373 Quotes About Ministry

God is immutable—He never changes! His ministry to you is complete, on target, and constant!

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.

You don't need a prophet to tell you to eat.

The commencement of all labor consisted in the preparation of his own soul.

Responding well to others, especially survivors of wrongdoing, may require that we open ourselves to hearing something other than what we expect or want to hear, even when what we hear threatens our ideas about how the world is ordered—as listening to survivor testimony might do. Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.

Every experienced pastor knows that what the penitent heart says about itself is much more consequential than well-made truthful sentences that shout from the outside of the inner voice of conscience. No element of confession is more crucial than the discipline of listening. The attentive listener is a chosen agent of divine reconciliation. When the moment for keen listening is offered, take it as an inestimable gift.

What right have such men to represent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly?

All the practical tips in the world won't sustain us in the hardships of ministry or produce the kind of gospel ministry that will change our towns.

Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world.