Stop Wait… Wait… Waiting. Start Becoming Faithful Leaders.
So, after all of this, you might be asking yourself, what exactly does it look like for an apostolic-type leader to engage faithfully in their calling?
In 2 Timothy Paul paints a picture for one of his young key leaders of what sort of life he needs to expect as an apostolic leader. Paul tells Timothy that he must be…
Like a Soldier – ready to jump up and go wherever needed… part of an apostolic team
Like an Athlete – highly disciplined in his life and development… mastering the scriptures
Like a Farmer – extremely hardworking and engaging in intense seasons of work… maintaining a portfolio to help remain on task
Then in 2 Corinthians Paul clarifies the difference between a true apostolic leader and the counterfeits who were bewitching the church in Corinth.
The essential components of a genuine apostolic leader are…
A full-life commitment
A clear sense of the work in front of them
A discerning approach in how they navigate forward
An ability to defend their role (confront, convince, cut off those who won’t align themselves with the teaching)
An ability to make powerful arguments (confrontational when necessary)
Apostolic planning with flexibility across dynamic situations
I could unpack these statements and write a five-page paper on each, but I’ll spare you that at the moment.
What is at stake if these leaders don’t take their calling seriously?
I saw it this week. Households sacrificing in order to be a resource to their communities in apartment complexes, laundromats, local restaurants, libraries, community centers, etc. whose homes are wide open and who are pouring their entire lives into creating stable community for those who desperately need it. But they aren’t sure how to shape their situations into a true church community and they’re not sure how to train leaders; they don’t have help or guidance, and they are wearing themselves out; and they either have no apostolic leader in their situation to challenge them and help train additional leaders or they have an apostolic-type leader who doesn’t take their role seriously and is leaving novice shepherds and fledgling churches exposed to the elements and other dangers.
Those men and women with apostolic gifting and calling who are locked into traditional church and ministry contexts must stop masquerading as traditional church leaders who play along with the game of treating the gospel as if it is a mandate for a corporate takeover of society or as if it is merely a mantra to be ceremonially rehearsed week after week, somehow convincing themselves that by running around and staying constantly busy that they are “working hard like a farmer.” A farmer doesn’t busy themselves with unnecessary tasks. That would be a waste of time and would result in a lower-yield crop or the loss of a crop entirely. Farmers must be focused and make choices, and so must we.
These leaders must free themselves from the shackles of their religious institutions that want to keep them in their employ and control their every move and decision. We have got to return to Christ’s plan which His Spirit revealed to Paul and was delivered to the churches by the apostles. We must recover apostolic authority and the apostolic function without trying to synthesize them with our existing church traditions or overemphasizing their role as capital “A” apostles.
We’ve got to reset the destination coordinates in our GPS. I’ve observed so many people that start moving toward the way of Christ and His apostles, but because they don’t have a solid understanding or a deep commitment, they never reset their destination, and so their internal GPS, guided by an almost subconscious commitment to their old tradition, keeps recalculating and taking them right back to the same spot, so that they never make any actual progress. We’ve got to break free of these “guidance system” strongholds.
As apostolic-type leaders we must recover Paul’s traditioning framework and then network together to shape church communities as a global movement around these patterns.
We must help churches return to The Way of Christ and His Apostles, fully dedicating our lives and ways of thinking around building Jesus’s family according to the “pattern of teaching” delivered by the apostles. This is the only legitimate way to worship Jesus… and that statement makes sense when you begin to comprehend what He accomplished when He upended the old reality and inaugurated a new and living way. (Check out Romans 12:1-2)
We must, once again, become what the church was for its first three-hundred years, a unified global family movement.