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Taking a whole church overview

Whole Church Overview : Easy Printing Version

Helping people develop their gifts and talents and use them in minstry is primarily a one to one function. Nevertheless, understanding the gifting of a complete church can be invaluable to a leadership team.   This can identify possible new minstry areas, possible suitable candidates for forthcoming ministry opportunities and be of great help in planning whole church training sessions and programmes.

If a gift sheet such as the "Gifts and Services" tool is used widely within the church, this can yield invaluable data to the church leadership. For example, the graph below shows one church's spread of gifts. Each gift area is supported by at least three people having it as their major gift.

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A second stage of the analysis mapped out church members on a two-dimensional plot.  (below) The horizontal axis is a "tasks" vs "people" scoring, adding the scores for Caring for Others, Intercession & Ministry and Evangelism, and subtracting the scores for the other three elements. Those having a positive score on this axis are more comfortable on "people" ministries, whilst those with negative scores are more likely to be "task" people. However, this indicates natural strength, and any attempt to pigeonhole people must be avoided by both individuals and the leadership- "I'm a task person, I couldn't possibly go and talk to that new family."
 

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The vertical axis is "Private" vs "Public" gifting - scored by summing Practical Help, Intercession & Ministry and Caring for Others and subtracting the other three. Those with a positive score are people happier working by themselves, or with people in a private setting, whilst those with a negative score are more likely to be willing to take on an "upfront" role of some kind.

The important thing with both charts is that they provide the leadership with some perspective on the gifting within the church fellowship. There are two ways that this can be used - scores can be used to help allocate people to "vacant slots", but there is also the opportunity to develop areas of church ministry where there is a wealth of gifting.

There is often opportunity to do both. In the short term there are likely to be a number of vacancies in the ministry of the church. This process allows suitable candidates to be identified, and asked to pray through whether the vacancy is right for them. In longer term planning, the church may shape its ministry by considering how best to use the gifts that God has provided. This can lead to new programmes being initiated and existing ones expanded or discontinued.

This kind of sheet can also be an excellent way of helping newcomers transferring from another church to settle quickly into a new one. Using this process after a couple of months can provide new data on the total gifts available within the church, and a structured way for a leader to review the gifting of newcomers.