When thinking about ministry, I wonder if it is not more useful to think of it terms of an extension of the expected Christian life. By expected, I do not mean to use categories of normal and supra-normal, but only to speak of a “normative” ideal of the Christian life. Before continuing, let me define what it is I think the Christian life to be. The Christian life to me is (1) performative and (2) in Christ. I’ll briefly explain what I mean by these two characteristics.

The Christian life is performative in that every identity is performative. There are no concretized identities, and no identities that are solely the results of innate tendencies. We, as humans, are moved toward and away from certain identifications by the discourses in which we live and by the forces/powers under which we are in subjection. For the Christian, this life is not only rooted in Christ, but is, in my view, actually found in Christ and nowhere else. It is ontologically Christo-derivative. It appears more or less that way depending on the freedom we find in slavery to Christ[1] through the work of the Holy Spirit. So then, for me the “normative” Christian life is that life which continues to be formed/performed in the life of Christ (and I would extend this life to the life of the Trinity).[2]

Now, back to ministry. What if we were to think of ministry, of the ordained office, only as an extension of the Christian life? What would such a ministry look like? What would its primary characteristics be? What would its responsibilities be? I wish to briefly argue in the following pages that all of these answers will be found in digging deep into the two characteristics of the “normative” Christian life as described above.

First, ministry is performative. What do I mean by this? The act of ministry is a performance just like the Christian life (and all other lives) is a performance. Performativity should not be understood as play-acting, as something that is fake or less than real. All I mean by “performativity” is what Judith Butler means by it when she writes, “…performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.”[3]

Here we see that the performed identity is an assumed identity and an identity that can be solidified, but one which is not naturally the case. The performance of the Christian life is a performance of ritual, or repeating over and over again those actions that Christ works through us.[4] Similarly, the performance of ministry is at once an extension of this performance, and the solidification of a performance of a different, yet similar, identity. One of the more difficult things for feminist or queer theologians to accept is that there does seem to be a hierarchy within Trinitarian relations and, therefore, within certain Church relations (not to speak of personal, romantic relations). It is possible that queer theory at least helps us recognize the givenness of such hierarchy in relationships.

Let me explicate this hierarchical reality further. The aspect of subjection that is part of the Christian life is a subjection to God. Scripture is replete with imagery of God’s followers as God’s servants/slaves. This is not, of course, the only imagery because we, as Christians, are not participating in the usual kind of slavery. We are subjecting ourselves in love, and are gaining immense pleasure and joy from this self-subjection. I have highlighted the masochistic character of this subjection elsewhere. Suffice it to say, from my point of view, it is a freeing, loving masochism by which we are brought into the knowledge that we are with Christ in the “bosom of the Father.” If the subjection is located in Christ, it is also a subjection that leads to exaltation and glorification.

If this is an appropriate picture of life in Christ, then it is in my opinion also an appropriate picture of life in ministry. The only differences are in degree and responsibility. The minister, as visionary and congregational leader, must, if anything, be more subjected. There is a reversal of power that occurs in the Christian life and ministry. We read of Jesus Christ taking on the form of a slave in Philippians 2 – this is what I mean for the minister to become more subjected. If Christ, as head of the church, becomes a slave, then ministers, as representatives and leaders of a congregation should become slaves to the congregation and the larger Church. This is probably not a popular view, but one I think is rooted in scripture and the example of Christ. If the congregation also understands life in Christ as a life of performed loving subjection, one to another and to the minister, this mutual subjection will allow for a ministry of continuous witness to the power of the love of Christ. It will be a witness primarily because the strangeness of such an upside-down way of thinking actually working acts like a magnet. It is its strangeness – its abnormality – which is its greatest witness.

Butler also writes, “…my theory sometimes waffles between understanding performativity as linguistic and casting it as theatrical. I have come to think that the two are invariably related, chiasmically so, and that a reconsideration of the speech act as an instance of power invariably draws attention to both its theatrical and linguistic dimensions.”[5] Our performances as Christians and ministers are not only in what we say, but in how we act. In effect, our speech is action, and how we act speaks to who we claim to be. Of course, it is not as neat and tidy as this. There is not a one-to-one balance connecting how we speak to how we perform and vice versa. What I think Butler is trying to say here is that our discourse, the discourse in which we locate ourselves, “speak” us into being, and we attempt to perform according to that discourse (or those discourses). This is precisely why the Christian life and ministry are not so neat and tidy. There is no clear, ideal path to the Christian life or Christian ministry. It is new and surprising for every person entering into it, and the work of the Holy Spirit is a work of contextual creativity. There are, however, markers that can be discerned in the performances of those calling themselves Christian because their identity is located in the ontologically Real Christ.

The Christian lay person and the Christian minister are actors on a stage, operating under a particular discourse, and there is a power being exerted on them from the outside. I do not wish to go so far as to say that a grand Puppeteer is orchestrating the lives of Christians. It is a power than influences, for sure, and one which forms us if we freely choose to submit to it. But we are in interaction with it, and it defines us only in our relationship to it: in degrees of acquiescence or struggle. Many times, the way this Power acts on us is in our own expectation of how it acts or will act. As Butler writes,

I originally took my clue on how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law.’ There, the one who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits. The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object.[6]

It is easy to find examples of this anticipation in scripture, particularly in the book of Job, the Psalms and the prophets, and it is typically found in the asking of questions. Even Jesus on the cross exhibits his own anticipation of what should or should not be according to “the Law” when he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Is forsaking something God does not do? Apparently not according to this passage, so the object (here, Jesus) is formed as an identified subject in expectation of the authoritative discourse.

Those in ministry certainly have expectations placed on them, and for the purposes of this paper, it is not important what those expectations are. It is only important to recognize that these expectations, these “pronouncements of authority” – whether denominational, congregational or even personally subconscious – shape the minister in their performativity and identity. My own personal hope is that these authoritative expectations are rooted in the grace of God and in the identity of Christ, but all too often they are not.

There is judgment to be found in scripture against authoritative discourses that are not rooted in God’s grace. Let’s take Acts 11:5-10 and Amos 5:21-24 as brief examples.

⁵ “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came down to where I was. ⁶ I looked into it and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles and birds. ⁷ Then I heard a voice telling me, ‘Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.’ ⁸ “I replied, ‘Surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ ⁹ “The voice spoke from heaven a second time, ‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.’ ¹⁰ This happened three times, and then it was all pulled up to heaven again.

and

²¹ “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me.
²² Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them.
²³ Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.
²⁴ But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream![7]

The context of the Acts passage is an argument that Peter is making for the inclusion of the Gentiles into the early Church. One faction was convinced that circumcision was necessary for such inclusion, but Peter (though sometimes wavering in his conviction) was sure he had received an authoritative vision from the Lord, a new word, which would change the entire discourse, and therefore the expectations, of the new Church. So the new Law, that which would become formative in the early increasingly Gentile Christian Church, was one of inclusion. This new discourse formed objects of inclusivity. Such discourses are typically overcome by the old power structures, the old discourses, sooner or later, and that very thing happened to the 1^st century Church.

In Amos, we read “an authoritative disclosure” from the Lord which prompts an expectation of justice as a central theme of the God-filled life. In fact, the performances of worshipers are said to be distasteful to the Lord as they are. They are performances acted outside the authority of the Lord. They are not submissive to the Lord’s expectation of justice. Here, it is evident that performance is a central aspect of worship, and some performances are acceptable while others are detestable. The identity of the object is formed in expectation of an authoritative discourse or authoritative discourses. Butler continues,

…acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.”[8]

It is important to take a moment to defend the notion of performativity as it relates to Christian living and/or Christian ministry. To perform actions that then lead to self-identification as one thing or another is not a bad thing. The common judgment of “you’re just acting like that” is, in my opinion, a judgment we are all “guilty” of. We are all just acting one way or another because life itself is a series of actions taking place in the context of a series of discourses. I think Butler is defending the notion that it is precisely our acts, gestures and desires that produce our identities. There is no reason to think this is less true in the living of Christian life and work of ministry than in any other area of life. There is no underlying identity in the human realm that produces Christian acts, but rather the other way around: Christian acts (and the performance of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer) produce a formed identity. If anything, the identity of the One who influences us as Christians – Jesus Christ – is the Discourse itself which shapes us.[9]

On the notion of Christian “identity,” I begin to disagree from a Barthian standpoint with Butler’s understanding that there is no “being” behind doing, though I would agree with her that there is no inherent human being behind the doing of Christianity. She writes,

The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming: the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.’[10] In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.”[11]

My disagreement with her (or perhaps more correctly with Nietzsche) is that there is, in fact, a Being (I would be more comfortable with the term Reality) behind the doing of Christian performance, only that this Being is supra-human. In my estimation, as humans we are completely the sum total of our deeds, but for some of us, our deeds include submission to the divine discourse that is the working of the Holy Spirit. In this performance of submission, a separate Reality becomes us, living in and through us, acting out that Reality in our lives. Our old lives become the fiction – they are dead, according the traditional baptismal formulas. Our new lives in Christ are lives defined and identified by the performance of submission to the influence (discourse) of the Spirit.[12] We have become dead to our sins and are raised in new life. We were once slaves to sin, but have become slaves of Christ.

In conclusion, there is a radically different way of contemplating the categories of Christian identity and Christian ministry. If we accept Butler’s assessment that performativity within discourse(s) is a fundamental way of understanding identity creation, it may make sense to extend this understanding from gender to Christianity and ministry. Perhaps we are all actors on the Christian stage, and while hoping to steer clear of a Puppeteer picture of God’s actions on us, such a view may not be too far off the mark as long as the crucial safeguard of creaturely submission is added. Christian identity and ministry are, like all other areas of life, performed. Identities may become more solidified over time and repeated actions, but they are only ever concretized in the Person who was true human and true God – Jesus Christ. In our own temporal existences, concretization never fully occurs.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Bridges, Jerry. The Gospel for Real Life: Turn to the Liberating Power of the Cross Every Day. NavPress, 2003.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2007.

New International Version of the Holy Bible. 2011.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage, 1969.

Schillebeeckx, Edward. Church With a Human Face: a New and Expanded Theology of Ministry. Crossroad Publishing Company, 1987.

Stone, Dan. The Rest of the Gospel: When the Partial Gospel Has Worn You Out. One Press, 2000.

“Transformative Liturgy.” National Liturgical Conference. Oxford, 2005.