I have been thinking a lot lately about ministering in my strengths. In our ministry, it could be easy for some staff and/or students to get the wrong idea of what ministry looks like (that you have to do it a certain way in certain contexts or else it is not really ministry). I don’t want to be misunderstood; The principles of ministry that our ministry models and teaches should be carried out in every context possible, but that doesn’t mean that ministry has to look a certain way.
To give you an example of what I am talking about I will tell you what I have been thinking about. I am not incredibly gifted with striking up conversations with people in informal settings and talking about their life and relationship with God or what they believe about the gospel. I am more gifted at engaging people in a one-on-one setting over lunch or time in the Word or something like that. One potential response to this would be for me to avoid informal contexts or just breeze through them and wait for God to drop a one-on-one context into my life. However, a better response would be for me to seek to use the informal contexts to fuel a context where I could interact with someone over lunch or time in the Word. So I am now making it a point to use game nights, playing sports with guys, hanging out in the dorms, or other contexts like these to hopefully set up one-on-one times with guys throughout the week.
So my encouragement to whoever is reading this would be to figure out a context that you are gifted in engaging people with the truths of the gospel, then think for how you can use every context you are in to help you maximize the time you have in the context in which you are most gifted.
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