Ephesians

4. Teaching pastors. These individuals maintain the life of the body by feeding it the Word of God, cleansing it by calling for renewal and repentance, and encouraging its growth through ministry and fellowship.

Teaching pastors are also called elders, overseers, or bishops in the Scripture. Elders or bishops were always limited to one local church in the early Christian era. A man who was an elder in one church was not also an elder in another place. He could be an elder or a teaching-pastor only in one place.

Pastors in those days were not separated into a “clergy class” as they are today, and often were not full-time pastors. They worked at other jobs, and their service to the church was not their employment but their role within the church. In the purest, most biblical sense of the word, a pastor is not a clergyman per se, but is any person—clergy or lay—who exercises the gift of teaching and shepherding within the church.

It is an error to divide the church between “lay” and “clergy.” Many people who spend their working hours in the secular world have apostolic gifts, prophetic gifts, evangelistic gifts, and teaching/pastoring gifts. Every church has members who are engaged in secular work, yet who have discovered and are using their support gifts both in the church and in the lives of the unsaved worldlings around them.

I believe a terrible error has crept into the church at this particular point. Through the centuries, the church has veered away from the simple, biblical system that made it such a powerful influence upon society in its early years. Whereas the first century church truly saw itself as a body of believers, it gradually came to be identified not with people but with buildings. We fastened our attention on the meeting place instead of the people as the symbol of God’s church. In the process, we gradually transferred responsibility for the work of the ministry from the people to the clergy, the select few people who worked in the church building. Paul, in Ephesians 4, makes it clear that the ministry of the church belongs not to a few, but to the many, to all members of the body of Christ.

These four support ministries—apostle, prophet, evangelist, and teaching pastor—exist for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry (our contact with the world) and for the building up of the body of Christ (maintaining the health of the church). Who is to carry out these ministries? All the people! That is God’s intention. It is not the job of the pastors. The role of teaching pastors is to train, equip, support, encourage, discipline, and motivate the people to do this work. It is the people who are to do the work of the church. A view of the church that sees pastors as performers and the people as spectators is a tragic distortion of God’s view of the church as found in the Bible.

I once heard the game of football described as “eleven men on a field in desperate need of rest, surrounded by fifty thousand people in the stands in desperate need of exercise.” Sometimes, the church seems much like a football game. But that is not Paul’s view of the church, nor is it God’s. A pastor who tries to run the church like a football game is doomed to exhaustion and burn-out. Worse, he condemns his church to failure and relegates his parishioners to the role of flabby spectators. According to God’s plan for the church, every member is a minister. This takes the awful, unbearable pressure off pastors and keeps all members of the church well-exercised and effective in their daily Christian lives.