
Chapter 4 of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians will be our keynote passage for this discussion. I’m going to cite the Amplified Version because it explains portions of the passage I would prefer to not spend time clarifying. Once again, we will experience Paul as the King of the Run-On Sentence: 😁
Yet grace (God’s unmerited favor) was given to each of us individually [not indiscriminately, but in different ways] in proportion to the measure of Christ’s [rich and bounteous] gift . Therefore it is said, When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive [He led a train of vanquished foes] and He bestowed gifts on men. [Ps. 68:18.] [But He ascended?] Now what can this, He ascended, mean but that He had previously descended from [the heights of] heaven into [the depths], the lower parts of the earth? He Who descended is the [very] same as He Who also has ascended high above all the heavens, that He [His presence] might fill all things (the whole universe, from the lowest to the highest).
And His gifts were [varied; He Himself appointed and gave men to us] some to be apostles (special messengers), some prophets (inspired preachers and expounders), some evangelists (preachers of the Gospel, traveling missionaries), some pastors (shepherds of His flock) and teachers. His intention was the perfecting and the full equipping of the saints (His consecrated people), [that they should do] the work of ministering toward building up Christ’s body (the church), [That it might develop] until we all attain oneness in the faith and in the comprehension of the [full and accurate] knowledge of the Son of God, that [we might arrive] at really mature manhood (the completeness of personality which is nothing less than the standard height of Christ’s own perfection), the measure of the stature of the fullness of the Christ and the completeness found in Him. So then, we may no longer be children, tossed [like ships] to and fro between chance gusts of teaching and wavering with every changing wind of doctrine, [the prey of] the cunning and cleverness of unscrupulous men, [gamblers engaged] in every shifting form of trickery in inventing errors to mislead. Rather, let our lives lovingly express truth [in all things, speaking truly, dealing truly, living truly]. Enfolded in love, let us grow up in every way and in all things into Him Who is the Head, [even] Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One). For because of Him the whole body (the church, in all its various parts), closely joined and firmly knit together by the joints and ligaments with which it is supplied, when each part [with power adapted to its need] is working properly [in all its functions], grows to full maturity, building itself up in love. Ephesians 4:6-17 AMP
From all this we can safely conclude:
- God has supernaturally gifted all Christ-followers through Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.
- Some of us have been gifted to minister in leadership roles within the Body of Christ.
- While there are other ministry gifts (administrations, etc.), five specific callings are listed here.
- Their mission statement is building up and equipping the rest of the Church for works of ministry.
- We’ll know when their task is complete when the Body of Christ achieves:
- Unity of the faith
- Full knowledge of the Son of God
- Spiritual completeness and moral perfection; Christ-likeness
- Spiritual maturity, doctrinal stability, and resistance to deception
- Consistently speaking truth in love towards one another
- Everyone doing our part to grow the Body of Christ in both quality and quantity
Tragically, even a cursory examination of the current state of Christianity at this moment in history clearly shows we are not even remotely close to achieving those 6 objectives. Many of my articles here have examined why this is so. All of those essays were intended to move the ball down the field towards those goals. This article is me once again quixotically donning my rusty armor, grabbing my bent lance, mounting my spavined steed, and taking yet another tilt at that pesky windmill of scriptural misconceptions (looking for Sancho in all the wrong places!). 🤣
The Non-Controversial Gifts
There is considerable debate within Christendom over whether apostles and prophets are still alive and active within the Body of Christ. I’ll address all that in the next section. But first, I want to cover the other 3 gifts which no one with a lick of Bible sense would argue over.
Evangelists
All Christ-followers are called to share the Gospel of Christ with the lost. The resurrected Christ never constrained His Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 to only those graced with this gift. Neither are evangelists limited to those who do that as a public ministry.All people having this gift love to fish and their sea is an otherwise-destined-for-hell humanity. Sharing the Gospel of Christ with anyone who will listen is like breathing to them. Start talking about winning people for Jesus and their eyes and demeanor light up like a fireworks sparkler. Get them started on this topic and you have pretty much lost control of the conversation because their enthusiasm can be overwhelming. Some may require some honing in their content and/or methods and/or presentation, but they are compelled to share Jesus with the lost regardless of how well or poorly they do it. And do it they will — they are unstoppable!
We without this gift need them terribly. Why? Because evangelists are the enthusiastic motivational speakers of the Body. They get other Christ-followers fired up to go out there and be lights to the world rather than resting on our blessed assurances in a pew playing church. They constantly challenge us to get out of our comfort zones.
There are 2 downsides to this gift, one for those having it, the other for those who don’t.
- Those who have it are constantly tempted to judge those who are not as enthusiastic and motivated about evangelism as they are. This can lead to them preach shame-based, performance-oriented messages to other believers. As I’ve already covered, guilt and shame are terrible motivators and God never uses them.
- On the other hand, not-evangelists are vulnerable to becoming demotivated because they cannot muster the enthusiasm and people-skills demonstrated by those having this gift. Satan attacks them — again with guilt and shame — accusing them of being second-rate Christians because they don’t “measure up,” using the evangelist gift as the yardstick.
Here’s my take on the whole matter: if you got it, flaunt it! If this is your gift, learn everything you possibly can to hone your craft, and then, as Ecclesiastes 9:10a says, “do it with your might.” Far more applicably to this situation, “do it with His might!”
Beware of comparing yourself to other evangelists. God knew you from the foundations of the world, He created you with certain talents and inclinations, and He already had your target audience defined. God doesn’t need another Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, or Reinhard Bonnke; that would be repetitively redundant. He wants you to seek His face concerning who you are supposed to reach, where that is, and how you’re supposed to do it. If you’re a stay-at-home mom and have unsaved moms in your sphere of influence, that could very well be the pond where you’re supposed to be fishing. If God has called you to minister on the streets or overseas as a missionary, there you go!
Hear, train, obey.
If you are not graced with this gift, that doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit won’t use you to share the Gospel of Christ. He has an amazing ability to create divine appointments — what the world calls “coincidences” — where your testimony of God’s goodness towards you and/or others can bear witnesss of God’s goodness.
Teachers
Some theologians and Bible translators lump pastors with teachers. This is how Christendom has regarded the teaching gift over the millennia. The restoration of teacher as a separate gift began during the Charismatic Renewal/Jesus Movement of the 1970s and has steadily gained traction ever since. The idea has even crossed over into non-charismatic evangelical circles, but to a much lesser extent.
All pastors are teachers, but not all teachers are pastors. I, for one salient example, am a teacher, yet I have never pastored anyone anywhere at any time. Wanted to? Definitely! Called to as of this writing? Nope!
Expounding and explaining God’s Word is the air we teachers breathe. My family has to be careful around me because I can easily launch into a seminary lecture/debate on any given Bible-related topic at the slightest provocation (I’m working on dialing that WAY back! 😇).
A quarter-century after the turn of the 21st century, Christendom at this time is easily the most illiterate (biblically and generally) generation in modern history. The biblical ignorance displayed daily on social media is simply staggering. The prevalent “don’t confuse me with what the Bible actually says in context, I know what I believe” attitude ensures this will remain the case until the currently-in-progress worldwide revival takes a far greater hold on society than we are currently witnessing.
Teachers are those called to stand in the breaches of scriptural ignorance we find in the walls of our faith and shore them up. Our effectiveness is determined by the level of compassion we exhibit while doing so plus our willingness to constantly adjust our own theological understanding as the Holy Spirit leads. Those breaches are shorn up by the Truth spoken in love, not by our personal opinions.The biggest danger for us as teachers is we have a temptation to think whenever folks are facing their challenge-du-jour, all they need is more/better information and/or correction of their faulty doctrine. Been there, done that, got T-shirts! It took me years to learn the lesson that people don’t care about what you know; they want to know how much you care. In a word: compassion. After decades of Bible study, I can assure you of one thing (of many! 😎): nowhere in the Hebrew and Greek lexicons does the word “teach” appear in any of their definitions for compassion — or any other related term, for that matter!
Pastors
This one, along with evangelists, is the ministry gift with the longest legs historically. Pastors are the shepherds of God’s flock. They are primarily concerned with the care and feeding of their “sheep.” That indeed includes teaching and the study/preparation required for that, but also includes what have been called the “sacerdotal functions” (performing marriages, officiating at funerals, performing baptisms). Add to all that personal/marriage counseling, comforting the bereaved, praying for the sick, leading in prayer, and being a paragon of moral/ethical purity, passion for the cause of Christ, compassion for the poor and hurting, and not to mention displaying all the fruit of the Spirit in their daily conduct towards their families, their congregants, and the public.
Whew! Makes me tired simply listing all that and I’ve just picked the low-hanging fruit.
Pastoring is hard work, sometimes brutal work. It is frequently rewarding, but sometimes those rewards are only received in heaven. I am honored to claim several pastors as my friends. Not one of them sits around awaiting their congregants to serve them. Rather, they work their hands to the bone serving not only their congregations, but also the communities in which they live.
Tragically, over the centuries as Christendom has been increasingly corrupted by man’s religion, the role of pastor has become distorted. Rather than pastors being regarded as those who teach and equip their churches for the work of ministry, they have become further burdened with performing the ministry themselves in lieu of their congregations. I could fill a library with tales (some of them truly horror stories!) I’ve heard over the years of overworked pastors who not only performed all their duties described above, but also were the church janitors, handymen, groundskeepers, bookkeepers, worship leaders, offering-takers, and communion-servers. Many of them lived on pittances. On top of that, they frequently have to deal with toxic elders and deacons on power trips, some of them overruling God-authored initiatives the pastor had clearly heard from heaven about. All the while, many folks look at them while clucking their tongues and saying pastors are only interested in money.
No wonder pastors are dropping like flies out of the ministry and returning to secular employment! As of recent statistics, only 1 out of every 10 pastors will actually retire as a pastor.
Whole books have been written analyzing pastoral burnout and other related issues, so I will not waste your and my time reinventing that wheel here. Suffice it to say, Christendom has had an execrable record for how we treat our pastors!
Being an Example
Before moving on, I want to address that statistic stating, “66% of church members expect a minister and family to live at a higher moral standard than themselves.”
There is an almost universal assumption held by Christians and pop culture alike that pastors/ministers/etc. are somehow “holy men” possessing powers to obey Almighty God unavailable to mere pew sitters. A variant of this is the awe in which folks used in the gifts of the Spirit are held in Pentecostal circles. Some ministers get put on pedestals so high they get nosebleeds. That’s OK, I guess, so long as they personally don’t start believing their own press releases!😎
Are ministers indeed supposed be good examples of moral excellence and loving conduct? You bet!
Do they have any extra tools to accomplish that unavailable to not-ministers? Not for a second!
All ministers at any level, professional or otherwise, have all the same challenges, temptations, and trials every Christ-follower faces using the selfsame tools, promises, and power available to the average person in the pew — and nothing more! No minister gets a spiritual turbocharger added to their ability to obey God simply because they are graced with any of the ministry gifts under discussion here. The rules are the same, the Holy Spirit’s empowerment to obey them is the same, the rewards for obedience are — yup, you guessed it! — the same. What their ministry gift provides is the heavenly anointing to perform that function, nothing more, nothing less.
The salient difference between ministers and laypersons is the consequences for disobedience.
- If a man cheats on his wife, it will damage his walk with God, crater his marriage (perhaps to the point of divorce), damage (possibly destroy) his family, and the all the other fallout resulting from such a terrible choice.
- Ministers, on the other hand, have all that plus the almost certain termination of their ministry (typically for life), public humiliation in the press and their community (maybe even the nation), their flocks’ resulting disillusion with Jesus and His Church, and possibly even the complete death of the ministries they may have labored their entire lives to build. The relatively recent scandals of Ravi Zacharias and Robert Morris immediately come to mind as examples of this.
Apostles & Prophets
These are where the current controversy over ministry gifts is taking place. And, from my perspective, it all boils down to how you define these gifts.
Just so I cannot be accused of burying the lead here: both camps agree the canon of Scripture is indeed closed and therefore cannot be altered or amended. This issue is not open to debate by either side.
- The first camp is inhabited by those who are convinced these offices refer only to those men who penned our Bible. They believe these 2 ministry gifts inherently possess the authority/ability to author divinely inspired, authoritative Scripture. From that assumption, they logically conclude that since the canon is now closed, these gifts have necessarily ceased to exist.
- In the other camp, we have folks who believe these 2 offices are alive and well in the modern era, albeit slightly redefined. They believe the power to author Scripture is not irrevocably intertwined with these gifts as the others do. In other words, this group is convinced these ministry gifts continue to exist but with the authority to pen further Scriptures divinely removed.
What the Dictionary Says
Let’s see first if the dictionary can shed any light here.
- apostle
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- Each of the 11 chief surviving disciples of Jesus Christ
- Any important early Christian teacher, especially St. Paul
- The first successful Christian missionary in a country or to a people
- prophet
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- A person regarded as an inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God
- A person who advocates or speaks in a visionary way about a new belief, cause, or theory
What the Lexicon Says
Now we’ll look in the Greek lexicon.
- apostle (apostolos)
-
- a delegate, messenger, one sent forth with orders
- Specifically applied to the twelve apostles of Christ
- In a broader sense applied to other eminent Christian teachers (e.g., Barnabas, Timothy, Silvanus)
- prophet (prophetes)
-
- one who, moved by the Spirit of God and hence his organ or spokesman, solemnly declares to men what he has received by inspiration, especially concerning future events, and in particular such as relate to the cause and kingdom of God and to human salvation
- The OT prophets, having foretold the kingdom, deeds and death, of Jesus the Messiah.
- Men filled with the Spirit of God, who by God’s authority and command in words of weight pleads the cause of God and urges salvation of men
- Prophets that appeared in the apostolic age among Christians; they are associated with the apostles; they discerned and did what is best for the Christian cause, foretelling certain future events
- In the religious assemblies of the Christians, they were moved by the Holy Spirit to speak, having power to instruct, comfort, encourage, rebuke, convict, and stimulate, their hearers
I think the highlighted definitions give us the latitude to consider the latter of the two groups to be correct.
Apostles
Apostles are the visionaries and pioneers of the Body of Christ. They divinely perceive a spiritual need no one else can see and pray to receive divine marching orders on how to meet that need. They may stick with that one vision for the rest of their lives, as most of our examples below did.
Others may go someplace to launch a new outreach. They spend several years developing spiritual momentum, nurturing it into maturity and sustainability. All the while, they train successors to assume leadership over that work. When God says they’re done there and it’s time to move elsewhere and start something new, they obey. Rinse and repeat. This was the Apostle Paul’s modus operandi for the entirety of his ministry.
The original 12 were used to pioneer Christianity doctrinally, ministerially, and geographically. Since the death of John the Beloved, that “doctrinally” part has dropped off. All apostles, regardless of era, receive callings from the Most High to launch new ministry works, oftentimes to unreached people groups.
Prophets
I’ve already delved into this one as a gift of the Holy Spirit in my series on charismata elsewhere here in Miscellaneous Ramblings, specifically in my article entitled, “The Gift of Prophesy” The issues I explored there are equally applicable to this ministry gift. It’s simpler to refer you to that article than to copy-and-paste it here.😁
Prophets are also alive and well in the modern-day. I personally know a few. Other authors have written entire books on this gift/office, so I will not try to duplicate their efforts here, either.
I would like to close out with this thought, however:
Do not despise prophecies.
1 Thessalonians 5:20
Please note this verse is written in the imperative voice. In other words, it’s not a suggestion.
This is a directive from Almighty God. His commandments trump all opinions, all commentaries, all traditions, and all doctrinal statements. There is zero wiggle room here. And by the way, He’s not referring to the Old Testament.
So if you find yourself on the wrong side of that decree, I suggest you repent because you’re now accountable for it. Just sayin’… 😇
Thanks for reading!