On Saturday, I saw an advertisement for a church while shopping at the mall. The sign said something like, “We now have 162 ministries to serve you and your family.” First of all, kudos to the church for communicating with their community via that sign. I applaud their effort to let people know where they are and what they are all about. But, reading that sign did raise a few questions for me:
1. Do people at your church try to stab each other at the printer?
Can you imagine the turf wars that go down when 162 ministries converge on the church printer like locusts on a field of grain? Just 162 ministries all trying to collate and staple and print, each and every one of them throwing the God card? That would be a blood bath.
2. How obscure do you get when you have 162?
When you have that many ministries, you have to start really catering to some niche groups. I mean, with 162, I am assuming that they have a “Snake owners ministry,” and a “People that still refuse to get a cell phone ministry” and a “Men in their 40s that grew up in Ohio but then went to school in Texas and finally moved to Georgia for a job in the healthcare industry ministry.”
3. Why include the 2?
Why not just say, “Over 160 ministries?” Or you could say, “more than 150?” Is there really a Goldilocks person out there that sees that sign and thinks, “161 ministries would have been too few and 163 would have been too many, but 162 is just right.”
4. Is there a Frisbee ministry?
I can almost guarantee that despite having 162 ministries, the church in question ignores God’s favorite sport Frisbee. Please, if you go to this church and you’re not currently praying that God will heal me of my sarcasm, email and let me know that you do indeed have a thriving Frisbee ministry.
5. Does your volunteer recognition Sunday service take 11 hours?
Honestly, when you honor volunteers do you just give them one big collective “thank you” from the pulpit or does each and every ministry come up to get love like some sort of church graduation ceremony?
So many questions and I fear I will have even more when people read this and post comments that say, “That ain’t nothing, we’ve got 200 ministries!”
p.s. At the church I start, called GracePointeLifeTruthHouseRiverNorth, we’re going to have three ministries: Love, Frisbee and breakdancing.
