Quotes about Ministry

To expect to continue controlling the use of money and the ministry overseas from our foreign-based mission board is an extension of colonialism. It adds an unbiblical element, which only humiliates and weakens the national missionaries in the long run. Christians need to learn that they are not giving their money to national workers, but God's money to His work overseas.

God's idea of ministry training is a broken vessel. His idea of spiritual preparation is suffering, which includes rejection.

Learning to preach is difficult because preaching is difficult.

I hear with growing clarity, it's that God is calling each and every Christian to personally participate in the healing ministry of Jesus Christ.

When Scripture, prayer, worship, ministry become routine, they are dead. When I conclude that I can now cope with the awful love of God, I have headed for the shallows to avoid the deeps. I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.

The great divorce between my head and my heart endured throughout my ministry. For eighteen years I proclaimed the good news of God's passionate, unconditional love—utterly convicted in my head but not feeling it in my heart. I never felt loved.

The decision to come out of hiding is our initiation rite into the healing ministry of Jesus Christ. It brings its own reward. We stand in the Truth that sets us free and live out of the Reality that makes us whole.

Humility and fraternal love are spiritual bedfellows. When we befriend our own brokenness and minister to our wounds with tenderness and compassion, the "other" is no longer an intruder but a fellow sufferer.

The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of GOD...people who are so deeply in love with JESUS that they are ready to follow HIM wherever HE guides them, always trusting that, with HIM, they will find life and find it abundantly.

The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God's love. The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God's Word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.

In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding... Solitude molds self-righteous people into gentle, caring, forgiving persons who are so deeply convinced of their own great sinfulness and so fully aware of God's even greater mercy that their life itself becomes ministry.

Christian leadership is a dead-end street when nothing new is expected, when everything sounds familiar and when ministry has regressed to the level of routine.