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"
Whine and Geez
Last night we hosted a wine and cheese party for our floor. Out of the 11 other people that live on our floor, 5 came over. It was really fun. We had 3 kinds of cheese, crackers, red wnd white wine, baklava, fruit and other goodies. It was really great getting to know some of the folks on our floor. We have always talked about doing it so it was nice to finally pull it off. One of our neigbours is a concierge at the 4 seasons. She said one of the oddest guest requests was a guest from Texas who wanted 100 A&W ketchup packets. He said he really liked their ketchup - I guess. Finished " Joyful Exiles " so unfortunately no more excerts for you - buy the book. Have moved on to " A Grief Observed " by C.S. Lewis . This might seem like an odd choice - I'm not really grieving the death of anyone or anything like that. I just have a personal goal of reading everything Lewis wrote. In the past few weeks I've finished Miracles and Mere Christianity (sorry - I got ...
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.