How to Stay on the Right Course in Ministry

This content was excerpted from Christ First: A Devotional and Spiritual Assessment for Ministry Leaders. 

“If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (v. 24). Jesus made it sound so simple and so difficult at the same time. This is not your average altar call.   

Various ideas about successful ministry are out there in books, blogs, and podcasts. But true success starts by putting Christ first in your ministry with these three actions: denying oneself, taking up one’s cross, and following Jesus. Imagine if churches took this on as their discipleship pathway. How many would still remain in the church? As ministry leaders, however, we’ve seen this path to be true. Humility, suffering, and letting God lead are the true marks of ministry.   

Denying oneself, then, means being humble enough to know you don’t know it all. It means being a servant leader, ready to wash floors and pick up trash when needed. It means submitting to authority even when you don’t always agree. It means taking the brunt of complaints from the sheep, not because they are right (they may be or they might not be), but because you’ve taken to following Jesus and there is a right time and place to speak, and a right time and place to keep your mouth closed. Denying oneself puts your preferences aside to understand that each of the people you minister to has a unique journey with God and ministering to them involves helping them discover the joy of knowing Christ more as God transforms their hearts toward Him.  

Taking up one’s cross, then, means willing to suffer and be persecuted. This might include being willing to be the fall guy if needed. (And no one ever wants to be the fall guy.) It’s being willing to endure staff misunderstandings and youth group rumors and church gossip that’s bound to happen in a body of sinful people. Taking up one’s cross could mean taking less pay at a smaller church that is preaching the gospel well and leaning into the work of the Holy Spirit in a biblically based way. It might mean enduring late nights and long weekends. It could also mean speaking up for truth and not submitting to authority if the authority happens to make immoral and unbiblical decisions. Taking up one’s cross means you know that suffering is part of the process, part of the journey, especially in ministry.  

And following Jesus means just that. Follow Him. But you can’t follow Him unless you know Him. And you can’t know Him unless you’ve studied Him: what He said, what He does, what makes Him tick. We follow Him in two senses: in heading in the direction that He heads, namely to the Father for His glory and the growth of His kingdom. And we follow Him in the sense of imitating Him, as we learn His ways, practicing being more like Him, even in His suffering. He is our guide, and He is our example, so we put Christ first and we follow.

To sum up, C.S. Lewis puts it well in the last words of Mere Christianity:  

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.