Leaders

No Room for Prophets: When Your Church Rejects Your Spiritual Gift

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Spirit, WordI don’t think a stranger tradition exists in evangelical churches than the use of spiritual gift inventories. Churches hand constituents a booklet on the gifts of the Spirit and task them with selecting (based on a set of questions in the booklet linked to specific personality traits) the spiritual gifts they possess. The only thing stranger is letting people self-identify their personal spiritual gifts WITHOUT a booklet.

So much for leaders mentoring their charges in a way that helps them discover their gifts.

What mystifies me is that all of the popular spiritual gift inventories that I have encountered in my life include the charismatic gifts that bother a large number of Christians. I wonder what happens when Joe Average, a relatively new believer and new member of the church, fills out his spiritual gift inventory and discovers that his gifts are as a prophet and a healer.

I know what happens in most churches: Joe’s prophetic gift is treated by leaders as “well, Joe, about that gift…,” while the healing gift relegates Joe to visitation ministries, where he’s supposed to make chit-chat with shut-ins and the “lightly” hospitalized.

What pastor really wants any of his people to score that spiritual gift inventory and come up with a prophetic gift high on the results? Prophetic gifts in most churches get forced into being considered good for one of the following three uses: only preaching, only nice “crystal ball readings” to reassure people, or for no good use at all.

Does Pastor Bob want Joe Average to use his prophetic gift to supplant him in the pulpit? Must I even ask that question?

Does Pastor Bob want Joe Average doing anything “weird,” like forecasting people’s futures or warning the church of its errors? (Even if the forecasts are for sunshine and blue skies only? Even if the warnings are more like Hallmark greeting card text? Or especially because of those possible outcomes?)

And then there are words of knowledge and words of wisdom. Even the gift of faith gives some leaders the willies when they think how their people might consider its use.

It seems like half the list of spiritual gifts is a minefield, and it may be why some church leaders look at spiritual gift inventories as a necessary evil. (Unless, of course, everyone has the pastor’s favorite gift: administration.)

Given how poorly we deal with spiritual gifts, if we deal with them at all, is it any wonder the typical modern evangelical church shambles along in its mission like some B-movie monster?

Want a church that uses spiritual gifts properly?

1. Everyone, stop with the fear—and the discrediting of the Lord. When churches and their leaders descend into fear over gifts, they discredit the Lord. Who is the giver of gifts? How can we NOT believe The Lord knows best what our church needs? If Joe Average has a prophetic gift or a healing gift, consider yourselves blessed, and let Joe—with wise counsel—use his gift! If you do, it’s guaranteed that God will do more in your church, and not less, because of Joe’s Spirit-endowed contribution. Trust God, folks!

2. Leaders, stop the vanity. If you don’t see yourselves as replaceable, then you’ve made yourselves royalty, and that’s not how the Bible teaches you should lead. Enable the gifts in your people; don’t stymie them because they seem a threat to the perfect church kingdom you’ve erected. “He must increase and I must decrease” may apply not only to your relationship with Christ, but also to your standing among your brothers and sisters in Christ in your church. Don’t be the cork in the bottle of what God wants to do in your midst because you lack the humility to let others do what God can do through them. As someone wise once noted in Acts, when you constantly rein-in your people, you just may find yourself opposing the work of God.

3. Nonleaders, stop the vanity. Nothing ruins a church faster than people who desperately want to be seen as possessing a particular gift yet who in no way offer evidence of its God-driven operation in their lives. The number of unqualified—yet self-proclaimed—teachers I’ve witnessed “teaching” in churches could fill a stadium. And no one does more damage than a proud, deluded dispenser of words of knowledge or prophecy. Leaders are partially responsible for creating these disastrous disciples, which means they need to reboot their gift ID process, so…

4. Leaders, get rid of the spiritual gift inventories and identify gifts God’s way. Paul drew alongside Timothy and helped his charge grow into his giftings. He didn’t hand Timothy a spiritual gift inventory booklet and tell him, “Have at it!” No, Paul worked with the young man and mentored him in such a way that Timothy knew what his gifts were because Paul affirmed them. Leaders, I believe your number one task is to personally commit to helping each person in your church not only identify his or her spiritual gifts, but also…

5. Leaders, fan the flames of your people’s gifts. Read #2 above. Once you’ve gotten out of the way and done your own personal gut check about your motivations, enable the gifts in your people. There NEVER should be an environment in a church where there is no room for this gift or that. Don’t step on the embers, leaders, but do all you can to make them into a roaring fire.

6. Everyone, use the gifts or lose them. I can’t point to a verse that claims specifically that unused spiritual gifts will vanish, but the parable of the talents sure seems to validate that idea. Wonder why your church limps along? Perhaps you’ve squandered your gifts. Perhaps repentance and wailing before the throne will get them back. Or perhaps not. The warning is not to diss those gifts in the first place. Just don’t go there.

7. Everyone, rejoice. The gifts are given for the edification of the Church and for the completion of the mission tasked to us by the Lord. Eagerly pursue the gifts and rejoice in their use. Or to quote a song, “Forget your troubles, come on get happy.” Nothing beats a smiling, grateful countenance on someone employing a spiritual gift for the benefit of the Body of Christ. That’s real church, and it’s exactly how each of us should function as part of that Body.

 

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and Why No One Can Get (or Give) Any

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I’ve got about six months until I hit 50. That milestone isn’t sitting well with me, though.

Part of my unrest is that the major tropes of my youth with regard to the accumulation of years have failed. Or perhaps I should say that I failed to fulfill them.

By the time you are 50, you are supposed to be in the prime of your career. You are a leader in your community. Your savings account is overflowing. You have power. Your words matter to people and they listen to you because you are a success.

At least that is what I grew up believing because that’s what we were all taught to believe.

Problem is, I haven’t achieved any of those. My careers (yes, multiple) have all been derailed at one point or another by uncontrollable economic factors, so this elusive “prime” I keep hearing about seems to be some mysterious other’s to enjoy. I’m not rich, so I have no power, since the money = power equation only grows stronger the larger the number of years on the calendar. Politics seems to be the only avenue to leadership anymore, and no party will have me. And since achievements in those preceding traits are the sole signal for success in our society today (with the possible exception of scandal, so there’s at least that still open), I’ll never be a worldly success.

They say that youth is wasted on the young, and I understand this more and more. Supposedly, the counterbalance is wisdom, but no one cares about wisdom. In an age of knowledge, where Google can give you answers to nearly any question you have, and it’s all within reach of a ubiquitous cell phone, what is wisdom? The Internet is filled with dime store philosophers, and most days anymore, I feel like just another of their horde. Name a topic and there’s a pundit for it.

So if none of this works, what is left for the guy who has managed to get to 50 years without making a total wreck of life?

I was taught to always refer to adults with “Mr.,”Mrs.,” or “Miss” preceding their surname. Even when I was in my 20s and 30s, my parents’ peers were still “Mr. Kreider” or “Mrs. Frey,” not “Joe” or “Phyllis.”

This gave those neighborhood stalwarts some ethereal cachet that made them different from me. Better. Smarter. More worthy of respect.

Just the other day, I was out with my son, and we ran into the daughter of a friend. She’s 19-21, if my faulty memory serves, and she called out to me by saying, “Hello, Mr. Edelen.”

I found it almost startling to hear “Mr. Edelen.” Perhaps I am now an adult, part of that elusive set of peerage that reserved such titular prefixes for the friends of my deceased parents.

If anything, that callout got me thinking more deeply about respect.

If none of the other standards for adulthood drilled into me in my youth can be assumed, surely respect can. Yet despite being called Mr. Edelen by one well-raised young lady, I think that more of us can identify with Rodney Dangerfield.Rodney Dangerfield - No respect

Getting to 50 without screwing up one’s life no longer merits the special favor of respect. Perhaps it never should have in the first place. We keep hearing that respect must be earned, and if anything, that’s still the prevailing thought.

Yet if our societal beliefs on respect are to be grasped, no one is earning respect.

The presidency used to be a position of respect. I don’t know if that was forever shot down by the presence of presidential protein on an intern’s dress, but since that event, neither of our last two presidents have garnered any respect. Even from Christians, respect may be talked about with regard to the POTUS, and we can blabber with the best of ’em about Founding Fathers and the greatness of America, but the words we say about our president don’t encompass respect.

In fact, even in the Church today, I can’t think of anyone who gets any respect. The world at large has a built-in reflex for questioning authority, and that seems to have slid down the gutter into the American Church.

Don’t believe me? Consider the following.

An elder from your church pulls you aside some Sunday and says, “I notice your giving has been down this year. What can we do about that?”

For many of us, the first thought is, Take a long walk off a short pier, buddy.

Even if we substitute pastor for elder in that scene, nothing improves. Doesn’t matter who the person is, we don’t want anyone telling us we’re doing it wrong.

But, Dan, the giving thing is a naturally divisive issue, you may say. And I know you don’t ascribe to a New Testament tithe, anyway. OK, then have the elder or pastor suggest that you’re not spending enough of your time in service to either the church or the community. Or that a church leader noticed a sin in your life you may need to address. Or that you might think you’re a gifted teacher, but that class you really want to teach is not what the church needs from you now. Or that you’re not as gifted in teaching as you think you are, and that perhaps your gift is driving the church bus.

How quickly the thought becomes, So which other churches can I visit next Sunday?

We can talk all we want about respect, but no one seems to get any anymore. We are so selfish and believe ourselves so wise, that no one can speak into our lives with any authority and have us instantly consider his or her words worthwhile simply because who he or she is demands respect.

We don’t honor offices or the people who inhabit them. Titles now mean nothing. We have become like cliffs of granite, immovable, unswayable, and suitable only for jumping off for those who would suggest we move or sway.

Sure, plenty of Christian leaders have abused their authority. Sure, some people may not be worthy of respect.

But is anyone?

I maybe a poor example of human being and perhaps an even lousier Christian. Maybe respect should not be afforded me simply because I’ve hung around nearly 50 years.

Yet what else is there? If we can’t respect those people who are still standing after 50 years or more, especially within the Church, what hope do we have to ever move anything—including the Church—forward? Instead, we may be dooming ourselves to a downward spiral of selfishness that keeps crying out for others to respect us, even as we fail to respect anyone else.

Unity & Disunity in the Church

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Tim Challies at Challies.com posted twice this last week on the issue of unity within a church (“Satan’s Great Desire” and “How to Build Unity in Your Church“).  As usual, Tim does a good job of noting the problem, rooting it to Scripture, and offering a solid biblical response to maintaining unity.

But what is left unsaid in those two posts is what has nagged at me the last few days, especially since I believe the topic of the year is church community (and the sudden interest in community seems to be widespread now).

Tim says that a lack of mutual love within a church is a major reason for disunity. His answer is for those in the church to use their spiritual gifts to serve each other.

You’ll get no arguments from me on this.

However, I believe that the problem we have with disunity within churches is more insidious than a lack of love.

What I share below is my experience as a trained observer of churches and people. I can’t give you a lot of Bible verses (yet) to back my observations, only that I believe that what I write is going to resonate—especially with seasoned Christians who have been wounded by their church experiences.

First, a clarification. How does disunity in a church manifest?

What most people see of disunity itself is anger, frustration, resentment, people leaving the church in numbers, and church splits.

Personally, I don’t believe that the majority of this disunity and its fruit can be traced to the Smiths not loving the Joneses. For the people in the seats on Sunday, not getting along with other people in the seats is almost never their reason for manifesting the bitter fruit that leads to people leaving the church.

What I know of people who have left a church or of a church that has split, the reasons are of a different sort. The leavers and splitters are far more likely to note the following failures:

Nuclear blast1. Church leaders failed to address “sticking points” within the church despite others (usually nonleaders)  noting those issues.

2. Church leaders failed to respond to pleas for personal help.

3. Church leaders failed to nurture other people’s God-given spiritual gifts (or even purposefully stymied them).

4. Church leaders failed to communicate vision and direction to the rest of the church body.

5. Church leaders failed to recognize they are fellow brothers and sisters of equal stature with the rest of the people in the church and therefore failed to lead humbly.

Picked up on the pattern yet?

Most solid people (as opposed to church hoppers/shoppers) who leave a church or most churches that split do so for one major reason: church leaders failed.

This is not to excuse those who are not church leaders for their personal culpability in that failure, but it demonstrates an enormous, glaring problem.

If church leadership failures are a major reason for disunity in a church, perhaps the problem is not one of love, as Tim Challies notes, but of the entirety of the way we allow our churches to be led. Perhaps the models of church leadership and proper church functioning we have fallen into over time are not the models depicted in the New Testament. Perhaps this is why church leaders fail so often, why so many people leave a church (or Christianity altogether), and why disunity reigns.

Sadly, almost no one within the North American Church wants to deal with this problem because it means a total rethink of the way we do church and would prove too threatening to a vast number of people.

But if the Church is to do more than survive, thriving means dealing with that problem.

And that is going to have to take a whole lotta love.