Five-Fold Ministry
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Five-Fold Ministry refers to the New Testament book of Ephesians, in which the author instructs that people serve in the church, "some apostles, and some prophets; and some evangelists; and some pastors and teachers; for the equipping of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ". A recent, continuing movement within Charismatic Christianity exists which regards this as a model for the principal offices of service, or "ministry" within the Christian Church. The exegesis is that the text describes five offices of ministry: The offices of Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor, and Teacher. However, by the rules of Hellenistic Greek grammar, the basis text actually describes four offices, "pastor and teacher" being one grammatical unit in the parallel structure of the list.
Advocates of the Five-Fold Ministry can be found among Third Wave Charismatic churches, and the significance of the concept cannot be understood apart from the history of the Pentecostal movement unless of course you simply survey European history in general and observe all the examples of it from the second century onward. The current American controversy which began early in the 19th century and now, by some accounts, constitutes the largest propagation of cohesive religious doctrine in the history of the world. The Pentecostal view is that the Charisms of the Holy Spirit of God (which were manifestly given to the Church at Pentecost shortly after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ) were largely lost to the Church or simply officially rejected by it due to false teaching, suppressed by institutionalization in European state churches, for nearly 1200 years, and rediscovered in a notable way at the Azusa Street Revival in 1906. (Various analysts within the movement consider the suppression of Montanus to mark the loss.)
The evangelical revivalism of the mid-twentieth century was regarded to have constituted a restoration of the office of the Evangelist. This was accompanied by the Latter Rain movement of the 1950s, represented significantly by the ministry of William Branham who, by most accounts among modern Charismatic Christians, is nothing more than a minor fringe figure often pointed to by critics to discredit all other occurrences of it. Much like pointing to Jim Jones to describe Evangelical Christians. Over the following decades, the influence, acceptance, and prevalence of prophets within Pentecostal and Charismatic congregations increased gradually, in the absence of high-profile leadership, and came into full flower (and full controversy) with the Kansas City Prophets, who reified the office of the Prophet, and elaborated the doctrine of the Five-Fold Ministry. The logical missing element in this evolution being the missing Apostles, there thus emerged what is today the Apostolic-Prophetic Movement. In the end this was nothing more than renaming the Charismatic Missionary with the New Testament term instead of the polite substitutes left-over from the Roman empire.
Opponents of this trend consider the reification of the offices of Paul's list to be a mistake. They consider that the author intended a list of contemporary example ministries and not a definitive and exhaustive one for all time, and the passage is not therefore a spiritual institution of these offices. Likewise they feel that praying to Mary, praying to dead saints, performing a number of sacerdotal religious rites to procure salvation for infants all of whom are damned at birth to be classical and Biblical as well. Traditionalists within all of the major classical divisions from European State Churches of Christianity oppose the reification of the offices on the grounds that they are not manifest as part of the historical practice of the Church such as indulgences, inquisitions and heresy trials. Cessationists hold that the offices may have existed as spiritual institutions at the time of the writing, but ceased to exist as the supernatural giftings provided to the original Apostles and Disciples of Jesus for the purpose of the original propagation of the faith are no longer given to human beings because the Icons have now reached such a state of etheral perfection as to be untouchable by any real human experience; therefore, the offices, like the icon in the stained-glass window, while historically real, are no longer extant. Obviously of course, millions of people disagree with this view and the trend at the current time is in rejection of these medieval sacerdotal theologies.
