I’ve worked with a lot of young leaders over the years, and several of them considered themselves apostolic at a young age. Some of them are…if the gift continues…see the last post. Others are young evangelists who have mischaracterized themselves, and a few have been engaged in apostolic environments when what they actually carry is passion for the apostolic task, but are gifted very differently.
Most of what follows was born out of trying to help those men and women be more precise with the word, which meant I had to get more precise with it myself. In 2024, I sat down and wrote a short paper doing exactly that, because I kept running into the term “apostolic” doing three different jobs, sometimes inside the same conversation, and I couldn’t always tell whether the person using it meant a passion, a gift, or a calling.
I promised at the end of the last post that I’d pull those three apart, so this is the attempt. This isn’t another run at the question I left open, whether the gift of apostleship continues. I still don’t know. What I want to do instead is assume the layer I’m confident about, that the pioneering work goes on and Christ keeps supplying his church with people who do it, and then get more careful about what we’re actually meaning when we call that work apostolic. And I’ll say this much at the outset: if apostleship does continue, it’s usually the gifting and the calling, but both of those are a good deal more rare than the popularity of the word would suggest in many of the circles I spend time in.
Also, a word carrying three jobs eventually does none of them well. When “apostolic” means passion and gifting and calling all at once, a few things tend to happen. The zealous get told they have a gift they may not have. The genuinely gifted get told their gift is really just a personality. And calling becomes something a person can claim on their own rather than something a church recognizes slowly.
So here’s my attempt to disambiguate the term.
Apostolic Passion
Let’s start with the most common form.
In a lot of churches there are people whose hearts beat for the places the good news of Jesus hasn’t reached yet. They’re the ones pushing the church to send rather than to keep, advocating for the overlooked, and asking the uncomfortable question about the neighborhoods and the nations nobody in the current ministry is thinking about this week. Sometimes, their zeal knows no bounds, and honestly, they can become a real challenge to the more pastorally minded person whose heart is oriented toward the saints already in the room. And I’m one of them. And I both care deeply about the 99 and want to go seek out the lost 1.
That zeal isn’t a personality quirk, and it isn’t restlessness dressed up in mission language. At least I hope not! It’s a conviction, and it’s rooted in God’s heart and in the biblical text in exactly the way a bent toward compassion and mercy is rooted in God’s heart and the biblical text.
Paul names it as an ambition:
“and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, ‘Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.’”
(Romans 15:20-21)
He says something in the same key to the Ephesian elders: “But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). Paul was a gifted apostle and a called one, and both of those are true of him. But neither of those texts is about his gift. They’re about what he wanted, where he kept pointing himself, and what he was willing to lose to get there. That’s what I would call apostolic passion.
And here’s what I’ve come to believe about it after thinking about this for way too long. Plenty of people carry apostolic passion who don’t have the gift of apostleship at all. They have mercy, or leading, or serving (Romans 12:6-8), and they exercise those gifts with a fierce orientation toward people who’ve never heard. And calling that passion a gift of apostleship does them no favors. It hands them a category they’ll never quite fit, and can make them feel like a failure when the pioneering church-planting fruit never shows up. And it can be catastrophic when we put them in an apostolic seat, because now the mismatch isn’t just private discouragement…it’s a role they can’t play and a team, a ministry, or a movement expecting something that isn’t there. I think naming this form of apostolic as passion does something different and better. It tells a person the zeal is real and from God, and then it points them at the actual gift they’ve been given to spend in service of it. We really are one body with many parts! Some of the kindest work a church or ministry can do is help a zealous person find out which part they are. And also what they are not.
Apostolic Gifting
The second thing people mean by the term “apostolic” is an actual gift, a present work of the Spirit in a particular person.
The practitioners who’ve thought hardest about this describe it in overlapping ways, and I find the overlap more useful than any single definition. Neil Cole talks about being sent with a specific God-given assignment to lay a foundation for the expansion of the church, and being mature enough to equip others to do the same. Alan Hirsch describes the apostolic person as an innovator and a cultural architect, the one who initiates something new and then builds an organization around it. Others call them visionary, catalytic pioneers, always pushing into new territory and eager to explore. No definition is perfect, and you can hear different people reaching for the same thing from different angles, each of them describing the outcome rather than the mechanism.
The outcome is the point. The distinguishing mark of a person with this gift isn’t that they pray zealously for the lost, though they usually do, and it isn’t that they can talk strategy, though many of them can talk it all day. It’s that they start things. They initiate. They cast a vision that other people will actually leave something to join; they lay foundations rather than building from someone else’s, and when you look behind them a few years later, there are new disciples and new ministries and new churches that weren’t there before. Said simply, you can know the gift by the fruit.
And the gift almost always shows up immature before it shows up mature, which is worth saying out loud and repeatedly. If I could drill one thing into pastors and teachers, it would be “don’t confuse immaturity for rebellion.” I wrote a couple of years ago about identifying gifted people on a team, and to say it again: immature apostles overreach on vision and outrun the people they were supposed to be bringing with them. That’s an immature saint still being sanctified even as the Spirit has granted a gift. And a crucial response is discipling that raw material rather than suppressing it or dismissing it. If you ignore it because it’s inconvenient, you create an environment those people won’t participate in, and you’ll lose the gift. But if you hand that immature, gifted person a platform before it’s matured, you’ll have a different problem on your hands. One of my dreams is to help cultivate an environment where these immature saints are identified, loved, discipled, and deployed in ways that are commensurate with their gifting, not just their risk.
And to say it again, I remain unsure whether the gift of apostleship continues. If it does continue, I’m confident today’s version is different from the foundation the first Apostles laid, because foundations get laid once and Paul says the church is built on that one (Ephesians 2:20). Precisely how it’s different, I still can’t tell you…maybe someone else can.
Apostolic Calling
The third way some people use this term is the heaviest, and it’s the one I’d urge the most caution about.
Apostolic calling, as I understand it, is rare. It’s a vocation rather than a capacity, and its scope runs wider than any single community: a people, a region, a nation. It also seems often to be marked by direct revelation from God through dreams, visions, and divine encounters. Paul describes his own this way:
“But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles…”
(Galatians 1:15-16)
Notice two things there. The revelation first: God “was pleased to reveal his Son” to him, which is not something Paul arranged or worked his way up to. And then the timeframe. Set apart before he was born, called by grace, and the whole thing only legible looking backward. Paul isn’t reporting a decision he made about his career. He is reading his own life and finding God’s hand on it from the very beginning.
That’s why I think calling is discerned rather than claimed, and discerned slowly. The people I’d put in this category do seem to share a set of marks: a deep care for those who’ve never heard, a steadfast commitment to the foundational doctrines of the church and the gospel of Christ, and a real willingness to be creative about how the good news of Jesus gets carried into a culture rather than being bound to the way it’s always been done. But you can’t see that set in a season. You see it across decades, as the fingerprints of God’s providence show up over a whole life. Which means the recognizing usually belongs to the people watching rather than to the person being watched.
So here’s the sentence I’d write most carefully in this whole post. Of the three words, “calling” is the one most likely to be claimed and the least likely to be self-evident, and I’d rather be slow and be right than hand someone the title because the vision was big and the room was excited. Apostolic calling is evidenced over a lifetime, often accompanied by suffering, rarely has a fairy-tale ending, and is often misunderstood in its time by those in the existing church.
Which One Do You Mean?
So there you have some working language…these probably aren’t even definitions. But they are ways I have been talking about “apostleship” now for over a decade, even while I’m unresolved personally.
None of this is definitive, but hopefully some of it is helpful. I’m trying to use one difficult word a little more intentionally, and hopefully you’ll think a bit more about God’s word and the gifted saints around you because of it.
When someone tells me a person is apostolic, or tells it to me about themselves, the useful next question for me has been “can you tell me a bit more what you mean?” And it helps me to consider if their passion is fueled for the lost and the least of these. And perhaps their gifting is owed a relationship or a room to start something, and helping identify people to be recruited into it. But I’m more convinced than ever that the calling is owed patience and the humility to let God finish a sentence he started before that person was born.
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