Ministering

Estimated reading time: 12 minute(s)

I touched on this in my other post this morning, but after some of my reading last night, and then reading the blogs of a couple friends (Laura and Steph, and also Chris) I thought I would expand on what I was thinking there…

God made us to relate. Relating is sharing life with other people. Sharing your successes, partying with the good newses of life. Sharing a meal, a game night (we like those!), a movie night, a day in the park, or any sort of fun thing. Sharing the good things God is doing in you. Even sharing your possessions. That builds a foundation for sharing in the hard times. When a child dies. When a spouse cheats, or leaves. When a job is suddenly lost. We share those things too.

Now somehow over the past 2000 years, the church has made that essence of who we are, relational beings, into a system. We have come up with all kinds of structures to create opportunities to relate, we have classes to learn how to relate (to believers, and especially to the lost), and pastors are paid to relate. And it’s their job to make sure others are relating well also. It’s a business. The product, healthy people relating well with each other and with God. And we’re pretty OK at turning out that product, without much deviance from the norm in each one.

We call that ministering. When you give it that spiritual sounding title, it makes it seem more important. Attaches “kingdom” value to it. We talk of “ministering” to someone who’s hurting, or someone who is outside the lines we ourselves have drawn. It is an effort to accomplish some sort of visible result in someone’s life. Or even just our own. The accomplishment is a feeling of satisfaction at allowing God to minister through us.

I myself am a perpetrator of such thinking. I have been in “paid” ministry for a long time. Granted, I have done it most unconventionally, but still, I get paid to love people and “minister” to them. Which on some levels is super cool. But mostly it makes me sick. I just want to love people because I do. No strings. No obligations. No attachments. No requirements. I don’t think that I have those, but I know that we have created sets of expectations of our paid ministry people. It’s their job to “minister”. Do you know what that does to them??? To their hearts???

People. This is not a job. We should not get paid to “minister”. It is not a command from God. He leads by example. We love because we have first been loved. He loves me, so I love you.

I really don’t think I have a problem with this, personally. (That sounded arrogant… it’s not meant to be…) I think somewhere along the line God showed me this truth, and I got this one. I do love people, not because I have to, but as an overflow from how much my Father loves me. My struggle remains in my being a “professional christian”. I am moving slowly away from that, but not sure how to use some of the gifts God has given me, and completely leave the system of organized relating. That is certainly a work in progress, and ever shall be perhaps.

There is no magic in loving someone. No special way to do it. It doesn’t count more with the loved or with God if we call it “ministering”. That word, that idea, frustrates me so much.

Really, the problem is in our view of two worlds. The sacred and the secular. I really think Jesus lived in what we would call the “secular”… but didn’t think of it that way. He did not have the boundaries we do. He hung out at the synagogue, at the temple, with the religious dudes (whom we blast, but would be today’s pastors, ministers, elders and other church leaders)… and he also hung out with the drunks and the whores and the other “dregs”. Jesus knew one world – the Kingdom of God. It’s all his. All of it. Perhaps I will develop this more at a later date.

We don’t need special words. We don’t put on our cape and fly around “ministering” to people. If we do, we’re robbing them and ourselves of the deeper joy of living in God’s love and grace and sharing that with them. Listen to your Father, and love whom he wants you to, when he wants you to… and just get to know him. Do your job, whatever occupies your 9-to-5 life, always aware of how He is working in and around you there… and then love the people he places in your path everywhere else.

There is no grand strategy needed. Just obedience and attention to his lead. His specific lead for you.