THE ABOLITION OF THE LAITY

(Delivered at First Christian Church, Denton, Texas; Laymen’s Sunday, October 20, 1963)

“As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” (I Peter 4:10)

The title of my remarks may strike you as a strange one, if not contradictory. Why should one speak on the abolition of the laity at anytime, especially on “Laymen’s Sunday.” Understand that I am not speaking on the abolition of “Laymen’s Sunday,” for if we are to have laymen we may as well have a Sunday for them. Rather I am advocating the abolition of the laity. “Laymen’s Sunday” not only serves to remind us that we make such distinctions as clergy and laity, but also it gives us opportunity to reevaluate such distinctions.

Since the days of Martin Luther and our own Alexander Campbell important effort has been made to recapture the New Testament concept of “the priesthood of all believers.” This effort has tended to dim the distinction between clergy and laity, and it has led some reformers to call for an abolition of the clergy completely. A consciousness of “the priesthood of all believers” has not only inspired an anti-clericalism in many Christian circles, but has also given new impetus to lay activity in the church.

The priesthood of all believers; however, means more than an anti-clericalism or a re-emergence of the laity. It may be expressed as an abolition of the very idea of laity. The point struck me forcefully in a recent conversation I had with a Quaker. Knowing that the Quakers do not have a professional ministry, I said to my friend, “In order to restore to the church the New Testament concept of ministry we may have to do away with the clergy.” He replied without hesitation, “Oh, no, it isn’t the clergy that we need to do away with. It is the laity that must be abolished.” This is perhaps the best way to get at the truth that every Christian is a minister, or clergy, if you like, for the word clergy refers to God’s lot (or heritage, 1 Pet. 5:3), those that are set apart to serve him. We should have no laity, for in a very important sense we are all in the Christian ministry.

If you are a baptized believer, then you are a minister of Christ! It may surprise you or alarm you, antagonize you or please you, but you are a Christian minister just the same. Paul could say to you what he said to Archippus in Col. 4:17: “See that you fulfil the ministry which you have received in the Lord.” This is the meaning of 1 Pet. 4:10: “As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.”

“As each has received a gift . . . “ Each of us is capable of serving God in some special way. It is a mistake to suppose that one must “enter the ministry” or become an “ordained” preacher before he can be a minister of Christ. Can there be any calling of God more meaningful than wifehood and motherhood? The Christian woman is surely God’s minister, not merely because she rocks the cradle, but because she nurtures the human spirit. And so with the Christian father. In his poem The Cotter’s Saturday Night Robert Burns refers to the “priestly father” who says to his family as night falls over their humble home like a protective blanket, “Let us worship God,” a phrase that deeply impressed the Scottish bard.

The priest-like father reads the sacred page. . .

Then kneeling down to heaven’s Eternal King

The saint, the father, and husband prays . . .

The poet describes how the family congregation “together hymns their Creator’s praise,” and then by way of contrast shows the superficiality of the pompous religious ceremony that then characterized the churches of his native Scotland?

Compared with this, how poor Religion’s pride,

In all the pomp of method and of art,

When men display to congregations wide

Devotion’s every grace, except the heart!

The Power, incensed, the pageant will desert,

The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole;

But haply, in some cottage far apart,

May hear, well pleased, the language of the soul,

And in His book of life the inmates poor enrol.

The time was in our own fair land that family devotions were as common as TV parleys now are. Oh, how we need to restore the family altar! There is no higher ministry than for a man to gather his family around an open Bible and teach them the word of God. The poet Burns is right: the father who trains his children in Christian morality is as much a priest as any man who ever donned a sacerdotal stole. Likewise the mother who trains her daughter in Christian grace and chastity is as much a minister as any man who ever stood in a pulpit.

One reason we fail to see the vast areas of Christian ministry is our secularization of knowledge. We err in supposing that some truth is secular while other truth is divine. This fallacy was impressed upon me just last week when a devout neighbor collared me about a letter I had written to the editor of the Denton Record-Chronicle, in which I referred to the Bible, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin, and Greek philosophers as important sources of moral training. She wanted to know why I would place such “secular” sources as Thomas Jefferson and philosophers alongside the Bible.

I asked her if it were not true that God is the source of all truth. She agreed that He was. “Then if Jefferson learned any truth, whether about morality or political science, would this not be the truth of God?” I asked her. She wasn’t so sure about that. “Is not mathematics of God? Is He not the author of numbers? As we learn more about our world, outer space and the universe, are we not learning more about God and His work?” The neighbor’s fallacy is that she thinks of the Bible as “spiritual” or “divine” truth, while all else is “secular” and therefore of less consequence if to be trusted at all. History is like wise divided into sacred and profane, as if to suggest that God had a hand in the history of Israel but not in the history of Europe or America.

I explained to my religious friend that there are different kinds of truth, though all truth is of God. The Bible reveals to us certain truths that are vital to the redemption and nurture of the spirit of man, its special purpose being to reveal the image of God through the Person of Christ. Every Christian is to be a minister of these truths, teaching everyone he can the great principles of the, sacred scriptures. The heart of the Bible is the gospel, and all of us are ministers of that gospel.

But there are other truths and principles that God has given us for the good of society, whether they be political, nutritional, educational, agricultural, scientific, economical — and those who minister in behalf of these truths are also ministers of God. Whether one tills the ground, teaches school, runs a machine, or manages a home, he or she is doing a work that God wants done. This must be what the Bible is talking about when it says: “Let those who have believed in God be careful to apply themselves to honorable occupations, for these are excellent and profitable to men,” (Tit. 3:8) If one cannot believe that what he is doing is what God wants him to do, perhaps he should not be doing it.

The Bible speaks of the “governing authorities” as being of God, for the state is an institution of God. In so many words it says that “the (political) authorities are ministers of God” (Rom. 13:6). It says that this is the reason we are to pay taxes! To be sure, all God’s ministers are not faithful ones, whether they occupy pulpits or a royal throne, but they are His ministers none the less and are responsible to Him for their conduct, as we all are in the use we make of the gift that He has given us.

Alexander Campbell had a way of speaking of “three books” in which God reveals himself to man: the book of Nature, which involves the entire universe, and here God speaks to us through biology, physics and chemistry; the book of Human Nature, which is man himself and his relations with other men, and here we have psychology, philosophy, sociology and history; the Bible, which is God’s special revelation as to how man is to be conformed to the image of his Maker.

All these areas of knowledge are of God, and he who ministers the truths gleaned by these disciplines should do so as unto God, as a faithful minister of the Ruler of the Universe. This means he will not “secularize” knowledge, supposing it to be separate from spiritual or religious truth. He will understand that all truth, having the same source in God, is interrelated, and that it is a harmonious whole. The facts of science do not contradict the truths of the Bible. They are two threads of the same seamless garment, two aspects of God. The work of scientists like Copernicus and Galileo, who opened up for us an entirely different view of our universe, may be as much to the glory of God as the work of translators of the Scriptures like Wycliffe and Tyndale, who opened up for us the Bible in our own vernacular. The more a man knows about himself and the world in which he lives the abler he is to understand the Bible as the word of God. Knowledge begets knowledge.

There should be no place for anti-intellectualism in the church, even though we must avoid the worship of knowledge. We should desire for our people the highest level of education possible, for the right kind of education not only makes one wiser, but also better. Ignorance is a blight on any people, and those who are engaged in the fight against ignorance are important ministers of God. The same is true of those who labor to free society of disease, poverty, hunger, and tyranny. These holy ministries are as vital to the church as to the world.

When we succeed in abolishing the laity and start thinking of every member of the church as a minister, then motherhood, farming, merchandising, and dentistry will be considered “callings of God” as well as preaching. And what a difference this would make in our attitude towards our work! Some years ago a New York preacher addressed his church on the unusual theme “Going to work for God on Monday morning!” It was such a revolutionary idea that it changed the lives of some of the working people. Work is not drudgery to the man who believes he is doing what God wants him to do, and that he is doing it for God. One’s job can be a joyful experience if he can see it as part of God’s plan for a better world. Our mission is to build a sane world through the alleviation of human suffering and ignorance, by saving lost souls, by bringing hope and peace to our troubled world. Those who dedicate themselves to the cause of “peace on earth and goodwill towards men” certainly have a sacred ministry.

This emphasis upon a broader view of the ministry does not mean that every Christian does not also have responsibility of ministering the gospel. The Lord never intended that the preaching of the gospel be placed in the hands of a professional clergy. History indicates that professional priests have never been successful in taking the gospel to the masses. In all those instances in which the church was effective in reaching the rank and file with the gospel, it was the ordinary men and women who performed the ministry. In one of his recent books, Harry Emerson Fosdick put it this way:

In recovering Christianity as a layman’s religion we are getting back to the place where Christianity started. Neither Jesus nor any of His disciples were members of the priesthood or the clergy. They were laymen, all of them. The Master, a layman Himself, talked nothing but layman’s language. Moreover, early Christianity was spread across the Roman Empire, not by clergymen, but by laymen who translated the gospel into terms of daily life.

Robert W. Burns concluded his term as president of the International Convention of Christian Churches at the recent Miami meeting with these words:

I come to the close of this year of general service deeply concerned about the quality of Christian experience in each of us and the welfare of the cause we love.

What are we fighting against today? Not simply against the obvious evils of communism, resurgent nationalism, injustice in any form anywhere, but our own worst selves, our divided loyalties, our half-hearted service to Christ, our indifference.

“Our half-hearted service to Christ . . .” ”Our indifference . . .” “Our own worst selves . . .” These are the barriers that face us in our attempt to retrieve the idea of the priesthood of all believers. Unlike our Lord who came to this world “not to be ministered to, but to minister,” we have become a people who must be entertained by the refined oratory of brilliant preachers, and then we criticize the preachers!

In a scholarly treatment on Ministry and Priesthood, T. W. Manson of the University of Manchester in England, refers to the influence of the ordinary Christian as compared to that of the “brilliant preachers” in the Early Church:

The Christianity that conquered the Roman Empire was not an affair of brilliant preachers addressing packed congregations. We have, so far as I know, nothing much in the way of brilliant preachers in the first three hundred years of the Church’s life . . .

The great preachers came after Constantine the Great; and before that Christianity had already done its work and made its way right through the Empire from end to end. When we try to picture how it was done we seem to see domestic servants teaching Christ in and through their domestic service, workers doing it through their work, small shopkeepers through their trade, and so on, rather than eloquent propagandists swaying mass meetings of interested inquirers.

You see, they had no “laity” then, for all the Christians were ministers! Prof. Manson goes on in his study of the ministry of the early church to point out that it was the convincing power of the lived life that won people to the Christ, not well-articulated sermons.

The greatest source of power in this church, or any other church, is not in the pulpit, but in the lives of its members. If we love God with all our personality, if we are indeed filled with the fruit of the Spirit —- “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — our lives cannot help but be a testimony of God’s grace. If we are truly people of the Spirit rather than of the world, if we are indeed Christian rather than secular in our affections, then our influence for good in this community should be sensational. The church ought to be the most vital, dynamic moral and spiritual force in this city. But such force can be realized only as the Spirit of God flows through our lives into the lives of others.

There is the possibility that we are more pagan than we are Christian. If the purpose of Christianity is to conform men to the image of Christ, it looks as if we have failed miserably, for the church is more like the world than it is like Christ — not that Christianity has failed, but we have failed Christianity. If the church continues to be little more than a service club, if it becomes more and more like the world around it — conforming to the world rather than transforming it — then the role it is to play in this dangerous nuclear age will be a superficial one.

There are no easy answers to the problem of a decadent Christianity. But surely a converted church is part of the answer! If the members of this church would begin each day with the Christ, continue each day with the Christ, and end each day with the Christ, what a difference it would make.

Suppose Jesus of Nazareth were in Denton, Texas, today. What would he do? How would he live? What would his interests be? Those who claim to be his disciples should not be so different from what he would be. Jesus would be in Denton to serve, not to be served, to minister, not to be ministered to. Once we sense this high calling to the ministry, such talk as “Let the minister do it, that’s what we pay him for” will end, for we will then be sensitive to the face that the Christ continues to minister to this desperate world through all of us who are his disciples.

The ideal that God envisaged for his people back in the time of Moses will then be realized:

“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Pet. 2:9) — The Editor