Kairos (I)

Maybe kairos is the best way to explain the following bit of news. This Sunday evening I’ll be ordained to the Gospel ministry by Lakeview Baptist church. A bit of background.

When Kadie and I packed up the UHaul and trucked on over to the spacious living quarters at Southwestern Seminary in 1991, I had recently been licensed. The seminary requires all its students to be licensed in order to enroll. My pastor at the time helped me accomplish this, but due to the tumult of graduation, marriage, and moving that occupied that summer, he and I decided that I’d return home at a mutually convenient time and then I would be ordained.

We planned on setting up my ordination later that year, but never got around to it. It was a low on my priority list. After that first year, the pastor of my home church was forced out, and there arose a pharaoh pastor who knew not Taran. I grew disconnected with that church, but didn’t feel a close association with our church in Ft. Worth either.

When I went to Baylor, and was called to pastor Lone Oak, it wasn’t a concern of theirs. Neither was it an issue this last year at Susan Song. Plus I had two additional reasons for not wanting to get ordained.

First, ordination is not a key doctrinal issue for me. I don’t know if there’s a fourth level of doctrinal triage or not, but that’s about where I’d put it. There’s nothing wrong with ordination, but it is not required. I follow Spurgeon in saying that if God has called you into service, you really don’t need any one else’s endorsement. It is simply not a big concern to me. (Although Spurgeon goes even further. He said that ordination was a case of “empty hands being placed on an empty head.”)

Second, I’ve always thought that ministers were separated enough from the laity. There is a tendency in the church to assume that ministry is what you pay the preacher to do. It is a faulty division of labor: there are those who minister and those who support those who minister.

But I believe strongly in the calling of all believers as ministers. The key verses of my own ministry have been 2 Corinthians 5:18-19.

Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reonciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

Paul is writing these verses to underscore the fact that all people are entrusted with God’s ministry, not just the leaders in the polyester suits. Ordination simply adds another unnecessary layer of insulation between clergy and laity.

So why get ordained?????