Several years ago, I taught a breakout on spiritual gifts for a room full of community group leaders. Instead of opening with a lecture, I opened with an exercise, which I often do in teaching and training settings. They usually go something like this: turn to the person next to you, and between the two of you name as many passages about spiritual gifts as you can. No phones. No Google. Just see what you can recall with God’s word and your collective minds.
They found them, and people often do, which is exactly why I use the exercise. If you give a room enough time and permission to work together, a group of Christians will reconstruct a startling amount of Scripture from memory. Pastors chronically underestimate how much aggregate biblical knowledge is sitting in a room they are about to teach.
In this instance, most of them got Romans 12. 1 Corinthians 12 surfaced, Ephesians 4 showed up as well, but hardly anyone landed on 1 Peter 4. This is the text I had planned to start with, since it sorts the whole business of spiritual gifts into speaking and serving categories. And categories can be really helpful to frame our understanding.
My point is, the texts were findable…that’s rarely the problem. The problem showed up in the next question, when I asked them to pick one of the gifts they had just named, tell me how they would define it, and then tell me where they had seen it at work in their own group over the past year.
Blank stares and looking at the floor ensued.
The folks at this training were not casual attenders. These were the people who open their homes on weeknights, who lead studies, who sit in hospital rooms and living rooms with people in the worst weeks of their lives. They had been shaped by careful preaching for years in a way that showed. They knew where the gifts are in the Bible. What they could not do was tell me what any of those gifts had looked like in their own experience, and the gap between those two things was not knowledge. It was confidence in the knowledge applied.
I’ve thought about that room a lot since, and been sharpening some of my own convictions around too many experiences just like this.
What the Old Phrase Was Protecting
For most of my ministry life, I have said that mission is the organizing principle of the church. I said it in staff meetings, in training rooms, in homes, and to many who listened to me one-on-one over the course of years.
I said it because the alternative in front of us was a church that made every decision by asking what the people already in the room wanted. I have always wanted the church to serve those who are saved, but to be intentional about pursuing the lost as well. The phrase was a corrective, and correctives can be overstated. But “mission is the organizing principle of the church” pushed us to think about people outside the kingdom, not only those inside it. It refused to let the Great Commission sit in the back of the building as one program among many. And it was actually quite effective. I have watched people go to hard places and stay there because they believe this to be true.
I also observed some of the implications. Years ago I wrote that in our zeal for movement, we did some serious damage to the people God had entrusted to us. And that sentence is still true. When mission is the organizing principle, people can slowly become means to an end. Leadership can start running on strategy and natural capacity, because strategy and natural capacity are what you can actually schedule and are quite easily reproducible. But the body gets flattened toward a single activity, no matter how often you shape identity. And sometimes, those whose contribution is not obviously evangelistic become a support function for the people whose contribution is.
None of that happened because anyone was faithless. It happened because we were organized.
Two Different Questions
Here’s the thing I’ve been mulling over these past few years. Mission and gifts are deeply intertwined, but in saying “mission is the organizing principle,” I think I have been emphasizing the wrong thing.
Mission answers what the church is for. Gifts answer how the church is actually put together. Those are not at odds, and I’m not walking back a single conviction about the Great Commission and the mission of the Church. I am saying, however, that when I called mission the organizing principle, I was using a word about arrangement to answer a question about purpose.
Paul does not make that mistake. Writing about Christ, he says this:
“from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
(Ephesians 4:16)
Read that again slowly, because the vocabulary is not devotional. Joints, equipment, each part working properly: that’s an organizational sentence, and it describes an arrangement in which Christ is the head, the Spirit distributes, the Word equips, and the body builds itself up in love. The arrangement is not ours to invent. It is ours to discover, and I think it’s taken me a long time to really see the point of this text.
Said simply, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are the organizing principle of the church.
The Spirit gives, we receive. The Spirit distributes, we arrange. The Spirit empowers, we depend.
The Kingdom Does Not Exist in Talk
And some of this is because Paul speaks a word to the Corinthians that I cannot get away from. “For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power” (1 Corinthians 4:20).
I do want to be careful here, because if I say “power” and you don’t hear it through the grid of the New Testament, you’ll perhaps dismiss my point or just stop reading.
Power is for witness. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). Power came to Corinth through a man whose speech was not impressive: “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). And power has a strange address. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
I’ve written before that weakness is not inability; it’s the place where God meets us. I believe that more now than ever. So when I say the kingdom exists in power, I’m not talking about an experience or a show, or however we might think about something “powerful” in today’s churches. I’m asking whether what happens in our churches on Sunday morning or Tuesday night can be explained without reference to God.
Structure is not the enemy of that power. I like structure. I’ve built a fair amount of it, and I’d build most of it again. I deeply cherish the ordinary means of grace, and they’re often just that…ordinary. But structure and structures are not neutral either, and this is the part I think we miss as church leaders. A well-built church system will keep running whether or not the Spirit is moving in it. That’s what makes the loss of power so hard to notice. Nothing seems to break. The calendar still fills, the volunteers still show up, the reports still get written, and somewhere along the way the church has become very good at doing what it can do in its own strength.
What We Believed and What We Built
I’ve used a simple grid for years to look at organizations. Beliefs are what we say is true. Values are what we say matters. Artifacts are what we actually build, fund, schedule, and measure. When the three disagree, the artifacts are telling the truth. This is a simple way of understanding culture.
You can have a statement of faith that says plainly that the miraculous and revelatory gifts given to the apostles and prophets of the early church are active today. That belief probably never changed; nobody voted it down, and it sat there in writing the entire time for a church.
But to understand actual beliefs, you need to look at the artifacts. And when it comes to my suggestion above that structure often replaces spiritual power, the clearest example I can give is the illustration I opened with.
That breakout was an hour and thirty minutes long, with question-and-answer time inside it. Let’s call it thirty minutes of teaching with a lot of dialogue. However, it was one session among several running in the same slot, which means every leader in that room chose it instead of something else. In my preparation for the time, near the top of my outline I put the goal in writing: the purpose of this breakout is not that you would know your exact gift, but that you would know what the gifts are and be able to start working that out in your community.
I aimed the outcome that low because an hour and thirty minutes was what I had. And that time, once at a conference, was the formation our community group leaders received on how the Spirit distributes his own power through them. We rarely touched on it in preaching or training. We certainly believed it, we just didn’t model it or train it.
And that reality sits next to what we did require. Our missional community training ran four weeks, and every week had teaching, processing, and homework. Week one was the gospel. Week two was how the gospel builds community and mission. Week three was a theology of mission. Week four was practices. The homework alone walked a leader through all twenty-eight chapters of Acts, four chapters of a foundational book, evaluating our spheres of influence worksheet, and an assignment to articulate the good news of Jesus out loud to another person. And several other things.
I want to be fair to what we built, because much of it was good. We taught dependence. Week three included a session called Prayer and the Impossible Mission, on our total inability and God’s power, and we made leaders pray about it in the room before they left.
But reflecting on the content, we walked four weeks of leaders through the entire book of Acts, the book where the Spirit gets poured out on everybody, and we never once asked them what gift the Spirit had given them. We taught that we could not do it and that God could. We never taught the gifts God had distributed out to do it with.
We taught dependence without distribution. That is the whole gap in three words, and it is baked into a curriculum I helped write. I’m not pointing at anyone here. I built the breakout, I chose its scope, and nobody stopped me from asking for more than thirty minutes. I never asked…I simply followed the structure given.
And perhaps, to be a bit critical, what we built assumed a church that runs on teaching, organization, and the sanctified competence of capable people. All three of those are good gifts. But we missed a crucial ingredient.
That gap has a name, and the name is uncomfortable. We were continuationist in our doctrine and functionally cessationist in our practice. And please hear me…I am not accusing anyone of unbelief. And I’m looking in the mirror…I helped build the systems I am describing.
Corinth Had the Opposite Problem
We read 1 Corinthians 12 through 14 as though we share Corinth’s problem. People are often cautious about the gifts being misused and abused. But we really don’t have that problem in many evangelical churches in the US today.
Paul was writing to a people where the gifts were spilling out everywhere, and the meeting was a mess. So he gives instructions about order. Take turns. Interpret. Let two or three speak. And we take those instructions, written to bring order to abundance, and use them as cover for absence. Chapter 14 assumes something is happening. I think we’ve kept the guardrails but lost the road.
And the result is often churches that are doctrinally sound about the Holy Spirit, but practically silent about him. I wrote a while back that we’ve become fluent in the language of feelings and quiet in the language of the Spirit. This is that same problem, one level up. It’s not just that individuals hesitate to say “I think the Spirit may be prompting this.” It’s that we built organizations where pretty much nobody ever has to.
A City Full of Capable People
Austin makes this harder than it would be somewhere else, and I say that as someone who loves this city.
This is a town full of high-capacity people who moved here on purpose, founders and engineers and operators and people who left somewhere more expensive in order to build something here, and the natural talent sitting in any given room on a Sunday morning is remarkable. Natural talent is a real grace from God, so I’m not about to decry it.
But a spiritual gift is not the same thing as a natural ability. A gift is a manifestation of the Spirit’s presence and power that builds up the church in ways that exceed what a person can naturally do or naturally produce, and that last part is the key. A gift exceeds. Which means that in a city like ours, where the ceiling on natural ability is very high, a Tuesday night group in Wells Branch or Mueller or out past Round Rock can run for a year on hospitality, good questions, and a capable host, and never once need a gift.
We can staff for competence and call it stewardship. We can recruit for capacity and call it discernment. And we can get a long way down the road before anyone asks what the Spirit has actually given to the people already sitting in our rooms. And worse, our leaders often describe their specialty or their role, but can’t even remotely articulate with confidence their spiritual gifts. Let alone call them out in someone else and train them for using them faithfully.
The More Excellent Way
But before I go too far, there’s a trap on this side of the argument too, and Paul saw it coming. Between the chapter about the gifts and the chapter about using them, he put a chapter about love. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1).
Organizing around gifts can go wrong in exactly the way organizing around mission went wrong. You can become a church that arranges people by capability instead of a church that receives people as gifts, and you’ll have traded one kind of usefulness for another. It’s easy to lose sight of the Giver when you are busy cataloging the gifts. So the aim was never a better org chart. The aim is a body that grows and builds itself up in love.
When I taught a session on the Holy Spirit, I told the room that he is not the “shy one” of the Trinity. He is there in the second verse of the Bible, hovering over the water. He is there in the last chapter of the last book, saying “come.” He has never been quiet, and is throughout the word of God.
He is not shy. And he has already given his church everything it needs to do the very thing he has asked of it.
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