According to The Trellis and The Vine, ministry is a requisite for any Christian to be acceptable to God.  No ministry to demonstrate, no rewards in the life to come.  In my last post on this book, I mentioned how the authors used that horrid phrase, “growing new work”.  That means basically if you’re a Christian who’s not working at growing the Kingdom, you’re wasting space, using up resources, and sticking in everyone’s craw.  What’s the message?  Get to work and become a productive member of society because if you aren’t doing work then you’re supposed to be growing it like a hydrangea shrub with steroids, fertiliser, stem cells, and anything else you can lay your hands on.

TATV went a step further with this doctrine on p. 41:  “This means that the two fundamental activities of Christian ministry are proclaiming (speaking the Word) and praying (calling upon God to pour out His Spirit to make the word effective in people’s hearts”.  It made me wonder: what about practising what they preach?  Isn’t that a core fundamental to Christian ministry?  Godly example?  After all, people copy what they see, not necessarily what they’re told.  This is a Monkey-See-Monkey-Do universe, not Monkey-Hear/Read-Monkey-Do.  This really hits the road when some folk hear sermon after sermon after sermon and still don’t have Christ in their hearts and are still living in sin.  They’re hearts are still distanced from God and they cannot adore or worship Him with fullness of heart because noone’s demonstrated Christ to them.  They’ve gone to church and having been pigeon-holed as THAT guy with THAT problem and been passed around from one person to another like a hot coal, they lose any hope that anyone has the time for them.  They fall through the cracks because nobody wants them and while countless 0thers have promised to follow them up and model Christ to them and they leave church, never wanting to know Jesus or go to a church again.  Eventually they get forgotten and if someone does remember them, the conversation at church will be, “Whatever happened to that guy Robert, the one who was doing it tough with a Muslim wife?”  “Dunno, actually.  Pete was meant to be following him up but I guess it never happened. *tut tut* Oh well, I guess he’s lost now; it happens all the time, eh?  I guess he was never one of us”.  D.A. Carson is purported to have once offered a non-Christian the opportunity to live in his house for a month in order to show him what it means to live as a Christian; and that’s a great example to follow.  I’ve never heard of a pastor here in Australia ever offering to do that.

A Christian is someone who does what they say: they practise what they preach before they preach what they practise.  They model Christ and they may never need to explain their faith in words because they’re actions will likely speak for themselves.  They’re real about their weaknesses and brokenness and don’t act like the ‘solid’ Christians that churches revere as splendid examples of holy obedience.  Those are the people that make Jesus real and attractive and Magnificent.