Dad Ministry or Church Ministry?
By Jonathan Ho
My daughter Hanna was born in June 2023, and for the first time in my life, I became responsible for the life of another person. With this change came questions around my calling in Christ. What should come first, ministry or family life? Is my number one priority in life to raise my children or to go where God is calling me? How do we decide what comes first?
There are many areas in life where we believe life consists of either this or that. Some people call these “either/or” situations. We debate either/ors in church circles; we read books about whether we should honor our parents or follow Jesus’s call; we struggle over whether we should go into secular work or religious work, and we often end up paralyzed on one end or the other. But what if we’re asking the wrong question?
While it’s true that saying yes to one thing often means saying no to another, the reasoning behind our thinking is often one of value. We often think that one choice is more valuable than another; in Christianity, we often think of the more obviously religious option as the more important with the secular or less religious appearing option as the one we must choose to get by and survive (i.e. pay the bills). Growing up, I heard that contemporary Christian radio stations would use a metric of the number of times “Jesus” was mentioned in a song. There needed to be a minimum number of Jesus counts for each song or timespan of songs. Whether what I heard was true or not, we often associate Christian language with what is sacred or holy. If my work includes Christian language, then it’s ministry, and if not, it is secular work.
Mark Greene, former Executive Director of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, describes what he calls “The Great Divide”, a lie that only parts of our lives are sacred and holy while other parts are not related to God, but rather “secular”. He argues that “life’s a peach, not an orange”.[1] An orange is split into segments but a peach is not; before God, life is not meant to be split into segments of holy vs. secular. Life’s more like a peach, more intertwined and holistic. All aspects of our lives are meant to be lived in Christ, or as the apostle Paul wrote, “so whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”[2]
Someone might then point out how the apostles raised up others to serve so they (the apostles) could focus on the ministry of the Word of God.[3] The point here isn’t that there aren’t different roles; the point is one of taking difference and turning it into a holy hierarchy,[4] or as the late David Powlison described it, we often take spectrums of difference and turn them on their heads into ladders of value. You might think the ministry of the Word as more important, but is it not indicative of the necessity of the role of food distribution that they had to find people to take on that role (or else they would have to do it)? The role had to be filled. It was necessary. When the apostles had the congregation appoint seven men to head the daily distribution of food, they said to choose people full of the Spirit and wisdom.[5] This was a physical and spiritual task. The problem comes when we start judging tasks by their appearances.
In Christian circles, we often put the highest praise on those who serve in more direct Word ministries[6] and so we seek to elevate those roles, but ultimately, we must remember who truly deserves the glory and praise. When Ronaldo or Messi scores a goal in soccer, the focus isn’t on their feet (or head) but on them as people. As the body of Christ, it is not us the parts who deserve credit but Christ Jesus the head.[7] As the body of Christ, we serve together and the glory goes to God. At the same time, we must be careful not to undervalue the rest of the body of Christ, especially those not serving in those obvious Word ministries. Do we celebrate and regularly pray for our parents who work so hard to raise godly children? Do we take time to commission our brothers and sisters in Christ who are teachers and public workers? I’m not saying we should neglect our pastors and ministerial staff, but I am saying we should elevate our care for others as well.
We belong to one another and are called to love one another in devotion to Christ regardless of our assigned tasks.
The first question we should be asking is not which tasks are more important in our own eyes, but to ask where God has placed us and what He has put in our hands to do; what has God called us to. And more importantly, how does He call us to complete these tasks?
The question of ministry or family is a false question. Being in ministry means acting as a go between, in our case, acting as the go between for someone and God. We are a holy priesthood. This means that in all I do, I am to seek to connect with God with whatever is at hand and to whomever I encounter. The goal is to abide in Christ in whatever I do, knowing that my reward is in heaven, not on earth. The question is not only a question of what, but more importantly, of how. We often get so busy figuring out what our calling is that we fail to focus on how we live, how we see our neighbors, how we interact with God. Paul makes this very clear when he writes about love and how having faith to move a mountain and giving all we have to the poor gain us nothing without love.
In the end, I know I haven’t given you any answers on how to prioritize your life, but I pray that God would encourage you in these two ways: to see that all we do is before God and that, I believe, our greatest focus should be on how we live each day, not just focused on what our next great call from God is. Do I abide in Christ to walk humbly and be quick to listen, slow to speak, full of patience and kindness? Is Christ reflected through my life? These are the important questions for what we do and how we are to live in all areas of life.[8]
Addendum
In the article above, I talk about the how, and I think a visual might help. We often can’t help but try to put value systems on one thing or another and I find that adding a new dimension can help us ease away from that worldview.
Andy Crouch writes about how we often seek to see the world as black and white, but oftentimes life must be seen contextualized, with an added dimension. Like a move from classical Newtonian physics to quantum physics, we see a move from black and white determinative to a wider range of possibilities. He describes this as moving from either/or spectrums to 2x2 grids.
Instead of seeing life like this or that, such as serving either in ministry outside my family or serving my family:
What if we saw it in more dimensions? What if we saw that we could do both? And not only both, but focus our efforts in light of relationship with God rather than in the tasks themselves?
Jonathan Ho currently lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his wife Julia and daughter Hanna. He currently works in human services supporting workers serving those with developmental disabilities and psychiatric diagnoses. He is thankful for the many friends God has given him and enjoys spending time with them and seeing Christ’s movement in their lives.
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References
[1] https://licc.org.uk/resources/the-great-divide/
[2] 1 Corinthians 10:31, NIV
[3] See Acts 6
[4] I encourage you to read The Great Divide for a much deeper dive into this topic of hierarchies of holiness.
[5] See Acts 6:3
[6] Word ministries meaning tasks such as preaching, sharing the gospel, etc.
[7] See Luke 17:10
[8] See 1 Corinthians 13 - is it what we do, or how we do it that matters in the end?
What happens when a seasoned devilish fiend instructs his young protege on effective strategies for tempting the human he’s assigned to, doing all they can to assure the poor soul’s steady downward spiral to destruction and damnation through systematic separations from his family, friends, and his precious Creator..?