What is "ministry?"
After a great weekend of master's classes and the Frequency conference at Indiana Wesleyan University, I am thinking, a lot! I am going to deviate from thinking about what it means to be a Christ follower into what it means to "minister" and what a "ministry" really is.
Ministry is a broad term, covering anything someone does in the name of Christ (minister means to give aid not someone who is of the clergy, that's something we associate to it, not the original meaning!). So in theory, feeding someone who is hungry is a ministry (particularly as we fit both contexts, the idea of doing something in Jesus' name and the "professional" idea of someone who does things for the church) especially as it was something Jesus told us to do? However, should there ever be separation between the "professional" idea of ministry and the actual process of giving aid? I think not, but we've made it so. Is there a place for preaching? Yes. Is there a place for actual hands on giving and doing? Yes. Can we do both? Emphatic yes. Should we do both? Heck yeah! In fact, if we isolate either of those portions from the local church, we cannot claim to be following Christ at all! Those who preach without doing are more than dead, they are lacking a relationship with Christ! Those are strong words you say, and I say they must be, because even as I can't judge someone's heart and inside workings I can tell you they have a dead faith. The Bible says so, not me. I'm just telling it like it is. "Faith without works is dead." or in more modern English from The Message, "God-talks without God-acts is outrageous nonsense."
Or in other words, how can we even claim to believe something or have encountered the living God if we aren't doing something as a result of it? Moses met God and he was the first glow-stick, but more than that he went to Egypt to his certain death to free God's people. Peter was a chicken and lied, cussed, and generally threw a fit when the thought that someone could know he had followed Jesus then later stood before the same people he had been so afraid of and told them off (I love that the follow up is: "[When they] perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus" That sentence can preach!) and who Jesus really was to their pompous faces! Those are not people who were the same! Or think Wesley and Whitefield during the great awakening, they changed and changed the world, not they "just believed." The idea is that we must DO SOMETHING with our faith. That is what ministry is: the natural out growth of an inward change that demonstrates for everyone to see that our faith is alive and who exactly Jesus was!
How can we not do something? The idea that God's son would die for me so I could live is so astounding that it produces ridicule and scorn in many people, I mean how many people would give up a vital organ and die so that someone else could live? That modern analogous idea makes it so much stronger for me: Jesus died, giving up His life so I could live. Just as people say the dead person lives on in the person who received the transplant, Christ then lives on in us. In theory, that is my issue today, how can we not respond to that fact with action? If we have met the living God how can we not respond? Doesn't action flow out of that just as simply as does the idea germinate in our hearts? Sadly, no is the answer more often than not. That leads to people dismissing the church as hypocritical, judgmental, anti-everything moralizers who don't have anything of worth to inject into the hurt, pain, and suffering of this world! That is what drives me nuts! And I am just as guilty of it as the next guy... I say I believe and don't do...
Ministry is a broad term, covering anything someone does in the name of Christ (minister means to give aid not someone who is of the clergy, that's something we associate to it, not the original meaning!). So in theory, feeding someone who is hungry is a ministry (particularly as we fit both contexts, the idea of doing something in Jesus' name and the "professional" idea of someone who does things for the church) especially as it was something Jesus told us to do? However, should there ever be separation between the "professional" idea of ministry and the actual process of giving aid? I think not, but we've made it so. Is there a place for preaching? Yes. Is there a place for actual hands on giving and doing? Yes. Can we do both? Emphatic yes. Should we do both? Heck yeah! In fact, if we isolate either of those portions from the local church, we cannot claim to be following Christ at all! Those who preach without doing are more than dead, they are lacking a relationship with Christ! Those are strong words you say, and I say they must be, because even as I can't judge someone's heart and inside workings I can tell you they have a dead faith. The Bible says so, not me. I'm just telling it like it is. "Faith without works is dead." or in more modern English from The Message, "God-talks without God-acts is outrageous nonsense."
Or in other words, how can we even claim to believe something or have encountered the living God if we aren't doing something as a result of it? Moses met God and he was the first glow-stick, but more than that he went to Egypt to his certain death to free God's people. Peter was a chicken and lied, cussed, and generally threw a fit when the thought that someone could know he had followed Jesus then later stood before the same people he had been so afraid of and told them off (I love that the follow up is: "[When they] perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus" That sentence can preach!) and who Jesus really was to their pompous faces! Those are not people who were the same! Or think Wesley and Whitefield during the great awakening, they changed and changed the world, not they "just believed." The idea is that we must DO SOMETHING with our faith. That is what ministry is: the natural out growth of an inward change that demonstrates for everyone to see that our faith is alive and who exactly Jesus was!
How can we not do something? The idea that God's son would die for me so I could live is so astounding that it produces ridicule and scorn in many people, I mean how many people would give up a vital organ and die so that someone else could live? That modern analogous idea makes it so much stronger for me: Jesus died, giving up His life so I could live. Just as people say the dead person lives on in the person who received the transplant, Christ then lives on in us. In theory, that is my issue today, how can we not respond to that fact with action? If we have met the living God how can we not respond? Doesn't action flow out of that just as simply as does the idea germinate in our hearts? Sadly, no is the answer more often than not. That leads to people dismissing the church as hypocritical, judgmental, anti-everything moralizers who don't have anything of worth to inject into the hurt, pain, and suffering of this world! That is what drives me nuts! And I am just as guilty of it as the next guy... I say I believe and don't do...
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