spiritual-gifts(5/0)
What is the five fold ministry
The acronym APEST describes five spiritual gifts that Christ embodied and distributed to humanity. It’s not the only list of spiritual gifts, but it’s the one that seems most to describe the architecture of a church community, since these are given for the building up of the Church. But what are they exactly? 5Q Central describes the five gifts by the question, “What would this gift do with a bar of chocolate?…
Jesus fulfills the roles and gifts
I’m often struck by the upside-down way that Jesus represents the roles of prophet, priest and king and the gifts: apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd and teacher (APEST). He is a king, but he does not use his authority to wage war upon Rome as the insurrectionists planned or as King David did against the surrounding nations. Instead He used the kingly authority to deliver and serve. He is a prophet, and… well, actually, His prophetic acts seem identical to the prophets of old.…
All biblical roles and gifts express imago dei
The three dominant roles in the Hebrew Bible, prophet, priest, and king, are fulfilled in Jesus. I had originally thought because the Hebrew Bible used these roles to point towards Him (which it does), but had not realized that these three roles are subsets of the original Image of God role from Genesis 1. That’s so helpful to realize that humans are created to reflect, not only simply one of these roles, but all three combined, and that each demonstrate, albeit incompletely, what we are as Icons of God.…
The apostolic gift
What I’m about to share with you makes me extremely uncomfortable. I am apostolically gifted. (cringe) Let me explain. My deepest desire is to form communities of people who love Jesus and do what he says in places where these communities don’t exist… yet. Spreading the good news about Jesus is important to me, but I’m not an evangelist. I resonate with the evangelist’s hunger to witness and their disappointment at the Church’s weak outreach, but my communal view of Jesus communities keeps me fighting to light a fire in the church instead of running to the streets.…
Leaders are assisted by intuition
Intuition is like spiritual gifts in that it only assists a person but doesn’t define them. Intuition is a word with an ambiguous definition. We know it exists because others aren’t the same as we are. Little Jimmy could play the piano before he could walk, and we couldn’t carry a tune after graduating high school. Nevertheless, the knowledge that there’s a leadership intuition does little to change one’s perspective on leadership (although it may change one’s perspective on themselves).…