| |
|
|
I would like to say
that I have some wonderful philosophy of ministry put together, but
the truth is that I really do not. This will be a work in progress
and constantly updated as circumstances change.
When I look inside God’s Word, I
notice Jesus first of all when it comes to ministry. If I want to
be more like Jesus, and I do, then I must begin to follow Him in
everything He does. I look at His ministry here on earth and notice
the following. He is very kind and gentle with those who do not
even recognize the Christ. I too must be kind and gentle with God’s
people, my brothers and sisters whether they are of Christ or of
Adam. I notice His constant hour of prayer. Jesus would sneak away
to pray or stay up all night praying. He talks about fasting and
during that time spending it with God. I believe that He did not do
this on occasion, but the gospel writers were recording only a few
times what happened on a regular basis. What was Jesus praying
about and to whom? Without getting too technical, I believe that He
was praying for His disciples to better understand and live more
rightly. I believe that He prayed for the people He came or would
come in contact with to truly repent and follow God’s ways. I
believe that He poured Himself out to be like God, to be God in the
flesh. He knew His Father not because that was where He came from,
but because that was who He spent His time with. He did not
occasionally retreat to see the glory of the kingdom but regularly.
I believe I too must retreat regularly with Jesus to see the
kingdom. My ministry will only work if it is His ministry. A
worthy and respected minister is respected by the calluses he has on
his knees not His hands.
I believe Jesus really invested His
time and effort into His few disciples while He genuinely loved the
people in mass but did not become intimate with them. The disciples
were the main focus for Christ. The exponential rate of
discipleship is the draw to its effectiveness. If Jesus is to stay
alive in His people then it must be done by way of discipleship.
This is done by the method of transferring one life onto another.
We as humans look up to people all the time. From time to time we
really latch onto a particular one. We begin to emulate them by
living the same way. In some ways we want them to like us, in
others we want to be like them. We admire the way they handle life
in the big things and small things: how they treat their wife,
children, how they preach, teach, how they exercise, eat, how they
drive, walk, talk, how they love indiscriminately. This is
discipleship and it only happens when I look at Jesus in small
groups and with lots of time. I too believe that this method of
ministry is not only effective but the most effective for leaving a
legacy of Jesus after one dies. Whether one is wired for big or
small groups, lots or little self disclosure, or whatever else,
discipleship in the manner in which Christ carried it out works the
best.
I believe that Jesus was also
genuinely interested in the well being of every person that crossed
His path or the paths He sought out. While my main ministry is not
benevolence to the poor, disenfranchised, and put out, it is an
important part of ministry. These people are those who will become
disciples. These people will become either your disciples or
someone else’s. They are also worthy of being treated with the
respect of a brother or sister. It is not an inconvenience to serve
these people with their physical needs on a consistent basis. It is
a requirement of ministry on a daily basis. These people enter your
life everyday: store clerk, fellow in the restroom, new guy at work,
homeless man on the side of the road, new person at church, stranger
on a walk, and on the list goes. The gospels are full of accounts
where Jesus crossed paths with these people on a regular basis and
loved and cared for them. Ministry includes the same, reaching out
to the untouchable.
The third area I see that Jesus
spent in ministry was to the religious leaders of His day. He would
spend lots of time with these people trying to get them to see who
He really is. He would argue with them and rebuke them when it was
needed, but He loved them all the same. He wanted them to
understand true religion. I believe that ministry should include
time devoted to reaching out to those who have everything together,
those that know it all, and those that test your patience and make
you think. Jesus was often hot headed with these people only
because they believed their actions were God honoring when they were
really God cursing. These people desperately need to see the
kingdom as it really is. It is our job as ministers to reach out to
the educational elite, religious thinkers, atheists, scholars,
business men, politicians, and the upper crust of society. Now
Jesus did not spend insane amounts of time dealing with these
people, but He did spend time with them. He was curt and frank only
because the time was short and they needed to hear the truth. So
why I do not plan to spend lots of time with these people, I do plan
to spend some time with them. God is who will be able to break into
their hearts and steal up their soul. I am just the vessel He uses.
I look at other men of the Bible
and their ministries. The few things I notice are as follows. They
were all very passionate about what they were doing, some where very
reluctant and hesitant at times, but in the end I think even these
people got caught up in what they were doing for the Lord. The
soldiers of the time valiantly and passionately fought for God and
His people. The kings ruled as if they reported directly to God
Himself on a regular basis. The prophets yelled out to God’s people
to follow Him and return to Him when they had gone astray. The
ministers of God had a passion and a heart to see God’s people be
God’s people.
Their ministry manifested itself in
several ways. The people would publicly preach, quietly speak to
the king, and receive persecution from the leaders (God’s
entrusted). The message was still the same. Love God love his
people. They all received the boldness to step out in faith to
minister as God had requested of them: a boldness and courage that
only God can provide and maintain. I see ministry as a life of
boldness and courage to speak out God’s message.
Some say to have a philosophy of
ministry you must have a philosophy of man. I would say that my
philosophy of man is mostly tri-fold. Man is physical, emotional,
and spiritual. This means that man has physical needs like food,
water, sleep, anything that keeps his body physically going. His
emotions and spirit will do anything to provide for these basic
physical needs. While the physical is not always the main priority
of life, it many times is the main thrust. When a man’s physical
needs are met his emotions have the freedom to be as they are. This
is the time when you see a person for who they really are. How they
act, what they think, who they relate to, how they feel. This is
often called the personality. While circumstances will change and
sometimes change an emotion or inner character whether slowly or
quickly, the emotion/psyche will often remain constant. You can
tell who a person is whether their physical needs are being met or
not.
The spirit side of man is often the
most neglected. If the physical and emotional are in need than many
times the spiritual never comes up as an issue in life. Many people
live their life with out ever touching the spiritual side. This is
usually the scheme of the devil to keep us away from finding the
truth. However, God has put an innate sense in us to seek out the
spiritual. We are meant to find God and learn who He is. Over the
years of history man has manifested this in many different ways from
creating idols to ideology. The real kicker is that the spirit is
what really drives life. The spirit is what dictates what emotions
will be and how the physical will be taken care of. The spirit is
what drives a person. Those with a bad spirit manifest bad emotion
and bad physical characteristics. Those with a good spirit manifest
good. Often times though we have good and neglect the spirit
letting the other two to take control. Real life is lived when the
spirit guides life. The spirit sets priorities, values, morals.
The spirit even has the power to abstain the emotional and physical
of life from living for periods while the spiritual shines through.
At these times we really see God or Satan at work. But more often
we have to see the fruit (emotion and physical) to see what the
spirit is.
Ministry should be aimed at the
spirit. It should be aimed at the most important part of life.
Since spirit leads life, then it is only reasonable to minister to
the spirit. Ministry is not so much teaching people how to be good
in emotion and how to take care in the physical but who to be in the
spiritual. Be good be Jesus. Ministry is directing lives, to live
as if the spirit were in charge of life and nothing else. Ministry
gets diluted when we let the emotional and physical take over. It
is the spirit that must always guide.
Getting to the spirit is not always
easy. Many times it is done my going through the physical and
emotional. Every once and awhile you can tap straight into the
spiritual. That is usually done when the individual has already
begun to break down the walls of the physical and emotional, or
started to look into the spiritual himself. Ministry is breaking
through the walls and taping into the spiritual. It is molding the
spiritual with the small amounts of time that you are allowed into
one’s spirit. The sculpture takes time to mold piece by piece and
time over time. Eventually it will take shape. Sometimes many must
sculpt. Other times only a few sculpt.
I do agree that God has made
physical, emotional, and spiritual. I am not advocating that
ministers should ignore the first two as if they are evil and only
spirit is good. I am trying to say that ministry many times gets
clouded and bogged down in the physical and emotional without ever
making it to the spiritual. The spiritual is where life truly
begins to change. If ministry includes, which it does, helping out
the physical and emotional, then it must be done by taping into the
spiritual. Again the fruit of one’s spirit is their emotion and
physical.
|
|
|
