Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames is drawing a hard boundary line around what counts as legitimate spiritual authority: not charisma, not novelty, not the minister's personal brilliance, but a ministry tethered to an external, prior claim. "Ordinary" here isn't a shrug; it's a polemical term. It means regular, authorized, disciplined - the opposite of the freelance prophet, the self-appointed reformer, the minister who treats the pulpit like a platform for private opinions. In an age when Europe was splintering over who gets to speak for God, Ames builds a system designed to make the speaker smaller and the standard larger.

The phrase "receives all of its direction" is doing the heavy lifting. It casts the minister not as an originator but as a conduit, a reader bound to a text. That's classic Reformed anxiety about human invention in worship and governance: if the church becomes a workshop for "new" spiritual techniques, it drifts into manipulation, spectacle, or quiet tyranny. Ames answers with a chain of custody: Scripture, then the "means" God has appointed - preaching, sacraments, discipline, catechesis - practices meant to form people over time, not spike them with religious adrenaline.

The subtext is institutional but anti-institutional at once. Ames is defending the church's office by limiting its discretion. Authority is real, but it must be auditable. The ministry exists for "continual edification", a deliberately slow goal that resists both political capture and spiritual consumerism. It's Puritan restraint as an ethic: build the soul the way you build a house, by rules, tools, and patient labor, not by revelation on demand.