Tag: APEST

How Do You Find Your Spiritual Gifts And Place In God’s Purposes (And If You’re A Leader How Do You Help Others Do So)?

You are unique and unreproducible.  God made the universe in such a manner that even if you’re a twin no one looks exactly like you, thinks your thoughts, or feels your feelings.  There is no other person in the world equipped and gifted like you, with your track record of faith through life’s ups and downs, sharing your particular passions and if you are a Christian, nobody else has your uniquely designed pattern of spiritual gifts.  There are tests you can take to try to get an idea of what they are, and some of them may even be helpful to give you some idea of whether you’re more of an apostle or evangelist or teacher, but I have found that discovering our place in the Body or our spiritual gifts is not something we do alone by going online to take that kind of test, like a true-or-false quiz or Myers Briggs.  So how do we work that out then?  First of all it requires us to recognise that it’s not about me – it’s about Jesus.  Jesus moves in this […]

The Church Will Be Sunk Without This

I am so grateful for the insights of my friend Alan Hirsch – particularly for the gift that he has given back to the church to reignite its missionalDNA and particularly reclaim the need for apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers (APEST) to operate, for the church to be optimal. As he says, the systems we are presently running are perfectly designed to give us the results we are seeing. So I’m fully convinced and committed that it is almost the silver bullet the church needs. When we activate the 5Q ministries of Ephesians 4 through the church, everyone will see Jesus coming and the world will be changed like it has not since the beginning of our movement before it became an institution.   Yet as I read through the NT I’m reminded that there are other lists of gifts and ministries in various places, and as a church planter, network leader and coach I’m increasingly convinced that they are also vital for this to happen.  Paul wrote to the highly gifted church at Corinth, which despite its charismatic glories […]

How Do We Raise Up Evangelists In Church? The Answer Is Not What You Think.

What is God’s will for the church? Maturity. That the people in it grow together as the body of Christ reaching out to the world around us. God wants all of our churches to grow up. But the church has developed a strange view of maturity. We’ve equated it with knowing more Bible verses than someone else, or going to more meetings. That’s not how God measures maturity. Ephesians 4:15 says, ‘We must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.’  We’re meant to grow up, in every way, into Christ, the head. Head of what? His body. What’s his body? The church. You can’t grow into the maturity God wants for you outside of the church of which he is the head. So how does that happen? The answer is in the same chapter; the way that ‘all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ…’ is when we release all the gifts of […]

I hope 5Q Book puts us ‘in ministry’ out of a job, to get the rest of us in ministry

I’ve been waiting years for Alan Hirsch to write this book, ever since the unforgettable Forgotten Ways which is a core text now for the Transformational Leadership course I teach at WTC. This builds on that groundbreaking work and goes deeper still. I’ll declare that I got a free e-copy for review but I just ordered the paperback because like Forgotten Ways this will end up multi-coloured and with scribbles all over. Kindle says I’m 20% through it and it seems like I only just picked it up, I was so engrossed. I’ll blog again when I get my breath back and having let my thoughts settle. For those of us who are in church leadership and used to Hirsch, my question is, ‘HOW THE HECK CAN YOU GET USED TO HIRSCH?’ If you actually read books with a mindset of implementation not just interest, his challenge to present day western ecclesiology changes EVERYTHING. Or it should. I just pray it’s not to late – the ongoing focus in denominations on ordaining some more people into the old system rather than […]