Talk:Lay ecclesial ministry

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Thank you for your contributions to this article. Before changing the article, however, kindly check your sources. Several errors were introduced by later edits that could have been avoided by doing some research first... or at least bring it up to discussion here.Thank you, and God bless! Protoclete (talk) 21:08, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Lay Ministry vs. Lay Ecclesial Ministry

One of those errors was the edit that Lay Ecclesial Ministry (LEM) includes roles like reader or eucharistic minister. This is not the case. These may be lay ministries, but they are not ecclesial ministries. The Church has developed Lay Ecclesial Ministry to refer specifically to "professional" ministers who are not ordained, but nevertheless perform official, ecclesial ministrin the name of the church... a ministry which requires extensive theological, spiritual, human, and pastoral formation.Protoclete (talk) 21:08, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi. Sorry about the error. I am little unsure though about what you mean when you say "the Church developed" the Lay Ecclesial Ministry. Please see my comments below for more detail. The relevant documents all seem to suggest the church didn't develop a new ministry, and that the term is purely descriptive. --Lo2u ^{(T • C)} 00:21, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion! My comment above did mean that the Church (at least the Church here in the US) has developed the term "Lay Ecclesial Ministry" to describe the kind of ministry being done, and the people doing it, which is the topic of this article.Protoclete (talk) 19:49, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

This is a good point, and yet another reason why the page for Lay ministry should not blindly redirect to this page. I have also taken the liberty of decapitalizing the title of the article. I hope this meets with your satisfaction. --Champaign (talk) 08:04, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

agreed - Lay ministry refers to the ministry of the laity, ie, the entire vocaiton/apostolate of the laity. Much broader than lay ecclesial ministry, which refers specifically to theologically trained ministers with ecclesial vocations (working in the Church rather than in a secular career/vocation) Protoclete (talk) 11:42, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Debates about Laity and Ministry

perhaps a discussion of criticism of lay ministry and, in particular, the document " A response to certain questions regarding the collaboration of the non-ordained faithful in the sacred minisitry of the priest", would be appropriate? MattDawg579 (talk) 10:11, 6 December 2007 (UTC)Matthew Gagliardi

Lay is contrary to minister, it is like unmarried wife and unbaptized christian. In any case, there is a Roman document in this link that describes the phenomenon and gives general information relevant to this article. 69.157.230.14 (talk)

Check the sources listed in the article, especially from the USCCB for more up to date information.Protoclete (talk) 21:11, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, I'll have a look through that. I've cleaned it up a bit but it seems to encourage the idea that ecclesial ministry is a tier of the church hierarchy, along with the bishops, priests and deacons. And I think the word "presbyter" was used in place of priest to confuse things further. --Lo2u ^{(T • C)} 16:45, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Presbyter is the official term, and more ancient. Understandably, though, not the most common today, so i clarified its use in the article. I agree that LEM is not another rank in the hierarchy, but it is an ecclesial vocation, not synonomous wiht the lay apostolate.Thanks for your input to the article! Protoclete (talk) 21:48, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

"Priest" is an Anglo Saxon word, ultimately borrowed from the Greek πρεσβυς. It appears in the Canterbury Tales and it's well over a thousand years old. "Presbyter" is more modern. It's a post-reformation transliteration of the adjective form πρεσβυτερος, and it's never been particularly common. I may be wrong, but I didn't know the Catholic Church had an official vocabulary. "Priest" seems to be the word used in the Catechism though. Anyway, "priest" is also the word used everywhere else on Wikipedia so can't we just stick with it?

Sounds fine. I was thinking in terms of the scriptural and early church usage...terms for priest were reserved for Christ, and the presbyteroi were what we eventually called priests. Just a habbit to use the older term, rather than priest, but I'm all for consistency here. Protoclete (talk) 18:56, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

At the moment though, my major concern with this article is that I can't find any evidence about where this term comes from, who uses it, who these people are, what recognition they have etc. Teachers and doctors (for example) have a vocation but is there any evidence that "lay ecclesial ministry" is more than a coining of the USCCB? Because I've never heard it used in the UK and that's what this sentence suggests: "In Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord we identify them in a generic way as lay ecclesial ministers." and later "Lay ecclesial minister is not itself a specific position title [sic]. We do not use the term in order to establish a new rank or order among the laity. Rather, we use the terminology as an adjective to identify a developing and growing reality, to describe it more fully, and to seek a deeper understanding of it under the guidance of the Holy Spirit." The assertion in the first sentence that Vatican II created a new category of minister needs proper sourcing, and I just don't see where that would come from.

I am a little unsure about your concerns... the article specifcially addresses the definition of the term and who defined it, in this case the USCCB. I do not know if a particular individual coined the term and it was later adopted; it has been around at least 15-20 years.The reality of this kind of ministry pre-dates that of course, going back at least to the late 50's, though it really took off after Vatican IIProtoclete (talk) 19:42, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

What the Vatican document referred to above suggests to me is that people may perform ministries and that technically makes them ministers in a sense but the Church discourages the term because they hold no special title and this can create confusion between priests and laity. --Lo2u ^{(T • C)} 23:52, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I read the document the same way, but it is only part of the conversation... and it is not a legislative document. Thankfully, even Pope John Paul II didn't follow the recommendations of this document in reference to non-ordained ministers.I imagine that, in another couple decades, the Holy See will actually address the questions that the USCCB and other conferences are working on now, and we may have a new vocabulary then, but for now, this is it. Has there not been something similar happening in the UK? Do you have these kinds of ministers? Protoclete (talk) 19:42, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Well we certainly have catechists: among other things, they take confirmation classes and I suppose they involve themselves in other areas of church administration. Usually they have full time jobs though and I'm not sure we'd ever call them ministers. The confirmation that this is a USCCB term has certainly cleared up some of my confusion, but I really would like to see some very close sourcing (pages and paragraphs rather than long documents): you define them specifically as "coworkers with the bishop" rather than as simply parish workers or coworkers with the clergy in general. Am I reading that correctly? How has the church differentiated them from the general ministry? What term does the Vatican use?

Secondly, as I understand it a minister is usually one of the following:

1. A priest, a deacon, etc.

2. A member of one of the minor orders. Since Ministeria Quaedam[1] they have been called "ministries". They include the offices of lector and acolyte.

3. The laity: One who performs the munera ("ministries") proper to the laity is in a sense a minister, but only in the sense that he is performing ministries. Members of the laity may be temporarily designated "extraordinary ministers". These include extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, who may distribute Communion when there are insufficient priests.

Lay ecclesial ministers are really ministers in the third sense, aren't they? They don't have any formal title? They're people who perform particular tasks proper to the laity and the USCCB has chosen (correctly) to call them ministers, not because any higher authority in Rome created the term but because it was necessary to call them something. Are they any more "the new category of minister" than extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist?

Well, that's part of the discussion, and strong arguments have been made for all three. When i meet with ecumenical or interfaith colleagues, the evangelicals always call lay ecclesial ministers "Pastor" or "Reverend" because they make no distinction between ordained and unordained clergy. Sort of the "walks like a duck, talks like a duck, just call it a duck" argument (of course, we've opted for "non-duck water fowl"). Same applies for tax purposes in some states... on secular forms a lay ecclesual minister is "clergy". Se argue that minor orders is an appropriate parallel, since they were not ordained, but considered clergy, before Vatican II. Yet others argue that the focus needs to be on the lay apostolate/general lay ministry and not devop any more on lay ecclesial ministyr lest it lead to confusion about who is a priest and who isn't, and that to even consider LEMs as clergy rather than as laity is fundamentally dangerous. Still others argue that the whole clergy-laity distinciton is an unhelpful paradigm, and LEM reaches beyond it.My hope is the article to define the term and explain the phenomon without getting too much into the debates.Thats what this page is for!:-)Protoclete (talk) 16:56, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Finally, could you not find an alternative to "blossomed"? It doesn't really strike me as a very impartial word.--Lo2u ^{(T • C)} 19:54, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not particulalry attached to blossomed, just wanted a word that not only indicated an emergence of such programs, but a dramatic and nearly exponential growth of said programs, which is not a value judgement but a numerical measure. Protoclete (talk) 16:56, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, a church I used to visit in another diocese seems to have a "pastoral assistant"; I wonder if that is the equivalent. I don't think they exist in my current diocese. --Lo2u ^{(T • C)} 00:37, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

That sounds more like it...we have catechists too, but they are volunteers, usually with confirmation and some basic certificaiton classes, but nothing like the graduate theological work required for lay ecclesial ministry (or diaconate, or presbyterate). Protoclete (talk) 16:59, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

The thing is, a lot of the arguments made in this article are your own, or if they're not they're not sourced. Have you read WP:OR? It's really not enough to present good arguments if they're your own arguments. Why do you say LEM is "the new category of minister..."? Presumably you wouldn't call Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist "the new category". If there's no source that says this, it really can't be in the article. Would you consider putting precise references beside the parts that are marked as and maybe rewording any original writing? If you put references inside <ref>...</ref> tags, they will appear as footnotes.--Lo2u ^{(T • C)} 20:05, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Parish life directors

Another unusual title is "parish life director", a function usually reserved for a minister. [2] ADM (talk) 20:24, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

a "parish life director" is one of the offices that may be held by a lay ecclesial minister, and refers to the position described in canon 517.2

Feminization of the Church

Certain ecclesiastical writers have criticized a phenomenon of feminization within Christianity, pointing to the fact that Lay Ecclesial Ministry attracts more women than men. This could perhaps be mentioned in the article, along with appropriate sources of course. [3] [4][5] ADM (talk) 08:08, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Caps

Why is the title of this article capitalized? Woogee (talk) 04:37, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Good point. I am moving this article posthaste to Lay ecclesial ministry. --Champaign (talk) 07:55, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

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