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Beginner’s Guide to Christian Serving
There’s probably one passage more than any other that’s usually read at weddings. It’s the great chapter on love from 1 Corinthians 13. It’s an appropriate passage for married couples to reflect on, but it wasn’t written for them. This passage on love was written in a prolonged discussion of church ministry. It shows us how love turns volunteering into ministry and how a lack of love can make serving something less than it was intended to be.
I think we make subconscious value judgments all the time. We decide whether something is worth our time by the impact we feel it makes. The same is true of ministry. We want our lives to count, the question is how? How can you make the most impact in ministry? Let me share four ways I think the Bible answers that question.
Once you’ve been reading the New Testament for a while, you run into various lists of spiritual gifts. They can be confusing and intimidating. There are so many of them and people disagree about what some of them mean. It can be hard to understand what your gift might be. One of the ways that the church has responded to the confusion has been with quizzes and assessments. You can go through questionnaires that are designed to predict your spiritual gift (see an example: here). While those may have some value, I think there’s a better way.
Have you ever wondered why others in the church don’t care the way you do? Have you at least noticed that they don’t? If you haven’t felt this yet, before long you probably will. When I first felt this, I didn’t ask the why question; I assumed it. I assumed that other people didn’t care the way I did because they just didn’t care. I assumed that it must be a deficiency in their faith or their passion or something! What I was experiencing was real, but my assumptions about it were all wrong. Let me explain why other Christians don’t care the way that you do.
Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘The pastor should do something about that’? I have. The more you read about the church in Scripture, the more you see that needs to be fixed. There are things that we’re not doing. There are ways that we’re not relating. There are purposes we’re not fulfilling. As a pastor, I feel burdened to evangelize those who are lost, disciple those who are new, counsel those who are struggling, comfort those who are weak, train up our leaders, oversee our office, lead the church in prayer and still devote the bulk of my energy to teaching and preaching God’s Word. The reality is that I often try to do all of those things, but the Bible says that there are a few things a pastor should focus on.
