Knowing yourself and One Another to serve the Lord better together

12 February 2024 0 Sandrine Laporte

Régis Perrin began the Missionary team meeting from Monday 29th to Wednesday 31st January 2024 by encouraging us to listen to God.

In Matthew 17.5 we read “This is my Son, whom I love… Listen to him!” Régis encouraged us to experience this time together as a spiritual retreat in order to be united by the Holy Spirit to form together a community which lives out its values.

We then took time to study the Scriptures. Philippe led us an in-depth examination of Romans 12, 1 Corinthians and Ephesians 4, which speak of spiritual gifts. From this we derived several principles:

⇒ the gifts are a present from God distributed for the common good and profit;
⇒ Paul warns us against making comparisons which harm relationships and denigrate others and ourselves. No one is superior to or better than another. God assigns the gifts as he wished.
⇒ It is better to see how our gifts complement one another. God wants the members of the body to be concerned for one another.
⇒ Everything starts with humility. Paul says we are members one of another.
⇒ The purpose of the gifts it to equip Christians to serve one another.

Based on these principles we spent most of our time working with the tool “Profiling motivated aptitudes.” Briefly put, this tool helps us to identify what makes each of us unique and what are his or her specific aptitudes. Along the same lines the personality test Profil4colors helped us to get to know ourselves better and understand the way we work and to share this with others in our team.

The remainder of the time was spent as usual in sharing personal and ministry news, in worship, prayer and fellowship.

A new element I must mention, still with the aim of getting to know one another better and strengthen our relationships, were the games Lise and Samuel led us in on Tuesday evening. One team played against another, or as individuals. It was an amusing evening which sometimes revealed that our characters are not always as spiritual as we imagined.

The aim of these times of introspection, interaction and discussion in teams is to work better together for God’s glory. We plan to conclude our reflection at our next missionary meeting in April.

Sandrine Laporte