That is bad news in a doctor’s appointment but for many churches, if half the members were involved in ministry it would be a miracle.
The church is a body and bodies are made to work. They are made to move and function in an integrated and self-dependent way. Bodies are autonomous to others bodes but they are not internally autonomous. They require coordination and mutual exertion by the other members to operate optimally.
They say the magic number is 20%. If 20% of the church “gets it” you can change the entire congregational culture and momentum. 20% is sufficient but 100% is the ideal.
The only way this happens is by creating high expectations. Communicate that people must be involved and how to get involved. Create a non-organized-ministry-based culture where people aren’t waiting on a ministry to offer them an involvement slot, rather, they are going out into the world to involve themselves in whoever or whatever they encounter in the name of Jesus.
Let’s not be church bodies with hearts half dead. Let’s be church bodies that are fully alive.
2 Responses
Sadly, momentum can be stopped with just 1 vote of “no” so you have to make sure that you have no opposition. That said, please don’t forbid ordinary people from getting involved. I have seen it when certain people just weren’t wanted in any ministry. Sometimes a different opinion on just one matter was enough to get them booted.
If we are talking the whole of churchdom, then the church is the body, as the body is made of members, but if we are talking about a church, then we are talking those of the body in a location and not the whole. What happens is that people flock with others like them and many times there are many hands, but few feet in a local congregation and also we train our local congregations like this as well. We want many servants, but to do local things, but we don’t want people moving beyond the local. In the early days, they had no local membership, but they had membership in Christ, so they were free range Christians affecting those around them, even as they affected those with them. Local congregations are inefficient, because they were never supposed to be efficient, they were supposed to be about love and edification towards one another. The love of Christ though was to travel to the world as the people moved through it.