Making Connections For Ministry

I love metaphors because they so often reveal something about our relationships with each other and the world around us that I hadn’t noticed before. My favorite ones, like ripples on a lake or tapping a spider’s web, show how actions impacting one part of a team or community have a way of affecting the whole team. The New Testament engages similar metaphors to describe the church, the most prominent ones being building and body. These images emphasize how we are deeply interconnected and interdependent with each other in Jesus Christ.

These and other metaphors, like gardening, often find their way into our conversations within Faith Formation Ministries. Our calling to help churches grow faith for life leads us to find the best available resources for equipping local ministry leaders and congregations. Having “a connections mindset” means that our role is to seek the flourishing of the congregations and ministry leaders we are serving by helping them discern, locate, and access the resources they need to continue growing in Christ and in love for their neighbors. Sometimes those resources are within our team; more often, we find ourselves facilitating connections with other ministries. Our work isn’t to build up our particular ministry, but to make ourselves, including all our connections to other ministry teams and agencies, available to those we are serving.