What has happened to ministry?

It seems as though ministry has taken on a new meaning of “bigger is better.” Do only the big production ministries and only social media-post-worthy acts of service matter? We’ve slowly lost sight of what daily ministry means to a hurting world, and I believe we’ve lost the personal touch of one-on-one people helping.

I remember growing up, and ministry meant taking a meal to a grieving family or a mom with a new baby. Our Sunday School class passed around a signup sheet for each person to take a meal over the following several weeks to ease a family’s work load while they adjusted to their new bundle of joy. If we were grieving, the Church (both members and pastor) stopped by to pray with us. We were family.

Ministry meant going to nursing homes where we sang and greeted the residents in hallways as we entered and left. We learned to communicate with, and love and appreciate, those who had reached their elderly years of fragility. I fondly remember the smiles on those faces. We were family.

Ministry meant a group of women getting together to study God’s Word every Wednesday morning without going through an entire hierarchy of people to get approval (although we did have obstacles of legalism in leadership at times). We simply decided to meet, took turns preparing studies, brought snacks, made new friendships, and supported each other with the love of Jesus. We were a wide range of ages from young, tired moms dragging their babies and toddlers in each week, to older, wiser women who guided us with their words and lives. That, my friends, was true, God-ordained mentoring. We were family.

Ministry was everyone from the Church piling into an old school bus on a cold, snowy, winter’s night, when we drove to sick-and-shut-in’s homes (as we called them). We sang Christmas carols and delivered plates of homemade cookies or loaves of homemade bread. I remember many glistening, teary eyes while we sang those carols, both from the people receiving our gifts of love as well as those of us serving. It was because both were being blessed. We were all family.

Ministry meant we visited those in the hospital instead of being caught up in running the church like a business. We were taught that we were the church, living and breathing, and we went to hurting people when the need was there. We were family.

We now live in a day and time where everyone is pushing various methods of what we need to do to make life safer, reach more people, reach younger people, remember the elderly, rescue devastated children, and ease the pain of tragedies happening so fast that we can no longer wrap our heads around it. I do realize that things have changed drastically with a pandemic in our midst, but we can still minister one-on-one in modified ways. Maybe we in the Church need to stop trying to assimilate to (and being overstimulated by) the current culture and its methods, which are already being force-fed to us daily. Instead, maybe we should consider going back in order to go forward in the simplicity of serving each other again as though we are family, because in God’s eyes, we are.

“Carry one another’s burdens and in this way you will fulfill the requirements of the law of Christ [that is, the law of Christian love].” Galatians 6:2 AMP