Leadership, authority, and power

Marlin Miller, first president of unified Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) Elkhart, Indiana, died suddenly on November 3, 1994 at a relatively young age. Not only AMBS but entire Mennonite church lost a key leader, a person of considerable authority who exercised power for benefit of community of faith he loved. His administrative assignment had been difficult and personally demanding, yet few heard him complain. He carried burden of presidential leadership with heart of a true servant leader. Marlin not only exercised high quality leadership, authority and power, but he also addressed problem of leadership and authority Mennonite pastorate. Early on, he recognized that Mennonite churches were expecting AMBS to train professional pastors their congregations desired and required. That task may seem obvious, but it was not necessarily obvious at AMBS, for professional leadership faced an implicit anti-leadership, anti-authority, anti-power mythology shaped 1960s. Such opposition had found a systematic voice an AMBS publication People of God (1971). book outlined a theology of ministry which premised mission and curriculum of seminary for decades. (1) Central to anti-leadership mythology was idea of the priesthood of all what was purported to be its radical version. Marlin recalled that when he was a student at seminary several faculty members criticized pastoral ministry' and pastoral office' on such grounds. (2) As president first of Goshen Biblical Seminary and then of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, he was forced to contend with this myth if seminary was to meet expectations of its supporting constituency. As a good scholar, Marlin went to sources. What had Anabaptists really said to support myth? answer he found: virtually nothing! In his words, Anabaptist writers 16th c. [century] rarely refer[red] to priesthood of all believers.... And apparently neither Menno nor other Anabaptists and Mennonites of that time related question of Christian ministry or appointment and ordination of ministers church to priesthood of all believers. (3) Indeed even John Howard Yoder, one of primary formulators of this purportedly mythology, acknowledged that his position was not actually found sixteenth-century Anabaptism. reformers, Yoder declared, should not be looked to for special guidance or illumination on matters of how to renew ministerial patterns.... Yoder argued that objections to professional pastor pattern was part of reformation: The universalism of ministry is radical reformation that is still waiting to happen. (4) On what basis did Yoder argue that his vision of priesthood of all believers is unfinished business of radical reformation? Why did he and others so-called Concern movements develop this view? And how did it gain such wide currency that a landmark 1972 sociological survey by J. Howard Kauffman and Leland Harder, reported their Anabaptists Four Centuries Later, used it as norm to test modern-day Mennonites for their faithfulness? (6) answer is too complex to be explored here. Suffice it to say that myth indicts not only ministry but leadership of all church-related institutions. Indeed it questions very formation of church-related institutions. John Howard Yoder has contended that models or forms of most Mennonite agencies and institutions were borrowed from churches and denominations surrounding culture, and on that point he is surely right. That original purpose of most of these agencies and institutions was to renew Mennonite church is also quite accurate. But Yoder's thesis that follows these truisms is highly debatable: in second generation, form determines substance. …