S.H.A.P.E. process key to unlocking an army of volunteers in your church
By Tobin Perry

C.L.A.S.S. 301 C.L.A.S.S. 301 is one part of a four-part series designed to turn casual attendees of your church into core members who are actively looking for opportunities to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ in their in their community. Each class introduces your church members to a different one of God’s eternal purposes for the church.

LAKE FOREST, Calif. (PD)--Ever feel as if you don’t have a big enough staff to do everything God has called your church to do? What if you had an army of volunteers to do the work of ministry in your community?

According to C.L.A.S.S. 301, you have just that kind of army sitting in your pews – your church members. The third class of Purpose Driven® Ministries’ four-part C.L.A.S.S. series centers around helping church members understand their God-given role as ministers in the church. Then the class helps them look at their spiritual gifts, heart, abilities, personality, and experience to see how God can use them to serve in the local church.

Written by Pastor Rick Warren, the class has been taught at Saddleback Church for the past 15 years. Through Purpose Driven Ministries, churches can now purchase the materials and implement the class in their own context.

The need for the class comes out of Warren’s own personal experience. A few years after starting the church, he became overwhelmed by trying to do too much in ministry. After searching Scripture for answers, he discovered he had been going about church in the wrong manner. God has called every member into ministry and called pastors to administer the ministry of the church. With that in mind, Warren began focusing his attention on training church members to do the ministry of the congregation. Now, well over 5,000 people are involved in some kind of ministry at Saddleback.

The class’s proven track record for moving church members into lay ministry and the core of a church’s ministry makes the class an integral component to the Purpose Driven paradigm of ministry and crucial to a church’s roadmap for ministering more effectively in its community around the world.

C.L.A.S.S. 310 C.L.A.S.S. 310  will help your church develop a team of trained S.H.A.P.E. interviewers. These interviewers will help members of your congregation discover their S.H.A.P.E. and find opportunities for ministry within your church.

Although within the curriculum Warren reminds attendees they’ve also been called to be available for ministries they aren’t particularly prepared for, the key to the class’ effectiveness is how it prepares them to see how God might have wired them for a particular ministry. To do that, the class looks at a person’s S.H.A.P.E.:

Spiritual gifts: God has given every person who has committed his or her life to Christ a special gift to help build up the Body of Christ. This class will introduce church members to what those gifts are, how they are to be used in ministry, and what makes them different from natural abilities. The class will also tackle some of the most important cautions about spiritual gifts.

Besides explaining what the Bible says about spiritual gifts, the class will also help church members better determine what gifts God has given them. Included in the class is a five-step experiential process to help members discover spiritual gifts.

Heart: Then the class takes a look at a person’s particular passions to see how they align up with ministry opportunities within the church. With the full understanding that their passions and motivations control much of their effectiveness in ministry, the class will help those in attendance reflect on how God might have uniquely wired them with the desire to minister to a particular segment of society.

For example, if God has given a member of your congregation a particular passion to serve those in poverty, there’s a strong possibility that God wants them to serve in their local church by ministering to the poor. If God has given a person a particular passion for single parents, then maybe he has a place for him or her in the singles ministry.

Abilities: Besides the spiritual gifts that God gives to believers at the time of conversion, he also gives natural abilities at the moment of physical birth. God hard wires into everyone – believers and unbelievers alike – natural abilities like playing sports, singing, and planning. Then God expects believers to use those abilities in ministry at their local church. This class will help attendees discover these God-given abilities as well as knock out some of the nagging misconceptions about those abilities.

Personality: No part of a personality is there by accident. In fact, the personality of your church members will often say much about how they will express themselves in ministry. An extrovert will serve in a different manner than an introvert. A structured person will serve in a different manner than a more free-spirited person will. This class will challenge attendees to serve in the freedom of their own personality.

Experiences: Not only does God specifically design believers with spiritual gifts, passion, abilities, and a personality for a particular ministry, but he prepares believers for ministry through important experiences. As Warren often says, “God never wastes a hurt.” No one can better minister to a parent who has lost a child than another parent who has lost a child. No one can better minister to an abused child than a person who was abused as a child. This class will help your church members log both happy and painful experiences in their life and see how God could use those experiences in ministry in your church.