Our Pastoral Charges
Most religious bodies gather people in to a building. Celebrating Life Ministries sends its members out to the people. That single conviction shapes everything about how this ministry is organized, including how we understand a pastoral charge.
The model is not ours. It is much older than us.
Jesus taught in a house at Capernaum (Mark 2:1–12) and from a boat on the lake (Luke 5:1–3). He spoke with a woman at a well in Samaria (John 4:5–30), and with travellers on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35). He was received at a wedding in Cana (John 2:1–11). He stood weeping at the tomb of his friend (John 11:32–38). He healed a blind man at the roadside outside Jericho (Mark 10:46–52), and the sick who were carried to the door of the house where he was staying (Mark 1:32–34). He cooked breakfast on a shoreline for men who had fished all night (John 21:9–14). Even the room where he kept the last supper was borrowed (Luke 22:7–13).
When his disciples urged him to send a hungry crowd away to the villages to find food for themselves, he fed them where they stood (Mark 6:30–44).
He did not require people to come to a designated place before he would serve them. He went to where their lives were already being lived, and he was present to them there.
Ministry is authentic where it meets people in the places they actually live.
That is the pattern we follow. Families do not meet the great thresholds of life inside a sanctuary. A child is born in a hospital. A couple marries in a garden, a hall, a backyard. A life ends and is remembered in a funeral home, at a graveside, in a community centre. Our members go to those places, because that is where the people are.
The term is an old one. It comes from the days when a minister served several congregations spread across a countryside, travelling between them. A pastoral charge was never a building. It was a territory and the people within it, entrusted to one person’s care.
That older meaning is the one we have kept.
A pastoral charge of Celebrating Life Ministries is the geographic area within Ontario to which a member is sent, together with the households, couples, families and individuals within that area to whom the member is responsible for ministry at the thresholds of life — birth, marriage and death.
Every pastoral charge has a seat. The seat is the member’s own home, the place from which the ministry of the charge is prepared, directed and administered. Ceremonies are written there. Families are telephoned from there, couples are met, and the work of the charge is carried in prayer.
The seat is the address a member records with the Office of the Registrar General. It is the anchor of the charge, not its boundary.
A pastoral charge may reach across one or more municipalities, and the ministry is carried out throughout its whole extent — in the homes of those served, in funeral homes and cemeteries, in ceremony venues, in hospitals and care facilities, in places of public gathering, and out of doors.
Our members are itinerant ministers. They go to the people. But they go within the territory entrusted to them and out from its seat, sent to a particular place and to the people of that place.
Our members are presently at work in 219 Ontario municipalities. In 142 of those towns, the Celebrating Life Ministries member is the only registered officiant a family can call. Growth did not do that. Sending did.
The religious practice of a pastoral charge is made up of:
The practice of a pastoral charge is regular, ongoing and continuous through the year. We measure that regularity by the continuity of the ministry rather than by a fixed weekly assembly in one location, because a sent ministry is not shaped that way.
A charge is in regular practice when its member is actively and recurrently at work in the things named above. For most of our members, that is a matter of most weeks of most months, year upon year.
Holding a pastoral charge is a responsibility before it is a credential. Members of Celebrating Life Ministries are asked to:
This page sets out Article [X] of the Bylaws of Celebrating Life Ministries, which governs pastoral charges and has been the settled practice of this ministry since [YEAR].
Celebrating Life Ministries is a governing body on record with the Registrar General for the purpose of performing marriage ceremonies in Ontario. Our members hold registration with the Office of the Registrar General as Marriage Officiants. Couples obtain their own marriage licence from an Ontario municipality.