The Gifts for the City: Spiritual Gifts in Urban Ministry

By Andy Singleterry

"How can I determine which spiritual gifts I have?" Wrong question! Paul writes about the spiritual gifts in his letters as capacities of communities rather than individuals, and he never makes a definitive, definable list. The gifts are fluid and dynamic, refusing to be pinned down. "How can we start to describe how the Spirit works through us?" is a much more useful question. This book helps you answer that question, and then applies principles about spiritual gifts to urban ministry. Cities present particular challenges to the teams who live and minister in them. Certain spiritual gifts are crucial to teams trying to love their neighbors, and their neighborhoods, as themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Oct 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666758573

Andy Singleterry

Andy Singleterry coleads the San José site for Servant Partners. He is also the editor of Servant Partners Press.

Book preview

Introduction

Christians love psychological profiles. Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, Strengthfinder—ask around a church and you’ll hear all kinds of enthusiastic letters, numbers, and jargon. We seem to love the thought of answering some questions about ourselves, tabulating the results, and then reading an interpretation that tells us who we are. One would almost think that the New Testament included a psychological profile, that God had solemnly commanded us to fill out these tests and divinely inspired their interpretations.

But wait, maybe he did! The Apostle Paul, in a few of his New Testament letters, mentions something called the spiritual gifts. The lists are all a little different, but they all have some overlap, and they all name sets of character traits. The gifts all name things that Christians might be good at, which is a kind of profile. We can devise tests with several questions about each of these gifts, mix them up, and then put a key at the end. Test-takers will be able to count up their scores for each of the gifts! They’ll be able to have a specific number for each gift, so they can finally know which gifts they have!

Most Christians don’t have this breathless excitement about counting gift scores, but they do think about the spiritual gifts this way. Apparently, when spiritual gifts first emerged as a prominent subject for church study in the early 1970s, the first proposed test was so closely modeled on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that it couldn’t be used.¹ The connection makes sense. Scripture names a certain set of gifts, and God blesses each of us with a subset of them. We might quibble about the specifics of the list, or about how to identify that subset, or about some other details, but we share the basic premise.

I’m going to argue that this premise is incomplete. It misunderstands Paul’s message about spiritual gifts, inserting modern ideas, values, and expectations that have no place in his ancient thought. Then, bringing that scriptural misunderstanding into our modern lives, it leads us astray when we try to apply scripture in our lives. In fact, this false premise might lead us to an understanding of the gifts that Paul argued against.

Instead of a measurable psychological profile, spiritual gifts are an off-the-cuff expression of ministry skills and roles. The Apostle Paul wasn’t trying to write out the definitive list of spiritual gifts—if so, his lists would match each other and he would explain them more. He was more concerned with the phenomenon of giftedness and how it worked in the churches. Not individual people and their individual gifts, but communities of gifted people serving together. When we drill down to define discreet gifts in their universally-applicable meanings, we miss the forest for the trees. Faced with a whole orchestra, we hear only one instrument.

All of that is the subject of the first part of this book. The second part looks at how spiritual gifts play out on urban ministry teams. Most books on the gifts concentrate on how they work in the church context. What gifts do most pastors exhibit? Beyond musical skills, what gifts should a worship leader possess? How do I know if I have the gift of healing and, if I do, how do I use it in my church? This church focus makes sense, considering that Paul originally wrote about the gifts in local church settings and that the church is the shared context of almost all Christians. All churches have many members who aren’t exercising their gifts as much as they might. These writers on the gifts have the admirable goal, spoken or unspoken, of inspiring more church members to step into ministry.

But that’s not the only audience. Some of us have taken our first steps into ministry, and now we look at the gifts to see about refining our work. Or we’re on ministry teams and we want to investigate how we might work together better. The Gifts for the City is written for this audience. Specifically, I write for fellow urban ministers in small, incarnational communities.

What do I mean by that? Incarnational ministry is the practice of serving a specific group of people, in a specific place, by moving in and living among them. Rather than dropping in, distributing goods, and then moving along, we incarnational ministers plant ourselves in places of need and seek to feel their needs as our own. We try to make the ministry of justice and compassion as simple as loving our neighbors. As the word incarnational implies, we try to follow Jesus’s example in this. He might have kept the comforts of Heaven and used his power to bless the world from there, but he didn’t. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.² Incarnational ministers today try to follow his example in a way that points their neighbors back to Jesus.

Most of us doing urban incarnational ministry serve in small teams. Often, we band together to form a household, planting ourselves in the neighborhood we hope to bless. The New Monasticism, one prominent movement of urban incarnational ministers, employs this strategy. Such a household opens its home to neighbors, often characterizing its ministry as radical hospitality.

Other groups might form around an organization. A more formal model might be something like a Catholic Worker house, where staff live on-site, provide housing for people in need, and offer other services to a broader group of recipients. Less formally, a group of friends with a shared vision for a place might just decide to work together toward that goal.

What I have in mind is a group of Christians who:

•Choose intentionally to live in a marginal, under-privileged urban neighborhood

•Partner with neighbors to work on locally-led solutions

•Try to bless their neighbors by their presence

•Work to maintain spiritual friendship and growth among the group

Any such incarnational ministry team will benefit from paying some attention to spiritual gifts. I hope that The Gifts for the City helps them do this.

Where I’m Coming From

I work for an organization called Servant Partners, which plants teams like this in urban slums all over the world, and in inner-city neighborhoods of the United States.³ Slum populations are growing very fast in the developing world. People stream from the countryside to cities, yet those cities are ill-equipped to handle the influx. So, Servant Partners sends small groups to do incarnational ministry and bless their slum neighbors in their time of need. Depending on the situation, such a team might plant a church, organize the community around an issue, or start some kind of service organization. But always the team will strive to see the neighborhood’s strengths and weaknesses through their neighbors’ eyes, and to work in true partnership with those neighbors.

My wife Janet and I lead the Servant Partners site in San José, California. We live in a working-class neighborhood of Latino immigrants, where our team has planted a church and works to love our neighbors as ourselves. We also host cohorts of urban ministry interns. For twenty-two months at a time, groups of young adults come to join us in the neighborhood, to study and practice incarnational ministry. They come because they’ve heard about incarnational ministry and want to try it out. Our primary goal for the interns, even before the goal of doing good ministry for our neighbors, is to discern their vocations and get them started toward the lives God has for them.

A key element of that discernment is spiritual gifts. About halfway through their time with us, the interns participate in a Gifts Project. This aims to identify their gifts. That then informs their Development Plan, in which they lay out their goals for the second year of the internship. When I started working with Servant Partners, the Gifts Project included a few different paths to identify interns’ gifts, one of which was a long battery of keyed questions. We also had the interns answer some more open questions about their experiences and desires, and send out questionnaires to past partners and mentors who had seen them in ministry. Then, interns compiled all that input into a report with conclusions about their spiritual gifts. This has been a useful, flexible exercise—I am glad we’ve never just given the interns a bunch of questions and trusted those results to name their gifts. But the Gifts Project has bought into the limited-gift-set premise. For instance, when we sent out questionnaires for friends to identify interns’ gifts, we included a limited list of gifts with definitions.

As long as I have been assigning the Gifts Project to interns, I have been stretching and revising the assignment. I value the gifts identification as background for Development Plans, but I want the interns to take a more expansive view of their gifts. After six classes totaling fifty interns, I believe I have refined our methods. I’m happy to share with you what I have learned.

The Passages

The Gifts Project always begins with a study in the biblical passages that present the spiritual gifts; studying these and questioning whether they matched our modern thinking on the gifts is what inspired my skepticism about the psychological profile paradigm. There are three passages: Romans 12:6–8, Ephesians 4:11–13, and I Corinthians chapters 12 to 14. Obviously, the I Corinthians passage is much more extensive than the others, and most of how we think about spiritual gifts comes from there. As we get started in The Gifts for the City, I encourage you to read these three passages, especially the long one. That is our primary source. All that I’m writing here is basically a commentary on I Corinthians 12 to 14.

So, I want to include some background information on the passage. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is a feisty one, full of argumentative language. A faction within the Corinthian church had sent him an earlier letter, now lost to history, questioning his authority and outlining differences about church matters, both theological and practical. It seems to have been something like a manifesto. Representatives of another faction, more loyal to Paul, had also written to him and sent messengers. Our biblical book of I Corinthians is Paul’s fiery response to the rival faction’s letter. Reading it is like hearing one side of a heated debate.⁴

One of the subjects about which Paul differed from the other faction was spiritual gifts. They seem to have valued certain gifts more than others, or to have wondered what counted as a spiritual gift and what didn’t. So Paul wrote this lengthy, three-chapter section to explain the gifts, how they should work and what they were for. You’ll notice when you read that chapters 12 and 14 deal with the gifts, but the middle chapter doesn’t. Here among the spiritual gifts is the famous I Corinthians 13, the love chapter, associated more with weddings than ministry. But, reading the chapter in context shows that Paul was writing about communal love, not romantic love. He was saying that, as consequential as spiritual gifting is, the love that animates it is far more important. We’ll explore what this means for our urban ministry a little later.

You’ll also notice a tantalizing, offensive parenthetical note in chapter 14, in which Paul orders women to be silent in church. This is one of the places in Paul’s letters where he sounds like a terrible misogynist. I’m not qualified to say much about this difficult passage, to rehabilitate or condemn Paul, but I’ll point out a relevant contradiction. Just a few chapters earlier (in another problematic passage) he gives instruction for women praying or prophesying (I Corinthians 11:5). This earlier passage shows that Paul’s message can’t be as simple as women shouldn’t speak in church because he just told them how to do that very thing. Something else is going on.

Miracles or No?

Paul mentions several spiritual gifts in I Corinthians, including some of a supernatural sort. Healing and miracles sit right alongside teaching and leadership. Depending on how you’ve been taught to think about spiritual gifts, you may get excited about those miraculous gifts, or you may cringe. As a matter of style or worldview, many dismiss miracles as primitive superstition, impossible and irrelevant. As a matter of doctrine, some dismiss the supernatural gifts as relics, operative when Paul wrote about them but not since then. And many, probably most of the Christians around the world, have no problem including supernatural gifts in their faith life.

I don’t know where you find yourself among those descriptions, but I should explain my perspective on the supernatural gifts before we get too far into the book. I grew up in a congregation that had little if any experience in miracles, and I drank in the scientific skepticism of the world around me. But, as I’ve aged, I’ve seen supernatural things that have stretched my assumptions, and people I respect greatly have seen and done a lot more than me. I still don’t have much personal experience with the supernatural gifts—I don’t think I am gifted in any of those ways—but I have come to believe that God still gives them.

You’ll see that I sprinkle references to the supernatural gifts among the others, without marking them as a special category. You may disagree with this treatment, but I encourage you to keep going. Reserve your judgment, at least until chapter 8, where I deal more extensively with this question.

The Plan for the Book

The bulk of The Gifts for the City is in two sections, The Gifts and The City. The first section explores the nature of spiritual gifts. I will seek to clear away modern misconceptions about the gifts, and to identify those misconceptions’ sources. Then, I will refill that space with an understanding of the gifts more faithful to Paul and more useful to us today. The Gifts ends with a chapter on how we can identify our spiritual gifts, as individuals and communities. The second section, then, applies that knowledge to the urban context. The City starts with a chapter on cities and what makes them distinctive, which will include a deeper description of the incarnational urban ministry I have in mind. Then, I’ll include several chapters about issues that come up in urban ministry and how a good understanding of spiritual gifts can inform our ministry in those dynamics.

Following Paul’s example, in between The Gifts and The City sits an interlude on love. As we exercise our spiritual gifts, we need to be sure that we are motivated by love. Many other desires can creep in—power, prestige, popularity and more—so we need to regularly re-center ourselves on love. This chapter will help us do that.

I’ve written The Gifts for the City to help you understand and identify the spiritual gifts at work in