All of the United Church's studies on ministry acknowledge the role of the laity in the church's ministry. The Ministry in the Twentieth Century (1968), however, is the first document to question the necessity for an ordained ministry in the church or to suggest that this ministry may be detrimental to the church's welfare if, because of its focal position, it impedes the ministry of the laity. The Ministry in the Twentieth Century recommends that the church continue to "ordain" those who play an enabling function in the church but the understanding of ordination it presents is far removed from ordination's traditional meaning in the United Church or in the Reformed tradition generally. While On a Functional Ministry (1954) recommended that the church consider changes in the way it exercised its ministry so that the church could be more responsive to the heavily industrialized and technological context of the 1950's, the kind of changes which the Commission on The Ministry in the Twentieth Century advocate are more basic. The Commission on Ordination (1962) admits that the abolition of that ministry was one of the changes it had considered. The 1977 Task Force Report expresses many of the same sentiments found in The Ministry in the Twentieth Century. It presents a mainly functional understanding of this ministry, and creates opposition between clergy and laity via the suggestion that the laity have been prevented from realizing their ministry because of the status accorded the ordained ministry and the focal role this ministry plays in the church. Project: Ministry, in contrast, affirms the distinctiveness of the ordained ministry and its essential role in the church while at the same time emphasizing that there is only one ministry in the church "the ministry of Jesus Christ" in which both lay and ordained participate. What is noticeable in an examination of the United Church's two most controversial reports, The Ministry in the 20th Century and the 1977 Task Force on Ministry is that, other than a belief in the "servanthood" model of the ordained ministry and in the fact that this ministry must be carried out in mutuality with the ministry of the laity, nothing, including the existence of the ordained ministry itself, is considered normative. These two reports, in particular, indicate that there is a group of significant size in the United Church which distrusts the ordained ministry, and a smaller but equally vocal group which would like to do away with it altogether. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6796 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Fitzgerald, Georgina. |
| Contributors | Marrevee, W., |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 332 p. |
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