Uniquely Wired // knowing what you good at

Yesterday I made this comment:

(you should know how your gifted so that you can meet needs [which applies just as much to churches as it does individuals]).

Now I’m not sure if the parenthesis and brackets are in the right spots necessarily, and they don’t so much make sense here, but they did in context. Besides, that’s not the point.

The point I’m curious to hear your thoughts on is this idea that a church has been gifted to meet certain needs, but perhaps not others. One of the things we often press into people is that they are uniquely wired for a certain thing. That is, person ‘x’ has been gifted at knowing how and when to encourage people well. Person ‘y’ has the gifting of service and never seeks glory in it. Therefore person ‘x’ should encourage though they may be trying to focus solely on serving, and person ‘y’ needs to laser in on serving as opposed to trying to preach or something like that.

But when it comes to the little ‘c’ church, it appears as though we assume every local entity should be gifted at meeting every need that comes down the pipe. I think we’ve reached this conclusion because we are “made up of people of all the giftings.” That is, we have hands, and eyes and feet and we should be a complete body. My query is as follows: What if a local body, instead of thinking about meeting a host of needs discovered that it is actually only geared to reach things that a “hand” could reach, and another local body in the same community realized it was geared to doing things only eyes could do, while yet another local body realized it was specifically designed to do things only a little toe could do?

In my mind, this does two things for the body of Christ. It makes each local body more efficient as it discovers its gifting and allows them to pour heavily into those things/that thing (I’m not opposed to the discovery being multi-faceted therefore we must say “those” things, as this might be true of larger bodies in particular) as opposed to trying to meet many needs, some of which it is not geared to reach at all. The second benefit is that would require unity from local congregations. If my local body realizes it is gifted to “pick things up” and we decide to do that well, then we are going to have to submit to another local body who has exceptional “hearing” thus causing us to work together which I’m pretty sure is what Jesus wanted anyway.

These are my thoughts, they may not make any sense to you. Oh well…