The Purpose of Children’s Ministry (cont.)
For the sake of your church, your kidmin program, and the health of your soul, plunge your weakness and your failures into the grace of God. Find your identity in Christ’s faithfulness to you and your need of Him.
We need to ask ourselves different questions. Rather than “What will I need to do to be successful?” we should ask “What does it look like to have our identity shaped by the cross of Christ?”
Keller again deals with where we find our identity:
What will create a different kind of identity in which humility and confidence grow jointly? Volf answers: “No one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long…without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous humanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness.”
Christians are simul justus et peccator—simultaneously perfectly righteous in Christ and in the Father’s eyes yet in ourselves very flawed and sinful. This leads to a security and humility that live together. John Stott argues that this is a cross-shaped identity, one that leads to self-affirmation and self-denial at once. Jesus went to the cross to die for our salvation.
That is, at the same moment, a profound statement of our sin, telling us that we are so flawed and guilty that nothing less than the death of the Son of God can save us. But it is at the same time the highest and strongest expression of his love for us and our value to him.
So fight the urge to be only successful. Instead, seek to be only faithful. In the end, you’ll have both.
