Put me in coach?

It’s a strange thing to be gifted by God and then benched at church.

Imagine the Creator of the universe handpicks unique spiritual gifts just for you—gifts meant to build up the body of Christ, to encourage, serve, comfort, teach, lead, or create. You feel stirred. You probably sense the Holy Spirit calling you into various areas of service. You’ve prayed about it. You’ve studied the gifts. You’re ready. You even took that spiritual gift inventory quiz the church emailed everyone years ago. You can quickly find the test results it in your Gmail, right between the automatic reminder of this Saturday's “5:30am Bible Study for Men” and a friendly message from the church secretary to “not park in Pastor Dan’s spot”.

But every week, like clockwork, you arrive Sunday morning, you sit in your same row, sing the songs (even the two you didn’t particularly like). You listen to the sermon, take detailed notes, then head home. You drive home with your spiritual gifts untouched, still neatly packaged and unused. It’s like getting invited to help teach in children’s church. After your CIA-level background check clears, you arrive 3.5-hours early as instructed only to be told, “We’ve decided that Brenda will be teaching. You will help hold crayons, hand out coloring sheets, and be the bouncer if little Johnny gets out of control again.”

For a lot of Christians, that’s church life in a nutshell. Week after week, we gather for the main event—The Sunday Service™—which, in most churches, revolves around a few key activities: drinking bad coffee, listening to preaching, singing, and escorting little Johnny to his parents after he keeps hitting Susan. And that’s it. That’s the repetitious show. And yes, I said “show,” because we’ve unintentionally turned church into an audience-based performance where a handful of people do all the ministering and the rest of us… spectate.

And if your spiritual gift doesn’t fall into the “can you play an instrument, are you a pastor, can you lead congregational singing” categories, you’re out of luck.

You might be gifted in hospitality, wisdom, discernment, prayer, healing, encouragement, leadership, craftsmanship, administration, mercy, teaching children, or just showing up with a shovel to do the things nobody else wants to do. But where do guys like you or me fit into a 70-minute church service, a four song worship set, and a 45-minute sermon that needs to wrap up by noon so we can rush home to lunch?

And therein lies the problem. It’s not that churches are wrong or evil. Most don’t even know they are squashing our gifts. It’s not some secret conspiracy dreamed up at the mysterious monthly elder's meeting where they chant “Only the pastors may teach.”

No, it’s usually unintentional. It’s the slow creep of structure over Spirit. Over time in the name of a teaching church, many of our churches gravitated toward the weekly sermon and songs as the focal point of church life—not because they hate your gifts, but because the format is familiar, efficient, controllable, and predictable. You can plug it into your "are we a good church calculator" and it computes as success.

But in our belief that "equipping the Saints" means preaching at them and in our need to orchestrate law and order, we’ve sidelined the very people we’re supposed to be equipping. We've forgotten that the Church is not an educational institution —it’s a body. And if the elbow never gets used, or the ear never listens, or the foot never moves, we no longer have a church — what we seemingly have is a preferred playlist alongside a weekly spiritual lecture.

Let’s be honest: the average Sunday service doesn’t really require more than five people to function. Maybe ten, if there are slides to run and communion trays to pass. And that’s fine—for a program. But the New Testament paints a picture of something more real and more personal. More interactive and more alive.

Paul didn’t tell the Corinthians, “Hey guys, make sure you’ve got a solid worship leader and a teaching pastor. That should cover all the bases.” No—he told them to love each other. He taught that everyone has something to bring when they gather. A hymn, a word, a prophecy, a tongue, an interpretation, an act of love. That was church.

Today? Most of us have something to bring, but we’re never shown how to live a life of love for one another. So do we burn it all down and start meeting in our living rooms with an acoustic guitar and homemade communion wafers? Not necessarily. (Although I’d be excited about theto playing with fire.)

The answer isn’t to abandon Sunday services altogether—it’s to stop treating them like the entirety of the Christian experience. The church family calendar needs more than one big thing. We need places where people can celebrate together, grow together, pray together, serve together, wrestle through Scripture together, eat nachos together, and weep together. Because spiritual gifts don’t mature in rows of church pews—our gifts grow when we live real life together in relationships, in taking risks and learning to follow Jesus whatever may come.

Some of you are called to preach, and thank God you’re doing it. But some are called to quietly sit next to someone in pain. Others are called to organize chaos, to fix what’s broken, to notice what’s missing. Some are builders. Some are weepers. Some are relentless encouragers. And if our churches don’t make room for that—if our only “use your gift” options involve a microphone or a guitar—we’ve missed the point.

You weren’t gifted to sit through a church service. You were gifted to love others and fulfill their needs. Can we start living like the Sunday service is just a sliver of the whole pie? Because when the whole body is engaged—when every part is moving, praying, loving, helping, showing up—we won’t have to beg people to “get involved.” They’ll already be alive. And church won’t feel like an institution or a weekly show. It’ll be more like a family that loves each other so obviously, even a lost and dying world can see we've been reborn by God himself.