Ministry of Giving Hope

Church is about hope.  Those who go Sunday after Sunday may go through many ordinary times, but there are also those moments which come to all of us which are anything but ordinary.  In those moments we make our way to the place of our Sunday habit not out of routine, but out of desperation.  We go seeking not to be entertained, but to hear some Word from God which will enable us to go home, make it through the rest of the day, and get up tomorrow.  We go looking for hope even though every part of us is screaming that there is no reason to hope.    

With this being true, the nature of what we do as we gather is changed.  Spending extra time in prayer before daring to preach is something important for the preacher.  Looking at and seeing the congregation which gathers is another.  At first glance the desperate ones may look like the ones who are living under sunny days.  And those who sit in the pews might look around, make sure to say a kind word to everyone possible, and to pray prayers of concern for others to the God who knows all of us and all our needs.     

Broken ones do not just show up at church on Sunday once in awhile, but every Sunday.  It is a gathering place for the hurting and the broken as well as the dying.  It is the place where we go when there is nowhere else to go and when there is no one else to whom we can turn.  To come to the place where sufferers gather to worship every Sunday means we are stepping into the arena of holy work.  Most assuredly, God will be at work in the hearts of those who live without any reason to hope and if we are listening and seeing, He is likely to involve us in the ministry of giving hope to the hopeless ones.