Reflecting on Kingdom Loyalty and Collaborative Ministry

In a recent reflection, Ted Esler explores the tendency for Christians to prioritize loyalty to specific ministry organizations over the broader mission of the Kingdom of God. He warns that believers can inadvertently become so focused on their own organizational expressions that they lose sight of the collective work of the gospel.

To illustrate this, Esler recounts a personal experience from his time as a young missionary. While staffing a booth at a missions conference, he met a man who described his past work in a restricted-access Middle Eastern city as being part of a "God team." The man explained that despite representing various organizations, the missionaries were united by a shared goal under the banner of the gospel. Esler uses this encounter to encourage believers to recognize that God organizes teams across institutional lines, urging them to avoid the pitfalls of organizational tribalism and instead embrace a unified commitment to the Kingdom.