Clearly, the Church's role has both a personal and social dimension to it. One of the great mantras of the modern Church has been "every member ministry", that is a sense that God is calling each member of the Church to a particular ministry. The priesthood of all believers, as taught in the New Testament, is turned into the priesthood of each believer. This may be based on a misunderstanding of what the New Testament actually says but whether or not every member has a ministry, every member certainly has to be a disciple of Jesus. In the business of making disciples, the Church will find that people have gifts which can equip them for particular kinds of service (or ministry) in the Church and in the world. How the local and national church discerns what the vocation of different members might be, how it prepares, commissions and supports them, will determine the Church's effectiveness in local communities and in the nation. Such effectiveness cannot be "bought" by becoming trendy or simply reflecting contemporary values, as politicians want the Church to do, but by making sure that all of the gifts given to Christians are being exercised to make the Gospel helpful, intelligible and liveable in our age, our locality, our nation, our world. 

For centuries the Church has been committed to a presence in local communities: rural or urban, prosperous or deprived, mixed or monochrome. This has meant that the Church has been present when other services have withdrawn or only come in from outside to complete given tasks in a particular village, town or ward. The Church's presence must, however, be effective and this means a well thought out and well deployed ministry. 

A basic assumption will be that the Gospel provides everything that a local church needs for its ministry and mission. The task of the wider church, and especially the stipendiary clergy, is to identify and enable those who are called to fulfil specific ministries in the local church, whether that is in serving the community, building up the faithful, teaching children or being prophetic about issues of justice and the proper use of resources. 

In the recognition of gifts for ministry, how God is calling women and men to serve him in the Church is a specific consideration. While men and women are equal because both have been made in God's image and given a common task, they are also different and fulfil their vocation in distinctive ways. Just as families and communities need a proper recognition of the distinctiveness as well as the complementarity of genders for balanced flourishing, so also the Church needs this for ministries which are balanced and complementary. The modernist and proto-feminist "one-size-fits-all" approach does not take difference into account and thus presses     women into male patterns of work and recreation. The Church may be in danger of repeating this mistake just when the world is abandoning it.