Paul Benger

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Pastor, Creator, Leader, Author, Entrepreneur, Cultural Architect, Leadership Coach
  • Why “Fake It ‘Til You Make It” Is Not a Sustainable Leadership Strategy

    Why “Fake It ‘Til You Make It” Is Not a Sustainable Leadership Strategy

    There is a piece of advice that gets handed around in business circles like wisdom. You have heard it. You may have even lived by it. Fake it ’til you make it. The idea is straightforward enough: project confidence before you have the competence. Build the brand before you have the product. Market the promise before you can fulfil it.

    In the startup world, this became something close to doctrine. Create the identity first — the logo, the aesthetic, the story — then build the actual thing to match. For some, it worked. For many more, it collapsed the moment reality caught up with the projection. The gap between image and substance has a way of closing. And when it does, it rarely closes in your favour.

    What concerns me more than its presence in business is where this thinking has quietly settled in the church. We have leaders who have mastered the language of vision and calling, who can project authority and prophetic weight, but whose inner life — their character, their formation, their depth — has not yet caught up with the platform they are standing on. And sometimes, perhaps without fully realising it, we have dressed up “fake it ’til you make it” in spiritual clothing and called it prophetic.

    The Problem with Brand-First Leadership

    Modern strategy in business is essentially this: establish who you want to be perceived as, then work backwards. Build the audience before you build the product. Sell the dream before you can deliver it. There is a certain logic to it in the commercial world, where branding and demand-generation serve real purposes. But leadership — real leadership — does not work that way. Because leadership is not primarily about perception. It is about trust. And trust is not built through clever positioning. It is built through proven character over time.

    When leaders build a platform that exceeds their character, one of two things happens. Either the weight of the platform eventually exposes what is missing underneath, or the leader spends an exhausting and ultimately unsustainable amount of energy managing the gap. Neither is a good outcome. The first is a crisis. The second is a slow collapse dressed up as ministry.

    When “Prophetic” Becomes a Cover Story

    Here is where it gets uncomfortable for those of us in church leadership.

    There is a version of “fake it ’til you make it” that has found a home in charismatic and evangelical ministry culture. It goes something like this: a leader feels called to something significant — a church, a movement, a platform, a ministry. The calling feels real. The vision is compelling. And so, instead of submitting to a formation process, they simply declare it. They speak it into existence. They present the vision as though it is already accomplished. They lead with the language of what will be as though it already is, without the substance, the character, or the track record to underwrite the claim.

    Now — to be clear — there is something genuinely prophetic in the church. Speaking faith-filled vision, declaring what God has promised, stepping out before you can fully see: these are all legitimate expressions of faith-based leadership. The problem is not prophetic vision. The problem is using prophetic language as a substitute for formation. It is claiming a future that you have not yet been shaped to carry.

    The biblical prophets were not people who simply made bold declarations. They were people who had been through something. Isaiah encountered the holiness of God and was undone before he was sent. Jeremiah was told he was known before he was formed, but he still walked decades of painful ministry before the words carried weight. Moses spent forty years in the desert before God spoke from a burning bush. The declaration came after the formation, not instead of it.

    The Sequence That Changes Everything

    One of the most clarifying frameworks I have encountered in leadership development comes from the work of Robert Clinton, whose research into hundreds of biblical and historical leaders revealed a pattern that runs entirely counter to the brand-first approach.

    Clinton observed that God consistently develops leaders in a specific sequence: Know → Be → Do.

    First, the leader comes to know — knowledge, revelation, theological depth. Then, before they are sent to do, God insists on the being stage. The shaping of character. The formation of the inner life. The tests of integrity and obedience. Only then does effective action flow naturally from who the person has become.

    The world, and unfortunately much of contemporary ministry culture, tends to run this sequence in reverse: Do → Be → Know. Get busy. Figure out who you are later. Learn on the job. But Clinton’s research found something sobering: the leaders who skipped or rushed the formation stage — the being stage — were the ones most likely to experience catastrophic failure later, often at the point of their greatest influence.

    His conclusion was direct: skill grows faster than character. And when that gap opens up wide enough, it becomes a chasm.

    David’s Forgotten Formula

    There is a verse in Psalm 78 that quietly holds one of the most important leadership principles in Scripture. It describes David’s leadership of Israel in just twelve words:

    “He shepherded them with integrity of heart; with skilful hands he led them.” — Psalm 78:72

    Notice the order. Integrity of heart first. Skilful hands second. Character before competency. Being before doing.

    David was not without flaws — scripture does not pretend otherwise. But the thing that made his leadership sustainable, the thing that earned him the designation of “a man after God’s own heart,” was not his strategic brilliance or his military success. It was the formation of his inner life. Years of obscurity, tending sheep, writing psalms in the wilderness, running for his life. By the time David took the throne, the throne was not bigger than the man sitting in it.

    That is the test worth applying to any leader, including yourself: Is the person bigger than the platform, or is the platform bigger than the person? When the platform outgrows the person, the whole thing becomes unstable.

    Formation Is Not a Delay — It Is the Process

    Here is the reframe that changes everything: the formation process is not what happens before your ministry begins. It isyour ministry beginning. The years of testing, character development, hidden faithfulness, and unglamorous preparation are not delays in God’s plan for your leadership. They are the plan.

    Joseph did not become a leader in spite of the pit, the false accusation, and the prison. He became a leader through them. Each test — and Clinton would call them exactly that, integrity checks — was shaping something in him that no amount of positional authority could manufacture. By the time Pharaoh placed the signet ring on his finger, Joseph’s character was ready to carry what his calling required.

    The question worth sitting with is this: Have I been shaped by what I have been through, or have I simply survived it and moved on?

    A More Sustainable Path

    So what does the alternative actually look like? It looks like:

    Pursuing depth before scale. Before you expand the platform, ask whether your inner life can sustain the weight of it. Formation is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing commitment to knowing yourself, being honest about your gaps, and submitting to the people and processes that develop you.

    Treating character as infrastructure. In the same way that a building needs foundations proportional to the floors it will carry, your leadership capacity must be proportional to your character. Mac Lake frames it simply: character and competency must develop together, not sequentially. Every skill you build should be matched by a corresponding character quality.

    Letting your track record do the talking. Authentic authority is not declared — it is recognised. You do not need to announce what you carry if you actually carry it. The leaders whose words land with weight are the ones who have earned that weight through a life people can read.

    Embracing the hiddenness. Some of the most critical leadership formation happens in seasons that feel invisible, unrecognised, and slow. Resist the cultural pressure — and the church pressure — to shortcut your way to influence. The seasons that feel like waiting are often the seasons that are doing the most work.

    The Gap Always Closes

    Here is the uncomfortable truth about fake it ’til you make it: the gap between image and substance always closes eventually. Either you do the work of formation and your character catches up to your calling — or reality catches up to you. Leadership built on projected confidence without genuine substance does not simply plateau. It collapses. And when it does, it takes people with it.

    The church deserves leaders who are not merely impressive but trustworthy. Leaders whose public face matches their private life. Leaders who have been through enough that their words carry the weight of lived experience, not just well-crafted vision.

    Character is the infrastructure that platform runs on. Build that first. Build it slowly. Build it honestly.

    The rest will follow.

  • You Can’t Change the Season — But You Can Change the Level

    You Can’t Change the Season — But You Can Change the Level

    I was talking recently with a group of church leaders, and I asked them to share a frustration they were carrying in ministry right now. What came back was striking — not because the frustrations were unusual, but because they were almost identical across people in completely different contexts.

    Flat momentum. A team that feels tired. A vision that feels stuck. The sense that you’re doing all the right things, but something just isn’t moving. One leader put it perfectly: “I feel like I’m running hard but going nowhere.”

    I’ve been there. Jeannie and I have pastored Ikon Church for thirty-eight years. Over that time we’ve had mountain tops and valleys, seasons of extraordinary growth and seasons of grinding it out. And the thing I’ve learned — the thing I wish someone had told me earlier — is this:

    Life is experienced in seasons. But it’s lived on levels.

    That distinction changed how I lead.

    The Writer of Ecclesiastes Saw It First

    The Teacher in Ecclesiastes opens chapter three with one of the most quoted passages in the Bible:

    “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot…” — Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

    Most people read this as a poem about acceptance. And there is acceptance in it — an acknowledgement that certain rhythms of life are beyond our control. But what the Teacher is really doing is more demanding than that. He isn’t counselling resignation. He is calling us to wisdom: the wisdom to recognise which season you’re in, to stop fighting what you cannot change, and to ask the better question — how do I lead and live well in the season I’m actually in?

    Because here’s the truth: you can’t control the seasons. But you can control the level at which you live within them.

    Seasons cycle. Levels ascend.

    The Apostle Paul captures this in 2 Corinthians 3:18 — “we are being transformed into his image from glory to glory.” Note the movement. Not from glory to hardship to glory. From glory to glory. The transformation is always upward. Seasons come and go they go up and down. But levels? Levels are intended to go in one direction.

    1. Seasons Are Inevitable — Levels Are Intentional

    In leadership as in life, seasons come whether you want them or not. I’ve been in momentum seasons — where everything you touch seems to turn to gold. I’ve been in seasons where I couldn’t catch a break. Seasons where everyone seemed to love what we were doing. Seasons where it felt like half the church had quietly drifted. Seasons of opposition, seasons of joy, seasons of genuine grief.

    You can’t vote on which one arrives next.

    But here’s what I’ve learned: within every one of those seasons, there is a level available to you that you have not yet occupied. The building might be the same. The city might be the same. The faces might be the same. But you don’t have to lead from the same level.

    Seasons happen to you. Levels happen in you.

    That’s not just motivational language. It’s a theological claim. Two pastors can be in the same city, the same economy, serving the same demographic — and one is leading at a fundamentally different level. Not because their circumstances are different, but because they are different. They’ve grown beyond the limits of the season.

    Proverbs 15:24 puts it simply: “The way of life winds upward for the wise.” Upward. The wise don’t plateau. They ascend. Not because their seasons are easier, but because they refuse to let their season set their ceiling.

    2. Frustration Is Not Just Agitating — It’s Educating

    So how do you know when it’s time for a new level?

    Frustration.

    I know that’s not the answer you were hoping for. But stick with me.

    Every great leader I know faces seasons of deep frustration. And the instinct — every time — is to try to fix the season. To change the strategy. To hire someone new. To launch something different. Anything to make the frustration go away.

    But often, the frustration is not a problem to fix. It’s an invitation to a new level.

    When the systems that used to work doesn’t work anymore — that’s not just a systems problem. When the way you led last year no longer inspires your team — that’s not just a culture problem. When the strategy that brought growth now feels stale — that’s not just a strategy problem. God may be using every one of those frustrations to say the same thing he said to Israel at the foot of the mountain:

    “You have stayed long enough at this mountain… See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession.” — Deuteronomy 1:6, 8

    You have stayed long enough. That’s not a rebuke. It’s a release. God is not frustrated with you — he’s frustrated for you. He can see what’s possible on the other side of a new level, and he will not let you settle for the current one.

    Exodus 23:30 adds a patient, important word: “Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.” Notice that word — until. The process of going level to level is the very thing that increases your capacity for what comes next. The frustration isn’t wasted. It’s formational.

    Ask yourself honestly: What’s frustrating me right now? Don’t just vent about it. Study it. Something in there is trying to tell you something.

    3. It Takes Maturity to Admit “This Level Isn’t Working”

    This is where most leaders get stuck.

    It takes real humility — and a certain kind of courage — to look at what used to work and say out loud: “It’s not working anymore.” To admit that the approach that built this team last year might not build it this year. That the system you put in place three years ago is no longer fit for purpose. That what got you here will not get you there.

    Leaders evolve or they erode. There isn’t a middle option.

    Paul’s language in Philippians 3 is instructive here. He doesn’t say he’s arrived. He says he is pressing on — and crucially, he names what makes that possible:

    “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 3:13-14

    Forgetting what is behind. You can’t move to the next level while clinging to the last one. You cannot be offended when God shows you the deficiency of your current level. You cannot get defensive when he says, “There’s more — but it requires a different version of you.”

    The most freeing statement I’ve learned to make is this: I don’t want to hold on to anything that’s holding me back.

    That applies to attitudes, habits, systems, default modes of leadership — anything. If it’s holding you back, it has to go.

    4. From Surviving to Supernatural Leadership

    There are two storms in the Gospels that I find myself returning to.

    In the first, the disciples are in a boat, terrified, while Jesus is asleep. They wake him in panic. He calms the wind and waves. What strikes me is not the miracle — it’s the level. Jesus could sleep through what caused panic in everyone else. He wasn’t unaware of the storm. He was operating at a different level within it.

    In the second, Jesus walks on the water toward the terrified disciples. What they feared most became the ground he stood on.

    What Jesus did literally, we are invited to do metaphorically. Leaders at a new level walk on what other people drown in. They bring calm into crisis. They carry faith into fear. They lead with clarity in the very circumstances that cause others to freeze.

    That’s not leadership skill. That’s supernatural leadership. And it is available to you — not when your season changes, but when you decide to lead at a new level within the season you’re already in.

    Three Questions to Sit With This Week

    You don’t need a new season. You need a new level. Here’s where to start:

    First — what season am I actually in? Not the one you wish you were in. The real one. Name it honestly. You can’t navigate a season you won’t acknowledge.

    Second — what frustration is God using to invite me higher? Don’t just manage the frustration. Listen to it. What is it telling you about where you’ve been camped too long?

    Third — what am I holding onto that’s holding me back? An attitude. A system. A default. A posture. Something. Name it. And decide today that you don’t want to hold on to anything that’s holding you back.

    Your season may not change. But you don’t have to lead from the same level.

    What season are you navigating right now — and what might God be inviting you into? Leave a comment below.

  • If it’s not a Spiritual Gift it’s a Spiritual Discipline

    If it’s not a Spiritual Gift it’s a Spiritual Discipline

    I have to be honest with you.

    I don’t have the gift of hospitality.

    I know that’s a strange confession for a pastor to make. But it’s true. If you knock on my door unannounced, I will welcome you. I’ll make you a cup of tea. I’ll be warm, I’ll be kind, I’ll be genuinely glad to see you. But I will not experience profound spiritual joy. That’s not me being rude — that’s me being honest.

    Some people absolutely light up when someone shows up at their door. They don’t just cope with it; they thrive on it. Their home is always ready, their kettle is always on, and you can practically feel the love radiating through the door before it even opens. For them, hospitality isn’t an effort. It’s a gift.

    For me, it’s a discipline.

    And that distinction — simple as it sounds — has changed everything about how I understand the Christian life.

    The Line That Changes Everything

    Here it is, as plainly as I can say it:

    If it’s not a spiritual gift, it’s a spiritual discipline.

    That’s it. That’s the insight. But don’t let the simplicity fool you — there’s enormous freedom buried in that sentence.

    The New Testament gives us multiple lists of spiritual gifts. From Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, and 1 Peter 4, we have somewhere around 20 gifts, and there are more — teaching, prophecy, encouragement, mercy, giving, healing, administration, hospitality, apostleship, and more. The apostle Paul tells us that every believer has received at least one. Peter goes on to say:

    “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.” — 1 Peter 4:10

    Not might have received. Not could receive if you try hard enough. Have received. It’s done. The Spirit distributes them as he sees fit: “All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines.” (1 Corinthians 12:11)

    But here’s what we rarely talk about: most of us don’t have most of the gifts. And we were never supposed to.

    The Pressure We Put on Ourselves

    One of the quiet burdens many Christians carry is the pressure to be good at everything the Bible calls us to. We’re all called to give generously. We’re all called to have faith. We’re all called to show mercy, to encourage one another, to welcome the stranger. So when we find those things hard, we assume something’s wrong with us.

    The person sitting next to you in church who weeps every time someone shares a struggle — who runs toward pain rather than away from it, who always seems to know exactly what to say to the broken-hearted — they have the gift of mercy. When they show compassion, the Spirit of God is actively at work through them. It flows supernaturally. It costs them very little.

    For others of us — and I’m putting my hand up here — showing that level of compassion takes real effort. Not because we don’t care. Not because we’re spiritually immature. But because mercy isn’t our gift. For us, being merciful is a discipline we have to choose, a muscle we have to intentionally exercise.

    And that is perfectly fine.

    The distinction frees us from a subtle but crushing form of comparison. You stop asking “why can’t I be more like them?” and start asking “what has God actually given me, and how do I grow in what He hasn’t?”

    Gifts Are Supernatural; Disciplines Are Intentional

    A spiritual gift, when it’s operating, has a quality of ease and fruitfulness to it that goes beyond natural ability. It produces joy. It produces results that surprise even the person using it. When a person with the gift of encouragement speaks into your life, something shifts — not because they’re naturally clever with words, but because the Holy Spirit is working through a vessel that’s been fitted for it.

    Jesus himself modelled this. Though fully God, he chose not to cling to the advantages of his divinity. He did ministry as a human being, dependent on the Spirit — led by the Spirit, filled by the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit. “The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing.” (John 5:19)

    He is our model. And the gifts of the Spirit are the same means by which God has chosen to continue the ministry of Jesus through his church.

    But a spiritual discipline is different. A discipline is a practice we build into our lives — not because it flows naturally, but because Christlikeness requires it. I may not have the gift of mercy, but I am called to be merciful. I may not have the gift of giving, but I am called to be generous, tithe and contribute. I may not have the gift of faith at the level someone else carries it, but I am called to trust God.

    So I practise.

    I practise mercy by putting myself in situations where I have to choose it. I practise generosity by giving even when I don’t feel the supernatural pull to do so. I practise faith by speaking God’s promises out loud when my feelings tell a different story.

    Paul says it clearly: “Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 14:1) There’s room to desire more. There’s room to grow. But the foundation is this: know what you’ve been given, and build the rest into your life with intention.

    Why This Matters for How You See Others

    When my three sons were younger, I noticed they each had entirely different strengths.

    Same family. Entirely different gifts.

    If I’d pushed each of them to be more like the others, I’d have crushed what was unique about them. What they needed wasn’t to be rounded off into a homogenous version of “the ideal person.” They needed space to discover and develop what they actually had.

    The church is no different. Paul’s picture in 1 Corinthians 12 is a body — and a body doesn’t need every part to do every function. It needs each part to do its function well. When the part that sees tries to do the work of the part that hears, you don’t get a better body. You get a confused one.

    So when you see someone whose mercy flows effortlessly, don’t envy them. Celebrate them. They’re filling a gap that you were never designed to fill. And find your gap — the one that only you can fill.

    What to Do With This

    Two things.

    First, discover your gifts. Pay attention to where you experience joy and ease in serving others, where things seem to work supernaturally, where people confirm that God is using you in a particular way. Ask God to show you. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has graciously given us.” (1 Corinthians 2:12) You have been given something. The Spirit wants to help you understand what it is.

    Second, name your disciplines. Look honestly at the things you’re not naturally gifted in but are still called to as a follower of Jesus. Don’t be ashamed of them. Build them into your life with intention. The Spirit will meet you in the discipline just as he meets others in the gift.

    You are not a half-finished version of the person in the next row. You are a gift machine — naturally gifted, shaped by experience, and supernaturally equipped to do the specific part of God’s work that only you can do.

    But the parts that aren’t gifts? Don’t abandon them. Discipline them.

    That’s not a lesser way to live the Christian life. That’s maturity.

    This post is drawn from Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts by Paul Benger. Available on Amazon.

  • The Gifts That Make People Nervous

    The Gifts That Make People Nervous

    From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts

    Let me name the elephant in the room.

    When most Christians hear the phrase “spiritual gifts,” they’re broadly fine — until the conversation gets to the gifts that involve healing, miracles, prophecy and tongues. That’s when the room shifts. Eyes drop. People who were engaged a moment ago become suddenly cautious.

    And honestly? I understand that. These are the gifts that carry the most baggage. They are the gifts most associated with manipulation, exaggeration, and theatrical performance. They are the gifts most likely to have caused someone pain, embarrassment, or disillusionment. And they are the gifts most likely to be dismissed by serious, thoughtful Christians who have decided that the safest response is to simply leave them alone.

    But I want to suggest that leaving them alone is not the answer. And the reason I think that is not because I am naive about the problems, but precisely because I am not.

    Two Equally Bad Responses

    Here is the pattern I observe. When it comes to these gifts — faith, healing, miracles, tongues, prophecy — Christians tend to fall into one of two camps.

    The first camp marginalises them. These gifts get quietly shelved, perhaps with a theological framework that says they ceased with the apostles, or simply with a practical assumption that they’re not really for ordinary people in ordinary churches. The result is a Christianity that is decent and sincere, but largely explained by natural means. There’s nothing happening that strictly requires God to be real.

    The second camp sensationalises them. These gifts get amplified, performed, and made central to the identity of a community. Healings are claimed loudly. Experiences are elevated. People who don’t receive what they expected are sometimes made to feel that their faith was insufficient. The result is a Christianity that is spectacular but fragile — and often harmful to people who were already vulnerable.

    Neither response is faithful to the New Testament. And in Empowered, I spend a significant amount of time arguing for a third way.

    What If There’s a Third Way?

    The book of Acts opens with a remarkable phrase. Luke says he wrote his gospel about all that Jesus “began” to do and to teach (Acts 1:1). That word “began” carries immeasurable weight. It suggests that what Jesus started during His earthly ministry was never meant to conclude with His ascension. It was designed to continue — through His followers, empowered by the same Spirit.

    Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out demons, and multiplied bread to feed thousands. These were not peripheral features of His ministry that we should feel free to leave behind. They were signs of the kingdom’s arrival — visible demonstrations that God was breaking into the broken world with power and love. And His commission to His followers was clear: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons” (Matthew 10:8). This was not a suggestion. It was a command, placed alongside preaching and baptism as an essential expression of kingdom ministry.

    The early church took this seriously. Luke records it as though it were ordinary. People were healed. Situations were transformed. Items of clothing carried healing from Paul to the sick (Acts 19:12) — and Luke narrates this without apparent embarrassment. For the first Christians, God’s supernatural work through His people was not an extraordinary exception. It was the expected expression of the kingdom continuing through a Spirit-empowered community.

    The Wonderful Tension

    So how do we navigate this faithfully, without falling into either dismissal or excess?

    The theologian Gordon Fee, whose work on Paul and the Holy Spirit is among the most rigorous scholarship in this field, gives us a genuinely helpful frame. He describes the church as living within what he calls a “wonderful tension” between two realities — heaven and earth. We are a community of people who live on the earth, in a broken world where suffering persists and prayers are sometimes not answered the way we hoped. But we are also a community that has already tasted the powers of the age to come, that carries the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, and that is called to demonstrate the kingdom’s reality in the present.

    Fee’s insight is that this tension, when held well, is not a problem to be solved — it is the normal posture of the Spirit-filled church. If you pull the tension too tight — claiming too much, too fast, demanding results, treating healing as a guaranteed transaction — you end up in dangerous territory. You create an environment where the vulnerable are manipulated and the doubtful are shamed. You make faith into a performance.

    But if you let the tension go too slack — settling for a Christianity that expects nothing supernatural, that treats the power gifts as historical curiosities — the church’s witness falls flat. You end up representing a God whose power is entirely in the past tense.

    The third way holds both. We expect God to move supernaturally because that is who He is and what He has promised. And we hold that expectation with humility, because we do not control Him, we cannot predict His timing, and we will not always understand His purposes.

    Learning to Step Out

    John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard movement and one of the most thoughtful practitioners of healing ministry in recent church history, had a phrase he returned to repeatedly: “Faith is spelled R-I-S-K.”

    What he meant was this: every time you pray for someone to be healed, you are stepping into uncertainty. You don’t know what God will do. You don’t know how He will respond. And there is always the possibility that nothing visible will happen — that you’ll pray with genuine faith and the person will leave unchanged. That is a genuinely uncomfortable place to stand.

    But Wimber’s argument was that this risk is worth taking. Because something always happens when we pray in faith — it just might not be what we expected. Sometimes the healing is gradual rather than instantaneous. Sometimes it is emotional or spiritual rather than physical. Sometimes the most powerful thing is simply that a person who felt abandoned by God experienced the love and care of people who were willing to stop and pray. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

    Wimber also said something that I find myself coming back to often: “We don’t seek God’s power, we seek His presence. His power and everything else we need is always found in His presence.” That reordering matters enormously. When the power gifts become about performance, about results, about spiritual credibility — they have already gone wrong. When they remain rooted in love for the person in front of you and trust in the God you are bringing them to, they remain faithful.

    The Gift of Tongues

    Of all the gifts, tongues is perhaps the one that provokes the most uncertainty. It is the gift most likely to make thoughtful Christians feel distinctly awkward.

    But consider its biblical framing. Luke traces its origin back to Pentecost — and before that, to Babel. At Babel, humanity’s arrogant attempt at unity through power resulted in the scattering of language and the fracturing of community (Genesis 11). At Pentecost, the Spirit reverses that fracturing. People from every nation hear the gospel in their own language. What divided humanity is being undone. The gift of tongues, in its origins, is a sign of the Spirit’s power to cross the boundaries that separate us.

    Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, addresses its use in corporate worship with remarkable pastoral care. He doesn’t dismiss it — he regulates it, because he wants the church to be built up. Tongues with interpretation can function as a message from God to the congregation. Personal tongues is a form of prayer in which the Spirit intercedes beyond what words can express (Romans 8:26). These are not fringe experiences reserved for a spiritually elite few. They are gifts of grace, given by the same Spirit who distributes all the others, for the building up of the body and the deepening of the individual’s relationship with God.

    Where I Land

    In the appendix of Empowered, my wife Jeannie tells a story about a period of physical healing in my own life — something that happened after a trip to Rwanda in 2017 that I can only account for by the power of God. I include it not to prove a point, but because I think honesty requires it. I am not arguing for the power gifts from a theoretical distance. I am arguing for them because I have experienced what happens when God’s people hold the wonderful tension well — expectant but humble, bold but not manipulative, willing to step out in faith without demanding a particular outcome.

    The gifts that make people nervous are not gifts to be avoided. They are gifts to be approached carefully, biblically, and with a community around you that can help you discern, test, and develop what the Spirit is doing.

    The question is not whether these gifts are real. The New Testament evidence and the witness of the global church make a compelling case that they are. The question is whether we will engage them faithfully — neither dismissing what God has given nor using it for ends He never intended.

    My invitation is this: don’t settle for a Christianity that explains itself entirely by natural means. And don’t pursue spiritual experience as an end in itself. Seek His presence. Do it with others. Hold the tension well. And be open to what God might do in and through a community that is genuinely available to Him.

    Paul Benger is the lead pastor of Ikon Church and the author of Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts. Find the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=empowered+paul+benger

  • Three Kinds of Gifts — and Why Your Church Needs All of Them

    Three Kinds of Gifts — and Why Your Church Needs All of Them

    From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts

    There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in churches over the years. You walk through the door, spend a few weeks in the services, and fairly quickly you start to sense what the community values most. For some churches it’s the teaching — careful, expository, scholarly. For others it’s the atmosphere — the worship, the spontaneous prayer, the expectation of something supernatural happening. For others still it’s the community — the warmth, the hospitality, the sense that people here genuinely care for one another.

    None of those emphases is wrong. But each on its own is incomplete.

    In the book of Corinthians, Paul paints a picture of a church where spiritual gifts operate in extraordinary diversity. There are gifts of teaching, prophecy, healing, administration, mercy, tongues, helps, faith, and more. Far from trying to organise these into a tidy hierarchy, Paul insists they are all expressions of the same Spirit, distributed with intention, and necessary to the health of the whole.

    The theologian Robert J. Clinton, whose work I draw on heavily in Empowered, helps us see these gifts in three distinct clusters. Understanding these three clusters — and recognising which ones your church leans into most — may be one of the most important things you can do for your community’s health.

    The Three Clusters

    Word gifts are the gifts that clarify God’s nature and truth. They include teaching, prophecy, encouragement, evangelism, shepherding, and apostleship. These gifts deal in revelation — bringing God’s truth into the room and making it accessible, applicable, and life-changing. A church rich in word gifts tends to produce theologically grounded disciples who know what they believe and why.

    Love gifts are the gifts that reveal God’s heart. They include administration, helps, mercy, giving, and hospitality. These are often the least celebrated and most undervalued gifts in the church — and yet they are, as I describe in the book, the connective tissue that holds everything else together. Without them, even the most powerful sermon or miraculous healing loses its impact. They are the soil in which every other gift takes root.

    Power gifts are the gifts that demonstrate God’s presence. They include faith, healing, miracles, tongues, and interpretation. These gifts operate in the realm of the supernatural — they are visible signs that the kingdom of God is not merely a theological concept but a present, active reality. They point beyond what is humanly explicable and say: God is in the room.

    The Problem of the Lopsided Church

    Here is what I observe again and again: most churches lean heavily into one of these clusters and neglect the others. You end up with what I call “word churches,” “power churches,” and “love churches.”

    Word churches are excellent at doctrine and preaching. They produce biblically literate congregations. But they can become cold — intellectually rigorous without being relationally warm or spiritually alive. The gifts of mercy and healing rarely feature. People learn a great deal but don’t always encounter God.

    Power churches are spiritually electric. Things happen. There is expectation in the room. But without the grounding of word gifts, spiritual experience can become unmoored from Scripture — and without the love gifts, the vulnerable and broken can sometimes fall through the cracks in the rush towards the spectacular.

    Love churches are warm, inclusive, and deeply pastoral. They create communities where people feel seen and cared for. But without word gifts, they can drift from theological clarity. Without power gifts, the supernatural work of the Spirit can feel quietly absent — nice people doing nice things, with little that would require God to be real.

    The New Testament vision is all three clusters operating together. As I put it in the book: a church that is doctrinally sound, supernaturally empowered, and practically loving gives the watching world a complete picture of Jesus. They see His truth proclaimed clearly, His power demonstrated tangibly, and His love expressed practically. That three-dimensional witness is what makes the church compelling rather than irrelevant.

    Why Every Gift Matters

    One of the most striking things in Paul’s teaching is how deliberately he refuses to create a hierarchy of spiritual significance.

    Paul lists administration alongside apostleship (1 Corinthians 12:28). Let that sit for a moment. The gift of steering a church well — managing its systems, coordinating its people, creating the structures that allow mission to happen — Paul places it in the same sentence as the gift of pioneering new ground for the gospel. They are not in competition. They are equally essential.

    The Greek word for administration is kubernēsis — a word that means helmsman. It’s the person who steers the ship towards its destination. Not the person who owns the ship. Not the person who draws the map. The one who reads the wind, manages the crew, and makes a thousand daily decisions that keep everything on course. Without them, the ship drifts.

    Similarly, the gift of helps — the person who sees what needs doing and quietly does it before anyone else has noticed — sits alongside miracles in Paul’s list (1 Corinthians 12:28). The person who makes sure the room is set up, who checks in on the speaker before they preach, who arrives early and leaves late, who notices the detail everyone else walked past — that person is operating by the same Spirit who raises the dead.

    This is not flattery. It is theology. The same Spirit who empowers the evangelist also empowers the administrator. The same divine energy that flows through miraculous healings also flows through acts of hospitality and mercy.

    Paul goes further. In 1 Corinthians 12:22-25, he insists that the parts of the body that seem weaker are indispensable, and that the parts we think of as less honourable are to be treated with special honour. God intentionally structures it this way — so that there is no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.

    What Does Your Church Need More Of?

    There is a question worth sitting with honestly: which cluster does your church most undervalue?

    If you are in a word church, you may need to create more space for the power gifts — not as a performance, but as a sincere expectation that God moves supernaturally among His people. You may also need to ask whether the love gifts are sufficiently honoured — whether the person serving coffee is celebrated as genuinely as the person preaching.

    If you are in a power church, you may need to deepen your roots in Scripture and theological formation. Supernatural experience without doctrinal grounding can drift in dangerous directions. You may also need to examine whether compassion for the ordinary, ongoing needs of people — grief, loneliness, financial hardship, mental health — is as prioritised as the dramatic.

    If you are in a love church, you may need to ask whether you are expecting too little of God. Whether a culture of warmth and care has inadvertently replaced an expectation of the Spirit’s power. Whether theological depth has been sacrificed on the altar of accessibility.

    A Vision for the Whole

    Jon Tyson puts it well: “We need the tension of difference to be the beauty of unity.” The gifts are not given to a body that all looks and operates the same. They are given to a body of remarkable diversity, where every member brings something that the others cannot supply.

    The administrator makes space for the healer to operate. The one with the gift of mercy creates the relational safety in which prophecy can be received. The teacher grounds the community in truth so that spiritual experience can be tested and kept healthy. The giver releases resources that make hospitality possible on a scale that would otherwise be impossible.

    Each cluster needs the others. A healthy church is not one that has perfected a single expression — it is one that makes room for all three, values each equally, and keeps asking the question: what is missing here, and who among us carries the gift to supply it?

    Spiritual gifts are not given for personal fulfilment or individual advancement. They are given for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7). Every gift, however unspectacular it may seem, is a grace given to the whole community. And every community that truly wants to represent Jesus to the world will need the word gifts that make Him known, the love gifts that make Him feel near, and the power gifts that make Him undeniable.

    The question is not: which gifts do we prefer? The question is: are we making space for all of them?

    Paul Benger is the lead pastor of Ikon Church and the author of Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts. Find the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=empowered+paul+benger

    Also my new book SAINTS OUT NOW

  • Your Gifts Won’t Survive Without Community

    Your Gifts Won’t Survive Without Community

    From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts

    Sarah sat nervously at the edge of the prayer circle. Three months into this church, she still felt like an outsider looking in — quiet by nature, uncertain of her place, more likely to slip out unnoticed than to step into anything. When the pastor asked if anyone would pray for a family facing a medical crisis, something stirred in her she couldn’t explain. Before she’d fully decided to speak, words were already forming. She prayed. And when she finished, the room was still.

    Afterwards, a church leader found her. “You have a gift of prayer,” he said simply. “Specifically intercession. We need that here.”

    Sarah didn’t know but she had carried it for years, because the gift had never had a context in which to emerge. It needed a room, a need, a community gathered around a shared burden. Without those things, it would have remained exactly where it was — dormant, unnamed, unused.

    This is not an unusual story. It is, in fact, the normal way that spiritual gifts work.

    Gifts Are Not Private Property

    There is a particular cultural assumption about spiritual gifts that the New Testament consistently resists — the idea that they are personal possessions, individual endowments to be explored in private and deployed at will. The language we use tends to reinforce this: my gifts, discovering my gifts, what I have been given.

    But Paul’s framing in 1 Corinthians 12 is stubbornly communal. The gifts are not given to individuals for individual benefit. “To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). The common good. Not your good, not your ministry, not your platform — the good of the body. The body is the whole point.

    Gordon Fee, whose scholarship on the Spirit in Paul’s letters is excellent, makes this explicit: “God is not simply saving diverse individuals and preparing them for heaven; rather He is creating a people for His name, among whom God can dwell and who in their life together will reproduce God’s life and character.”

    A gift exercised outside of community is not functioning as Paul describes. At best it is incomplete. At worst, as the charismatic world has discovered to its cost, it can become something dangerous — unchecked, unaccountable, shaped more by an audience’s response than by the community’s discernment.

    The gifts are covenantal, not personal. They belong to the body, entrusted to individuals for the body’s sake.

    We Are Part of an Unfinished Story

    Luke begins the book of Acts with a telling phrase: “In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach” (Acts 1:1). That word — began — carries immeasurable weight. Luke is telling Theophilus, and us, that the Gospels are not the conclusion. They are the introduction. What Jesus started, he continues through his Church, empowered by the same Spirit.

    Acts itself ends with the same open-ended logic. There is no neat resolution, no closing summary, no “The End.” Paul is in Rome, “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31) — and the narrative simply stops. Because the story hasn’t finished.

    It is still unfolding. In your city. In your church. In the gifts that are operating, dormant, or just beginning to surface in the people around you.

    This is what it means to be the Church — not admirers of a completed historical project, but active participants in Christ’s ongoing work. The gifts aren’t accessories for the especially devout. They are the means by which that work continues. And they are discovered, developed, and deployed not in isolation, but in the community that carries the story forward together.

    Temple and Table — The Two Rhythms That Change Everything

    The early church in Jerusalem had a simple rhythm captured in a single verse: “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts” (Acts 2:46).

    Temple and table. These two spaces created the ecosystem in which spiritual gifts flourished in the first century, and they remain the essential rhythms for gift development today.

    The temple represents the gathered community — corporate worship, teaching, prayer, and shared encounter with God. It is where the prophetic word finds a platform, where teaching gifts are exercised in public, where leadership is tested and recognised. It is where the community witnesses the Spirit moving across the broader body. Acts 4 gives us a striking picture of what can happen when the temple experience is taken seriously: “the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly” (Acts 4:31). That was not an individual experience. It was a communal one. The boldness that followed flowed from their unity in prayer, not from private spiritual practice.

    The table represents something different but equally essential — the intimate, unhurried rhythms of shared life. Small groups, shared meals, embracing new people, the kind of relationships where people are truly known rather than merely noticed. It is around these tables, metaphorical and literal, that the quieter gifts find space to emerge: mercy, encouragement, wisdom, helps, administration. It is where a reserved woman in a home group discovers she has the gift of intercession when someone she loves needs prayer. It is where a tradesman discovers he has the gift of teaching when teenagers start leaning in.

    Neither rhythm is sufficient alone. Temple without table becomes a performance — impressive, even inspiring, but ultimately hollow, because there is no intimacy to root it. Table without temple becomes comfortable fellowship without direction, warm and relational but slowly drifting from the mission that gives community its purpose.

    Both are the work of the Spirit. Both are the soil where gifts grow. The question is not which to choose — it is how to cultivate both with intention.

    The Modern Problem: Together, But Alone

    Sociologist Robert Putnam coined the phrase “bowling alone” to describe a troubling shift in American culture: people were ten pin bowling more than ever, but bowling league membership was plummeting. More activity, less community. Physically present, relationally absent.

    The Church has not been spared this cultural current. We have become skilled at creating shared experiences — gatherings, events, services, conferences — whilst remaining strangers to one another. We cherish our individuality and our personal spiritual journey. We want the inspiration of corporate worship without the accountability of intimate fellowship. We want the affirmation that comes from exercising gifts in public without the correction that comes from people who know us well.

    But biblical Christianity knows nothing of isolated discipleship. The very concept would have been foreign to the early church. Faith was inherently communal, gifts were inherently relational, and growth was inherently corporate. You cannot develop a gift of mercy without people to show mercy to. You cannot discover a gift of encouragement without relationships deep enough to require it. You cannot test a prophetic gift without a community of discernment around you.

    The individualisation of faith does not just impoverish the community — it actively damages the individual. It eliminates the relational context in which many gifts are discovered in the first place. It removes the accountability that keeps gifts healthy and properly directed. And it eliminates the feedback loop — encouragement, gentle correction, increasing responsibility — through which gifts actually mature.

    A prophetic gift without the testing of mature community can veer easily into pride or error. A teaching gift without relationship becomes dry and impersonal. Leadership detached from mutual submission grows controlling. We need each other not just for warmth, but for the very formation that makes our gifts safe and life-giving to those around us.

    When Gifts Come Alive

    Three stories from Chapter 4 of Empowered stay with me because they each illustrate how unpredictably and how specifically community creates the conditions for gifts to emerge.

    Liz was quiet by nature. She attended her home group more out of obligation than enthusiasm, preferring to listen rather than speak. When a fellow member mentioned an upcoming cancer surgery, the group prayed — and Liz found words flowing through her with unusual clarity, boldness, and faith. The prayer carried a spiritual authority everyone in the room could sense. Over the following months, people began asking specifically for her prayers. Eventually her pastor invited her to lead the church’s prayer ministry. Over the years, she witnessed God perform miracles in response to those prayers. Her gift had been present for years. It emerged in community, in a specific moment of shared need, and it never would have been discovered in isolation.

    James was a tradesman with no formal education. When his church asked him to help with youth ministry, he protested — “I’m not a teacher. I barely finished school myself.” But at a weekend retreat, he found himself explaining theological concepts to teenagers using analogies from his construction work. A concrete foundation as a metaphor for building faith in Christ. Scaffolding as spiritual support. The teenagers leaned in. Five years later, he leads the church’s mentoring programme, helping young men navigate faith and life with the same practical wisdom that first surfaced at that retreat. His gift would have remained dormant without the community that pushed him into service before he felt ready.

    Maya was eighteen. A youth leader noticed that when someone in the group was excluded or struggling, Maya would appear with words that restored confidence and reminded people of their worth in God’s eyes. She had an uncanny ability to see past people’s facades to their true potential. After observing the pattern for several months, the youth pastor pulled her aside and explained what she had been doing — the gift of encouragement (Romans 12:8). With that understanding, what had been an intuitive response became an intentional ministry. Maya began mentoring younger girls and eventually developed a peer support network that transformed the youth group’s culture.

    In each case, the gift didn’t announce itself through a spiritual gifts inventory or a private revelation. It emerged through relationship, within the ebb and flow of shared life, often when nobody was looking for it. Gifts are discovered not in assessment moments but in the messy, beautiful reality of people serving together.

    Gifts Need Accountability, Not Just Encouragement

    There is a dimension to community’s role in gift development that we tend to underemphasise because it is less comfortable: community doesn’t just affirm gifts — it also corrects and constrains them.

    Paul’s extended teaching on spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12–14 is not primarily about discovery or even deployment. It is about order. The gifts are to be exercised under authority, submitted to communal discernment, evaluated by those with wisdom. Two or three prophets speak; the others weigh carefully what is said (1 Corinthians 14:29). Everything is done in a fitting and orderly way (14:40).

    This structure is not bureaucratic interference with the Spirit’s freedom. It is the protection that allows the gifts to be genuinely trusted. When gifts operate outside of this structure — when a minister or individual insists their gift speaks for itself and requires no testing — the community is not protected, and the gift itself becomes vulnerable to distortion.

    The most powerful expressions of spiritual gifts — reconciliation, peacemaking, pastoral care through seasons of genuine hardship — often emerge precisely in the difficult places of community, when relationships have been tested, when conflict has been navigated, when the cost of commitment has been paid. Gifts don’t flourish in transient, consumer relationships. They flourish in covenant ones.

    Practising Temple and Table Today

    The rhythms of Acts 2 remain as vital as they were in the first century, though they take different shapes. For those wanting to engage them more intentionally, three postures are worth cultivating.

    Join a ministry team. Serving alongside others in a shared task is one of the most reliable environments for gift discovery — because it combines the inspiration of shared mission with the intimacy of working relationships. The worship team member who discovers a pastoral gift while praying with fellow musicians. The children’s ministry helper who uncovers teaching abilities they never imagined. The hospitality volunteer who realises they have a gift for administration as they coordinate events. The context does the work that a spiritual gifts questionnaire cannot.

    Participate actively in a small group — the key word being actively. Simply attending is not enough. Gifts emerge through engagement: sharing prayer requests, offering to help with practical needs, contributing to discussions, taking on small responsibilities. The safe space of table fellowship is where the quieter gifts — mercy, encouragement, wisdom, helps — have room to breathe and be named.

    Invite honest feedback from trusted people. Most of us are poor judges of our own spiritual gifts. We either dismiss obvious gifts as “just being helpful” or assume we have gifts we don’t actually possess. Ask people who know you well what they observe in you. Their perspective reveals what we cannot see in ourselves. This requires humility — the willingness to receive both affirmation and gentle correction. But it is one of the most significant gifts that community can offer.

    The Soil Cannot Be Replaced

    The opening of Acts tells us that Jesus began his work. The closing tells us it is still unfolding. Somewhere between those two bookends is your story — and the story of the people around you, each carrying something the body needs, each requiring the soil of community to discover it, develop it, and offer it for the common good.

    Spiritual gifts do not thrive in private. They were never designed to. They are planted in you for the sake of others, and they grow through the friction and grace and shared life of belonging to a community that is trying, together, to embody the kingdom of God.

    Your gift needs your community. And your community needs your gift.

    The soil cannot be replaced. But it can be cultivated. And the harvest, when it comes, belongs to everyone.

    This post is drawn from Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts by Paul Benger. Available on Amazon.

  • When the Spectacular Blinds Us — Sensationalism, Accountability, and the Gifts of the Spirit

    When the Spectacular Blinds Us — Sensationalism, Accountability, and the Gifts of the Spirit

    A reflection on charismatic culture, pastoral responsibility, and the cost of elevating gifting above character

    There is a particular kind of silence that has caused immeasurable damage to the charismatic and Pentecostal church. It is not the silence of ignorance. It is the silence of people who suspected something was wrong, who perhaps even knew something was wrong, and who said nothing — because the gift was too impressive, the ministry too large, the atmosphere too electric to risk disrupting.

    That silence has a name. It is the fruit of sensationalism. And it is costing us dearly.

    The Hunger That Became a Vulnerability

    The desire for the supernatural is not in itself a problem. It is, in many ways, a sign of theological health. A church that has given up expecting God to move, to heal, to speak, to break in — that church has, in some meaningful sense, stopped believing the New Testament.

    But hunger, when it becomes desperation, stops being discerning.

    When we need the spectacular — when the measure of a gathering’s success is whether something unusual happened, when a minister’s authority is proportional to the drama of their revelations, when the atmosphere of awe becomes the primary currency of spiritual credibility — we have created the precise conditions in which deception flourishes and accountability collapses.

    The apostle Paul saw this tendency clearly in Corinth. A church dazzled by the more spectacular gifts, ranking members by what they could perform, measuring spiritual maturity by what could be demonstrated. His corrective in 1 Corinthians 12–14 is not to suppress the gifts. It is to reorder the priorities. “Eagerly desire gifts,” he writes — but the whole argument of chapter 13 insists that gifts without love are not just incomplete; they are nothing. “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge… but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

    The Corinthian mistake was not that they valued the gifts. It was that they valued them above everything else. We have inherited that mistake.

    What the Evidence Now Shows

    Two cases, separated by decades but united by the same structural failure, deserve our honest attention.

    Paul Cain was one of the most celebrated prophetic voices in the charismatic world of the late twentieth century. Associated with the Kansas City prophets and admired across the movement, he was known for the apparent precision and power of his prophetic ministry. Leaders of significant standing built credibility by association with him. His gifting was, by all accounts of those close to him, remarkable.

    In 2004, three of those leaders — Rick Joyner, Mike Bickle, and Jack Deere — publicly disclosed that Cain had been living a long-term pattern of homosexual behaviour and serious alcoholism. These were not rumours. They were confirmed, including by Cain himself, who issued a public apology and sought counselling.

    What is most instructive about this case is not the sin itself — Scripture is clear that every person, however gifted, is a fallen human being in need of grace. What is most instructive is the admission that followed. Jack Deere, one of the three who finally acted, said this:

    “We all have preached that you never put gifting over character — but that is what we did for Paul. We would have fired anyone else. The reason we didn’t is because of his gifting.”

    That sentence is worth reading more than once.

    Shawn Bolz has been a prominent prophetic voice in contemporary charismatic Christianity, widely known for delivering what appeared to be precise, supernaturally sourced personal prophecies — naming details about people’s lives with striking specificity. In early 2025, Christian content creator Mike Winger released an extensive exposé detailing two categories of serious concern: that Bolz had been mining social media to source information presented as divine revelation, and that multiple credible witnesses had alleged non-consensual sexual misconduct against people in his ministry context.

    Bethel Church, with which Bolz had been associated, released a public statement acknowledging that credible allegations of sexual misconduct had been brought to their attention as early as 2019. They apologised for their failure to act with appropriate urgency. Their statement effectively confirmed that a culture of protection — for the gifting, for the ministry, for the atmosphere — had taken precedence over the protection of people.

    Bolz subsequently stepped back from public ministry.

    These are not isolated aberrations. They are symptoms of a culture.

    The Structural Problem

    When a prophetic or miraculous gift becomes the primary basis for a minister’s platform and authority, a dangerous dynamic takes root: the gift becomes too valuable to jeopardise. Raising concerns about character, behaviour, or accountability is experienced — consciously or not — as a threat to something precious. Better to manage quietly. Better to wait and see. Better to let the ministry continue than to risk losing what God is doing.

    This is precisely how predatory behaviour survives in gifted environments. The gift provides cover. The atmosphere generates loyalty. The sensational creates a kind of communal investment — we’ve seen things here, we’ve experienced things here — that makes it costly to speak.

    Paul’s framework in 1 Corinthians 14 is deliberately anti-spectacular. “Everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (14:40). The gifts are to be tested, weighed, and evaluated. “Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said” (14:29). The Greek word there — diakrinō — means to distinguish, to discern, to judge carefully. Paul is not calling for the suspension of prophetic ministry. He is insisting that prophetic ministry without communal discernment and testing is not biblical prophecy. It is performance.

    John is equally direct: “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Testing is not cynicism. It is obedience. A culture that treats the testing of prophetic claims as somehow offensive to the Spirit has got things exactly backwards.

    The Shepherd’s Responsibility

    Ezekiel 34 is one of the most searching passages in the Hebrew scriptures. God’s indictment of Israel’s shepherds is not primarily that they were wicked. It is that they failed to protect: “You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally” (Ezekiel 34:4).

    The shepherd’s first responsibility is to the flock — not to the ministry, not to the atmosphere, not to the reputation of the house. When leaders choose the protection of gifted individuals over the protection of vulnerable people, they have inverted the shepherd’s calling. They are, in Ezekiel’s terms, feeding themselves rather than feeding the sheep.

    Jesus himself, in Matthew 7, gives us the most uncomfortable test of all for those operating in the prophetic and miraculous: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you.’” (Matthew 7:22-23).

    Gifts can operate without intimacy. Miracles can happen without holiness. The supernatural is not always a reliable guide to the character of the person through whom it flows. Jesus knew this. He taught it. We have, far too often, forgotten it.

    What Mature Charismatic Practice Actually Looks Like

    None of this is an argument against the gifts. It is an argument for their proper stewardship.

    A genuinely mature charismatic culture holds several things together that sensationalism tears apart:

    Gift and character are inseparable. The New Testament consistently connects empowerment by the Spirit with the formation of Christlike character. The fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) and the gifts of the Spirit are not two separate tracks. A sustained gap between what someone demonstrates in public ministry and how they live in private is not a spiritual mystery to be tolerated. It is a warning sign to be taken seriously.

    Testing is an act of love, not suspicion. When Paul commands the weighing of prophecy, he is protecting the gift as much as guarding the community. False prophecy, unchecked, discredits genuine revelation. Abuse, unaddressed, destroys the trust that ministry requires. Communities that test, correct, and — when necessary — act are communities where the gifts can flourish safely.

    Platform is not a substitute for accountability. One of the most dangerous features of the contemporary charismatic landscape is the way platform insulates individuals from the ordinary structures of community accountability. When a minister’s primary relationships are with audiences rather than with elders, mentors, and peers who can speak honestly into their lives, the conditions for unchecked behaviour are already in place. Jack Deere’s confession — “we would have fired anyone else” — is a confession about the corrupting effect of platform on judgement.

    Protecting people is always primary. When credible allegations arise, the first question cannot be “what will this do to the ministry?” It must be “are people safe?” The Bethel situation is instructive not because Bethel is uniquely culpable, but because the pattern of delayed action in the face of credible evidence is recognisable across the charismatic world. The flock comes first. Always.

    A Word About Grace

    This post is not written to fuel cynicism about the charismatic church, nor to suggest that the gifts of the Spirit are too dangerous to pursue. The opposite is true. It is precisely because the gifts are so important, so genuinely needed, so central to the mission of the church, that their misuse and the culture that enables it must be addressed honestly.

    Paul Cain was, by the testimony of those who knew him, genuinely gifted. That does not diminish what he did, nor excuse those who should have acted sooner. Shawn Bolz’s situation involves allegations, some of which remain contested; what is not contested is that Bethel held credible information for years and chose protection of ministry over protection of people.

    Both men are, like all of us, people for whom Christ died. The call to accountability and the call to grace are not in competition. We can hold both. What we cannot do is allow grace to become a reason for inaction when people are being harmed.

    The charismatic church has extraordinary gifts. It also has structural vulnerabilities that sensationalism creates and protects. Naming that honestly — without condemning the tradition, without abandoning the gifts — is not a failure of faith. It is an expression of it.

    The Spirit who gives the gifts is also the Spirit of truth. He is not threatened by scrutiny. He is, in fact, the one who invites it.

    “For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.” — 2 Timothy 1:7

  • Even Jesus was Empowered – and that changes everything 

    Even Jesus was Empowered – and that changes everything 

    From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts

    There is a theological assumption so deeply embedded in the way we think about Jesus that most of us have never stopped to question it. It goes something like this: Jesus healed people because he was God. Jesus taught with authority because he was divine. Jesus cast out demons and raised the dead because he had access to divine power that we simply don’t.

    It sounds reverent. It sounds orthodox. And it lets us off the hook entirely.

    But it isn’t what the New Testament actually teaches.

    The Assumption We Need to Lose

    The Gospels are unanimous on this point: Jesus did not conduct his earthly ministry by drawing on his divine nature independently of the Father and the Spirit. He operated as a Spirit-empowered human being — fully submitted, fully dependent, fully anointed — showing us what Spirit-filled humanity actually looks like.

    This is not a radical claim. It is the explicit claim of the New Testament itself.

    Jon Thompson, in his landmark work Convergence, puts it with arresting clarity:

    “Jesus did not rely on His divinity to do ministry. Instead, He laid aside divine prerogative and showed us what it means to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit… He is the model of a truly spiritual life.”

    Sit with that for a moment. Jesus is not primarily our Saviour who did what we could never do. He is also our model who did what we are being invited to do. The incarnation is not just rescue — it is demonstration. Jesus lived as he lived in order to show us how to live.

    What Kenosis Actually Means

    The theological term for what Thompson is describing is kenosis, drawn from Philippians 2:6-7 — Paul’s breathtaking summary of the incarnation:

    “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

    Kenosis does not mean that Jesus stopped being God. It does not mean his divine nature was inactive or absent. It means that in his incarnate ministry, Jesus voluntarily chose not to operate from independent divine prerogative. He set aside the unilateral use of his divine attributes and stepped fully into the limitations and dependencies of human existence.

    N.T. Wright, in Jesus and the Victory of God, frames this with characteristic precision:

    “Jesus believed himself called to do and be what, in Israel’s scriptures, YHWH had promised to do and be. But he would do this not by being a distant, detached deity, but by becoming human and accomplishing this task as the Spirit-anointed Messiah.”

    This is the extraordinary claim at the heart of the Gospels. The one who is fully God chose to accomplish his mission as the Spirit-anointed Messiah — which means his ministry is not a category entirely its own. It is the model for ours.

    The Gospels Won’t Let Us Miss This

    The Gospel writers are not subtle about this. Luke, in particular, goes out of his way to show us the Spirit’s role in every phase of Jesus’ life and ministry.

    At his baptism: “The Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove” (Luke 3:22).

    In the wilderness: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” (Luke 4:1).

    At the launch of his public ministry: “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14).

    At his inaugural sermon in Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18).

    This is not incidental detail. Luke is making a theological argument: the entirety of Jesus’ ministry — his teaching, his miracles, his compassion, his confrontations — flowed from his anointing by the Spirit.

    Matthew confirms it: “If it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28). Jesus himself traces his power not to his divine nature but to the Spirit.

    John’s Gospel deepens the theological frame. Jesus says: “The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work” (John 14:10). And earlier: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit” (John 3:34).

    Jesus ministered from a position of total dependence and unlimited anointing. Not divine bypass — divine dependence.

    Three Streams, Held Together

    Jon Thompson argues that Jesus embodied what he calls “convergence” — the perfect integration of three essential streams of Christian life and ministry that we almost always pull apart:

    Word — He taught the Scriptures with authority and truth. His teaching wasn’t performance; it emerged from deep immersion in Israel’s story and the Father’s revelation.

    Spirit — He operated in the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit. Healing, deliverance, prophecy, miracles — these were not departures from his normal ministry; they were the normal expression of it.

    Sacrament — He lived in deep communion with the Father through the spiritual practices that shaped his inner life: solitude, prayer, fasting, worship. “Very early in the morning, whilst it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35).

    These three streams flowed together in Jesus without contradiction or competition. He did not choose between biblical depth and spiritual power. He did not trade communion with the Father for effective ministry. He held all three — because all three belonged together.

    Thompson’s diagnosis of the contemporary church is sobering: most churches lean heavily into one or two streams whilst neglecting the third. Some prize biblical teaching but are suspicious of spiritual power. Others pursue supernatural experience but have shallow scriptural roots. Still others emphasise liturgy and sacramental practice but lack both depth and power. Jesus held all three. He is the model.

    From Intimacy to Ministry

    Here is the most important thing that Chapter 3 of Empowered draws out — and it is the thing most likely to be missed in our rush to do something with our gifts.

    Jesus’ authority came not from platform. It came from intimacy.

    Jon Tyson, in Beautiful Resistance, captures what made Jesus different:

    “Jesus resisted the pull of hurry, fame, and power, staying anchored in the Father’s love and the Spirit’s leading. That’s why his authority had weight — it came from intimacy, not from platform.”

    The hours in Gethsemane. The forty days in the wilderness. The pre-dawn retreats to solitary places. These were not interruptions to Jesus’ ministry — they were the source of it. Everything that flowed outward into healing and teaching and transformation had its origin in what was cultivated inward in the Father’s presence.

    John Mark Comer names the implication plainly: “Jesus’ life is not just something to admire, it’s something to imitate. His way of life is the template for human flourishing.”

    Cambridge theologian Sarah Coakley adds a crucial clarification about what this means for spiritual authority:

    “The Spirit’s work in us, as in Christ, is not about the assertion of power, but about the transformation that comes through vulnerable openness to God. True spiritual authority emerges not from grasping after divine prerogatives, but from the kenotic pattern of self-offering that Jesus modelled.”

    This is the correction our age desperately needs. We have confused anointing with gifting, platform with authority, confidence with power. Jesus shows us a different way entirely: authority grows from surrender, power flows from dependence, gifts are most alive when they are rooted in love.

    Curtis Thompson frames the contrast sharply: “We grow into the likeness of Christ not through anxiety or performance, but through the joyful awareness of the Father’s presence and the Spirit’s work in us.”

    Our gifts were never meant to be managed or performed. They were meant to be released — from a place of rest in the Father’s love, carried by the Spirit’s anointing, offered in the kenotic posture of self-giving that Jesus modelled from first to last.

    What Jesus Models for Us

    If Jesus is the model — not merely the exception — then his life becomes a set of concrete invitations.

    He models radical dependence on the Father: “The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing” (John 5:19). Jesus did not operate from accumulated spiritual capital. He lived moment by moment in attentive response to the Father. That dependence is not a limitation we should outgrow. It is the posture we are being invited into.

    He models empowerment by the Spirit: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil” (Acts 10:38). The Spirit is not a supplement to our natural gifts. He is the source of our supernatural ones. The anointing Jesus carried is the same anointing he has poured out on his people.

    He models the integration of disciplines and gifts: The one who healed the sick and raised the dead also rose before dawn to pray in solitude. The disciplines were not what earned the gifts — they were what kept the channel clear. Prayer, rest, Scripture, fasting, Sabbath, community — these are not alternatives to Spirit-empowered ministry; they are its foundation.

    Our Call to Follow

    Following Jesus into this Spirit-empowered life means reshaping not just what we do but how we approach it.

    It means practising humility — understanding ourselves as vessels, not sources. Our gifts are not competencies we have achieved. They are graces we have received. The moment we begin to take credit for what the Spirit is doing through us, we have already begun to lose it.

    It means embracing dependence — genuinely needing the Spirit’s presence and power, not just hoping for it. This is not passive resignation. It is the active, daily discipline of asking, seeking, opening ourselves to be filled. “We require daily filling by the Spirit” is not a pious sentiment. It is a practical reality.

    It means adopting Jesus’ rhythms — prayer, solitude, Sabbath, worship, generosity — not as religious duties but as the practices that create the conditions in which the Spirit can work most freely. Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong reminds us of the global scope of this:

    “The Spirit’s gifts are not limited by culture, race, or social status. When we follow Jesus’ model of Spirit-dependence, we discover that God’s power works through the most unlikely people in the most unexpected places. The Spirit blows where it wills, empowering the global church for mission.”

    And it means living in community — because spiritual gifts are discerned, tested, and developed within the fellowship of the body, not in isolated self-assessment.

    Dallas Willard’s definition of discipleship is worth returning to here: “Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.” This is not a call to clone Jesus’ personality or replicate his specific actions. It is a call to embody his character and his approach to ministry — dependent, Spirit-filled, rooted in intimacy, given for others — in the unique context and calling that is yours.

    The Promise That Makes It Real

    Jesus’ resurrection didn’t just vindicate him. It opened the door.

    After his resurrection, he appeared to his disciples and said: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21-22).

    The commissioning is not accidental. It follows the pattern exactly. He was sent as the Spirit-anointed Messiah. He now sends his people — and he breathes the same Spirit into them. Paul makes the connection explicit in Romans 8:11: the same power that raised Christ from the dead now lives in everyone who belongs to him.

    This is not wishful thinking. It is the explicit promise of Jesus himself.

    The question is not whether you have access to what Jesus had. The question is whether you will follow his model — the dependence, the intimacy, the surrender, the rhythms — that allowed what he had to flow.

    Because what Jesus modelled was not the exception to human life. It was the possibility of it.

    This post is drawn from Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts by Paul Benger. Available on Amazon.

  • You’re Not Meant to Watch from the Sidelines

    You’re Not Meant to Watch from the Sidelines

    From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts

    There’s a particular kind of frustration that settles into a church over time. It’s not the frustration of conflict or crisis. It’s quieter than that. It’s the frustration of watching the same small group of people carry everything — Sunday after Sunday, meeting after meeting — while the majority of the congregation does what congregations have been trained to do: show up, receive, and go home.

    We call it attendance. But God has a different word for it.

    The Spectator Problem

    Jesus didn’t die to fill seats. He died to raise up a people — a body, as Paul describes it, with every part functioning, every member contributing, every gift deployed for the common good.

    And yet somewhere along the way, the church absorbed the logic of the performance economy: a few gifted professionals on stage, a large audience benefiting from their talent, and a clear but unspoken division between those who serve and those who are served.

    This isn’t a new problem. Paul was already addressing it in Corinth. The Corinthian church was fascinated by the more spectacular gifts — tongues, prophecy, miracles — and those who didn’t have those gifts drew a quiet conclusion: this must not be for me. Paul’s response in 1 Corinthians 12 is both a rebuke and an invitation. He doesn’t lower the expectation. He raises it. He insists that every single member of the body has been given a gift. Not as a possibility. As a fact.

    “To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” — 1 Corinthians 12:7

    Each one. Not each especially anointed one. Not each ordained one. Not each extroverted, stage-ready one. Each. One.

    Watchman Nee said it bluntly: “The church loses immeasurably when its members refuse to exercise their gifts.” The losses aren’t theoretical. They’re people — people who never discover what they carry, communities that never benefit from what God placed in them, missions that stall because the workers are watching from the stands.

    The spectator problem isn’t a personality problem. It’s a theology problem. And the solution isn’t a better volunteering system. It’s a recovered theology of gifts.

    The Spirit Decides, We Participate

    Here is one of the most liberating and most misunderstood truths about spiritual gifts: you didn’t choose yours.

    “All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines.” — 1 Corinthians 12:11

    The word Paul uses here is boulētai — he wills, he determines, he chooses. The distribution of gifts is a sovereign act of the Spirit. This means you are not responsible for manufacturing your gifts, and you are not in competition with anyone else for theirs. The Spirit has already decided.

    But — and this is where the invitation comes in — sovereignty doesn’t eliminate participation. Paul’s language throughout 1 Corinthians 12–14 is active. He says pursue (14:1), desire earnestly (14:39), seek to excel (14:12). The Spirit decides what you carry. You decide what you do with it.

    John Wimber used to say that faith is spelled R-I-S-K. There is no such thing as passive gift use. Gifts are exercised, developed, offered, and refined through practice. They atrophy through neglect. The question is never just “what has the Spirit given me?” It’s always also: “what am I doing with what I’ve been given?”

    This dynamic — sovereignty and participation, divine initiative and human response — is the rhythm of the whole Christian life. We don’t earn grace, but we do respond to it. We don’t manufacture the fruit of the Spirit, but we do cultivate it. We don’t generate the gifts, but we do exercise them.

    You are not a passive recipient. You are a participant in the mission of the Spirit.

    Three Kinds of Gifts

    Before we can discern our spiritual gifts, it helps to understand that not every God-given capacity is the same kind of thing. There are at least three categories of gifts worth distinguishing.

    Natural Gifts are the capacities you were born with — the aptitudes, temperaments, and tendencies that were present before you ever thought about ministry. Some people are natural communicators. Others have an instinctive ability to read a room, organise complexity, or care for someone in distress. These are not accidents. They are woven into you by your Creator. As Psalm 139 reminds us, you were knitted together with intention.

    Acquired or Developed Gifts are the skills built over time through practice, discipline, and experience. Malcolm Gladwell’s observation that mastery often requires around ten thousand hours of deliberate practice captures something real: competency is cultivated. A musician, a carpenter, a counsellor — each has invested themselves in their craft. These developed capacities are also gifts. They represent stewardship of time and talent, and they are every bit as much a part of God’s equipping as anything else.

    Spiritual Gifts are distinct from both of the above, though they can overlap with them. A spiritual gift is a God-given, Spirit-empowered capacity for ministry and mission — given specifically to build up the body of Christ and advance the kingdom of God. The key difference is not the activity itself but the source and the effect. Spiritual gifts are expressed in dependency on the Spirit, and they produce results that exceed what natural talent or acquired skill alone could account for.

    These three categories aren’t in competition. The Spirit often takes what is natural in us and supernaturally amplifies it for his purposes. And he sometimes gives gifts that bear no relationship at all to our personality or background — because the Spirit is sovereign, and the body needs what it needs.

    Robert J. Clinton’s work on spiritual formation is helpful here: gifts emerge through a lifetime of response to God, not in a single dramatic moment. The question is not “have I had a spiritual gifts experience?” but “what is consistently bearing fruit in my life and in others?”

    We Don’t All Have the Same Gifts

    The diversity of gifts is not a problem to be managed. It’s a design to be celebrated.

    Paul’s body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is not just poetic — it’s instructive. A body with every part doing the same thing is not a body. It’s a tumour. Healthy bodies are marked by differentiation: eyes and ears and hands and feet, each doing what only they can do, all of it coordinated by the head.

    Jon Tyson puts it this way: “We need the tension of difference to be the beauty of unity.” Different gifts, different temperaments, different streams. The church that values every gift — not just the visible and celebrated ones — is the church that is most fully itself.

    This has practical implications for how we structure church life. Churches tend to over-resource the gifts that serve their particular culture and under-resource the gifts that challenge or complement it. A Word-centred church may unconsciously marginalise those with gifts of mercy, healing, or administration. A Power-centred church may struggle to honour the quiet teacher or the faithful servant. A Love-centred church may neglect prophetic sharpness.

    The healthy body needs all three streams. Word — teaching, prophecy, wisdom. Power — healing, miracles, faith. Love — mercy, service, hospitality, giving. When one stream dominates and the others are marginalised, the body limps.

    Are Some Gifts Just Things We Should All Do?

    It’s a fair question. If the New Testament calls all believers to evangelise, to give generously, to show mercy — then in what sense is evangelism or giving or mercy a spiritual gift at all?

    The answer lies in a distinction: if it’s not a spiritual gift for you, it’s a spiritual discipline.

    All of us are called to love our neighbours. Some people carry a supernatural grace for it — they walk into a hospital ward and the atmosphere shifts. What is effort for most is effortless for them, not because they’re better but because the Spirit has equipped them specifically for it. For the rest of us, we’re invited to practise it as a discipline — not because we’re let off the hook, but because maturity is formed in the doing.

    The gifts don’t excuse the rest of the body from the call. They model what the Spirit can do when he works through us. They inspire us. They set the pace.

    Four Tests to Discern Your Gifts

    So how do you actually work out what your gifts are? Chapter 2 of Empowered offers four tests — not as a formula, but as a framework for discernment.

    1. The Pattern Test

    What keeps happening? Where do you consistently see fruit — not occasionally, but repeatedly, across different contexts and seasons?

    The Spirit tends to be consistent. If people regularly come to you for counsel and leave changed, that’s a pattern. If things seem to get more organised when you’re involved, that’s a pattern. If you’ve noticed that when you pray for people a particular kind of breakthrough seems to follow, that’s a pattern. You’re not looking for one peak experience. You’re looking for a groove worn by repeated movement of the Spirit.

    Gordon Fee observes that gifts are confirmed over time, in community, through fruit. The Pattern Test is simply paying attention to what the Spirit is already doing.

    2. The Holy Discontent Test

    What frustrates you when it’s missing?

    This is one of the more counterintuitive tests, because we don’t usually think of frustration as spiritually significant. But there’s a kind of holy discontent that is actually the signature of a gift — a God-given intolerance for a particular kind of brokenness or gap.

    The person with a gift of mercy is not mildly bothered by suffering — they’re devastated by it, compelled by it, unable to walk past it. The person with a gift of leadership doesn’t just notice when a team is directionless — something in them rises up and won’t rest until order is restored. The person gifted in teaching doesn’t just wish people understood the Bible better — they’re almost indignant when truth is mishandled.

    Pay attention to what troubles you in a way that moves you to act. That frustration may be the Spirit’s fingerprint on you.

    3. The Joy Test

    Where do you feel most alive when you’re serving?

    Not most comfortable. Not most appreciated. Most alive — that sense of rightness, of doing what you were made to do, of the Spirit moving through you in a way that is both energising and larger than you.

    There is a specific kind of joy that comes from operating in your gifts. It’s different from the satisfaction of a task completed or the relief of a job done. It’s more like how athletes describe being in the zone — effort that doesn’t feel like effort, flow that doesn’t feel forced.

    This doesn’t mean gifts are always easy. A prophet who delivers difficult truth doesn’t find it comfortable. A leader navigating a hard season isn’t breezing through it. But underneath the difficulty there is a settled sense of this is what I’m here for. That’s the Joy Test. Pay attention to it.

    4. The Desire Test

    What do you long to do?

    This test is the most personal and, for many people, the most surprising. We’ve been trained to be suspicious of our desires — to assume that what we want is probably what God doesn’t want. But Psalm 37:4 tells us that when we delight in God, he gives us the desires of our heart. That’s not a promise about getting what you want. It’s a promise about transformation — that as we align with God, our desires begin to align with his purposes.

    The longing to intercede, to teach, to lead, to create, to serve, to heal — these desires, when surrendered and tested, often turn out to be the Spirit’s invitation. Not every desire is a gift. But every spiritual gift tends to come with desire. The desire is part of the gift.

    Gifts Are Discerned in Community

    One more thing needs to be said: you cannot reliably discern your own gifts in isolation. Spiritual gifts are not private possessions — they are given for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7), and they are recognised in community.

    Gordon Fee puts it directly: “The gifts are not merely personal possessions; they are for the common good, to be discerned and affirmed in community.”

    This is why the role of leaders and community is not peripheral to gift discernment — it’s essential. The community sees what you cannot always see in yourself. A faithful leader will name what they observe, confirm what they see emerging, and create space for gifts to be tested and developed. You need people around you who are honest enough to speak, wise enough to observe, and committed enough to walk with you over time.

    If no one has ever named a gift in you, find people who will. If you’ve never asked the community around you what they observe in you, ask. Gifts flourish in the light of community, not in the dark of self-assessment alone.

    You Were Not Made to Watch

    Tyler Staton makes a point worth our attention: spiritual gifts don’t belong only in the church building. They operate in the boardroom, the kitchen, the classroom, the hospital, the school playground, and the neighbourhood street. The Spirit did not equip you for Sunday mornings only. He equipped you for your whole life.

    You carry something the world around you needs. Not in a platform sense. In a body-of-Christ sense — you are a member, and every member matters.

    The spectator life is not a comfortable alternative to full engagement. It is a slow diminishment. The gifts that are not exercised don’t disappear — they wait. And the body that misses what you carry doesn’t compensate — it limps.

    You were given a gift by a sovereign Spirit who distributes as he wills, placed into a body that needs what you carry, called into a mission that won’t be fully accomplished without your participation.

    You were not made to watch from the sidelines.

    This post is drawn from Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts by Paul Benger. Available on Amazon.

  • Why Spiritual Gifts Aren’t Optional

    Why Spiritual Gifts Aren’t Optional

    There’s a quiet assumption running through much of the Western church that goes something like this: spiritual gifts are for a certain kind of Christian. The upfront ones. The confident ones. The ones who seem to have a direct line to heaven. The rest of us? We just serve on the welcome team, give our tithe, and hope for the best.

    But that assumption isn’t just unhelpful — it’s unbiblical.

    In my book Empowered, I set out to challenge this idea head-on. Because the New Testament doesn’t present spiritual gifts as an optional add-on for the enthusiastic few. It presents them as the standard equipment for every follower of Jesus. And if we’ve lost sight of that, it’s worth asking why — and what it’s costing us.

    The Gift That Comes With the Giver

    Let’s start with what spiritual gifts actually are. At the simplest level, they are God-given abilities, distributed by the Holy Spirit, that empower us to serve others and advance God’s kingdom. They are not natural talents. They are not personality traits. They are not proof of spiritual maturity. They are something else entirely — supernatural tools God provides to accomplish what we cannot do on our own.

    The apostle Paul puts it plainly in 1 Corinthians 12:4–7. There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. Different kinds of service, but the same Lord. And then comes the line that should stop us in our tracks: “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.”

    Each one. Not some. Not the elite. Each one.

    Gordon Fee, in his landmark work God’s Empowering Presence, describes the Holy Spirit as the personal, empowering presence of God among His people. That’s a beautiful and theologically rich way to understand what’s happening when we talk about spiritual gifts. They aren’t abstract “things” we carry around in our pockets — they are expressions of God’s living presence in us.

    Why So Many Have Given Up

    If spiritual gifts are for everyone, why have so many believers quietly walked away from them?

    The reasons are more layered than we often admit. Some people have grown disillusioned or confused. They don’t understand what the gifts are, and so they’ve never pursued them. Others have witnessed gifts being abused — used for personal gain, control, or manipulation — and that left a bad taste. For others, spiritual gifts just seem “weird” or out of place in our rational, post-enlightenment world.

    And then there’s a subtler issue: many believers feel excluded. They see gifts being exercised on public platforms by high-profile leaders and quietly wonder, Do my gifts matter too?

    All of these are real barriers. And they deserve honest answers, not dismissal.

    But here’s what’s crucial: the New Testament response to misuse is never disuse — it’s right use. Paul spends an entire chapter (1 Corinthians 14) teaching the church how to use spiritual gifts properly, so they build up and encourage the body of Christ. And in 1 Corinthians 13, he reminds us that love must be the foundation for every spiritual gift. The answer to abuse isn’t abandonment. It’s maturity.

    Jesus Is the Model

    One of the most important theological foundations for spiritual gifts is often overlooked: Jesus himself modelled a life empowered by the Holy Spirit.

    Though he was fully God, Philippians 2:6–7 tells us he chose not to exploit that equality with God for his own advantage. Instead, he lived as a fully human man, dependent on the Spirit to fulfil his mission on earth. From his baptism — when the Holy Spirit descended on him — to his ministry in the wilderness and beyond, Jesus shows us what it means to live in the power of the Spirit. He was continually filled by the Spirit, led by the Spirit, and empowered to perform miracles, heal the sick, and preach the good news of the Kingdom.

    And then he made an extraordinary promise. In John 14:12, Jesus told his followers that whoever believes in him will do the works he has been doing — and even greater things. His ministry wasn’t meant to end with him. He empowered every believer through the Holy Spirit to continue his work.

    If Jesus himself operated through the power of the Spirit, how much more do we need to?

    Everyone Gets to Play

    John Wimber, one of the great pioneers of renewal, was passionate about moving the gifts out of the hands of a few leaders and into the lives of ordinary believers. His famous phrase captures it perfectly: everyone gets to play. The Holy Spirit, Wimber argued, is an equal-opportunity employer. The gifts aren’t reserved for pastors, preachers, and platform personalities. They belong to the whole body.

    Roger Stronstad, in his work on Luke’s charismatic theology, makes a similar case — that the Spirit doesn’t just anoint individuals here and there, but empowers the entire body to speak, serve, and demonstrate God’s kingdom. And Yonggi Cho, who led the largest church in the world in Seoul, South Korea, believed that releasing spiritual gifts into small groups was one of the key reasons for their explosive growth. When everyone is empowered, the whole church flourishes.

    This is the picture the New Testament paints of normal church life. Not a performance by a few gifted leaders, but a community where every member knows their gifting and uses it to serve.

    Faith: The Key to Activation

    Here’s a tension we need to sit with: God gives the gifts, but we activate them by faith. Romans 12:6 tells us that we have different gifts according to the grace given to us — and if your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith.

    Gifts don’t automatically operate just because we have them. We have to step out in faith, frequently in weakness and uncertainty. That’s uncomfortable. It’s messy. It involves risk and the very real possibility of getting it wrong.

    Robert J. Clinton, in Unlocking Your Giftedness, teaches that discovering and developing your gifts involves testing, feedback, and risk. You can’t figure out your gifts in a vacuum — you discover them in the messy, beautiful process of trying, failing, learning, and growing.

    As Wimber famously said: faith is spelled R-I-S-K.

    What’s at Stake

    So why does this matter? Why not just let sleeping gifts lie?

    Because without the gifts, the church is merely human. With them, it becomes a living temple of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual gifts build up the church. They reveal God’s presence. They empower mission — healing, prophecy, evangelism, acts of mercy that extend God’s kingdom in the world. They unite and diversify the body. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:27, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”

    Gordon Fee puts it powerfully: the church is a community of the Spirit, in-dwelt and gifted by the Spirit, as the present expression of the people of God.

    That’s the kind of church I want to be part of. A community where spiritual gifts aren’t treated as optional extras for the super-spiritual, but as the normal, expected, beautiful way that Jesus continues to minister through his people today.

    They are for you — not just pastors, not just extroverts, not just “special” Christians. They are God’s empowering presence made visible. They are signs that Jesus is alive and active in his people. And they are tools for mission, love, and transformation.

    The only question is whether we’ll have the faith to step into what God has already placed inside us.

    This post is drawn from the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts by Paul Benger.