I had an idea. I’ve been working with Five Fold Survey stuff since about 2012, and so I know it pretty well. I’ve been working with University Lutheran for almost 11 years now, since 2007, and so I feel like I know IT pretty well. So why not try to take the Five Fold Survey as University Lutheran? 
Now, of course, when I take the Five Fold Survey about University Lutheran, it’s going to be an imprecise activity. I’m not going to have the same perspective as someone who has been here longer or shorter than I have been. I’m not going to have the same perspective as someone who doesn’t work here. But from my perspective, if we look at our church as a singular “body” gifted in this Five Fold way, what are our gifts? What I came up with after taking the survey this way was that University Lutheran was strongly “Teacher” oriented, followed by “Shepherd”, and then a tie between Evangelist and Prophet, and finally, the lowest gifting being the “Apostle” gifting.
If you’re unfamiliar with these categories, what this is saying is that my taking of the test means:
Teacher – We’re a smart church. I can see this in droves. We have some very well educated and very smart individuals who are a part of University Lutheran. We care about concepts and theologies. Generally speaking, we are pretty well-read and informed. This also means that we can at times probably come off at times as being snooty and that we can fail to action in favor of “more time to study”.
Shepherd – We are also a caring church. The old saying goes that “every church thinks of itself as a ‘friendly church’ but the ones that do this well are churches who are full of friends.” I think we are indeed a church full of friends at least at some very basic level. We care for one another, we celebrate each other’s victories and mourn each other’s defeats. These friendships may not go super deep, but they are there in seed form, and are greater than what you find at many churches. However, this level of intimacy that we enjoy among ourselves does run the risk of making outsiders feel excluded from the deep relationships we have with one another.
Prophet/Evangelist – We’re tied in terms of our “prophet” and our “evangelist” side, and these things are on our tertiary level which means they are more likely going to be things that we aspire to than actually live out. On the Prophet side, we have these strong desires to make honest judgments about how we are living up to God’s Word and expectations. We have strong desires to care for the broken, the poor, and the hurting. On the Evangelist side, we have strong desires to reach new people and to network people together for good works. However, while these are desires, they will often succumb to pressures and fail to act on them.
Apostle – I scored us lowest on the gifting of “Apostle”. The Apostle’s failings are often that he/she is too driven, demanding, and insensitive, and so we avoid those pitfalls for the most part (except for the fact that your pastor’s lead gifting is ‘apostle’). However, we will also avoid change, entrepreneurial endeavors, and will likely be unconcerned by systematic issues that could become liabilities. We are going to have trouble with organization and building momentum to achieve our goals.
Do you like what you see above? Do you agree with it? Do you want to change it? Do you want it to stay the same? The answer lies with you, especially if you are a member here. Because you as a member of University Lutheran bring your gifting to the church. When we send a member away, we send a little bit of the gifting that we have enjoyed off to a new church. When we add a member, we gather their gifts together with ours. This gifting is a little picture of Christ offering Himself as the ultimate gift of the Church.
So what gifting are YOU bringing? We would love it if you would go to http://fivefoldsurvey.org and start to answer that question, and then let us know what you came up with.