Let me be the first to say that I admire young people who want to passionately engage in winning souls for Christ. As your older sister (not that old!), I love your energy and desire to see the work of God grow. There does seem to be some confusion about what it means to “minister” or “have a ministry”. I am seeing this over and over, and finally I think I have worked out how to express my thoughts on the matter.
Above all I want you to know that my heart is for the church, and by that I mean the organization, the community and concept that if we do not teach, support and empower Christians as they grow, we will lose souls along the way. This hurts me. We need people who are properly educated in the Word to teach and be able to answer questions. We need mentorship to take those words and turn them into actions especially when the going gets rough. And when its time for the mature Christian to mentor others, or to share the gospel among friends, family and strangers, we need to accompany them in the process so that they become good solid leaders. The goal of this website is to offer wisdom and experience to the first two groups at the same time modelling to the mature group possible approaches to outreach. I’m not writing this to complain. I want to see the church restored and functioning because people need the Lord.
There seem to be two camps of young people moving into ministry. Either they are fresh from finishing a degree in seminary and expect that a job offer for a church will fall from the sky or they have an aversion to reading, and focus their efforts on sharing their experiences of God, in hopes that everything relies on them interpreting encounters through experience. These attitudes are accompanied by a lack of experience and maturity (and I don’t mean spiritual!). It’s the kind of world where anyone can make up a School of Ministry, and charge money to help people acquire credibility. Especially if new Christians enroll, the experience can be confusing and if there is no context (meaning, if that new Christian does not have a church that they regularly attend and Christian people who are interacting with him/her regularly). It may cause their spiritual gifts to shoot up quickly, but since they are not rooted, when basic trouble hits they get weeded out quickly and their very salvation is put in jeopardy.
Recently I saw an episode of Dr. Phil where an older woman who had adult children was facing an intervention by Phil and the family. She was convinced she was prophetic and accused her family of not being supportive so she had to cut them off. Within minutes of bringing everyone on stage, the woman became belligerent and very immature. Her behaviour revealed that she still has a lot of growing to do as a Christian but also as a person. I was so sad for her because she was convinced that official prophetic people validated her “gifts”.
I love prophecy and found this entire episode disturbing, mostly because I could see how it happens. I meet people too, who will talk to me because they perceive that I can offer them something supernatural, but the moment I start asking questions about their relationship with God, they realize it won’t be as easy to get me to employ my gifts as others they have met. My goal in asking is that I want to know your evaluation of your walk with God so I can ask the Holy Spirit what He would like to do next.
Spiritual gifts are hard to explain to the average person. Either you get people who have great faith or next to none. Then of those who have great faith you have the ones who understand the Source of the gift and are in relationship with Him, and you have a portion who are following people and fortune telling. For this reason, many churches do not want to engage in prophetic ministry among other gifts.
I am deeply concerned about some of these school of ministry events that are popping up. Sis, if you feel that God is telling you to go, or even if you just want to go, then go, but please be careful. When you hear something that you don’t understand, write it down, pray on it, and talk to someone you trust when you get home. Don’t be caught up into massive fundraising (African church, I am looking at you o!) just because you are looking for SOMETHING.
(I’m half joking with the African comment - I have sown at times big amounts into those same ministries. The difference is that I have cultivated an intimacy with God where I know when He is asking me to sow. But it’s good for us all to remember when people are in a desperate place, taking advantage of their state is not wise. Someone will want to argue with me that you have to give in order to get out of the valley. Chaley, put it in the comments and we will go for it.)
If a school of ministry asks you to participate in a political demonstration in effort to show visible support of Christian values, I believe that’s inappropriate. It’s not fair to the individuals or the faith. Protesting is a choice to use your body in a way that takes away from its privacy and loans itself to mass group. I worry about the message that sends. I do believe that there are Christians who are called to participate in political action, but I don’t believe the way to do achieve that is to use people who have paid money to attend your school. It would be far better to take a neutral approach of informing your students so they can make decisions about their own beliefs.
These schools often promise to teach you how to use your spiritual gifts. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I am concerned when the leadership of the school does not collect detailed information about the participants. I have attended week-long schools of ministry, and they have been wonderful experiences. What you may not know is that whatever spiritual gift is activated during that time will most likely function because of the leader’s gifting. Let me explain.
I want you to think of a spiritual gift as match without a matchbook or flint. In your life, you may have by accident struck this match and experienced it in part, but most likely, you are not sure what you did to get it going, and sometimes, your hands get burned.
When you attend a school of ministry, the leader gives you a match book, and a manual about fire safety. Then, s/he and sometimes the team of people who are leading, open an umbrella over you. Under the umbrella, they create a safe space where everyone can now try to light their match and see what its like. If I could use another analogy, it’s like driving in the parking lot. Chances are you won’t hit anything, and people are on hand to help you learn how to drive.
Operating in the spiritual realm is different when the umbrella is open as opposed to when it’s not. When you get home, it is possible that the same technique will not work to light the match. More importantly, you may have things in your life (spiritual bondage) that was just hanging around, and now that you are trying to affect the spiritual atmosphere, this thing can turn against you and start to create disruption (nightmares, fear, confusion for example). On the other hand, this bondage may try to use your gift for its own purpose. When this happens, the source is contaminated and the individual may be convinced that God is using their gift when in fact, it is the enemy of our souls.
Schools of ministry should not be opening people up in this way without first checking to see who is in the room and assess what kind of spiritual baggage they might be carrying. The umbrella is powerful, but it does not address the fact that there are many Christian leaders who are too “encounters” based and lack discernment. Discernment is the gift of being able to detect the source of supernatural and natural activity. All ministry teams need discerners, people who can be the eyes and ears of Holy Spirit at critical times. When we encounter things that are not right, it is our job to fix it. We have to inform the participant that there is something they need to follow up on with their pastor. It’s not okay to just walk away.
I would never pray for deliverance over someone I don’t know. I can pray for that person to be healed, for the oppression to stop, for protection and for intervention, but if deliverance is in order I want to make sure that I use my gift appropriately, because I’m doing this for God and this is one of His babies. His opinion is all that matters.
My other caution to schools of ministry is that too many I see these days are grossly imbalanced between theology and practice. If they build that spiritual component but don’t support that person’s theological growth then all that is being taught is how to drive with a damaged and dirty windshield.
Once the school of ministry is over, is there any follow up? Do you only receive updates and more advertising of future events? I want to be really clear here. I think it’s wonderful that there are some people who do this full time and rely on it financially, but I am also very skeptical of methods that leave people who have paid and trust you on their own after you’ve “activated” them.
If a participant does the school so they can be an authority, but they don’t have a pastor or worse, they have such attitude that they can’t make it work with any church, then nothing good has happened. One of the beautiful things about church is even when you’re angry at the people who are there, you still have to go and figure out how to love them through their hard parts. Without love, all those spiritual gifts are just clanging cymbals.
Leaders- do you follow up with the individuals and find out what it is they are doing with the anointing you imparted and where are they needing more support? The framework of ministry that is popular in 2019 is “hands free”. You want people to show up and people to give, people to demonstrate and people to testify but you don’t want to deal with the parts of community that make abiding difficult. A lot can be learned from going through the process of disagreeing with a parishioner, agreeing to love them anyway and then living with them while you and they are still not comfortable. That person is learning how to submit when they didn’t get their way and you are realizing how to hold the bridle without breaking the horse.
Horse power can work for you or against you. Too many save their charisma for the cameras but let me say this, the people you minister to should love you and you should be the kind of leader that knows how to cultivate and tend to that love. I say this realizing that it is difficult to balance that with loving your family too, but also, this is what you signed up for. You may actively need someone to coach you in how to do this properly- there is no shame in that. The question is, can your pride stand to have that coach give you feedback on your performance? No one wants to be operated on by a surgeon who out of practice. In a similar way, it is your responsibility to the people who come to you for ministry to be teachable and to handle them with care. When leaders are lacking in this area, they end up burned out. They become defensive and their lives can be ship wrecked in the sense that they don’t know how to get back to where they were.
Back to my sisters- I believe that God wants you to be aware that He has created each of you with a unique design that broke the mould. There is no other person who is just like you! And you are full of treasures and gifts that will also take a lifetime to discover. You don’t need to rush this process. I encourage you to take Peter C. Wagner’s Spiritual Gifts Inventory when you think you’re ready for something more. But first and foremost is to cultivate love and relationship with Christ. No school of ministry can sell you tools that will expedite this process and the truth is, that’s not what you want. Enjoy loving God and getting to know Him. Let that be your focus. Explore what He has for you, and involve your Christian family in this too. It is more important for me that you get a good Christian family that you are anchored in than you become an evangelist because eventually when you are tired and worn down, it is your brethren who will pray with you and restore you.
If you read something here, and it struck a chord, do me a favour and send this to someone else.
