The buzzwords common to most Christians are words like ministry, mission and evangelism (or evangelization, to use the current form of it). These are the happy buzzwords of a Church not simply surviving but engaging and working to fulfill the Lord's own bidding. Conveniently, however, they are suitably vague -- vague enough to sound more useful than they are. These terms are vague precisely because the theological underpinnings of these concepts are also vague or, more likely, left unexplained. It is, after all, much easier to use a term which can mean whatever you want it to mean than to be forced to abide with the meaning assigned to them.
There was a time in which ministry referred more specifically to the ministry of Word and Sacrament, a ministry which is an office and which has a charism. Now everyone worth their salt has a ministry and everything one might do is ordinarily called a ministry. We have food ministries and healing ministries and teaching ministries and administrative ministries and, well, just about every kind of ministry you could ever imagine. It is fun to take what we do and call it a ministry but that does little to inform or describe or mark the boundaries of it. It just makes it sound better -- more noble!
The same could be said of the term mission. We have missions, we are in mission, we are missional, and we have mission statements. It is glorious. The term means whatever we choose it to mean and applies however we choose it to apply. In the end, it is a rather noble and profound way we describe what is our work for God. Most of the time these missions exist to improve things, to make things better, and to make us better. What kind of mission would do the opposite? We have missions for the poor, for victims of injustice, for racism, for misogyny, for gender identity, and just about everything else under the sun -- except missions to speak the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen to those who have not heard, so that they might believe, and to bring them from outside into the family of God that is the Church. It is almost offensive to think that our missions would be bound to be God's mission.
The same could be said for evangelism or evangelization. It is less about God's Word than our words, less about the truth that endures forever than it is what we currently think (or feel), and less about bringing people to Jesus (in Word and Sacrament) than it is about bringing Jesus to them (so that they have a good feeling about Him). Buzzwords are so popular precisely because they mean whatever we want them to mean and most of all they make the ordinary and routine sound like it is special and significant. This is, in many ways, a mask we wear to make our part of the work of the Kingdom seem bigger than even God's. Why, we can make the Kingdom of God happen by what we do and we can stymie God by what we don't. It is almost like God needs us more than we need Him.
The mission of the church is helping people, the ministry is how we carry out the help, and the evangelism is what we say or do to help them (our version of the Gospel). Do you see how easy it is to more the barometer of such buzzwords away from God and nearer to us? Do you see how easy this degenerates into political issues, causes, and processes? Do you see how little it all ends up having to do with such things as being Christ's witnesses, speaking His Word faithfully, and drawing the people of the world to know Christ where He makes Himself known in the Word and Sacraments? Or, maybe, that is the whole point of these words we love to speak but seldom want to define or clarify.
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