The Mystery of Ministry

The nature of ministry is something that cuts very deep into the heart of modern Christian subcultures. I fear to speculate how many people get involved in “ministries” for base motives such as craving for recognition or acclaim. I’m sure there are many. I’m sure there are also many who do so out of a sense of obligation, whether imposed on them by pleas for help from the church hierarchy or by their own conscience. In any case, I think the majority of us grow up thinking of ministry as a profession; an idea that I believe has choked the life out of the Christian community.

We’ve divided ourselves into professional and non-professional Christians. The professionals go to church to work – to “minister”, if you will. The laymen go to church to listen to the professional Christian’s spoon-feedings of Christian Living 101. This seems to me to be a horribly deformed anomaly that leaves the so-called professionals exhausted with the business (and busy-ness) of professional ministry, and leaves the others cocooned in the absurd notion that God wants them to simply be regular customers at the spa for the spiritually tired.

It seems to me that ministry should be the life of everyone who claims to have been delivered. I imagine a miserable species inhabiting a desert where every day is another struggle to find water. In this desert, there are some inhabitants who have found such water that, when they’ve drunk it, is in them a well of water springing up into everlasting life (John 4:14), and they never thirst again. Some years later, many people still claim to be recipients of the miracle elixir, yet they stagger wearily each designated water day to the "official well" for a refresher by the professional water-masters (ministers).

Somehow this seems wrong to me. If salvation is really the incredible thing we say it is, why are we always in need of a fix? If we are truly recipients of a heavenly gift of living water, why aren’t we running around all week, loving and sharing and inviting everyone we meet to drink it too. Instead, we feel a warm glow every other month when we can share with our Sunday School class that we had the opportunity to invite someone to church. God help us, if our only offering to the miserable, tired, hurting, and sick is that we have a neat club where they can hear professionals talk about the “magic water”. Furthermore, if the thirsty can’t see a significant enough difference in us to make them wonder what we’ve been drinking, perhaps we’ve been drinking from the wrong well all along and deluding ourselves with our weekly spiritual pep-talks, involvement in “ministries”, and other programmatic activities to such an extent that we are utterly useless to the world.