Ordination Charge
for Revd Maureen Walker
delivered by Revd Professor Bill Loader at Manning Uniting Church, 9 July 2000
Maureen,
We have ordained you as a Deacon.
You have become a member of an order which has taken many forms over
the course of the church’s life. Like all ministries it finds its origin and
its life in the ministry of Jesus Christ.
All are called to ministry.
All are called to share God’s life in the world, whether in formal acts of worship or
hands-on actions of care.
All orders of ministry which have been put in place in the church to make this possible
participate in this same wide range of ministry.
They vary in the focus and intensity of their activities rather than in their range.
As a Deacon your primary focus will be offering leadership in this wide range of ministry
as it expresses itself in acts of caring service in the world. You will do more than this,
but this is the concentration that belongs especially to your order.
To engage in leadership includes leadership by example.
You will pray for people.
You will care for people.
You will bring to people in word and deed the good news of hope and love.
To engage in leadership also includes teaching.
You will dream dreams and see visions and tell what you have seen.
You will help people understand how to care, what they are caring about and why.
You will help people make connections between themselves and their faith and their world.
To engage in leadership also includes prophecy and protest.
You will not only see the poor, but identify the structures which create and sustain
poverty.
You will not only see injustices, but identify the powers at work whose interests are
served by injustice.
You will not only comfort the broken hearted, but cry out to God with them in the
impenetrable darkness where no answers are ever visible.
Human need knows no end. There is no final page. The stories go on. Human misery is stark and frightening. Its haunting darkness can create its own dense cloud to engulf the reader in despair, to rise from the page and consume all hope with heaviness and death. You may let your eye run to the shafts of light, skip the pain, and see only the promise of happy endings. Your ministry will be measured by your ability to avoid such denial- and to avoid such death.
For you are not asked to carry the world on your shoulders. You are not
to be held accountable for every human need.
There will be times when you must close your eyes, not in denial, but because you can only
see so much.
There are times when you must rest, not in carelessness, but in deliberate nurture of your
own being.
You do not have to do everything, so you can be free to face human need without the
trickeries of denial and without the self indulgence of despair.
Such freedom from yourself will mean you will be best available to others.
You will be free to affirm joy and to affirm pain
and to be yourself in ministry.
Maureen,
We have not ordained you to a life of faith and work, for that is the
life of Christ in all the baptised;
We have not ordained you to become engaged in the struggles for justice, that light may
shine in darkness, for we are all to pray, ‘Your kingdom come!’
We have not ordained you to hold the hand of the needy, sit with the dying, weep with the
bereaved, for the Spirit everywhere urges the fruits of compassion.
We have ordained you
to lead the people of God in caring service,
to equip the people of God for their ministries,
to enable the people of God discern the spirits of injustice and oppression.
We have ordained you to sound the trumpet of jubilee in the world.
We have ordained you as a Deacon in the Church of God.