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,” 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.
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.
2. Learn to recognize people’s gifts from their criticisms and suggestions.
3. Make it a practice to affirm the gifts you see.
4. Ask for help in the church according to gifts discerned.
5. Enlist those with the gift of administration to serve on personnel and nominating committees, where they can practice making appointments by gift.
6. Ask people individually how they see your gifts as helping them.
7. Keep spotting the gifts of administration by noting those who enjoy accomplishing things through others.
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.
2. Pastors who do not understand the difference between leading and administering generally do not know how to ask administrators for help.
3. Other people don’t see what administrators see.
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?”
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.
From the book Growing Your Church Through Training and Motivation copyright © 1997
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