My struggle to put into words all the many thoughts and their many threads often haunts me when I stare at that dreaded blank page. Especially when I'm exhausted at the end of a long day and can only just follow the plotline of 'Masterchef'.
However I am passionate about this topic as it has more implications for ministry than I realised, so I want try and get this down.
When my husband and I started our journey towards full-time ministry we felt like we wanted to start yesterday and couldn't believe that we had 3 years of college ahead of us before we could get going. However, while we were at college, Luke did weekly ministry placements in a church, in fact, he was required to do 20 hours per week in the 2nd year. Preaching, teaching, rosters, meetings, planning camps, etc, and I tagged a long most of the time in song leading, bible study leading, cooking and hopefully doing what I most strive to do: analysing church practise and cutting through foggy thinking to try and obey scripture in our lives as individuals and families and corporate worship.
We thought we saw so much in those three years and I remember so many car conversations of 'when I'm working...'Theology figured in substantially in these conversations, of course, and the connection between the pragmatic 'method' of serving God through church and the theology of orderly worship was the logical end.
In turns out you can have the same theology as someone and have a different philosophy of ministry - or to be more specific, do ministry very differently to each other. You can both be sold on evangelism being essential and end up butting heads over whether to do a lot of kids ministry or make a lot of friends and pray for opportunities.
Then the theology of worship, how do you worship God corporately?! This dilemma is one of the reasons that there are so many different denominations. How do we worship God in Spirit and in truth but also obey all the commands of the bible to remember his death, sing, read the scriptures, practise hospitality, prophesy so that unbelievers are convicted of God's presence etc? How do we make our services honouring to God and at the same time make church a place where people will come and become part of our fellowship?
These things are exciting and inspiring as we think about where we will be next...
