This past Sunday, I was ordained to the Christian ministry. Officially, I’m a Teaching Elder (being called an “elder” has a way of making 30 feel younger than it has since my birthday) commissioned as an evangelistic missionary to Berlin. It’s a strange feeling, a lot like being newly married – hard to process, different and yet not different, at once the culmination of a long, hard-fought, seemingly impossible process and only the beginning of something I feel I can’t possibly be really prepared for.

The ordination took place in the morning worship service at our sending church, and I’m glad for that – a few people remarked that it was the first time they’d seen an ordination take place. There’s a high point to the whole service: once I’d taken my vows, and before I was given a charge, I knelt and was surrounded by the commission of elders appointed to carry out the ordination, who laid hands on me and prayed for me.

That’s the essence of Christian ordination, if we take our cues from the handful of New Testament texts that refer to it (Acts 6:6; 13:2-3; 1 Tim 4:14; 2 Tim 1:6): laying on of hands with prayer. In the Old Testament, it was sacrifices that received laying on of hands (Exod 29:10 and many other places), transferring the guilt of the worshiper to the animal; now, it’s the gift received previously by the elders that is passed on to the ordinand.

In Acts, it’s made clear that this always happens in conjunction with prayer, and that’s the thing that is so good for the congregation to see happening. The founding event in a man’s ministry is an act of prayer, asking God to provide all that’s needed for whatever He asks of the new pastor. Missionaries often make what must seem like an emptily pious habit of asking for prayer in their presentations and meetings. We talk a big game about how much we need individuals and congregations to be in prayer for us, but I imagine most of our hearers are getting squirmy by that point because they know the next thing we’ll ask for is money, the thing we all know missionaries are really after.

That’s part of the process, part of the discomfort of our calling. We do need money, as I’ve detailed recently, and there’s no point pretending we’re not hoping for donors as well as prayer supporters. But ordination happens by prayer, and so does the work of every ordained officer of the church, and so does the mission of God in the world. That becomes a much more pressing reality for us once the money is there and we reach the field; we realize how incompetent and needy we are, and we start to see a correlation between the activity of our prayer teams and the fruit we see. Ask a missionary who has spent time on the field – at least with a healthy team – what he or she misses most about being there, and a likely answer is the experience of intense, regular prayer with others who see praying as foundational to their task.

If an ordination commission has not prayed for an ordinand, they simply have not ordained him. If a church does not pray for its missionaries, it has not sent them. If missionaries are not praying, they are not carrying out the mission; neither are we doing what we were sent to do if we are not asking you to pray for us and telling you how you can intelligently and strategically do so. This is the calling we all share, whether we go or send: to pray for laborers to the harvest.

-Ben