We ministers of His Word speak about flexibility and mobility, but we ought to add a third point, versatility, because the apostolic company that is coming forth has to be viewed in that light. For instance, the ones who do the best in any job are the ones who have been trained from the beginning to work in the Word to be editors, to be transcribers, and so forth, until the thinking of that Living Word is very much in their mind. Then they will do well, because in that varied exposure they attain versatility.
If someone is trained to fill only a certain slot, there is a difficulty in his spirit of filling that spot with an understanding of the overall picture, which he does not get until he has gone through the various phases. The business world in the old generations did not have specialists so much as they had people who were trained. They started in as a stock boy in a stockroom, or in a shipping department, and they worked up step by step until finally they became vice-president of the company or something like that. But the whole point is that they were exposed to every single part of it. If they started at a high level without an understanding of the company, there was always a gap in their comprehension and execution according to the vision and principles that governed or underlined that company.
Now on the spiritual level this principle certainly is true also. We need to first develop humility through the discipline of working on the lowly position in the ministry. There is a certain discipline in it, but there is a humility that cannot be attained any other way. If you put someone in as the head of the ministry, it is very difficult for that person unless he has come up under these other humble stages of stewardship to the Living Word. He will automatically think in terms of filling a position and its relative importance and what it means as far as his authority is concerned. But if he comes up through these humble stages and sees that his whole dedication is to the Word, then his commission has a flexibility and a versatility and a certain mobility to it.
The ministries who have been trained have become valuable in many places, because a way of thinking is in them. None of them who move into these various places would even accept the commission of authority that would be a position. They are so trained, so conditioned, so prepared in their heart to just fulfill the ministry of the Word. That is why this versatility has to be viewed very carefully.
Unless this versatility is learned by shifting the ministries from one area to another until they have totally absorbed, by their proximity to the Living Word and to the ministries of the Living Word, the thinking and the ways of it, they will always be just one person who will contribute a great deal in only one or two areas. Maybe they move more perfectly than any efficiency expert, but it will not be as effective in the overall output of the Word because they do not see the vision; they are not absorbed in the complete vision of it. This is why versatility has to be worked in them. It is the key of several of the ministries who work with me. Therefore, the result has been very good. They will be better when they go to other functions because they will have absorbed a versatility and a vision.
No one assumes a certain function with any guarantee that he will continue to fill that function. He has to realize that his overall worth is that he can serve anyplace, at any time.
He must not feel demoted if he did well in one place and he does not even have a chance to do that job at the next place. This thinking has to be led by the Lord. “The first shall be last and the last shall be first” (Matthew 19:30); that continual leapfrog principle is going to produce the effective ministries.
Because you are doing it today, it does not mean that God is going to let you do it tomorrow. Because you did it yesterday, it does not mean that you are being demoted when you cannot do it today.
To review, we are going to be mobile; we are going to be flexible and versatile, and above all, we are going to avoid feeling that we own a position or that we own a person.
This is difficult for us to see because there are some relationships that are not that flexible—relationships which God has ordained. There are other relationships that tend to be assumed as a permanent feature of your ministry. For instance, there are certain ones whom I depend on for certain things. But through the years I have continually faced this, that just about the time I am working well with someone on something, he is put over another department; and I lose that special service with me. Someone else will fill that place. We cannot stand in the way of anyone, or lock anyone into a restriction that working only with any of us would impose on him. He is going to be flexible and versatile and mobile in order to attain the fullness of what God has for him. I am feeling the same thing for myself. I have a relationship to the churches in Southern California that will always be special. But now I am preaching less often to them in person and ministering to them more effectively through the tapes. I still love them very much, but the ministry now is becoming more mobile, more flexible, more versatile. That is good.
It seems that nothing is inflexible in this changing order from one dispensation to another. So what if someone says, “Here is one person whom I cannot get along without. He is like my right arm. He is a secretary to me and he thinks like I do.” That could eventually be a limitation. Maybe he must learn someone else’s thinking in order to really get the whole mind of Christ that is being ministered to all of us, and not just one aspect of it. He, in turn, can then begin to train others. That becomes very important.
It is difficult to understand that you can lock people into yourself until they are not mobile or flexible or versatile. Do you say, “Well, all that they do is so effective; it’s wonderful.” But is it possible that they could be more effective by expanding their awareness and the way that they work with other people, too?
I am being repetitious, but it is necessary to be repetitious until this thought is embedded in our minds—the last traces of owning a person, or controlling a person’s life, have to disappear. For instance, if you are married the relationship should not deteriorate; but the relationship itself is going to change. It has to. When the husband’s ministry begins to come forth, the wife has to adjust to the changing flexibility, mobility, and versatility of his ministry. But he has to do the same thing for her, too.
If it is right for you to be versatile, then it is right for those who work with you to be versatile. If you are to be mobile, so is everyone else. You are to be flexible, and so is everyone else! This opens up one of the greatest, most practical keys to oneness in our functioning.
One of the great solutions to a recurring problem is to understand that this versatility must be developed within the individual. For instance, I was in the administration; but now I am not in administration as much. I am in the Word and in writing books and editing, and so forth. That is basically the shift that I have made. Yet there is administration that I still do, too. We tend to shift too much off onto others, even though they develop maybe more efficiently than we were in the job. That is easy to do, where I am concerned. It is easy for me to find others who can do things better than I can, but they in turn look around for someone they can shift it on. We tend to pass the beanbag too much, instead of seeing that the whole idea is to develop efficiency with a mutual participation in it. Do not strain the other person to the place where he is limited; let him also be versatile. He must not be limited to one phase of ministry that he has taken over and absorbed from you. Maybe there will be a dozen people who will have to do what you once did, but they will not do just one phase of it. They must develop a ministry in the Word, too.
I noticed, as an example, that those who had served for five or ten years as deacons, as ushers, tended to enter into deep spiritual problems. They were not aware of what God was doing or saying because they were preoccupied with their serving, and so we tried a rotation system. Someone else would watch the doors and bring down the offering plates, and so forth, while we put the deacons for three to six months on the front row and said, “You’re going to be one of those who prophesy.” They had developed exclusively one ministry which they could do very well; but as a result they were not mobile, flexible, or versatile. This condition was not conducive to their development.
Suppose that some who work in the Word are also good in accounting, and so you work them constantly. They become very efficient. They can run computers, they can balance books, and they know exactly where every check should be deposited and from what fund every check should be written. Then you become aware that they have spiritual problems, and that they should go back and edit a few tapes and get back into their relationship to the Word. There is always this danger in shifting anyone into any job exclusively, and this limiting of their serving in the Word.
It is also good for people who serve in the Word to do something else. We tended to feel, “The deacons are going to do the menial tasks, and the elders are going to do all the spiritual things.” After a while the elders would come and sit in their fine clothes and would not turn a hand to do anything, not even on a workday. They were above that. They were elders. It would have been good for them to get their hands dirty and do some good menial work. This would have given a versatility to their ministry that would have been spiritually healthy for them.
When you find those who can do something, be careful that you do not lay so much on them that they are doing one little, specific task to the exclusion of their own growing and developing. Do not lock them into yourself, and do not lock them into one style of work where they cannot grow and develop. Everyone, even those who transcribe and edit the Word, should have other tasks to do, too. The truth of the matter is this: we are far more efficient as beings before God if we are versatile. I know that it is good for me to edit This Weeks, and I cherish that. But there is also little administration, little counseling, and speaking the Word that I do, too. All that is good for me. I have to discipline my time; and I have to keep a big, broad, panoramic view of everything that is taking place. Otherwise, I could get lost in books and become a bookworm. I could get lost in a lofty tower and come down once a month from God to the people, but what an artificial life that would be.
You best receive a Word from God when you are close to the people and their problems, and while ministering to the sheep. No vision or revelation is so great that it means we cannot see it enhanced best by the versatility within each one of us in our service to the Lord.
Perhaps one of the greatest problems with a Word like this is that the people who can hear it are not the people who need it. The people who are not versatile, or who are locked into personal situations and are not flexible, are the ones who will hear it with an ear that does not even discern that it is for them. The personal application of this Word may have to come by an apostolic company, or by a group of the brothers, saying, “We see this, but you don’t see it; and so we are going to move in the Lord to see it changed.”
If you are not versatile, you do not hear a Word on versatility. If you are not flexible, you do not hear a Word on flexibility. If you are not mobile, you do not hear a Word on mobility.
You are still locked into your own viewpoint, your own situation, and your own functioning, or those who are functioning with you. This is the reason why the forty or fifty basic changes in church structures and pastors came all over the country. Some hated it. The ones who hated it were the ones who did not benefit by it because they did not even see what God was doing. But those who were open and flexible benefited from it in an enormous, wonderful way. That is the way this flexibility is.
You can complain, “You took away my right hand!” Maybe you need to grow another one. That old right hand may be able to do something better than you are doing it, and you can go do another job. We tend to get locked into an association of ministries who invariably become restrictive to each other.
These guidelines could be interpreted in such a way that people could actually use them as an excuse to leave a difficult commission that God has given them. To have a commission does not mean that you have to personally do every bit of it. Suppose God sends you to pastor a church.
That does not mean that you have to be the pastor and have the last word in everything, and that you clean the rest rooms and sweep the floors and also type all your own letters, and so forth. As much as you can, you must look for people to whom you can delegate that work. But be careful that you do not delegate it to the point where you have violated your own commission. If you have created a vacuum in your own life by the fact that in fulfilling the delegating that God wanted you to do, you overdid it, then you are not fulfilling your own commission that He gave to you.
This is a very important point, because I have seen several who tend to do that. They find someone really efficient to work with them; and the next thing you know, they do not have to work so hard at it. They may do something else, that God has not commissioned, and lose the touch that they should have over the area God delegated to them. Their hand is no longer on the throttle. They are not even a good confirmation or a good check. They are just getting the things that are fed to them.
One thing I have always tried to do, no matter whom God places in charge of administration or anything else: I request that there be communication back to me. I want to know what is happening. I do not intend to interfere, but neither do I intend to violate the responsibility that I have as one who has been commissioned by God. This is a shepherd’s responsibility. He is giving his life for the sheep, and not just until he can appoint a good man to take care of them so he can go off into town and let the hireling defend the flock (John 10:11–12). He is also watching over and taking care of his responsibilities under the basic commission that God gave him to do.
The first thing we have to do is get others to work with us. Get others to have the vision and to follow through with the original guideline: Every man who has a job should be training two people to fill it. When he has two people who are going to do his job, that does not mean that he no longer has a job. We have used the phrase “working yourself out of a job.” That is not true. We work ourselves into a greater stewardship of that job. We are not only responsible for the job or the ministry, but then we become responsible for the oversight and help of those whom we have trained to take our place.
This is all based on the assumption that the Kingdom is going to grow (Matthew 13:31–33). What I once did for one church, I cannot do for a thousand churches. But I can see a thousand men come in, whom I am concerned about, and watch their motivation and train them. Then there is no vacuum created in the churches; neither is there a vacuum in my own life because I have run away from responsibility. Two people may be in training to do everything I am doing, but that does not mean that I am not still responsible to watch over it very carefully.
A pillar in the Kingdom of God must be mobile, flexible, versatile, responsible.
The ultimate worth of a minister of the Lord is that he can serve anyplace at any time with anyone.
A true bond servant never owns a position or another person.
A true shepherd is one who is continually in the presence of the Great Shepherd, but lives with the sheep.
The greatest Word from God often comes when you are close to His people and their problems and while you are ministering to them.
We tend to get locked into an association of ministries who invariably become restrictive to each other.
We are responsible to train others to take our job, and then we will become responsible for the oversight and help of those whom we have trained.