The church’s witness in the world
I would like to begin by reminding you of the preaching offices which we considered earlier, and, most important of all, that the apostles were the “special messengers” of Jesus Christ. We noticed at the time that this did not only refer to the twelve apostles because there were other apostles as well. Barnabas was an apostle, and Paul was an apostle, and there appear to have been others with this title1. We realized at the time that we have no counterpart in our organization to the New Testament apostles. They appear to have been divinely appointed leaders of the new community, yet even they were subject to ecclesial decisions, as we see below, where in each case it was the church that gave instructions, one may say, to the apostles and sent them forth on their journeys.
“As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work where unto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away” (Acts 13:2-3)
“When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question” (Acts 15:2).
Next we have the prophets. These were the people who spoke at their meetings and 1 Corinthians 14 gives quite clear instructions from the apostle as to the way the office of the prophets was to be conducted. They were the preachers of the word, and we have already noticed more than once that some at least were women members of the church, because Paul speaks of women “praying” (which seems to mean publicly praying) and “prophesying” (which certainly meant publicly preaching) “having her head uncovered”: “But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head” (1 Cor 11:5).
Then we have the phrase “the evangelists” who appear to have been unattached missionaries proclaiming the Christian evangel or good news abroad in the earth. Philip the evangelist was one of these and, of course, Silas, and Paul himself, were evangelists. We might say these were the people who went outside the ecclesial organization preaching the word of God and taking the Gospel abroad to other parts.
And then we have the “teachers,” who are associated with “pastors,” the pastors and teachers instructing the flock: “And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;” (Eph 4:11). The idea of the pastor was of a shepherd, the church being the flock; the pastors were therefore the shepherds of the flock and also the teachers. This would appear to have been a more domestic office in the local church, as opposed to the evangelists who went out preaching the gospel. These teachers and pastors seem to have done their work more among the flock, building up the ecclesia in the knowledge and understanding of the word of God.
Now these were the preaching and teaching offices as we see them in the New Testament. They were not a race apart as the clergy later became, and the elders of the church often combined the work of leadership and general supervision of the church with the active preaching and teaching of the word. Paul and the apostles exercised their office as elders, and at the same time were, without doubt, evangelists and preachers along with it, rather as in our own organization where a man “doubles up” very often on two or three offices, so it seems clearly to have been in the New Testament. A brother in our own organization may be a speaking brother, a presiding brother, and an arranging brother at the same time, and this, I think, is very proper and very much in harmony with the pattern we see in the New Testament.
Writing to Timothy, Paul has something to say about the elders which illustrates this point: “Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour,” he says, “especially they who labour in the word and doctrine” (1 Tim 5:17). We shall return to this passage later on. For the present, all I want you to notice is that clearly there were some of the elders who labored in preaching and teaching the word and doctrine and others who did not. Paul is saying that those who labor in “preaching and teaching” are to be counted worthy of double honor, possibly meaning they were to receive a “double portion.”
Preaching versus teaching
I think it is worth noting in passing that there was a distinction between preaching and teaching. The preaching of the gospel, the taking out of the evangel, or good news to the world — was that which converted men to Christianity. They proclaimed the message of life in Jesus Christ, and went out with this message like the water of life to parched and thirsty land. And the “teachers” established those who had been converted, their function being, I suppose, the exposition of Scripture and the application of Christianity to daily living, which was never overlooked in the New Testament church. Central to it all was the manner of persons you should be, “That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing” (Col 1:10). This is “doctrine” in the New Testament parlance, and the teachers’ job was to apply the doctrine of Christ so that the church having been converted by the preaching of the Gospel was built up and set on its right path by the teachers in their expositions of Christian doctrine.
I suppose it was not entirely unlike our own set-up today, as we suggested earlier, though we do not have any persons whom we call prophets (and I also do not think we have the exact counterpart of prophets in our organization) but the nearest we have, answering roughly to the function of the prophet, would be our Sunday speakers, our preachers, and exhorting brethren. Notice that there were no “lecturing brethren” in the New Testament Church, whilst on our part we do not have any “preachers.”
I wonder sometimes why we cannot just preach the Gospel instead of giving “Bible lectures” which has, at least, a rather frightening sound in the ears of many people. It is certainly true that some of our public addresses are really very much Bible lectures and not really anything like preaching the Gospel.
We have been, in the past, a little afraid of the word “preaching,” and have preferred to give lectures. I merely make a note in passing that our lecturing brethren have no place in the New Testament order but preachers certainly did.
Presumably, the teachers would be answerable to our Bible Class speakers, Sunday school teachers and such like. Never let us ever underrate the importance of those who labor in preaching and teaching in the Sunday school and youth groups because this is very important in our own organization. I am convinced of this today. Fraternal gathering speakers also ought to be “teachers,” not just moralizers, or dribblers forth of platitudes, but shapers of thought, getting people to think carefully about the implication of our Christian calling. These are the teachers in all their various aspects.
Evangelists? Well we do not have any that we call evangelists, but we do have Bible campaigners and Bible mission workers, and I would think clearly that they are similar in the work they do to the evangelists in the New Testament times. The work is often carried on in a lonely capacity, going out with the Gospel to lands and places where hitherto it has not been taken. This was essentially the function of the evangelists, but we should never forget the personal witness of the rank and file members, who are the salt of the earth in our community, and were in the New Testament church in the very teaching of Jesus Christ himself.
We use the phrase rather glibly, but when Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth,” he really meant it, and he did not just mean those who are the front men of the organization, but every single member is a grain of salt, as it were, sent out to season society with the ideas of Jesus Christ. Christians are sent out to bring some kind of preservative element into society; sent out to make the world a better place, to make it more savory in the sight of God; to try to infiltrate the thoughts of Jesus Christ, and the message of Jesus Christ into the environment in which they live. “You are the salt of the earth” — YOU!” Never mind about apostles, prophets and evangelists, pastors and teachers and arranging brethren, even lecturing brethren. You are the salt of the earth.
There is an interesting example of this: “And Saul was consenting unto Stephen’s death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except the apostles” (Acts 8:1). Now the apostles stayed in Jerusalem, but how they managed to do it, why they were allowed to do it, we are not told, but when the church suffered this persecution all the believers were scattered abroad except the apostles. “Therefore they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word” (Acts 8:4).
These were the grains of salt being scattered, as it were, from Jerusalem; scattered into society, into the world. It was not the apostles, for they were in Jerusalem. It means, clearly, the individual brothers and sisters, the nonentities, the nameless people of whom we know nothing except that they were members of the Christian church in Jerusalem, and were the people who went out and took the word of God with them. This is something we must all remember.
How did they do their preaching?
First of all we recognize the fact, which I have suggested before, that they were not a disjointed society without direction, with everybody doing everything haphazardly. It is patently clear that they were organized under the direction of the apostles, who we earlier suggested may have received their instructions on the progress of the work from the lips of Jesus Christ himself, when he “gave commandment unto his apostles” after his resurrection as to how the work of the church was to proceed under their general guidance. The work proceeded in an orderly and organized fashion. There are clear signs of this in the Acts of the Apostles.
There would not appear to have been anything quite equivalent to our own Christadelphian method, where we have speakers going out all over the place, with somebody driving up the Motorway, going north, passing somebody from the north coming down the other lane and passing somewhere about Birmingham! This is the way we do it today. It may, of course, serve a useful purpose in our case because we are organized more on an inter-ecclesial basis than they were in the first century, but it may also be less effective than a concentration on local preaching work such as generally appears to have been the method in the New Testament church.
The work seems to have been concentrated in areas, with towns or cities as a headquarters from which, in an orderly fashion, the evangelists and preachers went out taking the message and forming as it were light stands in the surrounding countryside. Dr. Blunt in his History of the Christian Church in the First Three Centuries2makes a very good case for the organized establishment by the apostles of preaching headquarters in the strategic centers of the Roman world beginning at Jerusalem. As Jesus said, you notice, this word was to be “preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations, beginning atjerusalem,” so they were carrying out the instructions of Jesus Christ to the letter as to how the work was to proceed.
Then from Jerusalem, Blunt suggests we get the growth of the Antioch church as the springboard for the preaching to the Gentiles. Paul and Barnabas later made their headquarters at Antioch which seems to have become the mother church if you like, from which Paul and Barnabas were sent out on their preaching mission. Then we have Corinth, Ephesus, and finally Rome, and in each of these strategic centers churches were established, big churches, thriving churches, as a basis for operations in the particular province which they served so that other churches would grow up around them, gravitating as it were to the center church from which the Gospel had gone out to them.
It is interesting to notice that similar methods seem to be successful in Bible Mission work (for example in South Africa) where there seems to be the same idea of establishing a center, getting some workers there, building up an ecclesia, and then moving on to another center, leaving always a nucleus of people to carry on the work, in order that there shall be organized development from place to place rather than a sporadic effort going out in all directions like fireworks on bonfire night and fizzling out in space.
Now, having considered the preaching and teaching offices, what about the preachers themselves? I am thinking of the status and support of preachers in the New Testament, where we find statements which indicate that the work of preaching and ministering to the church was for some, I emphasize this, for some, a full time activity and that they were supported by contributions from the body of believers.
This may come as a shock, but I think it is demonstrably true. We have always proudly maintained what we like to think of as a lay ministry, and we boast very often of our unpaid workers, and sometimes tend to sneer at the “paid hirelings” (as we call them in some of our literature) of the established churches. I was brought up to really believe that to be a paid preacher of the Gospel was in itself a demonstration of the apostasy. The truth, however, is that support for preachers of the Gospel and for workers in the church is scriptural.
We may reasonably object to the bishops’ palaces and the rich living (as we allege) of some of them. We may object to them sitting in the House of Lords as the “Lords spiritual” of this country; but there are no scriptural grounds for objecting to the maintenance of full time ministers. And be it noted that the great majority of these full time ministers are on lower salaries than their congregations (or most of ours).
There is an interesting verse in Galatians. Here is a passage, which has been sometimes misunderstood: “Let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things” (Gal 6:6). This is often understood to mean that a man who understands Scripture is to communicate it to others. If you are taught the word it is your business to pass it on to other people, and instruct others also. I am absolutely sure that it does not mean that. It means that the man who has received instruction in the word of God is to be prepared to help the man who is giving him the message.
To “communicate” means to share with him in all the necessary things of life, and this is what Galatians is saying. “When anyone is under instruction in the faith he should give his teacher a share in all good things he has” is the NEB rendering. What Paul is saying is, “If you receive the spiritual blessing of being instructed in the word of God you should be prepared to help the person doing the instruction in the material things of life.” The Living New Testament paraphrases the verse as: “Those who are taught the word of God should help their teachers by paying them.”3
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One