Fivefold Ministry Misconceptions

Misconceptions About The Fivefold Ministry

Some people think the fivefold ministry is not an active call in the modern church. Others think it's a form of power and control in the modern church. Both miss the point...

Misunderstanding Positional Hierarchy

These are areas of ministry - not areas of government. These positions are intended to grow, direct, serve, and maintain the Church. These are not positions that are meant to rule, dictate, oppress, and manipulate the Church. The only hierarchy that should matter to us is that Jesus is the King of the Church and we follow Him. When it comes to the rest, we are one body, and the eye can't say that it's better than the foot. Both serve a purpose that the other does not. A blind man can walk, and a lame man can see, but in a healthy body both fully serve thier unique purposes.

To say that they were listed in order of importance or authority would be a misunderstanding. Christ walked out the fullness of all five of these ministries. We are to walk them out in surrender to Him and dependence on Holy Spirit - knowing that we should also be walking out all of them in fullness, and our limitations in any one of these areas is a testament to our insufficiency before Christ.

If anyone thinks that they are better because they are superior in any one of these ministries - say teaching - then they are missing the bigger fact that they are admitting to only being good at one fifth of the whole ministry that Christ embodies. And if anyone claims to walk out the fullness of all of these ministries, then they are making themself equal with Christ.

The fivefold ministry is not a ladder that you have to climb. You don't start out as a teacher and work your way up to being a pastor, then an evangelist, then a prohpet, then an apostle. These ministries are giftings, not skills to be attained by putting in time. You could have an evangelist with 30 years of experience, a teacher with 20 years of experience, and an apostle who is only a year into their walk with God all working together to build up the Church, by, say, planting a new church.

The apostle will have newer ideas that resonate with the younger generation, while the evangelist will have plenty of experience to draw on in order to reach out to that younger generation with those ideas, and the teacher will be there to both disciple the apostle, as well as the new congregation. And through them working together, the church will be planted. And as believers begin to attend the church God will provide the prophet and shepherd, and many others with overlapping gifts for the advancement of that congregation.

That's not to say that we can't all serve in every one of these ministries at some point and in some capacity, but we all know that a jack of all trades is a master of none. And it's not a bad thing to be very good, and skilled, and talented, and gifted at one particular ministry. I just want to be grounded in the humility of knowing that even if you are great at being an apostle, you are still only performing well in one-fifth of the whole ministry of the Church.

In summary, don't think of the five-fold ministry as some sort of hierarchy, but rather as a round table where each ministry sits, and in the middle of the table is the Church - which is where we should all be focusing. We work together, we share, we discuss, but we are to do so as co-laborers in God's Kingdom.

I wanted to lay that groundwork first because it's easy to get caught up in the majesty of each one of these ministries when you start to zoom in and focus on the specific details about any one of them. These are ministries given by Jesus for the purpose of building up His Bride. Of course they are going to be wonderful and majestic positions, and of course they will inspire us to want to walk in them. Unfortunately, we also tend to see them as intimidating and think that we will never be able to carry them out, or we are not worthy of them, or we compare ourselves to each other and get discouraged.

We do not walk out these ministries in our own strength, but only by the help and guidance of Holy Spirit. Anyone who has served for any amount of time in any one of these ministries will be able to tell you about times when they were weak and had to rely on God to carry out the ministry through them. It is not our particular skill, talent, strength, knowledge, cleverness, charisma, charm, or anything else that we possess that Christ needs from us in these ministries. He just wants us to surrender to Him and follow Him in carrying them out. We are His Bride, and we follow His lead.

Paul tells us that the intended outcome of these ministries is that we will have clear direction, so as not to be fooled by scheming people, and we will speak the truth in love. We will grow into the likeness of Christ. And we will grow in unity and love as the body of Christ.

Ephesians 4:14-16 (NASB95) As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

Claims Of Cessation

I want to address the idea that some members of the protestant church seem very passionate about. There are branches of the protestant church that strongly believe that the ministries of apostle and prophet have ceased to be ordained by God. They think that those offices, essentially, died with the original 12 apostles.

They quote Ephesians 2:20 and say that the foundation was laid by the original 12 apostles and there is no longer a "need" for further building on the foundation.

Ephesians 2:20 (NLT) Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself.

They take this verse out of context, and twist it to mean something that it does not. Paul is telling the Gentiles how they are unified in the family of God. Paul is pointing out who laid the groundwork for the ministry that reached them, and that they are now part of. He's not saying that part of the ministry, which he doesn't actually define until later, is dead. Why would he include dead ministries in the later description of ministries that Christ ordained for building up His Church?

If the office of apostle is no longer active then why are churches still being planted, and new ministries being created around the world?

If the office of prophet is no longer active then why do we still have missionaries being sent (like Jonah) to difficult places in order to reach people for God?

Maybe the western church has become stagnant, and as such the ministries of apostle and prophet in it have atrophied to the point where they appear to have ceased from the perspective of those entrenched in it's stagnation. Who needs apostles if no new ideas are valued or accepted because they would go against tradition and dogma. Who needs prophets if all the creeds, and sermons, and Sunday-school lessons have already been written down. The ministry of teacher would probably atrophy too, but instead it is just assumed to be absorbed into the role of the "pastor." And of course the "pastor" is happy to have evangelists who will do the vulnerable work of actually going outside and talking to people; which has the added benefit of bringing more butts into the seats and tithes into the coffers.

Don't take me wrong. I feel sorry for pastors in the western church. You start out feeling the call to shepherd God's people, but what you ultimately get is the weight of the entire fivefold ministry placed on your shoulders. And, like I said earlier, only Jesus was able to actually carry out the entire fivefold ministry Himself. I do not envy the role that the modern pastor takes on, because it is an impossible task to fill the shoes of Jesus.

I think the primary reason people think these offices have ceased is because there's a concption that pastors have become the defacto head of the church, and the only offices that can possibly exist for them to be "in charge" are the offices that they can delegate things to. The cessationists would have you believe that the "pastor" is the one responsible for the growth of the church. And it's precisely because the "pastor" in modern churches tries to fill more than one role that they tend to get burnt out and discouraged.

The pastor should be a counselor, but they try to be the teacher. The pastor should visit the sick, but they feel obligated to expand the congregation and plant new churches. The pastor should speak truth in love, instead they are taught to deny, or even villify, the prophets.

What's worse, is that if a prophet enters a congregation the only way they are "allowed" to get the attention of the people is to serve in some limited capacity under the direction and approval of the multi-taksing, distracted "pastor."

Or if an apostle feels led to grow the congration in new ways, they just get shot down time and time again by an overwhelmed and exhausted "pastor."

I've been in a church where an entire team of seven elders was consumed for at least two years in just trying to counsel and resolve conflicts between two lead "pastors" who could not get along. The two "pastors" were so fixated on their own "authority" that they created an environment where an exhausted team of elders eventually had to expel both of them from the congregation and elect two new "pastors" to lead the church.

One last point I would like to make is the irony that the ministries that the Bible talks about the most are supposedly the ones that ceased, which implies that the "survivng" ministries have comparatively less direction directly from the Bible.

If you go to blueletterbible.com and look up Ephesians 4:11 and click on the Strong's reference for each word of each of the five ministries you will see a count for how many times that word, used in that verse, appears in the Bible.

In the NASB95 the word apostle occurs 80 times, prophet 144, evangelist 3, pastor 18, and teacher 59.

The Bible talks about apostles and prophets way more than pastors (shepherds) or evangelists, with teachers being kind of the underlying current. So why does the western church talk almost exclusively about pastors and evangelists? It's a loose correlation, but it's an interesting one nonetheless.

Maybe what needs to "cease" is the idea that the "pastor" is "in charge" and the whole nonesense of putting the entire weight of the fullness of Christ's ministry on one person. Maybe the church is stagnating because it's been taken over by a bunch of loud, overbearing people who want us to believe that God stopped working the way He has always worked. Jesus didn't perform miracles in His hometown because the people there did not believe, and maybe that is exactly why the western church doesn't see His miracles any more either. Maybe the ministries, and miracles, were not the things that ceased. Maybe it was true faith in God that ceased...