Do you feel useless?

Someone recently wrote to me and shared his feelings of uselessness in the Kingdom of God, and how most of the men he’s discussed this with feel the same way. He’s someone who’s served churches in worship teams, and worked in Aboriginal missions, and has been around long enough to see the change in charismatic churches to become much less than they used to be.

Uncoincidentally, about the same time as he was writing to me, I was having a conversation with someone else about her feelings of being under-employed in the Kingdom.

She recounted to me a conversation she’d had with a now-retired missionary who could enthrall masses with stories of great exploits for God, and her response when asked, “When will we be able to do what you’ve done?”

“You won’t,” was her reply. “It’s not the mission God’s given you.”

Although some may think I have a significant profile myself, the reality is I too can compare myself to colleagues in similar fields and be left feeling frustrated.

But I don’t.

I might have more readers, viewers and followers than you, but still mere fractions of what so many others do. If accused of “grifting” or being in it to “get rich quick”, I laugh my head off. If only they knew how incredibly difficult it is to make even an average income from voluntary support after a decade of faithful, fulltime service in Christian ministry in Australia, they would eat their words.

But here’s what I know, and what I teach in political involvement – because it’s true in any application in the Kingdom of God:

My job is obedience, His job is outcomes.

It’s God’s business, not mine, whether the effects and results of what He’s called me to do are great, or small, or seen by others, or even seen by me.

Our job is not to firstly think about our incomes, or our retirement planning, or our material possessions and comforts, but the mission He has given us.

Scripture quite clearly instructs us that no part of the Body of Christ, the Church, is dispensable or unimportant. I encourage you to read 1 Corinthians 12, even pausing here to do so now.

Certainly there are seasons in life and ministry, and certainly in Australia it seems many churches don’t know how to use older saints with more life and church experience, and so many of them don’t know how to transition from spiritually parenting to grandparenting. This is exacerbated by the social suicide of expecting women to have careers and work outside the home and church and find fulfillment in something like a cubicle with fluorescent lighting.

Our churches have conformed to culture instead of redeeming culture, but God measures greatness, worth and value differently. For the record, whether I personally like it or not, my vote is we trust God is wiser than us.

We, Australian Christians, have to get back to asking God if we’re being useful, and not finding our emotional happiness in the measure the local pastor – God bless him – places upon us. Be found in a local church most Sundays, and be open to whatever small ways God can use you to serve and be a blessing to others from Monday to Sunday.

Vocationally, you might be a missionary, a minister or a mechanic – but there are countless lost souls who need just one Word from God to change their lives, one Christian to minister the love and blessing of God to their lives.

Allow me to give some examples.

I host a monthly barbeque for men in my backyard. We have a firepit, and meat – and no women. We gather at dusk and just talk about anything until midnight. Anyone can bring anyone, as long as they bring their own food and cook their own food. It’s totally relaxed.

I’ve been doing this on the first Friday of every month for years now. I’ve also been doing small and affordable investments, improvements there so it becomes a better and better place for this ministry. It’s a ministry because I need it, and so I know other men need it – the company of men, encouraging and allowing each other to just be men.

There’s no agenda or structure. As with the lack of catering, it’s come as you are, come late or leave early, talk about anything. No one says, “I’m here for you bro’,” or “How’s your marriage going?” But sometimes we go there organically, without any expectations or structure or invitation.

Some nights we get incredibly evangelistic and pre-conversion discipling happens, but it’s actually rare. Sometimes it’ll happen in a side conversation, but most often we’re just having long debates – sometimes heated – as well as laughs over topics of mutual interest.

What God does there in those opportunities is up to Him – but we’re there, and available, and ready. We don’t know how some of those conversations will affect each other, or what God will do with them if anything. But we get community, and that’s a skill this culture has truly failed at, replaced by government services.

Another example: one time my local city councillor called me and asked if I could get a team of volunteers to clean up the yard of someone else in the city who had a health order from the council and little ability to help herself – because I’d offered some months prior.

We saved her many thousands of dollars, and loved her, and she came along to church when invited one day and had morning tea with us. She hasn’t kept coming to our church, but maybe she’s going somewhere else. Probably not. Maybe she’s on better terms with Jesus now because she saw some Christians love her practically without conditions. Only God knows.

“Useless” is an unhelpful waste of emotion. I’m not saying it’s not valid – go ahead and recognise it, then call it what God calls it.

False.

Don’t stop earnestly desiring the most helpful spiritual gifts, as Paul writes, but still have the perspective he offers immediately before and after that verse.

Not everyone is meant to be fully occupied in Church ministry, but everyone is meant to be constantly aware of their opportunities for Christian ministry – love.

Paul elsewhere says we were created in Christ Jesus for good works He’s prepared beforehand for us to do, but they may be surprising in their randomness, seeming trivialness and mundanity.

If you’re feeling useless, you might be! If you were after platitudes, I’m not your guy. But always ask God to measure you, and how you steward the opportunities He gives you. Then be sensitive to new opportunities, and intentional about how you can be more useful with the opportunities He gives you.

Never ever measure yourself or your usefulness by the jobs and roles others give you. Be brutally honest about yourself before God, and then find full contentment in doing whatever your hand finds to do with all your strength.

And relax about leaders who could but don’t use you, and the decline of church cultures on their watch. They’ve always been human, and God still chose us humans to partner with His mission to redeem the world anyway.

As with political reformation, nothing happens quickly, and nothing happens ever if we abdicate our responsibility to do what we can.

“Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things.”

Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & commentator, director of annual Church And State conferences around Australia, and founding editor of The Good Sauce. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to redeem culture through videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand, and events from Perth to Auckland. [more]

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