The spiritual gifts define the very essence of the church for the Pauline corpus and beyond the New Testament. In order to exercise these gifts, church members need to recognize, affirm, test each other's exercising of the gifts in the arena's of Christ's body. This requires that we know one another. Therefore, the exercise of one's gifts will become more difficult the larger and more impersonal the church becomes. To facilitate largeness, however, we often try to administer systems to funnel people into their giftedness. We mass administer Myers-Briggs personality type and skill profile tests. Yet this misunderstands and changes the very functions of the gifts in community. Gifts are more then just one's inherent talent slots or personality traits best suited to a particular task. They are supernaturally endowed capacities to be discovered within a living body of Christ. The mass administration of trait analyses is one more capitulation to modernity by evangelicalism. This methodology subdues the Holy Spirit into a technique to mass administer what was intended for the community of Christ to manage. - David Fitch in "The Great Giveaway"
Christmas in Vancouver
As you can see I've been fooling around with different templates, fonts, colours, etc. I like this one - Carla was using it, so I've followed her lead. The font appears small - I've enlarged it on this post. By the way - I've lost my site counter!!! When I made the template shift, it disappeared. I have had a difficult time adding a new one. this is a bit frustrating as I like to see how many people are reading this thing. Any techies out there able to help me out? Anyways - had another does of Christmas in Vancouver. Went on the bright lights train in Stanley Park. This was actually pretty good. The train goes for about 15 minutes through a well decorated part of the Park. There were a few odd images - along with Santa, snowmen and a nativity scene, there were also native americans and a leprechaun. The train took a turn into Bizarro world, when a dancing cowgirl on stilts came out and did a little jig. This was a real live person on stilts dancing around. I was wonde...
Comments
I agree with Fitch's view and the premise that mass administering a place for Spiritual Gifts can impede to a large degree the work of the Holy Spirit. However I think that there are a few things that we need to consider.
I think I will take the time to respond to your post here:
http://lifesdirection.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/creating-an-enviroment-for-spiritual-gifts-to-be-discovered-taught-and-recognized/
Blessings.