Many of you have noticed we’ve been on hiatus for nearly two months. This was not planned, but a result of conflicting obligations that kept me away. And when I finally could catch my breath, when I finally could concentrate on our web ministry, I found myself needing a pause to ask what are we doing and why.
The average website visitor (to most sites, including this one) stays for abut thirty seconds. They arrive, look around your home page, and head off to MySpace or wherever. Thirty seconds. The PraiseNet optimally operates on a four-week schedule, which means we have four versions of the site under construction at any given point: the current version, next week’s issue, and two weeks beyond that. It’s a lot of work. It’s extremely time-consuming. We receive virtually no funding and have no staff. Websites this ambitious usually have entire teams of people putting it together. PraiseNet.Org has me. And when I’m not available, the ministry stalls.
Even worse: Church Folk Don’t Read. Well, nothing is absolute, I mean, I’m sure there are indeed Church Folk out there who do, in fact, read. But the overwhelming majority of black Church Folk I’ve met simply do not read anything—the bible least of all. They certainly don’t read articles like this. They surf here, play the videos and music, glance at the headlines and maybe the callouts, and navigate away. 30 seconds, and they’re gone.
So, what are we doing and why? At this point in my life, it is no longer enough that I do something, or even that I get paid for doing something. At this point in my life, it is important the things I do be effective.
The things you do in your life need to be effective. Don’t do things for the sake of doing things, but ask legitimate questions: how will this activity tell somebody about Jesus Christ? How will it fortify and expand His Church? These are legit questions. Receiving inadequate answers to those questions is reasonable grounds to pause what you are doing, to reassess and to make sure whatever you do has lasting meaning and impact. That your work is effective.
In I Corinthians 16, Paul spoke about “a great door for effective work,” which suggested his two years in Ephesus had been less than fruitful. But his work was finally beginning to bear fruit, and Paul was finally beginning to understand why God had placed him there. There will be times when your work may seem fruitless and in vain, where you may not see immediate, obvious results. But, like Noah building a cruise liner in a desert, our task is to be obedient to God, to trust Him even when things seem futile.
God’s revelation for me is this: anybody can talk. Some can preach, but the majority of our preachers are just talkers with not a lot to say and not a lot of anointing on what they are saying. Writers, however, are few and far between. I mean, think about it, had nobody written anything down in biblical times, would we even have a bible? We have a bible because God inspired men to write things down. By “inspired,” I’m guessing God gave these men a certain fitful restlessness that drove them to their writing instruments. And now we carry it around centuries later. Many of us actually read the thing from time to time.
All of which is to say I shouldn’t worry about the 30 seconds. I should give in to the fitful restlessness and do as God commands. Create the record. One that might be dismissed, skipped over or ignored today, but, once committed to text, it is a record that will endure and some day be available to preach, to teach, to admonish and rebuke. To create disciples, and to call God’s people from their ignorance.
Of course, like Paul, I may be long dead before any of that happens, but the effectiveness of your ministry can rarely be accurately determined while you are actually doing it. The effectiveness of your work, of your testimony, is in how it endures and the fruit it produces. We may never know how any of our effort actually impacts anybody. But that value assessment is God’s responsibility. Like Noah, a prophet who was ignored and whose neighbors considered him foolish, our responsibility is to merely do as God asks: to proclaim His truth, and trust His guidance for a fruitful and productive work.
