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Dr. Oldenburg

HAVEN’T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE?
Learnings from the Licensure System

Mark Oldenburg
ELCA Bishops Academy
January 5, 2004

 I’d like to thank Pastor Almen masterful overview.  My task, as I understand it, is to put a bit of meat on his bones – to give some examples and specifics about the practice of licensing those who were not ordained to preside at Holy Communion.  This investigation relates closely to my doctoral thesis, The Evolution of the Ordination Ritual in East Coast Lutheranism, 1703-1918. 

From that work, before I get into my work proper, I do want to lift up one significant finding.  (I need to do that in this venue because the movie based on my dissertation fell through, since Tom Cruise decided on the second day of filming that he couldn’t do justice to the role of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg.)  That finding, which came as something of a surprise to me, is that Lutheran bodies of the Muhlenberg tradition were unanimous and universal in requiring both the examination and approval of the wider church (a synod or ministerium) and the call of a specific congregation for someone to be ordained.  While there were a exceptions – mostly related to missionary ventures, when there was as yet no congregation to issue a call and the synod acted instead – these certainly proved the rule rather than broke it, and when such commissioning bid fair to become normal rather than an exception (when the financial panic of the 1890’s restricted congregational funding so severely that many seminary graduates could not find a congregational call) the practice was simply stopped without much controversy, in order to guard normal practice.  This assumption of dual necessity and a sort of ecclesiastical multiple causation – so deeply entrenched as to be almost unquestionable – made one controversy among the newer Lutheran bodies simply inexplicable to Lutherans of the Muhlenberg tradition.  When the Buffalo Synod declared that ecclesiastical approval was the essential for ordination, to which congregational call was a mere ornament, and the Missouri Synod made exactly the opposite declaration, the General Council and General Synod couldn’t see what the big deal was.  (The same thing seems to have happened with the predestination controversy, but that’s completely beyond the scope of this paper, thank God.)

That understanding – that both ecclesiastical approval and congregational call are essential – lies behind much of the practice of providing or recognizing pastoral ministry in the early years of Lutheranism in the United States.  Two more prolegomena, if I may so try your patience.  First, the assumption of the dual essentials seems itself to spring from two sources.  One is the Ministerium of Pennsylvania’s roots in Halle pietism – this particular branch of pietism combined a sturdy confessional loyalty with an emphasis on conversion experienced within a community, and linked them with a commitment to structure and organization.  For Halle, as their establishment of orphanages, mission societies, school, hospitals, and a pharmaceutical industry shows, there was no war between Spirit and structure.  While establishments might be spiritually dead or worse, their intention and normal function was to serve as essential vessels, supports, and media for the Spirit’s activity.  Thus, within this strain of Lutheranism, fear of either synodical tyranny or congregational chaos was comparatively mild.  The second source of the assumption may well be Muhlenberg’s particular situation.  When the Patriarch arrived in North America, what distinguished him from the itinerant Lutheran preachers and from Count Zinzendorff’s Moravian “interlopers” was the fact that he had a call from the Pennsylvania congregations in hand.  In introducing himself to the congregations he relied not so much on his preparation in Germany and his approval (and ordination) by those authorities, as on those very congregations had given the court preacher in London the authority to issue a call on their behalf.  Thus, he was not putting himself forward, but simply responding to their vocation.  This experience seems to have been formative for the Ministerium of Pennsylvania and all the synods which grew from it.

A second prolegomena is a defense of bothering with this paper at all.  I will be dealing mostly with the experience of east coast Lutherans, and mostly in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries.  In this case at least, that is a useful investigation, I hope, not because precedents are in themselves important, but because and insofar as their situation is closely connected to ours.  They were faced with mission opportunities at an inconvenient distance from where the limited supply of pastors wanted to be, with cultural conditions significantly different from those for which pastors had been prepared, with indigenous leaders raised up by and in congregations, and suited for those local conditions, and with a general felt need for more pastoral leadership and ministry than the church could easily supply.  The system of licensing was one response to these conditions, and, with imaginative translation, might provide some useful sparks to responses in our own.

The Ministerium of Pennsylvania pastors carried with them the practices of theological education with which they were familiar.  This practice included three steps in pastoral preparation:

Catechists, who were theological students who had already attended a European university or worked with a single mentor in America.  At the beginning, catechists assisted their supervising pastor (assigned by the Ministerium), but were forbidden by Halle’s instructions to “do the work of the pastor or administer the Sacraments.”[1]  In fact, they were even forbidden to write their own sermons, but rather required to copy out sermons from a Postil, usually related to a catechetical theme.[2]  Catechists often served as school teachers as well as providers of pastoral care, and were allowed to baptize and bury in the absence of the pastor.[3] 

Licentiates, who were given a license to act as a pastor, but only until the next meeting of the Ministerium.  A licentiate could preach, preside at Holy Communion, Baptisms, Confirmations, weddings and funerals, and provide catechetical instruction as well as general pastoral care, but only in the congregations by which he was called and to which he was assigned.[4]  While catechists were under the supervision of a single mentor, licentiates were under the supervision of the ministerium as a whole.[5]  In order to renew their license, or to apply to be ordained, they had to present to the ministerium their journal of ministerial acts and several sample sermons (ideally, they would be examined in person, but since most licentiates served on the frontier, they rarely made the journey to the Ministerium meeting).[6]  Examination of the records of licentiates and voting on their renewal or ordination took up the greater part of the meeting of the Ministerium.  The examiners took their task seriously – more seriously, occasionally than did the examinees.  In 1795, apparently after going through one particularly egregious set of documents, the responsible committee recommended:

1. That in the future [the licentiates] should hand in their outlines, as they were accustomed to preach their sermons before their congregations.
2. That some of them might be admonished to aim more at edification and popularity than at oratorical art, for, if they preach sermons like the outlines presented, their congregations are to be sincerely pitied.
3. That those gentlemen who handed in no outlines, be severely censured.
4. That those [licentiates] who clothe themselves unbecomingly, be earnestly admonished to avoid such offense.[7]

Licentiates were considered members of the ministerium, and allowed to vote on issues other than licensure and ordination.[8]

Pastors were without the restrictions laid down upon licentiates.  It is interesting to note that, in its early years at least, Ministerium of Pennsylvania pastors were generally called by and assigned to specific congregations, but with the understanding that the United Congregations called the entire Ministerium, so that any minister was called not only to his own congregation, but available for service in them all.  Congregations, upon entering the synod, agreed to call only members of the Ministerium, as well as to use the common liturgy.  In return, they were assured an educated, morally exemplary pastor (when they could get one at all) something which was not assured in those congregations who welcomed self-appointed itinerant pastors.  The Ministerium of Pennsylvania saw itself, not as the sole source of pastoral leadership or Gospel ministry, but as a reliable provider of such ministry – it sold itself on quality control.

In use, the Ministerium of Pennsylvania and its daughter synods adapted both of the preparatory grades of ministry to suit and serve their needs in the New World.  The Halle Fathers forbade catechists to preach, but already in 1745 Muhlenberg struggled against this limitation, realizing that parishioners would not come to church to hear postil sermons (they could read them at home), and that congregations would patronize itinerant preachers if the catechists did not preach.  Thus, he did not prevent catechists from extemporaneously adding appropriate examples to the prefab sermons, and simply informed Halle that catechists were preaching “in casu necessitates”[9]

Licensure acquired even more uses.  It became the way candidates for membership in the Ministerium received a sort “test run.”  Candidates from Germany were generally given a license rather than immediately received as pastors.[10]  The Ministerium treated candidates with questionable ordinations similarly.[11]  Most importantly and most interestingly, when congregations on the frontier asked for admission into the synod, they also asked for the person (normally a school teacher or particularly pious member of the congregation) who had already been conducting worship and providing pastoral care in that location to be received into the ministerium.  If these candidates demonstrated some theological preparation, and if the congregations were at all remote, these candidates were licensed to the communities they had already been serving.  That is, while the “normal” practice was for people exploring pastoral vocation to train with an established pastor, then be licensed, the more common practice was for licensure to be used to provide pastoral coverage in inaccessible places and to provide supervised preparation for those who were coming into the Ministerium from the outside.

It might be useful (and I hope will be interesting) to give the experience of one particular candidate in the early years of the Ministerium, Charles F. Wildbahn.  In 1762, Muhlenberg received a request from the congregation in Woodstock, VA, asking that “their somewhat educated schoolmaster” be allowed to administer the Sacraments and liturgical acts.  Muhlenberg’s report to Halle indicates his disquiet with the practice, but his realization that the alternatives are worse:

It is exceedingly difficult to say yes or no in such circumstances.  Ordained preachers live far away and are hardly able to visit such remote groups.  The people would like to cling to the religion and practice of their ancestors.  [Vagrant preachers, who might provide sacramental ministry for pay, are morally suspect.]  If these people who live far away have nothing at all, they and their children either relapse into paganism or are dispersed among all kinds of peculiar sects, etc.  This raises the question: what is the best thing to do, or which is the least among many evils.[12]

Wildbahn presented this petition personally, but arrived after the close of the meeting of the Ministerium.  Muhlenberg gathered the members who remained nearby and asked their advice.  It was agreed to accede to Woodstock’s requests (as president of the Ministerium, Muhlenberg was authorized to make such decisions ad interim), and Wildbahn was licensed..[13]

Wildbahn had gone to the frontier of the Shenandoah Valley as a schoolteacher, and began reading sermons on Sundays and baptizing in cases of emergency.  At his application in 1762, he presented high recommendations both from the congregations he had already been serving in this way and from his neighbors.  Sometime later, however, Indians attacked and devastated the settlement in Virginia, and Wildbahn relocated closer to civilization, in south central Pennsylvania.  Since his license, however, was geographically limited, he gave up his status as a licentiate upon moving.  He continued to preach in congregations, however, and those congregations asked that he be licensed.  South central Pennsylvania, however, was not the frontier, and pastoral leadership, while inconvenient to find, was not impossible.  Rather than license him, therefore, the Ministerium decided to make him a catechist, allowed to preach catechize and in an emergency baptize, but not to preside at Communion.  He was placed under the supervision of the pastor in York.  Unfortunately, almost immediately thereafter, that pastor’s sordid history in Sweden before his emigration came to light, and he was removed from the Ministerium, leaving Wildbahn without a supervisor and the congregations without near-by pastoral leadership.[14]

For years, two groups from Wildbahn’s congregations in Pennsylvania and Maryland sent competing petitions to the Ministerium, one asking that Wildbahn be licensed, the other asking that he not be.  Finally, the Ministerium decided, rather reluctantly and after some rather unsubtle blackmail from the congregants, to give him a license:

Since the catechist’s congregations had no ordained preacher, connected with the ministerium, nearer than Lancaster; since fetching him from such a distance for Holy Communion entailed considerable trouble, difficulty and expense, both for the minister and for the congregation, especially in view of the fact that he had the catechist administer the cup anyhow; since there were several preachers in that neighborhood … who were not united with the Ministerium and yet administered the sacraments; and since the Swedish-German ordinaries in Yorktown made such a poor impression; it followed quite naturally that the friends of the catechist should be tempted to consider whether it would not be better for them to be by themselves rather than in union with and under the care of the Ministerium … Especially since their catechist led an honorable and sober life and possessed ability to catechize their youth and preach unto edification just as well as, if not better than, many another preacher inside or outside United Ministerium …

He was received as a licentiate, ordained after another few years, and became a solid, if not stellar, member of the Ministerium.[15]

While Wildbahn’s experience in losing his license was unusual, his progression from congregationally called catechist through licentiate, to pastor was not.  It was taken by many others.  John Stough, for instance, the patriarch of Lutherans in Ohio, having led congregations informally for six years, was made a catechist under the pastor in Hagerstown for a year before being licensed to serve 10 congregations in a radius of over 300 miles.  He visited each of those ten communities every four weeks for ten years as a licentiate before being ordained in 1804.[16]

Presidency at Communion by the unordained, while much used, remained an unusual, even uncomfortable practice.  In 1815 the North Carolina Synod requested that the Ministerium of Pennsylvania consider the propriety of licensing people to preside without the laying on of hands.  The Mother Synod seemed to agree, and established yet another grade of ministry, into which one was admitted with the laying on of hands, or the giving of the “right hand of fellowship.”  It is perhaps unfortunate that this grade was given the title “deacon,” which until then referred, like “elder,” to a class of lay administrators in a congregation (Muhlenberg, when feeling in a particularly Biblical mood, had referred to a licentiate as a diaconus, always careful to keep that title in Latin, whereas the congregational leaders was spoken of in German or English).  From 1815 on, then, deacons were those who, while not pastors, had been licensed to preside at sacraments for a limited time and place.  While there was a second service for ordination as a pastor, this service was not seen as essential  – there were several examples of new pastors simply being sent their ordination certificates after having been approved in absentia, if they had already received the “manual acts” upon being given a license.[17]

And by this time there were several synodical bodies, not all of whom followed the Mother Synod’s lead in structuring grades of ministry.  Given the mobility of clergy, and the rather uncertain frontiers of synods, it was no surprise that this diversity led to confusion.  What was the status of a Ministerium of Pennsylvania deacon (in the penultimate grade of ministry) who served a congregation closer to the Ohio Synod (which might only have had two grades)?  One of the reasons for the establishment of a General Synod was indeed to bring some order to this diversity of practice, in order to prevent what was called “unpleasant and unfriendly collisions”[18]  

That this effort was mostly, if not entirely, successful, is indicated by the licensure services provided in the General Synod’s liturgical books.  By 1847, there was a single service for the ordination of a licentiate (the term “deacon” seems generally to have fallen out of use again in this context).  However, several parts are printed in brackets, indicating that not all synods agreed on regulations and duties of licentiates, and that the presider must insert or omit passages as appropriate.  The candidate is given the right hand of fellowship (neither in this service nor in the service of ordination of pastors is there the laying on of hands with prayer), and sent “to teach and exhort, to feed and take care of the flock of Christ; and likewise to gather in the scattered sheep.”[19]

And, in fact, the licentiate remained a lively part of the practice of the Muhlenberg tradition Lutherans through the 19^th century.  The General Synod’s service of 1881 is unchanged, except in adding a confession of Scripture of the “Word of God and the only infallible rule of faith and practice,” and subscriptions to the Augsburg Confession and the constitution of the synod.[20]  In Georgia in 1874, three candidates were ordained as pastors – one was received from another denomination, another had studied at home with a pastor, while the third had attended Southern Seminary.  The only thing the three shared was the experience of having been licensed for about three years before ordination. So licensure remained an important and expected part church life and of ministerial preparation – so lively, in fact, that it was not unheard of for candidates to remain licentiates rather than seek ordination. .[21]

Seminaries had become the way of choice, however, of preparing indigenous leaders.  No longer was the licentiate used to recognize de facto providers of pastoral care and to supervise them in becoming recognized pastors. 

Nor did the licentiate spread, generally, among the Lutheran immigrant groups of the mid- and late 19^th century.  In the Joint Synod of Ohio, Matthias Loy, taught that the

Lord requires that ministers be rightly called by the Church, to which He has entrusted the means of grace, but does not command the rite of ordination to make the call valid, and least of all does He make the efficacy of the Word and sacrament dependent upon ecclesiastical rites.[22]

He celebrated the fact that the licentiate fell out of use in Ohio as it developed a settled and increasingly confessional ministry:  “It was a pitiful business, that absurd license system, and it soon died without much controversy as a practice inconsistent with accepted principles.”[23] 

The Augustana Synod provided an “alternate track” to ordination (that is, an alternative to seminary) for older, gifted, and experienced candidates, and made use of authorized lay preachers.  However, in giving the president of the synod or of a conference authority to license lay preachers, the constitution made it clear that such preachers were not to “administer the Sacrament of Baptism [except in emergency], confirm, marry, or distribute the Lord’s Supper.”  Not only were licensed students forbidden to perform ministerial acts, but when deacons of congregations led services in the absence of the pastor, they were to “confine themselves to an informal order of service, conducted from some convenient place outside of the chancel.”

The issue did not seem to be broached by Missouri, Buffalo, Iowa, or among the Danes.

Among Norwegians, of course, the critical issue was lay preaching, rather than lay presidency.  For Hauge and his followers, such preaching was close to a mark of the church – a use of the Spirit’s gifts.  For the Americans who saw themselves as mostly closely connected to the state Church of Norway, it was a violation of Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession.  Gisle Johnson, who trained many teachers for the New World, would have liked to have been more affirming of the practice than he felt confessional subscription would allow him to be, but saw lay preaching as necessary in case of such an emergency as a shortage of pastors.  While his students generally rejected this caveat, it became more acceptable to Norwegian-Americans when voiced by C. F. W. Walther.  And in the long process of union leading through the United Church to the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America, the painful question of lay preaching was resolved generally by affirming it within congregational mission and oversight.[24]

By the turn of the 20^th century, the licentiate had withered away in the Muhlenberg tradition as well.  Globally, it is far from dead.  Licensing lay presiders remains a practice at present not only in Germany, but in mission fields.  The Mekane Jesus Church, for instance, acted in 1976 to prepare “worthy elders” to “administer the Sacraments in the same way that they have been enabled to preach the Word.”[25]  And, of course, “The Use of the Means of Grace” affirmed what had been common practice, allowing bishops to license lay presiders in the ELCA.

Some themes which might arise from our experience with this practice:

-        It is not normal.  Licensing is entered into under unusual circumstances, and even then with some reluctance.

-        It is not simply used as a part of the preparation of pastoral candidates.  It can also be a response to missional needs (especially to remote communities) and to the desire for an indigenous and contextually apt Gospel ministry.

-        It seems to work best when it shares the “bridge” nature of pastoral ministry – that is, when there is significant involvement from both the congregation and the wider church in identifying, calling, and supervising candidates.

-        Especially given any sort of mobility, it can lead to a bewildering and unhelpful diversity of practice, and therefore it would be useful to have churchwide consistency.

The licentiate is not an equivalent to lay presidency – licentiates were expected to become pastors.  However, the practice is close enough to several of the issues at hand – not only synodically authorized worship leaders, but theological education for emerging ministries, and creative possibilities for seminary internships – that it may be useful to see how the church has road-tested this possibility before.