1 Florida United Methodist Review Online

Leaders learn to transform church

Photo -- spiritgifts celebration

Photo by Micahel Wacht

Participants in the SpiritGifts training retreat celebrate the pentecost experience by batting red, orange and yellow balloons representing tongues of flame around the communion table. "It wasn't all serious," said Dorothy Doughty, a member of First UMC, Gulfport. "there were times of gaiety."

By Michael Wacht

LEESBURG -- When church leaders use words like nominations, committee assignments and board meetings, many people think of a business rather than a ministry. Laity and clergy who attended the Oct. 19-21 SpiritGifts training explored ways they can help their churches begin operating less like corporations and more like spiritual communities.

The three-day training retreat at the Life Enrichment Center in Leesburg was designed to help church leaders discover their own spiritual gifts and train them to help others discover theirs, said Patricia Brown, director of the Florida Conference Council on Ministries' Spiritual Formation office and author of the SpiritGifts material used at the retreat.

"The retreat was about recognizing and naming and claiming our spiritual gifts in a context that promotes sharing, caring, praying, witnessing -- using all of our gifts," said Gary Bryan, a full-time supply pastor serving a two-point charge in Fort Ogden.

Through personal inventories, workbook exercises, group discussions and prayer, the participants created a list of their own spiritual gifts and brainstormed ways those gifts can be used in ministry in the local church.

"I learned that I'm stronger - more gifted - in some areas than I'm aware of," Bryan said. "It was revealing and encouraging to know, as a pastor, that I don't have to have all the gifts."

Participants also learned how to help members of their churches realize and begin to use their spiritual gifts. Brown said this is the first step in the process of "transforming our congregations."

"The goal is to get congregations to stop slotting people into predetermined institutional positions and get them to open up to the will of God," she said. "These [attendees] are the persons who are interested in transforming the church. They want to have a grasp of the process and to take it back as a ministry; not as a program, but as an ongoing process of the church."

Dorothy Doughty, a member of First United Methodist Church, Gulfport, said she had already planned to share the SpiritGifts training with people at her church. "I hope to go back and get the leaders in the church, the chairs of the different groups, to start out with a six-week program," she said. "From there, they would go out and have every member take the class."

Bryan said he also plans to teach the Spiritual Formation material in his churches, although he will make the training fit better with his congregations' personalities.

"I hope to take it back to the two churches and encourage others to want to know and to want to find out what their gifts are -- to do the will of God," he said