Being Salt

Being Salt addresses both ordination and leadership by taking as its point of departure the most distinctive yet often overlooked feature of ordination: indelibility--being ordained for life. Sumner wholeheartedly agrees with the Reformation emphasis on the ministry of the whole people of God. Still, he argues that we can only understand priesthood if we understand what one is ordained for. Indelibility--lifetime ordination--provides an entree to the question of what sets the ordained apart. In sum, Being Salt offers an evangelical argument for a catholic practice and so goes to the heart of what Anglicanism understands itself to be.

""This gem of a book shimmers with the practical and spiritual insights we would hope to find in a good discussion of the ordained ministry. . . . Readable, eloquent, informative, and passionately acute in its encouragement of the ordained minister's calling, Being Salt should be read by every pastor and priest, and should shape every congregation's discernment of its common vocation.""
--Ephraim Radner, rector of Ascension Episcopal Church in Pueblo, Colorado

""Being Salt offers a Christocentric-semiotic understanding of the priesthood, a splash of cold water on the face of a languishing church . . . Sumner writes in an engaging and colorful style which will delight the reader. This is a 'must' for pastoral theologians and seminarians: Being Salt will energize you and make you rejoice in your vocation as priest of the Church.""
--Kathryn Greene-McCreight, assistant rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in New Haven, Connecticut

""George Sumner begins with a question that at first glance seems of importance only to a few. If one is ordained to the Christian Ministry, is it for life? However, in Sumner's hands the question opens into one of central importance for all Christians. Just how is the Church to understand the significance of its own life and that of its Lord? And how is it to order that life so that it expresses truly what the church is called to be? George Sumner has written a book that is must reading for all clergy, seminarians, seminary faculty, and the congregations they are called upon to serve.""
--Philip Turner, Interim Dean and President, Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and retired Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale

George R. Sumner is Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto. He is the author of The First and the Last: The Claim of Jesus Christ and the Claims of Other Religious Traditions.