This past month in Ecuador, we were partnered with a church named Iglesia Alianza La Luz Carapungo. This church is a wonderful example of how God takes the biggest messes and the most broken things and makes them beautiful. The church is located in a poorer area of Quito on a street where violence and drug use and excessive alcohol intake were quite common sights and in a building that used to be a strip club. A man was even found dead right on the staircase that now leads up to the room where church services take place. Because we were going to be working with a church, I assumed that our month would consist of a lot of preaching or children’s ministry or leading bible studies or maybe even some street evangelicalism or something that looked pretty similar to what we did at the church we were partnered with last month. But I could not have been more wrong. The majority of our ministry looked a lot more like cleaning and organizing things around the church that probably hadn’t been cleaned or organized since the church was planted there seven years ago. And in the middle of all the cleaning and all the organizing, I was stuck there asking myself, “What are you supposed to do when cleaning is your ministry? Is that even really ministry? What does my cleaning have to do with furthering the Kingdom?”
But here’s the thing, just like I said in my last blog, ministry is not something that can be contained by some nice little human-constructed definition of what it should look like or what it should be. Living a life on mission isn’t just something that you do in your free time, something that you pencil into your neatly organized little planner, an extra hobby that you pick up when you have time to squeeze it into your schedule, another item to check off of your daily to do list. It’s the way that we are called to live as Christians every single day of our lives-a life spent choosing daily to throw off the old self and the desires of the flesh and putting on the new self and living by the Spirit because we have boldly professed that life with Jesus is worth it and our actions should show it. And just like life, ministry doesn’t look the same day to day, it’s dynamic and alive. And sometimes that means that your ministry is cleaning and organizing, so you do it and you don’t just do it, you do it with excellence and with joy and when you have your heart in the right place, you can’t help but see God’s Kingdom right there in your midst the whole time.
And so we cleaned and cleaned and cleaned some more. And then we organized and organized and organized some more. Every chair was scrubbed until it was scuff free and as close to its original white color that it could possibly get. Every closet was swept until all the dust was gone and organized until every single thing had its very own little place. Every single dish was washed and sanitized until it was sparkly and gunk free. Every song sheet was organized until every single one alphabetized and in its corresponding binder. And the craziest thing happened, once I changed the way I was looking at the task in front of us-once I stopped looking at it as just cleaning or organizing and stopped question whether it really counted as real ministry and started looking at it with an eternal perspective, as part of my everyday, way I choose to live my life ministry-I started to see God’s fingerprints all over it. People got to walk into that church and not see the collection of dirt and dust that have accumulated over the past seven years, instead they got to see Jesus. We got to remove the mess and the gunk so that there would be no distractions to the people seeing what we really want them to see, Jesus. And we got to organize and make things easily accessible so that the pastor and his wife and the other volunteers at the church don’t have to spend their time searching for things, but they can spend there time talking to people about Jesus, sharing the good news with them, encouraging them in their faith, pointing them back to the cross, speaking Life into them, filling them with Truth. And that’s what they’re really there for, to tell people about Jesus, not to be looking for things that have been misplaced around the church. And so I would do the cleaning and dusting every day for the rest of my life if it meant that people got to see and hear about Jesus more freely because Jesus and making His name known is so entirely worth it!
