By Ps Ho Wei Liang
As busy and performance-oriented Singaporeans, our focus is often on the tasks we must accomplish. Sometimes we bring that mentality into our church ministries. Yes, the tasks are necessary and important, but let us bear in mind that they are not the end goal.
Remember, we are serving the church. We serve with our time, talents and gifts so we may all be instruments of God’s grace to build up the church. The Bible tells us that we are not just a community. The spiritual metaphor Paul uses in Ephesians 4:11-16 is that we are one body in Christ. And we are to build up the spiritual body of Christ in love.
Sometimes, we are so engrossed in ministry tasks that a gap appears between the tasks and the people we are called to serve. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves, “How does my ministry build up the body of Christ?”
I am not saying that normal things cannot be spiritual, or spiritual things are not mundane physical tasks. Spiritual things exist in the mundane tasks. Look at the same thing, but through a different lens—spiritual lenses. Some of us may be more used to looking at mundane things with spiritual lens than others. After all, we are at various stages of our faith journey and we have very different starting points and backgrounds to begin with.
We are here, called to equip the saints and to build up the church. I think having the right lenses on makes a world of difference. We will begin to ask the right questions, see what our goal is, and understand how the physical task is not the whole, but a means to the end goal. Then it becomes evident that the people matter, how we do it matters, the little words sprinkled here and there matter. We will realise that how we serve is through our interactions with people to influence them toward Christ and for Christ. Our Bible study and fellowship sessions are the platforms for common time together so we may speak the truth in love to one another for mutual edification.
In this way, we see that all forms of ministry need to be relational; they cannot be solely task-oriented.