Today, we offer you a challenging excerpt from the new book, 5Q: Reactivating The Original Intelligence Of The Body Of Christ. It’s no secret that the Church has some hurdles to conquer in order to become the missional movement that is embedded in its genetic code. In today’s post, Alan addresses this and answers all of us who wonder, “Is there a silver bullet that will just fix everything?”

Read on to find out how 5Q can lead to actual transformation in the 21st Century Church.

Happy New Year from the whole 5Q team! We are beyond excited for 2018 and can’t wait to share all the latest news and updates that we’ve been working on, but…we are going to wait just a little longer.

Last year, we had an amazing co-op of writers and thinkers come together and provide some inspiring and paradigm-shifting content. So, before we launch a new year’s worth of Re5Qlutions and new resources, let’s take a look at five great posts from the last year that have pushed the 5Q conversation forward way beyond the blog.

“The church is empowered “by a certain communion with Christ which allows some measure of his perfected spirituality and destiny to be repeated or re-enacted in our lives.” So much so that we can legitimately say that if Jesus is the incarnation of God, then the church (individually and corporately) must in turn be particular and local incarnations of Jesus. Augustine is ascribed as saying that, “A Christian is: a mind through which Christ thinks, a heart through which Christ loves, a voice through which Christ speaks, and a hand through which Christ helps.” This is as true corporately as it is individually. The miracle is that he actually chooses to abide with/in any particular people.

We are not called to introduce people to a truth claim; we are trying to introduce them to Jesus himself.  He is the good news. The good news is incarnated in Jesus.  It is personified in Jesus. The gospel is best communicated in flesh, not just in words.  So Evangelism always begins with our life, our actions, our character, our posture. Can we state propositions about Jesus? Yes of course, but we must physically incarnate Jesus before we verbally instruct people about Jesus.

In the last post we looked at the Teacher capacity and we are going to continue to work through each of the five gifts, sharing insights from a recent sermon series from Jon Ritner, Pastor of Ecclesia Hollywood, as well as excerpts from the new book, 5Q: Reactivating The Original Intelligence And Capacity Of The Body Of Christ. In this post we are going to look at the Shepherd.

We’re going to walk through each of the gifts over the coming weeks, and today, we’re going to start with the most familiar: Teacher. Our goal is take the most familiar gift, the teacher, and help you think differently about it, see the calling from another point of view, helping you to experience it as a multi-faceted identity.

Over the course of a life in ministry, this is a very common question for most of us. The more we dive into 5Q, really get into the guts of it, the more that believe that APEST is the way to discover the answer. More than just giving an answer though, 5Q launches us on a journey where we discover God’s will as we exercise our calling. Beyond our personal calling, 5Q gives us a way to experience our call as a part of the function of the whole Body of Christ.

Last week, we looked at the state of Apostles, Prophets and Evangelists in the Church. Bringing the APE back from near extinction is a post that takes an honest look at the APE and the lack of place they find in current state of the Body of Christ. 

This week we want to Release The APE Back Into The Wild, back into the Church, their natural habitat. 

At his point in our history, most churches exist to perpetuate of systems of shepherding and teaching; and that isn’t a bad thing in itself, but the Shepherd/Teachers are internal functions, only some of the necessary systems of a healthy body. We need the outward, apostolic gifts.