Ministerial Ethics Moral Formation for Church Leaders

Abstract

Ours is an age of ethical uncertainty. In Walker Percy’s novel The Thanatos Syndrome, a minister faces an ethical dilemma. Percy capsules his moral confu sion and ours in one line: “This is not the Age of Enlightenment, but the Age of Not Knowing What To Do.”1 One writer calls this quote an apt aphorism for our age and adds: Politicians, scientists, physicians, business leaders, everyday citizens, and our clergy increasingly find themselves in situations where they really do not know what to do. As a result, ethics has become a boom industry, and moral failure a regular front-page phenomenon. Conventional wisdom seems glaringly in adequate in the face of our environmental, technological, political, economic, and social situations.2