Authority is the right to exercise leadership in a particular group or institution based upon a combination of qualities, characteristics, or expertise that the leader has, or that followers believe their leader has. To exercise authority involves influencing, directing, coordinating, or otherwise guiding the thought and behaviour of people and groups in ways that they consider legitimate.

We may question authority, or we may fear authority for its capacity to become authoritarian and oppressive; but we cannot live together for long in any human community without submitting ourselves to the authority of the community's deepest values and norms, and to the leadership of those charged with their articulation, interpretation, and realization. No community can function without some form of leadership that enables the community to survive and achieve its goals. Authority is not an enemy of a community, as we sometimes suppose.

Rather, its enemies are tyranny, which coerces obedience without legitimacy. There are various forms of authoritarianism which abuse authority and also anarchy, in which each individual is an authority to him or herself.

What is true of human community generally is also true of the church. It is not possible for the church, in its various manifestations, to exist in faithfulness to its calling without the willingness of its members to submit themselves to the authority of its deepest convictions about God, God's purposes for the world, and the church's role in those purposes. But these core beliefs and values, which bind the church together, must be articulated and interpreted in ever-changing circumstances. Conflicts must be managed, boundaries between the church and other communities must be maintained, and directions for the church's life and work must be envisioned. All of this implies leadership, and leadership implies authority.

Within the Christian tradition, clergy have authority through ordination to proclaim the Word of God, to administer the sacraments, to exercise pastoral care and oversight, and to equip the laity for ministry. Denominations use different definitions for ordination and interpret it differently, but these are the charter functions for which most churches grant authority to clergy in their ordination.

In one of his essays, sociologist Max Webber defines that authority may be exercised on traditional grounds, "resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them." Or, it may rest on charismatic grounds, "resting on the devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative pattern or order revealed or ordained by him." Finally, authority may be based on rational-legal grounds, "resting on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority to issue commands." Weber meant these descriptions as ideal types; that is, they were an effort to describe the pure form of each. In real life, we usually find them in some combination, but with one as the dominant type.

To what extent are questions of authority and leadership new? Each generation of the church has confronted its own version of these issues and has had to face challenges and opportunities peculiar to its own time.

At the turn of the millennium many of the difficulties churches and clergy face over authority originate in broad social and cultural changes that have been occurring over many years that have affected the churches and consequently clergy as well. While these complex changes will not be examined in any detail, four factors are of particular importance:
1. The questioning of fundamental assumptions about God.
2. Marginalization of the church itself.
3. Dependence upon voluntarism in the work of the church.
4. Finally, clergy emphasis on shared ministry with laity.

1. The first is the perception of the historicity or relativity of our knowledge and beliefs characteristic of what some call a postmodern age. Our most fundamental assumptions about God and God's purposes for human life are called into question. Both the achievements of the sciences and the pluralism of modern life make it increasingly difficult for us to speak confidently of "timeless truths" or "eternal certainties" that we can express in precise doctrinal formulations or unchanging moral principles. Instead, we speak of our faith in terms of myths, metaphors, and symbols.

Of course, many fundamentalist Christians continue to speak of their faith with great certainty, yet even many conservative Christians find it difficult to avoid the challenges of modernity and attempt to smooth over and modify the content and style of their beliefs to make them more acceptable to contemporary men and women.

As long as we lived in a culture that generally shared the assumptions of a Christian perspective, or at least a Judeo-Christian perspective, we could ignore the challenge of other faiths. Even when there were competing ways of understanding life, we were able to compartmentalize our lives. Communications technology, the ease of travel, residential mobility, and the growth of a highly multi-cultural society make it difficult to take much for granted or to segment our lives so neatly.

One travels to other cultures with different religious traditions and experiences what it is like to be in the minority. Closer to home, one's son or daughter becomes a Moonie or a Hare Krishna. One's next door neighbour is a Muslim or a Buddhist or their best friend is a practicing New Age spiritualist. One is also faced with the incredible complexity of moral issues in business, medicine, international affairs, or one's personal life. And regularly, one is challenged by African-American, feminist, or third-world critiques of one's taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions. Such events and experiences make it extremely difficult to ignore beliefs that are in radical opposition to one's own or to assert with conviction one's belief in absolute, eternal truths and moral principles.

Today believers no longer hold to the faith as if it were a whole cloth that can be accepted in its entirety. Instead, they pick and choose among fragments of the tradition, just as consumers pick and choose among different products. Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibbey puts it more vividly: "The gods of old have been neither abandoned nor replaced. Rather, they have been broken into pieces and offered to religious consumers in piecemeal form."

How are clergy to speak with authority in such an ethos, much less lead? Is it even possible to speak with authority at all?

If the Bible and the church's teachings continue to function as authorities, it is not because we believe they are infallible or have escaped the relativity of historical experience. We accept their legitimacy confessionally, not propositionally. We trust them as reliable interpreters of God's power, as reliable sources of a vision of God's purposes for the world and for human life. We believe that their teachings and precepts point beyond themselves to God and God's purposes, as difficult as these sometimes may be to discern. And this is also true for the authority we grant to clergy and other leaders of the church. We grant them authority to lead, not because they claim infallibility or cloak themselves in an infallible scripture or an infallible church, nor simply because the church has ordained some of them into the clergy office. Lastly, we grant them authority or legitimacy because we have come to trust them as reliable representatives and interpreters of God's power and purposes.

The second factor that contributes to the crisis of authority is primarily institutional or structural in character. It involves a shift in the social location of the church from the center to the periphery.

The church today is marginal in our society and the clergy role is thereby diminished. The perception is based on assumptions about the broad process of secularization whereby the church has moved from being a central institution, with considerable authority to prescribe normative expectations for other social institutions, to a place on the periphery. Most of us no longer view major social institutions as having a religious basis or as expressions of divinely established "orders of creation," as they were in the Middle Ages. Instead, over the years such institutions as political, economic, military, educational, leisure, and, to a lesser degree, familial, have become autonomous, free from the authority of the church.

The church is now one functionally specific organization among several, with no authority (legitimacy) to prescribe or dictate appropriate behaviour in other sectors of society. At best, church leaders can attempt to influence decisions and actions more indirectly by morally persuasive analysis and interpretation.

Clergy are caught in this movement of the church from the center to the margins of society. Although the public still holds clergy in high esteem, as numerous opinion polls show, there is a widespread belief that the clergy's primary role is to help individuals deal with the issues of their private lives.

A third factor contributing to the clergy's uncertainty about their authority is the voluntary character of religious life. Churches are voluntary associations of persons, typically like-minded, who freely choose to come together to give expression to their religious convictions and work for common purposes. As voluntary associations, they depend on the voluntary participation and support of their members.

The principle of voluntary association makes it highly improbable that clergy can enforce compliance with their teachings. At one time, clergy had the power of excommunication, and congregations had the power of expulsion as means of enforcing compliance. While these means still exist in principle, they are rarely used, and it is doubtful that they carry the same weight that they did before this postmodern age.

Individualistic and voluntaristic values in North American religion and the broader culture have gone hand in hand with an egalitarian emphasis are a fourth factor that affect our understanding of clergy authority and its exercise. Hierarchies of any kind have been profoundly suspect. With each individual responsible for his or her own salvation (now more likely to be defined as self-realization), no one has any special "pipeline" to God's grace-not priests, or preachers, or clergy organized into professional associations.

The understanding is that ministry belongs to the whole people of God. This means the church's ministry is the calling of all Christians and not the exclusive preserve of clergy. During the church's long history, there have been pendulum swings between an emphasis on the ministry of all Christians and one where ministry is identified with the clergy role. North American religious life has leaned in the former direction. At its best, shared ministry has meant a functional differentiation of clergy and lay roles, each with complementary tasks and with various ways of maintaining some balance of power.

For Christians, authority (legitimate power) in the church, including clergy authority, has typically been grounded in the church's convictions about God as we know God in various historical experiences, and especially as in the history of Jesus Christ. These convictions, and the experiences on which they rest, are the ultimate source and defining character of the power that leaders exercise legitimately in the church. They are also the ultimate source of the legitimacy of other authorities such as scripture and tradition. The authority which resides in sacred texts of the Bible, are recognized as standards of reference as such as dictionaries or encyclopedias, or a foundational document such as the Constitution of any country. These are authorities that we consult in our efforts to interpret reality or to resolve ambiguities or conflicts. This is clearly of importance for understanding clergy authority as clergy draw on the Bible as a resource in exercising leadership.

People grant authority to scripture and the church's tradition(s), and to those who interpret them because they believe, in last analysis, that these authorities are grounded in God and God's purposes for the world. This implies, of course, that there are shared convictions and experiences of the sacred as the ultimate basis of authority.

There is little likelihood that any of us will recover the authoritative status that church and clergy held even a century ago, nor would most of us want to do so. Nevertheless, the hope here is, that clergy who face issues that cause them to question their authority will find new bases for claiming their authority and for exercising it as reflective leaders.