Love, and Do What You Will: Some Reflections on Holy Orders

By Bryan Hollon

May 28, 2026

For sixteen years, I taught theology at a university in Ohio and was privileged to work with many sharp, disciplined, and ambitious students. Occasionally, I’d recognize someone with a genuine instinct for theology: a student who already knew Scripture well, could trace an argument, and understood why theological error is harmful. When that happened, I’d try to move the conversation beyond grades and careers and towards vocation.

I once asked a college senior what he wanted to do after graduation. He was a Business major headed for a career in Finance. When I pressed further and asked what he really loved, he said he loved Scripture, but that was obvious from his engagement in my class. He also loved people and described a rich church life growing up, so I asked: “Have you ever thought about ordained ministry?”

You’d have thought I’d proposed he join a traveling circus.

He wasn’t hostile but genuinely baffled. Ordination simply didn’t register as a real option in his mind. It didn’t offer the right money or the right prestige, and most importantly, it didn’t seem like it would matter enough. It seemed small and diminished compared to his own ambitions.

This young man was not an outlier, since too few people are seeking ordination to meet the church’s current and future needs. In the Anglican Church in North America, as in other traditions, we have far more clergy retiring than being ordained, and the median age of the clergy is fifty-seven. For most capable young Christians, Holy Orders does not even appear on the horizon of vocational imagination. And this is a problem that should trouble us all deeply.

Notably, the problem is not so much indifference as misdirected desire. The Church has a growing number of young men with genuine spiritual hunger, but what it lacks are young men willing to submit that hunger to the long, unglamorous formation that Holy Orders has always required.

Rod Dreher published a Substack essay last week describing the recent influx of young, conservative men into Eastern Orthodoxy. These are men drawn to what they describe as “a more demanding, even difficult, practice of Christianity.” Dreher affirms their hunger for a deeper faith as a good thing, but the essay’s primary concern is with how that passion plays out online in sometimes appalling ways. In one recent example, Dreher tells the story of an Orthodox woman who wrote about dating culture in her parish community and then found herself under attack by an online mob. As things escalated, intimate photos were leaked, so the young woman removed herself from social media while the men involved remained unapologetic and sought to justify their actions.

Something similar happened in 2020 when a Presbyterian writer named Aimee Byrd became the target of a Facebook group, made up entirely of Christian men who, rather than engaging her writing, mocked her appearance, her marriage, and worse. What elevated both episodes beyond the category of “men behaving badly online” is that some of those involved were ordained ministers. In other words, they were men who had vowed to guard and serve the Church and its many members.¹

And these are not isolated episodes. According to recent polling, young men in America are becoming more conservative, more religious, and more vocal about their convictions in online groups. They also attend religious services at higher rates than young women their age, which is a surprising reversal of a long-standing pattern.² In other words, a generation of young men are increasingly rejecting progressive cultural trends while simultaneously hungering for a life that is demanding and real and costly. This obviously comes with its dangers, as the two episodes I’ve recounted suggest, but it also has the potential to be a gift, so the church should pay attention.

Regarding the dangers, both episodes show us what can happen when young men hungering for a more meaningful and consequential life remain largely unconverted and unformed. Namely, their passion is misdirected because they’ve missed the difficult, formative work of having their hunger properly ordered by the faith they claimed to be seeking.

And here is the point. The desire for a serious faith is not the same thing as possessing one, and closing the distance between the two is the truly serious and costly work these men claim to desire.³

The irony in all of this is hard to miss. The young men hungering for a faith that is demanding, serious, and costly are exactly the men the Church needs in its leadership pipeline, and Holy Orders is exactly the kind of vocation they claim to be looking for. They are, in a real sense, already oriented toward the right thing, even if they have not yet found the right form for it. The problem is that neither the Church nor these young men have made the connection between what they are hungry for and what Holy Orders is and requires. Holy Orders is not a consolation-prize vocation for men who weren't ambitious enough for something else. It is a good, honorable, feasible, and absolutely necessary vocational path for those willing to be formed by something greater than themselves, in service of something that will outlast them. That is a serious and costly thing, which is precisely what these men say they want.

So what are holy orders, and why should we be mindful of their weight?⁴

The Oldest Calling

Genesis 2:15 tells us that God placed Adam in the garden “to work it (abad) and to guard it (shamar).” Our English translations make Adam sound like a farmer, but the Hebrew verbs portray him as a priest since “to serve” and “to guard” refer to the work of priests. When they appear together elsewhere in the Old Testament, they consistently describe priestly service in the sanctuary, so their appearance in Genesis 2 is noteworthy. It suggests that the Garden of Eden was the first temple, and Adam was the first priest. Or better yet, that the priestly vocation is inherent to human nature, of which Adam is the first type and Christ the prototype.⁵

Adam’s task as image-bearer and priest was to maintain God’s sanctuary, to guard it from chaos and uncleanness, and to extend its ordered boundaries outward until the whole earth became God’s dwelling place. This means that, from the very beginning, human vocation is priestly vocation. In other words, the priesthood is not an emergency measure invented in response to sin. It is woven into the fabric of what it means to be human. It might be appropriate to say that man was not made for the priesthood but the priesthood for man; it is ordered to the fulfillment of man’s true nature found only in Christ.

But Adam failed, and the way he failed reveals a great deal about the nature of priesthood in general, since the story of the fall is also a story of Adam’s inability to fulfill his priestly vocation. How so? Well consider that the serpent entered the garden as unclean, chaotic, and hostile to God’s order. Adam, who was charged with guarding the sanctuary, simply stood by and allowed it all to happen. He neither guarded nor served but accompanied Eve in eating the forbidden fruit. And the disorder that followed is still with us as the ongoing stain of original sin.⁶

The controversies mentioned at the start of this letter are not native to the age of social media; they are the age-old failures of men, charged with guarding what is holy, either standing idly by or joining in the destruction.

The True Priest

The rest of Scripture is the story of God reconstituting the priestly order that Adam failed to keep. As with other major biblical motifs, the theme of priesthood runs through the whole biblical story from Genesis 3 through Leviticus and the prophets, through the Psalms and the wisdom literature, until it is finally gathered up and fulfilled in Jesus Christ—the Last Adam and the one true High Priest.⁷ Where the first Adam remained passive while the serpent corrupted the garden-temple, Christ enters the wilderness and meets the devil directly. Where Adam was undone by disordered desire, the Last Adam trusts the Word of God and prevails. He accomplishes what Adam forfeited and, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, holds his priesthood permanently (Hebrews 7:24).

Having accomplished redemption, Christ shares his priesthood with his Church. All the baptized participate in his royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9) as the restoration of what Adam forfeited. From within that larger priesthood, God calls some to Holy Orders – deacons, priests (presbyters), and bishops – ordained ministries that arise from within the common priesthood and remain proximate to Christ’s own. The diaconate is a commissioned ministry of service in his name, the presbyterate and episcopate are representative ministries of his Word and Sacraments in the midst of the Church.

Ordained ministry is the continuation, borrowed and delegated, of the vocation that began in Eden. It entails guarding the good deposit and gathering a disordered people around the Word and Sacraments of Jesus Christ.

Word, Sacrament, and the Ordering of a People

The ministerial acts by which Christ gathers, protects, and preserves his Church are, as the theologian John Webster argues, his own—incommunicable and non-representable. Christ does not hand off his priestly work to human agents as though passing a torch. And yet Christ himself, freely and sovereignly, chooses to represent himself through human ministry, not, Webster writes, “by transferring to them his right and honour, but only that through their mouths he may do his own work.”⁸ The priest’s authority is real, but always derivative and participatory, and never independent. A priest does not generate spiritual life but attests to it, administers it, and guards it.

But this is not to suggest that the vocational priesthood is unimportant or less important than we may have otherwise imagined. On the contrary, without the “ordering ministry” of clergy, Christian communities lose their bearings and find themselves conformed to the prevailing culture. The Church becomes therapeutic or activist or something worse, rather than formative in the sense of Galatians 4:19. The work of the priest is to resist this drift through the steady, ordinary practices of proclamation of the Word, administration of the sacraments, and otherwise equipping the saints for prayer and service. It’s through these ministries above all that disordered loves are slowly set right and a people are restored to God.

The ordination rite of the Book of Common Prayer is infused with this deeply formative and Christocentric theology. Just before the bishop lays hands on the ordinand, he places a Bible in his one hand and a chalice in the other. Then the bishop says: Take authority to preach the Word of God and to administer the Holy Sacraments. Do not forget the trust committed to you as a Priest in the Church of God. The ministry of Word and Sacrament is thus entrusted to a servant called to keep the Church resting on its one foundation and tethered to the one saviour and Lord who can build it.

The Shape of Life

For this reason, the bishop lays his hands on the ordinand and asks: “Will you be diligent in prayer and in the reading of Holy Scripture? Will you frame and fashion your own life according to the doctrine of Christ?” And each time, the ordinand answers: “I will, the Lord being my helper.” The order a priest commends to others must first be visible in his own personal, social, and familial life. His is not a private virtue but a way of being in the world that witnesses to the peace and order of Jesus Christ and his coming kingdom.

This is why the controversies described at the beginning of this letter are so serious. Some of the men involved had taken vows like these. What they lacked was not intelligence or theological education but the discipline of a formed, ordered life which the office requires. The Anglican Church in North America is not exempt from the challenge these controversies represent. Some of our aspirants, ordinands, and clergy have been among the loudest voices in our own online controversies, and not all of that engagement has been constructive.

Young men in this extremely online era are being formed by an internet engineered for maximum assertion and tribal loyalty, which knows nothing of patience or any other virtue. This “platform culture” rewards the loudest voice, but not the most faithful one. Yet, to lead the Church, and serve Christ in building something that will endure, requires a different kind of formation altogether.

The call to Holy Orders is an invitation into exactly that kind of formation. It is not a destination but a direction– an “ordering.” Ordination is entry into a sacred order and constitutes a long becoming through prayer and preaching and pastoral work. Paul writes to Timothy: “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3). Paul then suggests that the soldier is also an “athlete” and a “hard-working farmer,” so images of discipline, patience, and labor toward a harvest are entirely fitting (2 Timothy 4-7). The point of all of this is that the ordained minister must play the long game. The weapons are not political power or platform reach but truth, righteousness, and the Word of God. And the stakes are eternal.⁹

The More Excellent Way

The desire of so many young men for a serious, costly faith is not misplaced, but there is something more demanding at the heart of the Christian life than most of us have yet attempted. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” That is most true, not of doctrinal precision or moralistic rigor, but of love. Patient, attentive, costly love, which by definition desires the good of our theological opponents, is the hardest thing in Christianity. And it is what the ordered life is ordered toward.

“Love, and do what you will: if you are silent, be silent in love; if you shout, shout in love; if you correct, correct in love; if you spare, spare in love: let the root of love be within, and nothing but good can spring from this root.”

Augustine is not arguing for indifference to truth but insisting that the root determines the fruit. Ministry that grows from a root of love will build up the body of Christ. Ministry that grows from pride or resentment, however doctrinally correct, will always wound the Church. The ordered life is one in which love is slowly becoming the root from which everything else grows.

I am not at all suggesting that we should be indifferent or shy away from the hard questions our church faces. Love is not a path around those questions but the only condition under which they can be finally answered. A well-ordered ministry places the Church’s most difficult questions in the hands of Jesus Christ, who is more than capable of leading his people into truth. And hasn’t he promised that, “when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide [us] into all the truth” (John 16:13)?

Consider the ordained minister who labors faithfully in Word and Sacrament, approaches controversy as an act of creaturely service rather than a campaign of conquest, and desires the good of those with whom he disagrees. He does not need to defer hard questions, but he’ll learn to engage in a way that builds up the church in love. This is the only posture that will bring resolution because it entails faithfulness to Jesus Christ and trust in his gospel truth.

I write all of this as a reminder that Christ is, in fact, calling us to this and only this form of ministry. The hunger for something real and demanding and capable of outlasting the latest online controversy is not a disordered instinct. This is the grace of God stirring in restless hearts because God wants to draw us to himself.

My hope is that those hungering for a more costly and consequential faith will find it in a life of true Christian faith, perhaps focused on preaching the Word, administering the Sacraments, and caring for the people of God.

This is what the Church needs, and this is what the call to Holy Orders is a call toward and into. The work is demanding, and Chesterton was right that real faith has been found difficult and too often left untried. But we are called to try it and to trust that the one who promised to build his Church will keep his promise.¹⁰

The Very Rev. Cn. Bryan C. Hollon, Ph.D. is the Dean and President of Trinity Anglican Seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and a prominent theologian in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). He writes a blog; A Mere Christian On the Anglican Way! You can subscribe for free to receive new posts and engage his work. Footnotes to this piece can be seen at his Substack. https://bryanhollon.substack.com/