Today I finished the third version of my ordination paper and it is ready for submission to the State Committee on Ordination. Here it is, in full. The requirements for this paper required it to be 8 – 12 pages, double-spaced, with internal parenthetical scriptural references. Moreover, the outline section headings and order are mandated by the requirements.

Feedback welcome.

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Ordination Paper

By
Matthew M. Thomas

Submitted to the State Advisory Committee on Ordination of the American Baptist Churches of Ohio
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Ordination
On
1 December 2005

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Part I: Personal

1. Christian Experience
I grew up in a Christian home and attended an evangelical American Baptist Church from the time I was 6 months old. I professed faith in Jesus Christ at age 4 and was baptized. I continued to grow as a follower of Jesus Christ throughout my childhood. When I got to high school, I began to differentiate my faith from that of my parents. This differentiation allowed me to say that my faith was something that, while nurtured by my family, was my own and I was intentionally trying to follow Jesus Christ.

2. Call to Ministry / Vocation
While all followers of Jesus Christ have a call to full-time ministry, (see III.1 below), I received a call to a particular kind of church leadership in part in high school, later in college, and still later throughout seminary. This call came both with specific experiences (in 1994, in high school; in 1998, in college) and as a developmental process where I realized that God was calling me to lead his people so that we all can live out God’s mission in the world, drawing all people to Christ.

3. Academic and/or Field Preparation
My field preparation began in high school when I began leading Bible studies and other gatherings of Christians in my high school and in my church. This field preparation continued throughout college and seminary, as noted below.

I studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (www.uiuc.edu) from 1997 – 2001, double-majoring in Ancient History and Classics, receiving my B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences in May 2001. This curriculum, while conducted at a state school, provided me with the opportunity to focus on the church in history and develop fluency in Greek and Latin for use in studying the socio-historical context of the first Christians and the development of the scriptures. During that time, I led various aspects of ministry at the Baptist Student Foundation at the University of Illinois, the American Baptist Mission to the University of Illinois community.

I attended Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, IL (www.seminary.edu) from 2001 – 2004, receiving my M. Div. in June 2004. My studies focused on how to develop disciples of Jesus Christ in our rapidly-changing culture in North America. During that time, I worked with St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL as a seminarian youth director, and with the Baptist Student Foundation as the Service Ministries Coordinator (i.e., developing mission projects for students).

Part II: Major Theological Concepts

1. The Nature of God
God first revealed himself to the people of Israel as the one and only true God. (Deut. 6:3, etc.) He is, therefore, unique among beings: he alone exists uncreated.

God is Father – he is the originator and initiator of all that is. He is the originator, initiator and source of salvation and of life. He is the Father of the Son. (Jn. 10:35, etc.) His “Fatherliness� acknowledges God’s fully personal nature. God is not some “force� or “power,� but a fully personal being. This means that God is relational.

God is the Almighty (Is. 6:3) – he has the power to do whatever he wills to do whenever he wills to do it. All power devolves from him and it is his prerogative to grant it, to permit it or to remove it. The love of God is dependent upon God’s almighty nature to defend us and protect us and to bring justice to the entire created order. We find God the Father, the Almighty, to be mysterious, because we do not understand his power – it is completely beyond us. (Job 42:3) Many times, God’s actions do not make sense to us. At the end of our search for knowledge of God, we discover that we know very little.

God created and established the universe and all that is in it as our structure for existence, both the things seen and those unseen (that is, the spiritual aspect). (Gen. 1 – 2) We cannot perceive these spiritual forces except through metaphor (see Ezek., Dan. and Rev. and most descriptions of angels) – the angels, demons and the “Heavenly Host.�

2. The Nature of Humanity [Anthropology]
God created humans in his image (Gen. 1:26 – 27) intending them to reflect his glory and his likeness – being the icon, so to speak, of God himself. (II Cor. 3:18) Thus, human beings are God’s “crowning achievement.� As such, Adam was such a representative of the creation that he stands as sign and symbol of the entire creation itself. (Rom. 5:12 – 21) Humanity was created with a spiritual aspect – one that interacts with the spiritual part of creation. Adam was created in uninterrupted communion with God. (See, by counterexample, Gen. 3.) He was created mortal, but his life was sustained by God’s spiritual food as he lived within the center of God’s abundance in the Garden. Adam was to rule the creation as God’s representative, helping it to develop and thrive according to God’s design. (Gen. 1:26 – 30, 2:15)

God created humanity with the ability to obey and love him completely. This meant that humanity also had the ability to disobey God and turn away from loving him. Thus, when afforded the choice by the cunning of the Serpent, Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying the command of God, the result of which was a new set of circumstances collectively known as The Fall.

In The Fall, evil was introduced into the sphere of human existence and the creation became corrupted. (Rom. 8:20 – 21) Moreover, sin entered into the structures of the world’s existence and corrupted it fully. (Rom. 5:12 – 14) The Fall caused separations between men and women, between humanity and itself, between humans and God, between humanity and the creation, and between humanity and the source of life. Thus, the world that once accommodated the life of human beings without any difficulty became maligned to us – causing untold amounts of suffering. (See Gen. 3:14 – 19) Most of all, human death entered the world. (Rom. 5:12)

Losing the direct connection with God that allowed us to live forever, we became bound to our mortality and the power of death (Heb. 2:15); through the power of death we became bound to the power of sin and of evil. (Rom. 6:15 – 23) With no way for us to save ourselves, God had to initiate a way of salvation to destroy this power and to bring us back to him. Beginning with the call of Abram, we see God working out his salvific purposes through a unique relationship with a particular people: the people of Israel.

Establishing a covenant with Israel, God brought them into the abundance of the Land promised to Abraham, giving them the Law to provide them with a way to be his people and live as a society in a way that would cultivate the abundance he provided for them. (Deut. 28) Nevertheless, like every other structure in the creation, the law became co-opted by the power of sin so that it could not do the good that God intended for it to do: the Law was powerless to renew us so that its requirements could be met in us. (Rom. 8:1 – 4) Therefore, throughout God’s relationship with Israel, he promised to send them an ultimate deliverer (See Ac. 7) – whom we recognize is Jesus Christ.

3. Soteriology
Jesus Christ came into this fallen creation as the Second Adam to undo the sin of the First Adam by living a life fully obedient to the will of God. (Rom. 5:12 – 21) Jesus came in the likeness of sinful humanity so as to destroy sin in humanity so that the law’s justice might be carried out in us. (Rom. 8:3 – 4) He came to restore and reconcile all of the separations caused by The Fall. (Eph. 2:14 – 18) Moreover, he came to bring us into a relationship with God beyond what Adam had before the fall: he came to bring us his eternal kind of life so that we could truly be like him and live in his presence forever. (See I Cor. 15) Whereas Adam, though sustained by the presence of God, was mortal, in Christ we are able to shed mortality and put on immortality. In the great resurrection, we will remain embodied beings; we will be transformed to abide the uninterrupted communion with God – but now undimmed by mortality of pre-resurrected flesh.

To accomplish this, Jesus Christ truly died a real, historical death. Through his death, he destroyed the power of sin, evil and death in human beings. (Heb. 2:14 – 15) He chose to become subject to sin, evil and death in order that he might destroy them once and for all. He became subject to them when he permitted himself to be crucified, killed and left for dead. He chose to suffer death to destroy the power that death has over all the creation. Without Jesus’ death, there would be no redemption or atonement.

On the Sunday morning after Good Friday (Mk. 16:2), Jesus Christ, fully human (Rom. 8:3) and fully God (Jn. 10:30), rose from the dead by the will of God the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. (Rom. 1:4) In his death he destroyed death; in his resurrection he made the eternal kind of life of new creation available to all who believe. (Gal. 2:19 – 20) The resurrection allowed the restoration of the image and likeness of God to come to us in the power of God’s transformation. Jesus’ body was transformed into a (still fully human) Resurrection Body, the likes of which God promises believers will receive at the Great Resurrection. (See I Cor. 15)

After appearing bodily to his disciples, forty days after Jesus’ resurrection, he ascended into heaven (Ac. 1:3 – 11) to take his seat of power at the right hand of the Father. (Mk. 16:19) He will return from this place (Ac. 1:11) to judge the world, setting all things to right, completing the work of New Creation. (Mt. 25:31 – 46)

By becoming lifelong students of Jesus we are empowered to experience the transformation from corruption to incorruption that God will do in us. Jesus came to bring us a new way of life free from the power and influence of sin, evil and death. (Gal. 1:4) Christ is the fullness of God’s revelation to humans. (Jn. 1:14) He is our means to salvation. He is the life that we live as we are transformed by the power of God. (Gal. 2:19 – 20) He is The Truth, meaning that truth is a person, not an idea or an abstraction. (Jn. 14:6) Therefore, truth does not stand alone. Jesus Christ is the source of all truth on every subject since “through him all things were made.� (Jn. 1:3) Since truth is a person, we can only come to know truth fully through relationship with Jesus Christ. (Jn. 17:3)

4. Christology
Jesus Christ is the only Son of God by nature. (Jn. 1:18) He has the full nature, being and characteristics of his Father. The Son of God is truly God – not created. The church has historically used the term “begotten� (See Jn. 1:14, 18) to distinguish the Son’s status from the creation’s status. He is eternally begotten because he has no beginning. Since God is one, the Son is of the same being with the Father – God is one, by nature. Yet there is a distinction in persons between the Father and the Son. The Son, too, is personal.

At God’s appointed time, the eternal Son of God took flesh from the Virgin Mary (Gal. 4:4) and became the sign and symbol his new creation as the Second Adam, Jesus Christ – just as the First Adam was the sign and symbol of the original creation. As the Incarnate Son, is fully human and fully God. It is impossible to separate these two natures in Christ; it is impossible to confuse them. Neither nature was changed or destroyed or overpowered by the other. They are not divided against each other in any way. Jesus Christ is fully divine so that he can bring about the work of salvation, bringing us the eternal kind of life; he is fully human in order that the power of sin, evil and death may be broken in human flesh.

5. Pneumatology
Inasmuch as the Father and the Son are God, so the Holy Spirit is God. He is the third member of the Trinity. He is fully personal, not merely some force. He is equal in glory and worth to the Son and the Father. Spirit is also our ruler. (Jn. 16:13 – 15) The Spirit gives us life – both “natural� and “spiritual.� When we become believers, God breathes his Spirit into our lives, empowering us to live his eternal kind of life.

This eternal kind of life is the life that God lives: it is his quality of life, his lifestyle, and his length of life – forever. The Spirit empowers us to receive all of these things. All this work of the Spirit is called grace. This grace produces the fruit of the Spirit in us (Gal. 5:22 – 23) – a lifestyle that is godly. Moreover, the Spirit gives us gifts that we may use in our life of ministry. (See I Cor. 12 – 14, Rom. 12, Eph. 4) All the gifts that were available to the Apostles in the first generation of the Church, that are witnessed to in the New Testament, are still a part of the Spirit’s active work in our lives. These gifts are for the edification of the whole body. (Eph. 4:12)

Given that we, have been malformed by sin, the Spirit empowers our transformation into Christlikeness. (See II Cor. 3 – 4) He empowers our daily life to be an experience of God’s transforming power – whether in “spiritual� or “unspiritual� activities. Furthermore, he works within spiritual disciplines to transform our hearts, souls, minds and bodies to more fully and naturally reflect the Son’s glory.

6. Trinity
God exists from eternity as one being in three persons. These three persons are best defined by their relationships to each other: proceeding and begetting. The Father begets the Son; the Spirit proceeds from the Father; the three interact as distinct persons in one being. “Three persons� does not imply three gods; “One God� does not imply a monad with three modes or facets.

7. Eschatology
In Jesus Christ’s resurrection God began the process of the new creation. When Christ returns, this creation will be completed, (Rev. 21:1 – 4) God setting all things right – when Jesus Christ judges all of us for our deeds as our King. (Is. 2:1 – 5)
Christ’s kingdom is eternal. Never again will it be usurped or challenged by evil. (Is. 2:1 – 5) We will all become co-inheritors with Jesus Christ of eternal life (Rom. 8:17), and we will reign with him according to God’s pleasure. (Rev. 20:6)

At the end of this age, we will be raised and given a spiritual body, like Christ’s. We will enter into God’s presence forever. Our bodies will be transformed, and we will carry them into eternity. (I Cor. 15) The life of the world to come is available now through Jesus Christ; nonetheless, it will come into its fullness when Christ brings all things to their fulfillment.

8. The Scriptures
Jesus Christ is the fullness of God’s revelation to us. Yet God has used other means to reveal himself to us. Primarily, God has used the scriptures. The Spirit was at work in the writing and the codifying of the entire Old and New Testaments. The scriptures are the canon, or measuring rod, against which we examine our experience, our reason, and the historical tradition of the church. The scriptures are the final authority for faith and practice. (II Tim. 3:16 – 17) The Spirit is fundamentally involved in the revelation and the transmission of the faith. In the scriptures we can encounter the Spirit of God and expect to find our source reliable. The Scriptures are unique in this role.

9. The Church
The church is made up of those who are called by God to be his people. (I Pet. 2:9 – 10) God offers this call to all who are willing to accept it. (Rom. 3:21 – 26) The church is Christ’s organic body – the hands and feet of Jesus here on earth. (I Cor. 12:27) The church is also Christ’s bride – the beautiful spouse God is preparing for the Son he loves. (Rev. 21:2)

Part III: Concepts of Ministry

1. The Call to Ministry
The call to follow Jesus Christ as his disciple is a call that extends to all Christians and constitutes a call to full-time ministry. (Mt. 4:19) Each person is called by God to live out his or her call to ministry based on their gifts and talents, given by God. (I Cor. 12:4 – 13:13, Eph. 4:7, 11 – 13) Some of these ministries of the disciples are specific ministries of leading bodies of believers as they follow Jesus Christ. These roles are considered those to which people receive a ministerial call in the traditional sense.

2. The Role of the Clergy
The clergy’s role is to equip and empower the people of God for their lives as followers of Christ as they participate in God’s mission in the world. (Eph. 4:11 – 13)

3. The Laity
The role of the laity is to collaborate with God in his mission in the world: loving the lord their God with their whole being and loving their neighbor as themselves through following Jesus Christ and being formed in Christlikeness. (II Cor. 5:16 – 21)

4. Ordination
Ordination is the affirmation of God’s call on a person’s life to a ministry of leadership in the Body of Christ. (Ac. 13:1 – 3) It is furthermore an affirmation of the gifts, talents, skills and abilities that they do, in fact, have the call of God to lead. Furthermore, it is an acknowledgement by the ordinand and the people that the ordinand intends to pursue this call of God faithfully.

Part IV: American Baptist Polity and Practice

1. Baptist Distinctives

- The Scriptures as Canon: (See Part II, Section 8 above.)

- The Priesthood of All Believers: All followers of Jesus Christ are able to relate to God without the requirement of a human mediator, clerical or otherwise. All followers of Jesus Christ are peers. (See Heb. 6:13 – 10:35)

- Congregational Polity: The governance and authority for action in the church comes from the local body of believers, rather than from any hierarchy imposed externally to the local body of believers.

- Associationalism: Congregational Polity notwithstanding, it is essential and appropriate that local bodies of believers develop dynamic peership relationships with other local bodies of believers for the sake of common mission and accountability.

- Religious Liberty: Followers of Jesus Christ have the right to create indigenous expressions of our common faith with varying emphases based on local situations. Each should be able to worship according to one’s conscience, confirmed by the Holy Spirit.

- Regenerate Church Membership: Only those who are intentional follower-disciples of Jesus Christ, who have received the Holy Spirit and experienced “becoming alive to God� may be members of Christ’s Church. For this reason, believers’ baptism is the mode of baptism we adhere to.

2. Understanding of Ordinances as Practiced by Baptists
Baptists understand that there are two ordinances to be practiced by all Christians: baptism and communion. These practices were instituted by Jesus Christ and affirmed by his followers throughout history as being of great importance. They are not means of salvation but they are means of grace wherein we receive from God.
When we are baptized, we are united with Christ in his death and raised with him in his resurrection. In baptism, we formally put off our old way of life and allow God to put the new life of Christ on us. In baptism, we enter into the body of Christ. Baptism is more than a mere symbol: it is an action whereby we demonstrate our discipleship to Christ. The Spirit mysteriously works in us through this act to bring us into Christ’s body and into new life. (Rom. 6:1 – 11)

Communion is the participation of the people of God in the body and blood of Christ. (I Cor. 10:16, 11:23 – 34) It is a time of remembrance and hope – a rehearsal of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and a demonstration of our hope in our own resurrection. Communion is one of the places Jesus Christ sustains his people for their work of ministry in the world.

3. Choice of American Baptist Churches as Context for Ministry
I have been raised in the ABC. It is, in effect, my “family.� Nevertheless, I feel that the Baptists have the closest resonance with my theology, being congregationally-based; acutely interested in discipleship to Jesus Christ as the basis for church membership; mission-oriented, having been formed as a mission society; historically rooted, emerging from the English Separatists and developing through to the present day in one continuous historical experience.

4. Relationship of the Local Church and Pastor to the Denomination
Much of how the Local Church relates to the denomination is covered under what follows with the discussion of the Ecumenical Church. Nevertheless, a couple of additions are appropriate. The denomination is made up of the local congregations gathered together for common mission. As our primary association, the denomination is “first among equals� in the local congregation’s relationships outside of itself.

5. Relationship of the Local Church and Pastor to the Ecumenical Church
Each Baptist congregation is a part of the Ecumenical Church. It affirms the faith of Nicaea along with all other congregations throughout the world and throughout the history of the church. Each congregation is called to collaborate in God’s mission locally with whatever other believers are working in God’s mission locally. Each congregation is called to build local networks between local congregations for the continued proclamation of the good news of the Kingdom in Jesus Christ.