pat loughery

When are spiritual gifts to be exercised (practiced, used, exhibited, sought, …)?

For a church planter, this is one of many questions about church identity, style, approach that must be wrestled with, especially in regard to the main gathering/service time.

I have two friends who planted churches who have taken the seeker-friendly (seeker-targeted?) approach, and their philosophies of ministry were quite similar: (paraphrasing here) “Sundays are open doors for seekers and guests to visit and feel welcomed, so we aim the service in that direction. Consequently we provide no room for the gifts of the Spirit to manifest, as those types of occurrences tend to confuse and alienate seekers. Small groups are good places for people to practice the gifts.”

When we first planted, I struggled with this question. Along the way, we’ve come to some conclusions, some parts of our own philosophy of ministry that guides us through our core values and our vision for church.

At one of the church planting seminars we attended before we actually planted, I went to a brown bag session entitled something like “pastoring the gifts on Sunday mornings”. I’m not sure what the rest of the group learned, but what I heard during that time was this: “Either you believe in the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit, or you don’t. And if you do, then God’s in charge and your role is to provide a place, explanation, administration and training. And that includes Sundays just as much as it does in home groups, etc.”. I decided then and there that we would provide time and teaching in our public gatherings, be as naturally-supernatural as possible, not assume any prior knowledge of behalf of our guests, and if supernatural stuff happens, describe it as much as we know how.

Another question, related one, that caused me to think about this:

“If God wasn’t present in your church gathering, would it look any different?”

Of course, God’s always present – he created the air we breathe and the trees from which our building is manufactured and it’s his word that’s written down in the Scripture we immerse ourselves with, but – is the living, dynamic presence of God shaping, influencing, directing the time you spend? And if for whatever reason you didn’t sense him, or he wasn’t noticeably present, would anybody be able to tell any difference?

What we choose to do is this: Our worship leaders have flexibility to change their set, to lead us in worship without lyrics (individually singing what’s on our hearts, or sitting in silence, or prayer, or whatever); we always spend about 5 minutes after the worship music time actively listening for the voice of God and sharing what we hear in the spirit of encouraging, strengthening, comforting the church like Paul encourages in 1 Corinthians 14:1-5 – ; ; we always (or nearly so) plan for a ministry time after the sermon discussion, and usually we initiate that with a quiet time again, asking the Lord where he’s working among us, what he wants to do, and focusing our energy there. Or we simply ask for prayer or ask others if we can pray for them. Sometimes the appropriate warp-up seems to be for me to challenge people with a thought or an activity to pursue during the week, and we close.

You can probably tell that we don’t have an order of service down to the minute. Most people do. Some of our group would like one. We have a starting time, and a planned stopping time; the worship team knows how long they get; we keep announcements to a minimum; I get an amount of time for the sermon-discussion. But we only have one gathering, no need to leave quickly afterward, and in any case I know that we don’t start worship music till 10 or 15 minutes after 10 because people are too busy chatting [that’s not a distraction; I agree with Pagitt that this is a part of the worship experience], and after we pray for each others’ needs and give the benediction and stuff most everybody hangs out to clean up and talk more, and often people go grab lunch together after that. So the schedule is – well – flexible.

What we’re expecting to happen in this part of the gathering is that the spiritual gifts of prophecy, knowledge, wisdom, worship (one I don’t see listed in Paul’s writing but sure appears to be a gift to me), healing, miracles, discernment, teaching, tongues paired with
interpretation – all are on the table. Some evidence themselves more often than others. Obviously we hope for compassion and hospitality and giving as well, though these don’t necessarily manifest in a gathering in the same way.

I’ve heard some describe Paul’s thoughts on 1 Corinthians 14 as saying that Paul discouraged the use of spiritual gifts in a church gathering – but by my reading, this is simply inaccurate. Paul is correcting a hyper-charismatic church who exercises gifts without love (the sandwich chapter of 1 Corinthians 13 isn’t about marriage covenant nearly as much as it is about the church community) by saying, “when you do this, do it like so and so”. In fact, isn’t that the whole point of this part?

“Therefore, my brothers, be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.” – 1 Corinthians 14:39-40, NIV

And yet, I’ve been in some expressions of church for which the charismatic gifts were the focus, the goal, the target – not the giver of the gifts who has a mission for those gifts. We teach a lot and train a lot and model a lot about being “naturally supernatural” – expecting a supernatural God to move, but not putting on a shiny suit or a highly affected “J-uh-ay-sus! Voice!” or saying “Thus saith the Lord” or whatever – just being everyday people interacting in everyday ways with people that God loves in extraordinary ways.

As a church we’ll do a (another, deeper) topical series on spiritual gifts later in 2005.

Here’s our church’s limited experience with seekers and supernatural stuff manifesting: The seekers among us watch carefully, file away what they see, ask questions, agree and disagree, but they still judge us on how we love each other and them. They’ve seen healing happen. They’ve seen at least one person fall down under the power of the Spirit (slain, overwhelmed, pick your terminology). They’ve seen words of knowledge. They’ve been prayed for themselves. It didn’t freak them out, but it did raise questions. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Wow, it seems like I’m writing white papers more than blog entries lately :-).