God of the impossible

Christian ministry is essentially impossible.

We could develop that thought in several directions. But let's go with just one. Once we become meaningfully involved in peoples' lives; once, like Paul (and more importantly, his Master) we learn to serve not just "up front", "in public", but also from "house-to-house", we meet with certain realities. We meet with the impossible situations of peoples' lives, and the mess that sin (whether theirs or someone else's) makes of them. We come up against the labyrinthine maze of false teachings, false ideas and false understandings that have been blended together with fragments of truth in people's minds, and the difficulty of untying those knots. We see how many things are working against them, at so many levels.

How much easier just to re-configure Christian ministry as primarily an attempt to fill sanctuaries with listeners, run an efficient system of small groups, sell books, increase the numbers of podcast listeners,  appear at conferences, etcetera and etcetera. All the messiness of the lives of actual human beings recedes comfortably back into the distance. It remains at arm's length, and does not bother us with its messiness beyond the theoretical level of dispensing with wise ideas for others to look into implementing. Christian ministry then, instead of being impossible, becomes possible. We can do it, we can measure it, we can compare ourselves with others, and we can come out of it feeling pretty good (about ourselves).

It's a lot more comfortable to remain in the zone where we're doing things that we're capable of. But in actual Christian ministry, John 15:5, without the presence of Jesus, we can do nothing. And what is the point of Christian ministry which is not actual Christian ministry? Let us embrace the fact that our work is impossible, and throw ourselves out in faith into where we can only see blessing if the God of the impossible meets us there.