Ask not what you can do for your church. Ask what your church can do for you.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We hope you’ve joined a church that is more concerned with throwing wild parties and entertainment extravaganzas than it is with doing actual ministry. If your church cares about the New Testament model at all, it’s throwing a lot more glow-stick raves and monster-truck rallies than it is homeless outreaches and evangelism nights. Should the monster-truck-rally-to-homeless-outreach ratio be out of whack, it’s time for you to go back and reread chapter 1. There’s no use in continuing down the path of holiness if you’re in a church that’s going to keep bringing you down with discipleship, ministry opportunities, and the like.

During the rare occasions when your exciting you-centered church does actual ministry, your primary goal is, at all costs, to avoid lifting a finger. Make no mistake, now that you’ve joined up with a church and are plugged in with a small group, church leadership is going to go after you hard to force you to sign up for a ministry or volunteer at some lame outreach event. Your pastor smells volunteer blood in the water every time you walk by.

Let’s get biblical for a moment. The only thing Jesus ever said about serving in the church was recorded in Matthew 11:30: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” As Christians, therefore, our solemn duty is to hang back and let everyone else do the work.^*1

If you’re taking this Christianity thing seriously, then, your job is to come up with any excuse necessary to get yourself off the hook of serving the body of Christ.

The sinister free-time-destroying call to ministry comes in many forms. Your church might passive-aggressively place ministry sign-up forms in the lobbies, which are easy enough to avoid by just pretending you don’t see them. Give them a wide berth, as though they’re deadly land mines. Sometimes, if they get desperate for volunteers, they’ll guilt-trip the whole congregation with an announcement that they really need more people to step up to watch the two- and three-year-olds, visit a convalescent home, or something else totally lame like that. These are slightly tougher to navigate, so you’ll need to be on top of your eye-contact avoidance game to make it through unscathed. Pretend you’re concentrating really hard on your Bible, fake that you’re in a deep time of meditative prayer, or jump up with a spontaneous word of prophecy in an angelic tongue. Get creative here—absolutely any technique to get out of dull ministry work is fair game.

The worst-case scenario is that the pastor approaches you as you make a beeline for your car after the service and straight up, point-blank asks you to help out once in a while. Don’t bother with the biblical explanation of why you’re opposed to pitching in—your scriptural acumen will intimidate him and make him defensive.

Instead, a nearly ironclad excuse that works in this dangerous situation is to say that you just don’t feel called to help out at your church. Commit the following to memory and use them whenever necessary: “I don’t feel called,” “I don’t believe the Lord is leading me,” “I’m not feeling led down that path.” These are powerful trump cards you should keep at the ready for times like this.

Here is a sample conversation to help you the next time the pastor rudely asks you to volunteer, no matter how small the commitment may seem:

PASTOR: Hey, man. I noticed you’re really gifted with loving on people. I think it’d be a big blessing for you and for the church if you’d serve on the prayer team, even if it’s just fifteen minutes every other month.

YOU: That sounds amazing, my brother in Christ, and I’d really like to press in on that with you. But you know, I just don’t really feel called to help out in that way.

PASTOR: Oh, why not?

YOU: Well, here’s the thing, brother—God just hasn’t put it on my heart. I don’t feel a mystical burning sensation in my bowels when I think about volunteering to gather with other Christians and briefly pray for the life of the church.

PASTOR: Oh, all right then. Uh, I guess that makes sense. Is there some other way you do feel God calling you to serve the body of Christ?

YOU: That’s a great question, pastor. But I want to be careful not to do anything that’s outside the will of God, so I’m really going to have to keep that in prayer for the next several years before I can commit to anything.

PASTOR: Sounds good.^*2

As shown in the example above, if the pastor ever corners you and you run out of excuses, just say you’re going to keep it in prayer. (Don’t actually pray about it, of course. God might actually convict you of the need for you to love your fellow Christians, which would be unbiblical.) This shuts the pastor down right at the start, and it has the added benefit of making you sound spiritual, and you still haven’t even lifted a finger! It’s like getting something for nothing. “Keeping it in prayer” is an excellent little Jedi mind trick to convince people you’re really close to the Lord and to make sure no one ever catches on that you’ve never once helped out at the church.

As we’ve established from the beginning, the church is here to meet your needs, not the other way around. Theologians call this “you-centered ministry,” and it’s totally biblical. Trust us on that. Make sure you and your church never lose sight of that God-ordained priority.

So, hey, why not put your newly honed volunteer-avoidance skills to the test right away? If your church is in the Baptist or Methodist tradition, there’s probably a potluck scheduled for this coming Sunday. This is a great opportunity for you to be served by other people at church while doing very little work yourself.

Christ left three ordinances for the local church: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the potluck. The latter is a sacred tradition, thousands of years old. In fact, biblical scholars now believe Christ’s final Passover supper with His disciples was a potluck, with each of the disciples offering to bring a different hot dish for everyone to enjoy.^*3

At the potluck, everyone contributes a plate of tasty food, and then all attendees get to enjoy a little bit of whatever their hearts desire. Studies have shown that attending potlucks and consuming thousands of calories of melted cheese, fried chicken, and questionably cooked meat is almost guaranteed to prolong your life by a good thirty or forty years. So you’re going to want to jump right in with both feet and do life together, potluck-style. You do care about your health, don’t you?

Your goal at the potluck is to enjoy as much food as possible while providing the absolute minimum contribution yourself. Slip in undetected and drop a twenty-five-pack of store-brand napkins on the table or offer to carry some clueless grandma’s contribution into the fellowship hall and then pretend you made that crispy chicken casserole from scratch while she’s still hobbling in from her Cadillac with her walker.

Alternatively, do the really spiritual thing and bring nothing at all. You tithe to the church, don’t you? Why are they asking you to give a penny more than the customary 2 percent? They’re greedy, that’s why. All they care about is money, or else they’d let you have everything for free.

But just because you didn’t bring much doesn’t mean you don’t get to gorge yourself swollen on the glorious mountain of casseroles. No sir or madam! You eat as though you’re on death row. Bring a large purse or man-bag and just scrape a few generous helpings of every last hot dish on the communal table right on in there. Pack a thermos and pour all the store-brand two-liter bottles of soda someone else paid for in it so you can enjoy their generic goodness at home. You’ve gotta get your tithe’s worth.

The potluck is just a proving ground, your own personal Hunger Games, to see if you’re the very best at slacking off and leeching off others’ hard labor.

Once you’re sneaking into the biweekly potluck like a pro, you’re ready to ascend to the next plateau of greatness by figuring out what your spiritual gift is.

A spiritual gift is a unique blend of supernaturally bestowed talents and passions granted to everyone who believes in Jesus. For instance, Moses had the spiritual gift of getting really mad and breaking stuff. Samson had the spiritual gift of growing a really dope beard. And Peter had the spiritual gift of saying the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time.

We’ll be forthright with you: some spiritual gifts are way better than others. Some are the spiritual equivalent of The Dark Knight trilogy while others are the Batman & Robin of spiritual gifts. To discern which one God has infused you with, start by perusing the list of spiritual gifts on the next page.

Carefully look over this list, pray for a couple seconds if you feel like it, and then choose the one that sounds the best to you. Congratulations! That’s your new spiritual gift!

Don’t really worry about what you’re actually good at. Just choose the one that’s most beneficial for you. If you don’t actually possess the gift you’ve chosen, don’t worry. Take a bit of wisdom from Proverbs and “fake it ’til you make it.”

Spiritual Gift	Description	Awesomeness Level
Tongues	Babbling incoherently and calling it a private prayer language.	8/10 — You’re so much better than those carnal Christians who never got a second blessing! If they even are Christians.
Teaching	The supernatural ability to preach from a MacBook Pro sitting on a sleek, modern café table. Includes ability to make hilarious jokes every other sentence and tell heartwarming anecdotes.	11/10 — You are literally the center of attention while teaching. And people will tell you how awesome you are all the time. It’s definitely the best spiritual gift of them all.
Hospitality	Allows you to bake casseroles for people and do stuff for them or something.	0/10 — You don’t get much praise for this one, so steer clear.
Peddling the gospel for boatloads of money	Just turn on TBN and mimic what those guys do, and you’ll know if you have the right stuff for this spiritual gift!	9/10 — You get lots of money and fame. The only downside is there’s a small chance you go to prison for tax evasion.

Now, look, if you happen to fail at deflecting your pastor’s requests to serve, or if your pastor is just a bulldog who won’t take no for an answer, then take our advice and join a ministry to get the guy off your back.

Don’t worry, the goal stays the same—you still won’t be lifting a finger. But now you’ll get credit for saying you serve in a church ministry. Score!

Let’s take a tour of some of the most common ministry areas most churches have. We’ll provide an in-depth analysis of each in order to help you select the one that will bring you the most glory while requiring the least effort.

• Tech Ministry: Volunteering in the tech ministry means you’ve given up on becoming a prominent Christian of whom people will be talking about for years to come. Not one person will even know you exist. In fact, the only time anyone will ever look at you is when you bungle a worship slide on Sunday morning or if one of the mics stops working. Then the entire congregation will know just how much of a failure you are.

  This ministry also requires quite a bit of technical knowledge, so the work-to-glory ratio is really out of whack. We’d recommend a hard pass on anything related to the audiovisual ministry.

• Worship Ministry: Worship ministry is pretty great. You get to pretend you’re a real rock star, but you only need a fraction of the talent. Only bother to apply if you’re ridiculously attractive or else your modest looks will distract people from their worship of God and their awestruck adoration of the worship band.

  If your worship band’s music is just above mediocre, there’s a chance you’ll get picked up by a major contemporary Christian record label, and then you’ll be swimming in fame and fortune. So if you’ve got the looks, the designer wardrobe, and the modest guitar chord repertoire, you ought to consider this one.

• Youth Ministry: There are only two kinds of people who volunteer for youth ministry: self-loathing masochists and aspiring pastors who are just doing their time until they’re ready for actual ministry. You do, however, get lots of free pizza, soda, and video game time, so it’s not all bad. Just remember that you’ll have to supplement your less-than-minimum-wage income with panhandling or running a massive drug-dealing empire to make rent each month.

• Men’s Ministry: A church’s pastor to men is usually just a pastor who isn’t cool enough to be the main dude, like those local punk bands at the Vans Warped Tour who play on the side stage. He could also be a senior pastor who was edged out of the pulpit after reaching the ancient age of thirty-nine. The silver lining with men’s ministry is that you get to shoot a lot of stuff, roll around in the mud, and use phrases like “biblical manhood” to package it as real Christian ministry. Neat!

• Women’s Ministry: Women’s ministry is reserved for women who are gifted in teaching but aren’t allowed to use their gifting anywhere else. They get to throw lots of tea parties, spa nights, and Avon makeup sales pitches cleverly disguised as Bible studies. While women’s ministry is almost as lame as children’s ministry, it’s as good as you can hope for, ladies. So take what you can get.

• Children’s Ministry: Children’s ministry is superlame. You get very little glory and you’re dealing with harebrained kids who aren’t gonna remember what you’re talking about five minutes later, let alone by the time they get home (kind of like pastoring adults, but even more so). You’ll serve lots of Goldfish crackers and punch and come home covered in peculiar substances. We suppose you could do this for the satisfaction of doing it or to invest in the future generation of believers, but really it’s just far too much work to be worth it.

• Nursery: Same as children’s ministry above but with more diaper changing and lots of drooling. It’s basically a dungeon of tears and poop. Serving in the nursery is the bottom of the totem pole.

As you select the ministry that’s right for you, consider elements like how much of your free time it will suck up, how much glory you will get for your work, and how well it pays. With a little prayer and meditation, God will surely lead you to the ministry that fits you like a nice cashmere sweater and also earns you the praise of man.

No matter what ministry you serve in, remember the golden rule: let everyone else do all the heavy lifting. We mean this literally. If the potluck is wrapping up and people are tearing down tables and chairs, stand off to the side and engage in spiritual conversations about the things of God. Should someone dare approach you and ask if you’d lend a hand, hit ’em with a zinger like, “Oh, sorry. I was just over here discussing the gospel-centered gospel with a brother in the Lord. I didn’t realize you didn’t care about Jesus at all.”

Another approach would be to tell them your spiritual gift is encouragement rather than actually working. Then give ’em a pat on the back and say, “Nice job, buddy. I’m really impressed with your servant’s heart.” You look holy and they do all the labor. It’s a win-win.

This is fundamental, people. If church really is all about you (see chapter 1), then the pastor and the rest of the hundreds of people on the church staff should be waiting on you hand and foot, not asking you to do a bunch of lame stuff.

Doesn’t it feel good to be the king of the hill at your church? Getting all the glory while putting in minimal effort? Speaking from experience, we can say there’s no greater joy in the world, no matter what John Piper says.

Let’s check in with the tracker and see how well you’re doing.

Holiness Progress Tracker 5000

Wait, what? You backslid? Ugh.

You must have gone out and done actual ministry without letting everyone else do all the difficult, unglamorous work. What were you thinking?

You’d better get back on track if you ever want to achieve perfection. Stop messing around. We’ve got work to do!

^*1 This is definitely the correct interpretation of this verse. We talked to dozens of prominent Bible scholars, and they all agreed, so there’s no need for you to go looking into it yourself. We got you, fam.

^*2 Run, don’t walk, away from the conversation at the first possible moment. Jump in your car and floor it. Hanging around the church grounds too long after the service is unwise, as you’ll inevitably get asked time and again to serve in various ministries.

^*3 According to the latest research, Judas Iscariot brought Jell-O filled with questionable fruit pieces.