A couple of thoughts about ministry

Wow... God has seen a lot of growth at Albion over the last few years while I have been here. He has raised people up with hearts and passions for ministry, and He has seen them graduated. A new wave of people now grow up behind them. After three and a half years of serving God in Chapel I have learned a few things about ministry, and I'd love to share them with you.

The first is that in order to have a successful worship session, people need to be absolutely in love with God. They need to be passionately seeking after Him. People who worship love God, and people who love God worship Him. It just seems to be me that that is how it works. People who don't love God are less apt to worship Him. Loving God can come from a bunch of different places. But perhaps you can do things to help people learn to love God. For example, you can help people learn to love God by having sound teaching. Teaching that encourages God's followers to learn more and more about Him. By having sound teaching, some of your more conservative Christians might be more persuaded to join you in worship. To encourage some of the more liberal parishoners to take part in worship and in loving God, try service, especially serving the underserved. For "seekers" try encouraging more fellowship. If you encorperate all three aspects into your Christian community, I believe God will add to your number daily. Those that He will add to your number will be of diverse backgrounds too...

Give it a shot. At Chapel in the next few weeks we are really hoping to release some plans to get our group of Jesus lovers out into the world to do some neat things. We hope to have fellowship events, service events, and hopefully we should get some teaching coming down the pipe from some of our senior students who have had a ton of expierience in the ministry.

God will raise up His generation of lovers, by diversifying our worship expieriences perhaps we can diversify and grow our congregations.

God bless,

JR

A Vision for the Future:

I think one of the hardest things for me to hear from people who are going into the ministry, or have just joined the ministry is that when you get into church ministry, you go from working in teams (like you did in College) to working alone. In addition, one of my friends tells me that rather then being able to go out and cast his net into the waters to bring new people into the faith, he spends a lot of time jumping through hoops... 

I guess one thing that I see happening in the American Church is that pastors get caught up in fitting the profile of the ideal pastor. Namely, having to do 10 hours of Community Service like stuff... Being prominent and serving on some city school board or something like that, making sure the facilities are kept up, and all that. At the end of the day, it is just kinda wild that pastors spend their whole lives preparing to "do ministry" and perhaps they never really get the opportunity to do so when they have to "fit the profile". Don't get me wrong, everything they are doing is good stuff, but for some of us, who have the burning heart of an evangelist, we need to be out there. My suggestion is that at a church like the one I hope to kindle, pastors would only work part time at the church, and the rest of the time they would spend out in the community, either working or building the kingdom... Economically, I don't know how this will work out, either for the pastors or for the church, but it just seems like a healthy model for a team of evangelists, namely a team I would like to work with/for.