If you had a thing that was really important, would you give it to your ministry team?

Objectively:

If you had a really important message to share, an idea to promote, or a story to spread, would you give it to your ministry team?

There are other options you know.

You could get the important politician that your uncle knows to talk about it and write some letters.

You could start up a non-profit and put people on the board who could really get things done.

The clout of the head guy at the church is important.
If you could win her over to make an announcement and hold up your thing and talk about it, that would really get things going.  And of course, the piece de resistance: talking about it in the sermon. (Poignant.)

You could do a whole social media thing and get some viral buzz with You Tube uploads, facebook groups and pages, and take a look at google ad pages.

But asking a ministry team to take it on.

Even your ministry team?

It would be slow and maybe nobody would really get it and maybe it wouldn't even fit into the plan.

So unless it was just a nice little idea and not that important to you, neither one of us would give it to your ministry team.

Unless ministry was important to you.

So your ministry leader thinks he's a chicken: How badly do you need the eggs?

A man walks into a psychiatrist's office and says his brother has gone crazy.

"He thinks he is a chicken," the man tells the psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist asks the man if he has told his brother that he is not a chicken.

"I would," replies the man, "but we need the eggs."

There is a chance that you colleague, ministry lay leader, program participant, and even your self is, well, crazy.

Deluded.

Personality disordered.

Misguided theologically.

Selfish.

Passive agressive.

And so now what?

Can you really have that honest conversation and get everything out there on the table and find a place of wholeness and healing?

How badly do you need the eggs.

In any given situation, that is a determination you have to make.

And only you can make it.

You can get lots of input and feed back and suggestions.

But if the hours upon hours of devoted time put in working on planning the event (even though it's completely for reasons contradictory to why you are involved) are necessary to the success of the ministry, are you going to call a chicken a chicken?

What do you think you are?

Long term relationships develop from singular encounters

If your goal is to develop relationships through the mission and ministry of your organization, you might get caught up in evaluating your efforts based on how many people involved "stay in touch" in the years following the event.

That's probably OK, but we shouldn't discount the long term nature of relationships that can develop after one and only one encounter.

Someone that you meet may have an impact on your life and your faith if you are attuned to other people and their stories.  If you are ready and willing to take these experiences to heart, you may develop a mystical long term relationship without exchanging an email address or finding them on facebook.

It would be no doubt really cool to have the mission team get together for a meal and have a conference call with the group that they worked with in Costa Rica several months after the trip.

The youth group that looks forward to the annual trip to Appalachia because they will get to see the progress of their peer group working through the growing local church in its own ministry outreach is a great outcome.

But it may serve as well to go in hoping for an encounter between two people who haven't seen each other before and won't probably see each other again.  If these two people or two groups of people share something about how they live or why they believe something that they believe, that may be enough.

"How do you overcome tragedy.  How do you live in tragedy?  This is how I do it.  Maybe you'll remember this the next time you experience tragedy."

Maybe once that happens, everything else will fall into place.

Long term relationships can happen in a singular instant.

Cop out?

The success of your group might be spelled ism

What makes a ministry team or a small group worth being a member of is its purpose.  The reason the group exists is what will attract new members and retain the existing ones through the travails of mediocrity and the mundane.

And that mission or purpose or reason for existence might be defined by what the members believe.

My belief is what attracts me to you.  The group's collective beliefs are what define it and keep it going.

Whether or not I decide to join or give up my time to be a part of the project has to do with what I believe and how well I see that fitting into the overall purpose of the group.

The best groups I have been a part of are the ones that allow me to articulate what I believe and hold those ideas up to the beliefs of others.  We can then begin to understand and eventually trust and and in the rarest of occasions love one another for who we are and what we individually believe and why.

On the other hand, the most life sucking self defeating groups are the ones comprised of people who seem bent on making sure that everybody believes pretty much what the other members of the group believe.

Believism is the idea that what I believe is so important and correct that you and anybody else who comes into my sphere should believe it too.

The group gets together to reaffirm that what it believes is right and that people who don't believe what it and its members believe are wrong.

There doesn't seem to be much trust or understanding on display at these group meetings.

Another casualty of adding ism to what you and your group believe is love.

But that's just me.  Not everyone has to believe that.