Living Your Strengths
Living Your Strengths: Building Relationships and Making Music Together
By Bill Gabbard, Minister of Music
As a church, we’ve spent some concentrated time and effort over the last several weeks walking through the “Living Your Strengths” personality assessment. All of us on the staff, and many of you, took the time to go through the survey and review how the CliftonStrengths program identifies both our strengths, as well as areas where we can continue to work to improve. Thirty-four strength themes were divided into four main areas: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking.
What were my results? Before I tell you, I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed going through the many questions in the assessment. The sheer number of questions made it difficult to bluff one’s way through; and, of course, I showed the results to the person who knows me best, my own personal HR professional, Mary Lynn! And, happily, she concurred with the findings! Whew!
Back to the results... My “Top 5” were: Developer, Empathy, Connectedness, Context and Positivity. With the exception of Context, all of these fall into the Relationship Building theme group. Which is a good place for a church staff member to be, I suppose!
I found so many things which resonated with what I do here as a church musician and leader of ensembles: “Instinctively, you often motivate people.” “You take the time to discover each individual’s unique traits and truly understand them.” “You often experience an unexplainable and spontaneous bond between yourself and others.” “You occasionally stir people’s enthusiasm with your cheerful exuberance for life.” Facing the choir every Sunday, and facing all of you, I have a unique blessing and privilege of leading and encouraging all of you at once—and God is glorified with the sound of our voices singing together! Amen!
The experience of making music together is such a personal and intuitive experience, be it as a choral or instrumental group, or as a larger congregation of singing churchgoers. John Wesley, in his 1761 essay “Directions for Singing” (which is still printed in the opening pages of all Methodist hymnals), says, ‘See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it (singing) is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.” He also says, “Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself… see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually.”
The music we make together is important, but even more important are the relationships that we form, nurture and maintain. As I often tell people, choir is small group ministry in the very best sense of the word! We meet regularly (twice a week), share our prayer needs together, minister to the entire congregation every Sunday and—here’s the bonus—we get to sing together!
I’m so thankful for the relationships I’ve been blessed with here. And whatever your “Top 5,” I know that you can use these Strengths profiles to help you find your place in the life and work of this congregation that we all love. As I often tell the choir, “Can’t wait to see you on Sunday!”
Interested in learning your God-given strengths? There's still time! Contact John Uldrick (juldrick@spdl.org) for additional information. To access videos of the SPdLU session, visit: https://www.spdl.org/faithresources.