If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?
Paul, 1 Corinthians 12:17
If I thought I could win one more soul to the Lord by walking on my head and playing the tambourine with my toes, I’d learn how!
William Booth
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
Tick: You know, Arthur, when evil is afoot, and you don’t have any arms, you’ve gotta use your head. And when evil is ahead and you’re behind, you’ve gotta do the legwork. But when you can’t get a leg up, you gotta be hip. You gotta keep your chin up, and kick some—
Arthur: Tick, we get the idea.
Tick, 1994
COME A LITTLE CLOSER
There’s another reason we can give to the punk kid who asks why he should go to church. Two words: spiritual gifts.
If they were in operation on a regular basis, he’d never ask that question.
Let’s face it: there are certain things that can’t be done well over the Internet, like kissing. And there are certain things that only happen around the Thanksgiving table. Mom’s hugs; Dad’s proud, reassuring pat on the shoulder; the dog’s slipping a little tongue into your nostril as you bend down. You have to be physically present for that expression of love. Delivery of the news, “You’re going to be a father,” “Will you marry me?” and “I regret to inform you that your son was killed in the line of duty while bravely serving his country” should not be communicated by texting.
So with spiritual gifts. The first-century church used their spiritual gifts during the service. They had to be told not to overuse their spiritual gifts. We don’t even know whether or not we have any.
Paul established that spiritual gifts only operate when we’re in the presence of one another: “For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith” (Rom. 1:11–12). Nothing magical will happen as you sit there in church as part of an audience, but something supernatural will happen as you get involved in another person’s life and through the gifts function as Jesus’s hands, feet, and mouth. Jesus Himself will begin to interact with somebody through you as you serve that person through your spiritual gifts. Now that’s something worth dragging yourself out of bed for on a Sunday morning.
Getting ministered to, but more importantly, ministering to others is epic for the interactive mind-set of this generation.
I FEEL SO USED
As a youth pastor, when I took a kid and forced him to save all his money, get onto an airplane, and fly to some foreign country, he came back supercharged for Jesus. What made the difference? He was using his gifts. The mission field allows you to use your gifts. Sundays don’t. If Sundays were turned into the mission, he’d be given the same opportunity to supercharge his soul, but if you want him to sit down and shut up, he’ll tune out and walk away. Mission is where he experienced the power of God channeling through him. Like the disciples returning from their mission into the hill towns of Judea (Matt. 10), he’ll return revved up about what he saw and heard God do through him.
When the church becomes a theater, the attendees become an audience. They become spectators. The challenge of any pastor is when he tries to get an audience to start acting like missionaries. Somebody once said, “Christians are like manure. If you put them in a heap for too long, they begin to stink. But if you spread them out, they fertilize and become fruitful.” Why? Because they stop being an audience and become missionaries.
In the early church, prophecy, encouragement, and the other gifts were allowed to function as people ministered to one another, and those gifts revealed the presence of God to unbelievers (1 Cor. 14:25). If I don’t allow breaks in my service, then I don’t allow God to break in. Nobody can share during the praise and worship time if they feel they’re interrupting the performer’s set. As E. Stanley Jones explained,
The very setup of the ordinary church tends to produce the anonymous. The congregation is supposed to be silent and receptive, and the pastor is supposed to be outgoing and aggressive. That produces by its very makeup the spectator and the participant. By its very makeup it produces the recessive, the ingrown, the non-contributive, and the parasite. Men and women who during the week are molders of opinion, directors of large concerns, directors of destinies are expected to be putty on Sunday, and are supposed to like it. They have little responsibility, hence make little response, except, perhaps, “I enjoyed your sermon.” They have little to do, hence they do little.1
The new breed of church creates opportunities for people to interact with each other. Small groups are hardwired into our service at Refuge Long Beach with the express intention of allowing people to minister to each other and interact with lost people. That’s why coffee tables and horseshoes of chairs set around them are crucial. Nobody will get involved with the back of another person’s head. Whoever thought that church should have people sit in rows was a moron. Greeting somebody next to you is just to allow the worship team to get the heck off the stage and allow the pastor to get his mic rigged up. You can’t truly fellowship during this time. I want to take the time to hear about the woman whose heart is breaking for her son who is in prison yet again. Nobody notices her in a big church, but in a small group, that woman is guaranteed to come week in and week out and have people listen to her, pray for her, and maybe even follow up by writing to her son.
The beauty of it is that all believers at that table have been given opportunity to testify about the grace of God in their lives evangelistically. Not only have believers used their gifts during the service, but there’s also room for interaction with the newcomer to go beyond the four walls of the church by inviting them out.
GRACE FINDS BEAUTY IN EVERYTHING
Refuge Long Beach, where I’m planting, is an urban plant in the city’s downtown area. We meet in a community center in Bixby Park. Every holiday weekend, the hall is unavailable because it’s a government building. For this reason, every couple of months we have to meet outside with lawn chairs. Taking Matthew 10 as a text, we shocked our team one day by gathering them around like Jesus did the seventy-two and telling them that the teaching for the day was to go to the lost sheep of Long Beach and proclaim the good news of the kingdom. At first they looked stumped, but slowly they began to move out in pairs. Like the seventy-two, they came back rejoicing that incredible things had happened. Conversations lasted three hours, people broke down and wept, the hungry were fed, new friendships were kindled. Weeks and months later we are still witnessing the reaping of the fruit of that day.
Here is the letter I wrote to my planting team after that hard day’s planting:
By now you’ve begun to realize that church planting is not a spectator sport. It’s a full-contact sporting event. You’re going to sweat. It’s going to hurt. You’re going to get muddy.
Yesterday, at Bixby Park, I saw you guys seeking and saving the lost.… I saw you leaving the ninety-nine to go after the one. I saw you sweeping the house for the lost coin. I saw you unloading some Jesus-style kung fu in the spiritual realm.
“For the Son of Man came eating and drinking.” That was Jesus’s description of His own ministry. He was up close and personal, across the table and available, in your face and ready to serve. Simply put, He was available.
“For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
I think that many of you are beginning to realize that you actually matter at Refuge Long Beach, and more importantly, to the kingdom. In a church plant, when you don’t come, you leave a gaping hole. When you don’t give, we’re poor. When you don’t reach out to others, the lost don’t get reached.
Can you imagine what would happen if every once in a while, the average pastor pulled one of these on a congregation when they turned up?
“What? No teaching? No lesson? No worship?”
“Here is the lesson: teach what you’ve learned. Freely you’ve received, now freely give.”
I imagine that we’d see a lot more people fired up for the gospel than we’ve ever seen before as the people of God step out in faith and actually begin to engage the community around them on a Sunday morning.
Now there’s a thought.
If church has become a spectator sport, then we need to challenge people to get out onto the field. That’s all great, but nobody would dare leave the bleachers and hop onto the field unless they were drafted onto the team. E. Stanley Jones spoke about leaders as coaches, equipping the saints to do the work of the ministry:
If the laity only listen they will produce only listeners, but no leaders. If the pastors are the coaches of a team they will produce players. Out of those players they will produce coaches. Out of our present setup is produced increasingly empty pews. If the church is pastor centered, then the output will be rhetoric; if it is lay-centered, then the output will be action. It will be the Word became flesh instead of the word became word.2
But people have to know their gifts.
FIND YOUR PASSION
I don’t ask Christians what their gifts are. Over the years, I’ve learned that most believers who’ve sat in traditional churches aren’t just unaware of their gifts—they didn’t even know they had any. They’ve never been called upon to use them. Ironically, they weren’t required for what we call church.
Here is the secret to finding people’s spiritual gifts. You don’t start by looking for their gifts. You root around for what they’re passionate about; and people are passionate about things that burden them. If you can track what a person’s burdened for, you’ll discover their passion. When you discover their passion, their gifts will be trailing along behind.
What I’ve learned to do is grab some local papers and throw them down in front of the small groups. I ask them to circle the headlines that tug on their heartstrings, identifying needs in the community.
Next, I ask them to dream big. I’m actually looking for their gifts, but they don’t know that yet. I ask them to circle with a red marker a couple of needs that stand out to them from the newspaper and come up with a strategy of how to meet those needs. The rules are simple: their plan can’t be limited by lack of human or financial resources. When they begin to dream, their passion starts to bubble to the surface, and I start to see what gets them excited. Then I discern what God created them to do when we were “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).
This is the single most effective way to motivate a church to use their gifts. Here’s why.
Following a business model, a pastor drafts his five-year plan. Shine everybody else; the pastor is the visionary with the secret-service earpiece, communicating with the president. Here’s the problem; if you’re the only one who gets to listen on the Batphone to the Commissioner, everybody else will stop answering it. Nonetheless, the pastor with the five-year plan draws a straight line out of a chalkboard that eventually breaks at various stages into multiple lines indicating growth in the programs, benchmarks, and goals he’d like to see. Now the people become a means to that end. So he cracks the whip over them, for more money to realize the vision. He pumps them for “more bricks, less straw.” He begs, he weeps, he beats them until they become like the Pod People from Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, mindlessly slaving with soulless eyes for the vision set before them. They’ve been steamrolled, and their passions have been buried under your five-year plan.
Rather than trying to get people motivated to meet needs that they don’t give a rip about, I let their passions steer the direction of the church, knowing that the Holy Spirit has deposited a gift there. It’s my job to ensure that they have a platform to use it. When God deposited our spiritual gifts to us during our salvation, a passion was kindled in our hearts about something we wanted to do for God; but somewhere, somebody down the line told us it was stupid, they weren’t qualified, or it wasn’t “the vision of this church.” And something in them wilted as they tried to diffuse some of that energy by doing church chores. I’ve learned to sniff out people’s gifts. Somebody animatedly telling me an elaborate strategy for meeting the needs of the homeless has the gift of helps. Somebody who wants to counsel and provide support for single mothers dealing with life’s daily struggles in all shapes and forms has the gift of compassion.
And you can never predict who’s going to be burdened for what.
Are you recovering huge amounts of addicts who need somebody to reach down into the gutter and pull them out? You’re going to find somebody on your team has the gift of compassion and giving. If not, then somebody will turn up. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that God, in His providence, will supply what is lacking as every part of the body does its share. Heard that somewhere before too.
A friend and former coworker turned up at our church with the gifts of giving and compassion. A successful entrepreneur, he sat in the emergency room with our addicts as they detoxed, turned up at their apartments, cooked them food, and wiped vomit off the floor. He supported our church plant from the start, and his kids came to the church and got saved when we launched, but he didn’t turn up to the church until he was needed. At the time, none of us were aware of the need, yet God knew that it was right around the corner and moved somebody strategically into that slot to fit it.
There’s an anonymous poem that is liberating:
I’m only one,
but I am one.
I can’t do everything,
but I can do something.
And I will not allow the everything that I can’t do
to stop me from doing the something that I can do.
I’m only one,
but I am one.
WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
I’ve learned that above all, people are what Jesus is concerned about. He’s more concerned about what He can do in a person who serves than what He can do through that person. Quite frankly, He doesn’t need us.
Besides, the world out there has way more needs than I, you, or any number of Christians can possibly meet. Therefore, my strategy is to let the gifts of the people in front of me drive our mission. Because the strategy starts with people’s gifts, it therefore ends with everybody’s involvement.
For example, if I’ve started with ten planters on my team, I draw a circle representing our church. Within that circle I place ten dots representing my team members. Next I draw a bigger outer circle representing our mission field. I then draw arrows from the team members’ dots leading outside the circle of the church and into the mission field. Those arrows represent the direction their gifts will take us. Depending on the burdens, passions, and gifts represented by my team, those arrows could be anything from art exhibitions, to drug counseling, to a talking heads group in the local hipster coffeehouse. It may be that I’ve got an uncanny amount of artsy people. Then again, I might have a third of my church (which I do) made up of ex-cons and the recovery crowd. Those two tribes live on from different planets. I shudder to think of artsy hipsters attempting to style themselves to reach convicts, or my recovery crew walking into an art gallery. Getting people engaged on the right mission is crucial. Like a compass, they’ll find their true North if you give them room to wiggle on the dial.
When we let the gifts determine the direction of the arrows, we may get some converts. For example, if five people get saved as a result of us strategically using our gifts, I draw five dots representing the new converts in our mission field. Next, I erase the small circle representing our church, and draw it bigger to encircle the five newbies.
Now the outer circle becomes our church.
Now we’ve got five new sets of gifts added to our original ten. The last step is to find out what gifts the new converts have and draw arrows pointing to an even bigger outer circle. Rinse and repeat as your church grows. If I have three gifted musicians with a heart to hit the city’s stages, or three ex-cons with a desire to hit the barstools together and witness, or two film students who want to start a film club and critique movies, then I get behind them all, enabling them to weave the gospel into all of those activities as we engage our city on mission together. I just keep drawing arrows. The more I’m drawing dots, circles, and arrows, the happier I am as an apostle.
It’s liberating when you don’t have to do all the work but can sit in a corner doodling. When people ask what I do, I can either respond, “I do what Paul did,” or I can say, “I draw pictures all day!”
My teachers were wrong … it did pay off!
NOTES