The AIM teaching team gathered together leaders from our previous discipleship classes for a next-level training on spiritual maturity. This class focused on identifying the five-fold gifts of the Spirit (as found in Ephesians 4:11-12), and the participants came to understand how God intends them to work together as team to equip the church to become effective and influential in their communities. This picture of working together as team within our spiritual gifting was a whole new model for them to begin to grapple with. When we began to compare the way churches work today (one person, usually the pastor does 90% of the work and 100% of the preaching) with the scriptural model stressed in Ephesians 4, these leaders began to see how identifying the spiritual gifts and intentionally helping them to mature would result in a much more effective and potentially growing church.
After working through Scripture, a hands-on exercise of assembling simple balsa wood airplanes (5 gifts, 5 parts to the planes) was fantastic fun! They had never before seen such a thing. But they figured it out in teams, even without any help from the Americans! With carefully assembled planes, each team then walked outside and got a chance to launch their plane! Laughter and excitement! What a great visual of how every gift is needed in order to help the church to “fly.” It was a day they will never forget...and a spiritual lesson that stayed in their hearts.
