In my senior year of college, it dawned on me for the first time to look up the meaning of the word ministry. For years, I had been “doing ministry” – an activity. I had been “part of a ministry” – a group. I said sermons “really ministered to me” when I got the warm-fuzzies or heart-rending conviction. But what did the word mean, originally? What were its origins?
The answer I discovered was beautiful; ministry in the original Greek does not mean “to give rest,” nor does it mean “to serve,” nor any of the other definitions guessed at by my peers. It means: “To stir up” or “to stir up dust.” This means ministry is about engagement.
My view of ministry has been particularly shaped by John Piper’s Let the Nations be Glad, Makoto Fujimura’s Silence and Beauty, and, perhaps surprisingly, the fiction work, Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann. Together, these books and countless others have led me to this: Ministry is beholding God and stirring up culture towards worship.
Beholding God is perhaps an archaic turn of phrase, but it articulates well that process of drinking God in and delighting in Him. Beholding God is the essence of worship; this is the crucial “fuel” of ministry; “[W]e simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory... When the flame of worship burns with the heat of God’s true worth, the light of missions will shine to the most remote peoples on earth” (Piper 11).
But beholding God’s presence requires seeking Him out, and I believe ministry “stirs up the dust” of creation to do so. McCann writes of a character who wanted “a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday… [so that] in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness, he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same” (McCann 20). Jesus spoke in parables, building into our relationship the necessity to pursue him in the hidden and ordinary. Why would he do so? “Deep communication can only take place through a path of vulnerability… [Then] Beauty is [given]” (Fujimura 133).
Culture is aptly named after cultivation, a word that evokes images of “stirring up.” To minister requires stirring up the seeds of such Beauty in that “dust” of real places and people. “The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own” (McCann 275). Let the Great World Spin does so in the streets of Dublin and New York City, in prostitutes and ordinary men and a tightrope-walker. Silence and Beauty does so in the long history and artworks of Japan. Together, these books remind me that “[God’s] true greatness will be manifest in the breadth of the diversity of those who perceive and cherish his beauty” (Piper 216).
Often, when Christianity attempts to divorce itself from culture or form a sub-culture, “Communication of the good news is a consumer-driven, mall-like experience that plays to people’s escapist fantasies… [Art] on the other hand [may] allow our souls to be transformed” (Fujimura 167). He describes how art is comparable to what St. Paul calls “the aroma of Christ,” and how to those who are being saved, certain artworks are “representations of the city of God descending on the city of humans… paths leading into the culture of the floating world of enchantment” (Fujimura 160). Thus ministry stirring up culture is part of “the greatest movement in history” (Piper 223) towards “the gladness of the peoples in the greatness of God” (Piper 11). This “city of God” might be viewed as McCann’s protagonist views New York City: “It struck me,” he muses, pondering the skyline, “that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from” (McCann 59). Our current culture, and especially the arts, to me, can serve as the answer to the minister’s prayer: “Your kingdom come… on earth as it is in heaven.” As we look to heaven, we see this earth we come from with greater clarity as well.
Beholding God in culture and leading culture towards God; stirring up worship by worship; these are lofty ideas, but these books have formed me to practice them by His grace. They are extremely different from each other, but together, they work ministry in me.
Works Cited
Fujimura, Makoto. Silence and Beauty. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2016. Print.
McCann, Colum. Let The Great World Spin: a Novel. New York, NY: Random House, 2009. Print.
Piper, John. Let the Nations be Glad!: the Supremacy of God in Missions. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books 1993. Print.
