Does God care about what I do on a Monday morning

The people of God on a Monday, how Jesus turned the world upside down.

In Ephesians 4 Paul writes to the early church and says ‘you have an incredible mandate to equip the people for works for service’[1].

The way in which this was taught to me was that we need to teach people in the church to be good at church activities. They need to help out on rotas, do kids work, make coffees and join welcome teams etc. All of those things are good and helpful but I think fall way short of what Jesus’ vision for His church was and frankly is disempowering and lacks a response of integrity to the way we are created.

The sense, rather, in the text is that the role of the church is to equip all as we are empowered by God we might promote the cause of Christ throughout the earth.

Throughout the gospel narratives Jesus essentially calls people to be with Him to ‘come and follow’ Him that they may be His disciple of Him, or perhaps a better word is apprentice. With the idea being that as we follow we might know Him, grow like Him and do what He did.

Jesus’ focus and the focus of the early church was how does this ‘Jesus idea’, our life in Him, play out into every sphere into our ‘works of service’?

Historically my experience of church has been this ‘Chris it is great to have you in our church, this is where you can serve.’ And I get that and understand it. But I think we miss out on the broader vision of what Jesus hope the church would be. His hope was that ‘His kingdom would come here on earth’ and not just in the church.

The sense is that the works of service are, for sure, acts of ministry but this should and must include ministry in the spaces we inhabit when we step out of church services. I see my corporate training as much a place of ministry as I do the pulpit. And our job as the church is to help our congregation, in the best ways possible, to be about the things of Jesus on a Monday morning.

So we need to regain that early sense of the church – how are we going to be an equipping people that every sphere of our city, community, workplace, family and more is changed to be more like Jesus.

Do we, instead of simply inviting people in our church to fill our Sunday rotas have the courage to say to people ‘it’s great to have you in our church, how can we best equip you to be on mission where God has put you tomorrow morning?’

[1] My paraphrase of Ephesians 4 v 11-13