Ephesians: Our Identity in Christ ~ Part 15
Eliminating the Laity
Ephesians 4:11-12
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ. (Ephesians 4:11-12)
What's wrong with the church in our society today? Why is it declining? Why is it apparently so lacking in spiritual vitality?
No doubt many factors could be sighted to explain why churches and even denominations plateau and decline. Perhaps there is a loss of visionary leadership. Some denominations were founded by visionary men. After these men passed from the scene, the denominations lost sight of their vision. They began to flounder and fail. Perhaps the vision has been replaced with organizational structures. An organization without a vision will eventually calcify and lose the flexibility to change and adapt. While the message never changes the methods must. Many denominational ships strike the rocks here. And as a result the church or denomination begins to isolate itself further. This isolation only increases the rate at which it declines. Finally, sin is certainly a reason why many churches decline. In both Old and New Testaments, when there was blatant and unrepentant sin in the congregation, that sin had to be dealt with before the community of God's people could move forward. The sins of Achan in Joshua 7 and Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 testify to this. We are only kidding ourselves if we presume that God winks at sin. He is a holy God and calls us to be holy people.
There are probably many more factors which could be cited to help explain the anemia of the church. But there is one major factor which has had devastating results. This enormous and comprehensive aberration is that the church has developed a laity.
Somewhere in church history there developed a notion of a clergy --- those paid to do ministry --- and a laity --- those who receive the ministry. This notion has developed to the point where today there is what is known as a clergy-laity dichotomy. What this means is that there has developed a view that there are ministers paid to do all the ministry and that the common folk in the pew pay them to do it. But this is not what the Bible teaches at all. How did we drift so far from biblical teaching?
What we need in our day is to refocus on the biblical model for ministry. Where this has been done, and the biblical model has been tried, it has succeeded. What we find in the Bible may not be what we have accepted through tradition, but it will be what God intends, and it will be what will work.
The real need which the Word of God reveals is to eliminate the laity. The laity, as we define it in most of our churches, truly needs to be eliminated. How do we do that? We do it by equipping them to minister. This is what the Bible teaches is the true role for all God's people. The professional ministers are not paid to do all the ministering. The people of God are called to minister.
Having said that, let me add that there are those gifted people who have been given to the church. But those gifted people whom Christ has given as leaders are given for a purpose. Therefore, it is important to look at both the people and the purpose.
The People
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers . . . (4:11)
The people who are considered in this verse are the people God has gifted to provide leadership in His church. There are Christ's gifts to the church. We have already looked briefly at some of the gifts of the Spirit given to individuals. Here we come upon the gifts of the resurrected Christ to His church. These are gifts that He gave in order to establish and lead the church.
Apostles are the first category of gifted individuals. An apostle is one who is sent. In most of the places where this term occurs it refers to the original twelve apostles. These were men chosen by Jesus to be with Him and to occupy a special place in the future kingdom. But there is also a wider application given to apostles. There were a number of other people to whom this term was applied in the New Testament. We see Paul and Barnabas (Acts 14:4,14), Silas (1 Thess. 2:7), Apollos (1 Cor. 4:9), James, Jesus' brother (Gal. 1:19), and Andronicus and Junias (Rom. 16:7) referred to as apostles. These were people of wide influence in the church generally. Their ministry was instrumental in the establishment of churches. And in that sense the ministry of an apostle lives on to this day.
Prophets are those who tell forth the Word of God. The ministry of a prophet is not so much a foretelling as it is a forthtelling of the Word of the Lord. The New Testament prophet speaks a now word to the church. The Bible teaches that the New Testament gift of prophecy is given for edification, exhortation, and comfort. Indeed, that is precisely the effect when God speaks a fresh word into our contemporary situation.
Evangelists are those who are anointed to preach with power to the lost. This special anointing on their lives enables them to draw a net around lost people with keen effectiveness.
Pastors and teachers may be thought of as one gift. The Greek structure suggests that there is a linkage between the two words, thus establishing a leadership gift of pastor/teacher. There are good reasons for linking these two gifts together. A pastor is one who shepherds the sheep. The word from the Greek which is translated as pastor literally means “shepherd” and has a root meaning of “to feed.” While the image of a shepherd evokes many pictures, the chief job and responsibility of the shepherd was to keep the sheep fed. Well-fed sheep produce much wool. Well-fed sheep are contented sheep. Well-fed sheep are productive sheep. Well-fed sheep are healthy sheep. And so the primary task of a pastor is to keep the sheep fed.
But teaching is also linked to the other leadership gifts as well. In the New Testament some people are referred to as apostles and teachers, and prophets and teachers. Indeed, apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors all should be involved in discipeling others to be what they are. In the New Testament, the training ground for ministry was an apprenticeship. These leaders had to be teachers.
So there are gifted leaders given to the church. Over the centuries Christ has given many choice servants who have made a tremendous impact on the church. We see the Twelve Apostles, Timothy, Titus, Tychius, Epaphroditus, Stephen, and Philip. The church fathers such as Polycarp, pastor of the church at Smyrna, Ignatius, the pastor of the church at Antioch, Justin Martyr, defender of the faith in Samaria. We find Athanasius, Augustine, and Chrysostom, the gifted preacher and pastor to the church at Antioch and Constantinople. In the time before the Reformation, we find anointed people like Peter Waldo, Savanarola, John Huss, Cranmer, Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Samuel Rutherford, and William Guthrie. In the days of the Reformation we see Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Melanchthon, Balthasar Hubmaier, and Felix Mainz. On both sides of the Atlantic during the seventeenth century we see John Bunyan, George Fox, Roger Williams, and William Penn. In the eighteenth century we behold John and Charles Wesley moving two continents toward God. We see Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, David Brainerd, William Carey, and Adoniram Judson. In the nineteenth century, there was Dwight L. Moody, Charles Spurgeon, Charles Finney, Sam Jones, John A. Broadus, and David Livingstone. In our twentieth century we see Billy Sunday, George Truett, and Billy Graham, to name a few. And thousands more than these have been the rich deposit of God's grace to His church.
The Purpose
. . . for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ. (4:12)
Why has God given these leadership gifts to the church? He has given them for the equipping of the saints. And what are these saints to be equipped to do? They are to be equipped for the work of service. The word service is also translated as ministry. And what results from the saints being equipped for ministry? The effect is the building up of the body of Christ. So we see that the saints (you and me) are to be equipped so that the saints can minister, so that the body of Christ can be built up. This is the purpose for which God has given these leaders to the church.
This is a dynamic truth. This means that everyone is to be engaged in ministry. It is not the work of some hired holy man to do all the ministry.
Some people have the attitude that they pay a minister to do the ministry. By ministry they mean that he is to do everything. He is to do all the visiting, all the evangelism, all the praying, all the counseling, all the administration --- and if time permits he needs to get together a little talk for Sunday. After all, they think, that's why we pay him.
It should be no wonder that so many ministers are dropping out because of burn-out. They are burned out because they can simply not keep up with these kinds of expectations. In fact, many ministers feel compelled to pretend they are doing it all in order to keep up an image. This only further drives them to discouragement. The harder they work the more work there is to do. Their families get neglected, a fact which is lost on some church members, and the demands keep coming. “Why would God put such an unreasonable burden on one person?” Why would He, indeed! He didn't! He gave the ministry to all the saints. And He gave the task of equipping the saints to do that ministry to anointed and gifted leaders. You don't pay ministers to do all the ministry.
In fact, the Bible teaches that a primary rationale for a person being supported full-time is their need to have the time to prepare to teach. The Bible says in 1 Timothy 5:17, “elders with a gift of leadership should be considered worthy of respect, and of adequate salary, particularly if they work hard at their preaching and teaching.” The idea is that it takes time to prepare adequately for preaching and teaching. You just can't get a little talk up on Saturday night after you are exhausted from the week's activities. In fact, the apostles, in Acts 6, refused to get bogged down in the benevolent ministry of the church because it was taking them away from what they considered to be their chief priority. They said, “It is not desirable for us to neglect the Word of God in order to serve tables” (Acts 6:2). Then they said, “But we will devote ourselves to prayer, and to the ministry of the Word” (Acts 6:4). Their chief priority was the Word of God and prayer. It is interesting to note that often these are the first two things that are neglected in a busy minister's schedule. But it takes time to hear from God. Prayer and the diligent study of the Word go hand in hand in that endeavor. And, if you don't spend time at it, you might get a little talk together, but you will never equip the saints. And that is the problem.
The saints need to do the ministry. The saints need to be prepared or equipped to be Jesus for someone else. Only in this way will someone be ministered to. No pastor or team of pastors can do the ministry which has been ordained for the saints to do. And here this idea of the laity as the people who receive ministry simply gets in the way. The laity thus defined must be eliminated. They must be turned into ministers. Only when the laity is eliminated can the church be the church. Somehow something must change in the self-image of the people. People must begin to see themselves as a community of ministers. This does not mean that pastors and other leadership gifts are no longer necessary. They are. They are necessary to equip the saints. But the saints --- all of us --- are the ministers. All of us are to be available to minister to others in the community of the church.
We're to minister in practical ways, but primarily in spiritual ways. We are to spend time with one another, pray for one another, share Jesus with one another, encourage one another, and even admonish one another. When we deal with one another, we are to see ourselves as representatives of the Lord Jesus. And the pastor is not the only one who can do that. All of you can be instruments through whom His power flows. But that takes a fundamental alteration of thinking. You must begin to see yourself as that representative. You must begin to function on the level of spiritual gifts by finding your gifts and using them. And you must seek to be led by the
Spirit to minister to people.
And all of us must do it. The reason should be clear. There are times when we need ministry. And there are times when we need to minister. This is why God created the community of the King which He calls the church. God insists on dealing with us in community. He has chosen that through the church we would grow to maturity. He could have dealt with us in isolation, but He chose not to do so. Indeed, God in His very nature is community. The Trinity speaks of the community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so God has put us together with other believers that we might give and receive ministry and that we might be matured into the image of Jesus Christ.
And that is why He gave gifted leadership to the church. Gifted leadership is given to teach, preach, equip, and challenge the saints --- you --- to do what God has gifted and called you to do.
