Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Describing Your "Ministers"

When you begin to read the Bible regularly, you will also begin a period of reorienting your mind in so many areas of life. For example, it's one thing to say you believe in "every member ministry," but it's another thing to absorb it and reflect it in the way you speak and even in the way you might describe "ministry" on your church's website. Since I'm not a pastor, I might be getting out of my lane here, but for a minute this morning I imagined I was writing the text of an imaginary church's web page called "Our Ministers." (Churches also call this "Our Team," "Our Leadership," "Our Elders," etc.) Let's imagine you've come to our imaginary church website (let's call ourselves Piedmont Bible Church) and wanted to know something about who our leaders are. You see a link ("Our Ministers"), click on it, and read the following. (Mind you, this is not from an actual webpage. I'm just making this up.)

Our Ministers
The New Testament teaches that Christian ministry is entrusted to the whole church (Eph. 4:11-12). It is the task of every follower of Jesus to carry out works of service for the praise of God and the benefit of all. All believers and the whole church are the clergy of God. Under no circumstance do we consider the elders listed below to be the only "ministers" at PBC. They do not form a special rank or caste in the church. They are selected and appointed for the purpose of "equipping" all God's people for works of service. Each of our elders is a servus servorum Dei who understands himself as a servant of servants, a minister of ministers. Their place is not above but below the saints who are not adorned by special titles. In short, it is the entire body of believers at PBC who must do the work of the ministry, equipped and guided by gifted men who are able to teach and apply the Scriptures in such a way that every member discovers and begins to exercise the gift or gifts the Holy Spirit has given them. 
Of course, you'd probably write this differently, and that's okay. (For example, you don't have to keep the Latin!) 

Bless you, my friend!