Now, Discover Your Strengths

This Tuesday night Jamie and I went to Madison to David and Lisa Treloar's house. They pastor the Lakeshore Church and we've become good friends with them. David was holding a class for discovering your spiritual gifts, strengths, talents, personality, and learning from past experiences.

What I loved about the class was the comprehensive nature of it. In the past all I've really heard of is taking a spiritual gifts inventory and then trying to use your gifts in church. I know Rick Warren has a SHAPE model he uses (spiritual gifts, heart/passions/abilities/personality/ experiences). And I've tried doing that, but it didn't connect with me like this class did.

We used "Now, Discover Your Strengths," a secular book put out by Gallup. Gallup had interviewed over 2 million people and came up with 34 basic "strengths" that people have. And their theory is that most businesses hold 360-evaluations and focus on one's weaknesses. How can we improve...? Although that is helpful, it isn't enough for us to fix our weaknesses. We must leverage our strengths in order to be successful, whatever that is.

And I love that theory. I plan to hold some sort of class like this at our church in April. Hopefully our congregation can also see that God has made them unique and fitted them with gifts and talents to be used for His glory. This is not to say we won't minister out of our weaknesses as well...we'll just leverage our strengths more.

So, if you have time, check out the book on amazon. It's written by Buckingham and Clifton. Each book comes with a code for you to go to their website, take a test, and find out your top five strengths.

Opinions? Questions? Give me a comment.