Ministry

The term ministry refers to the work of persons sanctioned by a religious community to administer its sacramental rites and spiritual functions, including preaching, pastoral work, teaching, and community discipline. Although the ministerial office is a part of every major religious tradition, there has been debate over its character and shape particularly in many Christian communities throughout the history of the United States. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the ministry was defined as a masculine calling in the book of Leviticus, where God commands Moses to consecrate “Aaron and his sons” as priests of the Levite tribe and makes this a “perpetual ordinance.” While this concept of the ministry assumed a hierarchical form in most of western European Christendom, a parallel notion of potentially transformative social power—“the priesthood of all believers”—developed as well and became particularly influential during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As in Europe, many settlements in the New World witnessed an ongoing debate over the meaning and authority of the ministry, and since that time Americans have at times either reasserted or challenged traditional assumptions about the ministerial office as a domicile of divinely ordained masculine authority.

The English Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay colony in the seventeenth century modeled their society and ecclesiastical life upon their understanding of ancient [Page 314]Israel, organizing tightly-knit congregations whose members subscribed to a covenant and vested religious authority in properly trained males. Presiding over self-styled covenant communities “in the wilderness,” ecclesiastical leaders wielded great power. They justified their authority through a system of biblical interpretation that was intended to protect against theological error, but by requiring an extensive education that was denied to women they also ensured the maintenance of a male oligarchy.

Nevertheless, occasional challenges to Puritan notions of a male-only ministry did arise. In 1635 Anne Hutchinson of Boston's First Church began holding religious meetings in which she publicly questioned the clergy's emphasis on “good works” as proof of one's divine election. That Massachusetts leaders regarded her as a threat to male religious and social authority was evident when, in the 1638 trial that led to her excommunication and banishment, they accused her of acting more like “a Husband than a Wife, and a preacher than a Hearer.” Similarly, the Puritans imprisoned New England Quakers, whose rejection of scriptural prohibition against women speaking in church threatened the very foundations of Puritan society.

Between the mid–eighteenth century and the mid–nineteenth century, the Great Awakening, American Revolution, and Second Great Awakening spurred a mistrust of hierarchical structures of religious authority, prompting new notions of ministerial manliness. The disestablishment of state religion, the social and geographic mobility Americans enjoyed, and the impact of emerging republican and democratic notions of manhood created a volatile atmosphere in which the idea of “the priesthood of all believers” took on a new meaning. A new breed of self-made populist preachers held revivals and attracted large audiences. These preachers grounded their authority in their claims to salvation rather than in classical training. Couching their message in an appeal to common sense, individual liberty, and listeners' own ability to interpret the bible, ministers increasingly found that robust, charismatic preaching was more likely to fulfill popular expectations, and thus to assure their social influence than were such earlier markers of ministerial manliness as education and theological sophistication. Significantly, this more democratic notion of ministry did not always challenge the male monopoly on ministerial authority—indeed, it in some ways reinforced that monopoly because of its appeal to contemporary gender assumptions rather than biblical texts that might question such distinctions.

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