The last post was about three gifts we consistently receive in the kingdom but rarely see. These next two have the opposite problem. Leadership and administration are seen all the time. They just don’t often get received as gifts of the Holy Spirit, because there’s always a more ordinary explanation sitting right there.
I should say up front that I’m writing this one as an insider with bias. Two of the three gifts I think God has given me are the subject here, and I told the story of recognizing them in the second post of this series: leadership was a natural ability I had before I came to Christ until God ignited it, and administration I only spotted by comparison, watching things that were genuinely hard for capable people around me come easily to me. Other people observed both in me before I would have said either were a spiritual gift. So what follows is based on years of my own lived experience, which could validate the perspective or be read as completely biased.
And in my own story, I hadn’t realized these two were connected, but I read a book by Kadi Cole called Developing Female Leaders around 2019 or so. In that book, she pointed out that these gifts are two sides of the same coin. The spiritual gift of leadership could be expressed as, “Follow me as I follow the Holy Spirit in where He leads.” Administration is often expressed as “and here’s the map, the resources, the tools, and the resolve to keep following the Spirit through the twists and turns of the journey.” Those are my words, not Kadi Cole’s, but her writing really helped these two gifts click into place in my own experience and gave some framework I have operated from for a long time.
Standing in Front and Steering the Ship
Romans has “the one who leads, with zeal” (Romans 12:8), and the text asks for care immediately, because the ESV footnotes that phrase with “Or gives aid.” The word underneath means something like standing in front of a thing, and standing in front of people can mean leading them or shielding them; in the New Testament, it does both. If you follow the ESV’s own cross-references off that phrase, you land on “those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 5:12) and on the “elders who rule well” (1 Timothy 5:17). Same family of words, and in every one of those places the standing in front is inseparable from the caring for. A leader who has this gift and no affection for the people is not exercising it in accordance with God’s design and the biblical parameters.
Also, I’ve made this point already, but it bears repeating, since that cross-reference runs straight into the elders: the gift isn’t the same as the office. Post two spent its whole middle section pulling apart practices, gifts, and gifted people, and post three worked one of the office questions as honestly as I know how.
The leadership gift, however, is distributed throughout a church to people who will never hold an office and never want one.
Administration comes from somewhere else entirely. Paul drops it into a bare sequence:
“And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues.”
(1 Corinthians 12:28)
The word behind “administrating” is built on the picture of steering a ship. Not the one rowing, not the one who chose the destination, but the one with a hand on the tiller, who is the reason the boat arrives anywhere at all. Which is why the gift so often looks like nothing. The meeting that didn’t waste ninety minutes, the handoff that didn’t drop, the ministry that still exists in year four…none of those announce themselves. I often use the illustration that administration is steering a ship, but it requires a captain on the bow sailing into the unknown.
So to summarize, the gift of leadership stands before people and cares for them, administration steers the whole thing toward a goal, and zeal is often the fuel God puts under both.
The Adverb Is the Point
In fact, Paul doesn’t just say lead…he says lead with zeal, and a few verses later he turns and says it to everybody: “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord” (Romans 12:11). The same word, handed first to the gifted and then to the whole church.
Zeal that’s really from God and surrendered to the Spirit does something to a body that strategy can’t do on its own. It makes a church obedient and action-oriented. It moves people from agreeing with something to actually doing it, a gap most of us can live in for years without noticing. And when the Spirit puts fire under a leader, the room stops discussing and starts moving!
Sadly, however, there seems to be very little tolerance for this kind of zeal in American churches today. So here’s the first way I think we diminish this gift, and it may be the most common way we do so. Someone leads with heat, and we tell them not to get so worked up.
I understand the impulse, and honestly…I’ve felt it. Zeal is uncomfortable to sit next to. It makes the calendar feel inadequate, and the rest of us feel slow. And there’s a real thing being reacted to, because zeal that hasn’t been surrendered runs people over, and a church that’s been run over remembers. And plenty of churches feel like they have been run over, mine included. I wrote a couple of posts back about the damage done when we hand zealous people a role their gift can’t hold. The immature version of this gift is genuinely costly, and it should be shepherded rather than deployed at full speed in the early stages.
But “don’t get so worked up” isn’t shepherding. It’s an instruction to lower the temperature of a gift God set on fire on purpose, and when a church uses the same line Treebeard does in Lord of the Rings – “don’t be hasty” – it usually gets exactly what it asked for: a leader with zero sense of urgency. And what it loses is the gracious gift that would have made the church obey and act. If I could hand pastors one line for these conversations, it would be this: the fire isn’t the problem; the direction of the fire is. Make sure it’s pointed toward the Lord, the lost, and the least of these, and you can generally assume it’s heading in the right direction.
We Explain Them Away
The second way we damage this pair is quieter, and it’s the one I’ve come to think does the most long-term damage.
I made the case in the first post of this series that a spiritual gift exceeds what a person can naturally do or produce, and that in a city like ours the ceiling on natural ability is high enough that a church can run for years on capable people and never once need a gift. Leadership and administration are where that failure lands hardest, because they’re the two gifts in the lists most easily counterfeited by competence. There is always a natural explanation available, and it’s usually true: she’s organized, he’s a natural leader, they ran a team at work long before they ever ran one here. Every one of those sentences can be accurate, and every one of them lets us stop looking for the gift, not just the competence.
These two expressions are consistently praised in our culture, which values visible leaders and operational efficiency, but they are named as gifts almost never. Nobody stands up and says, “The Spirit gave you that,” after a well-run meeting. And the person carrying the gift usually agrees with the room, because from the inside, a gift like this feels like being good at something rather than like being given something. Which means the gift never gets stewarded as a gift: it doesn’t get prayed over, it doesn’t get consecrated, it doesn’t get taught to the next person, and it quietly becomes a competence the person is responsible for producing on their own. And I’ve seen it over and over again.
And I’ve lived on both sides of that. For a long stretch of ministry, the things I did with these two gifts were described to me in the language of skill…and I described them that way myself. Just because I can run a spreadsheet doesn’t mean I should, and it probably isn’t the use of my gift at work. The evidence of the gift is the thriving of the people of God while they stay on task in His mission, and that’s harder to measure than an effective, organized database.
Order Is Not the Cage
Administration has one more death of its own, and it’s a strange one, because it usually gets killed by the very people who benefit from it most.
Sometimes, we treat order as the opposite of the Spirit’s work. Spontaneity is spiritual; structure is administrative; and administration, therefore, becomes the department that keeps things running while the real ministry happens elsewhere. Paul doesn’t sort it that way. He spends three consecutive chapters on the gifts, chapters full of prophecy and tongues and interpretation and everything else that makes an orderly person nervous, and then he lands the whole thing with “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33) and “But all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40). Order is not the cage we put the Spirit in. It’s the housing that lets a gift be exercised in a room full of people that shows God’s character, heart, and power.
Now, don’t be fooled…order absolutely can become the cage. A church can get so good at structure that the structure is the only thing anyone is depending on, and the well-run system is exactly what makes the absence of the gifts invisible for years. Both things are true, and the difference between them isn’t how much order there is…it’s whether the person steering knows they’re carrying a gift or thinks they’re just running the thing.
With Joy and Not With Groaning
Lest you think I’m always a negative Nancy, I think I’ll finish this post on a text I love deeply, and that kept chastening me in eldership for many years:
“Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.”
(Hebrews 13:17)
Generally, Scripture keeps attaching emotional language to spiritual work. Lead with zeal. Do acts of mercy with cheerfulness. And here, keep watch with joy and not with groaning. And notice who the temperature is for. That last clause isn’t pastoral care for the pastor. It’s an argument to the congregation about their own good. The congregation has an advantage when leaders not only lead with care, but also with zeal.
So here’s what I’d ask you to do this week. Find the person in your church who leads with more heat than is comfortable (they’re pretty easy to identify!), and the person who quietly keeps the whole thing from falling apart (they might be harder to find), and tell them what you actually think God has given them – a gift. Not just “thanks for all you do.” Something closer to, I think, that’s the Spirit in you, and here’s what I’ve watched it do to us and for us as a people.
And remind them to do it with joy and not with groaning…trust me, they probably are groaning inside. Remind them it’s of no advantage to anyone, and Jesus, for the JOY set before him, endured the cross. Then pray for their joy!
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