Churches who believe in helping people discover HOW they are uniquely created to serve must also be committed to helping direct people WHERE to serve.

I have watched many churches teach their people on HOW to serve based on helping them discover elements like their spiritual without any thought about how to help them know WHERE to serve.

Back to my two ministers I talked with this past week.  One was using our mobilyzr ministry guidehttp://mobilyzr.com/onlineguide/overview.html and pumped about how it was connecting their members to meaningful ministry.  The other was excited about the personal discovery going on through the PLACE assessments, but struggling on what to do beyond the personal discovery.  His church was even providing one-on-one coaching after the personal discovery, but still struggling with connecting people to ministry.

I am thrilled with churches that truly desire to help every individual in a personal and individual way discover who they are in Christ by providing insight to members and attendees into their personality, abilities, discovering their spiritual gifts and passions and connecting their life experiences to these insights and discoveries.  This is why I wrote the five PLACE assessments so God’s people can discover their personality, spiritual gifts, abilities, passion and life experiences as it relates to fulfilling God’s purpose for their lives.  But, I hope you will like me commit whether you are beginning your connection process or strategy or have already implemented it you will ensure to incorporate two key steps in your process and strategy.  First, create a ministry guide so your people will know WHERE they can pursue their purpose.  Secondly, provide one-on-one coaching to help your people know better HOW and then WHERE to serve.  The results will be worth the effort.  A commitment to this simple two-step process will avoid, “I’m gift but WHERE do I serve”.

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?