I have worked within a great many parachurch and church ministries, and there is a pattern that I have noticed. Those who have come to Christ through a particular affinity-based ministry often naturally gravitate toward ministries built around that same affinity. This includes ministries designed for students, children, the elderly, motorcycle enthusiasts, former addicts, disability groups, and many more, just to name a few. While these ministries are excellent and often necessary to address issues facing individuals during certain seasons of their life, they are only a small portion of the body of Christ.
What often ends up happening is that a dangerous divide sneaks into these ministries. Where they are designed to minister specifically to a certain people, those ministries can, without intending to, become dangerous silos, prepared for a spark to set them off into an explosion, or become ultimately ineffective at their full aim of making disciples of all nations.
I am not arguing that affinity-based ministries are wrong. In fact, I believe many of them are necessary and deeply valuable. The problem comes when a ministry designed to serve one part of the body becomes a substitute for participation in the whole body.
Preferences
The first way this happens is through preferences.
In an affinity-based ministry, there is room for the preferences of the affinity to dominate the meeting. Most of these preferences are simply just that: preferences, and there is nothing ultimately wrong with them. It may be music style, room layout, peer groups, or even the way a ministry structures its meetings.
The danger is not that we have preferences. The danger is when our preferences become so central that we are no longer willing to worship, serve, learn, or fellowship outside of them.
The local church is made up of people who are not all like us. That is part of the beauty of the body of Christ.
Lack of Connections
When we limit ourselves to just our peer groups, we often times are doing so to keep ourselves safe.
I know as a disability parent there are many trials and tribulations that my family has gone through that a lot of church members would just not understand. I have heard the hurtful but good-meaning comments. I could fill an entire book with them. So I understand the tendency to drift toward those with similar life experiences as you.
However, in isolating out of fear, we are robbing the church and ourselves of a means of growth God has placed in front of us.
As Proverbs says, “iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17). The sharpening of iron is not an easy process. It is a painful process of metal slamming into metal.
When I, in love, clear up a misunderstanding of my brother about my son’s disability, I am equipping him to love others better. When I endure with patience miscommunications, I am learning to love them better. When I make a mistake or unintentionally offend someone, I learn and grow.
Some of the very people we are tempted to avoid may be some of the people God intends to use to make us more like Christ.
Missing Powerful Testimonies
Most of the ministry we drift toward is related to where we needed the most help as a believer. This is natural and lines up with what Paul says in 2 Corinthians.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
— 2 Corinthians 1:3–4
This is good, and oftentimes God uses our past as a means of equipping us for the work of ministry.
Yet there is something extremely powerful when someone is serving not out of a sense of “I have been there before,” but out of a genuine love stirred by Christ.
My wife and I have spent a lot of time with other disability ministry advocates, and one of our first questions ends up being, “So who in your family has a disability?”
Some of the best answers come when it is absolutely no one and it was someone who just knew the Scriptures and knew that their God would care.
That happens when a church is not isolating and siloing its ministries. It enables other believers to see the ministry needs and prepares hearts to serve and worship.
When the church gathers across generational lines, it reminds the older saints of their value in the lives of younger people. When we cross affinity groups, it equips the church to serve the whole body.
Abandoning the Body for Its Parts
You see, to abandon the body of Christ for just a segment is to abandon the whole body for its parts.
Paul gives us this picture in 1 Corinthians 12. The church is not one part pretending to be the whole body. It is many members who need one another. “The body does not consist of one member but of many” (1 Corinthians 12:14). Paul goes on to say that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Corinthians 12:21).
There can never be true spiritual health for any of us if we are divided from the body.
We are united in Christ. All the walls of separation have been broken down in Christ. Paul says that Christ “has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14). We are united by the same Spirit. “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Corinthians 12:13).
This does not mean that every ministry must look the same or that specialized ministries should disappear. It means that every specialized ministry must remember that it is a ministry of the body and not a replacement for the body.
The hand is valuable. The eye is valuable. The foot is valuable. But the hand was never designed to live as though it were the whole body.
And neither were we.