God’s Call, the Church’s Call, and Ordination
by The Rev. Ernest A. Bergeson
Pastor Bergeson is a retired ELCA pastor in Harwich, Massachusetts. He originally submitted this article for publication in The Lutheran about the time of the formation of the ELCA.
For some time I have struggled inwardly over what I have seen happening to the position of the ordained clergy within our Lutheran Church. When I became a pastor in the Augustana Lutheran Church in the 1940’s, the most important thing I had to do in order to be accepted as a candidate for ministry was to convince the matriculation committee at the seminary that I had truly received an inner call of God to serve the church in preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments. We had to present to that committee a biography of our spiritual journey to that point. Everything hinged on convincing the committee that I had that inner call so that when my seminary days were completed, the call could be confirmed by the church in a call from a congregation.
It was only then that the Ministerium of the Church would further examine me to determine if I understood fully the implications of the inner call in submitting myself fully to the apostolic faith as set forth in the Confessions of the Church. It was then that the Church voted to ordain me as a pastor and invoke the gifts of the Holy Spirit, that I would be true to my calling. Even though we never called ordination as a Sacrament, as did our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, the Church had a view of ordination that essentially sacramental. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we were following what the Apology to the Augsburg Confession says: “But if ordination be understood as applying to the ministry of the word, we are not unwilling to call ordination a sacrament.”
What later troubled me in the LCA has troubled me even more in the ELCA: we have somehow gotten away from the idea of the inner call and the sacramental character of ordination. We have more and more opted for a strictly functional view of the ministry. Instead of probing the validity of an inner call, it seems we have instead probed the psychological and sociological suitability of the individual to hold what we consider the “professional status” of an ordained pastor.
I could not bring myself to vote for the ordination of women at the LCA Minneapolis convention in 1970, because no one presented a good theological case for the change. All the arguments were of a psychological and historical nature. It took an evening of hearing a woman who had been studying at the Episcopal Seminary in Cambridge to bring me to change my mind. Here I heard for the first time a person spilling out her heart about the fact that she had experienced the inner call of God to the priesthood of her church, but at the time her church was denying her the opportunity to fulfill her God-given call. I was so convinced of her having that inner call that I said to myself, “Who am I to say that women should not be ordained if God issues the call?”
I remember an evening when a classmate of seminary days and I were talking about our call to the ministry, and a young intern was listening in. He seemed all ears as he said, “Tell me more. I’ve never heard this before.” He sat fascinated by our view of what it meant to be ordained and sent out by the Church with the Gospel. We talked about the inspiring send-off we got from Dr. Bersell’s sermon about springtime in the Augustana Church at our service of ordination. Is this kind of experience completely lost to a Church that wants to treat ordination only as a step toward the hiring of a functionary who is nothing more than a professional employee of a congregation?
Now that I have become one of the retired pastors of the Church, the ELCA for sociological reasons only is disenfranchising us as voting members of the ministerium of the Church. The new Church, even after a study of the ordained ministry, has opted to endorse a functional view of ordination, giving voting status only to those who are directly under call by a congregation or to special service in the Church. The sacramental character of ordination seems to me to have given me a life-long call of God that can be terminated only by being defrocked for cause. I have fought against the idea of the three-year “on leave from call” limitation because I felt it was theologically untenable. That is why I have over the years always voted against putting anyone on that status.
Recently I read that Dr. James Nestingen, in speaking to the ALC bishops, said that ordination is not a civil right for an individual, nor is it a personal endowment. I would challenge that as a completely erroneous way of looking at the permanent and sacramental character of ordination. Just as psychological and sociological aspects of the ministry exist but must never supersede the theological meaning of ordination, so talking about civil and person rights of the individual has little to do with the understanding of the gifts of the spirit to the individual in ordination. The only civil right it involves is that granted by the state to pastors to be the agent of the state in performing a marriage rite and certifying that by the filing of the marriage license with the town or city clerk.
In summary, may I say that God’s call, the Church’s call and the bestowal of the gifts of the Spirit for the fulfillment of the office of Word and Sacrament have to be seen in a way that is consistent with the historic apostolic character of that office under the ultimate authority of Christ. A pastor is committed in ordination to a life-long office under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit which the Church recognizes, and the church holds him or her accountable. If the ministry becomes the functional job of a professional, as it seems to have done in the ELCA, then the integrity of the office is lost.
Not long ago I heard Rabbi Murray Rothmann say that he was concerned about the conversions to Judaism that were taking place, not because individuals were theologically committed to the Covenant, but because they were sociologically being brought in through intermarriage. It is with the same concern that I see the polity of the ELCA being shaped by sociological and psychological understandings of ministry, but failing to understand fully the theological character of the office.
