Following these appeals, in a connexion which we can trace, the thought passes (ver. 17) to the Christian Ministry. "Outside the gate" of the old order, the disciple finds himself at once not an isolated unit but included in _a new order_. He is one of a spiritual community, which has of course its system, for it has to cohere and to operate. It has amidst it its "leaders," its [Greek: hegoumenoi], its pastoral guides and watchmen, a recognized institution, which always as such (though always the more as it is more true to its ideal) claims the obedience, the loyalty, the subordination, of the multitude who are not "leaders." These "leaders" are set before us as bearing a Divine commission, for we read that they "must _give account_." So qualified, not as assertors of themselves but as servants and agents of God, they watch for souls, with a vigilance loving and tender, asking for response.
Such an ideal of the Christian Ministry is as remote as possible from that of a sacerdotal caste, or indeed of anything that has to do with a harsh and perfunctory officialism. Its position is totally different from that of an agency of mediation between man and God, between the Church and her Lord. We have one passing note of this in the fact, present in other Epistles as in this, that the Ministry is addressed and greeted through the Church rather than the Church through the Ministry. See below, ver. 24: "Salute your leaders." If we may put it so, the Christian clergy are so far from being the sole deliverers of the apostolic writings to the people that the people rather have to deliver such messages to the clergy.
Yet on the other hand this passage is one of the many which set the Christian Ministry before us as a vital factor in the life of the Church, an institution which has its life from above, not from the will of the community but from the gift of God. In their anxiety to avoid distortions and exaggerations of the ministerial idea many Christians have failed to give adequate place in thought to its essentially Divine origin and commission. A passage like this should correct such a reaction. There is in the Church, by the will of God, a "leadership," recognizable, authentic, not arbitrary yet authoritative, not mediatorial yet pastoral. It is never designed indeed to come really between the believing soul and the ever-present Lord. Yet it is appointed as the norm a human agency by which He works for the soul, not only in the solemn ministration of His great ordinances of blessing but in spiritual assistance and guidance as well. It will be the pastor's folly if he so insists upon the imagery of shepherding as to forget for one moment that the "sheep" are also, and in a larger aspect, his equal brethren and sisters, "the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty." It will be his folly, and the ruin of his true authority, if he forgets in any part of his service that he is not the master but the servant of the Church. If in his "guidance" he dares to domineer, and if in his teaching he takes the tone of one who can _dictate_ any point of faith or duty, on his own authority, apart from the Word of God, he is fatally mistaking his whole function. Nevertheless he is called to be a "leader," with the responsibilities and duties of a leader. This thought is to keep him always humble, and always intently on the watch over his own life. But it is to be present also to the members of the Church, to remind them always to _tend towards_ that generous "obedience" with which Christian freedom safeguards Christian order. The Church is never to forget the responsibility of the Ministry; it is to assist the Ministry in its true discharge. For in this also "we are members one of another."