When a person finds him or herself in a position of leadership in the church, it comes as a mixed blessing. It's a great privilege, and aspects of the work are tremendously rewarding.You can find yourself saying, “You mean I GET to do THIS?!” The flip side is that it comes with a crushing responsibility and often the grumbling of hypercritical people.Full-time Christian ministers approach such a privilege with an eye for the structure of what they are doing what can be called the “programme” or they approach it with an eye for the people involved in any given programme.The first is easier to organise and manage, because it's just a thing one has to manipulate to fit on the clock, but the second is where Jesus put His emphasis. He came to seek and to save lost people. Persons were His emphasis. He broke rules to pitch His tent with them.Christian ministry ought to come with a warning label: “A person is not a thing to be moved around on the chess board of one's ministry so as to accomplish some kind of holy strategy.” A person is to be known and loved, and “love” in this context means to connect with and relate to.That introduces the subject.I have a bone to pick with an approach to Christian ministry. Call it the PR campaign, the well-intentioned effort to make Christianity look so appealing that non-believers will want to become Christians too.In order to make the PR campaign effective, everyone gets organised and muffles their individuality so as to present a unified and consistent picture. In fact, this approach is all about what things look like and the look has to be attractive and appealing. People have to appear to be happy.However, Christianity is not contagious because things appear to be what they are not. When Christianity is contagious it speaks truthfully about the way things actually are. It addresses the uncertainties and the disappointments, the ambiguities, the enigmas and the seeming paradoxes of life, and it presents a complex God who is both so unlike us as to be utterly transcendent over us, but who is so committed to us that He is unremittingly among us.Earlier in my Christian walk mentors and teachers described our goal as one of living an overflowing life in which a person bubbled over from the Holy Spirit and became an example of victorious living.That usually meant this so-called overflowing Christian would appear to be healthy, prosperous, and successful. His or her children would all be obedient and respectful believers. He would be a powerful man of God who could teach the Word of God and mentor younger Christians and lead his family in a steady and consistent journey through life.She would look like a dutiful, respectful, and obedient wife, creative and productive, feeding and clothing and nurturing all in her care out of the strength of her character and spiritual maturity. They would all be happy, a family deeply satisfied and fulfilled. They would be on the cover of every Christian Hallmark card at the local Bible bookstore.That, however, is not the real world for most Christians. In fact, that is a false picture the world can recognise immediately as a whitewashed facade. There is no difference between that and the bone Jesus picked with the religious leaders of His day when He said, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean.”And why is that? Because no one can satisfy all the requirements of the law or any rule-based system for gaining favour with God and other people. You can't do it, and so the only thing left is to put a fresh layer of paint over what you can do and hope other people accept that. It's doomed. It doesn't fool God. It leaves other people feeling that something is a bit off, and it makes the person him or herself ultimately unfulfilled, guilty, and worried that they will be found out as a fraud. That is slavery. There is no freedom in a whitewashed, inauthentic life.Might I ask a question? What do Christians have to lose from being real with others and ourselves?Are we not free, set free by grace from having to measure up to religious standards and laws, and made perfect in Christ? Yet, are we not also each a picture of the overall church itself in which both weeds and good plants coexist?We are redeemed and positionally glorified in Him, but we all fall short of the glory of God and always will in this lifetime. My feet are made of clay, and I experience imperfection daily; furthermore, there is not one other person on this earth whose feet are any different. He loves me the way I am. Why, if I have received such a gift, would I EVER demand more from someone else that they live up to some kind of rule I create to make myself or my ministry look good?No.The law, the obligation to present a good performance, to meet a standard, cannot save a single person, and in that I mean both in terms of justification and sanctification. If we choose to live by the law, we will kill ourselves trying to achieve something we cannot possibly accomplish.If we demand that others measure up in some way, instead of simply being real being who they are we will kill them trying to present a good facade, which becomes a false picture of what the Christian life is actually like.You cannot present “the way, the truth, and the life” by offering pretence and for-effect caricatures of real people. You must address people as they are and the world as it is.