Church and the Laity Among Protestants

Increasing attention is being paid on the fringes of the major Protestant denominations to the role of laymen in the work of the churches. A theology of the laity is in process of development and represents an effort to distinguish between ecclesiastical and secular vocations of the church's ministry. Despite emphasis, however, on the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers there is a subtle clericalism in the denominations which undermines the role of laymen. This points to a major dilemma in contemporary Protestantism. The rapidly developing institutional bureaucracies of denominations and of local congregations create needs of their own which must be met before the churches can attend to the goals for which they were originally established. In this situation laymen are almost inevitably utilized as subordinates to ministers in the work of of the institutional church. Seldom is the ministry aware of the developing conception of clergymen as assistants to laymen who are active ministers in the world. On the frontier of Protestant action there are exciting experiments to seek solutions for this dilemma but the work is usually frustrated by a tendency to institutionalize the experiments and by the apathy of the laymen themselves.