Help write my new book and provide me feedback on this article. Please comment at the end after reading this article! – Kent
The concept, paradigm, or worldview of spiritual gifts establishes a culture, a reality: each person has different gifts, and therefore different roles. The key, as Jim Collins says, in his classic book, Good to Great, is to help people get on the right bus—direction, goal, and the right seats on the bus. This is the discovery of your “sweet spot.”
Has this ever happened to you? We were at a restaurant the other day and we had a waitress that couldn’t get anything right. I’m sure she was a really nice person. Or to say it another way, I don’t think she was a bad person. She was just in the wrong seat on the bus. Or, maybe she caught the wrong bus.
Over the years I’ve noticed that churches are filled with people who are nice people and who mean well. They want to serve. They want to work in the church. They want to help the ministry. They want to expend their energy for God. But they’re in the wrong seat or maybe on the wrong bus. Being in the wrong seat is just not being where your gifts will flourish.
Any wonder we have a lot of people working from the wrong seat in the church. Their gifts are somewhere else. We tend not to follow biblical approaches to helping them find the right seat. We ask for volunteers, as if anyone is a gifted Sunday school teacher. Or as if everyone is a gifted Bible class teacher. Of as if anyone is an usher. Or as if anyone would be just thrilled to wash dishes in the kitchen. Or as if anyone can’t wait to go out and share the gospel with people out on the street.
The Bible says that the church is the body of Christ. How would you like it if your foot volunteered to be a liver? It’s a little absurd, but so is the way many churches operate! What about if your esophagus was nominated and got elected to be your knee? Again, absolutely absurd. If your human body operated the way most churches operate, it would be the most ineffective, unproductive, disorganized inefficient operating organism. It would be, in effect, like most churches.
Some people caught the wrong bus. It sounds odd, coming from a Church Doctor, but I meet a lot of people who actually ought to go find another church. Not for selfish or consumer oriented reasons like, “I’m not getting my way” or “I’m not getting fed”. But sometimes people are just on the wrong bus. Some people are in the wrong fleet of buses, the wrong denomination. I know Jim Collins isn’t one of the writers of the Bible, but what he talks about in Good to Great is the biblical principle that Scripture laid down long before Jim Collins was ever born. The way Collins describes it is brilliant and much help to all kinds of people. If Christians would only read the Scripture and fashion their church accordingly, they would be happier, more fulfilled, and their churches would be more effective.
Help write my new book and provide me feedback on this article. Please comment below using the form immediately below for private submission and the comment section further below for comments that others may see! – Kent
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