Ordination Charge
for Revd Janelle Macgregor
delivered by Revd Professor Bill Loader at the Kalamunda Uniting Church
26th September, 2004
Janelle
We have ordained you as a Minister of the Word. This means that we have recognised your competence, spirituality and skills, for exercising leadership within the Christian church in a particular way.
Many exercise leadership. All are called to ministry; for all are called to live the life of God in the world. The particular leadership role to which you have been ordained is essential to the being of the church. We are not just a group of individuals seeking the spiritual path, but communities and groups of individuals who affirm that belonging together is crucial to our existence before God.
We are also groups and communities who are nurtured by a tradition, a stream of inspiration and reflection, which flows across more than two thousand years. That stream carries with it nutrient for the soul and nourishment for the life of faith lived in community and expressing God’s love in the world.
Your particular leadership role as a Minister of the Word is to lead people to the waters, but also to help people engage its riches with care and discernment. That means recognising where it is life giving and recognising where it has been life inhibiting. You will help people think, because you will help people put things together: their thoughts but also their lives. You will also help people find themselves in relation to others in community and to the world in which we live. You will teach people to love and be loved in ways that they never imagined. You will step out with them into the unknown.
Life is a dance in which there are rhythms of joy and ecstasy, but also moments of stumbling, of losing the pattern. You will dance and you will lead. Sometimes you will know the music so well, your movements will simply flow with spontaneity and freedom. Sometimes you will face new adventures, strange contortions, unfamiliar rhythms, where you will feel like an amateur, as much a learner as anyone around you. You will be tempted then to sit out the next dance or define yourself according to the familiar.
The Spirit never guarantees we will not stumble nor tread on the toes of those around us. Sometimes we will never swirl to the beauty of new things without trusting ourselves to be as human as anyone else. And when we do, we make it possible for some to join the flow who have long lost their rhythm and their hope and whom the world has discarded to the dark unlit corners of grief and injustice.
Yet sometimes our best moments are when we have rested well and recognised that there is no real joy in exhaustion, for us or for those around us. The music is God’s; the rhythm is the life of the Spirit; the body is the body of Christ. We move in patterns ancient and ever new; we lead within the boundless energy and joy of God.
You will dance and you will lead. Christ has danced before you. You will need sometimes to explain the steps. You will lead people to the waters in baptism. You will gather the circle for the nourishment of the life poured out. You will spin off new teams and new patterns. And all the while you will move over the waters of the deep and rejoice at the great birthing of the universe that is the heart of God.
Janelle
We have not ordained you to be a caring person; you are already called to that;
We have not ordained you to serve the Church in committees, planning activities, and organisation; that is already implied in your membership;
We have not ordained you to become involved in issues of justice and peace, in the struggle, personal, social, political, against all forms of oppression and idolatry; for that is laid upon every Christian.
We have ordained you to something smaller and less spectacular:
to read and interpret those sacred stories of our community so that they speak the Word to people today;
to remember and practice those rituals and rites of meaning which in their poetry address people at the level where change operates;
to foster in community through Word and Sacrament and pastoral care that encounter with truth which will set people free to minister as the body of Christ.
We have ordained you to the Ministry of the Word. Amen.