At the dawning of the third Christian millennium, the Church remains tasked with faithfully proclaiming the good news of liberation from sin and newness of life made known to us through the incarnation, life, teaching, dying, and rising of Jesus Christ her Lord. She does so in a world that continues to constantly evolve, where new discoveries in the sciences and new perspectives in the humanities challenge believers in general, and the ministers of the Church in particular to respond to the needs of a new era.
In this new era, everything is questionable, questioned, and doubted, and often for good reason. The jurisdictions and denominations which make up the Church, while doing tremendous good across history, have a checkered past to cope with; one in which the Gospel has been used to justify the unjustifiable, and the penalties for disobedience of accepted orthodoxy have been cruel and inhumane.
Furthermore, as the Church draws further away from the time of her Lord, her power has become rooted far less in the gospel and more fully in the secular and sacred power that the Church has wielded across the generations, most specifically since the legalization of Christianity in the 4th Century of the Christian Era. As a result, while the Church frequently presents a message concerning a loving God that is backstopped by a painfully merciless practice which speaks no common vocabulary with the liberating Kingdom promised in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Old Catholic Ordinariate for Specialized Ministries exists to support those ministering in a variety of unique settings in providing a compassionate, caring response to this dissonant tone in the contemporary life of the Church, one which sees the Gospels, and indeed all the Scriptures, together with the dogma, doctrine, and discipline of the Church through the lens of the clearest text in Scripture concerning the nature of God: “God is love.”