Reflections on Ministry

rick posted on May 26, 2009

“Reflections on Ministry” by Rick McKinley

1 am on Sunday night and I am enjoying God, and some nice nebbiolo and felt compelled to share with you what I am learning and if it is of no use, totally disregard it, but this is what God is teaching me in ministry I suppose. There were six things that stuck out to me upon realizing that I am a much more dissatisfied person than the average unbeliever because God put in me a taste of heaven and grace that is so real and so acute that I find myself grieving over much of life that I see being lived in me and around me knowing how far it pales in comparison to what I have tasted this far of heaven. Most of what I have learned about ministry has avoided this truth or created a ministry philosophy that tried to work around it leaving me to feel like a nut job, but I do believe after twenty years of following Jesus and ministry that this is true, as a result of that I have listed six ramifications that I think come from this truth.

1. The subversiveness of love is the primary work of the pastor: To be in private love, adoration and worship of Jesus and to see and understand yourself as a person planted in your particular soil by God to display his love to others, that they would feel not your love but Jesus’. They would know through interacting with you what Jesus thinks about them, this is the highest calling.

2. The art of unbusyness and unneccesariness is essential to the being available to God. There is disaster awaiting the one who gets bogged down with doing good, and not dwelling in the excellent. It is our job to pay attention to God and life and to help  others to do the same, this is the heart of the work as pastor. I am not suggesting that this means that we don’t do our work or have work to do. We have a lot of work to do, but what I am saying is that many times we exchange important things for urgent things and the important things never get addressed. The importance of paying attention to God can not get pushed out for the urgent things that distract us from Him.  We must stand before a distracted world, congregation and fellow pastors and help them all pay attention to God.

3. Theological and biblical inquiry is essential to discovering the depth and Glory of Jesus. This is essential and important to the holistic office of pastor and yet this very thing will be the first thing you abandon for trivial busyness. Fight it off with all your are, so you may gain Christ and be every growing in him.

4. Though the experiences of Christ and the Spirit may be ever satisfying, and the word be life giving, the blessings of family and the fruit of ministry be ever present, the longing for heaven and the violent reality of its absence will leave you with a broken heart that will express itself in and empty and sour stomach feeling. Upon feeling this you will very much be tempted to think your doing ministry wrong and want to seek someone/something/some success or affirmation that will take away this feeling. For most pastors you will flee from this feeling through seeking a more successful position. Don’t do it though. It is in this emptiness created by the absence of heaven and this utter dissatisfaction with life apart from heaven, that will keep your lamp lit for Jesus, it will place the gospel ring of truth in your preaching that can’t come about any other way. His true work within you is right here in this place, and it is your half broken heart that allows you to have the burning in your bones of Jeremiah, the passion to weep in the Garden with Jesus and the courage to stand with Paul before an opposing congregation and preach Christ crucified as the power and wisdom of God. It is this knot in our stomach that will keep you an honest preacher in a sea of compromised men.

5. If you want to be a pastor you must learn obedience through suffering just as Jesus did, (Heb 2:10-18, 5:8-10). If Jesus in his humanity needed to learn obedience through suffering then how much more do we need to learn it, as mere men? And how much more those whom God has given us to lead? If Jesus needed to learn obedience through suffering, how much more those of us who lead God’s people? And we must learn obedience this way so we can, with authenticity, declare his beauty and sufficiency to those who we lead, because they will also suffer in this world and we want their faith to prevail.

6. It is the primary objective of my faith and ministry to apprehend such a vision and faith in Jesus, as revealed by his Spirit through the Scripture, that I would follow him not only in his life but also in his death. I would hope that I would die in such a state of faith that I could lay down my life and dismiss my spirit into the hands of the one who appointed my very moment of death, just as Christ dismissed his spirit and entrusted his life into the hands of the Father before me. My aim is that I can do so with full confidence that the one who appointed my death and subsequent judgment is gracious and merciful and good and will lovingly accept my spirit and resurrect my body on His day. I aim to believe this with such conviction that I could encourage and lead my people in such a faith for their day when they will suffer their own death and by grace do so in faith.

That’s my six lessons learned from the truth that nebbiolo tastes great but can not quench my thirst for the new wine of heaven and my dissatisfaction with life until he comes.