In equipping people, we don’t use spiritual gift tests or personality assessments because those usually eliminate people’s openness to the uncomfortable gifts (healing, prophecy, even tongues). We encourage people that the best way to identify your gifts is to be open to being used by God for others and begin practicing them. See what builds up the community and begin to embrace those gifts.
Gospel Counseling
We also equip our people to counsel one another with the gospel. Counseling is usually seen as a last ditch effort to save a terrible situation, but we seek to embrace the gospel as the definer of all spheres of life. Since this is true, we seek to address every challenge with the gospel of Jesus Christ. We encourage our leaders to start by asking about the challenges that people face, discussing their goals in the challenge, and helping them to develop a gospel-centered mindset and steps to achieve this goal. I completely stole this method from Gospel Coach by Scott Thomas.
Gospel Community: For the Mission of God
We end by discussing how all of this is not merely to create a focus on the community, but to create a community that embodies Jesus in order to invite those outside of the community into a welcoming, gospel-humbled environment.
We have the opportunity to use our spiritual gifts and our lives defined by the gospel to extend the message and mercy of Jesus Christ. We have the great opportunity to be an alternative community not by creating our own subculture, but by embodying Jesus to our culture.
“The world will know you are my disciples if you love one another…”
These are the words of Jesus as a challenge us to value Christian community and we live in a city that is in need of entire community of Christ followers to display Jesus’ love and His mission to heal the brokenness and restore hope.
This article on building gospel community originally appeared here.
