I have written on Holistic or Integral Ministry or Missions before. I prefer the term “Holistic” but there are many who prefer the term “Integral” and I suppose that is fine. I used to be an engineer so perhaps my dislike for the term “integral” relates to its use in calculus.

Anyway, I have often described how holistic ministry is the intersection of what is commonly thought of as “spiritual ministries” (evangelizing, church planting, discipleship, etc.) and “developmental ministries” (social justice, feeding, medical care, psychoemotional care, etc.).

However, there are many varieties of holistic ministry not only in terms of the types of ministries involved, but also in how they relate to each other. In the figure below, consider that the green area (holistic ministries) as a region with two axes. The horizontal axis could be seen as far as the focus. If the focus is more on developmental ministries, it would be more to the right (and obviously more to the left if the emphasis is on spiritual ministries). The vertical axis is whether the ministries involved are more integrated or more separated. If a developmental ministry is done along side of spiritual ministry but the two do not work hand-in-hand, but connection is really only temporal and spatial (happening at the same time and place) we might say they are separated. If the ministries work together in such a way that work together and strengthen each other, one may say that they are integrated.