Helping your small group, team, or congregation discover their gifts will release a new level of effectiveness in your church. Those involved in this process will experience God working in and through their lives in a fresh and fruitful way. The Gift Test makes this challenge an exciting, simple, and inexpensive exercise.
The purpose of this series is to offer some basic “entry points” for beginning to explore your Minimum Factor graph.
This post is for those whose Minimum Factor is Gift-based Ministry.
Two initial points need to be made.
Currently 99 UK corps (churches) within The Salvation Army are actively engaging with NCD. 54 of these are part of the ‘Transforming Churches Process’ and many of them are slowly discovering that God is working through this new approach to ministry. What follows is a selection of comments from 8 of these corps, and all are being both challenged and inspired by NCD.
Gather a group together in your church to map the needs of the surrounding community. Share your findings with others in the church, including the leadership.
If you have a gifted evangelist in your church, ask them how, based on your gifts, you could work with them to grow fully devoted followers of Christ.
Ask the music team if they enjoy the music in the worship service and also what music most helps them encounter God and why.
Use Romans 12:1 to consider what you bring personally to the worship service.
Ask the senior leader of your church to explain why attending the worship service is important. Discuss the answer with your friends and family. Provide the leader with feedback.
Ask anyone you come across in your church, who seems to have some longer-term tension with another person, to tell you one or more positive things about that person, then encourage them to communicate those to the other person in some way.
Make eye contact and shake hands or greet someone from your church with whom you have had even the slightest relational tension and ask how they are going generally or with one of their specific areas of interest.
Speak out about the positives of a person or current situation (or how things could clearly be worse) when in any negative sounding discussions this week (but then of course work to make the situation better).
Take time before meetings this week (e.g. at meals with your family, a leadership or team meeting, a mentoring appointment, etc.) to think about a celebration point that relates to that individual or group as a whole and then share that point in the meeting.
Make a list of ten reasons for celebration from your life this week (eg. from your work, church, ministry, family and friendships, the Bible, etc.) and share some of those points with at least three people from your church.
Ask yourself and someone within your sphere of influence (who seems to be travelling smoothly on their Christian journey), what kind of challenge you should be taking on if it were to cause you to ask God for help whenever attempting it.
Share with someone why you believe they have a particular gift that is better developed in them than in yourself.
Ask your congregation/small group/team/family/friends what unique gift they personally brought to worship this week with which to bless God and encourage the church.
Proverbs 10:17 (NIV)
17 Whoever heeds discipline shows the way to life, but whoever ignores correction leads others astray.
If you want to give your church a real headache then here is some very useful advice:
Gift-based ministry Baptist USA specific cat info.
Gift-based ministry is based on the conviction that God has already determined who should assume each ministry within the church. The role of the leadership is to help its members identify their gifts and find or create ministries that match them. When you live in harmony with your spiritual gifting, you are no longer ministering in your own strength, but the Holy Spirit is working in you. Thus, even though you may be an ordinary person you can accomplish extraordinary things...A little over a week ago my wife, Tammy, brought home a card from staff at a local child care centre.
Comments written on the card literally blew us both away.
Having spent a bit of time being part of the local underground music scene, I must confess I have developed a bit of a bad habit.
The habit was challenged to its core last year, and I am pleased to say some pleasant changes have occurred as a result.
Empowering Leadership (EL) and Need-Oriented Evangelism (NOE) are the two Qaulity Characteristics (QCs) which I often lack to have enthusiasm for especially when it comes to me personally contributing something in these areas for the positive growth of my Church. I don't have leadership and evangelism in my "gift mix”, and together with a lack of NCD knowledge, it was little wonder that a while back I ended up concluding there was no point to even thinking about them. Thankfully, since then, God has shown me ways in which I can contribute to these QCs without "chea
Here are some 'Quality Characteristic Hand' photos I took that made up part of a thematic photo panel in the foyer of our church. At the bottom is a mock up of the photo panel itself.
You can click the photos to download the originals if you like.
Hope it is useful or prompts your own ideas.
