Over the weekend Andrea and I were at the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit. There were 8 sessions across two days and each session had something major to reflect on afterwards. However, the session that stood out for me was by a guy called Marcus Buckingham who advises companies and corporations on how to recognise, develop and use the individual strengths of their employees. He made the point that all to often we focus on building up a persons weaknesses rather than fulfilling the potential of their strengths.
This obviously has relevance to the church and to our discipleship. We recognise that we have God-given natural abilities and personalities and we also have supernatural gifts that all must be used in serving God in the world. A major part of our discipleship is recognising what they are and looking for the best way to use them. Most Christians I know would say that they haven't yet discovered what those gifts and abilities are, despite the fact that there are great tools for helping with this, Willow's network course and the S.H.A.P.E. course from Saddleback Church are great for helping people with this.
Part of the problem I think is they way we run church. Churches tend to focus on fitting people into their existing programs rather than fitting their programs around the gifts and strengths of the people in the church.
Listening to Marcus got me thinking about what would St Andrew's look like if we focussed on people's strengths and gifts. If we only developed our Church life around what people had been gifted to do rather than trying to shoehorn them into what we are already doing or think we should do. The strengths and gifts of the people in our church is our most valuable resource - maybe we are wasting that resource?
4 comments:
Hey Steve,I totally believe that God equips our church at St Andrews with people with the skills needed to fulfil his future plans at St Andrews and in our local community.
To do that by fitting around peoples existing skills whilst also finding new ones is very exciting and a great way of thinking to take St Andrews forward in this new century.
I can't wait to hear more
Love and blessings
Nicky
Having recently read 'The Purpose Driven Church' by Rick warren of Saddleback Church, in which he talks about their S.H.A.P.E. programme, I would be recently excited if we started to develop our church members in this way. I would want us to be careful though to not assume that everything we do or are planning to do is not using the strengths of our members. Clearly we need to help everyone to identify their God given strengths and then encourage people to serve in a way, which uses their gifts a to the full. After all, God has surely brought each one of us to St. Andrew's for a reason.
Hi Steve
Been thinking about what we do at St Andrews and I actually think we already do identify people's gifts and use them appropriately a lt of the time.
My thoughts on this are that what we need to ensure, is that once people are doing stuff, we need to support and encourage them. This has to come from the leadership but also from the rest of us too. Praise, encouragement and affirmation do wonders for self esteem and maintaining momentum and enthusiasm for whatever it is that's being done. We talked about this in our cell last week, about how, perhaps, we don't encourage eachother enough. When people feel unnoticed, unappreciated...they become disheartened and perhaps lose interest in what they do....so, not only should we be spotting each other's talents and gifts then using them appropriately, we need to be constantly building eachother up too. A bit of tender loving care never does any harm!!! Helen x
Helen,
I agree with what you're saying. Probably very few of us in Church feel that they are encouraged enough. No matter how loving and encouraging a church is there will always be some who get less encouragement than others. The more leadership responsibility a person gets the lonelier it gets as well.
The thing that should sustain each of us (and it's what keeps me going when I feel unappreciated or misunderstood) is that we are doing what God put us on this earth to do. I think more and more that we need to encourage each other more intentionally, but even more important help people discover their worth in what Jesus has done for them and created them to be.
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