Dave Devenish of Newfrontiers will soon release his new book
Fathering Leaders, Motivating Mission:Restoring the Role of the Apostle in Today's Church This is an extract of the book taken from Adrian Warnock's excellent blog. Read the whole post
here.
Are there apostles today? A series by Dave Devenish
Many years ago, my wife and I were leading a walking holiday in the Lake District (a beautiful region of northern England) with the youth group in our church. We had been joined by a lad, a friend of one of our young people, who had no previous knowledge of Christianity and certainly not of Christian jargon.
We held Bible studies each evening and had been looking at one of Paul’s letters. On one of the walks, this young lad asked to speak privately to me. We walked ahead of the others and I was excited by the prospect of him perhaps asking important questions about the Christian faith or even of my being able to lead him to the Lord. He said he had been trying to follow our Bible studies but had one major question: ‘What is the difference between an epistle and an apostle?’ He said he had become quite confused on this subject! Of course, I hid my disappointment and answered the question. (Praise God – a few weeks later he committed his life to the Lord and is still walking with God today.)
This teenager’s question is akin to one of the explanations often given of why we no longer have apostles today: ‘We have the Epistles, so we do not need Apostles.’ The argument is that one of the prime reasons for Christ appointing the apostles was so that the New Testament could be written, and once it was complete there was no further need for apostolic ministry. Obviously it is true that the final truths of Scripture were committed to the first-generation church and have been preserved for us in what we know as the New Testament. Jesus said to his twelve apostles, ‘When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.’1 While that Scripture by extension means that we can all know the help of the Holy Spirit to understand the truths of Scripture, nevertheless its primary meaning was that the Holy Spirit would lead those original apostles into all truth – all the truth we need now for our instruction, correction and training, and which is contained in the New Testament. However, it must be pointed out that most of the apostles did not contribute to the writing of the New Testament and that a significant part of it was written by Luke, who, although for a time part of Paul’s apostolic team, was never described as an apostle himself. Thus we can see from the outset that being an apostle is not synonymous with being a writer of Scripture.
Different Views
There are four views of apostles that I want to examine in this chapter. They are as follows:
1. Most of the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament ceased after the first century, including the gift of the apostle.
2. The apostles were a very small group of people, comprising the twelve and the apostle Paul. (Some have
even argued that the original eleven got it wrong in Acts 1 when they appointed Matthias, and should have waited for Paul.)
3. There were many more apostles in the time of the New Testament, and most spiritual gifts continue today, but not the gift or office of the apostle.
4. All the gifts of the Holy Spirit in New Testament times continue today, including the gift of the apostle.
No Longer Needed?
The first view, that the revelatory and sign gifts have ceased, is based on a particular interpretation of Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians: ‘But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.’2 The Greek phrase translated ‘perfection’ (or ‘the perfect’ in some translations) is
to teleion, which is an adjective related to the verb teleioo, meaning ‘to bring to an end, to complete’. It also carries the additional meaning ‘to make perfect’ or ‘to be perfect’. God is so described in
Matthew 5:48, where it can only mean ‘perfect’. The same word, however, is used in
Ephesians 4:13 in the context of the role of the leadership gifts to equip the church, where it is translated ‘mature’. This first view suggests that ‘the perfect’ in 1 Corinthians 13 refers to the full revelation given in the New Testament, and that once this was complete, there was no further need for the partial forms of charismatic revelation manifested in particular revelatory gifts such as prophecy. The classic exposition of this view was made by B.B. Warfield3 and is reflected in much contemporary reformed and dispensationalist theology.
The problem with this view is that it could not have been understood in this way by those to whom Paul was originally writing. Gordon Fee puts it this way: ‘Paul’s distinctions are between “now” and “then”, between what is incomplete (though perfectly appropriate to the church’s present existence) and what is complete (when its final destiny in Christ has been reached and “we see face to face” and “know as we are known”).’4 In other words, ‘the perfect’ is an eschatological reference to the time when Jesus returns and the final purposes of God’s saving work in Christ will have been accomplished. Spiritual gifts will then no longer be necessary for the building up of the church.
Another variant of this first view is that ‘the perfect’ does not refer to the completion of the New Testament but to the maturity of the church which occurred when more regular clergy had arisen and became the norm for established church life. Fee comments very astutely:
It is perhaps an indictment of Western Christianity that we should consider ‘mature’ our rather cerebral and domesticated – but bland – brand of faith, with the concomitant absence of the Spirit in terms of his supernatural gifts! The Spirit, not Western rationalism, marks the turning of the ages, after all; and to deny the Spirit’s manifestations is to deny our present existence to be eschatological, as belonging to the beginning of the time of the End.5
Maturity certainly implies not just ‘regular clergy’ etc. having been established, but the bringing to maturity of the church in every generation as a result of the equipping work of leadership gifts described in Ephesians 4.
A Limited Number of Apostles?
The second view confines the use of the term ‘apostle’ to the twelve and Paul, and regards the appointment of Matthias6 to replace Judas Iscariot as a mistake on the part of the eleven remaining apostles. However, the New Testament nowhere teaches that the eleven were wrong to appoint Matthias and should have waited for Paul. Although the casting of lots was not a normal means of obtaining guidance in the church after the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (though it has been employed by some, for example, John Wesley), it could nevertheless be followed in faith at that time, on the basis of scriptures such as
Proverbs 16:33. Furthermore, the qualification for being one of the twelve was not only having witnessed Christ’s resurrection, but also having been with Jesus from the beginning of his earthly ministry at the baptism of John until his ascension. It was important that there should be witnesses to Jesus’ life and ministry, as well as to his death and resurrection, all of which are now recorded for us in the four gospels. There is no evidence at all that Paul would have qualified for this. All we know of him at this time is that he was being taught at the feet of Gamaliel.7
The New Testament text itself refers to several others as apostles, and for some of these, too, there is no evidence that they witnessed Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection. They are as follows:
- Andronicus and Junias.8 ␣
- Apollos.9 ␣
- Barnabas.10
- Epaphroditus (though this reference is usually translated ‘messenger’, a point that we will examine later).11
- James – the half-brother of Jesus.12 ␣
- Silas.13 ␣
- Timothy (though some would argue that Paul specifically excludes Timothy from this role by his reference to him as a brother, but that is a moot point).14
‘All the apostles’ who received a resurrection appearance from Jesus are distinguished from the twelve and Paul.15 The fact that the church had to be on the lookout for false apostles would not have been an issue if the apostolate was restricted to the twelve and Paul.16 The visiting preachers who caused such problems to Paul in Corinth are described somewhat ironically as ‘super-apostles’,17 so it seems that they were taking the title of ‘apostle’ on themselves, relying on self-advertising oratory rather than the humility demonstrated by genuine apostles.18
Some would suggest that the seventy (or seventy two) sent out by Jesus were also apostles. Certainly the Greek verb apostello is used of the commission that Jesus gave the seventy, and there are considerable similarities in the mandates he gave to the twelve and the seventy. Of course, both were also symbolic numbers which would have been clearly understood as such by the people of that time. ‘The twelve’ recalled the twelve sons of Jacob, the forefathers of the twelve tribes of Israel, and were symbolic of Jesus’ formation of a renewed Israel. ‘The seventy’ is doubly symbolic: it was the familiar way in which the Jews of the time referred to the nations of the world, based on the seventy nations of Genesis 10; it would also have reminded them of the occasion in Moses’ time when the Lord put the Spirit on the seventy elders,19 which enabled a wider distribution of responsibility so that Moses would not have to carry it alone. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s commentary notes in relation to ‘all the apostles’ in 1 Corinthians 15 explain that ‘the term here includes many others besides “the Twelve” already enumerated (v5): perhaps the seventy disciples of Luke 10’.20 I am not fully convinced about this argument, but it helpfully illustrates the diversity of views concerning the number of apostles.
Again there is some excellent material available for further study on this point, in particular Herbert Lockyer’s book
All the Apostles of the Bible and an excellent essay on the subject by J.B. Lightfoot.21
Footnotes:
1 John 16:13.
2
1 Cor. 13:8–10.
3 B.B. Warfield,
Counterfeit Miracles (Cornell University Library, 1918).
4 Gordon Fee,
God’s Empowering Presence (Hendrickson,1994), p. 208.
5 Fee,
Presence, p. 207. See also Wayne Grudem,
Systematic Theology (IVP and Zondervan, 1994), Chapter 30.
6
Acts 1:21–26.
7
Acts 22:3.
8
Rom. 16:7.
9
1 Cor. 4:6–9.
10
Acts 14:14.
11
Phil. 2:25.
12
Gal. 1:18–19.
13
1 Thess. 1:1;
2:6 (apostles – plural).
14
1 Thess. 1:1;
2:6;
2 Cor. 1:1.
15
1 Cor. 15:7.
16
Rev. 2:2;
2 Cor. 11:13.
17
2 Cor. 11:5.
18 Barrett takes the view that ‘super-apostles’ was actually a reference to those described in
Galatians 2:9 as ‘pillars’. C.K. Barrett,
The Signs of an Apostle (Paternoster Press, 1996), pp. 37–8. Chrysostom, Calvin and Hodge also took this view. In this case the above comments would of course not apply!
19
Num. 11:25.
20 Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, quoting Chrysostom,
Commentary (Zondervan, 1870 and 1999).
21 J.B. Lightfoot,
Epistle of St Paul to the Galatians (Zondervan,1978), pp. 92–101.
Apostles today? Part Two – Do Ephesians 4 ministries continue?
The following post is from Fathering Leaders, Motivating Mission by David Devenish, copyright 2011 reproduced with permission from Authentic Media.
Only Some of the Ministries Continue Today?
We now turn to the third view: that the gifts of the Holy Spirit still continue today, but not the gift of the apostle. This view acknowledges that all five ministry gifts of
Ephesians 4:11 were given by the ascended Lord Jesus to the church at the beginning, but contends that not all of those gifts continue today. Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, for example, taught that only the pastor/teacher continues today. He argued that not only did the apostle and prophet disappear after the first century, but so did the evangelist. The evangelist, he said,
‘supplemented the work of the apostles and extended it and caused it to spread and become established. Thus the evangelist was a man whose office was temporary, and as the churches were established and became more settled, this office likewise disappeared.’22
Those given a special call to preach the gospel today were not, in his view, ‘evangelists’ in the New Testament sense of the word but rather ‘exhorters’, as apparently they were known in the UK in the eighteenth century. It was necessary, he maintained, for an apostle to have witnessed Christ’s resurrection, to have been commissioned to his work by the risen Lord himself in person, and to be a man with supernatural revelation of the truth, so that he could speak not only with authority but also infallibly.
Wayne Grudem, in his book
Systematic Theology, argues for the continuation of prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher, but not apostle. He says:
‘The two qualifications for being an apostle were: (1) having seen Jesus after His resurrection with one’s own eyes (thus, being an “eyewitness of the resurrection”), and (2) having been specifically commissioned by Christ as His apostle.’23
J.B. Lightfoot, in his classic essay to which I have already referred, argues the same case. Wayne Grudem does point out:
‘Today some people use the word apostle in a very broad sense to refer to an effective church planter, or to a significant missionary pioneer (“William Carey was an apostle to India,” for example). If we use the word apostle in this broad sense everyone would agree that there are still apostles today – for there are certainly effective missionaries and church planters today.’
He proposes, however, that it is inappropriate and unhelpful to use the word, because it causes confusion between the roles of New Testament apostles and contemporary church planters and evangelists, and implies a desire for ‘more authority in the church than any one person should rightfully have’.24
So in the face of these strong arguments, why do I believe that the gift of the apostle continues today?
Given to the Church in Each Generation?
One of the key passages to be debated is
Ephesians 4:11–13:
It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 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.
This chapter seems to speak to the continuing needs of the church throughout its history, and not just its initial first-century foundations. The five-fold ministries were given by the ascended Christ as love gifts to the church for a particular purpose, namely that God’s people would be equipped or prepared for works of service, so that the body of Christ might be built up. This need continues 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 chapter defines maturity as not being like children (i.e. immature), tossed about by every strange doctrine, and it notes that the body of the church learns to build itself up in love as each member of the body functions as it should.
This equipping ministry is surely needed in every generation, and it is not a natural reading of the passage to assume that there is a distinction between gifts that should continue to perform this equipping function and gifts that should not. The differing views of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Wayne Grudem on this point illustrate the unsatisfactory results of attempting to make such a distinction. It is true, as Wayne Grudem emphasizes, that the word ‘gave’ in relation to the ascended Christ is past tense and refers to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit with his gifts when Christ ascended on high; but surely all gifts continue to come from the ascended Christ to his church and his ministers. It seems to me a more natural reading of Ephesians 4 to assume that the church in each generation needs the gifts of the ascended Christ, just as it needs and is promised the power of the Holy Spirit, similarly given from the ascended Christ. Though the day of Pentecost was the first pouring out of the Holy Spirit, it was not one single event for all time, as the verse ‘The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off – for all whom the Lord our God will call’25 makes clear, but an ongoing promise of forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The whole tone of Ephesians 4 seems to suggest something both dynamic and normative for the church at all times. As Markus Barth writes:
In 4:11 it is assumed that the church at all times needs the witness of ‘apostles’ and ‘prophets’. The author of this epistle did not anticipate that the inspired and enthusiastic ministry was to be absorbed by, and ‘disappear’ into, offices and officers bare of the Holy Spirit and resentful of any reference to spiritual things. Ephesians 4 does not contain the faintest hint that the charismatic character of all church ministries was restricted to a certain period of church history and was later to die out.26
Footnotes
22 Martyn Lloyd-Jones,
Christian Unity and Exposition of Ephesians 4:1–16 (Baker Publishing Group, 1981) p. 192.
23 Wayne Grudem,
Systematic Theology (IVP and Zondervan, 1994), p. 906.
24 Grudem,
Systematic Theology, p. 911.
25
Acts 2:39.
26 Markus Barth,
Ephesians 4–6 (Doubleday 1974), p. 437.
Apostles today? Part Three – Witnesses of the resurrection?
What then about the claim that to be an apostle someone must have seen Jesus in his resurrection? This assertion is based on 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul is justifying his apostleship to a church that was beginning to question it. Paul there makes a series of four assertions of his apostleship to the Corinthian church: ‘Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord?’
Firstly, ‘Am I not free?’ is a reference not just to his apostleship but to his freedom from the Jewish law and also a freedom to conform to aspects of the Jewish law in order to win Jewish people. Secondly, ‘Am I not an apostle?’ must refer to the commissioning that he had asserted on several occasions. He then says, thirdly, ‘Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?’ It is hard to argue from this that this is the necessary proof for all time of somebody having the gift and ministry of an apostle. There were others who also saw Jesus’ resurrection but were not called apostles, for example, ‘five hundred brethren at once’. His last statement refers to the fruit of his apostleship. In this context he states that even though he may not be an apostle to others, he must be an apostle to the Corinthians because he founded their church. Surely if the main qualification was that he had seen the resurrected Jesus then he would be an apostle to all. As Gordon Fee points out,
‘Since others who saw the Risen Lord did not become apostles, what most likely legitimized his apostleship was the accompanying commissioning. Although he does not say so here, in Galatians 1:16 the revelation of the Son of God is accompanied by its purpose, “that I might preach him among the Gentiles”.’27
Gordon Fee goes on to add:
Can anything be said in our day about ‘apostles’? Given the two criteria expressed here [seeing the risen Christ and having effectively planted churches], one would have to allow that apostles do not exist in the sense that Paul defines his own ministry. But it should also be noted that this might be too narrow a view, based strictly on Paul’s own personal experience. His more functional understanding of apostleship would certainly have its modern counterpart in those who found and lead churches in unevangelized areas. Only when ‘apostle’ is used in a non-Pauline sense of ‘guarantors of the traditions’ would usage be narrowed to the first century.28
This is really the point. Evangelicals who believe, as I do, that apostles exist today, strongly affirm that the canon of Scripture is complete and establishes the full truth that God has revealed to us, but are also convinced that the ministry of church planting and laying good foundations in churches and the authority (as we will see later) to oversee those churches needs to continue – subject, of course, to the overriding authority of Scripture.
Furthermore, Ephesians 4 is not the only scripture which speaks of the apostle alongside other gifts in relation to the life of the church. Paul gives several lists of spiritual gifts. Sometimes these are the gifts to the church of a person or ministry or office, as in Ephesians 4; sometimes they are charismatic gifts of particular supernatural abilities, as in
1 Corinthians 12:8–10 – ‘To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom . . .’ etc. In some cases, however, Paul mixes the two. For example, after he has explained the charismatic gifts in the context of the one body of Christ, he goes on to say that God has appointed certain people as gifts to the church: apostles, prophets, teachers, workers of miracles, etc. He then raises a question in relation to both categories of gift: Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all work miracles? It would be strange if Paul listed apostles alongside all the other gifts in this context, if it was clearly understood that the only apostles were those who had witnessed the resurrection. Gordon Fee comments:
For Paul this is both a ‘functional’ and ‘positional/official’ term. In keeping with the other members on this list, it is primarily ‘functional’ here, probably anticipating the concern for the ‘building up’ of the body that is already hinted at in verse 7 and was stressed in chapter 14. Most likely with this word he is reflecting on his own ministry in the church; the plural is in deference to others who would have the same ministry in other churches.29
Flexible Usage in the New Testament
Another basis for my belief in the continuing ministry of apostles is that the term ‘apostle’ is used more flexibly in the New Testament than is sometimes taken into account. Those who justify the continuation of apostles today often see three different ways in which the term is used in the New Testament – three categories of apostle, if you like:
1. Jesus Christ himself is described as ‘the apostle and high priest whom we confess’.30 He was the Messiah, the One supremely sent to accomplish our redemption from sin and the restoration of everything lost through the fall and its effect on the whole of creation.
2. The twelve – the apostles of the resurrection and foundational to the whole church throughout history, whose names are symbolically on the foundations of the eschatological New Jerusalem.
3. The apostles of the ascended Christ, according to
Ephesians 4:11, given (alongside other leadership gifts) to equip the church until it comes to maturity and unity. Terry Virgo helpfully clarifies the distinction from category 2 above: ‘They were not witnesses of His resurrection but gifts of His ascension.’31
C.K. Barrett extends this concept to ‘at least eight persons or groups of persons denoted with varying degrees of propriety, by the term “apostles” and probably all giving it somewhat different meaning’.32 Barrett’s categories include:
- the original group called the ‘twelve’ founder members of the church in Jerusalem
- the ‘pillars’ Peter, John and James (not one of the twelve)
- Peter’s work away from Jerusalem – moving an understanding of apostleship for Peter in a Pauline direction
- John similarly
- those sent out by the Jerusalem leaders (the equivalent of the ‘agents’ of non-Christian Jewish leaders), with whom Paul had some problems 33
- Paul himself
- those in the Pauline circle, e.g. Barnabas, Apollos, Andronicus, Junias
- the ‘apostles’ of the churches34
Of these categories, the penultimate one is of particular importance in our argument, as it includes Apollos and Barnabas, both of whom are described as ‘apostles’, but neither of whom is recorded as having seen the risen Lord; indeed it would have been impossible in the case of Apollos, who was in Corinth and Asia Minor, and most unlikely in the case of Barnabas. So there were apostles that we know about in Scripture who were neither part of the twelve nor a special addition with special qualifications, like Paul.
Furthermore, the fact that the word ‘apostle’ was used in Judaism and more widely in Greek (as we will see in the next chapter) can take away the ‘mystique’ of the word as applied to only a few. If, for example, we translated the term by the modern words ‘envoy’ or ‘messenger’, would that not help us? Sometimes the word apostolos is translated ‘messenger’ or ‘representative’. This is often explained as being a totally different category, but I would argue that it illustrates the flexibility with which the word is used to describe an office which is very important for the church – in all ages. Although I think his use of the term ‘prophetic’ is confusing, I believe Herbert Lockyer gives the correct slant on this when he says,
‘The apostolate, then, was not a limited circle of officials holding a well-defined position of authority in the church, but a large class of men who discharged one – and that the highest – of the functions of the prophetic ministry (1 Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians 4:11).’35
Given all these varied references to apostles in the New Testament churches, it is not justifiable, in my view, to deny the validity of apostolic ministry today. As Dave Harvey of Sovereign Grace Ministries, an apostolic network in the USA, expresses it:
Many evangelicals today resonate with the conviction and logic of O. Palmer Robertson, who said, ‘Nothing in scripture explicitly indicates that the apostolate ever would come to an end. Yet it is generally recognized that no one in the church today functions with the authority of the original apostles . . .’ To paraphrase this common perspective, present-day apostles may be unpopular, but they are not unscriptural. While Sovereign Grace Ministries heartily agrees that ‘no one in the church today functions with the authority of the original apostles,’ let us not hastily extrapolate on Dr Robertson’s phrase to conclude that no one today functions as an apostle of any kind. Such a conclusion inflicts considerable harm on attempts to build the church and preach the gospel.36
Footnotes
27 Gordon Fee,
NICNT:
The First Epistle to the Corinthians (W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), p. 395.
28 Fee,
Corinthians, NICNT, p. 397.
29 Fee,
Corinthians, p. 620.
30
Heb. 3:1.
31
Newfrontiers Magazine, Issue 04: September–November 2003, p. 8.
32 Barrett,
Signs, p. 72.
33
Gal. 2:12.
34
2 Cor. 8:23;
Phil. 2:25.
35 Herbert Lockyer,
All the Apostles of the Bible (Zondervan, 1972), p. 183.
36 Dave Harvey,
Polity – Serving and Leading the Local Church (Sovereign Grace Ministries, 2004), pp. 17–18.
Apostles today? Part Four – What do they look like in practice?
Those who are recognized as apostles by particular church networks are sometimes accused of making themselves equivalent to Paul or Peter, but this is not the case. In the similar context of prophets today, Jack Deere says:
It is simply not reasonable to insist that all miraculous spiritual gifts equal those of the apostles in their intensity or strength in order to be perceived as legitimate gifts of the Holy Spirit. No one would insist on this for the non-miraculous gifts like teaching or evangelism. For example, what person in the history of the church since Paul has been as gifted a teacher to the body of Christ? Luther? Calvin? Who today would claim to be Paul’s equal as a teacher? I do not know of anyone who would make such a claim for the past or the present. Therefore, since no one has arisen with the gift of teaching that is equal to the apostle Paul’s, should we conclude that the gift of teaching was withdrawn from the church? Likewise, should we assume that everyone who has a gift of evangelism is going to evangelize like the apostle Paul? Who has planted as many churches or started as many new works with the depth and the authority that the apostle Paul did? We can admit to varying degrees of intensity and quality in gifts of evangelism, in gifts of teaching, and in other gifts. Why can’t we do that with the gift of healing? Or the gift of miracles? Or the gift of prophecy?37
To be fair, Jack Deere does not make the connection, but surely we could add ‘or the gift of an apostle?’.
Another factor to consider is that the New Testament warns against receiving ‘false apostles’. If it was known and accepted that there was a fixed group of apostles, then this warning would hardly have been necessary.
Clearly there were more apostles and prophets than just the twelve and Paul, and so churches needed to be able to distinguish between genuine and false ones. This was also the case a little later in church history, as the Didache (dating from the end of the first century or beginning of the second) records:
‘Concerning apostles and prophets, act thus according to the ordinance of the gospel. Let every apostle who comes to you be received as the Lord . . . But let him not stay more than one day, or if need be a second as well; but if he stay three days he is a false prophet.’38
I do not know why length of stay was taken as a measure of an apostle or prophet’s genuineness, and I am not suggesting that in a relational context such guests should only stay for two days! This quotation, however, does indicate that the ministries of apostles and prophets continued after the completion of the New Testament, and that there was an ongoing need to discern between the false and the genuine.
Needed for the Church Today
Pragmatically, there is an evident need for the continuation of many of the functions of the original apostles. This would include church planting, laying good foundations in churches, continuing to oversee those churches, appointing the leaders, giving ongoing fatherly care to leaders, and handling difficult questions that may arise from those churches. There are really only three ways for churches to carry out these functions:
1.
Each church is free to act totally independently and to seek God’s mind for its own government and pastoral wisdom, without any help from outside, unless the church may choose to seek it at any particular time.
When we started the church which I am still a part of, for example, we were so concerned to be ‘independent’ that we would not even join the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, although we adopted their trust deed and constitution because that would prevent us being purely independent. We were at that time very proud of our ‘independence’!
2.
Churches operate under some sort of structured and formal oversight, as in many denominations today, where local church leaders are appointed by and accountable to regional leadership, whether ‘bishops’, ‘superintendents’ or ‘overseers’. It is hard to justify this model from the pages of the New Testament, though we recognize that it developed very early in church history. Even the word
episkopos, translated ‘bishop’ or ‘overseer’, which came to be used of those having wider authority and oversight over other leaders and churches, was used in the New Testament as a synonym for the local leaders or elders of a particular church.
The three main forms of church government current in the institutional church are Episcopalianism (government by bishops), Presbyterianism (government by local elders) and Congregationalism (government by the church meeting). Each of these is only a partial reflection of the New Testament. Commenting on these forms of government without apostolic ministry, Phil Greenslade says,
‘We assert as our starting point what the other three viewpoints deny: that the apostolic role is as valid and vital today as ever before. This is to agree with the German charismatic theologian, Arnold Bittlinger, when he says “the New Testament nowhere suggests that the apostolic ministry was intended only for first-century Christians”.’39
3.
We aim to imitate the New Testament practice of travelling ministries of apostles and prophets, with apostles having their own spheres of responsibility as a result of having planted and laid the foundations in the churches they oversee. Such ministries continue the connection with local churches as a result of fatherly relationships and not denominational election or appointment, recognizing that there will need to be new charismatically gifted and friendship-based relationships continuing into later generations.
This is the model that the ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ (to use Peter Wagner’s phrase) is attempting to follow. Though mistakes have been made, including some quite serious ones involving controlling authority, and though those of us involved are still seeking to find our way with the Holy Spirit’s help, it seems to reflect more accurately the New Testament pattern and a present-day outworking of scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4.
‘Is the building finished? Is the Bride ready? Is the Body full-grown, are the saints completely equipped? Has the church attained its ordained unity and maturity? Only if the answer to these questions is “yes” can we dispense with apostolic ministry. But as long as the church is still growing up into Christ, who is its head, this ministry is needed. If the church of Jesus Christ is to grow faster than the twentieth century population explosion, which I assume to be God’s intention, then we will need to produce, recognize and use Pauline apostles.’40
In summary, I believe that a strong case can be made for apostolic ministry continuing today, while also recognizing the unique role of the original apostles who witnessed the resurrection, and while thoroughly submitting to the truth revealed in the pages of the New Testament and seeing that truth as God’s final revelation. There is surely more support in the pages of the New Testament for relational oversight of churches than for denominational structures, and it seems to me preferable to use the Ephesians 4 terminology of the fivefold ministries equipping the churches, rather than to resort to Episcopal designations or their equivalents in other denominations.
If, however, my thesis has not yet convinced the reader, please read on. Even if some of my readers cannot share my convictions about the continuing relevance of apostolic ministry gifts, I believe that the principles contained in this book for the planting and oversight of churches are very important for the future of the church and of world mission.
Footnotes
37 Jack Deere,
Surprised by the Power of the Spirit (Kingsway, 1994), p. 67.
38 Quoted in Michael Green,
I Believe in the Holy Spirit (Hodder & Stoughton, 1978), p. 190.
39 Philip Greenslade,
Leadership (Marshalls, 1984), pp. 142–3.
40 Greenslade,
Leadership, p. 143.
