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Recruitment's Missing Link
One spiritual gift stands crucial to activating all the others: the gift of administration.
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It is my conviction that volunteer work in the church is more greatly enabled by spiritual-gift theology than by any other single factor, training technique, or conceptual base. And one spiritual gift stands crucial to activating all the others: the gift of administration. Automatic AppraisersAs my fellow researchers and I have come to understand it, the administrator gift excels at clearly stating major and supporting goals, visualizing the division of labor required to enable a group to work together toward those goals, and especially appraising the work force: Who can handle which assignments? Another way to say this is that an essence of the administrative gift is the ability to recognize ability. In our experience, administrators do not have to be asked to assess people's capabilities—they do it automatically. They are continually sizing up talent and have a rich store of observations from their contact with people around them. They carry in their memories a knowledge base. They can estimate skill in handling both supervisory functions and specific tasks. We have also learned that laypeople with the gift of administration are typically very busy, employed in business or other positions where their gifts are utilized. Unfortunately, they often cannot help their congregations because their abilities have not been recognized or, if recognized, have not been requested. At the same time, they generate frustration in others by turning down any number of specific tasks in the church. Why? They know instinctively that they will not make maximum contributions in such slots; they have chosen to avoid non-administrator assignments. We have rarely heard of a case where administrators were not willing to make room in their busy lives to do the things for which they had been uniquely, specially gifted. But they do not stand around casually, waiting to be asked. That isn't their style. The Hash PositionMany pastors have leadership gifts. They have the ability to cast a vision of a desired future, to promote ideas, and to inspire people to enter into programs of committal or self-improvement. They regularly challenge, comfort, instruct, and correct. These elements of the leadership gift cause people to gain a sense of hope and destiny and to be willing to contribute their energies and money to the work of the church. Unfortunately, many of these bright, capable, loving, energetic leader types do not have the insights needed to take the resources they have attracted and relate them to one another or to church goals. They can neither accomplish the goals nor bring satisfaction to the volunteer workers who are enlisted. This is no cause for embarrassment. It is simply a proof of Paul's teaching that "there are different kinds of gifts," each of them distributed as the Spirit wishes. One of those gifts is leadership. Another of those gifts is administration. The two are not the same at all. |             |
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