Do you have a Sunday job fulfilling and enabling someone else’s ministry vision? Sunday jobs we call ministry are very often impatient abandonment of true spiritual callings.
When we first become a Christian there is no problem in doing blindly what we are trained to do. But then we mature and grow up! If we will allow it.
True callings are only brought about and fulfilled by a free and open community of Jesus-seekers. Communities where people are equal, who share life together …and not just communities who put on weekend sermon events. An organization without hierarchy, without one-way relationships, no celebrities here, no guilt trips, no striving for the attention of the great man in charge. No building up of status and credit in the hierarchy and with the man, for time served.
Pastor-seeking and pastor-centered organizations (which seems to be all most Christians want) and which have custom roles for people to fill like Sunday jobs. Jobs which relieve guilt, or fulfill obligations that are artificially placed upon us by those more ambitious and more influential (obligations which are NOT from the Lord).
These Sunday jobs are an abandonment of our true, collective and individual spiritual ministry and callings.
“Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter (not of obligation, not of guilt trips, not of fitting in, to some organization) but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
2 Corinthians 3:5-6
The nature of Christian ministry is not self-help advice-giving by those with speaking or leadership skills. It is not even a ministry primarily in filling heaven. Our ministry is a ministry of a new covenant and as we gather and sharpen one another, come to know the mind of Christ together. We are together made into ministers of the new covenant between humanity and our creator.
Serving in Sunday jobs might get us a social life, at best, but a social life is not important compared to pleasing Jesus and fulfilling our callings.
Sunday-job ministry attitudes kill real spiritual ministry and spiritual lives, if we allow them to. This hurts the Lord’s place in the earth, and it hurts those who otherwise the Lord might touch through us.
We feel idle and get impatient and disempowered, compared to those on stage. We question within “we’ll I got to do something… right?”
Instead just seek, just respond in obedience, just gather with Jesus followers. He will take it from there. He really will.
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