Aphorisms: Every Part of a Ministry is a Ministry

Do you ever have a word pop into your head, be pretty sure you know what it means (but lack confidence), and think you might have a use for it? That happened to me the other day, and the word was aphorism. I looked it up, and confirmed my feeling that I knew what it means. Google defines it as “a pithy observation that contains a general truth.” and that states it better than I could.

The use I had for the word was to label a couple of pithy facts about ministry design that had been floating through my cranium for a long time. Although I had only two aphorisms in mind (and still do), I am sure there will be more.  I’m thinking a short list of these epigrammatic (ahem!) statements could go a long way toward creating a system of ideas that would be helpful to guide all kinds of ministry design approaches.   And this is the primary topic of my blog.

My two aphorisms are these:

• Every part of a ministry is a ministry.
• All design is redesign.

Let’s look at these statements more closely, one in this post, and the other in the next.  Then we’ll add posts as we add aphorisms.

Ministries involve people.  I believe it is commonly understood that if I am helping to deliver a ministry, I am ministering.  It doesn’t matter if I am helping as a part of a large ministry or if I deliver it all by myself, I am still ministering.  It follows, then, that whatever I do of this sort can be, and virtually always is, called a ministry, my ministry.  My ministry is often part of a larger ministry, a component of it.  Stated differently, the larger ministry has parts.  To illustrate: if I sing in a church choir, my ministry is to be part of the (larger) choir ministry.

Without consciously thinking much about it, we say the same thing about ministries in general.  For example, “our ministry to preschoolers is a part of our children’s ministry.”  In other words, the preschool ministry is a component of the children’s ministry.  More than that, we can extend this further.  E.g., “our children’s ministry is a component of our family ministries;” or, “our church’s ministries include family ministries.”

We also can employ this understanding in the other direction.  A preschool ministry has parts, whether they are age groupings or singing and story-telling times.  A choir member’s ministry includes parts such as rehearsal and worship time or worship services and concerts at rest homes.

We might say that ministries are nested like the Russian matryoshka dolls, and this is the technical term as well.

Our aphorism merely states nesting in a general way: every part of a ministry is a ministry.  This is a very important fact, because it says we can build up complex ministries from simpler ministries.  Conversely, it is entirely appropriate to conquer complex ministries by dividing them into parts, and these parts also ministries.