 What is Ordination?A reflection by Eric Massanari, PNMC Executive Conference Minister
In A Shared Understanding of Ministerial Leadership, our Mennonite Church USA polity statement on ministerial credentialing and leadership, ordination is described as "a long-term, leadership-ministry credential granted by the church. Ordination is the appropriate credential for all pastors, area conference ministry staff, chaplains, missionaries, evangelists, those serving as the national-office ministers, and those determined by the church to have a continuing ministerial-leadership role in, and on behalf of, the church." Ordination typically follows a two-year period of licensure, during which time an individual's fitness and readiness for longer-term ministerial leadership is assessed within the life of the community of faith. In our Anabaptist lineage of Christian faith, the community is an integral part of the call and the credentialing of ministry leaders. As it is stated in the Shared Understanding document: "A person's call to ministry occurs within the body life of the church. A person does not appoint him- or herself to the ministry--one is chosen by the church. By affirming a person's strengths and gifts, the congregation confirms the person's inner call to ministry." In other words, while ordination suggests a setting apart of certain persons into ministerial leadership roles, this setting apart is always rooted and grounded in the Body of Christ, the church. I find it particularly meaningful that ordination shares the same root as the word ordinary. Both come from the Latin, ordinare, which literally means “to set in order.” Ordination is a commitment to the path of becoming, with God’s help, one's most “ordinary” and real self as a ministering person. It means humbly and courageously accepting the gift of being simple, free and “coming down where we ought to be,” as the old Shaker song goes. It means accepting God’s call to a path of seeing, naming and evoking that same holy ordinariness at the heart of each person one serves in ministry, and at the heart of each moment one lives in the messy beauty and brokenness of life. Ordination means allowing one's life to become a proclamation and a magnifier of the great Love of God, so fully embodied and revealed in Christ, that is the source and ground of all. Ordination is always communal in its expression and action. To become ordained for ministry is not a call to be or become an extraordinary or particularly holy variety of human being. Rather, ordination is a path that seeks to embody and proclaim the truth that to be human is already something quite extraordinary and holy.
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