HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 4, 2025 – Ministry work isn’t the same for everyone. Not everyone has the same type of ministry. We can see this even way back in the early Church, when Jesus sent some of his followers out two-by-two with strict instructions, while others he told to go home and show their people what God had done for them. Jesus himself modeled various ministry styles, from home churching, to teaching in local synagogues, to open-air preaching in the streets and on hills, to private one-on-one after-hours sessions, where people who didn’t want to be seen with him in public would come to him alone under cover of night.

How we’re to minister to others and to witness what God has done for us depends fully on God. These are not decisions we should make for ourselves. We shouldn’t choose our ministry style based on what we want. We should wait for God to direct us.

The man who used to live wild and naked among the tombs, breaking whatever chains were put on him and cutting himself with stones, wanted to join Jesus’ traveling ministry after he was healed, but Jesus told him that he should instead go home and show the people there what God had done for him. When I first read about this man, I thought Jesus was rebuffing him and trying to let him down easy. But now I realize that Jesus was giving the guy a ministry that was a perfect fit for him and one in which his witness would give him the biggest bang for his buck.

If the man had gone out among strangers to tell them what God had done for him (which is what he’d ask Jesus if he could do), the strangers wouldn’t have had the “before and after” context that the man’s family, friends, and neighbours would have. It’s all well and good to claim that you used to run naked and howling among the tombs until Jesus healed you, but you’re relying on people to believe your claims. Many won’t. The people who knew the man as he’d been and then saw him after he was healed – that was a powerful witness without even speaking a word. It would have been an astonishment to those people just to see the guy wearing clothes and speaking calming and coherently. Far from rebuffing the man, Jesus was gifting him a ministry with clear instructions, and blessing his labors in advance. What a beautiful thing!

A few weeks after I was reborn, I went to a church service in a little town about an hour’s drive from where I was living at the time in South Australia. There was a reception after the service, and when most of the guests had left, I spoke to the minister about my rebirth. He listened politely for a few minutes and then suddenly took me by the hand and led me over to a window. Once there, he tilted my face so that it caught the full sunlight. Then he said something I’ll never forget. It was more a murmuring to himself than a statement to me. This is what he said: “Yes, you’ve suffered.”

Everything I’d told him up to that point wasn’t enough for him to fully believe me; I was a stranger, and all he heard and saw when I first started talking to him was a rush of words and a happy glowing face. He couldn’t connect this joyful woman with the demon-infested wretch I’d claimed I once was. He needed something more tangible before he was willing to buy my story. He needed hard evidence, and that’s what he found, I guess, in seeing for himself the suffering lines etched on my face, lines that had been softened and smoothed by my spiritual healing but were still perceptible in a strong enough light.

There are many people who used to know me as I was, before my rebirth, who google me and arrive at this blog out of curiosity. They read a bit (mostly the “About” page) to see what’s become of me. Of course, to most of them, not much of what they read here makes any sense, because they’re not reborn themselves, and so they dismiss it with a sneer and an eyeroll, laughing at what I’ve become. Some of them think I’ve gone crazy. Some of them think I’m faking it. Some even think, given enough time and booze, I’ll snap out of it.

But for some (and it’s for those few that I write this) – for some, my witness here gives them pause. They’re not sure what to think, but they know something must have happened to me, something that can’t be explained away by mere medical science or latent maturity onset. Because even though the tone of my words is more or less the same as they remember, the words themselves sure aren’t the same. These are not words that would have come out of me when they knew me. I might not have been running around graveyards naked and howling back in the day, but I almost was. I certainly had a similar version of the legion in me. Instead of stones, I’d use knives to cut myself. And the change, when it happened, was as instantaneous and drastic as it was for that man all those years ago – one minute I was howling and cursing, and the next I was weeping tears of joy and hugging a Bible.

Twenty-six years later, I’m still hugging it.

If genuine, our witness and our ministry should be so intertwined, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. This is why Jesus sent the man back to his hometown, so that his witness would inform his ministry and his ministry his witness. Most people who read this blog are strangers to me; they didn’t know me before my rebirth and so need to take me at my word that I was healed from what I said I was healed from. Not all of them do take me at my word. Not all of them are convinced.

But the people who knew me when I was an atheist and who now read these words – they know something happened to me. They might not know exactly what it was, but they know something happened. The same hometown advantage that the former legion man had in his ministry, I have in mine.

Maybe you have it, too.

Ministry work doesn’t mean you have to go off to a remote village in Africa or start a megachurch in California or street preach in New Orleans during carnival. You don’t choose your ministry based on what other people are doing or what you think you’d like to do. And you certainly don’t choose your ministry based on what other people tell you to do. God chooses your ministry for you, and in so doing, blesses it and provides you with clear instructions. Ministry is not a numbers game tallied by butts on seats or donations totals. (It never was a numbers game.) It’s about doing God’s will and God’s will only, and in so doing showing whomsoever will what God has done for you.

What they then choose to do with that information is between them and God.