Church Governance (17)

When reading Ephesians 4, it is really important to follow Paul’s line of thought right through. The chapter begins with a challenge to be humble and gentle and to love one another. Pauls follows this with teaching about unity. The message of Ephesians 4:3-6): is that there is one God, one Father, one Lord, one faith, one hope, one baptism, one body, and one of nearly everything else.

Most readers assume that Paul goes on to a different topic in Eph 4:7 and starts a new teaching about leadership. This is not correct. His teaching about gifts is a natural consequence of his teaching about unity. Because there is one God, one Lord, and one of everything else, you would expect that there would be one leader, but that is the one exception. There is one church with numerous leaders. A church needs more than one leader, because one person does not have all the gifts that are needed to represent Jesus.

When Jesus ascended, he sent the Holy Spirit to earth, but this is not the gift that Paul is speaking of to the Ephesians. An important consequence of his ascension was that he opened up the way for many people to step into a leadership role. If he had remained on earth, he would have been the one leader of the church. Everything would have been directed to him. By going away and not appointing a successor, he made it possible for most people to become leaders.

He did not look for the most Christ like of his disciples on earth and leave him to control the church, because he knew that none of his disciples was up to the task. Jesus was the perfect prophet, apostle, evangelist and pastor-teacher. No other human could fulfil all those roles, so Jesus chose to have a group of elders care for each local church. One would be a prophet. Another would be an evangelist. A couple might be pastor-teachers. One or two might have potential to be sent out as an apostle.

None of these people could fully represent Jesus, but together they could. Jesus knew that no human would be capable of being his successor, so he gave people with different giftings to care for the church together. It took a team of elders with balanced giftings to care for a body of people in the way that Jesus had cared for his disciples.