Serve, Specialize, Then What?

2 Timothy 2:15 - Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (NKJV)

The Activation Insight

One thing I’ve realized over the years: the fastest way to get new believers activated and growing in their faith is surprisingly not to put them on some long-term Bible study track or equipping plan, but to get them plugged into a small group AND serving at church in some capacity.

Ushering, taking a slot to look after babies while their parents attend service, packing visitor gift packs, or even arranging chairs before and after the service; all these are easy, low-commitment ways to get people started in church involvement. Especially in a smaller church.

You know me by now: I’m an introvert. If you put me into anything involving study by myself, I’ll stay there forever.

But there’s something profound about what happens when someone shows up weekly to arrange chairs or hold babies. They’re not just “helping out”, they’re becoming someone who belongs to this community. They start seeing themselves as “a person who serves at this church.” That identity shift does discipleship work that a 12-week course can’t touch.

The small group piece compounds this because it provides the relational glue and learning context. They’re not serving in isolation; they’re connected to people who can answer questions, model faith, and reinforce what they’re learning.

When Specialized Ministry Enters the Picture

Where I start to pay attention, however, is when newer believers start getting involved in the more specialized stuff.

The most obvious is my wheelhouse: music ministry. The new babes in Christ might come already with music instrument skills from real music lessons, or singing ability. Meanwhile, your worship team volunteers may be self-taught or started lessons at those cell-musician factories we have in Singapore. We're talking about a possibly large gap, a large difference, in ability.

The temptation is real: someone shows up with guitar skills or a great voice, and suddenly there’s this pull to fill the roster need rather than consider their spiritual readiness. Especially in smaller churches where volunteer pools are limited. And then affirming them (“you’re so important, you’re making such a difference!”) can inadvertently lock them into that role identity before they’ve had time to develop the spiritual foundation underneath.

It reminds me of 1 Timothy 3:6: "... not a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit.” Paul’s talking about elders there, but the principle applies: premature positioning can actually harm someone’s spiritual development.

There’s a crucial difference between stacking chairs and leading worship, isn’t there? With chairs, ushering, and baby care, the spiritual stakes are relatively low. They can learn on the job. Mistakes don’t ripple outward much. But music ministry? They're now in a spiritually formative role, shaping how people encounter God, modeling what worship looks like, potentially even teaching theology through song selection.

Now worship ministry is not the only potentially tricky role. If new believers attend prayer meetings, feel an affinity to that, and suddenly they start signing up for spiritual warfare classes outside your church, or looking into inner healing or deliverance ministries, you ought to start paying attention. And checking in with them a bit more often.

If you’ve been in church long enough, you’d have enough horror stories about things gone wrong from there. (And if you haven’t, buy your pastor a coffee and ask him for his experiences.) Besides a lot of obvious ways things have gone wrong, there is the danger of the noob thinking being trained in a specialized ministry makes them feel superior to those who aren't.

The Seminary Parallel: Knowledge Without Reality

Let’s not single out the obvious charismatic practices here, shall we? Spiritual pride transcends denominations and theology.

Let’s look at theological training. At its core, theological training is essentially a time-compression tool. Instead of spending 40 years slowly accumulating biblical familiarity through repeated reading, you get a curated, accelerated path through church history, systematic theology, biblical languages, hermeneutics. That’s genuinely valuable, why should each generation of pastors and ministers have to reinvent the wheel repeatedly to be effective?

But here’s the trap: the graduates can mistake having been given a map of the territory for having actually walked the territory. They have the knowledge framework, but maybe not the lived reality of the Word that comes from decades of actually walking with God through it. And if they don’t continue that personal, ongoing engagement with Scripture post-graduation, they end up operating on borrowed capital; they're teaching from notes rather than from wells.

Speaking plainly: we are counting on the graduates of such training to continue their own study of the Word, in order to have the reality of the Word feeding their effectiveness.

Whether it’s the worship leader who’s been to Bethel conferences, the intercessor trained in spiritual mapping, or the seminary graduate with their MDiv, the knowledge asymmetry creates a temptation toward spiritual elitism. “I know things you don’t know. I’ve been trained. I have access to insights/experiences/frameworks you lack.”

The parallel with the new believer taking specialized ministry training is striking: both can end up with expertise without maturity. The new believer learns deliverance protocols or prophetic activation exercises; the seminary grad learns covenant theology or Greek verb tenses. Both can become proficient in their specialty while remaining spiritually shallow in foundation.

The Path I’d Recommend

I’ll be the first to say:

1. Yes, serve
2. Pursue your areas of interest
3. Get effective by specializing

After all, that’s what I did.

But after that:

1. Stay humble
2. Grow beyond your specialty

If not, I can tell you where you’ll end up. You’ll end up a powerful speaker and preacher with a lousy family life. You’ll be the best church musician and end up in adultery. Or you could be the best teacher in children’s church but unable to handle your own kids.

It’s the selective maturity problem. Such people have grown deep in one dimension while remaining stunted in others. And because the specialized ministry produces visible fruit and affirmation, it becomes easy to ignore (or rationalize away) the areas of unhealth.

The worship leader whose anointing on stage is real, whose gift moves people into God’s presence... but who’s also nursing a secret porn addiction or emotional affair with another team member. The children’s ministry champion whose kids feel like they’re competing with “church kids” for mom’s attention and affection. The powerful preacher whose spouse is lonely and whose kids are bitter.

Specialization creates capability, but it doesn’t automatically create character. And the scary part is that the very success in your specialized area can mask (or even enable) the brokenness everywhere else.

Why Deliverance/Inner Healing/Spiritual Warfare Deserve Special Attention

Why did I single out inner healing, deliverance ministry and spiritual warfare at the beginning of this? Because, unlike the other ministries I detailed so far, those have an added problem no one talks about. They give the practitioners filters through which they can view and excuse their own weaknesses and failings.

The worship leader who falls into adultery has no framework to spiritualize it away. Sin is sin, full stop. The preacher with the broken family can’t really blame demonic attack for his neglect. He didn’t prioritize well.

But someone steeped in deliverance/inner healing/spiritual warfare? They have a whole explanatory system that can reframe their issues:

- “I’m struggling with anger because of generational curses”

- “I can’t maintain healthy relationships because of unhealed inner wounds from childhood”

- “The enemy is attacking me because I’m so effective in this ministry”

- “This sin pattern is actually a demonic stronghold, not a character issue”

The practitioner becomes simultaneously the expert and the perpetual patient. “I know more about spiritual warfare than you, but also I’m under more attack than you, so my struggles are different/more complex/more justified than yours.”

It’s not that these frameworks are always wrong; sometimes there are genuinely deep wounds, sometimes there is real spiritual opposition. But the danger is using these lenses to externalize responsibility for what might actually be good old-fashioned flesh patterns that need repentance and discipline.

The new believer who’s genuinely hungry and sensitive might be exactly the person who gets drawn into unhealthy streams because they don’t yet have enough biblical familiarity to discern well. They can get stuck in a perpetual cycle of “working through issues”- always discovering new layers, new roots, new traumas to address - rather than at some point being able to say “I’ve been healed, now I need to walk in obedience and maturity.”

The one attracted to spiritual warfare can interpret every relational conflict, every moral failure, every struggle as demonic attack rather than recognizing patterns of their own sin nature that need to be crucified.

And because they’re developing expertise in the ministry, they have spiritual authority and vocabulary that makes it harder for others to challenge them. “You just don’t understand spiritual warfare like I do. You haven’t been trained in this.”

And as for inner healing?

Here’s something nobody tells the new Christians who get pulled into those ministries: a huge part of the method is simply getting you into a light trance and then guiding you to imagine Jesus saying certain things to you.

It might feel spiritual, but the mechanics are practically identical to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) reframing, a psychological technique where a facilitator helps you reinterpret memories by changing the emotional lens.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If a ministry works exactly the same even when you remove Jesus from the process, then the power isn’t from Jesus; it’s from the method.

And if the power is from the method, then stop calling it “inner healing.” It is just a psychological technique with a Christian wallpaper pasted on.

The Epistemological Problem

And, if that was not enough, these specialities primarily deal with info and concepts that are NOT stated or elaborated upon in the Bible.

As a comparison, I can talk with theologically trained people. I may not be proficient in their jargon and buzzwords, but they can recognize that I’ve read my entire Bible through as often (or more often) as they have. If we disagree on stuff, they understand my thought processes, so there’s a chance I’d learn from them or they from me.

With theological training, even when there are disagreements, you’re at least operating from the same source material. You can point to texts, compare interpretations, trace arguments through Scripture. There’s a shared foundation and a common court of appeal. “Show me in the Bible” is a move both parties recognize as legitimate.

But the spiritual warfare/deliverance folk who already are used to thinking on stuff not explicitly covered by the Bible? That’s a different story. Do I have to outtalk them on principalities and threshold guardians just to convince them that the book of Proverbs is still applicable to them?

When authority shifts to personal revelations and visions, experiential knowledge (“I’ve seen this in ministry”), teachings passed down through specialized training lineages, spiritual discernment that can’t be verified by others, and elaborate demonologies and spiritual hierarchies extrapolated from a handful of verses, suddenly you’re not having a conversation about what Scripture says. You’re having a conversation about territorial spirits over cities, specific demon names and their functions, protocols for breaking soul ties, the spiritual significance of objects in someone’s home... whole elaborate systems built on minimal biblical foundation.

Don’t cosign loans, work diligently, guard your heart, seek wise counsel? This is straightforward biblical wisdom from Proverbs. But if someone’s worldview is dominated by “which demons are operating here,” those practical imperatives can seem quaint, unspiritual, not addressing the “real” (spiritual) issue.

A Word to Small Group Leaders and Ministry Coordinators

You’re the ones in the trenches with new believers weekly. You’re making decisions about who joins worship teams or gets invited to prayer meetings. You’re the ones who notice when someone starts attending outside training. You’re close enough to “check in” regularly.

Here’s what I’d encourage:

- Have clear guidelines about specialized ministry onboarding, especially the spiritually “hotter” ones

- Know which outside ministries and trainings your people are attending and vet them

- Don’t be so desperate for volunteers that you fast-track people into influence roles

- When someone’s expertise becomes their identity AND their excuse, you’ve lost them unless you intervene

Buy your pastor a coffee and make sure you’re aligned on this. Ask for their horror stories. Learn from them.

A Word to the Happily Specialized Noob

I get it. You’ve found something that resonates. You feel effective. People are being helped. This feels more real than stacking chairs.

But let me ask you some uncomfortable questions, not accusations, just questions:

• Can you explain what you’re learning using just Scripture, or do you need the framework from your training to make sense of it?
  
  
• Are your relationships healthier? Your character more Christ-like? Or just your ministry more active?
  
  
• If someone challenged your approach from the Bible, could you defend it? Or would you have to appeal to “you haven’t been trained in this”?
  
  
• When was the last time you read Proverbs and just… applied it? Without filtering it through spiritual warfare?

Specialize all you want, but don’t let your specialty become your whole diet. Read the whole counsel of God. Stay accountable to people who aren’t in your specialized bubble. And for the love of God, don’t use your training as a way to avoid basic obedience and character formation.

Here’s the gut-check: Five years from now, will your life show the fruit of the Spirit, or just the activity of the gifting?

Conclusion: Diligent Workers

Back in 2010, I wrote about 2 Timothy 2:15 and the importance of being diligent workers who don’t need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. That verse is still relevant here.

https://jvworship.blogspot.com/2010/08/teachers-of-pet-topics.html

Serving is good. Specializing is good. Getting effective in your area is good.

But we’re called to be diligent workers approved by God, not just skilled practitioners in our niche. That requires staying humble, growing beyond our specialty, and maintaining a foundation in the whole counsel of God rather than just our favorite frameworks.

Whether you’re stacking chairs or leading worship, whether you’re trained in deliverance or systematic theology, the question remains: are you rightly dividing the word of truth? Or have you settled for being an expert in your corner while remaining immature everywhere else?

The approval we’re after isn’t from our specialized community. It’s from God. And He sees the whole picture, not just the stage, not just the ministry, but the family life, the character, the hidden places where no one else looks.

Be diligent. Stay humble. Grow beyond.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​