Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Trust The Gifts, But Never The Gifted
My wife and I met in a lovely church. At the time it was thriving, happy and full of good things. Now it lies in a shambles. Sunday attendance in the thousands has dwindled to the tens, they are in severe and enormous operating debt. Need I go on?
We left some seven years ago when things were still "good." Why? The current state of the church was utterly foreseeable. I was on the ruling board; beat my head against a brick wall for a year or so explaining to deaf ears at every opportunity that things were going wrong, gave up and left. Some have tried to tell me I was a prophet -- a title I refuse, if for no other reason than prophets generally end up martyred.
I started thinking about this after Jollyblogger called this quote from a post I did last week "brilliant." (Thanks David, brilliance and I do not often find ourselves in the same room.)
Years ago I heard someone preach about the difference between the "motivational" gifts of Romans 12 and the "specific" gifts of I Corinthians. The basic idea was that we are all pre-wired somehow to fill certain roles in the life of the church - those are the "motivational" gifts - but that we are granted "specific" gifts from time-to-time to accomplish a given task.
When I heard the sermon, it made me tilt my head kind of like a dog when it looks at you and you are talking to it as if saying, "I know you're talking, I'm really interested, but this makes no sense."
My suspicions about this idea were confirmed a bit later when I was talking to someone that had been around the horn with the idea a few times. Their comment was that in practice the motivational gifts ended up being like "zodiac signs" - people dividing themselves into clubs by motivation, and then excluding themselves from some things because it wasn't their motivation. So for example, those motivated to prophesy didn't need to help clean-up after the potluck, because that was for those motivated to service. Funny thing was there were always a whole lot more prohets than there was servants.
As someone who has decalred himself in the middle of the charismatic/cessasionist debate there is one idea that is paramount to me to stand in the middle. The gifts are not ours, we are not assigned a role and then left to it. We are not granted a single priviledge, office, or right based on any gift that we may or may not be exercising at a given time.
So, was I prophetic about my former church? That is for others to decide and a question I refuse to consider in any seriousness. I had no visions, no great revelations. Frankly, as far as I was concerned, it was just commonsense.
At the risk of blowing my own horn, I think that is how it should be with the gifts - they will be utterly ordinary to the person gifted. The gifts are to glorify God. If they are important to the gifted, if the gifted take identity from them, then someone besides God is being glorified.
We left some seven years ago when things were still "good." Why? The current state of the church was utterly foreseeable. I was on the ruling board; beat my head against a brick wall for a year or so explaining to deaf ears at every opportunity that things were going wrong, gave up and left. Some have tried to tell me I was a prophet -- a title I refuse, if for no other reason than prophets generally end up martyred.
I started thinking about this after Jollyblogger called this quote from a post I did last week "brilliant." (Thanks David, brilliance and I do not often find ourselves in the same room.)
This is a tremendous example of precisely the kind of thing that scares cessassionists to death. The problem with prophets is that they usually don't know where they end and God starts.At the time, I was discussing Bruce Wilkinson abandoning his extensive African missions. Why would anybody claim the role of prophet? It's not really a happy place.
Years ago I heard someone preach about the difference between the "motivational" gifts of Romans 12 and the "specific" gifts of I Corinthians. The basic idea was that we are all pre-wired somehow to fill certain roles in the life of the church - those are the "motivational" gifts - but that we are granted "specific" gifts from time-to-time to accomplish a given task.
When I heard the sermon, it made me tilt my head kind of like a dog when it looks at you and you are talking to it as if saying, "I know you're talking, I'm really interested, but this makes no sense."
My suspicions about this idea were confirmed a bit later when I was talking to someone that had been around the horn with the idea a few times. Their comment was that in practice the motivational gifts ended up being like "zodiac signs" - people dividing themselves into clubs by motivation, and then excluding themselves from some things because it wasn't their motivation. So for example, those motivated to prophesy didn't need to help clean-up after the potluck, because that was for those motivated to service. Funny thing was there were always a whole lot more prohets than there was servants.
As someone who has decalred himself in the middle of the charismatic/cessasionist debate there is one idea that is paramount to me to stand in the middle. The gifts are not ours, we are not assigned a role and then left to it. We are not granted a single priviledge, office, or right based on any gift that we may or may not be exercising at a given time.
So, was I prophetic about my former church? That is for others to decide and a question I refuse to consider in any seriousness. I had no visions, no great revelations. Frankly, as far as I was concerned, it was just commonsense.
At the risk of blowing my own horn, I think that is how it should be with the gifts - they will be utterly ordinary to the person gifted. The gifts are to glorify God. If they are important to the gifted, if the gifted take identity from them, then someone besides God is being glorified.
