Ponder: ministry and domestic work

"We tend to conceptualise working harder as producing more.  Yet the wisdom of the medieval theologians of church growth would suggest that the work of ministry might be more helpfully seen as parallel to domestic work--washing, ironing, cooking a meal and washing up--which needs to be done, but then needs to be done again, than to artisan or factory work, which produces a measurable product.  This does not mean that growth does not take place, but it is more analogous to natural, organic growth--the growth of a garden or a child--rather than to capitalist expansion and productivity."

Mirada Threlfall-Holmes, "Growing the Medieval Church" in Towards a Theology of Church Growth (2015), 195