Submitted by Joel Workman, Co-director People Care and Formation
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash
Are you an Apostle, a Prophet, an Evangelist, a Shepherd, a Teacher? Do you even know? Hopefully at some point in your journey with Communitas you’ve been introduced to the APEST tool, or you’ve read Ephesians 4 at some point in your life! While no tool is perfect and complete, the APEST is a great resource for individuals as well as for our church communities. What gifts has God placed within you? Where do you thrive? How might God be inviting you (and everyone else in your community for that matter) to be a part of his body – serving, growing, leading…? If you’ve not spent time with the APEST recently, we want to suggest a few resources that can help you explore and discover how you can help “build up the whole Body into maturity and unity.”
- KCUnderground not only challenges us to view these gifts through the metaphor of a garden, there’s even a free downloadable pdf you can use with your team/community.
- APEST Thinking Hat Exercise: Do you need a group exercise for your next team meeting? This exercise could help your team with decision-making and problem-solving.
- Creating Experiential Worship Stations: Our own Shannon Deal wrote this blog post in 2017. One of her suggestions is to first select a unifying theme, which could be APEST. How can you implement these gifts into the way you worship individually or as a community?
- 5q Central: And finally, we’d be remiss to not include Alan Hirsh, the APEST guru. If you’re looking for a book that dives into this topic more, don’t forget about The Forgotten Ways (by Hirsh) or 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ!
Let’s continue learning and growing together!
