Editor's Note

Ministers of change

The first time I received a check for doing ministry was in 1977. I was a full-time college student and a part- time campus minister. The amount of the check was laughably small, but even so, I remember being amazed that they were paying me to do this!

In the 1970s, there was an ongoing discussion about who could be defined as a “minister.” Up until then, Catholics didn’t really use the word. Protestants had ministers. Catholics had priests and nuns. If lay people did something around the church, it was always for free and always to help out Father or Sister. I remember a musician friend asking to be paid a small stipend for playing at four Masses every weekend. You would have thought he’d asked to lead a Satanic worship service on the high altar.

New ministries
As fluid and even turbulent as our understanding of ministry was in those days, it is in ways even more diffuse today. We have ministry titles today that we never dreamed of in the 1970s. Who had heard of a “parish life coordinator”? If my musician friend had been a certified “lay ecclesial minister,” would that have war- ranted a paycheck? Some of us had heard of “catechists,” but they were more like deacons (well before we heard of “permanent deacons”) in mission countries. And, at the other arc of the pendulum, I know of one diocese today that will not allow anyone who is not ordained to use the word “minister” in his or her title.

Those who are not Catholic might find all this confusing. And yet, for most of us, it all seems mostly fine. We know there is a priest shortage, and yet, few of us are deprived of Mass on Sunday. In some communities it can be difficult to schedule an anointing of the sick, but there are plenty of “ministers” who will bring Communion and pray with the ill. All the babies are still getting baptized, and the engaged couples are still getting married.

So what, if anything, needs to be said about ministry today? Here’s the thing that bothers me. I didn’t decide to make a career as “lay minister” after college just to make liturgy prettier. I took to heart that ancient phrase, “As the church prays, so it believes.” I believed then, and still believe today, that if we worship authentically, the world will be changed.

Change agents
But that only happens if, at the end of the liturgy, we send out change agents or ministers of change. A few of us have a vocation (in the sense David DeLambo uses the word on pages 8-9) to serve the parish structure of the church. But all of the baptized have the vocation of proclaiming the good news to the world beyond the parish. As I write this, dioceses across the country have just completed the Rite of Election. If the numbers are similar to past years, that means there will be about 125,000 new Catholics in the United States on Easter Sunday. Are they ready to be ministers of change in the world? Have we shaped our inside-the-church ministries to fully form and support the ministers of evangelization? That’s the conversation we need to be having about ministry today.

Nick Wagner
nwagner@bayard-us.com