As I start this article about the rest of what is known as the ‘five-fold’ ministries (having already dealt with apostles to a large extent in the previous article) I need to make a couple of points to form a background.
Firstly, as I said in my last article, there are no ‘Big Names’. Whatever gifting you or anybody else might have, it is purely functional and it is given to enable the health and the growth of the Body of Christ, the Church. There is only one Big Name, and that is Jesus.
Secondly, you could be functioning, say prophetically in the tiniest home church or small group, and you would be equal to any prophet who travels between churches or has a ‘major’ ministry. Size or public visibility does not matter in terms of value in the Kingdom. Following the call of Jesus is what matters.
So, apart from apostle, there are four other gifts that we need to look at. They are prophet, evangelist, shepherd and teacher. Some people refer to them as ministries, but that carries the connotation that somehow these are big things that stand individually on their own and independent of each other. What we sometimes end up with is a situation where you have a Prophet (with a capital P) who has a big prophetic ministry, travelling all over the place. Similarly the Evangelist (with a capital E) preaches to large crowds and moves from city to city. If they’re any good, their diary will be full for a long time ahead. Similarly the Teacher has a big teaching ministry and people come from far and wide to “sit under their ministry”. The last one, the shepherd doesn’t sound so important at all. So the Church has called him Pastor and made him the hierarchical leader of the church, and as a general rule, the bigger the church is the better. Whilst this style of ministry has undoubtedly brought results, it is not quite what is outlined in Ephesians. It is time to consider change.
By the way, there is nothing to say that any of these rôles are just for men. They are equally open for women and not as second class incumbents ‘by permission’. Yonggi Cho said “if you want to build an organisation use men; if you want to build church, use women”.
Men like things under control; they like organisation. Church is an organism, not an organisation. One of the fastest growing churches in the world today is the Iranian church, and women are taking a leading rôle
Ephesians 4 v 11 – 13 is the passage where all these gifts or functions are mentioned together:
Ephesians 4:11-13 NIV
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
In verse 11 the word translated as pastor is poimēn which means shepherd. This is the only place where the translators have chosen the word ‘pastor’. Everywhere else they translate it as shepherd. It occurs 17 other times in the New Testament, on four occasions it refers to actual shepherds at the birth of Jesus, and on the other 13 occasions the word is describing Jesus. Pastor is a direct translation from the Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, and the use of the word here in Ephesians 4 carries a much grander sense of title, of ‘a Minister’. Shepherd (which by definition at the time of writing of Ephesians was a humble occupation) better fits the rôle of serving the flock.
Our western world view is highly individualistic and that has infected western Christianity too, so when we look at these gifts, we all to easily find ourselves falling into the trap of seeing them as individual standalone “Ministries” that each carve out their own path across the Christian landscape. Sometimes they cooperate with each other, sometimes they don’t.
The truth is a little different. Wolfgang Simson in his brilliant book “Houses That Change the World” likens the five gifts to the church as seeds all found in the same flower head. When all the seeds are released together so that they grow together, the original beautiful flower is replicated. Each of the five seeds are interdependent and need to function together in order to replicate the flower.
Think of it like this. Who was the perfect Shepherd? (Clue: “I am the good shepherd….”). Who was called “Good Teacher”? Who said of Himself, “no prophet is welcome in his home town”. Who was the first and best preacher of the gospel? Who is described in Hebrews 3 as “our Apostle”? The answer obviously is Jesus. He is the perfect apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd and teacher. If we want to replicate the nature, character and presence of Jesus, then we need all these characteristics functioning together – as they do in Him.
The purpose was always to build up the Body of Christ (the churches that make up the Body) by equipping the people until all are united in absolute trust in Jesus and in knowing Him. The aim is to become mature, and full of Jesus. Again I make the point about individualism. These verses in Ephesians are not primarily for individuals.
Apostles, prophets, evangelists etc are not there to get me to maturity, but to get us all to maturity together.
Let’s go back to the analogy of the flower with a multi-part seed that has five different aspects to it – the Ephesians Ch 4 gifts of Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher (APEST for convenience). Once APEST is planted, growth will follow, Church will grow, and APEST will also reproduce itself.
Everything in nature is designed to reproduce. A flower has seeds which when planted produce a new flower, complete with new seeds to enable the cycle to carry on replicating. So, APEST is the five-part seed. When planted, Church is the flower that grows, and within that Church flower, there should be fresh APEST seeds waiting to be planted to produce more Church flowers. We have already seen that these APEST seeds are designed to work together, in the same flower bed if you like. Not A (apostle) in this bed P (prophet) over there in a different garden, E (evangelist) in a different county etc. If we allow each of these gifts to roam free and operate independently of each other, eventually they will give birth to churches, but they will be churches that are modelled closely on what the single part of the seed carries.
For instance an Evangelists’ church would be totally focussed on outreach and reaching the lost. Pastoral care would be non-existent and teaching would be limited to teaching people how to share the gospel. A Teacher’s church would be very focussed on teaching with little pastoral care and no outreach. A Prophets’ church would be so busy reading the signs of the times and debating the significance of colours in dreams that anybody but a prophet would feel out of place there. You get the picture. What God intends is that the APEST multi part seed is planted and allowed to grow to produce a fully formed multi-dimensional church. In that process new apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers emerge who in cooperation will birth new churches – and so it goes on.
There is a process here. The outcome of the various APEST ministries work is to equip people so that the Body is built up, mature, knows Jesus and becomes more like Him. Because the Body of Christ keeps growing ever larger across the earth by a process of replication, the APEST gifts need to replicate too, and this is how it works.
An Evangelist’s job, for instance, is not to be “the church evangelist”. The Evangelist’s job is to equip other evangelists, to spot them, to recognise those who carry the same (perhaps undeveloped) gifting, and develop them and train them. It is also important to train these new evangelists in how to identify and train others. Importantly, part of that training process is an understanding of how to work with the other gifts to build up the local church.
Similarly a Teacher’s rôle is not to be the recognised Teacher, although he or she will teach. But they will also recognise encourage and train up others who carry that same teaching gift, teach them how to recognise and train others, and teach them how to work together with the other gifts to build up the church.
In this way each of the APEST gifts replicate and continue to replicate and continue to learn how to function with each other for the good of the whole body. Some of these gifts naturally tend to work together at certain stages, ie Apostles and Prophets in the “going” stage – moving out into new communities and cultures. Then the Evangelist may well come into their team for a while although a good part of the Evangelist’s work will always be set in the local church, modelling, training and releasing. Shepherds and Teachers will often find themselves working closely together too in establishing people in the faith as well as equipping them to establish others who come to faith.
There is some fluidity in this process in that any one church may not have each of these gifts present, or the gifts may be present but not particularly well developed. So let’s look at the everyday small church.
In such a church of say 12 to 20 people, some of these gifts may not be obviously present. The word ‘obvious’ is important. Gifts will be there among the people but may not yet have been recognised by the individual or by the Father and Mother Elders who lead the church.
Here is an important point to make; Jesus is the perfect Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd and Teacher. Jesus lives in each one of us. He is united to each one of us. What is in Him can be revealed through each one of us. Each of us has access to each of the APEST gifts in greater or lesser degree because Jesus lives in us. We know that all can prophesy, but it is also true that all can access the other gifts too. All can teach, even if it’s some very simple thing that one person learned in their walk with God and passed on to another. All can shepherd, ie care for another. All can share the gospel at a basic level, “this is what happened to me….”. All can have a desire to see the Kingdom grow, to see the gospel penetrate new communities and cultures – that’s the basis of the apostolic gift.
So whilst we all carry in us at least a little bit of each of these APEST gifts, there are some who will develop more strongly in one or more of those gifts and they need encouraging and developing for the benefit of the church. There will be some who go on to use their gift outside their own church for the benefit of other churches. That does not make them any better, bigger or more special than those who only function inside their own church. This is all about function – about serving the Body of Christ.
It may well take help from outside to recognise those who carry an APEST gift and train them in stewarding it well. A Prophet may need to be invited to train up and release local prophets; a Teacher may need to come and work with someone who has a teaching gift that they need to develop. Obviously this can easily be done across several churches at once. The point of all of this is to equip the Church so that it becomes mature, and grows by replicating itself again and again.
Maturity comes on a personal level and also there is whole-church maturity. Maturity is where people are full time disciples of Jesus, and are making disciples as they go. On a personal level I need to cooperate and learn to change and grow, as I remember that I have a place in the bigger picture called church. At any one point in time I might benefit from the help of a teacher, or a prophet or a shepherd etc. to help me.
However, at any one point in time the church needs the help of all five gifts functioning together and in harmony to bring it to maturity. The Shepherd knows the church, knows what the prophet and the teacher has said; the teacher knows how the evangelist is equipping the church and so on. They all function in relationship with each other and in conjunction with the elders who actually lead the local church. And where the required gifting is lacking in the church, it can be found from other churches. We are all one body.
As the gospel spreads, people are saved and new churches are formed we need to avoid setting the bar unnecessarily high for ministry function, whilst also being watchful that whatever we do is the best that we can. Church is not a place for performance. It is a place for real life living out of our relationship to Jesus in a real family type setting. It is a place where we can learn, make mistakes, learn some more, be forgiven, be stretched and always be loved.
As a church is properly influenced by the five ministries, maturity will come and more churches will be birthed as the Kingdom is extended among those who do not yet believe:
• Apostolic. The church will grasp the bigger picture; that the Kingdom influence needs to extend into every corner of society, into every culture, that all need to have the opportunity to respond to the gospel and that this is the mission call of this church.
• Prophetic. The prophetic is normal in the life of the believers, not just in meetings or when they relate to each other, but also wherever they find themselves among unbelievers.
• Evangelistic. The church will understand that each person is called and has been equipped to represent Jesus well wherever they are; that they are able to share the gospel or their own story and lead people to Jesus.
• Shepherd. Good pastoral care that meets the legitimate needs of each believer is the norm. This kind of care provision is not limited to one or two specialists (although there is a place for specialisms). All members genuinely care for one another. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” John 13 v 35.
• Teaching. Teaching in the local church is always rooted in scripture and is always practical. A high value is placed on the scriptures and knowing what they say, and being able to communicate that in a way that is accessible and practical for every believer no matter what their educational background or life experience.
These APEST gifts are just that. They are God’s gift to us, the Church, to enable us to enjoy fullness of life with Him and at the same time accomplish the task He has given us.
Church is out there 