Discipleship #15 - What is Ministry?

It is not performance, not a platform, and not really what we do at all. Ministry is participation in God's life—a life poured out in love. Ministry is the act of bearing God’s presence into the lives of others. It is the slow, patient healing work through love, word, silence, and presence. And before it is ever ours, ministry is God's.

God is the first and eternal Minister.

An older phrase for ministry is “the cure of souls.” It is not management or mechanics, but the mysterious, personal tending of lives—lives that are wounded, wandering, waiting. God does not minister to us like a technician tweaking a system. He ministers like a shepherd who calls us by name, like a friend who sits beside us in our pain. Ministry begins, therefore, not in what we do for Him, but in what He does for us.

This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Theologian Eleanor Stump describes divine love as “second-personal”—not distant or detached, but relational and enfleshed. Jesus does not heal from a distance; he enters our suffering. He unites himself with our wounds, so that healing flows not through technique, but through presence. God’s ministry is always with-ness before it is for-ness. He is Immanuel—God with us.

In Augustine’s Confessions, he writes of God as the one who “pierced my heart with your word, and I loved you.” Augustine’s story is not one of religious ambition, but of divine pursuit. God ministers by calling us from restlessness to rest. He seeks the heart and heals us not by power but by drawing us into love. Augustine’s ministry was never about his brilliance—it was about a broken man being grasped by grace.

We must recover this vision of ministry. In a world obsessed with strategy and success, we should repeatedly remind ourselves that ministry is divine action. It happens when God encounters someone in their depth—through us, yes, but never because of us. These ministering moments are interruptions of grace. They are not engineered. They are given.

And so ministry is less about skill and more about surrender.

God's power is not made perfect in our triumphs, but in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). True ministry happens not when we impress, but when we embody Christ’s suffering love. God's strength is found in vulnerability. Ministry, therefore, is not about appearing strong. It’s about becoming a vessel through which God’s love flows—especially in weakness.

When we sit beside the grieving, tell the truth in love, and serve without applause, God ministers through us. We become, in Paul’s words, “jars of clay,” carrying a treasure that is not our own (2 Corinthians 4:7). And that treasure is the presence of Christ.

This is the God who ministers: the One who walks with us in our pain, speaks love into our shame, and gives himself for us. And by the Spirit, he calls us to do likewise.

Not to save the world, but to bear witness to the One who already has.