I link, therefore I am. (Heh heh).
The following links stem from and elaborate the previous post.
Ordinary: Christianity For the Rest of Us
Ordinary Christians and a Great Commission
Archives for July 2013
Every Member Ministry?
Is the believer who works in “full time Christian service” more “sold out for Jesus” than the believer who works in a secular job, or as a stay-at-home mom, etc.?
When a Christian is involved in secular work, does he/she need to somehow ‘Christianize’ it (for example, by ‘witnessing’ to co-workers, having a Bible on his desk, putting Christian slogans on his/her locker, etc.)?
Does every Christian have a “ministry”? Is every Christian a “minister”?
Or, does God give every Christian a calling (“vocation”), and thus a responsibility to pursue his/her calling as unto the Lord?
Scott Clark has written a helpful article on the popular evangelical notion of “every member ministry.”
According to Dr. Clark:
“The uniqueness and centrality of the official preaching of the Word is diminished when we equivocate between the official, public, ordained administration of the Word and the unofficial witness to the gospel by the laity. The tendency among evangelicals is to describe all those acts as ‘preaching.’ This move is part of the democratic, populist spirit of modern evangelicalism. When I say I ‘modern’ I don’t mean last week. Nathan Hatch has shown that, in American evangelicalism, this has been the dominant pattern since the 1820s.” KEEP READING