One spiritual gift stands crucial to activating all the others: the gift of administration.
—Carl F. George
For a long time, volunteer behavior in the church was a mystery to me. My personal breakthrough in understanding came in phases. I had pastored University Baptist Church in Gainesville, Florida, for more than ten years when, one day, I went to a community meeting sponsored by a local hospital. Afterward, the doctor who had led the discussion was having coffee, and one of the matrons engaged him in animated conversation.
At one point he paused thoughtfully and asked a searching question: “What do you suppose motivates you to give your time and energy to this work?” He had discerned her to be a volunteer, and he wanted to estimate how her abilities might be applied to his program.
Several years later, that scene flashed in my mind as I stood in our church auditorium and listened to a young woman with glowing eyes and vivacious voice describe her recent visits to sick people in the hospital. She was bringing yet another group of names of patients she had encountered by word-of-mouth referral in the community, trying to schedule me to give these people the pastoral care she knew they would appreciate.
The love on her face as she recounted the details of her visits contrasted sharply with my own internal heaviness. For me, hospital visitation was a wearying chore. Carrying a heavy burden of administration, it seemed to me that there would always be more sick and dying people than I would have strength to minister to. Even the deathbed conversations and the remarkable appreciations expressed by patients and their families did not prevent me from dreading another set of hospital assignments.
She talked on, and my mind wandered to the earlier scene of the doctor questioning the volunteer. I said, half out loud, “What is it that motivates you to go to the hospitals to show mercy and extend comfort to these people?” Before the words were fully out of my mouth, I realized the source. “You have a gift of mercy!” I exclaimed. “God has given you a gift for consoling those in sorrow and comforting those in fear. You get such satisfaction from this that instead of a hospital call being an interruption, it’s the highlight of you day! You find time to go to the hospital as eagerly as some people seek out an ice cream shop, don’t you?”
“Yes, I get a great deal of joy out of doing this,” she responded.
Then, my understanding growing as we talked, I said, “You must be affirmed in this gift of yours; you must know that God has called you to this. I want to pray with you now for a greater impact and effectiveness as you develop this ministry further.” I went on to explain to her how to pray and read Scripture with the sick, how to minister to them herself without raising an expectation that I would follow up. She requested counsel on how to deal with some of the basic spiritual needs of these patients.
I left that pastorate shortly afterward to come to the Charles E. Fuller Institute, not yet fully understanding how God unfailingly gives gifts to his people, and that those gifts form the basis for all well-motivated, spiritually effective volunteer work. In retrospect, I realize a number of persons in the congregation had the same gift, and it was showing up in a similar way. They were projecting their gift onto me and assuming I would be as motivated to minister mercy and comfort as they were.
My failure to recognize their gifts meant we did not develop nearly as adequate a visitation program to the sick and hospitalized as we could have because I was unable to see what God was doing. He would have preferred for us, in a community with four major medical facilities, to develop this as a significant regional outreach. Since no church I knew of had such a program, no models were available. An adequate concept of gifts could have helped me understand that the availability of gifted workers is one way to detect God’s guidance for programs of outreach or nurture.
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 Appraisers
As 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 Position
Many 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” (1 Cor. 12:4), each of them distributed as the Spirit wishes. One of those gifts is leadership (Rom. 12:8). Another of those gifts is administration (1 Cor. 12:28). The two are not the same at all.
In working closely with hundreds of pastors in dozens of denominations, we have discerned that relatively few have the gift of administration among their dominant gifts. This has profound impact upon their ability to identify and direct volunteer workers within their congregation.
The absence of the administrative gift shows up sometimes in the poor placements pastors make. At other times, it is seen in their inability to visualize a job description or position required to support their objectives. One of the most sure indicators is the creation of what we have come to call the “hash” or “dump” position on the church staff. Sometimes it is the second professional position, sometimes the fourth or fifth. Whatever its rank, it comes about when the pastor who lacks an administrative gift appraises all the weaknesses or problems of the church at a particular time, lumps them together into a job description, and employs the first available person who is naïve enough to think he or she could possibly fill the position. Hash positions may include everything from long-range planning to custodial work, with youth recreation and senior citizen counseling thrown in for good measure.
Regrettable War
Meanwhile, the tension between leadership-gifted pastors and administration-gifted laypeople (and/or staff) grows. C. Peter Wagner has commented in Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow that Christians tend to project their spiritual gifts onto others. That is, they tend not to be aware of their own abilities as gifts, assuming that all other persons have the same potential.
Believe it or not, one of the easiest ways to identify a person’s giftedness is to examine what he or she criticizes! One thing an administrator surely knows how to do is spot the absence of administrative performance in other people. However, in our observation, he rarely realizes that his pastor might not have the gift of administration. He assumes the opposite and then criticizes the pastor for laziness, unwillingness to delegate, lack of confidence in lay leadership, distrust of newcomers, backwardness, or unwillingness to manage intentionally. If he were in the pastor’s position he would surely handle matters differently. The only excuses he can think of for the pastor are lack of humility, dedication, spirit, or commitment. These malignings are easy to radiate and difficult to overlook.
The pastor is naturally hurt by these criticisms and frequently launches a defensive action. How a leader wages war against administrators may take several forms.
- He may devalue the administration gift and consider matters like planning, goal-setting, monitoring, controlling, and supervising to be mere details, unworthy of serious consideration by the truly spiritual.
- He may insist that there are enormous differences between the business work and the church, and the body of Christ does not admit to the same kinds of intentional activity for which successful businesses are known.
- Pastors who are skillful in maneuvering can occasionally close out the business and administratively trained people from having any particular say, either at the church board or department leadership level.
Where the leader’s defenses are successful, administratively gifted laypersons start compartmentalizing—turning off their brains and gifts at the door, having learned that to attempt to offer insights from their business life will only raise defensiveness from the minister and other leaders. This effectively blocks them from applying their gifts.
Loyal Legion
Other members of the church, however, seem much less problematic. Every pastor has, in varying numbers, a loyal legion of fans who comes to the rescue each time there is a call for help. Although church leaders have noted that relatively few people volunteer on a general call (pulpit announcement, bulletin insert, even costumed skit portraying worker needs), the ever-willing group is different. It is commended by the minister and frequently affirmed with mottoes like “The best ability is availability.”
This motto, like other old wives’ tales, needs to be carefully examined. Perhaps it should be rephrased to read, “The best ability (for a particular task) is the ability required to satisfactorily perform (that task).” If the need is for an emergency warm body with a good attitude, then availability may be the ability that wins the day. We have found, however, that many ministers do not recognize the gifts of availability for what they really are.
We have come to believe that the gifts of helps and service have as a key ingredient the willingness to be available to call for help. (Somewhat arbitrarily, it has been suggested that the gift of helps focuses on assistance to a person or persons, while the gift of service describes willingness to invest time and energy in a group or organization.) These long-suffering, service-gifted persons spend many hours in front of computers or with brooms in their hands or rearranging chairs or addressing and mailing envelopes or telephoning or doing multitudes of other things required for organizational maintenance.
If, when the call for volunteers goes out, those who respond have as part of their gift mix both helps or service and an additional gift that happens to match the task, the results can be positive. Suppose the youth department needs a substitute teacher. The loyal legion says, “We’ll help.” If one of them is accepted and appointed, and if he or she also happens to have a gift of exhortation, teaching, pastoring, or leading, the result is a happy combination.
Frequently, however, a “willing” worker is put into the teaching position but, failing to have the gift of teaching, burns out in a very short time. A variation occurs when the poorly performing helper, held to the task by continued pleas, eventually weakens the class to the point that its vitality is gone and its growth potential blighted. An administrator would define this as a case of improper volunteer placement based on failure to perceive gifts.
Ministers tend to misread availability as a spiritual virtue—that is, “willingness” or “loyalty,” when, in fact, it is essentially an evidence of the gifts of helps or service.
Why are helping-gift people so available? Because many of them tend not to stay with any assignment for a very long time. An element of their gift is to clear their agendas of obligations. Either they accept tasks of short duration, or else they drop longer assignments midstream. They are often short-haul workers whose enthusiasm for a particular job remains only as high as their sense that the organization really needs them for that phase of its work.
So now the problem can be seen more clearly: A minister with leadership gifts but without administrative insight seldom recognizes ability and thus perceives willingness as the helping gifts. The willing are assigned instead of the able.
What Leaders Can Do
The pastor with the gift of leadership is in a most strategic place. Through the power of the pulpit, he interprets not only Scripture but the history of the congregation as well. This power guides the church to set forth suitable goals for its ministry.
After that, the ability to recognize, to affirm, and to enlist administrators is crucial if those dreams, ideals, and visions are to become realities. Here are some steps to follow:
1. Study the subject of spiritual gifts in depth.
Naturally, I am partial to the writings of my friend and colleague C. Peter Wagner on the subject, but others have written instructively as well. Come to a sincere belief that it is okay not to have all the gifts.
2. Learn to recognize people’s gifts from their criticisms and suggestions.
Determine to get help from each gift instead of a headache. Criticism is an opportunity to discover someone.
3. Make it a practice to affirm the gifts you see.
Verbalize that here is another gracious bequest of the Holy Spirit. This will raise your own awareness—and the other person’s as well.
4. Ask for help in the church according to gifts discerned.
You may be surprised at the responses you get, because the Spirit implants a sense of stewardship in gift-holders and requires them to take seriously requests in line with their gifts. The transaction is suddenly not only two-way (between pastor and parishioner) but triangular.
5. Enlist those with the gift of administration to serve on personnel and nominating committees, where they can practice making appointments by gift.
Such people have a good sense of who can do what. They readily appreciate the usefulness of systems for discovering spiritual gifts, such as the Trenton Plan or the Modified Houts Questionnaire published by the Charles E. Fuller Institute. These tools help apply people according to their Holy Spirit-given gifts to the various offices of the church.
6. Ask people individually how they see your gifts as helping them.
It is useful to say, “What do you need from me in order to do your work?” This casts the person in the proper role of being responsible to minister. But it is even better to say, “What needs for help do you have that my gifts can meet?” This opens them up to the radical thought that you don’t have all the gifts—and so they should not expect you to.
All of the above help to set a good atmosphere in which defensiveness recedes and ministry advances. A final suggestion for leaders:
7. Keep spotting the gifts of administration by noting those who enjoy accomplishing things through others.
These will be the people who can listen to your declarations of vision and then
- frame supporting strategies (often in writing);
- identify the individual tasks that comprise the strategies;
- visualize the job descriptions to cover the tasks;
- discern suitable people to fill the job descriptions.
What Administrators Can Do
We have interviewed dozens of frustrated laypeople and staff members with gifts of administration and have found a recurring attitude in almost all of them: They’ve given up on their pastors. They have concluded that the minister is an incurable impediment to progress, and therefore they can only sit and stew.
Three things administrators need to understand are
1. The pastor is caught in a position that demands he be something of a star.
This expectation is not necessarily of his own making, but it is a reality nonetheless. And there is no way he can delegate this role to someone else.
2. Pastors who do not understand the difference between leading and administering generally do not know how to ask administrators for help.
The words and concepts are simply not a part of their conscious thinking until they do some study in the area of spiritual gifts.
3. Other people don’t see what administrators see.
The administrators’ degree of giftedness is often unrecognized, so that they impute their insights to the pastor and are perplexed that he doesn’t respond to “the obvious.”
Administration-gifted people must discipline themselves to use their gift for the body of Christ rather than on the body of Christ. Careful language will go a long way to reduce defensiveness. Few pastors will refuse the person who asks, “Can I help you construct some supporting strategies for your vision? Can I help you find the people to make your dream happen?”
People-Based Building
When pastors and layleaders examine the parts of the body the Holy Spirit has given them, they can then imagine prayerfully what the presence of those individuals should mean in shaping and forming the congregation. This is quite different from the widespread approach to volunteer work, which says, “We have determined our goals and organization form. Now our staffing tables call for X number of workers for existing programs and Y number for new programs.”
Congregations that grow as organisms—that is, with respect to the spiritual gifts of the people—are flexible, resistant to burnout, and confident that they are discovering the will of Christ. They are deploying the members of his body in ways that are satisfying, effective, and result in the production of both new converts and additional leaders in greater numbers than churches that are merely organizations.
Copyright © 1997
