Five-Fold Ministry: Intro to a New Series

In recent weeks, God has been teaching me a lot about spiritual gifts and the different offices where those spiritual gifts can be used. For instance, I have a lot of random spiritual gifts. I’ve taken spiritual gifts tests (found online—I just googled them), and I know what I enjoy and what I’m kind of good at. But how am I supposed to use them all together? I encourage people, like to read and write about spiritual things, and my gut is usually correct when I just “sense things.” Most of the time. I love listening to, creating, and teaching music with the goal to let my students become good at something so that they’ll have somewhere they can release stress. Etc, etc, etc.

I was going through Ephesians 4 with the Bible study I’m a part of, and we came upon this gem:

“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (verses 11 & 12).

1 Kings 18:44 references the hand. The little cloud the size of a man’s hand became a big ‘ole storm in the blink of an eye!

What the heck are apostles and prophets? Evangelists are those people who share the gospel all the time and give you little booklets about the gospel, right? Pastors are the people who preach at us on Sunday, right? And teachers are the ones we see every other day of the week if we go to school. Right? NOT QUITE. ON ANY OF THESE. Randy Barnett said in an article I’m referencing for this series, “There is nothing in Scripture that would lead us to believe that any of these no longer exists.” Even the prophet still exists today, although not many people may realize it.

In this series, we are going to focus on these five offices of ministry; we’ll zoom in on each one. I’m still doing a lot of research on these gifts myself, so expect good things. My goal is that in writing about these ministries, I can learn more about them, myself. (That’s what happens when I write about something, usually.) For those of you tuning in after the series has been published, congrats—you get to read them all or skip to the one you are most curious about. For everyone else who is reading my blog posts as I write and publish them, I’m going to try to give you three posts a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

As I share about a ministry, I would like you to consider who it is that you know who fits the description well. Then go ahead and let them know! Before I began this process, I was pretty sure where I’d land, but then I realized I was quite wrong. By the end of this series, perhaps you will have a better idea of where you land, as well! These posts should not be taken as they are written, though I’ve been doing research. They should be a tool or a kick-off to study these ministries on your own!

And that, my friends, is what I’m most excited about in writing this series. I will be talking about them each in the order they are found in Ephesians 4:11.

Anna E Meyer

For this series, here are some of my resources that I continually refer back to:

Almobayyed, Mona. “What Is the Fivefold Ministry?” eHow. 26 May 2014. Web. 26 Sept 2014.

Barnett, Randy. “The Five Ministry Offices” Randy Barnett Ministries, Covenant Global Church. ND. Web. 26 Sept 2014.

Dino, Brother. “The 5 Offices of the Church – Which Are Yours?” Shepherd Dino, Facebook. 9 Jan 2011. Web. 26 Sept 2014.

“The Five Offices of the Church—30 Bible Basics.” Guarding the Heart, ReviveNations. 28 Feb 2012. Web. 26 Sept 2014.

Traut, Ed. “The Truth About Prophecy.” California: Prophetic Voice Distributors, 1991. Print.