The religious Reformation of the sixteenth century brought many physical changes to church buildings in England: altars were replaced by communion tables, rood screens that had separated nave from sanctuary were pulled down, images of the saints were smashed, candles disappeared. There were profound theological changes too: prayer for the dead was declared unscriptural, belief in the intercession of the saints held to be superstitious and the Mass with its elaborate ceremonial was abolished and replaced with a much simpler service of Holy Communion. Yet despite his reforming zeal, Thomas Cranmer retained the historic threefold order of ministry in the Church of England: to this day we still have bishops, priests and deacons, each with their distinctive ministries within the wider ministry of the whole Church. So it is that our curate Lesley Ashton, ordained deacon last year, will be ordained priest at the beginning of this month here in St. Edmund's, where she will continue to serve.

Priesthood is a vexed theological issue. The medieval Roman Catholic view of the priest as mediator between the people and God was strongly objected to by the Reformers who replaced it with the idea of the 'priesthood of all believers'. A key biblical text here is 1 Peter 2.9: you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a quotation from Exodus where God is describing to Moses on Mount Sinai how and what the people of Israel are to be. Early Christians saw themselves as the 'new Israel', and part of the vocation of the Church as a whole was to exercise a royal priesthood. But this collective exercise of priesthood is actually a very different thing from the view that we are somehow all individually priests by virtue of our baptism, a notion of priesthood that is, arguably, as deficient (though in a different way) as the medieval Roman Catholic view.

The ministry of individual priests in the Church of England is perhaps best seen as being exercised in a representative way within the wider context of the priesthood of the Church which, collectively, 'embodies and manifests Christ in its corporate life' to quote a Jesuit theologian. We rejoice in this collective ministry as we also celebrate and give thanks for Lesley's particular calling and ministry on 2nd July.