Ministry and Bureaucrats

I just spent an hour speaking with a great group of students from Point University who will spent their summer work either working in camps on behalf of Point or at Christ In  Youth conferences. It is always refreshing to meet with these teams, and I’m grateful that I am one of the people asked to help them get ready for the summer experience.

Inevitably, these conversations lead to the all too obvious conflict between doing ministry as Christ calls us to and staying inside the boundaries the bureaucrats establish for us. We had an interesting conversation over should a college student be friends with a minor on Facebook and should a college student give a phone number to a camper. The obvious issue of “what’s a 20 year old kid doing texting a 14 year old member of the opposite sex?” and “are you sure that your Facebook page – not the things you might post but things other people might post – is appropriate for high school kids to see?” From the bureaucrat’s point of view, the answer to those questions is “probably not, don’t take the risk.” From the ministry point of view, “are you saying I shouldn’t keep up with kids I meet at camp who need the influence of a person like me in their lives?”

But that isn’t just a “summer camp team” issue! Churches and para-church ministries are constantly caught in the middle of seeking to do ministry and managing the bureaucratic context in which ministry can occur. Since there are no Holy Spirit inspired by-laws for ministry groups in the New Testament, we are left to improvise, as N.T. Wright might describe it, when it comes to what the relationship between ministry and the bureaucracy that surrounds ministry ought to be. Truth be told, beyond the idea that elders are the spiritual overseers of the church, there seems to be nothing at all in the New Testament about structure for ministry. Perhaps Paul’s comment at the end of 1 Corinthians 14 where he tells that rather dysfunctional body of believers that “all things should be done decently and in order.” But that comment seems to be directed at worship experiences, not structure.

Wright’s idea of improvisation involves understanding the tension that modern believers live in – the tension between the example we see in the early church under the leadership of the apostles and the expectations God has for the church when Christ reappears in glory at some point in the future. This seems to me to be precisely what Paul is talking about in Romans 13:11 when he says, “you know what age this is, how now is the hour for you to rise up from your slumber. Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.”  We live in the “age” between “example and expectations,” and the “hour” is our own point of tension – when we have to see what following the example and living up to the expectations actually looks like.

In our own “hour,” it is important to determine what the relationship between “ministry” and the “bureaucracy” that enables it looks like. We live in a far too litigious society to not have a bureaucracy, and a far too desperate society not to have ministry. Like shifting plates beneath the earth’s surface will sometimes cause earthquakes and tsunamis, when kingdom leaders avoid the challenge of managing the relationship of ministry and the bureaucracy, we can expect an earthquake or tsunami to catch us unprepared.

The challenge is enormous. Bureaucrats like to build walls, ministry like to climb over walls. Bureaucrats believe there can be a handbook for everything; ministry believes there are some important tasks for which there is no handbook. Bureaucrats believe that success is measured by carefully defined criteria; ministry believes that “success” is the wrong word – it ought to be “fruitful” and that’s how we measure ministry. Bureaucracy builds silos; ministry feeds the cows. Bureaucracy likes expanding control, ministry like expanding transformation of lives. Bureaucracies function from the stand point of rules to monitor behavior, ministry functions from the stand point of principles which transform people’s lives. 

In my twenty years of ministry in a local church, I established some “bureaucratic rules” for myself and the rest of the staff. We were never to be alone in the church building with a member of the opposite sex (not our spouse). We have similar “rules” at Point, and I cautioned our summer teams about the same issue. That’s just plain common sense. Our “far too litigious society” makes that a no-brainer.

But our “far too desperate society” screams for help and sometimes being a kingdom person has more to do with courage to climb over walls than it does recognizing boundaries. So there is a great need for what I like to call “sanctified common sense.” That kind of common sense comes from God, not Ben Franklin. For ministry to really happen, followers of Jesus must learn the difference between foolish risks and necessary ones. A foolish risk means I am standing on the railroad track of a bridge, looking at an on-coming locomotive. A necessary risk means that I’m trying to rescue a disabled person off of those tracks before the locomotive gets there.

Ministry means that I never allow cultural expectations to define what the Kingdom of God looks like. Jesus “dined with sinners” and seems to have cared not at all that the religious bureaucrats saw that as scandalous. Bureaucrats reminded Him that people would think that He was condoning their sin if he ate with them.

Bureaucrats expect that the rules fix things immediately. Ministry knows that transformation takes time. Do you remember what the servant who owed a gazillion dollars said to the king?  “Be patient with me, and I will repay.” (Matthew 18:21ff) Even when the other servant in that story, the one who owed the wicked servant for the Burger King Whopper his friend had bought for him – a manageable debt, sought relief, the question was the same. “Be patient with me, I will repay.” 

Perhaps that is why, as he lists characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22,23), Paul includes the noun form of the verb used in Matthew 18 – patience. Maybe the biggest difference of all between ministry and bureaucracy is their differing view of the value of patience.

For me, I’m praying that I never allow the impatience born of bureaucracy to short circuit the power of ministry for transformation that is always present when Jesus shows up.