The Church Reduced Itself to Two Voices. Here's What Was Lost.
If you've spent any time in Western churches in the last several centuries, you know the template.
A pastor preaches on Sunday. The pastoral staff cares for the congregation during the week. Small groups form for learning and relationships. Programs are built. A community gathers.
This is not a bad thing. But Paul's vision in Ephesians 4:11-13 is something considerably larger than this and something the institutional church has, over a very long time, quietly abandoned.
Paul names five graces that Christ gave his church at the ascension: Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher — APEST.
But here is what the history of the Western church demonstrates: Shepherd and Teacher became the template. They defined what a minister was, what a church looked like, what success meant. The apostolic, the prophetic, and the evangelistic were progressively sidelined, then effectively institutionalized out of existence.
Theologian Darrell Guder is direct about what this costs: the ST-bias — the church's default reduction to only Shepherd and Teacher — is "certainly one of the major and most daunting challenges that the Western Christian movement faces."
So what do we actually lose?
Without the apostolic, the church stops moving toward the frontier. It loses its missionary nerve, its capacity to plant and extend, its sense of sentness.
Without the prophetic, the church loses its soul. No one to guard the covenantal relationship with God. No one to speak truth to power. No one to ask the hard questions about whether the institution has become self-protective.
Without the evangelistic, the church turns inward. The message stops being a message and becomes an internal language. Outsiders feel like outsiders.
But here is the most important thing to understand, and it is what makes 5Q more than an organizational framework:
“Each of the five callings is not just a ministry function. It is a mode of Christ's own presence in and through his Body. To suppress any one of them is to suppress a dimension of Jesus' ongoing ministry. The church that operates on 2 of 5 callings is not just under-resourced. It is presenting a partial picture of who Jesus is”
Alan Hirsch - 5Q
Paul writes in Ephesians 4:13 that the fivefold is given "until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." The fullness of Christ. Not a portion of it.
The good news is that APEST was never taken away. It was encoded into the Body of Christ at the ascension. It is here. These callings exist in your church, your organization, your team right now. They may be undeveloped, misunderstood, or suppressed, but they are present.
5Q is the work of recovering them. Not adding something new. Remembering what was always ours.
This is exactly the work of the our Cohorts, helping teams and organizations identify, develop, and deploy the full spectrum of APEST callings in their own context.
“I really enjoyed this cohort. It was very stretching and enlightening. It caused me to have even more questions that are beyond the scope of the training, and that is a good thing. The instructor was very affirming and encouraging of the group, and always set a positive, uplifting tone for the meetings. Most importantly, we could tell her Love for Jesus and His Church and that made all the difference. Overall, the Course was excellent with a qualified, Spirit filled instructor.”
- Recent Foundations Cohort Participant