The Gift of Administration

By Odon Bulamba (Summarised by Benedicte Bahjejian - 25th May, 07)


The first gift we are talking about is the gift of administration. And this gift means to lead to facilitate or to steer something. Many leaders can be leaders and they are not administrators. To administer is something really heavy, strong, something that requires commitment, determination, something hard to do.

People who are doing admin in the church can become treasurers, secretarys, office managers etc. So if you’ve got this gift, you have to know that you’re working not only for God, but also for people. And you’ll see people of every colour coming to you, people having good moods or bad moods, people who are angry and tough and people who are soft, and you need to know how to deal with them.

Let’s take the example of Moses in Exodus 18, where he tried to do everything by himself and it was impossible. He then started to suffer. God opened the door of suffering in Moses’s life. He was suppose to preach, to tell them the message, to tell them what to do and organize everything. And he had a few million people to look after. During that time, we didn’t have speakers nor microphones, people didn't have the chance to pass the message to each other as easily as today. When Moses and Aaron spoke, the multitude had to be quiet, to listen. And I’m not sure how loud Moses’ voice was. Then they decided to put people in groups so that the leaders could pass the message to the people. But that was not enough, so his father in law came and told him to share the tasks with others, so that the work of God would be done properly. Moses accepted this advice.

Would you be ready as well to accept to share some tasks of your gift with others. If you have got a gift of healing, and someone comes up to you and tells you: the power is going to be removed from you and given to Catherine, how would you feel? If you have got a gift of singing and someone says ‘ Your power will be given to Tyrone, or to Odon’ If you have got the power of doing something for God, and God will remove some of it and give it to someone else, how would you feel? Would you feel ‘ now I’m free, I am not over loaded’, or would you feel bad because the glory of yours will go down, the success you had or the hand claps you received will disappear. How would you feel? I think, being a human being, you’ll feel like ‘I want to keep my gift. I want to keep this glory’. Whenever I stand up and pray for people, I want to see miracles happening. If you remove these miracles and give them to Colleen, what will I use? Even if I pray for people, they will not get healed any more.

God will make you to suffer in that way sometimes. He will take something from you, and give it away to someone else. Because these are not your gifts, he gives to whom he wants, please don’t be chocked, don’t be disappointed and say ‘God, I cannot do it any more’. God has given you a gift for a purpose, to use it for a specific purpose and after achieving this purpose, he can give it to another person to use it in another way. So you’ve got a mission, which means that your gifts last a limited time. And you have to work during this time frame to finish that mission as soon as possible, because you don’t know what tomorrow holds. That’s why you’ll see most of God’s people stand up, give their message, and people will say ‘yes, we are blessed’, and the second message is just down. It is nothing. You may be good in singing today, but tomorrow not sing as perfectly as before. Someone can play an instrument today, but tomorrow the desire of practicing disappears. I’ll lose the ability to play the guitar, the keyboard or any other instruments. They can continue to know how to start a song, but they will lose this motivation.

So Moses was now at this stage where his power was supposed to be given to seventy people. Imagine now, what did Moses have left. If he had 3 kgs of power, to be shared amongst 71 people, Im not quite sure if he was a leader by name, or just the man of God who had all the blessings and power. so why that? Because God doesn’t want us to take all the glory. He doesn’t want us to be proud of what we are. That’s why, He will take something away from you and give it to someone else. You’ll keep what you have got, only if you are humble. If you humble yourself, you can keep it longer because he can create other missions and say : Go now, do this. After finishing there, you’ll come and He will say : Go now and do that. Don’t be surprised if Benny Hinn came here and prayed for you tonight, and you don’t get healed. Don’t be surprised if you start singing at church and you are out of tune. Don’t blame yourself, or friends, or brothers, and think ‘ I sung out of tune because of you’. No! Glorify God for that and carry on.

So here, we have a good example of Nehemiah, another man of God. He is the only person in the Bible, up to now, apart from Jesus, who was a good administrator. I picked up some of his good qualities. Someone who wants to be an administrator, or wants to lead, for God’s glory, he must have compassion.

So let’s think about it; what do you understand by 'compassion’?
- you listen, to sacrifice your time to spend with people, you care for this person, put yourself in other people’s shoes.

So if I say: Bene has compassion, what does it mean? Everything good, positive? Is there any negative points in having compassion? Does it mean that she has only positive qualities? That she is good in all areas?

- Someone who can identify with someone else’s life

To have compassion is hard. For example, I may not have the same amount of comnpassion for Leah and for Michelle. It would depend on how close you are with me, or how I behave when something happened. Yesterday, I was driving around Heaphy Terrace, two very old people, maybe 80 years old were crossing the pedestrian, holding hands and a car hit them. I don’t know if it was what God prepared for them that night. Both the man and the lady remained lying on the street. And the driver jumped out of his car and started yelling: Oh my God, my God, what have I done! He was really sorry for what happened but who could really believe him, everyone started to blame him: you could see this sign showing you the pedestrian crossing. You should have slowed down. And I was really sorry for this man, and also for the people who were hit…

but sometimes when we see that Christians like you and me, are going through a hard time, they had an accident, they are killing or hurting others, do you have compassion for them or do you criticize them? If I’ve got compassion for my pastor who sinned, I will think about him and his life, kneel down and pray for him. An accident is just an accident. And you cannot say you are an expert, that’s why you will not crash. You can crash. You can be the best pilot in the world and have a plane crash. Although in the air we don’t have a air code. In spiritual life also, such accidents can happen. But we people who surround others, we need to have that compassion toward servants of God, for the souls God has been looking after. If you don’t have compassion, you cannot be a good administrator. You need that. You have to pray day after day for people, you must understand their needs, you must put yourself in their shoes. Although God can bring suffering, although things can be tough, although you can go up and down in your daily life remember; compassion is very important.

An administrator must be goal orientated and full of faith, leading by example, knowing when to delegate your tasks etc.

If you turn to the book of Nehemiah, you will learn a lot. If you have got this gift, read the book of Nehemiah again. For people who have been doing the one year Bible reading program, they have finished reading this book, praise the Lord. But if you have never read this book, try to teach yourself.

Other examples are Jesus, Joseph, Deborah, David, James and Jairus. When you are an administrator, you ‘ll start to think about the church, not only the building, but people, how to organize the church of God? How to make my task easy? How to put things together? You don’t need people to come to you and say: You must do this or that now. You have to look around and think, what do we need. Do you have any program for this month? For this year? Can you plan something? How will it work? Suggest, propose and people will build up something.

As I said a few weeks ago, we have got messages on tapes, and these tapes will start to get destroyed very soon. And God said that everything you have got, you have to type it now and save it in one way or another. Because those tapes are going to get cold and will lose the information. And I’m not quite sure why we are saving these messages but I think they will help us in the future. They will help our church, our group and other people somewhere around the wolrd. And then they might produce books. And these books will be given to people, maybe people will read them. So we have to know how to keep them, and if I don’t make an effort and you don’t make an effort and you are lazy like me, I’ve never typed any of them. I don’t even know how many messages we have. I don’t even know the titles. I’ve just printed some papers and gave them to you and after 2 weeks I forget about them. And I move on to something else. But some people who have that courage and determination, they will type them and save them. And if you don’t keep what you have the Bible says that someone else will come and remove what you have. It will be taken from you. By typing you can also refresh your spirit, refresh yourself what you’ve learnt so far. You can remember. Will you have time to do so? If you have time, please do it.

So we can see that the person who is an administrator has many things to do, to organize, to teach, to give other people tasks and share them with others, because you can’t do everything by yourself. Most people are really working with their conscience, they are conscientious with what they are doing. They have responsibilities, you can see that this person is very responsible. They will not start something and stop it on the way. They will try to go to the end.

When I was a child, I wanted so much to play with animals, and I remember one night, our father sent I and Gustave to take a cat from a house to another house. And the male cat I was holding saw a female one on our way, and the cat tried to jump and to go there. And I was holding the cat and it became angry :WAW, WAW, WAW!!! It was scratching. I held one and spinned the cat around. I didn’t know how to control him. Gustave who was next to me ran away. And finally because the cat was extremely angry, I was compelled to release him. The cat ran away. So the person who was expecting us to bring the cat, he found that time was passing by. He rang my father and asked him: Where is the cat? It’s been a long time. My father asked: Aren’t my boys there? No, not yet. And he needed that cat because he had rats in his house, that were eating everything. So how to go back home? And our father had told us to put the cat in a cage. My father told us you were supposed to take a cage and put the cat in it. But because we were young and stupid we believe we knew cats very well and thought it was going to be fine. And on the way, the cat changed behavior.

Sometimes we know we have such gift and we believe we know how to control things: I am settled in this area. And on your way, things change. And you’ll be surprised when you see something that worked well yesterday and doesn’t work anymore today.

How to go back home: we were afraid. What would we tell our father? Eventually we decided to go back home.
- Dad we didn’t manage to go to the place because the cat was angry.
- Why didn’t you look after the cat properly? You have to go and find it now. And our father was really, really tough. Go out and find it!
Where should I go to find the cat? It was night time. And Gustave put all the blame on me because I was the one holding it.
- So, you why didn’t you intervene?
And we started to blame each other.

And for God it is not a solution. Whenever we are wrong, we have just to come back to Him and say: God, you gave me a gift to help others and support them, to build up something new in their lives, but I destroyed it. I’m sorry. I did something stupid, forgive me.

And praise the Lord because the cat didn’t lose the address of the house and every time cats come back. Our cat came back the following morning and it was like: Oh thank you God! And it brought peace in the family.

And most of the time, you lose what you have but if you believe that a new morning will come God will give it back to you. And you will discover that yes, I have something new in my life.

Most of the time, we are not responsible of what we do because we don’t care much. Because we don’t care about what God thinks about us. And when we are not responsible, God will put us aside. We have to ask God through prayer about wisdom and authority. Most administrators are proud of their power and so on.

If you read Lamentations 3:57: When I called you you came close to me and you said: Don’t worry.

Has God already told you not to worry? I remember we spoke once about this message: Don’t worry. It’s written 365 times in the Bible. So, one time for each day: don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry.

What creates your worries? What brings worries in your life? Is it your health, your financial situation. Your skin colour, your weight, whatever you have, your studies and so on what really brings worries in your life? It’s the first thing I ask myself and I recommend you to ask yourself too. What brings worries in my life? Once you know what it is, you bring it to God and say: Look God, if you remove this thing from my life, I will not worry anymore. Worries can take you far away from God’s direction, worries can make you become someone who hasn’t got any control at all. Worries can make you sometimes look stupid or they can make you someone useless in the society and worries will make you somoen who will never be able to make a decision. Haven’t you seen people who are not able to make a decision in their lives?

If I tell Michelle:
- Let’s go and visit Michael.
- I’m not sure
- OK are you ready to go
- UHH, OK what do you think?
- Oh I think we should go.
- UHH, for me Hum…

So the person is not able to make a decision. And there are 2 ways to make up your mind: either yes or no. When you serve people as an administrator, you must be free from worries. Firstly you know what the Word of God recommends you and secondly if the Bible says yes, it’s yes, no matter what’s going on. If it’s yes, it’s yes, if it’s no it’s no. it’s pretty clear. And when it’s no you have to think why it is no. and when it’s yes, think why it’s yes. Because people will tell you: If something goes wrong in your body, remove your eye and throw it away. If your eye makes you sin, pull it off your body and throw it away. That’s all. Some people interpret this wrongly to say that that if Leah does something wrong against me, I will not have anything to do with her and I will throw Leah away. If Tyrone tells me this is not good for me, I’ll cut the relationship with him and throw it away. They will interpret the Scriptures in a bad way. They will apply Bible verses in a wrong situation in order to protect their personal interest or to show others they are really strict. But God also requires flexibility. All those things can be hard and not go the way we want, God’s flexibility is more important.