I was at a home group meeting this past weekend with friends and one of the guys mentioned something about being glad he was out of ministry and the hierarchical system of religion, and how even just the word “ministry” brings up negative feelings. I think this is honestly an increasingly common thing that is happening in the Body of Christ as people are leaving denominational churches in droves. There is a measure of necessary deconstruction and remodeling of our belief systems taking place as we encounter new information and then discover that in some churches and groups, asking intelligent questions about our faith is not acceptable. When this happens, we tend to realize that we don’t belong and need to go elsewhere or nowhere, but that regardless of what we do, it’s time to leave where we are now. And in coming out of one such system, my friend’s comment made a lot of sense.
The very idea of hierarchy or government or leadership has become so toxic to some people that it is easy to look at the scriptures from our woundedness and see Jesus promoting an end to all forms of chain-of-command. And yet not only was Jesus was not abolishing hierarchy and government, He was establishing it. We see this first in his own actions, and then further along we see Paul the Apostle elaborating further on what some of that is meant to look like. I think it is incredibly important if we want to function as healthy members of the Body of Christ for us to understand what God’s government looks like and what Jesus was establishing in the earth, and then discuss a key we can use to identify the health of the leadership of a local church Body.
God has a Divine Order that He has established in all creation. We see this in the functioning of the cosmos, in the Divine Councils the scriptures make occasional reference to, as well as what we saw modeled in the life of Jesus and later on by Paul the Apostle. We can see it in Genesis 1 with God placing the sun and moon to rule over the day and night. In Genesis 1:16 and 1:18 where it states that God set the sun and moon to govern over day and night there are two different words used, memšālâ and māšal, both of which essentially mean “to rule/govern”. Even in creation God set up divine government in the cosmos and the scriptures directly state it. Furthermore, He went on to give mankind authority over the earth and its living creatures (Gen 1:28) and directly gave Adam authority (Gen 2:15) over Eden to steward it. In Genesis 1:28 we again see two words used, this time slightly different—kāḇaš which means to subdue or bring under subjection by force, and rāḏâ, which means to dominate, tread down, or rule over in a manner that suggests it is done by force and/or power. The point of sharing all of this is simply for us to understand that in both the terrestrial heavens and the earth God created a divine order and that there is no way to escape this idea of hierarchy.
Adam was given authority over every living creature on the earth, which means from the beginning it was God’s intention to have a leadership structure in the earth. We see the presence of hierarchy even just in one of the names we call God—He is the “Most High God”. In order for there to be a “Most High” God there have to be gods that are less-high than the Most High, otherwise there wouldn’t be a modifier of “Most High” put on the front of the title “God” in order to delineate which God we are referring to. And no, I am not promoting pantheism, but rather a more appropriate understanding of cosmology and God’s divine order and authority structure in the heavens, including but not limited to the Divine Council and the Elohim, of which in Christ we have been included in. (If you want to learn more about this I highly recommend Dr. Michael Heiser’s book “The Unseen Realm” as a good reference tool).
In Isaiah 9:6-7 it was even prophesied about Jesus of the governmental system He was coming to establish, and this is probably a good part of why his disciples were so convinced He had come to establish another earthly Kingdom. They weren’t confused as to whether He was establishing a kingdom or not, because they were correct and He was establishing one. They were mistaken about what that governing system looked like and what it governed over.
Isaiah 9:6-7 states:
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”
According to that prophecy in Isaiah, Jesus came to establish a governmental system that would be ever-increasing, and that He would reign in righteousness forever. We actually see mention of this in Romans 5:14 where it talks about how death reigned from Adam to Moses (a reign is a governmental system ruling over something) but in Romans 5:17 it says that those of us who receive Jesus’ righteousness will reign with Him in life! (If you want to understand more about reigning in life with Jesus, pick up a copy of my book “The Gospel of Life and Immortality“).
Then we get to Jesus’s earthly reign where He appointed apostles. Apostles in the Roman Empire were tasked with governing over colonized areas and spreading the culture and ways of the Roman Empire into that region. By Jesus appointing 12 of his disciples as apostles, he was denoting a few different things—first, that there was indeed a hierarchy, as apostles carried more authority than the rest of His disciples, and second that their job as “sent ones” was to establish the culture of His government. You can’t “apostle” if there is no existing governmental system that you are spreading and expanding. The Apostle Paul elaborated a bit more on this when He explained in Ephesians 4:11-16 about what we now term the “Fivefold Ministry”, which is apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers.
Each of the Fivefold is vital for growing and building the Body of Christ, and while they are not necessarily more “important” than other people, Ephesians 4 states that these individuals and the ministry grace they embody is a gift of Jesus Christ to the entire Body. If we want to get away from systems of religious control that is perfectly fine, but if we want to get away from the divine order in the Body of Christ that Jesus gifted us, that would be foolishness at very best.
Personally, I operate in the grace of a Fivefold Teacher, and with that comes both grace for the task as well as responsibilities that God has given me to steward on behalf of the Body. It doesn’t make me more important that someone who isn’t a Fivefold minister of some kind, but it does mean that I have a specific job that may differ from what certain others are called to, and a large part of my task is to teach and equip the rest of the Body to walk into greater fullness of everything God has planned for us. That’s also why my books almost always carry not just information, but an activation component of how to practically live out and apprehend whatever the subject of that book is—because information will only take you so far if you can’t actually use it.
If we truly want to live out and walk out all that God has planned for us, both individually and corporately, we must accept that there is in fact a governing structure in the Body of Christ, that begins with apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:19-22). The purpose of this isn’t for anyone to lord their position over one another, but rather for each of us to play the role we were designed for, and in so doing for the entire Body of Christ to prosper.
Now, I did promise that I would discuss a key we can use to identify the health of the leadership of a local church Body, and it’s actually pretty simple. Unhealthy leaders and unhealthy leadership structure is all about control, whereas healthy church leadership is about guidance and guidelines that help people function in their highest calling without feeling a need to manipulate or control the individual.
I want to be clear about what I am saying with this, as well as what I am not saying. I am not saying that someone can do or say whatever they want in a local Body without care or concern for the influence it will have on other people and then if a leader speaks to them about their immature behavior then that leader is being “controlling”. No, that leader is stewarding a local Body and is looking out for the needs of everyone, whereas that individual is looking out for the needs of himself or herself only. Healthy leadership will come with established healthy boundaries. We should expect that. We should also expect that those leaders will have some sort of accountability structure in place (not necessarily personally with every member of that church, but with certain individuals in and outside of that local church Body) so if there truly are problems that arise, that there are people who can help mediate the conflicts and give additional perspective. However, that doesn’t mean that someone gets to do whatever they want and constantly ask for outside mediation if they don’t get their way. Accountability is also not a system to be used to control leadership any more than leaders are meant to control their members.
What I am saying is that a leader should help guide those under their leadership and attempt to help everyone figure out how they fit into the local Body, either personally or through other members of the leadership team. In other words, if you aren’t personal friends with the local pastor or apostle, that’s actually okay. He or she can’t be best buddies with every single member of the congregation, and it is an unrealistic expectation to hold of them. A reasonable expectation is that there will be someone in leadership that you can connect with, but the very nature of a leadership structure and the need for delegation means that one man can’t do everything. Even the Apostles in Acts 6 chose seven other men to have leadership roles under their ministry specifically because of a need to delegate tasks.
This article is getting a bit longer than I had anticipated, so I want to bring it to a close here, but the underlying point here is that ministry isn’t bad, leadership and hierarchy aren’t cuss words, and we need to value the place that leadership has in God’s system of Divine Order both in the heavens and in the earth. If we want to match what God is doing, then we have to get enough understanding that we can accept the presence of a governing system and then align ourselves with and in it where God directs us to go. And if you have been hurt as a result of being part of a local church where maybe someone didn’t steward God’s heart toward you as well as you could have hoped, I encourage you to seek out some of the inner healing resources on this site (I have written extensively on the subject of inner healing and deliverance including my coauthored book “Broken to Whole“, recently made into an audiobook) so you can heal and move past the things that have been holding you back.
