The Story So Far, Part I

I recall from a seminar where Dan Allendar spoke about the importance of story. Of course, illustrated by story. Story, I believe, is the real way to walk with God and learn from others.

With that, I start a sporadic series called "the story so far". Just how did I get where I am with knowing what God has designed in me? Maybe this series will help others.

I could start anywhere, but I'm not going to bind myself to making this chronological. So I'll start well into my story, around 1996. I had been a Christian since 1981, and that whole time I understood Ephesians 2:10 (For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do) as a command to the church. The collection of God's people is created for work prepared in advance. But in a Sunday school class on Ephesians, that got challenged. Ronnie (the teacher) proposed, against the traditional interpretation in our faith tradition, that what God created us for and prepared us for is in fact individually meant.

This idea pretty much blew me away. And raised a lot of questions. Mostly centered around 'how do we determine what we are created for?'.

This actually led to a few years of frustration -- initially I pursued it as many do, through spiritual gift assessments along with personality assessments. What a waste. Spiritual gift assessments pretty much only measure what you've already tried to exercise, while personality assessments are tainted by our wounds and the poser (that which we pretend to be).

Many readers may have heard of SHAPE as a guide to determining roles in the kingdom. (For those unfamiliar, it is Spiritual gifts, Heart (passion), Aptitudes, Personality, and Experience) And in that, there is some value. In talking to others and from experience, I really think you can drop all but the H and the E. Spiritual gifts are ultimately determined by experience and heart anyway (what have you done and did you enjoy it?), personality will shape your experience, and aptitudes (skills) I think is really just a godless way for churches to put you to work. Once H and E are determined, you can learn the skills you need. Ok, time to get back on track. As I said, I really think you can drop all but the H and the E. I discovered this by a challenge (I think it came through John Eldredge's Journey of Desire, since rereleased as simply Desire), a challenge to look at what my passions had been in my experiences.

Ok, still frustrating, but it seemed like progress. The problem was I had volunteered and done such a diverse set of things and enjoyed them, but over time they lost the appeal. For example, while in Dallas I was pursuing volunteering in benevolence, but moving to Cary NC, I tried benevolence volunteering there but it just lost passion for me. I kind of stumbled into helping a fairly new church with men's ministry, and in writing a draft of a vision of men's ministry and stepping back I saw it. In my volunteering, I'd always risen quickly to leadership, but not standards stuff. I was always building, creating or reforming ministry with an unspoken principle in mind -- I always built structures around individuals, rather than coming up with a structure and recruiting to it. The structure was intentionally fluid, adapting to the people.

See the vision for men's ministries that I came up with had to do with unleashing men to make a difference. In building the structure around individuals, it had been about fully utilizing the potential of the individual ...

to be continued sometime ...