The Subtle Enemies of Your Gifts

If gifts are essential to a healthy church, why aren’t they more widely taught?

Why aren’t spiritual gifts encouraged and enabled throughout a church beyond the occasional assessment, one-time class, or occasional sermon?

I learned the hard way why this is the case.

Before I describe the deterrents to your gifts, I want to preface the following: the church leaders who dampen the spiritual gifts of their flock don’t do so while twirling their mustaches and cackling about their plan.

It’s much more subtle than a conscious scheme.

This is why being both aware of the phenomenon and also having options to increase adoption without depending on the church leaders matters.

Here’s what I learned:

We were once at a church which, over a ten-year period, declined year-over-year declines. People left because they had been hurt or felt stymied in their growth. Leaders from other churches warned about this particular church based on its teaching.

Finally, after the attendance dropped from 200 to 20, it closed.

So what does this experience have to do with spiritual gifts?

Will a church actively engaged with their gifts prevent bad things from happening?

There’s no guarantee.

But that church’s dysfunction and demise, with 20/20 hindsight, was foreshadowed by Ephesians 4. Specifically, because the spiritual gifts weren’t active, balanced, and enabled in a healthy way, it did not experience the growth, unity, and ministry described in that passage.

Your situation is probably not this bad. But if you want to understand why spiritual gifts aren’t having the impact in your life as much as they could, then the valuable lessons from this painful situation could be instructive.

So what are the common enemies to your spiritual gifts?

Poor Teaching

“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.” (NIV)

Poor teaching results in the ignorance of gifts or, worse, the abuse of gifts.

In the case of the church described above, there was one “workshop” for about ten people about spiritual gifts. But teaching the gifts successfully doesn’t come from giving a handful of people an assessment.

One form of poor teaching, then, is just the absence of teaching.

Another misstep is teaching which actually leads people away from their gifts.

Poor teaching can also result in the misapplication of gifts. For example, this church allowed the emergence of a man who proclaimed himself to be a prophet, but primarily used that mantle to express his feelings and thoughts about people — sometimes without good intention.

Poor teachers who are aware of their deficits do not want to activate church-wide spiritual gifts because, according to Ephesians, the Five Fold mitigate such “deceitful scheming.”

When a church does unleash its gifts, the teaching becomes stronger, and doesn’t tolerate bad teaching.

As a result, one potential reason churches resist it is because effective Five Fold activation can potentially call out poor teaching.

But the resistance goes even deeper.

Poor Leadership

according to the effective working by which every part does its share (NKJV)

That church had a very divisive vetting period when it selected this particular pastor. Upon his selection, 30% of the congregation left.

I realize now that part of the problem came from the absence of a common framework for selecting a strong and healthy pastor.

In stark contrast, when David Platt left his church, the elders conducted a search. The primary framework for the selection of their new leader: the Five Fold!

Platt’s successor was introduced by walking through how he had been displayed each of the Five Fold. I had watched this amazing video while in the midst of the challenges at this other church, and my eyes opened.

I don’t believe every leader needs to be strong in all five spiritual gifts. That Brook Hills found someone who was blessed them, to be sure. But there are potential downsides: a leader who incorrectly believes they have all five, and as a result, are entirely self-sufficient, can lead a church down a dangerous path.

Sometimes, a deficiency in one or more of the gifts is actually better for the church when mixed with humility. A leader who knows where they are strong and where they are weak, confesses those weaknesses and leans upon the body to shore up his deficits, can fulfill the promise of Ephesians 4.

What doesn’t work is what this pastor did: denied his weaknesses in Teaching, Evangelism, and Apostleship. Without sufficient humility, rather than lift-up those with differing gifts to compensate for his own gaps, he propped up those who protected his position and silenced those questioning his need for improvement.

When a poor leader is at the head of a church, enabling spiritual gifts throughout the church can be scary — because it will reveal his deficits and enable growth without dependence on him.

Deeply and broadly teaching spiritual gifts to the congregation is often against the interest of leaders:

For a church and for you to experience the Five Fold Effect, you must have leaders who can be honest with their own gaps, relinquish that need to be the authority, and mesh with others by supporting their gifts in leadership.

If you have solid teaching (both in content and in adoption) and healthy leadership (humility, capability, and commitment), most of the other problems can be addressed.

These include:

Shallow Application

Often times, people talk about and surface their spiritual gifts in a limited scope: usually when the church is talking about it as part of a workshop.

But spiritual gifts, as we’ve seen, is part of an on-going and interdependent cycle.

Just as Christ’s grace does not appear on occasion or in hyper-spiritualized circumstances, but is present throughout our lives, so it is with spiritual gifts.

But when the application of spiritual gifts is seen in a narrow way, its strength is diminished. Its power dissipates.

These three common obstacles to the Five Fold Effect are prevalent, and can be hard to overcome.

But in the next section, I share with you the antidotes that can help you and your church overcome them and begin unleashing gifts today.