When Jesus Christ was here, he traveled from place to place proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom of Heaven to anyone who would listen. The Church is a part of that Kingdom, and in this lesson we want to take a look at how we can participate in Kingdom building while we are busy doing the three tasks that God gave the local Church: evangelism and mercy, discipleship and worship.

The Kingdom of Heaven

So what exactly is the Kingdom of Heaven, and what does Kingdom building look like? The Kingdom of Heaven is the result of our local Churches influence on pop culture and civil government. What I mean by that is every moment of every day we live in a world that “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19 ESV).

The end result is that culture is dominated by the corruption in human nature, and the local Church is in the middle of a war to celebrate the Works of the Flesh and discourage the pursuit of the Fruit of the Spirit that we can read about in Galatians 5:19-23.

When the followers of pop culture and the human authorities working in civil government want to celebrate the corruption in human nature, the Church will be opposed with persecution. Persecution is what happens when the local Church is seen as a threat to the spread of corruption in this world.

In response to that, building the Kingdom of Heaven involves making plans to survive the challenges a local Church faces when – for example – they are not allowed go shopping in the public market places and retail stores.

The Kingdom of Heaven involves a comprehensive approach to the daily tasks of life. There needs to be alternative sources of food, clothing, housing, public education and more for those who have embraced The Message of Christianity and have been rejected as a result by an unbelieving world. This has to be done in addition to the work of the Ministry in the areas of preaching and teaching.

How exactly this can be done is a very complicated issue that we will look at later. For now, I want to focus on the ministers of the Church.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Have you ever thought of the Kingdom of Heaven as a having a comprehensive approach to the daily tasks of ordinary life?

The Ministers of the Church

In Ephesians 4:11-12 (ESV), the Apostle Paul wrote that Jesus Christ “gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds (or pastors), and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”

In addition to that we are told in the Book of Acts chapter 6 that another group which was called Deacons was added to the visible human structure of the Church. The final group within the Church could simply be called Church members.

What I want to do now is take a closer look at how each of these groups operates within a local Church environment. In order to do that, we are going to look at each one of them in a different order than the one the Apostle Paul gave us in Ephesians 4.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Have you ever heard of the five ministries within the Church? (Why or why not?)

#2. Have you ever heard of Deacons before? (Why or why not?)

#1. Church Members

Church members have only one responsibility – they are meant to become disciples who are learning to be disciplined by God so they can replace the Works of the Flesh with the Fruit of the Spirit described in Galatians chapter 5.

As Church members begin making progress in their pursuit of the Fruit of the Spirit, God can give them promotions into other areas of service within the local Church.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Do you think of replacing the Works of the Flesh with the Fruit of the Spirit as your main responsibility as a Christian?

#2. Have you ever seen someone who made progress in pursuing the Fruit of the Spirit be promoted into other areas of service by God within a local Church?

#2. The Deacons

The Deacons were not a part of God’s original design for the Church, but were added by Church leaders in response to problems they were having taking care of the poor. In Acts chapter 6 we are told that there were cultural biases developing within the church of Jerusalem.

The end result of that bias was that there some poor Church members who were not allowed to have their needs for food, water and clothing provided for with the money donated in order to provide for the less fortunate.

The solution to that Church leaders developed was to appoint seven Deacons to make sure that no one was being neglected within the Church community. All these Deacons did was to make sure that poor Church members were treated fairly.

Let’s take a closer look at the work Deacons have to do. The Deacons were men whose only responsibility is to make sure that the poor within our local Churches are being treated fairly. In the book of Acts, there were complaints of discrimination being brought to the Apostles regarding the poor, and appointing Deacons to handle the problems was the Church’s response.

Being A Deacon requires a knowledge of how the rich, the middle class and the poor think about money and approaching them with requests for help with fund raising and spending in culturally sensitive ways.

The simple fact is that the rich, the middle class and the poor think differently about money, and deacons have to take all of those different concerns into consideration while they are working to share resources with the poor. Here is quick summary of the different concerns over money that the rich, middle class and the poor have that deacons need to be aware of.

Concerning the Poor

The Poor look at the world as a place where there is never going to be enough money to survive on. This way of thinking makes them incredibly generous. When the poor have very little to live on, they will share it freely with someone they consider a friend when they can, knowing that the friend will return the favor eventually.

To state it simply, the poor think money is “ours” and “we” use what we have to take care of each other whenever someone has a need. The poor do not have the money management skills that the middle class and the rich consider to be “normal” because they never had enough money available to manage.

Deacons have to collect funds from the rich and middle class to share with the poor when the poor need help with obtaining food, clothing or medical care. This kind of fund raising should be done “as he may prosper” according to 1 Corinthians 16:2 (ESV) which means anything we could save for the future can be spent on the needs of others in the present.

Concerning the Middle Class

The Middle class look at the world as a place where skilled labor is always rewarded. They tend to value hard work and self sufficiency. When a poor person comes asking for help, the middle class will tend to think that person begging needs to find a real job and use the money management skills that we all know instinctively, right?

Deacons have to convince the middle class to share with the poor when a real job and the money management skills they learned from their parents are not available to the people in need. Deacons need to understand how hard it can be to overcome poverty by using middle class money management skills that the poor were never taught at home by their parents.

Concerning the Rich

The Rich look at the world as a place to make investments. They are willing to lend out money generously, but they want guarantees that they will gain a return of the investment in the future.

The Rich tend to think of lending out money in order to organize new businesses and set up different kinds of industry to gain long term rewards on their generosity. This way of thinking tends to leave the poor out on the street because the only long term “reward” a poor person has to offer is the promise of repaying a debt.

The poor have no skills or resources for any kind of long term gain that Rich people are taught to value at home by their parents, and Deacons have to work around that to provide resources for the poor.

The work Deacons do regarding the financial needs of poor Church members allows more free time for the other ministers of the Church to work in their appointed tasks within the local Church, which we are going to begin examining now.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Have you seen Deacons work on helping the poor and less fortunate in the past?

#2. Do you understand the different ways that the Rich, the Middle Class and the Poor think about money?

#3. The Evangelists

The first ministry position we want to examine in detail is the Evangelist. The work of the Evangelist is to invite people from other world religions to receive the hope of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is all they do: they offer the followers of other world religions an introduction to Jesus Christ and those who accept their invitation they are allowed to baptize.

They have the responsibility of helping an unbeliever become a church member. As they publicly proclaim The Message of Christianity, the Evangelist can help the people who respond to become recognized as Church members.

An Evangelist appointed by the Holy Spirit does not have the authority to ordain anyone to any of the other ministry positions within a local Church. An Evangelist cannot endorse or ordain anyone to be a Pastor, Teacher, Prophet, Apostle or Deacon within a local Church. The New Testament places no restrictions on women working as Evangelists or in the area of evangelism.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Have you ever known someone who God used as an Evangelist in the past?

#2. Do you believe Evangelists are used by God to help people find hope?

#4. The Pastors

The second ministry position we want to examine in detail is the Pastor. The first detail I want to mention is that Pastors always appear as a group. We never see anywhere in the New Testament a single local Church having a single Pastor.

God’s design is to have one local Church being governed by a group of Pastors. These Pastors do not have authority from the Holy Spirit to perform water baptism on people who want to become Church members. That is something reserved by the Holy Spirit for the Evangelists to do.

The main responsibility Pastor’s are given by the Holy Spirit is for them to maintain healthy relationships within a local Church community. This is why there are some parts of the New Testament that refer to Pastors as Shepherds – they have make sure the sheep are not busy fighting and competing among themselves.

Sheep can be very mean to each other when they think their Pastor (or Shepherd) is not available and paying attention to their needs. That kind of neglect can cause sheep to begin engaging in abusive behavior towards other sheep.

We can even argue that when Jesus was here, he chose 12 disciples to reflect the proper size of a Pastor’s congregation. It is worth praying about to see if the Holy Spirit wants to have a single Pastor available to be responsible for maintaining healthy relationships in a group of 12 church members in the local Church environment.

In 1 Timothy 3:1-2 the Bible says that only men can be Pastors in a local Church.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Do you think a Pastor’s main responsibility is to maintain healthy relationships in a local Church?

#5. The Teachers

The third ministry position we want to examine in detail is the Teacher. The Teacher’s main contribution to the health and well being of a local Church involves doing research on the Bible’s background.

The Bible was written in two languages that most of us are not familiar with, and the people we can read about in the Bible had different cultural habits than we do today. The Holy Spirit appoints teachers in the local Church to help us deal with the challenges created by the different language(s) and difference in cultural habits between the people we read about in the Bible and culture of our modern audiences.

Every culture has certain things they believe are normal and each culture in the world has a different set of beliefs they cling to. In the English speaking world today, we tend to believe that truth can be researched and documented by Science.

People who lived in the past did not view scientific research as a tool we can use to discover and share truth. They had a completely different set of tools they used, and we have to take that into consideration if we want to understand any of their writings, this applies to the Bible as well.

So Teachers are given to the local Church by God to help us understand what God has done in the past. In fact, everything I have written and shared in these Basic Christian Beliefs is demonstrating the work the Holy Spirit assigns for the Teacher in a local Church, and teachers can be either men or women, preferably having men teach other men and women teaching other women.

Discussion Questions:

#1. How many people have you know who were gifted by God in Bible teaching?

#6. The Prophets

The fourth ministry position we want to examine in detail is the Prophet. This particular ministry is very controversial in the English Speaking world, and the entire controversy can be summarized this way:

Some Christians in the English speaking world today believe God still appoints Prophets to serve in our local Churches, and other Christians in the English Speaking world disagree.

I hope I explained that simply enough for you. The basic disagreement that exists on whether or not God is appointing prophets to serve within our local churches is a subject I am not going to deal with right now.

These Basic Christian Belief studies are simple that: Basic Christian Beliefs. This is meant to be an introduction to the Christian faith, so I have one thing I want to share about the Ministry of the Prophet with you right now. In the Bible, the ministry of the Prophet has very clearly been held by men and women in the past, but what was the point of having prophets at all?

The Ministry of the Prophet in the Bible deals with seeing the problems that are being created by the choices we make today. There is one person who claimed to be a Prophet that I have heard about online who – before he died – liked to say that “God sees you in the future and you look much better than you look right now.”

That gets right to the heart of the problem regarding Prophets – does God share information about the future with us or not? Obviously we have prophets in the Bible who write about the end of the world.

But we have to ask ourselves if the Holy Spirit is still appointing prophets in our local Churches to warn our local churches about other disasters like earthquakes, droughts, acts of terrorism or smaller matters like whether or not a new business venture could cost us everything and leave us being homeless if we decided to try something new?

Some Pastors and Teachers say yes the Holy Spirit does, and others say No, the Holy Spirit does not offer these kinds of warnings anymore. We will talk more about this when we begin exploring the books of the Bible together, especially the books written by the Prophets.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Do you think God still offers warnings about potential problems in life today? (Why or why not?)

#7. The Apostles

The fifth ministry position we want to examine in detail is the Apostle. This particular ministry is also very controversial. When Jesus Christ was here, he appointed 12 men to be his Apostles and none of them are alive today. The twelve of them lived in the past, but there are some parts of the Church who believe that Jesus Christ is still appointing Apostles to serve in the Church today.

The people who think the Apostles lived in the past and are never coming back think that Church History is moving forward on a Greek timeline. For those who think God is using a Greek timeline to control the direction of human history, the Apostles were appointed by God during the first generation of the Church and they will not return to serve in a local Church today.

Within the last 100 years or so, some parts of the Church have begun thinking that Church History is moving forward on a Hebrew time cycle. If God is using a Hebrew time cycle to control the direction of human history, then the first and the last generation of the Church will be led by men appointed by God to serve as Apostles.

All we have to do to know if there are going to be Apostles again is watch and pray. God does not want anyone he had led through the Order of Salvation to be confused about this.

Discussion Questions:

#1. Have you ever heard of a Hebrew time cycle before?

#2. Do you understand the difference between a Greek timeline and a Hebrew time cycle?

Conclusion

The Ministry positions exist within and around a local Church to nurture faith in the lives of Church members, for “without faith it is impossible to please” God (Hebrews 11:6 ESV). In our next lesson we will look at the tasks that these ministers have to perform in order to nurture faith in the lives of Church members.