What does it mean to share?

What does it mean to share our gifts in the church?

Two men who have been reflecting deeply on this question for several years, particularly as it relates to the global church, are Pakisa K. Tshimika and Tim Lind. They have been the leaders of something called the Global Gifts Sharing project, initiated by the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) in 1997.

Pakisa K. Tshimika and Tim Lind

When Lind and Tshimika began their work, they soon realized there was no common understanding of “gifts.” They first needed to work on a theology of gifts and a culture of understanding gift sharing. Then, before actual sharing could happen, the wealth of gifts already present – all kinds of gifts, not only spiritual gifts as defined in the New Testament – had to be identified.

They began to meet in workshops with people from the various MWC conferences, beginning in Africa and moving on to other continents. By 2003, the two men had written a book based on the project. Sharing Gifts in the Global Family of Faith became the resource for conferences and congregations in North America to do their own studies on the theme.

Lind and Tshimika say the project has stimulated a great deal of thinking about gifts and broadened the understanding of gifts within the global church.

“It’s not complicated theology,” Lind explains. “The basic principle is in the creation story and the Jesus story.” God’s intention from creation is that all are created as gifted beings, he says. Life itself is a gift, meant to be multiplied and shared with each other.

The Jesus story tells of God’s gift of life in Christ, in whom we are “a new creation.” In Christ, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and in Him “God so loved the world.”

They emphasize that sharing is not the same as giving. “Sharing involves a free and open mutuality,” they write, “one in which churches and individuals enter into each other’s lives and value and use each other’s gifts.”

Similarly, gifts are not commodities. What is being talked about in gift sharing has to do with relationship. “A true gift happens when something has changed between us.” The economic disparity between parts of the global Anabaptist family has often divided people into those with gifts and those with needs.

Lind and Tshimika are convinced that needs are often really gifts that are blocked from release, and further, that God allocates gifts equitably, not necessarily equally.

Gift sharing can be lived out between church members, between congregations, between conferences. But it will happen most effectively, they say, “when the importance of sharing relationships is understood at all levels of the church.”

—from MWC files