Margaret Thatcher once famously said “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” The same goes with with the church sometimes – if it’s not obvious that you do something then simply telling people that you do doesn’t necessarily change reality.

Baptists pride themselves in having no priesthood, because we believe that everyone is a priest. I can go along with the concept theologically of course, i.e. that the temple veil was torn in two (Matthew 27:51) negating the need for a mediator, that Christ is the mediator in the new Covenant, that we all have a ministry of reconciliation, that we all are ambassadors,etc.

Cattle Class Leaders

However if you look at how we resource and train people for ministry in the church, it tells a different story. The majority of people involved in leadership responsibilities within Baptist churches (diaconates, elderships and Boards) are ‘lay leaders’. By ‘lay’, I mean that they do that voluntarily, and do not receive any remuneration for that. They typically have other jobs and fit leadership responsibilities around evening meetings and time on the weekend. You will have either one or a few pastors on a typical eldership but the majority are usually ‘lay’ members.

They receive no training at any official level for the responsibilities they assume. If Johnny Appleseed gets voted into being an elder at a church meeting this weekend there is no text book, no course to enroll in, no online training, no weekend training, nada. He just has to pick it up as he goes along, hopefully getting shown the ropes by a more experienced campaigner.

The first ever Baptist church service in Australia was in April 1831 some 193 years ago, but still, nothing has been developed to resource and train the bulk of our leaders. I have done research into this with every Stare leader and church health director. There has never been much in the way of training and equipping resources for lay leadership, there isn’t any currently, and there are no plans for in the future. This is despite the capacity of our denominational staff and our related theological and ministry training colleges. New elders [or deacons and Board members) are left to their own devices.

This is an indictment on our culture and a deficiency that leads to perpetual suffering in our churches through division, traumas, splits, controversies and bad health – much of which can be remedied through providing training and equipping for the bulk of our leadership community. Leaving the skills, arts and responsibilities of leadership up to chance is a foolish and impoverished was of running a movement. The people at the highest denominational positions who are able to make a difference in this regard choose not to, or perhaps it never occurs to them.

The church can borrow a principle used by the army, in that training is provided for virtually anything a soldier or officer is expected to do. Very little is left to chance. It can be a bit limiting at times, but I appreciate the principle involved – that we don’t expect people to pull of tasks or roles that they have not been trained and mentored to do.

The Baptist world is exactly the opposite: our dereliction of duty towards our leadership community ensures that autonomy leads to amateurism. In this regard we fail our leaders and ensure that our ability to grow healthy churches is perpetually frustrated.

Business & First Class Leaders

Pastors live in a different class to lay leaders. Baptist pastors are the ersatz priests of the Baptist movement. I’m one of them, I know. Unlike the great unwashed who don’t require or get any training or accreditation, us Baptist priests have had theological institutions established in all major States to provide training especially for us. We even get taught to speak in tongues – Greek and Hebrew that is.

After a minimum Bachelor of Divinity if we want to be accredited we go through a selection system that here in Queensland has always been called ‘The Seven Deadly Doors’. That includes a full psyche assessment that would be the envy of ASIO (pro tip: delete all your Google searches and Tik Tok history) and a range of interviews with Union gatekeepers.

If you make it through selection you will then do a form of supervised field education for two years, and following that you may be ordained if you satisfy the requirements. If you don’t quite cut the mustard you may be knocked back and asked to come back again a year or two later.

Once you’ve started out in ministry as a newly minted accredited minister you have the option of doing a Masters degree. All up it’s 7-9 years of study and supervision combined. At that point you sign up to a church and you are placed in a leadership team with no theological or ecclesiastical training at all.

This perfectly demonstrates the fib that us Baptists have no priesthood. We do have a very special class of people who we train and resource, and then we have the rest who we leave to their own devices.

In my research one State leader told me that no training is provided to lay leaders because of the fact that it’s not the responsibility of the Union due to each church being autonomous, and that the responsibility for providing training to lay leaders belongs to each and every Baptist church on their own. Extraordinary.

The great irony to me is that church denominations who do have a distinct priesthood are the ones who do provide training for lay leaders, especially Catholics and Uniting Church. In other words, denominations with a priesthood, practise the priesthood of believers better than us Baptists who insist (with a straight face) that we don’t have a priesthood and that we are natural home of the notion of the priesthood of all believers.

History Repeats Itself – Priests By Another Name

In the Early Church there was no notion of Christian leaders as priests. Uche & Voss (Uche & Voss 2016, 14) hold that when we look at the New Testament, we discover that no ordained Christian leader is specifically called “priest”. This term is reserved for Christ and for all of God’s people. During the first two centuries of the post-apostolic church, priestly language and imagery were similarly applied in this restricted manner. 

Fast forward to the Reformation and we see a radical transition the priesthood: “instead of a priest behind an altar the striking new image provided by the Reformation was that of a preacher behind a pulpit with a Bible in hand, proclaiming the Word of God. This shift in understanding the church and ministry could not have been more shocking in the context in which it arose. All notions of priestly sacrifice in the sacrament were rejected. The idea of the religious professional as being closer to God was repudiated. The attitude that the Bible couldn’t be shared with the laity was abandoned. Preaching replaced the sacraments at the centre of Christian worship.” (Messer 1989, 38)

However, was this new class of anti-priest simply priests by another name?

Despite this seeming transition from a church polity where a priest or mediator would perform liturgy on behalf of the laity, that transition may be regarded as having only resulted in a different kind of priestly representation, especially in the Baptist context in Australia. It may be that whilst Baptists believe that every believer is a priest, concurrently that may effectively recognise a priesthood separate from the laity by way of a professional clergy class.

This is played out in church services in Baptist churches every weekend. To this day Baptist worship is largely devoid of liturgy and the sermon occupies the centrepiece of Sunday worship both in focus and in terms of the length of time that preaching occupies in worship services in a typical Baptist church.  The primary focus of the typical Baptist church service is on the sermon, at least in terms of how much time is reserved for this function in a typical service, and the sermon is usually the preserve of the pastor.

Whilst Baptists don’t believe at a theological level that their pastors have a priestly function, the status and focus on the pastor as the oracle of God (through preaching) is unrivalled. It is in essence the same as not just believing in a distinct priesthood but actively prioritising them in terms of access to training and resources.

Baptist founding father Thomas Smyth believed that pastors, teachers, and elders were indistinguishable and that every congregation should have plurality of these offices (Chute, Finn & Haykin 2015, 17).  The Baptist polity of congregationalism stemmed from the belief in the principle that every member was a minister. Chute, Finn, Haykin note that congregationalism is “a corporate expression of the Reformation principle of the priesthood of all believers” and that living this out results in congregational polity (Chute, Finn & Haykin 2015, 337).

They note that congregational polity stemming from the belief in the priesthood of all believers is “a hallmark of the wider free church tradition and has been championed by Baptists since the inception of their movement.” (Chute, Finn & Haykin 2015, 339)

The one key element of Sunday worship that is made available for people to engage with after the fact is sermons, by way of podcasts. Few other aspects of a weekly service are recorded and made available for viewing after the fact.

The elevation of the sermon to such lofty heights perhaps renders the change a zero-sum gain, in that the abandonment of sacraments was supposed to be in order for the laity to have franchise. The central importance of the sermon in Baptist contexts limits ministry in a church setting to limited individuals.

This may run counter to the dictum often heard in Baptist church of “every member a minister”. In typical Baptist church services ‘members’ or the ‘laos’ sit passively, often shrouded in darkness, listening to the preacher, often elevated on a stage, for the majority of the duration of the service.

Missing Legacies

The advantage for organizations and churches that develop systems for training and resourcing, is the benefit that comes from the development and gradual improvement and evolution of training. A body of work is continually refined and improved and each new generation of student benefits from this ongoing legacy and themselves contribute towards the body of knowledge and practise. As Baptists we simply don’t even have the opening stanza, let alone a body of work to add to or improve in the field of lay leader training.

In the army every event is followed by an AAR (after action review). That leads into a process called Lessons Learned, where the learning points are documented, and hopefully fed into the system so that successes and failures are understood and systems improved to eliminate weaknesses and further improve strengths.

The Baptist hierarchy in every State has known for generations everything they need to about the Groundhog Day problems that beset our churches, but have never sought to address these issues other than by having staff positions that are like ecclesiastical paramedics, arriving at the scene of the accident, always too late to prevent it.

Miroslav Volf holds that “at the heart of every good theology lies not simply a plausible intellectual vision but more importantly a compelling account of a way of life, and that theology is therefore best done from within the pursuit of this way of life. Understanding ourselves as members of Christ’s royal priesthood leads us to particular practises, into a particular way of life. Those practises then shape the way we spend our time and how we view ourselves, the church and the world.”*

It is surely the responsibility of the leaders of our respective State denominations and their key staff to at least be a catalyst for imagining how we can be healthier and more effective as churches. Without training we cannot improve.

“How is ethical character and leadership to be formed in them? The vast majority of them will not have attended a seminary where they could have gained, inter alia, a grounding in theology,; completed studies in ethical decision making and moral formation; learned how to work with many kinds of people; developed the skills of communication, finance, leadership and administration; been helped to attend to their spiritual growth; and nurtured ways of integrating faith and life.”

Kretzschmar (Eron 2015, 129)

In Part 2 we’ll look at a case study and explore how churches can put together their own training for lay leaders.

Uche, Anizor, and Voss, Hank. Representing Christ. Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press. 2016, pg 13, 14.

Messer, Donald E. Contemporary Images of Christian Ministry. Nashville: Abingdon Press. 1989.

Chute, Anthony L, Nathan A Finn, and Michael A. G Haykin. 2015. The Baptist Story. Nashville: B&H Academic.