Pepper Grinder: Comments

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Regarding Ministry for the Average Person - Part 4

Thank you so much for this series. In addition to being fascinating I think it is a great corrective to our tendency in American culture (and the Christian variations of American culture) to value the heroic over the ordinary. In general we assume that getting up each morning and being faithful in ordinary ways does not count as much as doing crazy things. My question for you is, how might this interact with Ephesians 4:11-13 which talks about how God has given different gifts (for that matter is the list exhaustive or representative? The only talks that I can remember tended to assume exhaustive but I suspect they were wrong) to the church in order that the church may be built up for ministry. Whenever I've heard people talk about this the tendency is to take it for granted that ministry that people are built up for is of the whacky heroic kind. Thus we're building people up to go to the Amazon or to hold a weekly barbeque for their neighborhood which results in a revival. I'm not saying those are bad, but how might one build up God's people for ordinary service, like being faithful in trust and prayer and love with the same people over and over? What does Paul think?
-Joshua   February 26, 2017

You bring up a lot of good questions. I probably left some unanswered, but I took a stab at an answer in the piece I just posted: Equipping.
-Pepper   May 27, 2017

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