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It is natural that parents have differing expectations for their children at various life-stages. Recently, my wife and I had to hold a family meeting with our children, who are now ages 6 and 9, to re-negotiate our family chore contract. We believed that our children had matured to a level that they should rightfully assume greater responsibilities within the household. The goal of the re-negotiated family contract was to ensure age-appropriate expectations for our children. So, for example, it would be unreasonable for Tamara and I to expect our daughter Alyssa (age 9) to cook all the family meals…this would only set Alyssa up for failure. However, Alyssa is more than able to manage the dishwasher and put away clean dishes.

Similarly, assigning ministry responsibilities to people according to their spiritual-maturity is fundamental to effective team building and ministry mobilization within our churches. When we assign "childish" ministry responsibilities to our mature Christ Followers, they will likely feel insulted and believe the assignment to be an intrusion upon their valuable time. If we assign "mature" ministry responsibilities to our immature Christ Followers, the ministry will likely be damaged and the Christ Follower will likely fail. However, this immature Christ Follower’s failure is not their fault; rather it is the fault of his/her pastoral leaders who should have known better and set the Christ Follower up to fail.

However, I know from personal pastoral experience that it can be very difficult to discern the true spiritual maturity of all our people. Without an appropriate system in place, it is nearly impossible to discern the maturity level of each person, let alone help them know how to continue the spiritual maturation process. Over the years of struggling with the tension between Spiritual Formation and Ministry Mobilization, I have come to believe that healthy ministries can only be developed if leadership places an equal emphasis upon both categories, and successfully integrates both categories. However, this integration process is very difficult for most church leaders to achieve because of the complexities associated with both spiritual maturity and ministry mobilization.

So I am requesting your help in two distinct ways.

First, I have created a PDF worksheet (Get It Here) that you are free to use within your ministry to help leadership identify what ministry positions are appropriate for the various spiritual maturity levels. If you use the worksheets, I would love to receive copies to help me learn how pastoral leaders assign ministry responsibilities.

Second, I have created a Flash-based Spiritual Formation assessment tool (Check it Out Here). While I can customize this tool for your ministry’s current use, the ultimate goal is to create a customizable Spiritual Formation assessment within AssessMe.org. I need your feedback regarding the current assessment structure and whether you find the structure helpful or not. I also need your recommendations regarding the wording used within the assessment tool.

I want to thank you in advance for your constructive and helpful input. You may email me or post comments to this blog article.  Lord willing, AssessMe.org will include an integrated spiritual formation assessment tool in the future.