When the five-talented become members among the members
There is a calling I have seldom heard expressed in the church, although the need for it seems considerable. We often encourage the one-talented members to rise up, speak, participate, and offer what they have received. Perhaps there is another calling that belongs beside it: the calling for the five-talented members to become one-talented members.
The language of five talents and one talent comes from Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25. Here I use it as a picture of differing gifts and capacities, never differing worth: the highly gifted are being invited to share the ordinary place of a member, while offering all they have received.
I do not mean that anyone should bury what God has given. I mean something inward, something that concerns our relationship to our abilities and the place those abilities secure for us among others.
Can a remarkably gifted person become an ordinary brother or sister in the experience of a gathering? Can someone with substantial knowledge participate without becoming its center? Can a person whose words naturally command attention discover the joy of being present without needing to speak?
These questions arise from gratitude for the help gifted people have provided, and from a growing concern that receiving help can become dependence. Somewhere along the way, the person who introduces us to Christ can become the person through whom we feel we must continually approach Him.
Perhaps a new shepherding begins where that dependence is gently released.
Something I Learned as a Student
While working toward my degree, I attended several schools. One was Evergreen in Olympia. Something about the way I experienced learning there has remained with me.
Much of our learning happened in small groups with professors. These were educated people, some with doctorates and considerable expertise. They had spent years studying subjects we were only beginning to explore. Yet they sat with us, listened, and participated in the conversation.
There were lectures, certainly. But what remains most vivid is the opportunity to ask a question as it arose and to receive an answer within a shared exploration. A professor could bring considerable depth to a simple question without making the person who asked it feel foolish.
We respected their knowledge. We did not need to imagine that we possessed the same understanding. Yet the difference in knowledge did not become a difference in human standing. They were accessible to us.
Their learning entered the conversation as something available for our benefit. It did not need to dominate the room to prove its value.
I remember this because it gave me a glimpse of what considerable ability can look like when it is willing to live among others.
Bringing the Gift into the Circle
I wonder what might happen if more of our church life took this shape.
A brother with decades of experience sits among several believers. One is new. Another struggles to express what has been happening inwardly. Someone carries a question that sounds simple but has troubled her for years.
The experienced brother has much to offer. Yet he begins by listening.
He does not need to turn every question into a message. He can respond to what was actually asked. He can admit when he has misunderstood. He can receive something from a person whose vocabulary is less developed than his own.
There may be a moment when his knowledge helps everyone. There may also be an evening when his greatest contribution is the attention he gives another person.
His gift has found a home within the fellowship. It no longer requires the fellowship to arrange itself around him.
This is what I mean by the five-talented becoming one-talented: a person bringing everything he has received while accepting the place of one member among the others.
The Gift and the Place It Creates
Abilities have social consequences. Someone who speaks clearly will often be asked to speak again. Someone who organizes effectively will be given more responsibility. Someone who answers difficult questions may gradually become the person whose judgment settles every discussion.
None of this requires an unhealthy intention.
The difficulty develops quietly. Others begin to hesitate before offering a thought. The experienced person’s response becomes the measure of whether an expression was worthwhile. A gathering learns to wait for him, even when he has repeatedly encouraged everyone to participate.
He may be bewildered by their passivity. They may be equally bewildered by their inability to overcome it.
Perhaps both are living within a relationship that needs to change.
Inviting people to speak does not necessarily free them to become members in practice. They also need room to discover, question, contribute, and sometimes express themselves awkwardly without feeling that a more accomplished person is waiting to correct the result.
A Calling to Anonymity
Anonymity may sound like an unusual spiritual calling. Many of us associate usefulness with visibility. If something helps people, surely it should become known.
Sometimes it should. Yet there is another kind of fruitfulness that grows almost unnoticed.
A conversation helps someone recover confidence in Christ. A patient listener allows a buried question to emerge. A quiet act of care makes a difficult week bearable. No ministry develops around these moments. No one receives an introduction.
The life shared is sufficient.
For a gifted person, anonymity can reveal attachments that public usefulness leaves undisturbed. Can something flourish without becoming associated with his name? Can another person receive the appreciation? Can he offer help that leaves no continuing claim upon the one helped?
Such questions deserve tenderness. The desire to be useful and the desire to be needed can become intertwined in any of us.
Perhaps hidden service gradually allows them to separate.
A Calling to Silence
Silence can be equally searching.
Someone accustomed to speaking may remain quiet outwardly while inwardly preparing the answer. He has surrendered the floor for a moment, but he has not yet entered the other person’s experience.
A deeper silence listens without deciding in advance where the conversation must go.
This matters because spiritual discovery is often slow. A person may need several unfinished sentences before finding the words. What first sounds confused may contain the beginning of something precious.
A ready explanation can arrive too soon.
I know how easily the desire to clarify can overtake the willingness to listen. Words seem helpful because they bring order. Yet the person speaking may need companionship before clarification, and attention before an answer.
The gifted member’s silence can communicate something profoundly strengthening: there is room for you here. What Christ is forming in you deserves our patience.
A Deeper Schooling in the Inward Life
By Zoe, I mean the divine life we receive in Christ—the life that becomes our inward source.
A person may explain this life beautifully and still need to learn how to attend to it in the next conversation. Knowledge of the source does not remove the need to live from the source.
Perhaps unusual ability makes this distinction especially important.
An accomplished speaker can produce a coherent message through familiar capacities. An experienced organizer can restore order quickly. A persuasive person can secure agreement. The outward result may be impressive while concealing how little inward listening occurred.
This is no accusation against ability. It is a reason for those who possess it to welcome a deeper schooling.
Can the capable person pause when he already knows what to do? Can he allow love to interrupt efficiency? Can he recognize that a successful meeting may still have left someone unheard?
The gift needs the life as surely as the weakness does.
When Help Becomes an Intermediary
The danger is seldom that someone deliberately announces himself as an intermediary between believers and Christ.
More often, the relationship develops through repeated habits. People wait for an explanation before trusting their own inward response. They seek permission to raise a concern. They become uncertain whether an experience is valid until someone recognized confirms it.
Counsel and fellowship are precious. We need one another. Yet their fruit should include a growing freedom to live before the Lord.
When that freedom diminishes, even well-intended help can become an obstruction.
Christ has opened our access to the Father. Our life together should help us enjoy that access with confidence. The Holy of Holies must never feel like a place whose entrance depends upon satisfying another believer’s expectations.
Shepherding carries a sacred responsibility here: to accompany people into a living relationship that the shepherd neither owns nor controls.
The Quiet Formation of Dependence
Dependence can feel reassuring to everyone involved.
Those receiving direction are relieved of uncertainty. The person providing it sees order, consistency, and apparent progress. Decisions become easier when someone reliably supplies the answer.
But growth involves learning to discern, and discernment requires participation.
A believer needs opportunities to bring a concern before the Lord, speak with others, weigh what is heard, and take responsibility for a response. These processes may be slower than receiving instructions. They may produce less uniformity.
They also allow something inward to develop.
A new shepherding would have patience for this development. It would not interpret every question as resistance or every difference as a threat to oneness.
There is a unity that becomes richer as members mature. Their expressions become more varied while their source becomes more deeply shared.
Such unity cannot be secured merely by making everyone predictable.
Gratitude Without Permanent Dependence
Many of us owe much to gifted Christians. Their words reached us at a necessary moment. Their experience helped us understand our own. Their faithfulness gave us courage.
That gratitude need not diminish as our understanding of shepherding develops.
Indeed, perhaps the fullest appreciation of someone’s ministry is to enter the reality toward which it pointed. If a brother helped us see Christ as our life, surely the desired fruit is that Christ increasingly becomes our actual source.
A precious ministry can remain precious without becoming the permanent center of everyone’s attention.
What has been received can pass into the common life of the members. An insight once heard from a gifted speaker becomes something quietly lived in a household, a friendship, a conversation, or a difficult act of forgiveness.
The source of the original explanation may no longer be mentioned. Its fruit has become living.
There is something beautiful about help that succeeds so fully it no longer needs to announce itself.
What This Shepherding Might Look Like
Imagine a gathering in which no one feels responsible for producing an impressive occasion.
Someone shares a difficulty. Another asks a question. A more experienced believer offers a brief thought, then listens as someone else responds. There is room to pray, room to be uncertain, and room to leave a matter unfinished.
The experienced members remain attentive. They do not abandon responsibility or withhold necessary help. Their experience allows them to notice who has been overlooked, when clarification would serve, and when silence would be kinder.
Their care helps others become present.
Over time, a hesitant person begins to contribute. Someone who always sought an answer starts to discern an inward response. Members learn to care for one another without waiting for the most capable person to initiate everything.
The fruit appears in the people.
The gathering becomes less dependent upon a particular presence because care, discernment, and participation are becoming shared.
A Calling for All of Us
Although I have spoken of the five-talented, this invitation reaches anyone who possesses influence. Within one relationship, almost any of us may be the more knowledgeable, experienced, or confident person.
We can all ask whether our help enlarges another person’s freedom to live by Christ.
A new way will require more than smaller meetings or different seating. We can reproduce the same dependence around a kitchen table. What needs to change is our willingness to occupy the ordinary place of a member: receiving as well as giving, listening as well as explaining.
Perhaps this is the calling: bring the gift into the common life, and allow Christ to determine its expression.
There will still be speaking, teaching, and care. But beneath them may grow something quieter and more enduring—a people learning together to live from the life within.
And the gifted ones will have the joy of belonging among them.
