Service, Helping, and Mercy

The last three posts have been about gifted people, two of them mostly about apostleship. I want to turn the other direction now.

In the second post of this series, I put Peter’s framing in front of everything else, because it divides every gift in every list into two kinds: “whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies” (1 Peter 4:11). We’ve been working the speaking side of that line ever since. But what about the serving gifts?

Today, I want to focus there. In my experience, these are the gifts church leaders tend to value least and lean on most. They’re the most prevalent gifts in the churches I’ve been a part of, and over a long enough horizon, saints with these gifts are often the ones sustaining the body, the ministry, and the mission.

The names of these gifts are service, helping, and mercy.

Before we dive into those three, in the next few posts, I want to walk through the gifts of Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 a few at a time, asking the same two questions of each.

• What is the Spirit actually doing when this gift is at work in someone?
• And what do we do, mostly without meaning to, that diminishes the gift?

That second question is the one I’ve been chewing on the longest. Over a decade ago I wrote a short book called Three Ways to Kill a Missional Culture, and its premise still seems right to me: we rarely lose the things of God by deciding against them; we lose them by mishandling them while meaning well. I think the exercise of the gifts dies in a similar way.

Now back to service, helping, and mercy. These three are the gifts that often make a church feel like a family, and the easiest in all four lists to receive without ever once seeing.

Three Gifts That Look Ordinary

Paul’s working list for this post is Romans 12:

“Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.”
(Romans 12:6-8)

The word behind “service” is diakonia, and it may be the least glamorous word in the New Testament’s vocabulary. It’s the word family Luke uses for the daily distribution of food to widows in Jerusalem (Acts 6:1), and the one behind Jesus’s definition of greatness (Mark 10:43). A person with this gift sees the practical need and meets it, often before anyone thinks to ask, and then they’re back at it next week, and the week after that. Saints with this gift are often serving in the true diaconate ministries of a church, caring for the poor, the downtrodden, the orphan, and the widow. And, more often than not, the office of deacon, when appointed under the biblical prescriptions, recognizes that person formally in the church. Yet still, in our North American focus on the speaking functions and leadership, these people are often under-appreciated.

Helping is even easier to miss. It shows up in 1 Corinthians 12:28, sitting between gifts of healing and administrating, and the Greek word behind it appears exactly once in the New Testament. It carries the sense of taking hold of something from the other end, coming alongside a load that belongs to someone else. Not the vision, not the platform…the load. I’m always reminded of Galatians 6:2 when I think about bearing the load and helping is so often bound up in restoration ministries or longsuffering, persevering care.

And then mercy, with the strange and wonderful adverb Paul attaches: “the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.” Mercy is the gift that moves toward suffering when most of the room is looking for the exit, and stays. The cheerfulness isn’t the forced brightness of someone pretending the hospital room is fine. It’s a gladness to be exactly there, the part no natural disposition fully explains.

Maybe a way to think about the difference between mercy and helping is simply “who goes first?” Mercy usually seems to be the tip of the spear in compassion.

Or maybe said another way, service sees the need of a person and meets it, helping takes hold of what someone else is carrying for the long haul, and mercy moves toward pain and remains there gladly.

Every believer is commanded to do all three, gift or no gift, and post two already made the case that the absence of a gift is never a permission slip. But some people are empowered for these beyond disposition and stamina. That’s the strength Peter names, and when you’ve been around it, you can often tell. The serving keeps going past where temperament explains it, and the people near it keep encountering God rather than merely encountering competence.

I have two friends I can confidently say possess the gift of service and mercy, and I watched it play out plainly with a dear saint of God who suffered for years and is now with the Lord.

In my experience, these gifts do most of their work in obscurity, and they’re often carried by people who quietly wonder whether what they do counts as ministry at all. It’s rare that we ask the person who sets up the chairs to share a testimony about setting up chairs, and even more rare to ask someone who has wiped up all kinds of bodily fluid, prayed incessantly through the breaths of a dying saint, and cried tears of joy and sorrow daily over those who are incapacitated.

Greater Honor

Paul saw this coming. In the middle of his body metaphor, he writes:

“On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable… But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.”
(1 Corinthians 12:22, 24-25)

Greater honor to the part that lacked it is emphatic for Paul. And for us, maybe that should be a leadership design decision. God values the nursery volunteer’s gifts of service every bit as much as the preacher’s gift of teaching. And we often nail that one in our North American churches, and we’ve even recovered the emphasis on care and counseling. And those are good recoveries of showing greater honor.

The trouble is many of our churches run an honor economy flowing the opposite direction. Honor tends to pool around the stage, the microphone, and the org chart, which is to say around the presentable parts. I haven’t met many people with the gifts of mercy, service, and helping that create exceptional slide deck presentations (and sorry if you’re the one…I don’t mean to offend!) But an honor economy unaware of the various gifts and unwilling to celebrate them will eventually damage those gifts and those whom the Spirit has granted them. As best I can tell, we do it in two particular ways.

We Consume Them

Here’s the strange property of the serving gifts: the better they’re exercised, the less visible they become. A teaching gift at full strength fills a room. A serving gift at full strength looks like nothing happening at all: the meal arrives before anyone asks, the room is somehow ready, the widow doesn’t spend the week alone. And those things that go unnoticed often become assumed. And when we assume, we can then unintentionally consume.

So we learn to consume these gifts like electricity, noticing them only in an outage. And consumption without recognition does something to a gift over time. It doesn’t usually squash it outright, since the people who carry these gifts tend to be the last to quit over being overlooked. What does the damage is not naming the empowered gift and showing its power. The server almost never hears that what they’re doing is “the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). They hear, at most, thanks for helping out. And a gift that’s never named never gets fanned into flame, deployed on purpose, or taught to the next person who carries it.

And by virtue of my own gifts, I’m one who certainly is prone to not naming and celebrating these gifts. My gifts are leadership, teaching, and administration, which means I’ve spent about two decades of ministry being carried by people with these gifts. It took quite a bit of time not only to appreciate the people who were gifted differently and with these gifts, but also to learn to celebrate the power of the Spirit on display through them.

I wrote in the first post of this series about churches that teach “dependence without distribution,” and I think this is where that failure can land first. These are the gifts a well-run system replaces most convincingly. We can contract out the hospitality, professionalize the care, and find others outside the church to serve the kids program. And the meals will keep coming whether or not anyone is serving by the strength that God supplies.

It’s easy for the systems and a hospitable culture to assume and then consume the gifts that created that very culture.

We Promote Them

The second way we damage these gifts is more well-meaning, which is what makes it hard to see. When someone serves faithfully for years, we eventually want to honor them, and in many churches the only honor we know how to give runs through the org chart, public recognition, or compensation. So we promote the server into leadership, hand them a team and a title, and call it recognizing their faithfulness. Sometimes it’s exactly that, because some servers are also emerging leaders, and the body should say so when it’s true. But often what we’ve actually done is reward a person with a gift by taking them away from the context they exercise the gift in. The church gains a reluctant manager and loses a gifted servant, and everyone involved meant it as a kindness.

The apostles handled this pressure differently. When the daily distribution to the widows broke down in Jerusalem, they said:

“It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty.”
(Acts 6:2-3)

We usually read that passage from the apostles’ side, as though serving tables were the lesser work they were escaping. But look at the qualifications. For daily food distribution, the church was told to find people of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom. That’s the requirement list for table service in the first church! Whatever else Acts 6 teaches, it won’t let us treat serving as the work you assign to whoever’s available, or as the apprenticeship you graduate from once you’re spiritual enough to do something visible. I’ve seen way too many young leaders do this very thing, and in some churches, the diaconate is treated as a preparatory step for leadership and eldership. However, the apostles “staffed it” that way because that’s what the work required and what the widows deserved.

Mercy, I think, has its own version of this kind of diminishment. Because the merciful person keeps moving toward pain, a church can functionally make them its crisis department and then consume them until Paul’s adverb disappears. I’ve seen this so many times in counseling and care ministries, and I grieve over the compassion fatigue and lack of care or support granted to those who serve in this way. It’s even worse for those who exercise this gift in professional context outside the church.

Cheerfulness is the canary in that coal mine. When the gladness is gone, and only the duty is left, the church hasn’t been receiving a gift…it’s been spending one. And those beautiful saints so often burn out and disappear silently.

And we should be corrected by this, and also by the Lord Jesus himself.

Not to Be Served

When Jesus wanted to tell his disciples what greatness in his kingdom looks like, he didn’t reach for the speaking gifts. “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:43), and the word underneath “servant” is the same unglamorous diakonos family we started with. Then he pointed at himself: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

I don’t want to overreach here, because every gift exercised in love looks like Christ in some way…that’s the point of the body. But there’s something about these three that carries our family resemblance most plainly, since the Lord of the church described his own coming in their vocabulary. Yes, Jesus will return in glory, but he came first as a servant. To quote my friend, “you’ll know if you have the heart of a servant when you’re treated like one.” And unfortunately, our churches so often assume these gifts and, at worst, become demanding of them when what’s really needed is recognition and support.

So here’s what I’d ask you to do this week. Watch for the thing that just happens in your church or ministry: the room that was ready, the meal that arrived, the person somehow already sitting with the one who’s suffering. Then find the person the Spirit did it through, and name what you saw. Not “thanks for helping out,” but “I think I watched the Spirit work through you, and here’s what I saw.”

God has already bestowed the greater honor. The least we can do is notice it and verbalize it so the church is beautified and Christ is magnified.