Positions, People, and Passion

If you have been in church for any length of time than you know there are necessary positions that allow the church to function as it should. Once these positions (which generally include teaching faculty, committee members, and other support staff) have been identified, people are then sought out to fill these created positions throughout the church body. This process, or one similar to it, takes place in a great majority of our Baptist churches today. The longer I am in Christian ministry, the more I see this “one-size-fits-all” approach to ministry has the potential to come up short. Here is what I mean. In the above structure, the focus is on the position and finding the person to fill that position.

It has been my observation that one thing is often overlooked here. On the fringe of this kind of structure, there may be a person or persons with a passion that we as a church have not identified as a valid and needed area of ministry. We don’t have a “position” for that. As we survey and look around the local body of Christ, there are many who have been gifted to be able minister in ways that are outside the box of traditional means. In today’s world, it is going to take ministering outside of what we already know in order to reach people.

I see coming in the future a more intentional process in the way we plug people into ministry. we must first identify where their passion is and then create an avenue for them to flesh out what they love to do. I believe the church would be better served by wrapping passion around positions instead of wrapping people around positions.