Modern political and economic practices have been divided into two systems that function as mirror images of each other. The first is that of a liberal-democratic political order. Within this system, the state keeps economics “free” so that the market might provide for the efficient distribution of goods through competition. To ensure that competing self-interests do not break out into overt physical violence, the state emphasizes a private realm of personal preferences alongside a public realm. The market functions to determine what is valuable and what is not. Economic competition provides value in the public sphere so that consumers might enjoy their own preferences in the private sphere.

The private sphere provides a realm for individuals to discover personal meaning in their lives and to survive the brutal competition in the public sphere. What sociologist Christian Smith describes as a “therapeutic individualism” results: “Therapeutic individualism defines the individual self as the source and standard of authentic moral knowledge and authority, and individual self-fulfillment as the preoccupying purpose of life. Subjective, personal experience is the touchstone of all that is authentic, right, and true.” The state functions to allow individuals to choose their own preferences. This is what the liberal state calls “freedom.”

The second modern system is a Marxist-Socialist perspective, which provides the mirror inverse of the first system. In the Marxist political economy, the individual exists for the good of the state so that the state might distribute goods to all persons in a just fashion. The state, rather than the market, must regulate the distribution of goods. Left to themselves, markets exploit the poor and the weak, the worker and the producer, for the benefit of the owners. By contributing to the good of the state, the individual contributes to the regulated redistribution of goods. The whole society then may function so that each individual has an appropriate standard of living to contribute to the well-being of the state.

These two systems generate two very different concepts of ministry, but both understand ministry primarily as service. Within a capitalist political economy, ministry becomes a product that one can offer to the demographic niche that one seeks to address through entrepreneurial activity. Ministry is placed within an economy of profit-cost analysis as a means to address the personal, therapeutic needs of individuals. It is, according to the famous maxim of Robert Schuller, “Find a need and meet it; find a hurt and heal it.” Thus George Barna argues that ministry correlates with marketing: "Ministry, in essence, has the same objective as marketing: to meet people's needs. Christian ministry, by definition, meets people's real needs by providing them with biblical solutions to their life circumstances." Rick Warren in The Purpose-Driven Church states that the congregation that he pastors, the Saddleback Community Church, “exists to benefit the residents of the Saddleback Valley by providing for their spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual and social needs." Upon closer inspection, the service that ministry provides is really for the inner, private, and therapeutic needs of an individual: "anybody can be won to Christ if you discover the key to his or her heart." Social, political factors are governed by the state and the market. Likewise, the church is a business that in its ministry meets the private needs of individuals, needs determined by the society in which the church lives, that is, by an individual’s “life circumstances.”

As the direct, inverse, mirror image, ministry as service from the perspective of a Marxist political economy relates to the public, bodily, economic needs of the poor to protect their human rights. As Gustavo Gutierrez states in his famous work, A Theology of Liberation, “In Latin America the world in which the Christian community must live and celebrate its eschatological hope is the world of social revolution.” Anivaldo Padilha similarly describes the development of the practice of diakonia in South America in the twentieth century:

"Until the early 1960s diakonia was meant to respond only to the consequences of poverty. However, as Christians in Latin America began to develop their own biblical theological methodology, the prophetic content of the diaconal praxis started to become evident. . . . This prophetic diakonia became even more intense during the period when most of the countries in the continent were ruled by military dictatorships and violation of human rights had become an integral part of state policy. . . . Gradually, however, the concept of diakonia became synonymous with conscientization or popular education. It was understood that it was necessary to unveil to the poor the structural causes of poverty. Solidarity became a synonym for political action on behalf of the poor. . . . Despite its mistakes, the politicization of diaconal praxis led the churches and ecumenical organizations to respond positively to cutting-edge issues that emerged out of the political, social and economic situation."

Diakonia comes in political action, action to reform the state and the market economic structures that oppress the lives of human beings.
At first glance, these two understandings of ministry as service seem to oppose each other directly. Yet underneath the disparity, one finds a certain commonality. Like ministry determined by a capitalist, liberal political economy, ministry in the Marxist perspective receives its mandate from outside the life of the church in the wider society in which the church lives: “The perspective we have indicated presupposes an ‘uncentering’ of the Church, for the Church must cease considering itself as the exclusive place of salvation and orient itself towards a new and radical service of people.” Similar to an entrepeneurial approach to ministry, the world outside the church, not the church’s own nature, determines what ministry is for liberationists. As entrepreneurial surveys of the felt-needs of a local population help determine ministry in the capitalist political economy, so in the Marxist political economy “the Church must allow itself to be inhabited and evangelized by the world;” “this renewal cannot be achieved in any deep sense except on the basis of an effective awareness of the world and a real commitment to it . . . .The point is not to survive, but to serve.”

Ministry understood as service has no integrity in and of itself as an ecclesial practice. Ministry becomes a derivative concept, a practice that only responds to the situations in which the church finds itself. The church empties itself, not of its social status as in the “kenosis” passage of Philippians 2, but of any inner integrity and mission that it might have as a particular people called into existence by God. If diakonia indeed means lowly service, then the church becomes a secondary, unnecessary social organization in God’s redemptive plan for the world. The real work of God’s redemption, the real work of ministry, will find itself in those who directly engage the world through the market or the state, not those who engage in “ministry” from within the church.

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The implications of this study for our understanding and practice of ministry are striking and far-reaching. Technically speaking, not all Christians are ministers, except as they represent Christ as a result of their baptism. Nor is just any type of “service” activity done by a believer a “ministry” in the biblical and historical sense. Ministry is not humble service, except as it requires submission of a person to a particular congregation in order to represent the Triune God on behalf of the congregation, a submission that becomes clearest in the authority granted to the elder to consecrate the elements at the Lord’s Supper in prayer. The Eucharistic re-presentation of the body and blood of Christ to the church by the sanctification of the Spirit enfolds all other acts of ministry within it.

More importantly, the ministry of a congregation and of those commissioned to represent it is not set by the perception of needs formed by any political systems. Ministry is set by the economy of God, that is, the Trinitarian relations of love in the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The revelation of this Triune God is seen in Jesus Christ and is witnessed to in the scriptures. While a church softball league might be fun for members of a congregation, it is not a ministry. Such an activity is not opposed to or against genuine ministry; it is just tangential to it. It is simply an activity of a different category. Some activities, however, seem contrary by nature to ministry. For example, one cannot run a church brothel nor operate a youth group as a para-military exercise and call it ministry. Such activities violate the character of the Triune God, which ministry must re-present.

By contrast, the nature of the Triune God seems to require that ministry encompass two factors if it is to preserve the faith given to the saints: 1) an ecclesial body must commission the person(s) conducting the activity to represent the church; and 2) the activity must reflect the character of the Triune God that has been revealed in Jesus Christ. At times this will look like what the world calls lowly service: activities like the proclamation of the Word of God or leading a congregation in prayer or engaging a group in the traditional Christian works of mercy by feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, providing shelter to the homeless, overseeing the sick, and burying the dead. These activities may look lowly, even servile, from the world’s perspective. But Christians know that this is the highest office that a human being can be given: it is to re-present Christ and Christ’s church, the body of Christ which God has called into being for the redemption of the world. For such a gift, those called by God and the church to minister can only give thanks.