By: Annie
When we talk about serving at church or leadership, it’s often focused on what people aren’t doing. Look at all these vacancies. Why aren’t more people stepping up? If you’d only put your trust in God, you could do great things. I’m not saying there’s no value in that line of thinking, but what’s another way of looking at it? What are people doing?
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Without too much introduction to this new series last week, I dove right into one of the biggest challenges facing our leadership right now: sustainable ministry. Unfortunately, overcoming this obstacle requires a lot of hard work and a great place to start is being open and honest about where we’re at as a church. So allow me to share my reflection with you.
Today’s Prayer Items section is particularly poignant to me. I am childish about how church is run. I took this job thinking I’d “fix” church. I planned to force leaders to plan ahead and stick to their commitments. I’d create online forms and manuals to improve operations. I’d record the best minutes and send them out promptly so no one would forget what was discussed. A year and a half later, I’m not sure I’ve done anything to improve our ministries.
If anything, I’ve changed. While my job is focused on administrative tasks, to truly support our leaders I needed to get to know them. It’s not just being aware of what they do, but understanding who they are and where they come from that informs their perspective on ministry. Having that made it more difficult for me to judge them and easier to show them grace and compassion.
In the same way we may need to rethink happiness, maybe we need to let go of our preconceived notions about what serving and ministry look like. It’s like this section of the bulletin. People I trust told me to bring it back because they saw value in it and so I complained as I struggled to write these articles no one reads. Taking comfort in knowing no one would read it, I uploaded the bulletin last week and then God decided to do something with it. He spoke into someone’s life and they reached out to start a conversation about serving. Ministry is endlessly frustrating and change is slow, but if you’re lucky, you might just catch a glimpse of God.