The Work of Apostles and Prophets

When we look at our current practices in our churches, we wonder how they would change under a leadership that includes apostles and prophets.  One thing I recently asked a pastor was if he knew what each member in his congregation’s calling was.  This was a church of 12 – 18 members, and he answered me “no.”  There is nothing wrong with not knowing another person’s calling.  In fact, we personally often do not understand our own callings until later in life.  However, to develop the individual functions of members in the body of Christ, someone will be told at some time what each one is called to do.  That someone is usually an apostle or a prophet.

It would greatly change the way a church operated if it considered itself a body, and that each member had a life-sustaining function.  If a person considers that they are the head of the body (church), he will find uses for the other members that help meet his vision for the body.  However, the real head, Jesus, already has a vision for the body of Christ.  And Jesus is calling the apostles and prophets back into the body of Christ to help build it up.

If a man calls himself an apostle because he draws other churches to join his network, he is not doing the work of an apostle.  If a man calls himself a prophet because he gets many people to donate to his orphanages, that man is not doing the work of a prophet.  Each is doing what is called “expansion”, being their own head of the body of Christ they are affiliated with, and yet not building them up into what each member should be. These leaders are taking members of Christ’s body and using them for a different purpose than what Jesus intended His mature members to be.

Each member of the body should become mature.  If we look at the body of Christ as we would look at a physical body, we could say that the members are made up of cells.  Using that example, when a new cell is born in the bone marrow, we would say it is immature.  It has not been “defined” yet as to its intended use and so is called “undifferentiated”.  It lacks a defined mature cell structure.  After cells mature they can perform the function for which they were intended.  Mature cells which lack the normal orderly arrangement of the cells from which they belong are called “dedifferentiated,” and become the components of cancer.  They once performed their function, but then lost that which enabled them to perform, and they became an agent of death in a living body.

I am using the example of the human body to illustrate a spiritual concept.  If we each as parts of a living spiritual body do not mature, we cannot perform a function that the body needs.  And, if we lose our ability to perform our function, a death occurs in the body of Christ.  Spiritually speaking, that is how serious it is that we have healthy churches, the spiritual bodies of which Christ should be the head.  We should have the five-fold ministry building the church, member-by-member, each in his or her God-given calling, nurturing the body into maturity through the gifts each one supplies (Eph 4:11 – 16).

Let us welcome God’s true apostles and prophets into the Body of Christ and grow up into the unity of our faith as we mature together.  Amen.