Following the Tread Part 5 of 7

ARTICLE 5 OF 7

Gifts, Not Thrones

I want to start with a feeling.

You’ll probably know it if you’ve felt it, because it’s distinctive and not as common as it should be. The feeling of being around a leader who’s genuinely, quietly secure. Not performing confidence. Not projecting authority. Just real. Present. Themselves.

There’s a safety in that which is hard to put into words. Something in you relaxes that you didn’t quite know was braced. You think more clearly, speak more honestly, bring what you actually have rather than what you think’s expected. The leader isn’t the source of everything, and isn’t trying to be. They’re on the journey too, and they know it, and somehow that doesn’t diminish their authority at all. If anything it deepens it.

I’ve known a handful of people who lead like that. People with genuine apostolic gifting and real leadership responsibility, wearing both lightly. Who include and build and release rather than gather and direct and retain. Kind but clear, strong but not dominating, secure in their calling without needing you to confirm it. Around them, the community feels less like an organisation being managed and more like a family finding its way together.

I think that feeling is what the New Testament was pointing toward all along.

What Ephesians 4 is actually saying

Most of us in charismatic and apostolic circles could quote Ephesians 4:11 fairly readily. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers. The five fold. It’s become one of the foundational texts for how we think about church structure and spiritual authority.

But I wonder if familiarity’s made us read and apply it to what we know a bit too quickly. As I’ve followed the scriptural thread more attentively, what I found doesn’t quite fit the kind of spiritual hierarchy or organisational chart I’ve often experienced.

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.

Christ gives these gifted people to the church. They are gifts. Not positions, not rungs on a ladder, not offices carrying defined levels of authority over others. Gifts, given to the body, for the body.

And the purpose is to equip God’s people for works of service, so the body builds itself up, so all of us together reach maturity and unity. The direction of movement in this passage is clear once I really noticed it: from the gifted person outward toward the whole community, equipping and releasing, not concentrating authority downward.

The gifts exist to bless and serve everyone else and make them all more fully themselves. That’s the direction of the flow and the whole point.

Functions, not positions

The words Paul uses are worth sitting with. An apostolos is a sent one, a word of movement and mission, not status. A prophetes speaks what the Spirit gives, a word of attentiveness and offering. An evangelist proclaims, a pastor tends, a teacher grounds. These are things people do, not positions people occupy.

Together they’re genuinely beautiful. Christ resourcing his church from multiple angles, each perspective a gift to the whole. The apostolic keeps the community outward facing and grounded. The prophetic keeps it attentive to what the Spirit’s saying now. The evangelistic keeps it from turning in on itself. The pastoral keeps it tender toward its own people. The teaching keeps it rooted in truth.

Every one of those is a gift the whole community receives, most powerful when offered in service of the whole rather than used as a basis for governing it.

What apostolic actually looks like

Apostolos simply means sent one. A functional word, describing a movement and a mission. Someone sent on another’s behalf, carrying their heart and message into new territory.

The pattern in Acts is consistent. Paul and Barnabas go where the gospel hasn’t reached. They plant, strengthen, invest deeply in local leadership, and then release. Acts 14 shows them returning to the communities they’d established, appointing elders in every church, and committing them to the Lord. The work is genuinely foundational, and then it opens its hands.

Paul’s ongoing relationship with the communities he served is tender and deeply important and not hierarchical. He writes. He reasons. He appeals, encourages, and where needed, corrects. But he does it as a brother and a spiritual father, not an administrator. He explains himself. He gives reasons rooted in the gospel. He trusts the communities he loves with their own Spirit-given discernment.

He says something in 2 Corinthians I keep returning to, because it names the whole thing in a single line. He’s defending his apostleship, making the case for his genuine authority, and says: not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy.

With. For joy. Not over, not directing from above. Alongside, for the flourishing of others.

That’s the apostolic heart when it’s working as it should. Close to that feeling I started with, the leader around whom something in you relaxes, in whose presence you find yourself more fully yourself.

The measure of fruitfulness

There’s something worth sitting with here. In the New Testament picture, the measure of apostolic fruitfulness isn’t how much influence the apostolic figure retains over the communities they’ve served. It’s how well those communities are flourishing in their own God-given life and calling.

The goal is communities genuinely rooted, genuinely led, genuinely capable of making their own Spirit-discerned decisions. Strong local leadership isn’t a threat to apostolic ministry, it’s the fruit of it.

Which means the most apostolically fruitful thing a leader can do is work themselves, gracefully and generously, toward the edges of what they’ve built. Not because they’re no longer needed or valued, but because the community’s become what it was always meant to become: not dependent, but deeply rooted. Not organised around a person, but gathered around the risen Christ.

That community, flourishing and free and genuinely itself, is the apostle’s greatest joy. And it’s exactly the kind of community the rest of us have been quietly longing for too.

The gift received

What would it look like to receive the five fold gifts the way Ephesians 4 describes them? Not as a governance structure or a spiritual org chart, but as exactly what Paul says they are: gifts from Christ to his church, given so every person in the body can be fully equipped, fully released, fully themselves.

The apostolically gifted person brings a founding, pioneering, sending perspective that helps everyone think bigger and reach further. The prophetically gifted person brings a Spirit-attentive ear that helps the whole community hear what God is saying now. The evangelist, the pastor, the teacher, each a gift to the whole, each making the body more fully what it’s meant to be.

Received like that, these gifts are genuinely wonderful. Not because of the authority they carry, but because of the life they release.

That’s the vision. A community where every gift is genuinely welcomed, and everyone the gifts are given to is genuinely, joyfully, freely equipped.

I think that’s what those early communities felt like, gathered round tables, finding their way together in the light of the Spirit. And I think it’s still available to us. More available, perhaps, than we’ve realised.

A thought to sit with: Think of a leader who’s made you more fully yourself. What was it about the way they carried their gifting and their responsibility that did that? And what would it look like for that quality to become the culture of a whole community?