Helping someone to learn with you often has four phases:
1. I do, you watch. It’s very directive.
2. I do, you help. The style is more coaching.
3. You do, I help. This is a collaborative space.
4. You do, I watch. This is delegation.
(If you want more elaboration on this, check out the video: The Multiplying Square - YouTube)
Unfortunately, some groups will jump from Directive to Delegation without the phases of Coaching and Collaboration. We like to either do things ourselves because it’s easier, or get someone who is already skilled to do them solo. Coaching and Collaborating are harder (sometimes initially slower) work, and if you’re focus is getting a task done, then it’s easier and faster to go solo.
Doing a task well by yourself is the opposite of what God is calling us to do in 1 Corinthians. It doesn’t matter how well the task is done if it’s not done with love. Love requires connectedness to others.
Collaboration and Coaching say to others: “I want your company, I believe in you, I want to share something of myself with you and be vulnerable to you, I’m going to trust you enough to depend on you.” Jesus said to his disciples that people will know they are his disciples by the way they love, not how they organise, evangelise, do miracles or activism. In 1 Corinthians 12, there’s a list of all the different actions that can be done, but repeatedly it says, “I would be nothing unless I loved others.”
The importance of love and community is high because we are meant to be demonstrating the nature of God – a Trinity of mutual love. In chapter 12, we are reminded that the Creator, Christ and Spirit are working together. If we are meant to be demonstrating who God is to the world, we can’t do it without a mutual connection.
The Corinthians were in danger of seeing their spirituality as a purely personal self-improvement program or a private experience between “me and God”.
Our relationship with God should nurture us, but it exists for the glory of God and the common good.
To find out more, you can read "How to love the Team."