Many have asked me where the name of this site came from – Why ‘Ministry that Matters’? There are a few layers to it. First, it was the theme of the 2025 Redeemer Network Conference with Ray Ortlund. I remember sitting on a Zoom call with Ray as we were preparing for the conference. Ray said with a grin, “I love this conference theme, because if we aren’t doing ministry that matters, we’re helping the Devil.” As we talked about the idea of “ministry that matters” – pure, whole-hearted, holistic, healthy ministry – Ray brought up Francis Schaeffer’s talk given at the first Lausanne Congress in 1974, called “Form and Freedom in the Church.” I had read it years ago, and it impacted me deeply. So much so that it’s required reading in the Redeemer Network residency program. I still go back to it often, and every time I do, I come away inspired in a new way.
Schaeffer’s basic claim is simple to state and hard to live. He said there are four things the church needs if it’s going to meet the pressure of its age: two contents and two realities. Miss any one of the four, he argued, and you don’t actually have the whole gospel. You have a fragment of it, dressed up to look complete, but truly a distortion.
Here’s a summary of Schaeffer’s talk, in his own words as much as possible.
1. The First Content: Sound Doctrine
Schaeffer starts with truth. Not vibes, not experience, not “just believe.” Christianity is a body of doctrine, and he wanted no confusion about that.
“Christianity is a specific body of truth; it is a system and we must not be ashamed of the word system. There is truth and we must hold that truth.”
He was especially hard on the idea that faith and thinking are somehow opposed to each other, that the spiritual move is to stop asking questions.
“It is not more spiritual to believe without asking questions. It is not more biblical. It is less biblical and eventually it will be less spiritual because the whole man will not be involved.”
And he didn’t let doctrine stay theoretical. He tied it directly to integrity, to whether you’ll actually live what you claim to believe when it costs you something.
“Do you think for a moment we will have credibility if we say we believe the truth and yet do not practice the truth in religious matters?”
This is content you can state and defend. No fog.
2. The Second Content: Honest Answers to Honest Questions
If the first content is what we believe, the second is what we owe the people asking us about it. Schaeffer refused to split the “spiritual” life from the intellectual one, as if faith lives in a separate room from your hardest questions.
“If Christianity is truth as the Bible claims, it must touch every aspect of life. If I draw a pie and that pie composes the whole of life, Christianity will touch every slice.”
He points to Jesus and Paul as models. Neither of them dodged questions. Both of them did the work of answering them.
“Christianity demands that we have enough compassion to learn the questions of our generation… Answering questions is hard work.”
That line still gets me. Answering questions is hard work. Not a talking point, not a clever one-liner, actual work. Schaeffer is clear that answers alone don’t save anyone, but he’s just as clear that dodging honest questions isn’t humility. It’s laziness dressed up as faith.
3. The First Reality: True Spirituality
Here’s where Schaeffer turns a corner most doctrinally serious people don’t want to turn. Right doctrine, held perfectly, is still not enough. He’d lived that gap himself.
He tells the story of a personal crisis in the early 1950s, walking the mountains near his home in Switzerland for weeks, wrestling with the fact that his own spiritual life had gone dry even as his theology stayed correct.
“A dead, ugly orthodoxy, with no real spiritual reality must be rejected as sub-Christian.”
What he found on the other side of that wrestling wasn’t a new doctrine. It was a recovered sense of Christ’s ongoing work in the life of a believer, moment by moment, not just settled at conversion.
“There must be something real of the work of Christ in the moment by moment life, something real of the forgiveness of specific sin brought under the blood of Christ… There is nothing more ugly in all the world, and which turns people aside, than a dead orthodoxy.”
Sound doctrine that never becomes a living relationship with God is still a failure. A costly one.
4. The Second Reality: The Beauty of Human Relationships
The last move is the one I think gets skipped most often in ministry circles that pride themselves on being doctrinally serious. Schaeffer says true Christianity has to produce something visible: beauty in how people actually treat each other.
“True Christianity produces beauty as well as truth, especially in the specific areas of human relationships.”
He’s not talking only about how Christians treat other Christians. He means everyone, including people we sharply disagree with theologically.
“We need two orthodoxies, first, an orthodoxy of doctrine and, second, an orthodoxy of community.”
An orthodoxy of community. Sit with that phrase for a second. Schaeffer says the local church is meant to function like a company’s pilot plant, a small working model the world can look at to see whether the whole idea actually holds up.
“Every church, every mission, every Christian school, every Christian group, regardless of what sphere it is in, should be a pilot plant that the world can look at and see there a beauty of human relationships which stands in exact contrast to the awful ugliness of what modern men paint in their art.”
He cites an old tradition about the early church that isn’t in Scripture but captures what Scripture describes: the watching world said of the earliest Christians, “Behold, how they love each other.” That’s the target. Not just correct belief, not just personal devotion, but a community so visibly different in how it treats people that it makes the gospel credible.
Why This Is the Whole Point
Put the four together, and you get Schaeffer’s real argument – doctrine without spiritual reality is dead, spiritual reality without doctrine is unmoored, and both of those without visible love toward real people are just religious performance. Ministry that matters has to hold content and reality together, truth and beauty, doctrine and community. Drop any one leg and the whole thing tips over, and if that happens, we are helping the Devil.
That’s the name of this blog. It’s what we are after at Redeemer, and it’s what I want to help others get after – Biblically faithful, gospel-centered, Spirit-empowered ministry rooted in the local church and spilling over into the world.
If you want to read the whole talk, it’s worth your time: Form and Freedom in the Church.
