2 Ways To Serve

If you have accepted Christ as the leader of your life, you need to be serving in and through a local body of believers. Jesus was the ultimate example of serving. He gave us example after example of how He put others first by taking on the role of a servant. The ultimate example was Him taking the cross for our sins.

Serving is not overly complicated. If you belong to a local body of believers, I am sure there are ample opportunities for you to get involved. In this post, I am going to break serving down into two categories as means of simplifying it.

1. Positional Service: Positional service takes place when you agree to serve in a particular ministry during a specific time and place. In my church we have several ministries that are broken down into teams that serve one time every four weeks. This is a great example of positional service. You are agreeing to serve in a position (i.e. foyer host, usher, nursery, etc.) for a period of time (one time every four weeks).

Positional service opportunities are usually the easy to get involved in and come with a fairly straight forward job description. They are crucial to the functioning of the church on service days. The Pastoral staff can’t do all that needs to be done on a Sunday or any other service time. Volunteers are essential to a successful service.

2. Personal Service: Personal service occurs without a schedule and a clear job description. These opportunities present themselves in the hallway when you come across a single mother who needs help with diapers or when you encounter a high school student who is in desperate need of a spiritual mentor. These are just a couple of examples, there are countless opportunities for a Christ follower to engage in both inside and outside of the church.

Personal service opportunities will likely require more from you than a positional service opportunities because they are personal. You have to get up close to the person to minister to him. You have to give of yourself in ways that are not clearly spelled out.

As a follower of Christ, you need to be engaging in both kinds of service opportunities. I will go as far to say that if every member in a local body of believers engaged in both positional and personal service opportunities you would find a very healthy local body of believers. And we should all want to be a part of a healthy body of believers.

What are some ways you have served both positional and personal?

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