God’s Original Plan
Ephesians 4 lists the 5 basic types of ministry gifts Jesus gave us to mature the church:
Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers . Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do His work and build up the church , the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.
Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the Head of His body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.
Ephesians 4:11-15 NLT
From this, it’s entirely safe to conclude that apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers are divinely tasked with training and equipping the rest of God’s people to perform the actual work of ministry.
Why?
So the Body of Christ will grow in unity — a unity flowing from each believer’s intimate, personal relationship with God. The result is spiritual maturity, doctrinal resilience in the face of deception, and the agape love He calls us to demonstrate toward one another and the lost.
The Church Fathers started Fixing What Ain’t Broke
During the Book of Acts and for a while thereafter, churches had apostles, elders/overseers, and deacons, but the earliest Christians did not identify ordinary believers as a separate “lay” class. The whole Church was called God’s people and a “royal priesthood” (see 1 Peter 2:5,9). This is known today as the small-p “presbyterian” form of church government. In my humble opinion, this is the only truly biblical form because it is the only one repeatedly documented throughout the New Testament.
Tragically, the church began a long, downhill slide as it began to institutionalize after the demise of the original 12 apostles.
The Clergy-Laity Compartmentalization
As early as AD 96, Clement of Rome began conceptually dividing the Body of Christ into clergy and laypeople, a previously unknown distinction. This created what is now called the “episcopal” form of church government. That form survives today within Roman Catholicism and the Anglican Church.
This clergy/laity concept was further promulgated by Ignatius of Antioch (AD 107-115), Tertullian (AD 200), as well as Cyprian and other bishops into the 3rd and 4th centuries. Once Constantine ended persecution by the Roman Empire, he also gave the clergy tax exemptions, judicial privileges, property rights, and public status, thereby turning an existing ecclesiastical distinction into a legally privileged social class.
So instead of elders being elected from and by their local congregations as documented both in the Book of Acts and early church history, they were thereafter replaced with full-time professional priests empowered through a central-church-government-imposed approval process called ordination. All sacerdotal functions (conducting water baptisms, marriages, and funerals) were thereafter reserved to clergy members alone. This became the standard church model for a host of denominations and remain so until today.
The Result?
Tragically, here again, the Law of Unintended Consequences raised its ugly head. This is what actually happened: instead of the clergy training the laity to minister as Ephesians 4:11-15 describes, the professional clergy took over the ministry. The laity became idle spectators, lazy consumers, and armchair quarterbacks critiquing the clergy’s performance.
The Word of Faith movement — especially during its rapid expansion in the 1980s and ’90s — helped further erode this perverted model by emphasizing that every believer can and should minister in the authority of Christ.
That being said, what they eventually replaced it with was equally unscriptural as the movement institutionalized. Rather than the ministry gifts existing to equip the saints, the saints were there to support and empower the ministry gifts in their own personal callings. Saints who refused to climb on board that particular train were invited to exit stage left.
So no one is lacking blood on their hands over this particular issue.
Thanks for reading!
Part 2: Three Ancient Counterfeits Part 4: When the Church Lost the Common Language Return to the Series Index
