The Ministry of Presence

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 GUEST AUTHOR:

Nicole Brown-Dominguez

Member, Illinois Conference

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I have befriended the women at a local shop. The store is a colorful explosion, packed to bursting with pieces from local artisans, antique dishware, cards with profanity and dirty humor, political humor, novelty socks, and knick-knacks that you might not know what to do with, but always make you laugh. The women are the same. They are bawdy, brazen, and brilliant with rich personalities. Over the years, I began to offer baked goods and developed a friendship with each woman. Somewhere in between the Vanilla Mousse and the Tahini Cookies, I felt invited to foster deeper connection. Somewhere over the course of this friendship, they understood I would pray for them in every circumstance. Somewhere, I found myself in a Ministry of Presence. 

What if we as Christians make things too loud? There is beauty in bold encounters with God that lead to transformation. They are the moments when the prayer week, the bible studies, and the sermon series end in a new believer coming to Christ. But most times, these efforts require them to come to us. How often do we mistake discipleship for apologetics? How often do we forget the quiet impact of the Ministry of Presence? The Ministry of Presence requires us to change both the method and the objective. This type of ministry is organic, oftentimes accidental. 

It is the soul of discipleship. Engaging in it demands time and investment. Building connection, trust, and mutual respect is earned through conversation, humor, and consistency. It also can’t be counterfeit. I’m not pretending to care about the internships, vacations, hospital trips, new jobs, and break-ups. They matter to me because it matters to them. If the objective is conversion, then fostering a relationship is a means to an end, not the end itself. In our rush to share the information of apologetics, we can make the people we meet sounding boards. We make evangelism a tableau requiring us to play our roles and know our lines, typecasting ourselves as the sage believers and the recipient one-dimensional sinners. 

This brings us to another aspect of the Ministry of Presence: it also, at times, demands that we hold our counsel. We’ve all seen the eager Christian who seeks to share the good news, recite doctrine, and, in their excited rush of scripture and Christianese, stampede the listener with information. Suddenly, it becomes how much I, as the believer, know, and not about how you, my sibling in Christ, can be introduced to God. And indeed, God is always the point. He is the being everything points back to. 

I am not a proficient apologist. Most times, I dread that I’ll be stumped by a difficult question or mangle an answer because I tried to fit this cosmic, complex narrative in a one-paragraph response. I’m terrified that a misplaced phrase will open an old wound, leaving someone nursing an old hurt or more confused than before. But this isn’t the purpose of the conversation. If we are dependent on being well-versed in information, but not representing the God it points to, we’ve quite literally lost the plot. 1 Corinthians 13:4 summarizes: “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” 

The scriptures implore their readers not to recite the gospel, but to live it. Allow the evidence of our faithful identity as Christ-followers to be in how we show up for those around us. We must live the adage “Preach the Gospel at all times and if necessary use words.” To truly live in the image of God, we must reflect our maker, who is, through every member of the Trinity, our model for the Ministry of Presence. 

This presence isn’t merely showing up in grief or suffering, like Job, but in the celebration and the mundane. If we do not sit together in laughter and benign conversation, how can we reach the safety of shared grief? If I had decided that the cards with profanity, or magnets with dirty humor mixed among the art and candles, shocked my Christian sensibilities, how would I be able to engage in a world that doesn’t always accommodate my beliefs? If I had decided that this vivacious collective of spectacular women wasn’t worth knowing because they boasted no obvious faith tradition and claimed lifestyles different than mine, they would be flattened, stripped of their depth and identity.  If I entered the store with my plate of chocolate cupcakes and pamphlets on The Great Controversy, the conversation may have ended before it began. The baked goods I gave them wouldn’t have been out of appreciation or affection, but a sales tactic, sweetening my pitch for Salvation. Many of the people we meet are already bruised from being manhandled by religiosity. 

As mentioned, the Ministry of Presence nurtures different “methods.” But they also lead to a different objective. The objective of Christian ministry isn’t conversion; it's representing the character of God as seen through the life of Jesus. This is where many well-meaning believers short-circuit. How often do we turn initiatives, sermon series, and outreach programs into a pitch to improve church membership? On a surface level, it's understandable. A church organization wants to know that the time and money put into a project were not in vain, that there was a positive outcome that can be quantified. But the moment we stand before God will not resemble an executive committee. We will be asked if our belief in salvation fostered the fruit of the spirit, discerning if we displayed compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, if we bore with one another through life, and relied on Him to forgive and be forgiven. A PowerPoint outlining the metric of souls won won’t be required to justify our access to heaven. We will be asked if we helped foster heaven on earth. 

The Ministry of Presence is the organic result of loving our neighbors. What was the purpose of Christ’s time on earth if not to rebuild the relationship between Love itself and their creation? I don’t want to convert the women from my local shop. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit. My responsibility as a sinner loved by her savior is to use the openings for conversation that the Lord provides for deeper discussion and to represent him in the meantime. Sometimes it looks like explaining the gospel. Sometimes it looks like bringing salted maple whipped cream and allowing God to do the rest.

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Please send any news items of what God is doing around the Illinois Conference to communication@ilcsda.org.

Naturally, the opinions of the author are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Illinois Conference office.