Who’s on First?

Certainly pastors are charged with pastoring their flock. The Bible is clear that much is required for those who have been given the task of shepherding. What about Ministry Leaders? What about Assimilation Teams? Who is ultimately responsible, and is there a way to know who should be serving and where they should be serving? I can remember going to church as a young adult and seeing the same few people doing most of the ‘service’ at the church – at least those in visible positions. Has much changed in a decade or two? I believe it has. More and more churches are wanting to have a better grasp of how many people are serving. Who are they? Are they serving in areas that match their giftedness?

Spiritual Gifts Tests are Just the Beginning

Tools abound in the marketplace to help churches assess spiritual gifts and personality to try to get people serving in their right place. But you cannot stop there. Just getting people sent out to a ministry does little to help those responsible for accounting of these resources to report on these numbers of servants. To do that, true tracking and accountability systems need to be in place – - and they need to be used!

Ideally, churches need to know the serving opportunities that exist in their church, the number of hours required to do those jobs, who they have to fill those “jobs” and when those people rotate in and out of service (i.e. when the jobs are empty and needing new servants).

Communicating the opportunities for people to learn how God created them through the use of spiritual gifts tests/assessments, and vehicles to use that data to place them into ministry service are needed at every church regardless of size or denomination.

Stopping your efforts at sending servants out into ministry without keeping up with that service is akin to keeping a checkbook where you record every transaction but never balance your book – you don’t have a clue where you are.

Let’s not let our churches go into the ‘red’ because we don’t know where people are serving. Just like getting a message from the bank that you are overdrawn, we don’t want to find out that our ministries are suffering from lack of servants only when it’s too late.

How about your church? How do you keep track of your servants?

I can’t tell you how many times, when a person has completed the PLACE process and we began to look at helping he/she find their PLACE of ministry within his/her local body, people discovered their ‘heart’s desire’ was not something they had conjured up, but in reality, was God designed!

PLACE is the tool to help people ‘see’ that their God given Personalities, what they Learn about their spiritual gifts, their Abilities, how they Connect passion to ministry and that their Experiences in life are for a purpose-there truly is ‘meaning to the madness’ we sometimes label ‘life’. Then, the tool utilizes the ‘seeing’ to discovering what is deemed too often as a dream unobtainable, in fact, is the person’s ministry PLACE!

How many times, after the personal discovery in the PLACE process, have I heard participants say, I would love to . . . . volunteer at the Crisis Pregnancy Center, mow a yard, decorate for the ministry events, send cards, read books, the list goes on and on . . . . and when time to consider PLACEment, I have heard the comment . . . “That is considered ministry? Then, sign me up!”

Over and over, I have found people want to ‘freely give as they have freely received’, out of a sincere love for the Lord and what He has done for them, they just honestly do not know how or think they don’t have anything to offer because they are stuck in the preconceived ministry ideas of teaching, singing and working in the nursery.  Because they ‘can’t’ or don’t feel called to these areas, they believe there are not ministry opportunities for them. PLACE has been the tool to move people from their heart’s desire to ministry! I believe with all my heart God has PLACE’d a wealth of treasures in the body of Christ, what we call the local church, they are merely waiting to be discovered!