Embracing Spiritual Gifts

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As Friends, we often say that “we are all ministers,” but too rarely do we prepare ourselves to recognize, welcome, and nurture spiritual gifts among us. These gifts aren’t rewards for good behavior but evidence of God’s grace, poured out among us to invite us into love, to encourage us to faith, and to build up the Kingdom of Heaven. They are also a powerful antidote to isolation, polarization, despair, and other deep ills of this troubled moment. But there is a paradox in spiritual gifting: although the Spirit showers these gifts universally, each one is distinct in the light and the shadow it casts in our lives. 

In our time together, we will explore the gifts and roles laid out in Ephesians 4: the gifts of the apostle, the prophet, the evangelist, the shepherd, and the teacher. We will reflect on the blessings and challenges of each and how they manifest among us today, focusing particularly on how we nurture these gifts into flourishing, suppress them into extinction, or twist them into toxicity by the spiritual environments we create in our meetings, churches and organizations. We will also make time to celebrate what the Spirit is doing in ourselves and in each other.  

Only by understanding the nature of spiritual gifts can we appreciate that none of us can see God’s will in full. Only by coming together in our differences and creating spaces in which all gifts are welcome can our life together be a testimony to God’s wisdom, God’s righteousness, and–most of all–God’s love. 

If you’d like to learn more about Adria and Embracing Spiritual Gifts, you can watch her First Monday Lecture on YouTube.

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Leader

Adria Gulizia is a lawyer, mediator, teacher, and mother. She carries a concern for how Friends’ traditional faith and practice translate into an increasingly unstable, atomized, and uncertain world. In her ministry activities and in her daily life, Adria is passionate about inviting all into deeper relationship with the Spirit of Christ, which spoke so strongly to early Friends and continues to speak today. She is a member of Chatham-Summit Monthly Meeting (New York Yearly Meeting), the Friends of Jesus Fellowship, and the Board of Advisors of Earlham School of Religion. She has facilitated workshops on a variety of topics, including spiritual gifts, listening as a practice of pastoral care, and Friends’ traditional commitment to the Lamb’s War. Her writing has been published by Friends Journal, Pendle Hill, and Illuminate, a Bible study curriculum written by and for Friends.  

Adria is currently collaborating with Joann Neuroth on a course through School of the Spirit called God’s Promise Fulfilled: Encountering and Embodying Grace in the Shadow of Empire. Her blog, “In the Shadow of Babylon,” can be found at shadowofbabylon.com.  

Adria was also recently featured on Pendle Hill’s podcast, The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. Listen now to “Inviting Ourselves to Be Challenged.”