The Anglican tradition of scripture, tradition and reason, nominally from Richard Hooker, gives us a format to work with for understanding why Total Ministry has such a solid basis. Instead of seeing Total Ministry as an upstart concept less than 100 years old, let us look at a background of scripture, Anglican tradition, and our own understanding tempered by community to be able to understand that this is a concept whose time has come.
A final note will be rung with chaos theory and the church. Total Ministry looks so chaotic from the outside; it is hard to tell if there is any structure at all. However, we are reminded that God's creative power brings order out of chaos.
While it is true that once people understand Total Ministry, they will read many of the scriptures through new eyes, there are a few passages of scripture that stick out in relationship to Total Ministry. These include Paul's theology of the Body of Christ and one of the Epistles to Timothy. Paul's travels give us insight into what was going on in the New Testament churches. Peter also touches on Total Ministry in his letter referring to living stones. And last but not least, we'll look at Jesus' training and empowerment of His disciples.
Anglican tradition and older tradition are full of calls to what is now considered Total Ministry. In this section, I will focus on William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. In a nutshell, if your life isn't focused on the will of God (doing ministry in all things), then why are you even in the church (the community at prayer)? And if you're not in the church, why are you doing ministry outside of the church?
Through reason we consider individual and community issues and how they interact. Is teamwork everything? Is there a place for the individual? Are we just a group of individuals? How do we fit together?
Total Ministry looks messy, and it is. Who is in charge and how do things get done? It is very fluid and from the outside looks very chaotic. Before you reject it on the grounds that you can't pin the idea down very well, let's look at two Bible passages, Genesis 1 and John 3.
In Genesis 1 God creates the whole universe out of primordial chaos. This is not creation ex nihilo, but creation out of chaos. Sometimes it still looks like chaos to us. However, we have been given excellent brains with which to think through the chaos and see order in it.
John 3 sees the wind of the Spirit blowing where it wants to go. A lot of Total Ministry is based on the theology of the Holy Spirit. This can get messy. You really cannot start out with a goal in mind, because you may be tossed off in a totally different direction. You never know what is around the next turn.
Chaos theory will help us through this maze, and it is a maze. Chaos theory tells us several things up front. The more information you can feed in on the front end, the better your results will be at the back end. You never get answers, only parameters. No matter how hard you try, there will always be some butterfly that will flap its wings and throw off all your calculations.