I think is a wonderful and fascinating place for us to play with the notions of what being a member of that

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Order of Ministry really is. But it's true that the priest language that's used applying to Christian ministers is not something, it seems to me, essential to the Order of Presbyter, but something which is attributed to the Order of Presbyter because of the role that they take in the celebration

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of the Eucharist as it has been worked out over time. I want to move now to consider a separate set of arguments that have been very strong, not only in Dr. Jensen's presentation here today, but also in other documents that have come to us from the Diasis of Sydney in relation to this matter.

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And this is the notion of the relationship between word and sacrament and the balance or parity or priority of the two. In a 1984 report prepared at the request of the Standing Committee of the Sydney Diasis in Sydney, it was entitled Lay and Diagonal Administration of the Lord's Supper.

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The author's JW Woodhouse and BC Newman argue that the recent growth of leadership by lay persons in preaching, public prayer and other elements of the Ministry of the Word without such a development of equivalent sacramental ministries regarding the Eucharist is an anomaly that suggests both, quote, a division between word and sacrament that's

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set up disapprovingly. And then also that the sacrament can appear to be more important than the word. These authors speak rather of, quote, the necessary dependence of the Ministry of the sacrament on the Ministry of the Word, unquote.

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At their most assertive, Woodhouse and Newman can state not merely that this present situation is inappropriate, but to object to a change whereby the same lay participation in sacramental ministries might take place that, even to object to this change, is itself, quote, arbitrary and unjustified, unquote.

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Now I think we've also heard in very careful terms this morning also similar arguments for lay administration in terms of the same unequal parallelism of word and sacrament. Now, when's this notion in the first place? It seems to me that this has to be deconstructed a little bit, the notion that sacrament depends

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on word and the word and sacrament have to have some kind of unequal parity. The 1662 book of common prayer, of course, envisages a unified Ministry of Word and sacrament exercised solely by the ordained, inheriting, of course, as it did from its predecessor books of the 16th century and from the medieval church, the highly clericalized

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pattern, where even the Ministry of Deacon was often marginal and lay participation was a minimal or non-existent. The idea of lay persons taking significant part in ministries of preaching or numerous other functions pertaining to the word was not envisaged at that point any more than was

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lay Presidency of the Eucharist. And so proponents of this development can argue that if you change one part, if you change the word part, then you ought to change the sacrament part as well. Ironically, it seems to me that the reformed tendency to emphasise a single form of ordained

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Ministry of Word and sacrament, you know, either it's all going to be done by one person or it's all going to be done by 20 people, that this is really a relic of medieval and subsequent Catholicism's tendency to focus solely on the order of priest rather than on the complexity of the various orders of ministry in the church and their distinct carriages.

00:30:00.480 - 00:30:14.800

The massing priest of the 15th century becomes the preaching presbyter of the 16th as a sacramentally based monochrome system of ministry, becomes a propositionally based system of monochrome ministry. The echoes remain.

00:30:14.800 - 00:30:28.960

Now, all of us have been prone to this tendency in various forms and there are very good questions that come up for us. You know, why should we just reserve the absolution or the Eucharistic prayer and then think that we're engaging in empowering lay people by giving them everything else to do that

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they're supposedly allowed to do by canon law? I would suggest that the need to establish a primacy of Word or sacrament or even to objectify ministries of Word and sacrament in such a way that we could possibly dream of objectifying them to the point of quantifying them and then comparing.

00:30:50.680 - 00:31:05.240

You know, that this is allowing 16th century issues to determine the way we read both ancient scriptures and contemporary needs in ways that are quite inappropriate. The balance of Word and sacrament, their partnership and mutuality is not a relationship of hierarchy and dependence.

00:31:05.240 - 00:31:20.840

The relationship of Word and sacrament is one of mutuality. It is one of the beauties of Anglicanism and its liturgy that this is not a zero sum game where a win for the Word means a loss for the sacrament. We have not always done both of them equally well and those of us on the Catholic side are

00:31:20.840 - 00:31:30.800

often in need of having to hear the need for us to perform the ministry of the Word in better and more serious and more substantial kinds of ways. Does this mean that we should make less fuss about the sacrament? No.

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This is not a competition. But deceiving competition seems to me unnecessarily to recapitulate the transition between the medieval and early forms of clericalism whereby a sacramentally based system is bumped in favor of a Word based system.

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But is this the issue that we're really facing in the church today? I think this goes to the heart of the problems in these proposals because it's apparent at a number of points to me that being reformed is he a not a guarantee of removing medieval excursions in favor of primitive models, sometimes the medieval excursions are actually

00:32:02.760 - 00:32:21.400

canonised and embedded by reading this issue through the experience of the 16th century. Had it been possible for the reformers to step out of their own clericalist assumptions and let's face it, most of them were Roman Catholic clerics before they became reformers. To view the ancient church and the Christian scriptures with different lenses, they might

00:32:21.400 - 00:32:36.600

have been less inclined to view all the surgical functions as of a piece where there was going to be one person or 20 people. The notion that what is true of ministry of the Word must be true of ministry of the sacrament is I believe simply a myth that needs to be challenged and here I do actually want

00:32:36.600 - 00:32:54.960

to return to the New Testament for a few moments attempting to throw up what I think are some relevant and neglected texts in more adequate terms for this debate. The earliest descriptions that we have of Christian worship, the series of instructions about conducting the assembly in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, I have somewhat

00:32:54.960 - 00:33:15.600

struck by the fact that in my necessarily limited reading of the documentation that I've seen favoring these proposals from the dioceses of these texts are not addressed. These texts seems to me provide a fairly clear indication of forms of communal participation and in particular participation of various sorts of the ministry of the Word which are

00:33:15.600 - 00:33:32.400

linked neither to presiding nor to eldership in the community. Addressing a tendency on the part of the Corinthians to set some of their members up with greatest status and power, the apostle argues that God has appointed in the church first apostle, second prophets, third teachers, then deeds of power, gifts of healing forms of

00:33:32.400 - 00:33:41.320

assistance forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Aren't we lucky that we don't have to have a separate part of the ordinal for each of those? Really, it would go on for years, wouldn't it?

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This picture of a diversity of discursive gifts, that is to say a multiferious ministry of the Word, continues in chapter 14 where Paul has to deemphasize that spectacular ministry of the Word known as speaking in tongues, expressing on his own part a preference for comprehensible gifts of prophecy and interpretation, but not seeking to reduce the ministry of those

00:34:02.880 - 00:34:18.920

to one particular person. Crucially, Paul gives a picture of genuine lay ministry, which I think we should distinguish from a kind of delegated ministry where certain lay people are authorised by some cleric to exercise particular gifts that he does not want to exercise in this day.

00:34:18.920 - 00:34:33.000

Paul gives a picture of the ministry of the whole last, the whole people of God saying in 1426, "When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation." And after this, he gives further advice on how that ministry of the law must be ordered

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to build up the community so that not everybody speaks at the same time, but that, in those terms, so beloved of Anglican litigists, all things should be done decently and in order. Thus, although there are specialists in the community, they are varied in their role. And Paul, at no point, relates the capacity to contribute to the discourse of the community,

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whether it's in ecstatic terms or in learned terms or edifying terms, with leadership. Rather, it is assumed that leadership exists to promote good order in the exercise of the diversity of gifts in the ministry of the word. So the view that ministries of the word are intricately linked to leadership in the community

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seems to me manifestly external to scripture or to a new testament model. It comes via the medieval aggregation of powder clerics, which is then gradually transformed from a sassadotal into a functional and professional model. Exemplified in the views that we hear about the rector or incumbent as really the key player

00:35:28.800 - 00:35:45.320

in the local congregation, who then somehow delegates aspects of the ministry of the word back to the laypeople to whom, as far as I can tell, it probably belonged in the first place. So the professional exercises a sort of scholastic knoses to be imparted to the faithful,

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rather than a leadership of order, which allows the various gifts of the ministry of the word to be shared by the different members of the community with one another. Is this lay ministry? What about presiding at the meal?

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It is true, of course, that a new testament does give us no straightforward definitive evidence on the matter. Paul is silent in first Corinthians, which is interesting, because they seem to have been a pretty chaotic bunch.

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In fact, this is presumably the one thing where the Corinthians did not lead instruction, because the answer was obvious. Everybody knew who presided at a meal. The host of the house on where the meal was held or the head of the association, which

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gathered for some kind of community meal, would always have presided. I think this is evident from a variety of other evidence, both Christian and for that matter, non-Christian, from the early centuries. Whether that makes that a definitive answer to the question is another matter, but I don't

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think there should be no temptation to imagine that they sort of said, "Okay, let's play Kothobos, the drinking game to decide who's going to be the president of the meal this week." I'm going to be something that was a matter of the order of the community.

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If Paul is silent about Corinth, such examples as we do have from the New Testament reflect a sense, the presiding over the meal was not a matter for just anybody. Jesus at the last supper, Paul on board the ship in the acts of the apostles. These are hardly typical scenes, but they represent typical conventions.

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The person who presides at the meal is the person who is the leader of the community under those particular circumstances. So it seems to me, by the way, and this is an aside which is not directed towards the proposals from the diocese of Sydney, that any lack of sense we have about how this

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should work reflects poorly upon us as a society and about the sense that we have of the value of hospitality and of the bonds formed at tables. If it's really a matter of indifference, who eats with whom and how, it just shows to what extent we've really lost our sense of the sort of sacred quality and natural theological

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terms. It's going to be another problem, isn't it? But the way in which food is itself a gift from God which reflects and creates bonds of intimacy and love between us, even when we're not talking about the Lord's Supper.

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And if it's true about eating in general, how much truer is it of the Lord's Supper, that the way in which we order the way we eat together reflects fundamental things about who we are. Now, I hasten to add, the Sydney proposals do not seem to me problematic in these terms.

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They of course do not see the question of who presides at the meal as a matter of indifference at all. I do not want for a moment to be seen to be charactering them in these terms. Rather, they seem to presume as I do that presiding at the Eucharist is about leadership

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and does communicate and reflect power. And that's the point, but who's power? Now to minister the word in the ancient community to go back to that for a moment was something that many different people undertook in various ways.

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It was not a clerical prerogative, even as the threefold order of ministry emerged, at least not initially. This is still clear from the writings of Tatalyan, who is himself a lay Christian, but apparently the leading teacher of his own community.

00:38:39.880 - 00:38:50.240

Now, how could you have that? The leading minister of the word in a community in the year 200, who was not a cleric, even though he argued in his own writings that the Eucharist could only be received from the hand of a presbyter?

00:38:50.240 - 00:39:02.560

Because the two are not the same thing. Because the minister to the word is a valued gift and ministry in the community, but it's not the ministry of the head of the community as such. It is only gradually during the third and subsequent centuries that the ministry of the word

00:39:02.560 - 00:39:20.520

becomes clericalized to the extent that another famous early theologian, origin of Alexandria, actually more or less got himself ordained unwillingly by a neighboring bishop who decided that it was no good having this wandering academic, giving Bible studies all the time without being under the authority of some bishop.

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So I do not think that the ministry of the word in the ancient church is understood as delegated, rather I think it was clerically appropriated upwards into what became the mediable synthesis. It could be argued by comparison with this evidence that the proposal to authorize local

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presbyters to administer the Eucharist and the diocese of Sydney does have support from ancient Christian models, but this would have to involve acknowledging that we are not talking about lay ministry as such. I would actually just as soon say that we ought not to look clearly for easy analogues

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between what we call ministries of word and sacrament. This, of course, are our language, not the language of the ancient church, but we should accept that they're qualitatively different in the way that the ministry of the whole community and the ministry of leadership relate to one another.

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In the ministry of the word, the president is not in the ancient church, primarily the teacher or preacher, but enables the various gifts of the church, which include those of teaching and preaching, to be ordered and shared appropriately. Sounds a bit like what we're doing now to me.

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As to the ministry of the table, the president gives thanks to God on the community's behalf over what God has created and given in memory of Jesus' death and resurrection and the community shares reverently in memory of Jesus. That sounds like what we're doing, too.

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So you see, I think that Anglican practice stands up pretty well to the template of what Christian practice ought to be like. This is not to say that people cannot legitimately draw other conclusions, but I hold to these positions and these practices not just because they're supposedly what we do as Anglicans,

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but because they seem to me to be adequate expressions of what has been handed to us about the gospel and the ordering of the church. I'm going to jump ahead a little bit, too. I just want to make one more point and crave your indulgence even for doing this much because

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I know I've been on going for a while, too. To my knowledge, and again, this is based on a limited reading of documents that have come from the diocese of Sydney. The issue of lay administration was being presented as one of principal rather than a pragmatism

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or pastoral need. Yet in the paper that we've heard this morning, we heard I think a very articulate and thoughtful and at times passionate articulation of a desire to share the Lord's supper in a pragmatic and pastoral fashion with a greater variety of people in the church, which I think is a very

00:41:48.800 - 00:42:06.440

interesting development. The context for Eucharistic celebration implied in that discussion is not so much that main liturgical assembly of the largest parish governed by a corporate eldership, as was evoked in the early of documents that came out of the diocese of Sydney, but rather this

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view in which the normal Sunday morning communion celebration is almost irrelevant and a very interesting and I think winsome view it is at certain points. This argument, however, still strikes me as rather curious and I have to say so especially in relation to the previous papers which have emerged from this discussion in the diocese

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of Sydney and to my general sense, which is of course very inadequate and this may be another matter of a further discussion. My general sense of Sydney Anglican practice which seems often not to be so highly focused on the value of the Holy Communion.

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In fact, Woodhouse and Newman in the 1994 paper, which is one of the stepping stones along the way of this process, had sounded a more familiar note when they described the notion that quote, "The Lord's Supper is the essential expression of the community's life," unquote as a fiction and a novel invention.

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They had even resorted approvingly to the 1662 book of common prayers rather quaint requirement that every parishioner communicates just three times a year in order to justify downplaying the importance of the Eucharist in the process of seeking its reform. Now, if this proliferation of local celebrations in nursing homes and hospitals and schools

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or whatever else that we heard described earlier on takes place, there would certainly be worse things that could happen in my mind. You see, I do not think that these matters are completely unconscionable, just that I don't think that they're the best models for us given what we know about the church

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and the sacraments. There are worse things than that, but why should we imagine, seriously, that lay ministers and communities in the diocese of Sydney who have not either to been accustomed either to using the Holy Communion as a central aspect of pastoral ministry, or to viewing it as

00:43:43.240 - 00:43:59.560

an essential expression of Christian community, which suddenly do so simply because authorised. This is not clear to me at all, and it may be that we can hear more about that. I grant, of course, the very moving description of the gentleman who went and took celebrated the Eucharist in that nursing home.

00:43:59.560 - 00:44:15.960

Yeah, for what it's worth, that's a valid Eucharist as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure that it's a good one in terms of how we should regulate our practice, but I would not seek to exclude such an action on purely legal grounds. But you see, I think there is a problem here about this shift between a view of playing

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down the importance of the Eucharist and arguing for lay administration in those terms, and one viewing it up. One playing it up. It's tempting at this point to see the drive for lay administration as a sort of sacramental

00:44:25.600 - 00:44:44.040

Cinderella seeking a theological prince charming of the ball, definitely changing partners and rationales as the dance progresses in order to gain more sympathetic onlookers. Now I do not for a minute, by the way, doubt the sincerity of Dr. Jensen's feelings about his devotion to the Lord's Supper, but I still wonder whether that's really the picture

00:44:44.040 - 00:44:58.760

that we're going to see emerge in the diocese of Sydney as a whole. There is an important point here about the availability of the sacrament that we must all consider in our own various settings. Those of us who have long considered regular reception of the Eucharist, not simply a worthy

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spiritual discipline, but a centre of Christian community, do face real issues about the capacity of our present structures to accommodate the needs of our communities and members. And despite the argument earlier, I still imagine that it really is in the rural areas of our various diocese where this issue is going to arise in more pressing kinds of ways.

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And I assume that that may even be the case here where there are communities in this diocese isolated enough who cannot receive regular priestly ministry and hence notions of how appropriately to organise Eucharistic celebration come up. And I have to say that although I can do a little more than put this on the wall and come

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back to it, that it does seem to me that the recent experiments in what is often being called 'total ministry' are more promising than a proposal to authorise lay administration in the way we've heard about it. In parts of rural Australia, such as the Goldfields region and the diocese of Perth, models

00:45:46.760 - 00:46:02.520

of local ordination are being used that draw on Roland Allen's mithiological principles, to the effect that the Church should be sufficient to its own mission in ministry. And hence if a Christian community is called into being, then the gifts of the deaconate and the Presbyterate should be assumed to be present in such a local community.

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And of course, starts with the assumption that the deaconate and the Presbyterate are things worth doing and worth having. It's the experience to see just how the availability of Eucharist really is best ensured in a world that is certainly changing.

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But I do think that the advantages of the total ministry model include not only the general point that has been made in many of the thoughtful responses to the Sydney proposals about the integral relationship between leadership and presidency, but that they also allow more fully for the distinctive carousels of Presbyter and Deacon to be manifest.

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And this seems to be something which is quite lacking in this proposal. It sort of inhabits the threefold order, but doesn't know what to do with it. I mean, what about Deacons? Are Deacons just priest-light?

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Those of you who are Deacons can throw things at me for saying so even at this point. But seriously, is there no distinctive carism of the deaconate that needs to be retrieved and acted upon fully in the Church? And of course, if the fact that that carism has not been properly identified and exercised

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is as much a condemnation on the Catholic wing of the Church as upon anybody else, because our own form of clericalism has been just as clawing. There is no question here of throwing stones across the fence between evangelical and Catholic forms of clericalism.

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We are both acting in ways that tended to obscure the diversity of gifts within the Church under this notion of clerical power being aggregated to particular individuals. So, to give an effective witness to our own understandings, which must speak for ourselves with authenticity and fidelity, will your Catholic Anglicans must be as much or more concerned

00:47:32.160 - 00:47:44.600

for the gospel and for charity as we engage in this process, as we are merely concerned to preserve tradition as such. But it seems to me that the importance of tradition in interpretation is never clearer than it is in this issue.

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Although the Catholic wing of the Church has often been intransigent about its own interpretations and is always in need of breaths of biblical fresh air, so to the reformed wing of the Church is not doing itself any favours in this debate by viewing scripture through a 16th and 17th century lens, which to me distorts as often as a clarifies.

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For this and other points, the unwitting preservation of the shortcomings of the medieval church in reformed controversies has dictated an argument that we never really needed to have, but we all share responsibility for that, I think. I do not regard these proposals as unconscionable or outrageous.

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I do view them as unnecessary and inappropriate. I do believe them as informed by concerns which reflect polemics to which we need not cling. There are worse things that could happen than that Sydney goes this way.

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There are better things as well. Some of the worst things are already happening. Some of them are not. But do we need this?

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Do we need this? The rest of us are really being challenged here to ask whether we can respond in ways that are not just defensive of clerical privilege or Catholic shibbolus, but can really acknowledge the issues and make authentic responses given the accountability that we have, because

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our task is not simply to react or criticize, but to reflect to Minister Wooden's sacrament faithfully as we've all promised to do, conscious that tradition and reform are gifts that continue to make demands upon a soil.