The Prayer Book’s Exhortation for Faithful Priests
On a crisp, bright Alabama day in December of 1994, I received my commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. I proudly stood before my friends and family in my dress greens (an abominable polyester creation) as each of us new officers received the gold bars of our new rank. One of the most moving moments for me was the taking of the Commissioning Oath. With my right hand raised, I repeated after the colonel who was conducting the commissioning service:
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Even as a young 24-year-old recent college graduate, I felt the weight of those words. It was a heavy responsibility to consider. My head filled with the many possibilities and paths my life could take as a response to this oath. My time in the military turned out to be rather mundane, which, by all accounts, was a blessing. But through those years, I learned and grew as both an officer and as a person.
Sponsored
That experience is not unlike that of anyone who enters ordained ministry. The call is real. The work of fulfilling the requirements for ordination is appropriately demanding. On one hand, every ordinand feels relieved to have finally arrived at the big day (ironically often also clad in the polyester of a cassock-alb). On the other hand, the words of the Book of Common Prayer‘s Ordinal are sobering. Like the Commissioning Oath I took as a young Army officer, it places a heavy responsibility on the ordinand. The weight of the office seems almost palpable. Just as I remember my commissioning in the Army, I also well remember the words the bishop spoke to me at my ordination over twenty years ago.
The Exhortation
Part of the Ordination service of every priest is the Exhortation, which the bishop gives. It is a powerful call to embrace the responsibilities and understand the weight of this office. The Exhortation is relatively short. It’s 338 words—only about one page of text in the Prayer Book. But its brevity does not lessen its gravity. In these four paragraphs, the ordinand is charged with four distinct things: to steward, to guard, to work, and to rely.
Steward
The first paragraph of the Exhortation commissions the priest to be
…a messenger, watchman, and steward of the Lord… to teach, to warn, to feed, to provide for the Lord’s family and to seek for Christ’s sheep who are in the midst of this fallen world.
This paragraph has a twofold focus. The first is to be a caretaker for the body of Christ, the family of God. The priest lives out this stewardship in the four functions listed: “to teach, to warn, to feed, and to provide.” These duties all support the Church’s health and protection. It’s a call to shepherd the people of God.
There are an incredible number of tasks that are demanded of ministers. It can be overwhelming. But here in the exhortation, we are reminded that these tasks must remain at the forefront of our minds and at the center of our ministries. In his classic book, The Reformed Pastor, Richard Baxter says,
The strength of believers is the honor of the church.
Richard Baxter (updated by Roger McReynolds), The Reformed Pastor in Modern English, 2020
That strength is the result of the faithful and sometimes mundane repetition of teaching, warning, feeding, and providing.
Then we are called to look outward toward the lost sheep. It says we are “to seek for Christ’s sheep who are in the midst of this fallen world, that they may be saved through Christ forever.”
Our pastoral task is always coupled with our missional task. Jesus reminds us, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” (Luke 10:2). Notice that the limiting factor in that verse is not the harvest, but the labor. So, Christ calls us not only to care for those in the church, but also to always be laboring in the fields for the harvest.
Guard
The 2nd paragraph’s focus is to guard ourselves for the sake of the Gospel.
If the church, or any of her members, is hurt or hindered by your negligence, you must know both the gravity of your fault, and the grievous judgement that will result.
This echoes Paul’s words to Timothy: “Set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12). We all know the damage caused by scandal and moral failure within the church, especially when leaders are involved. While we are all redeemed sinners and have our own brokenness with which to contend, we must strive to be diligent in our own conduct.
Again, I find Baxter compelling when he tells his fellow 17th-century ministers,
Pay careful attention to yourselves, because the tempter will tempt you more than other men. If you will be the leaders against the prince of darkness, he will spare you no more than God prevents him. He has the greatest hostility toward those whose very calling is to do him the greatest harm.
Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, 21
The Exhortation also reminds us to keep our perspective—both on ourselves and on the Church. The church is not simply an organization of the like-minded. It is the gathering of Christ’s own making, of those redeemed and ransomed by his sacrifice. If we are to care for it, we must guard ourselves.
Work
The 3rd paragraph of the Exhortation calls us to work diligently. It reads,
Work diligently, with your whole heart, to bring those in your care into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of God, and to maturity in Christ, that there may be among you neither error in religion nor immorality in life.
Obviously, this echoes the call to stewardship in the first paragraph but reminds us of the effort it requires in the ministry. “Work diligently, with your whole heart.” But to what end? Where should we aim our diligent work? The exhortation tells us. It is a call to unity of faith, the knowledge of God, and maturity in Christ. That is, we are to work diligently to make faithful disciples of Jesus.
This requires not only diligence but intentionality. It means we must not substitute anything for discipleship. We may find it easy to stop short of the goal and think our job is done when someone becomes a member of the Church or shows an interest in our Anglican tradition. Those are indeed good things, but they are not our primary goal. In the Great Commission in Matthew 28, Jesus calls us to go and make disciples, to baptize and to, in his words, “teach[ing] them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:20).
In his book Real Life Discipleship, Jim Putman says,
Discipleship is critical if we want to save the church from the Sunday morning show and make it a place where real relationship and real change takes place.
Jim Putman, Real Life Discipleship (NavPress, 2010), 21
Let us diligently work to labor for the harvest the Lord has set before us and build faithful disciples of Jesus.
Rely
We can sum up the final paragraph of the Exhortation in the word “rely.” There are two primary items on which we are to rely. The first is the Holy Scriptures, and the second is the Holy Spirit.
And seeing the demands of this holy Office are so great, lay aside all worldly distractions and take care to direct all that you do to this purpose: read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures.
We cannot be faithful ministers of Christ unless we are faithful students of His Word. This is true every bit as much for the layman as for the clergy. J.I. Packer was right when he said,
All our ideas about God should be measured, tested, and where necessary, corrected and enlarged by reference to Biblical teaching.
J.I. Packer, Concise Theology (Crossway, 1993), 34
All this, of course, is undergirded by reliance on the Holy Spirit. The Exhortation finishes by stating,
The will and ability needed are given by God alone. Therefore, pray earnestly for his Holy Spirit to enlighten your mind and strengthen your resolve.
While there are many things that can help us in the Gospel work we are called to do, nothing is more essential than the Holy Spirit. After all, the work is His, not ours. The harvest is His, not ours. The work of the priest is nothing less than a participation in the priesthood of Jesus. So, the priesthood is His, not ours. We must seek and rely upon His Holy Spirit.
Confidence and Trust in Him
When I began in ministry, I was the youngest person my diocese had ever sent to seminary at 27 years old. When I came out of seminary, I was, like many newly ordained, enthusiastic and more than a little prideful. The Lord was so patient with me. Over twenty years later, I have learned that the only confidence that counts is confidence in Christ. We can only learn this as we come to the place where we have to depend on him. Only when God sweeps away all the scaffolding we prop up around us do we discover his faithfulness and learn to trust our Lord more fully.
Sometimes, we learn these lessons because we are hard-hearted, hard-headed, and stubborn. Sometimes, ordained life presents us with gut-wrenching situations we could not imagine. There are many days that are dark and stormy. More than once, I have felt like I was scraping the bottom of my barrel; I had nothing left. But I can testify that the well of the Holy Spirit never runs dry. When Jesus promised to be with us to the end of the age, He meant it. This is true for each of us, ordained or lay.
In the Exhortation, we see the weight and the responsibility of the priestly office. It is good that the Prayer Book’s Ordinal lays this out before us so that we take the Lord’s call on our lives seriously. But likewise, the Exhortation and the Ordination service itself remind every redeemed sinner who wears a collar that this is ultimately Christ’s work. It is in his power and by his grace that we seek to live out his call and serve his Church.
Image by Diego Cervo, courtesy of Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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