What is our Ministry?

I hate cutesy titles.

Just throwing that out there.

So when I look at a church bulletin and they have simply renamed every single thing they do as their "ministry" it always causes me to roll my eyes.

ministry of music, the ministry of toilet cleaning, the ministry of coffee hour, the ministry of envelope stuffing, the ministry of...

When churches do that I think they are just pulling a fast one, switching out the idea of an essential part of the workload by calling it their ministry. There is nothing inherently wrong with this... it just does not work for me.

You see - I don't think running a church is part of the ministry.

I know this is a controversial thing to say - but I want you to think about this in other ways. Maintaining a hospital is not providing health care. Painting a tank camouflage is not part of the purpose of the armed forces. Getting an oil change is not the purpose of a car.

There are in fact two distinct things happening when we look at a church and for some reason, we have never liked to separate them out. We are running an organization called the church, and we are doing the ministry of a Christian.

I think the two are separate and they do not overlap nearly as much as we think.

So we need to upkeep a building, keep records, worry about sound systems, transportation, budgets, and administration. We need to have background committees on every level to ensure the functioning of the organization. We need to hire and fire and discipline staff. And on and on and on...

This is not ministry - this is business.

Now, to follow Jesus we need to, figuratively, care for the widows and the orphans. In reality, we need to have outreach programs in the community to care for the disadvantaged, we need to host worship services for deepening spiritual understanding, we need to offer educational opportunities to learn about faith, we need to mentor and counsel people on morality and ethics, we need to provide life transition events like baptisms, weddings, and funerals in order to give meaning to existence...

In either category, there are thousands of other possible answers but I hope from these two examples you can see the line I am trying to create. There is the business and there is the outcome. And perhaps it is time to separate the two out.

Back to the cutesy titles. I think it is disingenuous of us to pretend that we are doing the latter when we are doing the former. I think most of our effort is spent on the business of being the church and too little of our time is on ministry.

And on top of that when we do ministry we are often doing it for the reason of business. We operate programs as if they were advertising campaigns... We do good works hoping that they will lead to engagement with the business.

If you do not think this is true I want you to think back to any planning meeting and ask yourself if you have not heard this statement in some form or another - "well, how does that put bums in the pew?" "Does this bring more people to church?" "Does this translate into increased giving?"

If any of those questions can be answered - then you are probably doing ministry for the wrong reasons.

Again, would it not be better to have the two things completely separated out.

We need to provide a school breakfast program... (because there is child poverty, because education is important, etc.)

What business strategies do we need to engage in to afford and manage a school breakfast program? (meetings, budgets, advertising, etc.)

You see where I am coming from?

We are always asking - how do we keep the church open? And then secondly we are asking what we can afford to do.

What if we turned that around and asked - what ministry do we need to do? And then secondly we asked how do we become able to do that?

Is Sunday Morning worship important for us? What outreach is necessary for the community? What would Jesus do if he lived here? NOW... after we answer questions like this... then ask - can we afford our own building? Where would the best place to operate out of be? How many people do we need to hire to do this? etc.

By the way - I do think we need to be very honest about staffing too... Right now most churches expect staff - whether orfained, administrative, or even volunteer - to accomplish all of category A, all of the business, while hoping that they are actually spending most of their time on category B, ministry.

I don't think we have really stopped to consider if this model works. Or if we are being honest about what we want and how to get it.