An officer usually is a person elected or appointed to some position of trust, responsibility or authority in a government, corporation, society, etc.. We frequently associate it with police and armed forces.
The Church has officers also, but uses different words to describe them like “clerics” or “clergy”.
When church officer candidates are trained and ready to hold office, their commissioning is called ordination.
Church officers also can be retired or discharged, honorably or dishonorably (punitively). For centuries their term of office was idealized as forever; however now they have set, limited terms of office.
Church officers are often called “pastors”, meaning “shepherds”. A shepherd herds, tends, and guards sheep. Metaphorically, a pastor protects, guides, and watches over his congregation (his “flock” or sheep).
However, Church officers are not a different breed; they also are sheep. But, they have leadership roles in the Christian community. They may have positions of rank, authority, or responsibility, but their role is to serve.
In other words, the Church doesn’t have different classes of membership, only different roles of service and responsibility.
St. Augustine, in his sermon On Pastors, described it well:
“I must distinguish carefully between two aspects of the role the Lord has given me . . .
“The first aspect is that I am a Christian; the second, that I am a leader. I am a Christian for my own sake; the fact that I am a Christian is to my own advantage, but I am a leader for your advantage.
“Many persons come to God as Christians but not as leaders. Perhaps they travel by an easier road and are less hindered since they bear a lighter burden, In addition to the fact that I am a Christian and must give God an account of my life, I as a leader must give him an account of my stewardship as well.”
In today’s Church, there are many men and women exercising roles of service, but only some of them are ordained officers. Sometimes, using a somewhat old fashioned vocabulary, we call the others “lay ministers”.
Although they may have positions of trust and leadership in the Church, they still tend to be considered an entirely different class from the “ordained”.
A current practical problem is that the dwindling numbers of ordained clergy simply are too few to be the exclusive leaders in the Church, and some of them are personally inadequate to the task.
The understanding of Church leadership is changing, and some of the terminology being used to describe the changes is new.
For centuries, in a mostly monarchical Europe, Church leadership was monarchical and clerical. Vatican Council I, in a changing world, tried to address this. It began with clarifying the office, duty, and authority of the Pope but was interrupted before it could to do the same for bishops.
Vatican II remedied this in part. A new post-conciliar structure was the Synod of Bishops, a large and diverse ad hoc body chosen by the Pope to advise and collaborate with him in overall planning and leadership.
Now a next stage of development is gradually emerging; called Synodality, it involves finding and establishing forms of exercising church leadership that include more than pope and bishops alone. Initially perhaps upsetting and difficult to understand and implement, it is necessitated by the reality of the church today.
Slowly but surely, Church leadership is no longer being limited to an exclusive body of ordained Church Officers.
10 October 2021