Using Your Gifts to Serve the Church

On Thursday, August 13, our member Erma Dreas was recognized on radio station Z 88.3 as “Woman of the Week.” I learned about this from her daughter Michelle Mills. She asked that we place an acknowledgement of Erma’s honor in our bulletin. I replied to Michelle, “Indeed we will put this in our bulletin for this Sunday. Your mom has and exercises the spiritual gifts of helps and mercy more than anybody I know. She is a blessing to many people. Thank you for letting us celebrate this with Erma. We love her and Garfield at New Hope.”

Michelle wrote me back, “Thank you! I have to agree. She is a very special person to many. I just get to be especially blessed ‘cause I can call her mom.”

Week after week, Erma and Garfield prepare our Wednesday evening meals. They do it voluntarily and lovingly. Erma is a fine cook. Last Wednesday when Erma had to be away caring for an Alzheimer’s patient, Garfield was in the kitchen preparing the tea, coffee, and pitchers of water for our covered dish meal. We are held together and strengthened as a church by their faithful service each week. They are exercising a spiritual gift, which God gives them “for the common good”(1Corinthians 12:7). The spiritual gift they both have is the gift of “helps.” Those who have this gift see something very practical that needs to be done in the church, and they jump right in and do it.

The first place I met Erma when I came to be pastor of New Hope was in the Hospice Care Center. Later I visited in her home as she cared for two different patients who were nearing the end of their lives. She was exercising the spiritual gift the Bible calls “mercy.”

A large group of folks have used their gifts and abilities to build up this family of God. As we celebrate today, we thank God for adding brothers and sisters to His family. Thirteen years from now, there will be a 26th anniversary celebration of how God has used many people’s spiritual gifts of faith, leadership, teaching, administration, giving, encouragement, knowledge, wisdom, healing, discernment, mercy and helps to bless and strengthen New Hope Baptist Church. Let it be so.