By Mike Kim
Editor’s note – This article will be presented in three parts, three weeks running. Please note that Mike speaks as one who was a “traditional pastor” before embarking on his current journey.
It’s been said among those in our organic movement: if you want good answers, you need to ask good questions. In our journey out of inherited evangelical culture and conventional pastoral ministry, there were a slew of good questions with which God had us wrestle. One in particular that I wanted to highlight here has to do with a new (yet old) kind of ministry “leadership” in the church that has been strangely neglected: the five-fold gifting of Ephesians 4:11 — specifically the role of the apostolic and prophetic gifts in the church.
In Ephesians 4:11-16 Paul mentions five “people gifts” God gives to the church for the equipping of all saints to do all-hands-on-deck ministry needed for the maturation of the church from infancy to full Christ-like maturity: they are Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors/Shepherds, and Teachers. The passage is completely straightforward and often quoted — but just in reference to the role of pastors and teachers in the church. But doesn’t this miss the very point? Why do we not take Paul seriously that all five are needed? If a pancake recipe calls for the five ingredients of eggs, flour, sugar, butter and water, would skipping the first three ingredients and only focusing on water and butter do the trick of making a suitable breakfast for a hungry family? Why, then, do we do this with the five-fold gifting of the church? Why do we focus instead on just the last two in our ecclesiological expressions? And why have we largely passed over the first two, apostles and prophets, even though Paul twice in Ephesians describes them as foundation layers of the church?
Unfortunately, few of us hear the words, apostles and prophets, with a blank slate. Many have heard spooky stories involving an alleged apostle or prophet, or been taken advantage of by someone claiming to be one, or even seen a church experience problems from some form of abuse from one possessing either gifting. History is filled with examples of people with gifts and resources that didn’t have the character or wisdom to be able to handle them properly. This is nothing new in both the “sacred” and “secular” realms. But, experience conceded, what if Paul was really telling the truth? What if he was telling us key ingredients that the church absolutely needs to grow out of mere infancy into reproducing adulthood?
This not only is the straight-forward reading of Ephesians 4:11-16, but it also gains claim over us when we consider that Ephesians was a circular letter, designed to be publicly read in many different cities no matter what their own unique issues and people demographics were. Whatever Paul discusses in this standardized letter cannot be easily passed off as location, culture or community-specific. Instead, it holds weight as teaching that Paul wants people everywhere to reflect upon. Some, like Thom Wolf (a missionary and popular Perspectives course teacher from Global Spectrum), even see Ephesians along with Colossians comprising the bulk of the “deposit” to which Paul consistently refers in his letters; it was his standard teaching and training as an apostle who laid foundations for many churches as an “expert builder.” The bottom line is this: as people who claim that the Scriptures are our guide to faith and practice, we must push past whatever negative experiences or fear we may have and, instead, pay greater attention to the necessary role of apostles and prophets in the life, health and reproduction of the church — not because a crazy Christian is saying it, but because the Holy Spirit is saying it through Paul, an apostle.
Could this teaching in Ephesians 4:11-16 be as important to heed as Paul’s instruction on salvation in chapters 1-2, on relationships in chapters 4-5, and on spiritual warfare in chapter 6? Absolutely! It was as close to a standard as Paul may have taught, church to church and region to region.
If we accept this, then we now have a compass to help us understand how the church lost her way post-Reformation. In my reading of history, the Reformation [1.0] was a movement spearheaded by TEACHERS whom God used prophetically to right the ship that had gone off course. Reformers like Hus, Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin were men of the WORD, and nearly every one of them was committed to eliminating the ecclesiological “middle man” (the pope or the priest who spoke in and read a Latin text) and putting a common language bible into the hands of every man, woman and child. They did not quote tradition; they quoted Scripture, getting us back to Scriptural realities like Grace alone, Faith alone, Scripture alone. And they spoke with a spiritual authority and prophetic urgency that was perfect for the kairos moment.
But, as often happens, core ideas got lost in translation such that church-as-we-soon-knew-it had unwittingly and ironically re-established some of the very structures and re-adopted some of the very problems the Reformers “protested” against! We talk the talk about the “priesthood of all believers,” but haven’t we set up our own “middle-men” called pastors (or “pastor-teachers”) instead of priests, bishops or popes? We tell them to get educated, have them spend the bulk of their week in preparation of teaching/”feeding” us, and pay them handsomely for it. We like it when they can speak Greek and Hebrew and take their word for it when they quote it — without checking it out for ourselves! We don’t pay them or encourage them to EQUIP us [as Paul tells us they're supposed to do in Ephesians 4:12] — just to preach and teach or “feed” us. We don’t want their intern or understudy; we want THEM to teach us and build churches and church empires around the cult of their personalities. THEY are the new priests: the professional clergy class that the Reformers tried hard to get rid of. They are the “ministers” and the rest are “lay people.” What happened then to the “priesthood of all believers”?
We may not realize it yet, but Western churches for the last several hundred years have been “led” almost exclusively by only two of the five-fold ministry gifts in Eph.4:11: Pastors and Teachers — with brief appearances from the evangelists. Did the Reformers know that the time would come when church architecture would have a pulpit at the center instead of an altar? That 50% or more of the service would go towards the “sermon”? That churches would generously pay a new breed of clergy to teach us? That “good teaching” would quote Greek and Hebrew — inaccessible languages? That leadership would not enable people to self-feed with the Scriptures they fought to put into our hands but rather keep them dependent on them as experts? That we would fundamentally and uncritically believe that knowledge is the path to transformation or maturity. That church would feel like school [or now a concert] more than family? These are the vestiges of a mutated Teacher-infused DNA that has crept into the cellular level of Christ’s body.
We also see obvious vestiges of the mutant Pastor/Shepherd DNA too. To ponder: why is the spoken goal of finding a church “getting fed”? Aren’t there lots of people who literally and figuratively need to be “fed” that Jesus specifically told us to feed? Why do small groups stay together and closed for years? Why are they deemed successful when they do? Shouldn’t replication and reaching the lost be a better indicator of health than longevity of friendship? Why do pastors feel it is primarily THEIR responsibility to care for the flock, THEIR responsibility to “minister”? Why do churches talk about being “spiritual resources” to people and act like purveyors of religious goods and services? Why is it optional or a bonus if a church does evangelism or engages in mission? Why do most churches give less than 5% of their budget towards mission locally or globally? Why is that ok with most people when we consider all that the bible says about the mission and redemptive plan of God? Again, vestiges of a mutated Pastor-infused DNA that has crept into the cellular level of Christ’s body. It was never supposed to be like this!
The five-fold gifting gives us the compass to see how we lost our way: too much leadership by pastors and teachers, and not enough from the other three. The church reflects the over-focus on inside-the-walls relationships (Pastor) and over-focus on orthodoxy and theology (Teacher) that both have brought to the table post-Reformation. But not only was there an over-representation of leadership from pastors and teachers over the centuries, there was also an under-representation of the foundational gifts of Apostles and Prophets. And it shows.
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