Of Ministry and Balance

I've been working, on and off, on my philosophy of ministry for a couple months now. I did it once a year while I was at school, but haven't really touched it since the beginning of my graduation year. Originally, I wrote it with the academic influence on it, meaning I had to be conscientious about what I'd say and how I'd say it. Everything would come from my heart, but it remained a very broad and ambiguous sense of saying things - more politically correct, you could say.

This past summer, I've talked about vision seeking and a lot of aligning myself to where we, as a church, need to be going in the coming year(s). Doing this has allowed me to come back to what my philosophy of ministry is, and what the church's "philosophy" is as well.

It's funny, because in the past, I've just fired away at writing down exactly what I had learned and what I felt would be important to my philosophy, but after a couple months of thinking here, I really have yet to even write a single word on it.

I think there is a reason why. The overarching "philosophy," or reason/purpose, to anyone's ministry should always remain unchanged. Stemming from what Christ commissioned of the Church, that doesn't deviate from what the scriptures tell us. So, with that in mind, I was wondering, then, why I would need to redo my philosophy again. Even with wondering, however, I knew very strongly in my mind that something had shifted from year one into year two. It's fair to say that I got through my first year almost purely on energy, excitement, and the whole sense of newness. Did I really accomplish as much as it appears I have? Do people actually like me as a person and a pastor? How much longer until I get some actual push back? What's going to keep this ship sailing in the right direction?

All of these questions that come into my mind have affected the way I've approached doing my philosophy this time around. I think it's a good thing. So I've been wrestling with the balance I need to draw in terms of keeping that overarching purpose of why we do church and what our main goal is in this specific time and place, or the "context" as some would like to call it.

Context is always a bit of a "can of worms" type of a discussion because we so rarely go about it appropriately. For me, I think it will play a big role into my philosophy this time because I really believe that in this season, our church really needs to learn how to go deeper into the Gospel. This means that it's not so much hearing about the good news, but it's about keeping that freshness of what the good news means to us in our day to day lives and how it should affect the way we live. Tim Keller said Christianity seems to become very powerful at the margins of our societies. Having taken a course on marginal theology myself, I agree pretty strongly. Therefore, in many ways, ministering to "mature" Christians, believers who have been around for a long time, seems to be a really big challenge nowadays. For this reason, I really want to do a series on Philippians, but it seems everyone has been doing it. Would I be a bandwagoner if I jumped in on it too? Probably not, given my circumstances, but it's still something that will need to be addressed. James is another book that has popped up as well, so I'm glad I have options.

So there's some really introductory and surface level thoughts on my current philosophy of ministry. The philosophy will never really change too much. I think it'll just bring upon seasons where certain points of the philosophy will be emphasized more than others.

I'm thankful for my life these days. I'm glad that I've really been finding joy in doing the things I do because of the foundation I've been fortunate to build. This is not to say that everything is working out, but I'm able to face everything with joy, and that's really all I need. There's still a lot of adjustments I need to make personally, but I'm slowly getting there. The best part is when I catch myself pausing in conversation because I need to translate something in my mind so I can say it in Chinese. It's awesome the grace I get from these people who understand that Chinese isn't my go to language, so I'm a little slow when it comes to interacting with people when I have to use the language.

My church really is a small and faithful family that's been committed for decades, and my heart burns for their ability to grow and continue in what will begin as the next chapter of this thing we call church in 2016.