In August of 2018, I spent a week in Barcelona at a theology intensive on the Holy Spirit with goers from The Austin Stone. We deliberately brought in an experienced field worker, who taught alongside Dr. Gregg Allison. Gregg is a mentor, and I’d gotten to know him well when he supervised my doctoral thesis a few years prior. It was a formative week: we traced God’s promise to pour out his Spirit on sons and daughters from the prophets all the way to Pentecost, and worked hard to synthesize the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and put practices in our lives and ministry based on it.
The week the intensive ended, Gregg and I were also trading documents for a different assignment…our church’s statement on women in ministry. Gregg was working through this with his own church as an advisor, and it was a rich dialogue as well.
Those two projects have sat next to each other in my mind ever since, because they pull on each other in a place I still haven’t fully worked out biblically and practically. I closed the last post with a confession about exactly this: whether apostleship is a capacity the Spirit distributes or a person Christ appoints. It is a question I’m still wrestling with honestly, and this post is that wrestling, done out loud.
The Gift Is a Person
Here is the text that has held me all these years:
“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ”
(Ephesians 4:11-12)
A few verses earlier, Paul quotes Psalm 68 to describe what the ascended Christ did for his church: “he gave gifts to men” (Ephesians 4:8). And then, when he names the gifts, he doesn’t list capacities. He names what I believe are people. In the last post, I sorted the gift lists into three kinds of things (practices, gifts, and gifted people) and parked this list in the third column. Though other interpretations are possible, I still think that here, the gift is the person. Paul seems to make a similar move in 1 Corinthians 12:28, where “God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers,” and appointed is a word we use for persons, not abilities.
That may sound like a fine grammatical distinction, but I don’t think it is. If Christ’s ascension gift to his church were a set of abilities, the right question would be an inventory question: do I have one? But if the gift is a person, the question changes shape. It becomes a recognition question: who has Christ given to us, and are we receiving them as the gifts they are?
I don’t personally think APEST is a good test of gifts, but it is really about gifted people Jesus gave.
Given to Equip, Not to Do
Whatever else in this list is uncertain, the purpose clause isn’t. These people are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.” We often invert that in practice: the leaders do the work of ministry, and the saints receive it. Paul has it the other way around. The saints do the work of ministry, and the gifted leaders are given to make them ready for it. The body is the ministry, and the leaders are part of how Christ equips it, so that “each part working properly” can build the whole thing up in love (Ephesians 4:16).
I wrote in the first post about a curriculum that taught dependence without distribution, and this is the same gap viewed from the leadership side. When the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers do the ministry rather than equipping the saints for it, the arrangement can look impressively productive…and the body can quietly stop bearing load. Nobody decides this. It often happens because doing the ministry yourself is almost always faster than equipping someone else to do it, and our culture tends to reward fast.
And please hear me…this is not a case against vocational ministry. I’ve spent most of my adult life in it, and I thank God for those who labor in preaching and teaching. It’s a case for reading the “job description” Paul actually wrote for gifted leaders. The measure of a gifted leader in Ephesians 4 is not the ministry they perform. It’s the saints they equip.
The Question I Promised
But there’s a harder question sitting in that list, and the last post promised I’d take it up. Apostles. If the gift is the person, and the persons include apostles, then what exactly did Christ give…and does he still give it?
This is not a new question for me. Around 2008, I was introduced to APEST, the framework popularized by Alan Hirsch that reads Ephesians 4:11 as five ongoing giftings in the church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. It was a prominent dialogue in the missional world for a few years, and I thought then, and still think, that it’s a good framework for consideration. But I always had challenges with how to apply it faithfully given my understanding of the text. So Barcelona sharpened a wrestling that was already a decade old when I got there…I’ve been at this one for almost twenty years.
And I figured, why not show you my thought being worked out? I’d rather walk you through the tension I have wrestled with and the lack of clarity I still have than hand you a conclusion I don’t fully possess. And perhaps someone reading this can help me untie the knot!
Let me start with what seems clear. Earlier in this same letter, Paul writes that the household of God is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20). In Ephesians, “apostles and prophets” seems clearly to mean the New Testament apostles and prophets, the foundation generation. And foundations, by their nature, get laid once.
Now hold that next to Joel. This is the text we kept circling in Barcelona, the landing point of the whole Old Testament promise of the Spirit. When God promised to pour him out, he was explicit about who would receive him:
“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.”
(Joel 2:28-29)
Sons and daughters, male and female servants. When Peter stands up at Pentecost, this is the very text he reaches for to explain what is happening (Acts 2:16-18). The outpouring of the Spirit, and the gifts that flow from it, lands on both genders by explicit design. That’s not a progressive reading of the text; it’s simply what the text says.
So run the logic with me. If apostleship is a gift of the Spirit, a capacity distributed the way prophecy or mercy or administration is distributed, then the Joel principle says it should be given to daughters as well as sons. And the evidence that it was is nearly nonexistent. The only apparent New Testament candidate is Junia in Romans 16:7, and that evidence is thin. The phrase describing her can be read “outstanding among the apostles” or, as the ESV takes it, “well known to the apostles,” and I’m not willing to hang a doctrine of apostleship on a single disputed phrase. Meanwhile, I hold the historic conviction that the New Testament reserves the office of elder for men.
And there’s the bind. If apostleship is a distributed gift, Joel would seem to suggest in principle we should expect women apostles just like prophets, but the New Testament gives us almost none. And Ephesians does seem to keep this couplet together. Which pushes me toward reading Ephesians 4:11 the way the grammar already suggested: not as capacities the Spirit distributes to anyone, but as people Christ appoints. Gifted people, or perhaps anointed and appointed people in offices.
And yet the moment I say that, I feel the cost, because the same list contains evangelists and shepherds and teachers, and I have no instinct at all to close those categories. And it seems pretty clear to me that prophecy not only continues, but is encouraged to be rightly exercised by Paul for both men and women, and is the fulfillment of Joel. But we just don’t have sufficient evidence in the textual record of female apostles unless we hang a TON of weight on Romans 16, which I’m unwilling to do.
This is where my theological synthesis runs into internal conflict, and I’d rather say so plainly than paper over it. I felt it in 2018, working on a complementarian statement the same month I was studying the outpouring of the Spirit on sons and daughters, and I feel it still.
Gift and Office
I take some comfort in the company who have wrestled similarly.
Sam Storms, asked what gifts women can receive, answers with a parenthesis I find honest: “Aside from the gift of apostleship (but what do we make of Romans 16:7?), there isn’t anything in the nature of any spiritual gift that would confine them to men.” He affirms women prophesying from Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 11, distinguishes the gift itself from the settings where it’s exercised, and leaves Junia hanging in that parenthesis rather than pretending to resolve her. Here’s a continuationist who has studied the gifts longer and more carefully than I have, holding the same question open.
John Piper runs the same distinction from the opposite direction. Asked whether prophecy continues today, he observes that women manifestly prophesied in the assembly (1 Corinthians 11:4-5) while 1 Timothy 2:12 restricts authoritative teaching over men, and concludes that the gift of prophecy must be something other than office-level authority. Notice what’s doing the work in both arguments: the difference between a gift the Spirit distributes and an office Christ appoints. Piper uses that lens to keep prophecy open to every believer; I’ve been using it to wonder whether apostleship was ever distributed at all. Same lens, opposite directions. I’ve come to think that the gift-versus-office distinction is load-bearing for this whole conversation, and it’s why the sorting work of the last post matters more than it first appears.
There’s a common way through, and it may be right: distinguish the office of Apostle from a gift of apostleship. The office required an eyewitness of the risen Christ, called directly by him, carrying foundation-laying authority, and it closed with the men who held it. The gift, on this reading, perhaps continues wherever the Spirit empowers pioneering gospel proclamation that leads to church-planting. It’s foundation-laying work among people and places that don’t yet have the church, similar to the Apostles, but without any claim to Scripture-level authority. Or perhaps apostleship has ceased, and everything else continues, which makes me one kind of cessationist. I guess I find the distinctions helpful to a degree, but I honestly can’t yet tell whether it resolves my tension or relocates it.
Where I Land, for Now
So here’s where I land, for now, in three layers.
On the gifts generally, I’m a continuationist in a sense. I believe the Spirit still distributes his power through his people, and the first post in this series was one long argument against pretending otherwise in practice.
On the gift of apostleship, I remain unsure whether it continues. The tension I walked you through is real; I’ve carried it for years, and I don’t expect a blog post to dissolve it.
And beneath both of those, I’m holding out for this: the expression of what we might call apostolic ministry continues regardless. The pioneering, foundation-laying, equipping work that apostles did has not stopped being needed, and I don’t believe Christ has stopped supplying his church with people who do it. Uncertainty about the category never has to become uncertainty about the work. Whether the gift has ceased or not, the work continues where Jesus is neither named nor known, and will remain needed until every tribe, tongue, and nation bow before the throne.
That third layer, the “work,” is what keeps the question honest for me instead of paralyzing. In the next post, I want to pull apart three different things I think people tend to mean when they say the word “apostolic” (passion, gifting, and calling). Naming them and describing them separately honors all three, might bring a bit of clarity to how people I spend time around colloquially use a really complicated biblical term, and could give every believer a way into the work, whatever we finally conclude about the category.
Eight years on from that week in Barcelona, here is what I’m sure of. The ascended Christ is still giving gifts to his church. The saints still need equipping. The body still grows when each part is working properly. And whatever we finally call the pioneers, the builders, and the kingdom expanders, Jesus will build his church.
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