Have you ever wondered why God brought you… here?
Not them.
You. Why you, for this role, at this time, in this place – with this unique congregation, this town, this family, this history?
Why you?
It can be tempting to treat all of that as background noise – the accidental scenery behind the “real” work of ministry, which we imagine is probably happening elsewhere: in someone else’s book, someone else’s story, someone else’s better-resourced church. In the complexity and mess, ours can too easily start to feel like the waiting room before the real assignment begins.
But Scripture will not let us think that way for long.
He’s got you here for a reason. It’s not an accident.
The example of Esther...
When Mordecai encourages Esther toward the palace, he does not give her a strategy. He poses her a question: “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4v14). Her particular history – an exiled, orphaned Jewish girl, raised by her cousin, drawn none too willingly (understatement) into a pagan king’s court – was not an obstacle to her calling. It was in some way the shape of it.
And if we want the fullest statement of this idea, we need look no further than the incarnation itself. When God determined to enter human history, He did not choose an abstraction: not an anyone, not an anywhere, not an anytime. “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4v4). A particular woman. A particular law. A particular Roman-occupied province, under a particular emperor, in a particular unremarkable village at a particular time, indeed the fullness of time. God does not deal in the generic. He deals in Bethlehem. If we were there in the right place at the right time, we could have met Jesus. If the Father was unafraid of that much specificity for His own Son, perhaps we might trust Him with ours?
This matters because context so often masquerades as a limitation. Too small a church. Too ordinary a town. Too broken a congregation, too complicated a personal story with too many skeletons, too tricky a family background, too little platform. And so the temptation creeps in to reach for someone else’s answer – to copy-paste a sermon series, a ministry model, even a way of speaking and leading and prioritising, lifted from a context that is nothing like our own. It rarely works. What fits a city-centre platform sits awkwardly in a village hall; what suits a congregation of hundreds can crush a 12-person congregation. And, what worked for them with their particular gifts or experiences, may well not work for you with yours.
But watch Paul in Athens.
He does not walk into the Areopagus and reheat his synagogue sermon. He carefully, deliberately reads the room – the altars, the background, the philosophers, even their own poets – and speaks to that (Acts 17v22–28). The gospel he preaches never changes. But he refuses to pretend he is speaking to someone else, somewhere else. He pays slow, respectful attention to exactly where, and to whom, he has been sent.
Your context – the size and style of your church, the particular wounds of your people, your own limitations and strengths, even the parts of your story you would rather photoshop out – is not the thing standing between you and fruitful ministry. It is the actual material of your calling. It perhaps took me too long to realise this, but to borrow someone else’s context is not efficiency. It is, quietly, a failure to trust that God knew exactly what He was doing when He placed you where He did.
Not them. You.
Not there. Here.
Not then. Now.
God is not asking you to minister as though you were somewhere else, to someone else, at some other time. He has already, providentially, settled that question. He is only asking you to be faithful where you are.
For such a time as this.
