By Ormond Rush
What might a renewed sense of parish leadership and ministry look and feel like in the present realities of the church?
I wish to restrict myself to three points: (1) Do not forget the main game; (2) Look to being inspired more by biblical than secular models of leadership and ministry; (3) Do not turn inward.
Do Not Forget the Main Game
Firstly: do not forget the main game. What is the main game? What it was for Jesus: the reign of God. It is God’s power at work in human history.
God’s mission in the world is to reign in the hearts of men and women and to bring to fulfilment God’s purposes at the end of time. To promote that reign is the mission of the church.
The reign of God was Jesus’ abiding passion; he was driven by it; it alone explains what he was on about, how he saw his mission, and who he was perceived to be. He told parables about it, he sought to embody it by the way he acted, in his table fellowship and in the primary focus of his ministry, the outcasts, the marginalised, the sinners. The reign of God likewise, for the church, should be the main game. Everything we do must be related to helping God reign in the world. All we say about leadership and ministry is only secondary to and a function of the mission of the church. And that is? To be on about the reign of God.
And let us not forget: that reign is not equivalent to the church. We are not meant to be a little suffocating salvation club solely concerned about our own members, no matter how vital and utterly important that is. We do not contain God within our boundaries; God is at work beyond the walls we tend to set up around our churches. We, the church, are but the sacrament of God’s reign. But the church is like the broader reign of God to the extent that we too are meant to be like leaven in the midst, seemingly only tiny, insignificant mustard seeds, a community full of weeds and wheat.
All of this is a cause for deep, deep hope. Firstly, God is doing the work. We are co‐ workers with God in all this. It does not all depend on us, even though God needs us to work on the divine project. A corollary of this is that the number of people coming to church is not really, in the end, the ultimate criterion of success or progress. Success is when human beings care for and forgive each other and live in justice, peace and love. As the Eucharistic Prayer for the feast of Christ the King states, God’s kingdom is a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, peace and love.
So, as it faces all the contemporary challenges and opportunities listed above, what does a parish look and feel like when, for it, the main game is the reign of God? What does a parish look and feel like when it is distracted from focusing on the main game?
Biblical Models of Leadership and Ministering
The title of this article mentions two terms “leadership and ministry”. I want to restrict my remarks to the role of leadership in the broad sense, of applying to anyone in the parish who has the responsibility of marshalling and organising and enthusing others. I also use the terms “minister” and “ministry” in their broad, generic sense, not to refer only to people who technically are ordained ministers (as in priests deacons and deacons), or even formally and publicly commissioned for a task and function. Rather, including all of those, is the notion of leadership and ministry as a function of mission: there is one mission, and many ministries and ministers and leaders.
A key aspect of leadership is one’s “style” of operating and relating with those whom we lead. How do we relate to one another? On every page of the New Testament there are injunctions which touch on to how to relate to others. Jesus speaks of love and compassion, of being a servant, of not lording it over others as the pagans do. St Paul says: always think of the other person to be better than yourself. Vatican II gives us three trinitarian images of church which should guide leadership style at the parish level (The People of God, the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit).
The People of God image of the church, and therefore of the parish, reminds us that we are pilgrims on the road together; if you have ever been camping, you get the idea; do not be a slacker; do your bit around the campsite. We are all pilgrims on the way together. Secondly, the parish is the Body of Christ. St Paul does not use this image (with its image of “the head”) to highlight that some people are top dog over others; but rather the exact opposite. No one person, including the parish priest, or the parish secretary, or the chief organist has the divine right of kings or queens, let alone has all the goods needed; it is all about co‐dependence, in a positive sense; we all need each other and no one has it all.
Thirdly, the implications of the image of the parish as the Temple of the Holy Spirit reinforces the christological image; everyone has been given something special by the Spirit; the role of the leaders is to discern what those gifts are, and to be a broker for the Holy Spirit by creating opportunities for utilising the specific charisms of people gifted for a specific need in the local church. Leaders are good scanners of talent; they are talent scouts for the Spirit; they are not the ones who do it all and know it all. A little bit of humility helps!
Do Not Turn Inward
One way of getting a handle on the prioritising of energies in a parish where the main game is the reign of God is to see how communion and mission are balanced. Communion speaks of union with God, with one another, with all other Christians throughout the world, other parishes and dioceses. We are one in faith and the eucharist is our powerhouse. Communion names (but not exclusively) that dimension of church life where the community is gathered to be inspired, resourced, empowered. That generally happens in liturgy, above all the eucharist. If the main game is God’s reign in the world, and it is God’s work, then we need to gather together to allow God to resource us. It is only through God’s grace that we will achieve any kind of success in mission. Without being grounded in communion with God, and through that with one another, then we end up thinking it all depends on us. Despondency, despair and opting out will eventually win out.
Communion, although the foundation, is not so much the end‐point, but rather the beginning point of mission.
The forces of communion are both centripetal and centrifugal. The “going out” bit, the moving from “the church gathered” to “the church scattered”, is the point of it all surely, if the reign of God is the main game. This is when church is most church, when it is on about the main game. The end of the mass is always a sending out. And here, the 10% is the key, as leaven in the midst of the world.
It is not easy getting the balance between putting your energies into the church gathered (communion) and into the church scattered (mission), the first being concerned with matters like the liturgy committee and parish groups looking to the needs of a vibrant parish life. The second looks outward, beyond the visible faces to those whom we at the local level may never meet face‐to‐face. This concerns parish involvement in wider social justice issues, indigenous causes, project compassion—getting people in the parish to broaden their imaginations to take on God’s perspective on the world. If we are only or mainly concerned about the first bit, then we are turning the church into a little salvation club. Parish is not just about serving the people in them.
Another way of describing the need to maintain this balance between communion and mission is the need for parishes to nurture both “the mystic” and “the prophet” in their parishioners. It is as both mystics and prophets that lay people will be most effective as agents on mission. A prophet who is not a mystic can be a dangerous beast; a mystic who is not a prophet does not really feel the pain of God and want to alleviate it, and is happy to just feel “holy”. A parish which balances communion and mission will be nurturing mystics and prophets. How we do that at least includes having good liturgies, regular opportunities for prayer and Scripture study groups, adult education on a wide range of issues, among other things, which embolden them for mission.
We live in dramatic times, and maybe at times we feel we are unique in the great sweep of church history in having to face issues so challenging.
If all of the above seismic shifts in human affairs seems a bit daunting and even depressing, spare a thought, as one example, for someone like the great St Augustine and his traumatic times. It would be an interesting exercise to look at his reading of the massive changes taking place in his world in the fifth century, as the barbarian tribes moved south across Europe, changing the religious, social, cultural and political landscape of the world of his time. The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410. His work The City of God attempted to bolster the faith and hope of Christians in the face of such a challenge. The Vandals were besieging his hometown of Hippo in North Africa in 430 as Augustine lay dying. Any parish today, I imagine, probably feels no less daunted by similar global forces, but also hopefully feels no less equipped and no less hopeful in interpreting and responding to them. We have to find our own creative responses to the signs of our times.
Redacted version published with permission from the author
About the Author: Ormond Rush is Associate Professor and Reader at Australian Catholic University, Banyo campus, where he teaches theology. He is a priest of the Catholic diocese of Townsville, Australia. His most recent publication is The Eyes of Faith: The Sense of the Faithful and the Church’s Reception of Revelation (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009) and The Vision of Vatican II: Its Fundamental Principles (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2019)
Email: Orm.Rush@acu.edu.au