[AI Draft] Ministrymaxxing

Last Tuesday I spent four hours on a forty-minute Bible study.

Thirty-five minutes of those four hours was the passage. The rest was slides, and reformatting the slides, and the text thread, and the reminder in the text thread, and the schedule that moved twice, and a photo that would not size correctly, and confirming the room.

None of that was evil. Most of it was necessary. Almost none of it was ministry.

The tax

The modern world charges an administrative tax on every good thing. The dinner needs a signup. The trip needs a waiver. The group needs a calendar invite and two reminders. The generosity needs a spreadsheet. The sermon needs slides.

A hundred years ago you knocked on a door. Now you coordinate.

Each tax is small. In aggregate it eats the ministry it was meant to serve. You can spend a whole life paying it and call yourself busy.

The value chain

I stole the phrase from work, and it holds. Any job has a chain. At the bottom is work anyone could do, or anything could do — retyping, formatting, chasing, scheduling. At the top is the work that requires you: the judgment, the presence, the hard conversation, the prayer.

Left alone, the day fills from the bottom. Low work is louder. It has deadlines and notifications and a satisfying little sound when you finish it. The work at the top never pings you. Nobody sends a push notification that says a man in your group is quietly drowning.

So the chain inverts. You get very good at the bottom and never arrive at the top, and it feels like diligence the entire time.

Acts 6 is a memo about this

The apostles hit this exact wall, early. The widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. A real problem. A real ministry. Genuinely important, and genuinely not the thing they were put there to do.

Their answer was not we'll squeeze it in, and it was not that doesn't matter. They said it out loud: "It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables." Then they picked seven men, handed it over, and devoted themselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.

Notice what they refused to do. They did not abolish the work — the widows still ate. And they did not call it beneath the church. One of the seven table-servers was Stephen, who goes on to preach the longest sermon in the book and die for it. The table work was not a demotion. It was somebody's actual calling. It just wasn't theirs.

Exodus 18 is the same memo. Jethro watches Moses judge from morning until evening and tells him the truth: you will surely wear yourself out, this thing is too heavy for you. Hand off the small cases. Keep the hard ones.

What changed

I wrote a while back about acquiring new limbs — the strange new leverage of these tools. I said then that I wanted to steward it toward holiness. Here is what that actually looks like on a Tuesday.

The point of the new tools is not speed. It is altitude.

That deck used to live in Google Slides and cost me hours. It lives on this site now and costs me minutes. That is not the win. The win is where the reclaimed hours went: into sitting in Joshua 14 long enough for it to do something to me, and into texting the guy who didn't show up last week.

Had I banked the time instead, I would have optimized my way into nothing.

The obvious way to get this wrong

You can use "value chain" as a permission slip to avoid people. I know, because it is my exact temptation. Efficiency is a beautiful hiding place.

Some of the lowest work on the chart is the highest work in the kingdom. Jesus took a towel. The casserole, the folding chairs, the 5 a.m. ride to the airport — that is not overhead. Sometimes the admin is the love.

So the test is not is this menial. The test is two questions. Is this the thing only I can do? And is this what love requires right now?

Menial and loving stays. Menial and mechanical goes.

So, ministrymaxxing

It isn't doing more. It's doing more of the top. Push the mechanical work down — automate it, template it, hand it to someone whose calling it becomes — and climb into the work that needs a body and a soul.

The measure was never hours saved. The measure is what the hours became.

Which is the part that should scare me. Every hour I claw back is an hour I am now free to spend badly. If the reclaimed hour goes into a better system for reclaiming hours, I have built a nicer treadmill and called it obedience.

Let the machines take the tables. I want to take the people.

My prayer is that when the admin finally goes quiet, I actually get up and go find someone.

— Jack