On Sunday, 5/8/22, Pastor Cameron preached on twelve elements of being the church. After he shared, the congregation took time to ask God, "what are two or three of these areas in which you have gifted me?" We wrote down these giftings and brought them to the foot of the 12-ft cross in the corner of the room. It was a way of saying, "God, I see where you have gifted me and I will bring this gift to the community to share it."
We see that we have many strengths in our congregation. Fellowship, Worship, Generosity, and Hospitality all were very strong, but also Prayer, Steadfastness, and Unity. There is a principle of productivity that teaches you’ll gain more by developing your strengths, so these are the areas our church should lean into and continue to see growth through these expressions of our faith.
We also need to give attention to our weaknesses, and this chart clearly points out one—Salvations. In a similar survey we did with our leaders a few years ago, evangelism was indicated as lacking in our gift mix. This led us to invite Curtis Hinds to come and teach on evangelism, which we had intended to do annually until the pandemic shut things down. Additionally, we’ve already planned to teach a series next month on “Good News - sharing the good news of the gospel through our actions, words, and by participating in global missions.” So this is an area we are intending to build.
I think an important lesson from this survey is that we can use our strengths to improve our weaknesses. Inviting people into a group that knows how to connect through fellowship, generosity, and hospitality is actually a very powerful way to share the gospel. When non-believers witness genuine worship and prayer, they can encounter God personally and are often very open to committing to follow Jesus. In John 17:21, Jesus prays that Christians “all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” And in John 13:35, Jesus says, “By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." Unity and fellowship and hospitality are all effective means of evangelism if we take the important step to invite non-Christians into our community and communicate how all of this is an outworking of accepting Jesus as Lord.