124 - Contemporary Images of Christian Ministry

Contemporary Images of Christian Ministry

By Donald E. Messer

Nashville, Abingdon, 1989. 208 Pp. $12.95.

Donald Messer understands the art of imaging to be the intentional appropriation of various metaphors in order to deepen and enrich our self-understanding of Christian ministry. Using this notion of imaging, Messer reviews at length several such metaphors: wounded healer, servant leader, political mystic, enslaved liberator. Messer's hope in this review is to move our understanding of ministry beyond the confines of Protestant functionalism and Catholic ontologism, to a view of "calling" that is relational and dynamic. His reading is deep and richly anecdotal while his notes provide a fine map by which to traverse the tangled bibliography of Christian ministry. Although the metaphors he presents are not new, Messer offers them in a fresh style that is accessible without being shallow. Just when his presentation veers towards tired liberal nostrums, Messer underscores the dialectic at the heart of each metaphor. This book would be a splendid volume for ministerial groups to study, as a way to reflect upon their own ministry. My only concern is that in the hands of some seminary tyro, it will be misread as yet one more contribution to the muddled notion that besets American seminaries, that ministry is a matter of buying into the right identikit, that ministerial formation and metaphorical imaging are somehow one and the same. This is decidedly not Messer's intent.

David Lewis Stokes, All Saints' Church, Princeton, N.J.