A minister can face a great temptation to aim for the director's "post and position" leading to the ultimate fall of the call.
Missions
Ministries are doing a wonderful job,
reaching the unreachable and touching the untouchable. In the earlier days, hospitals cared for
patients unequivocally, schools gave the best education at low costs, and
missionaries served with love, everything was standardly the best. Yet over the
years, there is a shift of priorities.
Missions is not the same, the excellent education system has dropped,
hospital care is careless, rough and unconcerned and other aspects of ministry have
people placed in positions where they lord it over the others in "lower
positions" in a very crude manner.
It is of critical importance that anyone placed in authority in ministry
should have a servant-heart of love and not a leadership rule in a rigmarole
manner.
As I wrote earlier in "The Perfect
Pastor", "We are living in a time where we have too many
Leadership Conferences, but no Servant-hood Conferences. Jesus taught His disciples to be servants. He never
mentioned the word "leader", not once. Our best leader is the
Holy Spirit, when we are obeying the Word and obeying Christ by faith."
Frogs in Teacups
A frog is an amphibian who thinks the world of
himself. He lives in a well and thinks
that this is the great big world. A frog
has the capacity to swell up with pride, allegorically speaking, and burst with
pride into smithereens of nothing. A
teacup is what Jesus called people whose lives looked clean on the outside but
unclean in the inside. This is the
syndrome of people in position, who swell up in pride, living in a teacup
thinking this is the world, that their little world is the whole world.
Over the passage of
time, we see those in authority hurting different people in
"lower positions" to break their spiritual capacity and tying them in
chains of spiritual abuse.
The bottom-line is pride is taking ministries
to teacups, where their spiritual wings are clipped. Those ministries will never fly in spiritual
heights and eventually learn to fly on broomsticks to hurt others allegorically speaking! The blessings cannot be poured down from Heaven to touch and
transform nations because of leadership pride.
Ministry Myths
We have some myths while in ministry. We are living under the spell of many myths in
ministry as given below
We think we are serving the Lord: As ministries grow, the needs increase. They desperately need workers. Not many people can work under the difficult
diversities of requirements, working very long hours and because it is
ministry, a nonprofit organization, workers are not paid much, and work long
hours, but one never complains because they all feel they are doing it for the
Lord, so of course, one never complains about the money. The directors keep saying saying,"We are doing it for the Lord, but
actually, doing it for themselves. If
ministry is keeping a person always on a tightrope to meet the needs and growth
of the ministry and stealing away peace and joy, then something has to be
re-examined again. We are desperately on
a very wrong track.
Over the years, many workers feel like a “hit
and run” case? Beside
ministries, this can also apply to a mega church, which is getting very big and
the church staff are tired and beaten down with dark circles around their eyes
We think our Leaders Can Never Fall: The
ambitions of a church or Christian organization leader can lead to dangerous
precipitous bends in a road. The leaders want to go at breakneck speed ahead, but the helpers in the ministry cannot keep up and go crashing
down at these bends. Some helpers in ministry literally burn
out, die out, some become crippled in the mind, others bitter. The truth is, they did what they were told,
not by God but by a man who pulled the strings in their lives. Very often, more than not, the church leaders
gets into a rushed brushed schedule, flying in and out of states and even
countries, relying more on the energy
of the flesh, their influence, their power, their connections, and the
adoration of their flock, if they have a mega church. God is pictured in their subconscious mind as
somewhere in the sky mildly looking on.
They feel they have curried divine favor with God and have no one to
answer to, living this lie in a delusional way. Ministers can fall into temptations living on this energetic arm of the flesh and that fall hurts hundreds to thousands of others.
We think we are always on the right track
because we are serving God: Since we are in ministry, we already feel we are serving the Lord, so we are in the perfect will of God. But ministries can
lose their sense of direction and purpose.
As ministries grow, they lose a personal touch and become impersonal,
cold, and forget the core of why they started in the first place. They are trying to do good, but the system
itself fails due to the man-made mammoth ministries, relying very little on the
Holy Spirit, one cannot pour out love unless we have the Holy Spirit shed
abroad His love, only then can we minister.
Unfortunately, I have rarely seen that love in ministries, I have seen
it more with people loving and serving God in whatever they are doing. I know of children who were molested in a
childrens home, people who were spiritually abused by leaders as they had a
hold over their lives and made them feel if they did not listen to them, they were
rejecting the voice of God Himself. This
happens often simply because as ministries grow, it is difficult to
monitor the dark undercurrents, the demonic activity is greater and leaders get
delusional. Arrogance spits out of
them. A poor soul has to have a prior
appointment to meet them, even if the leaders are free. No one ever saw Jesus sitting in an office,
meeting people by appointment. Each day
gave Him the grace to take on what was needed to be done. Yes, sometimes one is tired, or has a lot of
work, and has a right to rest or say no, but not by practice and habit as is
the trend of the times. This is why the
structure of these ministries was not our Lord's original plan in the first
place. He knows the hearts of man and the pride and arrogance and even
the complex immoral sins that occur in such set ups. It was never His idea.
Missing Link with Ministry and the Holy Spirit: The cause of this system is the missing link
of the ministry/church and the Holy Spirit.
Love has to first spill out to the people through the Holy Spirit. We cannot love with our own love, we do not
have it in us. We cannot do it. We have to depend on the Holy Spirit, moment
by moment, day by day. At first it seems
impossible, but the more we commune and talk with God, the easier it will
become. God will make the roads, the
inroads, God will make a way and He will make, create something new and
wonderful and make pathways for people who walk and talk to Him and obey
Him. Then the people in ministry and the
church will become powerful on Earth, equipped empowered, having the power to
transform and deliver people and help the orphans, the homeless, and addicts,
the hopeless, depressed and weary. The
church stopped believing many things, so Christian NGOs and ministries stepped
in and made organizations and tried to help people, they did a remarkable work,
but along the way, tripped and fell because the ministry rope was very
entangling and had a web of complexities that went with the package. It could never be “keep it simple.”. It could never run that way.
Since ministries are on the go and they cannot
just stop, they should aim at being small, personal, give the helpers the
liberty to choose the area they feel called into. A leader should never aim for an office or a
chair and want the "post" of a director with an iron rod rule. He is finished as a man of God once that
happens, he can never function as a pure-hearted child of God and a servant to
the people. “Pride goes
before a fall”. The love of
position never fails to whet the carnal appetite of a human.
Today, many help ministries are functioning like corporate companies. The entrapment of such establishments can bring more harm than good if they lose the Presence and Heart of Christ.
Today, many help ministries are functioning like corporate companies. The entrapment of such establishments can bring more harm than good if they lose the Presence and Heart of Christ.
The aim of this article is not to criticize and
run-down Christian organizations and mega churches, but to awaken in us a need
that we cannot do it on our own. We need
to ask the Helper, the Holy Spirit, daily to help us, to flood us. It is not a onetime event, but living waters we needs constantly, daily bread we need to eat. We then can love one another and reach out
and help the needy, only with the power of the Holy Spirit. We cannot reach out to the needy until our
own cup is full and running over. Only
the Holy Spirit can do that for us. We
have such a Great Gift, may we learn to value this.
Rita Farhat Kurian
Email Us For Prayer!
You can send E-mail for prayer requests and also urgent prayer and will pass this on to the prayer group in Siliguri of Elder Richard Tamang's so do send in your prayer requests! We will all pray!
Email: ritafarhatkurian@gmail.com
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