An except from Steve Thomas' short book Unity and diversity (releasing the variety of gifts that God has put in the church), available in full and free from Salt & Light.
Chapter 4: Developing a diverse team
So, God gives apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers to equip all of God’s people for their life of service in God’s Kingdom. As we have said, the ultimate goal of what are often called fivefold ministries is to equip ordinary people who have come to know Christ to do extraordinary things in Christ’s service. I propose simply to summarise in this chapter the various ministries outlined in Ephesians 4, and then describe each in much more detail in subsequent chapters, and suggest how we can go about training and developing them.
The team as a hand
One well-used illustration of the fivefold ministries is that of a human hand. (I confess that I don’t even know who used the picture originally!) But it is quite helpful. The thumb is seen as a picture of the apostolic ministry, which somehow helps all the others to function – a co ordinating ministry. The second finger, like the prophetic ministry, points the way. The third finger protrudes more than the others, and is like the evangelist, who “sticks out” into the world. The fourth finger carries the wedding ring, which speaks of covenant love, which the genuine pastor (I mean those who have a real pastoring gift, not simply those who carry a title of ‘Pastor’) promotes most strongly in the church. And the fifth finger, like the teaching gift, definitely gets in your ear!
We shall go into the role and function of each of these fivefold gifts separately, and then talk about how the gifts operate in team.
Apostles
Apostles were obviously crucial in their role of establishing and fathering churches.
Apostles were not the only ones starting churches, of course. Philip (an evangelist) was active in preaching the gospel in Samaria, and saw signs and miracles happen there, and obviously had gathered a number of believers together, but Peter and John clearly established the church through an impartation of the Holy Spirit. And indeed, we assume that the Ethiopian official whom Philip encountered also started churches in Ethiopia, and people from Rome who were in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost presumably returned and started the church in Rome.
The apostles were key in directing the churches’ life in Acts, alongside the elders appointed in each local church. Significant changes in, and questions about, how the church went about their developing ministry always came back to the apostles. Undoubtedly apostles equip others to find their place in the growth and expansion of the church, have building ministries which build people into the life of the church, and keep them moving in a vision for God’s Kingdom.
Prophets
The ministry of prophets was well known in the history of the Jewish people as people who heard clear messages from God and spoke directly for God into different situations in the journey of God’s people. Their ministry was a mix of forthtelling and foretelling. Some of their ministry addressed issues in the current day, and spoke the word of God into those situations – forthtelling – while other prophetic ministry was much more predictive in nature, and declared God’s promises for the future – foretelling.
Both types of prophet are in evidence in the New Testament. Agabus is clearly a predictive prophet. In Acts 11, he prophesies a famine in the entire Roman world, which led to an offering being taken for the Jerusalem church; he later prophesies Paul’s imprisonment. Judas and Silas were also seen as “forthtelling” prophets (Acts 15:32), who “encouraged and strengthened the believers”. The equipping prophet is always seeking to help God’s people hear what God is saying to them and to the church as a whole, and to train up others to develop their ability to hear God, and speak God’s word to others. He equips others for their ministry.
Evangelists
Evangelists help the church grow through seeing people come to faith in Jesus and join the church. They are vital to the Body of Christ, although they can often feel on the “edge” of the church community, by and large because they are doorways into the church. Theirs is a ministry of multiplication. Acts 21:8 describes Philip as an evangelist who had four daughters who were prophetesses. Their ministry is often accompanied by miracles, healings and deliverance. The equipping evangelist wants to help God’s people be fruitful, and wants to strengthen them in faith and courage that they can also lead others to Christ, and indeed, can see the power of God come into other people’s lives. There are, of course, many different types of evangelists, just as there are different types of prophets: I will outline more of this in a later chapter.
Pastors and teachers
The way that the passage is written in Ephesians 4:11 shows that the ministry of shepherds (the true meaning of the word pastor) and teachers are closely linked. They help the church grow through pastoral care and teaching of the word. Equipping ministry in this realm helps strengthen God’s people to press strongly into their relationship with Christ, and to understand the word of God and how to build on it, and will develop others who can care for others and teach others in their following of Christ. There is some variety of perspective amongst commentators as to whether these are two separate ministries or one ministry with a dual emphasis. I will deal with these two ministries in separate chapters, because my own conviction is that they need to be recognised separately.
While I have seen some “shepherds” who also have good teaching gifts, I have also worked with pure shepherds who do not excel as teachers, since they are primarily people persons. Likewise, I have worked with teachers who are not great carers for people, since they are often black and white in the way they look at and apply God’s word, and therefore are often felt not to be very pastoral. The ministry of the teacher focuses on the word of God, what the Bible is saying, and what it teaches us about the way we should live as God’s people. The teacher is more concerned with principles, and the shepherd more concerned with people. There is, of course, considerable crossover between the two, but distinctions still exist.
Gift and ministry mix
Although many people are a mix of one or two of these different giftings and ministries, most of those called to ministry in the church are strong in some, and lacking in others of them. This is one reason an individual minister (the pastor, the vicar, or the minister) is insufficient to lead a local church alone, and underlines why local churches need access to other types of ministry to develop the diversity of people in their churches.
I come back to what I said in the foreword of this book. I realised many years ago that, if the church I was leading was limited to me and my gifts, they were in trouble! The church would be fine, so long as it was made up of people just like me – they would be happy in the main. But if there were people who were not like me, who had other giftings, they would feel very deprived, and very dissatisfied indeed. Indeed, let’s just suppose that the ministries mentioned in Ephesians 4 each made up 20% of the total of ministries in the Body of Christ. So, let’s say 20% are apostles, 20% prophets, 20% evangelists, 20% pastors and 20% teachers. If I, as a leader, am mainly a teacher, I will satisfy and be able to develop 20% of the people. The rest of the people will either remain in the church largely dissatisfied and undeveloped in their gifts, or else they will move on to a church where the leader pleases them better, and is more akin to who they are in their gifting. Indeed, I suspect that this is largely what happens in the church at large. Either people stay attending a church led by someone who is not really similar to them in terms of their gifting, or else they move on to another church led by someone who is more akin to their own gifting. This is not simply a question of whether we are like the leader, or even whether we like the leader, but whether we feel that they are developing us for the ministry that Jesus is calling us to fulfil. Is this why we see so much church-hopping from the saints? Does it come more from boredom than a bad heart? Perhaps they are not really being equipped for their ministry as they should be?
If this why people keep moving churches, then all we do is recycle church members, rather than develop teams of leaders and ministries who can lead growing churches that satisfy, develop and train all sorts of differently gifted people.
So, the time may have come to raise the bar, in terms of leadership in our churches. How, then, can we raise up leadership teams that include all of the necessary giftings to equip all of the gifted people in our congregations?
Five gifts and the church community
I first came across this way of visualising what some call the ‘APEST’ gifts – Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd and Teacher – when I was pointed to a blog post. It helpfully, in my view, draws out how the 5 gifts play their part in helping God’s the church be all that he wants it to be.
The circle represents the church.
The ‘APE’ gifts function in an outward-facing way on the edge of the community:
Apostles are pioneers who love to move Jesus’s movement forward. They want to extend and take new ground. They are risk takers who are adaptive, innovative and problem-solvers. They grasp core values and replicate them in the people they send out. They ask, “Where next?”
Prophets help the community stay aligned to God. They are attuned to Holy Sprit’s leading; they challenge injustice and call for a high moral standard within the Body. They ask, “What does God think?”
Evangelists love inviting others into community. Their heart is to make the circle bigger by recruiting others. They are enthusiastic promoters and storytellers. They are the most likely to see those who are left out and welcome them in. They are infectious communicators of the gospel message and call for a personal response to the redemption of Christ. At the same time, evangelists are often good at leading Christians out into the world for witness, so they provide a two way bridge: for non-Christians into the church, and for Christians out of the church for friendship and witness with non-Christians.
The other two gifts (‘ST’) are more inward facing to promote health and stability within the community:
Shepherds (Pastors) care for the health of the community. They nurture, support and promote unity. They are the glue that holds a diverse community together through compassionate care and encouragement. They seek to reconcile and reunite parts that naturally tend to divide.
Teachers keep us biblically grounded. They understand God’s word and know how to explain it in a way that impacts others. They help systematize our organizations and create traditions so we can leave a legacy for the next generation.
Some of the challenges of the five gifts in team!
There are, of course, irritations as well as joys in having differently gifted people working together in team. There is a certain amount of “rubbing up” against one another. Prophetic people want truth, life and honesty, calling a spade a spade, and can sometimes be rather blunt. Apostolic people like things clear, strategic and well defined, and can sometimes “box in” other giftings. For that matter, evangelists can be enormously pragmatic and unprincipled, so long as people come to Christ, while teachers hate the pragmatic sloppiness that can be found in others. The pastor just wants everyone to be happy, and tries desperately to avoid conflict.
Every team will need to take time to appreciate, value and receive the gifts of other members of the team, appreciate their strengths, and find grace for their weaknesses. This will take honest communication and good leadership from the apostolic leader.
Going back to my Baptist roots, I now see that the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers has a fault-line in it. That is, it leads people to conclude that anyone may minister in any way in the Body of Christ. This is unhelpful. People need to understand which gifts God has given them. And then, they still need training in how to minister in the gifting that they have, how to helpfully share the revelation that they have, how to care for God’s people with sensitivity, etc. So training and equipping God’s people is essential.
