Michael Sadgrove’s Wisdom & Ministry: The Call to Leadership, (2008), SPCK, London.

 “I don’t think we need ordination at all. Anyone can do what ministers do.”, was a reflection once made to me at a Synod meeting by, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lay leader. If the meaning of ordination is somewhat misunderstood (and often dismissed as irrelevant) within the church in Australia, its place and role within public life is even more conflicted. The embedded anti-authoritarianism of the Australian psyche tends to make the general public wary of any institutional leadership, religious or secular. The overlaid piety and claims of divine mandate that come with the identity of the clergy only exacerbate this suspicion. Ordination, or at least people’s impressions of it, gets a hard time both within and without the church in Australia.

Written out of the starkly different context of Durham Cathedral with its long history and prominence in English religious and cultural life, one might think, then, that Michael Sadgrove’s 2008 work Wisdom & Ministry: The Call to Leadership, which he describes as,  “an attempt to reflect on the meaning (his italics) of ordained ministry as it is understood and experienced both by the Church and by the ordained themselves” (p3), might seem somewhat out of place for an Australian readership, lay or ordained. Occasionally, this potential disconnect is borne out as it is in the story of the person who asked Sadgrove once why he hadn’t been at his morning prayers, still a requirement of canon law in the Church of England (pp100-101), and a daily duty for parish priests. While Sadgrove realises through this encounter that the public expectation of what role priests fulfil, as interpreters of the faith for the community at large is still very alive in the consciousness of people looking on, it is hard to imagine a similar problem in Australia where the church has to constantly fight for acceptance and respect in the public square. It’s not that Sadgrove paints the ordained ministry as an easy vocation to live out in today’s world – quite the opposite –  (see ch 4, pgs 48-59, and pgs, 94-96, 125, 129 & 135), but rather that there is never any question of its right to exist within the public sphere.

Such contextual differences aside though, Sadgrove’s reflections (and that’s what they are – this is in no way a systematic work) on the meaning of ordained ministry and the place of wisdom in forming ministers are deeply theological and surely challenging and helpful to anyone who senses God’s call to this vocation and for the church at large. All candidates for ministry should read this book before they are ordained.  

In a general sense, one of Sadgrove’s greatest achievements is to overcome some of the key dichotomies that have come to influence unhelpfully reflection on ordination and show how calling to ministry in this regard is a far deeper and more cohesive reality. An obvious one is between what the minister ‘does’ and who the minister ‘is’, or perhaps whose the minister is. Rather than fall back on either side of what is an unhelpful divide, Sadgrove portrays a dialectical, integrated, and creative connection between the formation and the function of the minister within the public office of the ordained. On the contrary, in ordained ministry identity and interaction, reflection and response, personal prayer and pastoral practice, belong inherently together, a point Sadgrove makes abundantly clear throughout. He writes, “Much of this book is concerned with the inner world of the minister, because it is from there that testimony and proclamation come.” (p78), and axiomatic to his analysis is that, “…self knowledge is the basis of all true wisdom.” (p19).

In a similar vein, and this is perhaps the most telling and destructive dualism that has come to bear on the church’s life in the last half century, Sadgrove quashes the tendency to affirm any intentional separation of the public and private lives of the minister. Using the very pertinent example of King David, he says, “…what we are in our personal lives and relationships is inextricably linked to what we are in our public lives and leadership roles. It is a fallacy to imagine that it doesn’t matter what we do or are in private provided our ministry is un-affected.” (p65). The obvious corollary is that our ministry is never un-affected by ‘what we do or are in private’. For the modern church, so often displaying a lack of wisdom by blithely embracing such dualisms, this is a salient point (see also Sadgrove’s critical concern over any separation between liturgy and mission, p99).

It is through this lens of wisdom, then, that Sadgrove sees the deepest meaning in the Christian life and in ordained ministry, and, it may be said, the greatest potential for formation, insight, and powerful presentation of the gospel message. For him, wisdom is discovered, displayed, and developed, at the intersection of the various aspects that come together in ordination – the calling and purpose of God, the life of the individual (public and private), the public witness of the church, and the leadership of God’s people – yet it is also that which determines the efficacy and power of the ongoing Christian witness as these things continue to intersect in pastoral ministry. “How to present the hope of the gospel honestly, intelligently, attractively in our time”, he writes, “calls for wisdom of the deepest kind.” (p25), where wisdom is seen, “in the Hebrew sense of having insight into the way things are and where God is to be found in them…” (p25).

While Sadgrove presses home the need for individual clergy to seek, acquire, and nurture wisdom throughout their pastoral ministry, he perhaps could have made more of the need for a collective wisdom, an ecclesial wisdom, which the church must also develop in relation to the place of ordination within its life and witness. Rightly understood as a gracious gift of God (2 Tim. 1:6), ordination is as such given both to the individual who is called by the Holy Spirit to the vocation of servant leadership, and to the community who will choose, affirm, and set apart, those who will fulfil this particular calling.

The gravity of what is being affirmed and enacted in ordination has too often been taken lightly or even caricatured within the church, especially in the Australian context. Ordaining men and women to represent the Triune God to God’s people and vice-versa, to carry their burdens and walk with them in suffering, to shepherd  spiritually and protect them, to preside at the sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism, to preach the good news of Jesus Christ from the scriptures, to interpret and sift through the traditions of the church, to guide them in prayer and peacemaking, to bury and marry them, and to engage the gospel in the public context, is no small thing. The church’s very identity is at stake, for as Sadgrove makes plain, “…the leadership of any organization sets its tone, articulates its vision, inculcates its values.” (p6).

The weight of this calling so regularly lost on sceptics who look on ordination with indifference or even scorn could often not seem heavier to those who actually bear this yoke. Further, as William Willimon has pointed out, even communities which consciously eschew ordination will still have within them those who exercise many of the functions of spiritual leadership (see William Willimon, (2002), Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry, Abingdon, Nashville, p49). Sadgrove might have missed an opportunity to open up a richer discussion of the role of wisdom for the collective people of God in reflecting on the place of ordination and how discernment is exercised in selecting and forming ministers.

There can be no debate, though, about the insightfulness of much of what Sadgrove has to say. Even his calling the church back to the place and importance of wisdom for its life and witness makes this book worth reading. Those already engaged in ordained ministry within the Uniting Church and elsewhere and those preparing for it will find Wisdom & Ministry: The Call to Leadership particularly powerful. The hope is that, in addition, a wider readership might also help the UCA reclaim ordination as a vital part of its ecclesiology; at the very least to commit itself to the ongoing task of becoming wise in the ways of God as a people of faith.

Rev Michael Earl
Wesley Mission, Sydney

Rev. Michael Earl is a member of the Ministry team at Wesley Mission in Sydney, responsible for the Wesley Chapel in the City Congregation.  Michael is also a gifted musician and writer, co-writing the theme song for the 2009 12th Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia, ‘Holy Spirit Rain’ with Rev. Phil Newton.

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