A priest is a channel of forgiveness, grace, mercy, healing. A priest provides pastoral care. This is what God has called every believer to do and to be. The first step, then, in helping people move into ministry is to remind them of that, to tell them, “You are priests.”
—Bruce Larson
Over a decade ago, I visited an exciting church in the inner city of Chicago. While most Sunday sermons in that neighborhood echoed through half-empty auditoriums, the sermons of this church’s pastor reached overflow crowds Sunday after Sunday. Obviously, it was an unusual church. People weren’t just dropping their money in the plate and then putting their feet up while the pastor did all the work. They believed they were called to minister and by God’s power could minister.
I had a chance to talk at length with the pastor. “What’s the secret of your success here?”
“Simple,” he said. “I just tell people who they are—chosen by God, his children, his priests. I don’t shame them for what they are not; I tell them who they are.”
At that moment, I promised myself. If ever I return to the pastorate, I’m going to remember that. I did return, and I kept that promise. I’ve been telling people who they are, and it works. As I am just getting my feet wet in my new position at the Crystal Cathedral, let me use my experience with University Presbyterian Church’s (UPC) lay ministry as a prime example.
A Kingdom of Priests
Just before God gave Moses the Law, he instructed Moses to tell the people they were to be a kingdom of priests (Exod. 19:6). The New Testament repeats that theme. Peter refers to the believers as a holy and royal priesthood (1 Pet. 2:5, 9). At the very end of the Bible, the same theme is repeated, that Christians are called to be a kingdom of priests (Rev. 1:6).
Primarily, a priest is a person who mediates between God and another person. A priest is a channel of forgiveness, grace, mercy, healing. A priest provides pastoral care. This is what God has called every believer to do and to be. The first step, then, in helping people move into ministry is to remind them of that, to tell them, “You are priests.”
For the most part, Jesus didn’t pick as his disciples the highly trained, the well educated. Not that he chose unqualified people; I think those twelve were the most qualified. They didn’t have to unlearn other disciplines. They had clean slates. At least three were fishermen, and one was a government employee, but none were clergy (rabbis).
These are the men told by Jesus, “I will make you fishers of men.” He didn’t say, “Maybe you will be” or “I’ll try to teach you how.” He said they would become that, and they did.
But what does that mean today—to be fishers of men, to be priests? When we tell people they are priests, what are we calling them to do?
I believe this priesthood involves four facets of ministry, four separate roles in which every Christian needs to function. We all are to be evangelists, ministers of healing, missionaries, and prophets.
Called to Be Evangelists
When I arrived at UPC, the evangelism department had just two responsibilities: to provide a special evangelistic speaker for one week each year and to follow up on visitors.
I left the structure alone for a year so I could evaluate the program’s weaknesses and strengths. After that, I proposed to the Session, “How about dropping the evangelism department? Every member of this church is called to be an evangelist, to talk about Jesus to the people where we live and work. Having a department responsible for this lets us off the hook. Let’s make evangelism everybody’s job.”
That challenge needed some explaining, of course. We had to help our congregation understand that evangelists aren’t scholars who teach theology, though occasionally they are. An evangelist is an introducer. Not everyone can teach; anybody can introduce.
An evangelist merely says to someone experiencing the pain of life, “Have you had enough? I want you to meet the ultimate Someone who can change your life—Jesus Christ.”
In eight years with no evangelism program, that congregation nearly doubled. We received about four hundred new members each year. The believers were the evangelists, and they were taking that commission seriously.
Called to Be Ministers of Healing
While evangelism is a ministry to the nonbeliever, the ministry of healing most often takes place between believers. We are priests, called into each others’ lives to be agents of all kinds of healing—emotional, relational, physical, mental, vocational.
At UPC, we provided one setting for that to take place—a quarterly healing service. Anyone who wanted could come forward for prayer with the pastors and elders. But the primary setting for this ministry was the small group.
The Christian community provides a powerful healing climate. When “two or three are gathered/’ the Holy Spirit’s power is made manifest, just as Jesus promised. In that climate of love, one person may reveal a problem and the others listen and pray, and healing takes place. Openness and honesty, walking in the light—all are powerful medicines.
Healing is not the province of the specialized few; a secular study some years ago proved that. It was done to determine which school of counseling—Rogerian, Freudian, Jungian, and so on—produced the best results. The results were intriguing. The most effective counseling was provided not by the disciples of any of these professional schools, but by the control groups used in the study. Ordinary people—airline pilots, secretaries, housewives, businesspersons—with no therapy training, who simply spent time listening, produced better results than the professionals.
It has been said that only about one person in ten seeking counseling has special needs requiring professional help. The other 90 percent are well served by talking to a sympathetic lay person. For instance, early in this century, there was no cure for alcoholism. It was not until two untrained laymen discovered the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous that there was any concrete program for recovery.
UPC offered dozens of groups for people with special problems. There were groups for the addicted, for cancer patients, for the unemployed, for stroke victims, for the divorced, for single parents. The healing ministry was largely in the hands of unpaid lay people, but they were people filled with God’s love and the healing power of his Holy Spirit.
We did, of course, refer extreme cases to a counseling service, but we avoided adding a professional counselor to the church staff. Had we done that, we felt, we would have sent the wrong message to our church family. Instead, we said, both by word and action, “You are ministers of healing.”
Called to Be Missionaries
The Jesus who said, “Come unto me, all ye who are heavy laden” also said, “Go ye into all the world.” Our call to discipleship includes the command to go. We are sent forth in mission.
On Sunday mornings at UPC, our worship service included a commissioning of those who were going as missionaries, both at home and abroad. One year, 356 people served overseas. A few were long-term career missionaries. Others went for a year to teach English in China. Many took “a vacation with a purpose,” working two weeks or more at an orphanage in Baja California or roofing buildings in Jamaica. These efforts were directed by our able pastor of world missions, Arthur Beals, a gifted man whose contacts all over the world helped the church connect people eager to serve with appropriate overseas opportunities.
To prepare people for cross-cultural ministry, UPC’s Christian education curriculum included a class on being a world Christian. But actually, the bulk of this kind of training was not done in the classroom. Would-be missionaries were called on to practice cross-cultural missions right there in Seattle.
UPC was located just one block from the main drag of the University District. Any time of the day or night, within a two- or three-block stretch, you could find almost any ethnic group: Aleuts and Eskimos, Latins and Europeans, Africans and Asians. Mixed in were gang members, students, drug pushers, professors, punkers, shoppers, winos, and bag ladies. Adopting Jesus’ own method, people went out to that area in groups of two or three to meet some of those people from other cultures and find ways to minister to them.
Three of our young singles were walking in the University District, practicing cross-cultural mission in preparation for a mission trip to Mexico. A young man sitting on the curb asked them for money. They sat down with him. He was smelly, dirty, and unshaven but pleasant and friendly.
“Why do you need money?” they asked.
“I can’t get a job.”
“Do you want one?”
“Oh, yeah, I want a job. I’ll do anything.”
While one of the group sat with him, the other two covered both sides of the street, going into every store to ask if it was hiring.
They discovered that a nearby pizza restaurant needed a dishwasher and arranged an interview for 1:00 the next day. The three took the young man home, got him some presentable clothes, and gave him a place to bathe and shave.
He showed up at the restaurant the next day at twelve—an hour early—and got the job. And he kept the job. Later, he started coming to church and eventually became a Christian.
Our church family found you don’t have to go overseas to do missionary work. You can become a missionary wherever you find people.
Several years back, some UPC members began helping out a few Southeast Asian refugees—providing clothes for them, finding some basic furniture for their new homes. From that modest beginning, the church saw the emergence of what became the largest Cambodian church outside of Cambodia. That church was the flowering of missionary work done in Seattle by some Christians who cared.
Mission can begin across the street as well as across the world, and it’s not confined to a few well-trained career missionaries. The UPC church family experienced that reality.
Called to Be Prophets
This priesthood to which we’re called involves a fourth role: prophet. A prophet is not primarily foreteller (a future-teller) but a forthteller, one who speaks forth for God about the social evils of the time. “People are being oppressed,” the prophet says. “Injustice and immorality are rampant. God has a better way if we will serve him and be obedient.”
In earlier centuries, the church was on the cutting edge of social change—establishing orphanages, hospitals, schools, programs for the poor. Today, all too often, we end up sweeping up behind the parade, tagging along after the courageous efforts of others.
It doesn’t need to be that way. The church can and should be producing the people who are leading us into a more peaceful, benevolent, and just society.
One member at UPC was the Seattle superintendent of schools, and I saw him in this kind of prophetic role. When he arrived a few years back. Bill Kendrick inherited an almost hopeless situation—43,000 students with a diminishing financial base and a growing number of impoverished students. Hundreds of families had already put their children in private schools or moved out of the school district.
Bill was realistic about the problems, but he also noticed that some students were succeeding in spite of those problems. Most of those children came from Asian cultures—Cambodian, Chinese, Vietnamese—where education was a top priority. They had parents with high expectations who told their kids, “You will not play hooky. You will do your homework. You will bring home A’s.” And they did.
Bill saw the need for that kind of role model for all the kids. So whenever he spoke to Kiwanis Club, Lions, or Rotary, he shared his vision to find an ombudsman, an encourager, for every student in the Seattle schools, one person outside the school system who would care for that kid and hold him or her accountable.
All kinds of people responded: chief executive officers, lawyers, businesspeople, accountants. Each one—over twenty thousand at one count—was linked with a student.
All that was the result of one man’s efforts to change the climate and increase the potential for excellence in the public schools. There’s a better way to do what’s being done in every area of life. There’s a better way to practice medicine and law, to conduct business and social services, to do police work and education.
In our jobs, in PTA or the Garden Club, and even in our churches, there’s a better way to do whatever is being done. The Holy Spirit is the author of creativity, and we can tap into that creativity.
Prophets, Old Testament or twentieth century, are those men and women who are called to make a difference, and that prophetic role is an essential element of the holy priesthood we Christians are called to.
The sanctuary of University Presbyterian Church was no larger than those of nearby congregations. Remarkably, however, ours was so filled three times each Sunday morning that it took three traffic officers to direct cars in and out of the parking lot.
But that Sunday morning turnout, encouraging as it was, couldn’t measure the impact of the kingdom of priests unleashed over Seattle during the remaining six days of the week. In homes, schools, factories, and offices, they deployed—as evangelists, ministers, missionaries, and prophets. They were performing pastoral care, both for one another and for a world that needed their ministration.
Copyright © 1990 by Christianity Today
