In the late 1990s, I had the great experience of working with Jay McSwain on his earliest versions of assessments for PLACE. I’d never heard of the concept of “Abilities” before then. But, I’ve come to consider its inclusion as a self-discovery tool as one of the significant contributions of PLACE.

The Abilities system was created by John L. Holland. He designed it to help people figure out their best niches in the world of work. The Holland Abilities approach deals not just with work activities we favor, but the kind of work environments in which we flourish: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, or Conventional. (For an overview, see The Holland Hexagon: Careers and Six Basic Types.)

A few weeks ago, I went to a workshop where I took an extensive Abilities work assessment and learned even more about this system. No, it wasn’t a PLACE workshop, though PLACE uses this assessment tool in their in-person and online workshops. It was the “Self-Assessment and Career Evaluation” job search seminar at my county’s employment services. Perhaps in a moment of mid-life sanity instead of mid-life crisis, I’ve discerned that this is my Halftime moment, which means time to refocus from personal success to leaving a legacy of significance. Time to shift careers …

Anyway, my Abilities results showed a strong double preference for Artistic and Investigative. That means I do my best work on problems that don’t have a defined set of rules for solving. That means I get to dig for details, think about ideas, and imagine creative solutions. It makes sense that my Abilities strengths and challenges would apply to ministry settings as well.

I was thinking just this morning about what my top Abilities mean for me as a disciple with a spiritual gift of teaching. If we look only at spiritual gifts, then the usual teaching situation would seem to be about my getting up in front of people to inform, lead, and persuade them. As an Artistic-Investigative teacher, informing is something I’m fine with. But teaching to lead and persuade is something else – yikes! Those make me queasy! No surprise that leading and persuading fit with Enterprising – which happens to be my weakest Ability.

So, put me in the usual teaching situation, and we should expect that I will mostly flop, not flourish. Sure, I can stretch myself to do lead-persuade kinds of teaching sometimes, but it’s just not the best of what God designed me for! I’m not just spiritually gifted as a teacher, I’m an Artistic-Investigative teacher.

Here’s the take-away:

It’s easy to limit ourselves and others to ministries that generally fit them, based on definitions of spiritual gifts. But that approach doesn’t consider the optimal place for each unique person, based on their combination of spiritual gifts and Abilities. Abilities help us move from good-fit ministry to finding a better- or best-fit place of service.

Every investor wants to know how much his/her investment makes over time. However, rarely do I hear about churches wanting to know how to measure effective as it relates to their people serving, and whether their strategy to involve people in ministry is paying off.

WHY?  Some potential reasons are:

1. Believe the results are impossible to measure.

2. Believe the results are not important to measure.

3. Don’t want to know the facts regarding how effective they are at connecting people to ministry.

4. Have never considered why or how to measure ministry involvement.

I went on church staff in 1998 as Associate Pastor of Ministry Development and my job involved connecting our members to ministry. I never thought of where to start. I did what most church leaders did and started by giving our people spiritual gift and personality assessments. While instruments like spiritual gifts assessments play an important part, if I had it to do over again, I would not start with an assessment. I would start with knowing how many people were already involved in ministry. This result then becomes a starting point, so I can measure the results. I would start with wanting to know how much commitment a person already had to ministry. Then I would implement the process. Yes, the process would include the use of spiritual gifts assessments. Then I could measure at the end of a year or whenever I choose whether my process was increasing servanthood/ministry involvement at my church.

A practical place to start…

One of the easiest ways to find out how many people are serving already is by conducting a survey. Today’s technology and the survey resource provided by PLACE ministries allow people to log onto a customized church webpage and complete a survey. The survey provides information that helps knowing how many people are doing what role in ministry and how long of a commitment has been made. The survey also provides how many hours a week the ministry is taking and a short job description of what the person is doing. These results added with the investment of purposeful ministry strategy are bound to guarantee a big ministry involvement pay off! Go to Mobilyzr to learn more!