Apostolic Leadership and Every Nation Seminary Development

in 2017 our launch director for every nation seminary called together a group of leaders and teachers from different nations around the world we met in manila for a week to work on what became our integrative courses and we were talking philosophically about the best way for us to bring theological education and leadership development in what would become every nation seminary as we had this discussion we&#39;re writing on whiteboards that were scattered around the room and we were discussing and brainstorming the idea of the learning environment we wanted learning environment we wanted to produce and multiply and and create uh throughout the seminary process and all these words written all over these whiteboards they all fell into four categories we wanted our environment to be relational to be biblical we wanted everything we study and teach to go d to be deeply rooted in scripture we wanted it to be apostolic that was sort of the the the culture we wanted to be to go through every course and every uh event we did and we wanted it to be global we wanted a global cohort we didn&#39;t want a cohort of americans and another one of africans and another one of of asians we wanted a global cohort every time and so we we liked those four and everything we wrote seemed to fall into one of those categories then we started talking about the ministry skills we wanted to develop in our school and we we talked about if what are the what are the core ministry skills that someone needs in this cultural environment that&#39;s biblical and global and relational and apostolic but what are the skills when someone goes through our courses what are the skills they should be better at certainly they come into this with skills but what are the skills that you need to upgrade during your time in every nation seminary and again we had we had dozens of skills out there but they all fell into four categories there were discipleship skills we wanted every single every nation seminary student to be a better disciple and a better disciple maker after three years there were leadership skills and that&#39;s what&#39;s missing in a lot of theological education there are a lot of people who develop theological skills but still don&#39;t have basic leadership skills we didn&#39;t want that we want we wanted every single student they&#39;re coming in as leaders and we wanted everyone to leave as a better leader than preaching skills again everyone is preaching but we wanted that to be upgraded and and different aspects of preaching the whole preaching process from study to interpretation to sermon crafting to to delivering and sermon living we wanted all of that to be upgraded and missionaries we wanted missionary skills whether whether we&#39;re church planters pastors evangelist campus mission whatever we wanted the basic skills of a missionary to exegete the culture and to contextualize and to learn the language whether it&#39;s the linguistically the same language but the language of the culture to understand and be able to preach the gospel cross-culturally even in our own city so those were the skills we were hoping to upgrade and just about every skill we&#39;re working on with all of you will fit into one of those four categories now what happened is we saw these on the board it ended up it was like it was one of these magical moments like hey wait a minute those seem to fit together and so we labeled our four integrative courses relational discipleship biblical preaching apostolic leadership and global mission now this video right here is an intro to our apple cider leadership course and during that week in manila for in in in 2017 i was arguing that this course should be titled servant leadership and um i obviously lost the debate because this is not a servant leadership course this is the apostolic leadership course and it actually uh the the people pushing the a word were the younger leaders behind a generation behind me the people my age were going oh let&#39;s call this servant leadership and um certainly we want all of us we all are looking for servant leaders and we want to model servant leadership like jesus did but that didn&#39;t capture fully what we wanted but the idea of apostolic did now there&#39;s a lot of confusion a lot of misinformation a lot of ideas about apostolic that we do not want to embrace and we do not want to propagate and so what i hope to do today is not define apostolic i think you can you can go to bible hub and look up the greek and define it for yourself it&#39;s pretty clear but more than define it i want to describe what we mean in the every nation world when we say apostolic leadership and part of what i&#39;ll do is talk about what we don&#39;t mean what what doesn&#39;t fit for us in the culture and in the in the ministry context we&#39;re trying to uh we&#39;re trying to create so we&#39;re going to try to describe it i want to start by looking at not just apostolic leadership but in the context of the bigger picture in ephesians 4. and everybody studied this and preached this but let&#39;s look at ephesians 4 verses 11 through 13. 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 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of god a mature to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of christ now these five gifts ministry gifts mentioned by paul here in ephesians 4 in the esv it&#39;s the apostle prophet evangelist shepherd and teacher other translations say pastor and so the apostle prophet evangel shepherd and teacher has been abbreviated as a pest a-p-e-s-t a pest now without the apostles it has been said we just have pest which is not what we want to propagate and not what we want to become and without the shepherds and teachers if we eliminate those and we&#39;re just apostles prophets that advanced us then we become the ape and when i think about that i remember sitting in a in a in a room in a conference center with a gathering of about 30 global apostles it was called the international apostolic ministry conferences or that i was as often as the case in those kind of moments i was might have been the youngest one in the room and this was only about five years ago and there were some some some brilliant legends of ministry in that room and i took every opportunity i could to have a coffee with them and ask questions and sit at lunch with these these leaders who were in their late 70s 80s and uh one of them uh i think it just turned 90. and what a wealth and a depth of of of experience and knowledge and character and walking with jesus and all this but they were all talking about apostles and apostolic movements in ministries and and i was sitting on the back table with a man who&#39;s a legend he was in his late 80s at the time and and um we were we were cutting up and laughing at his jokes he was talking really loudly because he was couldn&#39;t hear very well and i kept trying to get him to be quiet because he kept making me laugh during this conference but i learned a lot from this man and but while this young self-titled apostle was teaching some stuff that was rather bizarre my buddy this legend got the piece of paper that was on the table and he wrote a p e s t apostle prophet evangelist shepherd teacher and uh and then he x out the st encircled the ape where it said ape he slid the paper to me punched me and pointed to that guy speaking and um that went on for most of this conference with this guy and i i do consider this man an amazing man of god and the truth the fact was he was kind of true because the guy was saying i&#39;m an apostle and then he was saying some stuff that wasn&#39;t rooted in scripture and it was just uh unhelpful to be kind uh and my veteran buddy recognized that and so we there&#39;s a lot that&#39;s said and taught and written about apostles and apostolic movements that we want to try to clarify um a lot of the writing in the language goes back to the 80s 90s around that time when c peter wagner who was a professor at fuller seminary began studying growing churches and the phenomena that he labeled the new apostolic reformation um wagner wrote a number of books and um peter wagner was a good man godly man he was a missiologist and a phenomenologist but not a theologian he studied phenomena and and he was a missionary for many years of his career and um and leaned toward cross-cultural mission church growth but loved to study phenomena and so a lot of what wagner observed um he he affirmed but then he started putting language to it and in one of his books and this is um one of his books he talked about different types of apostles and i wrote down someone he talked about vertical apostles and horizontal apostles and some of us wondered if that meant those who laid down and took naps a lot the horizontal apostles versus those who stood up he talked about ecclesiastical apostles functional apostles congregational apostles convening apostles ambassadorial apostles mobilizing apostles territory apostles and marketplace apostles the list goes on and it was almost the point where just about anybody who does anything could take the title apostle and that we didn&#39;t find that helpful we we um and in the early days of every nation we push back on that and push that aside and so that&#39;s really not where we&#39;re going we prefer to go and look at a more biblical use of the concept and the idea rather than taking these and i understand what wagner was trying to do he was trying to describe something he was observing as a phenomenologist he would look at phenomena and try to put language to it and often he did that in church growth and missiology that was it was helpful sometimes like this i don&#39;t find it helpful at all i find it confusing this whole idea of this list of apostles and using apostles so-and-so and apostle this and that now a lot of people do that and um i don&#39;t i don&#39;t have a problem with those who do it&#39;s just not us it&#39;s not the culture we&#39;ve tried to create um where we take it because the title can be so confusing now what we&#39;ve tried to do is use the ick the ic the apostolic rather than going this is apostle so and or this is a prophet this or that but we want to be apostolic and we want to be prophetic and i think we found that to be much more helpful not everyone is an apostle but we hope and believe and work toward every leader in our world and every nation world to be apostolic at times to think apostolically to act apostolically to to be apostolic where appropriate sometimes to be prophetic where appropriate you can be prophetic without being a prophet you can be pastoral without being a pastor even people like me who aren&#39;t so pastoral most of the times occasionally have an anointing of pastoral moments and i can be pastoral but i&#39;m not primarily that people um in the same way can be apostolic in certain situations and moments and it doesn&#39;t mean they have to take the title apostolic now often we call people pastors because in in our culture and context it seems to make sense without having to explain that i think when we use a title like apostle we have to explain it are you like paul are you writing scripture this and that and obviously that&#39;s not uh what any of us think so we&#39;re we&#39;ve just chosen usually to use the ick the apostolic now now let&#39;s go back to ephesians 4 and not just focus on the apostle or apostolic ministry but let&#39;s focus on all five the apostle prophet evangelist shepherd and teachers and together what they&#39;re supposed to do this is the outcome and and a quick look at that we see that there are three outcomes it&#39;s maturity unity and ministry okay and so that&#39;s the outcome when these ministries are functioning together and verse 12 it says that the purpose of the a pest is to equip the saints for the work of ministry for the building up of the body of christ to equip the saints and the the apostle the evangelist the prophet the teacher the pastor they&#39;re not supposed to do all the ministry they&#39;re supposed to multiply ministry so the first outcome is a ministry multiplication when these gifts are functioning properly one person isn&#39;t hoarding all of the ministry time but it&#39;s a multiplication of ministry it&#39;s equipping others to do ministry and i find sometimes leaders aren&#39;t successful in ministry because they do too much ministry instead of equipping others to do ministry there are times when we have to refuse to do ministry so others can do it and we take an equipping role that&#39;s what apostolic is that&#39;s what prophetic is that&#39;s what pastoral does that&#39;s what evangelistic does it equips so others can do it and the result is a ministry multiplication secondly it says until we attain to unity of the faith so the second outcome of these ministries functioning together is a unity of the faith um there&#39;s a another way to say that is doctrinal unity or theological unity a unity of the faith there&#39;s a certain core sets of beliefs that become clear we&#39;ll see that in a moment when we get to the book of acts and then thirdly the outcome is maturity in christ and so the end of that verse 13 says that these gifts this apest gift mix functions to till the church to the people to the body of christ becomes mature manhood to the measure of the fullness of christ so what we&#39;re looking at is ministry multiplication that&#39;s what&#39;s at stake unity of the faith and maturity in christ that&#39;s what we&#39;re after that&#39;s the end result not confusion not arrogance not all the other things that sometimes are attached to the word apostle in our modern cultural understanding and experience now let&#39;s go from ephesians 4 from the apest grouping to talk specifically about apostolic leadership what does the bible say about apostles apostolic councils apostolic leadership or apostolic teams what is there um in galatians chapter 2 um paul says this they saw that i had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised just as peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised those are two different people the circumcised and the uncircumcised verse 8 for he who worked through peter for his apostolic ministry there&#39;s that ick speaks of peter in terms of apostolic ministry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine or my my apostolic ministry to the gentiles and so here&#39;s what we learn about apostolic ministry from this text in galatians apostolic ministry has to do with people a call to a people not exclusively to that people group but primarily to that people group and so we&#39;ll see an apostolic anointing is attached to a call to a people group peter was called to the gentile to the jews does that mean he never ministered to gentiles no we find him reluctantly ministering to gentiles but very effectively ministering to gentiles but yet his main apostolic ministry it was to the jews paul&#39;s primary apostolic ministry was to the gentiles exclusively to gentiles no we know he ministered in synagogues to jews but the drive of his life was to the non-jews hudson taylor you&#39;ll hear about him in your global mission courses and church history courses that&#39;s in taylor&#39;s primary call was to the chinese people exclusively no primarily yes you may be familiar with frontiers ministries today that movement is a call for people all over the world missionaries two muslims of all different nationalities of muslims the salvation army said their calling was to those farthest from god to the worst of the worst the people that have been chewed up and spit out and left behind by society and they&#39;ve had um more than a century of amazing ministry knowing who their apostolic calling was to for deborah and i it was clear that the calling on our lives it was two future leaders in the philippines to the campuses of the philippines and so when you think about that it&#39;s this idea of apostolic ministry has to do with people it&#39;s not first and foremost structures and titles and all of these things that had to do with people when it&#39;s laid out in galatians now we want to look at what does apostolic leadership look like in the book of acts we want to look at four chapters and see four principles four descriptions of episode of leadership and now listen our hope is not that any of you will leave here and print up a new business card or change your twitter profile and put the word apostle in front of your name apostles so and so that&#39;s not our goal our goal is that we would all whether we&#39;re a pastor a teacher an evangelist or prophet that we would attach the ability to be an apostolic prophet an apostolic pastor an apostolic teacher an apostolic evangelist and i want to describe what that looks like and so in four chapters in acts we&#39;ll see a description of what that ick looks like that apostolic council apostolic leadership apostolic um church culture that&#39;s being built so in acts 6 we see that apostolic leadership is spiritual leadership in acts 13 we see that apostolic leadership is missional leadership acts 15 we see that apostolic leadership is theological leadership and then in acts 20 we&#39;ll end with this we&#39;ll see that apostolic leadership is relational leadership so if it&#39;s not spiritual missional theological and relational it might not be apostolic it might be something else so let&#39;s look at this uh the first one is in acts chapter six very familiar passage to all of us we know what happened the church is growing uh in in in in the hellenist and the hebrew widows are getting in a conflict there&#39;s some there&#39;s some multi-ethnic conflict there there&#39;s also some middle class and poor or maybe upper class and middle class or some there&#39;s some economic conflict that&#39;s mixed in with the ethnic conflicts and the racial conflict there&#39;s also linguistic issues going on there&#39;s a lot happening here but what we see is this verse 7 the end of this the word of god continued to increase and all these people are coming obedient to the faith but what happened what happened was the apostles gathered together and said it would not be right for us to neglect prayer and the ministry of the word in order to wait on tables the waiting on tables needed to happen but the apostolic leadership remained as spiritual leaders they delegated the others it was important work to feed the hungry widows it was important work to be socially responsible but they said it&#39;s not right we are spiritual leaders first and foremost we need to make sure these things happen but we need to give ourselves to prayer in the ministry of the word and the start point for me when we talk about apostolic leadership whether it&#39;s apostolic prophet or an apostolic evangelist or an apostolic teacher or an apostolic pastor the starting point is prayer and the ministry of the word it&#39;s not it&#39;s not my uh my visionary ideas no it&#39;s a word and if it&#39;s not rooted in scripture and if it&#39;s not scripture being propagated and taught i would say we&#39;re on shaky ground to call that apostolic apostolic focuses on prayer and the ministry of the word it&#39;s spiritual leadership secondly we go to acts 13 we see another gathering of apostolic leaders in acts 13 it says verse 1 there were in the church at antioch prophets and teachers barnabas simeon who was called niger lucious of cyrene then you get the whole list and it says while they were worshiping the lord in fasting the holy spirit said set apart for me barnabas and saul for the work to which i have called them after prayer and fasting they laid their hands and sent them off now we know that paul was an apostle we know that barnabas was certainly the leader at one point of that apostolic team and later on paul was leading and he goes back and forth who&#39;s leading but there was this apostolic ministry so apostolic leadership when we look at acts 13 is missional leadership when people talk about apostolic ministry they have but there&#39;s no expanding mission i have to question whether that&#39;s really apostolic the description we have here in this next few chapters max 13 up until acts 15 because of this apostolic leadership we see the mission expanding we see mission expansion and so that&#39;s why i say apostolic leadership is missional leadership it&#39;s getting people on mission it&#39;s seeing the mission grow seeing the mission expand seeing territory taken new churches planted new nations open new people groups uh being broken open with the gospel it&#39;s not the same it&#39;s not just maintaining it&#39;s not maintenance it&#39;s not primarily management it&#39;s an organization all that&#39;s fine but it&#39;s this expansion that&#39;s what apostolic does there are a lot of sometimes apostolic movements that are labeled apostolic movements and what they do is gather what&#39;s already happening i&#39;m not sure that fits the description here this is a new churches new nations new disciples new leaders missional expansion so when we say apostolic leadership we&#39;re talking about spiritual leadership but also missional leadership is tied to the mission of god thirdly apostolic leadership is theological leadership all of the growth from acts 13 to acts 15 we see it&#39;s primarily through gentile areas and so that brings up some theological questions and so acts 15 is a gathering of apostles and elders local church elders and apostolic leaders gathered together to have what&#39;s described as this rigorous debate this passionate arguing both sides and the real question is do these people they&#39;re they&#39;re they&#39;re coming to christ but they don&#39;t have the same sometimes ethical standards as jewish people who&#39;ve built their lives around the old testament around the ten commandments around the law of moses and now these pagans are coming to christ and they don&#39;t know these things are considered wrong in a jewish culture it&#39;s always right for them whether it&#39;s the way they ate whether it was their morals ethics all kinds of things all they knew is their cousin got healed of blindness and somebody said jesus did it and so they said we want jesus whatever that means but maybe they still had three wives and maybe they were still getting drunk and maybe they still were eating uh were eating pork and so the jews were going how can these people be right with god and so that prompted a very healthy very important theological discussion on the nature of salvation and you know the conclusion you know what happened but the point is that the apostolic team the apostolic leaders provided theological clarity apostolic people provide doctrinal clarity and so that&#39;s why i say apostolic leadership is theological leadership it is doctrinal leadership there are times in our world where we bring apostolic leaders together to discuss and debate and try to bring clarity on current theological issues but also on historic theological issues and bring clarity for now and how does it apply in different cultures in different contexts and so it&#39;s so important that anybody who who aspires and i hope it&#39;s every one of you to some level of apostolic leadership that we have deep theological foundations and we know how to accurately handle god&#39;s word so that we can provide theological and doctrinal leadership we can provide theological foundations and doctrinal clarity for people who look to us to leadership we don&#39;t have the option to say we know i don&#39;t really know maybe that you know maybe the bible says maybe it says that no apostolic leadership brings clarity but it&#39;s not a lone apostle we see in acts 15 it&#39;s a group of leaders having an open and honest and at times very contentious and passionate debate and coming to a conclusion and then bringing clarity to the churches so apostolic leadership is theological leadership and number four finally apostolic leadership is relational leadership it is common to do spiritual leadership and missional leadership and theological leadership and be relationally dysfunctional and relationally disconnected it&#39;s also quite common to see great relational context in ministry with horrible theology and almost no mission and maybe shaky spirituality it&#39;s not either or it&#39;s both and and and all four of these have to come together and work together we&#39;re not picking and choosing which one we like the most if you&#39;d lean toward deep theological leadership but don&#39;t really do well relationally that&#39;s not acceptable we need to embrace relationship and theology if you&#39;re very relational but don&#39;t want to be bothered with the nuances of theology that&#39;s not that&#39;s not a healthy leadership model we embrace all four theology mission relationship it all works together deep spirituality spiritual formation and we&#39;re trying to pull all that together in apostolic leadership now when we get to acts 20 we see this beautiful picture actually we see it all through acts but it kind of culminates in acts 20 and you see how relational the apostle paul was now you see of course in thessalonians in some of his letters he uses family language instead of ecclesiastical language he talks about my spiritual children and he says i was like a father to you even says i was like a nursing mother to you so paul&#39;s constantly using familial language and relational language to make its points but here in acts this is a picture of how relational he was he wasn&#39;t just a driven mission person with a trail of body bags people who couldn&#39;t keep up with his with his missional passion no it wasn&#39;t just that watch the relationship verse 36 when he had said these things and this is him saying i&#39;m on my way to rome you&#39;re never going to see me again he&#39;s hinting that um he&#39;s pretty certain he&#39;ll be killed there and die there uh and so this shakes them these are the ephesian leaders the leaders from the church at ephesus and when he had said these things he knelt down and prayed with them all there&#39;s that spiritual leadership and there was much weeping on the part of all they embraced paul and kissed him so he says look i&#39;m my mission is i&#39;m going to rome probably going to die there and they&#39;re sobbing they&#39;re praying together but they&#39;re sobbing and they&#39;re they&#39;re they&#39;re expressing emotion verse 38 being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken that they would not see his face again and they accompanied him to the ship and then we see uh by chapter 21 it&#39;s this group we luke and others so it&#39;s that apostolic team is on knowing there&#39;s danger and that&#39;s what apostolic does apostolic is the opposite of comfort apostolic is not entitlement we see this apostolic move this apostolic passion the apostolic call um moving to rome knowing there&#39;s danger if it&#39;s apostolic it does not normally and naturally gravitate toward comfort and safety apostolic pushes us out of our comfort zone and pushes us sometimes into a dangerous zone that&#39;s what apostolic does maybe the calling is primarily pastoral and we&#39;re bringing spiritual health and spiritual safety and strength but there&#39;s this apostolic edge that pushes toward the dangers that we see going on right here now as i close this intro to apostolic leadership i want to close by looking at the ultimate model of apostolic leadership and it&#39;s not the apostle paul he was certainly great at it but the ultimate model that modeled spiritual leadership for us modeled missional leadership a mission no matter what the cost no matter what the price and theological clarity theological leadership but ultimately model relational leadership are the ultimate apostolic model for us to follow hebrews chapter 3 verses 1 and 2. therefore holy brothers you who share in a heavenly calling consider jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession so the writer of hebrews is saying now consider jesus the apostle and high priest of our command he&#39;s calling jesus the ultimate apostle and we need to pause a moment and consider him stop what you&#39;re doing consider think deeply about jesus as the model apostle and here&#39;s what you come up with and all of this talk about apostolic leadership yes there&#39;s a high bar being raised but let me clarify and let me simplify when we consider jesus as the ultimate model of apostolic leadership of spiritual leadership of missional leadership theological leadership relational leadership that&#39;s what apostolic leadership is that&#39;s what we&#39;re calling it that&#39;s how we&#39;re describing it when we consider jesus how do you do all that that&#39;s overwhelming sometimes i don&#39;t think i can do any of that often i&#39;ve proved i can&#39;t do any of that and do it well but here&#39;s what we do when we consider jesus here&#39;s what it comes down to verse two consider jesus the apostle of our confession who was faithful to him who appointed him who was faithful to him who appointed him ultimately all it comes down to in apostolic leadership is being faithful to the one who appointed us yes there&#39;s a sending body who appoints every one of us and sends us on mission but what this is talking about is our heavenly father so don&#39;t get freaked out about apostolic leadership don&#39;t get overwhelmed don&#39;t get puffed up by it don&#39;t take it as a heavy burden it&#39;s just simply a matter of being faithful to the god who called you to this great vocation the great ministry the great calling that he&#39;s given you faithfulness you

in 2017 our launch director for every nation seminary called together a group of leaders and teachers from different nations around the world we met in manila for a week to work on what became our integrative courses and we were talking philosophically about the best way for us to bring theological education and leadership development in what would become every nation seminary as we had this discussion we&amp;#39;re writing on whiteboards that were scattered around the room and we were discussing and brainstorming the idea of the learning environment we wanted learning environment we wanted to produce and multiply and and create uh throughout the seminary process and all these words written all over these whiteboards they all fell into four categories we wanted our environment to be relational to be biblical we wanted everything we study and teach to go d to be deeply rooted in scripture we wanted it to be apostolic that was sort of the the the culture we wanted to be to go through every course and every uh event we did and we wanted it to be global we wanted a global cohort we didn&amp;#39;t want a cohort of americans and another one of africans and another one of of asians we wanted a global cohort every time and so we we liked those four and everything we wrote seemed to fall into one of those categories then we started talking about the ministry skills we wanted to develop in our school and we we talked about if what are the what are the core ministry skills that someone needs in this cultural environment that&amp;#39;s biblical and global and relational and apostolic but what are the skills when someone goes through our courses what are the skills they should be better at certainly they come into this with skills but what are the skills that you need to upgrade during your time in every nation seminary and again we had we had dozens of skills out there but they all fell into four categories there were discipleship skills we wanted every single every nation seminary student to be a better disciple and a better disciple maker after three years there were leadership skills and that&amp;#39;s what&amp;#39;s missing in a lot of theological education there are a lot of people who develop theological skills but still don&amp;#39;t have basic leadership skills we didn&amp;#39;t want that we want we wanted every single student they&amp;#39;re coming in as leaders and we wanted everyone to leave as a better leader than preaching skills again everyone is preaching but we wanted that to be upgraded and and different aspects of preaching the whole preaching process from study to interpretation to sermon crafting to to delivering and sermon living we wanted all of that to be upgraded and missionaries we wanted missionary skills whether whether we&amp;#39;re church planters pastors evangelist campus mission whatever we wanted the basic skills of a missionary to exegete the culture and to contextualize and to learn the language whether it&amp;#39;s the linguistically the same language but the language of the culture to understand and be able to preach the gospel cross-culturally even in our own city so those were the skills we were hoping to upgrade and just about every skill we&amp;#39;re working on with all of you will fit into one of those four categories now what happened is we saw these on the board it ended up it was like it was one of these magical moments like hey wait a minute those seem to fit together and so we labeled our four integrative courses relational discipleship biblical preaching apostolic leadership and global mission now this video right here is an intro to our apple cider leadership course and during that week in manila for in in in 2017 i was arguing that this course should be titled servant leadership and um i obviously lost the debate because this is not a servant leadership course this is the apostolic leadership course and it actually uh the the people pushing the a word were the younger leaders behind a generation behind me the people my age were going oh let&amp;#39;s call this servant leadership and um certainly we want all of us we all are looking for servant leaders and we want to model servant leadership like jesus did but that didn&amp;#39;t capture fully what we wanted but the idea of apostolic did now there&amp;#39;s a lot of confusion a lot of misinformation a lot of ideas about apostolic that we do not want to embrace and we do not want to propagate and so what i hope to do today is not define apostolic i think you can you can go to bible hub and look up the greek and define it for yourself it&amp;#39;s pretty clear but more than define it i want to describe what we mean in the every nation world when we say apostolic leadership and part of what i&amp;#39;ll do is talk about what we don&amp;#39;t mean what what doesn&amp;#39;t fit for us in the culture and in the in the ministry context we&amp;#39;re trying to uh we&amp;#39;re trying to create so we&amp;#39;re going to try to describe it i want to start by looking at not just apostolic leadership but in the context of the bigger picture in ephesians 4. and everybody studied this and preached this but let&amp;#39;s look at ephesians 4 verses 11 through 13. 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 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of god a mature to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of christ now these five gifts ministry gifts mentioned by paul here in ephesians 4 in the esv it&amp;#39;s the apostle prophet evangelist shepherd and teacher other translations say pastor and so the apostle prophet evangel shepherd and teacher has been abbreviated as a pest a-p-e-s-t a pest now without the apostles it has been said we just have pest which is not what we want to propagate and not what we want to become and without the shepherds and teachers if we eliminate those and we&amp;#39;re just apostles prophets that advanced us then we become the ape and when i think about that i remember sitting in a in a in a room in a conference center with a gathering of about 30 global apostles it was called the international apostolic ministry conferences or that i was as often as the case in those kind of moments i was might have been the youngest one in the room and this was only about five years ago and there were some some some brilliant legends of ministry in that room and i took every opportunity i could to have a coffee with them and ask questions and sit at lunch with these these leaders who were in their late 70s 80s and uh one of them uh i think it just turned 90. and what a wealth and a depth of of of experience and knowledge and character and walking with jesus and all this but they were all talking about apostles and apostolic movements in ministries and and i was sitting on the back table with a man who&amp;#39;s a legend he was in his late 80s at the time and and um we were we were cutting up and laughing at his jokes he was talking really loudly because he was couldn&amp;#39;t hear very well and i kept trying to get him to be quiet because he kept making me laugh during this conference but i learned a lot from this man and but while this young self-titled apostle was teaching some stuff that was rather bizarre my buddy this legend got the piece of paper that was on the table and he wrote a p e s t apostle prophet evangelist shepherd teacher and uh and then he x out the st encircled the ape where it said ape he slid the paper to me punched me and pointed to that guy speaking and um that went on for most of this conference with this guy and i i do consider this man an amazing man of god and the truth the fact was he was kind of true because the guy was saying i&amp;#39;m an apostle and then he was saying some stuff that wasn&amp;#39;t rooted in scripture and it was just uh unhelpful to be kind uh and my veteran buddy recognized that and so we there&amp;#39;s a lot that&amp;#39;s said and taught and written about apostles and apostolic movements that we want to try to clarify um a lot of the writing in the language goes back to the 80s 90s around that time when c peter wagner who was a professor at fuller seminary began studying growing churches and the phenomena that he labeled the new apostolic reformation um wagner wrote a number of books and um peter wagner was a good man godly man he was a missiologist and a phenomenologist but not a theologian he studied phenomena and and he was a missionary for many years of his career and um and leaned toward cross-cultural mission church growth but loved to study phenomena and so a lot of what wagner observed um he he affirmed but then he started putting language to it and in one of his books and this is um one of his books he talked about different types of apostles and i wrote down someone he talked about vertical apostles and horizontal apostles and some of us wondered if that meant those who laid down and took naps a lot the horizontal apostles versus those who stood up he talked about ecclesiastical apostles functional apostles congregational apostles convening apostles ambassadorial apostles mobilizing apostles territory apostles and marketplace apostles the list goes on and it was almost the point where just about anybody who does anything could take the title apostle and that we didn&amp;#39;t find that helpful we we um and in the early days of every nation we push back on that and push that aside and so that&amp;#39;s really not where we&amp;#39;re going we prefer to go and look at a more biblical use of the concept and the idea rather than taking these and i understand what wagner was trying to do he was trying to describe something he was observing as a phenomenologist he would look at phenomena and try to put language to it and often he did that in church growth and missiology that was it was helpful sometimes like this i don&amp;#39;t find it helpful at all i find it confusing this whole idea of this list of apostles and using apostles so-and-so and apostle this and that now a lot of people do that and um i don&amp;#39;t i don&amp;#39;t have a problem with those who do it&amp;#39;s just not us it&amp;#39;s not the culture we&amp;#39;ve tried to create um where we take it because the title can be so confusing now what we&amp;#39;ve tried to do is use the ick the ic the apostolic rather than going this is apostle so and or this is a prophet this or that but we want to be apostolic and we want to be prophetic and i think we found that to be much more helpful not everyone is an apostle but we hope and believe and work toward every leader in our world and every nation world to be apostolic at times to think apostolically to act apostolically to to be apostolic where appropriate sometimes to be prophetic where appropriate you can be prophetic without being a prophet you can be pastoral without being a pastor even people like me who aren&amp;#39;t so pastoral most of the times occasionally have an anointing of pastoral moments and i can be pastoral but i&amp;#39;m not primarily that people um in the same way can be apostolic in certain situations and moments and it doesn&amp;#39;t mean they have to take the title apostolic now often we call people pastors because in in our culture and context it seems to make sense without having to explain that i think when we use a title like apostle we have to explain it are you like paul are you writing scripture this and that and obviously that&amp;#39;s not uh what any of us think so we&amp;#39;re we&amp;#39;ve just chosen usually to use the ick the apostolic now now let&amp;#39;s go back to ephesians 4 and not just focus on the apostle or apostolic ministry but let&amp;#39;s focus on all five the apostle prophet evangelist shepherd and teachers and together what they&amp;#39;re supposed to do this is the outcome and and a quick look at that we see that there are three outcomes it&amp;#39;s maturity unity and ministry okay and so that&amp;#39;s the outcome when these ministries are functioning together and verse 12 it says that the purpose of the a pest is to equip the saints for the work of ministry for the building up of the body of christ to equip the saints and the the apostle the evangelist the prophet the teacher the pastor they&amp;#39;re not supposed to do all the ministry they&amp;#39;re supposed to multiply ministry so the first outcome is a ministry multiplication when these gifts are functioning properly one person isn&amp;#39;t hoarding all of the ministry time but it&amp;#39;s a multiplication of ministry it&amp;#39;s equipping others to do ministry and i find sometimes leaders aren&amp;#39;t successful in ministry because they do too much ministry instead of equipping others to do ministry there are times when we have to refuse to do ministry so others can do it and we take an equipping role that&amp;#39;s what apostolic is that&amp;#39;s what prophetic is that&amp;#39;s what pastoral does that&amp;#39;s what evangelistic does it equips so others can do it and the result is a ministry multiplication secondly it says until we attain to unity of the faith so the second outcome of these ministries functioning together is a unity of the faith um there&amp;#39;s a another way to say that is doctrinal unity or theological unity a unity of the faith there&amp;#39;s a certain core sets of beliefs that become clear we&amp;#39;ll see that in a moment when we get to the book of acts and then thirdly the outcome is maturity in christ and so the end of that verse 13 says that these gifts this apest gift mix functions to till the church to the people to the body of christ becomes mature manhood to the measure of the fullness of christ so what we&amp;#39;re looking at is ministry multiplication that&amp;#39;s what&amp;#39;s at stake unity of the faith and maturity in christ that&amp;#39;s what we&amp;#39;re after that&amp;#39;s the end result not confusion not arrogance not all the other things that sometimes are attached to the word apostle in our modern cultural understanding and experience now let&amp;#39;s go from ephesians 4 from the apest grouping to talk specifically about apostolic leadership what does the bible say about apostles apostolic councils apostolic leadership or apostolic teams what is there um in galatians chapter 2 um paul says this they saw that i had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised just as peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised those are two different people the circumcised and the uncircumcised verse 8 for he who worked through peter for his apostolic ministry there&amp;#39;s that ick speaks of peter in terms of apostolic ministry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine or my my apostolic ministry to the gentiles and so here&amp;#39;s what we learn about apostolic ministry from this text in galatians apostolic ministry has to do with people a call to a people not exclusively to that people group but primarily to that people group and so we&amp;#39;ll see an apostolic anointing is attached to a call to a people group peter was called to the gentile to the jews does that mean he never ministered to gentiles no we find him reluctantly ministering to gentiles but very effectively ministering to gentiles but yet his main apostolic ministry it was to the jews paul&amp;#39;s primary apostolic ministry was to the gentiles exclusively to gentiles no we know he ministered in synagogues to jews but the drive of his life was to the non-jews hudson taylor you&amp;#39;ll hear about him in your global mission courses and church history courses that&amp;#39;s in taylor&amp;#39;s primary call was to the chinese people exclusively no primarily yes you may be familiar with frontiers ministries today that movement is a call for people all over the world missionaries two muslims of all different nationalities of muslims the salvation army said their calling was to those farthest from god to the worst of the worst the people that have been chewed up and spit out and left behind by society and they&amp;#39;ve had um more than a century of amazing ministry knowing who their apostolic calling was to for deborah and i it was clear that the calling on our lives it was two future leaders in the philippines to the campuses of the philippines and so when you think about that it&amp;#39;s this idea of apostolic ministry has to do with people it&amp;#39;s not first and foremost structures and titles and all of these things that had to do with people when it&amp;#39;s laid out in galatians now we want to look at what does apostolic leadership look like in the book of acts we want to look at four chapters and see four principles four descriptions of episode of leadership and now listen our hope is not that any of you will leave here and print up a new business card or change your twitter profile and put the word apostle in front of your name apostles so and so that&amp;#39;s not our goal our goal is that we would all whether we&amp;#39;re a pastor a teacher an evangelist or prophet that we would attach the ability to be an apostolic prophet an apostolic pastor an apostolic teacher an apostolic evangelist and i want to describe what that looks like and so in four chapters in acts we&amp;#39;ll see a description of what that ick looks like that apostolic council apostolic leadership apostolic um church culture that&amp;#39;s being built so in acts 6 we see that apostolic leadership is spiritual leadership in acts 13 we see that apostolic leadership is missional leadership acts 15 we see that apostolic leadership is theological leadership and then in acts 20 we&amp;#39;ll end with this we&amp;#39;ll see that apostolic leadership is relational leadership so if it&amp;#39;s not spiritual missional theological and relational it might not be apostolic it might be something else so let&amp;#39;s look at this uh the first one is in acts chapter six very familiar passage to all of us we know what happened the church is growing uh in in in in the hellenist and the hebrew widows are getting in a conflict there&amp;#39;s some there&amp;#39;s some multi-ethnic conflict there there&amp;#39;s also some middle class and poor or maybe upper class and middle class or some there&amp;#39;s some economic conflict that&amp;#39;s mixed in with the ethnic conflicts and the racial conflict there&amp;#39;s also linguistic issues going on there&amp;#39;s a lot happening here but what we see is this verse 7 the end of this the word of god continued to increase and all these people are coming obedient to the faith but what happened what happened was the apostles gathered together and said it would not be right for us to neglect prayer and the ministry of the word in order to wait on tables the waiting on tables needed to happen but the apostolic leadership remained as spiritual leaders they delegated the others it was important work to feed the hungry widows it was important work to be socially responsible but they said it&amp;#39;s not right we are spiritual leaders first and foremost we need to make sure these things happen but we need to give ourselves to prayer in the ministry of the word and the start point for me when we talk about apostolic leadership whether it&amp;#39;s apostolic prophet or an apostolic evangelist or an apostolic teacher or an apostolic pastor the starting point is prayer and the ministry of the word it&amp;#39;s not it&amp;#39;s not my uh my visionary ideas no it&amp;#39;s a word and if it&amp;#39;s not rooted in scripture and if it&amp;#39;s not scripture being propagated and taught i would say we&amp;#39;re on shaky ground to call that apostolic apostolic focuses on prayer and the ministry of the word it&amp;#39;s spiritual leadership secondly we go to acts 13 we see another gathering of apostolic leaders in acts 13 it says verse 1 there were in the church at antioch prophets and teachers barnabas simeon who was called niger lucious of cyrene then you get the whole list and it says while they were worshiping the lord in fasting the holy spirit said set apart for me barnabas and saul for the work to which i have called them after prayer and fasting they laid their hands and sent them off now we know that paul was an apostle we know that barnabas was certainly the leader at one point of that apostolic team and later on paul was leading and he goes back and forth who&amp;#39;s leading but there was this apostolic ministry so apostolic leadership when we look at acts 13 is missional leadership when people talk about apostolic ministry they have but there&amp;#39;s no expanding mission i have to question whether that&amp;#39;s really apostolic the description we have here in this next few chapters max 13 up until acts 15 because of this apostolic leadership we see the mission expanding we see mission expansion and so that&amp;#39;s why i say apostolic leadership is missional leadership it&amp;#39;s getting people on mission it&amp;#39;s seeing the mission grow seeing the mission expand seeing territory taken new churches planted new nations open new people groups uh being broken open with the gospel it&amp;#39;s not the same it&amp;#39;s not just maintaining it&amp;#39;s not maintenance it&amp;#39;s not primarily management it&amp;#39;s an organization all that&amp;#39;s fine but it&amp;#39;s this expansion that&amp;#39;s what apostolic does there are a lot of sometimes apostolic movements that are labeled apostolic movements and what they do is gather what&amp;#39;s already happening i&amp;#39;m not sure that fits the description here this is a new churches new nations new disciples new leaders missional expansion so when we say apostolic leadership we&amp;#39;re talking about spiritual leadership but also missional leadership is tied to the mission of god thirdly apostolic leadership is theological leadership all of the growth from acts 13 to acts 15 we see it&amp;#39;s primarily through gentile areas and so that brings up some theological questions and so acts 15 is a gathering of apostles and elders local church elders and apostolic leaders gathered together to have what&amp;#39;s described as this rigorous debate this passionate arguing both sides and the real question is do these people they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re coming to christ but they don&amp;#39;t have the same sometimes ethical standards as jewish people who&amp;#39;ve built their lives around the old testament around the ten commandments around the law of moses and now these pagans are coming to christ and they don&amp;#39;t know these things are considered wrong in a jewish culture it&amp;#39;s always right for them whether it&amp;#39;s the way they ate whether it was their morals ethics all kinds of things all they knew is their cousin got healed of blindness and somebody said jesus did it and so they said we want jesus whatever that means but maybe they still had three wives and maybe they were still getting drunk and maybe they still were eating uh were eating pork and so the jews were going how can these people be right with god and so that prompted a very healthy very important theological discussion on the nature of salvation and you know the conclusion you know what happened but the point is that the apostolic team the apostolic leaders provided theological clarity apostolic people provide doctrinal clarity and so that&amp;#39;s why i say apostolic leadership is theological leadership it is doctrinal leadership there are times in our world where we bring apostolic leaders together to discuss and debate and try to bring clarity on current theological issues but also on historic theological issues and bring clarity for now and how does it apply in different cultures in different contexts and so it&amp;#39;s so important that anybody who who aspires and i hope it&amp;#39;s every one of you to some level of apostolic leadership that we have deep theological foundations and we know how to accurately handle god&amp;#39;s word so that we can provide theological and doctrinal leadership we can provide theological foundations and doctrinal clarity for people who look to us to leadership we don&amp;#39;t have the option to say we know i don&amp;#39;t really know maybe that you know maybe the bible says maybe it says that no apostolic leadership brings clarity but it&amp;#39;s not a lone apostle we see in acts 15 it&amp;#39;s a group of leaders having an open and honest and at times very contentious and passionate debate and coming to a conclusion and then bringing clarity to the churches so apostolic leadership is theological leadership and number four finally apostolic leadership is relational leadership it is common to do spiritual leadership and missional leadership and theological leadership and be relationally dysfunctional and relationally disconnected it&amp;#39;s also quite common to see great relational context in ministry with horrible theology and almost no mission and maybe shaky spirituality it&amp;#39;s not either or it&amp;#39;s both and and and all four of these have to come together and work together we&amp;#39;re not picking and choosing which one we like the most if you&amp;#39;d lean toward deep theological leadership but don&amp;#39;t really do well relationally that&amp;#39;s not acceptable we need to embrace relationship and theology if you&amp;#39;re very relational but don&amp;#39;t want to be bothered with the nuances of theology that&amp;#39;s not that&amp;#39;s not a healthy leadership model we embrace all four theology mission relationship it all works together deep spirituality spiritual formation and we&amp;#39;re trying to pull all that together in apostolic leadership now when we get to acts 20 we see this beautiful picture actually we see it all through acts but it kind of culminates in acts 20 and you see how relational the apostle paul was now you see of course in thessalonians in some of his letters he uses family language instead of ecclesiastical language he talks about my spiritual children and he says i was like a father to you even says i was like a nursing mother to you so paul&amp;#39;s constantly using familial language and relational language to make its points but here in acts this is a picture of how relational he was he wasn&amp;#39;t just a driven mission person with a trail of body bags people who couldn&amp;#39;t keep up with his with his missional passion no it wasn&amp;#39;t just that watch the relationship verse 36 when he had said these things and this is him saying i&amp;#39;m on my way to rome you&amp;#39;re never going to see me again he&amp;#39;s hinting that um he&amp;#39;s pretty certain he&amp;#39;ll be killed there and die there uh and so this shakes them these are the ephesian leaders the leaders from the church at ephesus and when he had said these things he knelt down and prayed with them all there&amp;#39;s that spiritual leadership and there was much weeping on the part of all they embraced paul and kissed him so he says look i&amp;#39;m my mission is i&amp;#39;m going to rome probably going to die there and they&amp;#39;re sobbing they&amp;#39;re praying together but they&amp;#39;re sobbing and they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re expressing emotion verse 38 being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken that they would not see his face again and they accompanied him to the ship and then we see uh by chapter 21 it&amp;#39;s this group we luke and others so it&amp;#39;s that apostolic team is on knowing there&amp;#39;s danger and that&amp;#39;s what apostolic does apostolic is the opposite of comfort apostolic is not entitlement we see this apostolic move this apostolic passion the apostolic call um moving to rome knowing there&amp;#39;s danger if it&amp;#39;s apostolic it does not normally and naturally gravitate toward comfort and safety apostolic pushes us out of our comfort zone and pushes us sometimes into a dangerous zone that&amp;#39;s what apostolic does maybe the calling is primarily pastoral and we&amp;#39;re bringing spiritual health and spiritual safety and strength but there&amp;#39;s this apostolic edge that pushes toward the dangers that we see going on right here now as i close this intro to apostolic leadership i want to close by looking at the ultimate model of apostolic leadership and it&amp;#39;s not the apostle paul he was certainly great at it but the ultimate model that modeled spiritual leadership for us modeled missional leadership a mission no matter what the cost no matter what the price and theological clarity theological leadership but ultimately model relational leadership are the ultimate apostolic model for us to follow hebrews chapter 3 verses 1 and 2. therefore holy brothers you who share in a heavenly calling consider jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession so the writer of hebrews is saying now consider jesus the apostle and high priest of our command he&amp;#39;s calling jesus the ultimate apostle and we need to pause a moment and consider him stop what you&amp;#39;re doing consider think deeply about jesus as the model apostle and here&amp;#39;s what you come up with and all of this talk about apostolic leadership yes there&amp;#39;s a high bar being raised but let me clarify and let me simplify when we consider jesus as the ultimate model of apostolic leadership of spiritual leadership of missional leadership theological leadership relational leadership that&amp;#39;s what apostolic leadership is that&amp;#39;s what we&amp;#39;re calling it that&amp;#39;s how we&amp;#39;re describing it when we consider jesus how do you do all that that&amp;#39;s overwhelming sometimes i don&amp;#39;t think i can do any of that often i&amp;#39;ve proved i can&amp;#39;t do any of that and do it well but here&amp;#39;s what we do when we consider jesus here&amp;#39;s what it comes down to verse two consider jesus the apostle of our confession who was faithful to him who appointed him who was faithful to him who appointed him ultimately all it comes down to in apostolic leadership is being faithful to the one who appointed us yes there&amp;#39;s a sending body who appoints every one of us and sends us on mission but what this is talking about is our heavenly father so don&amp;#39;t get freaked out about apostolic leadership don&amp;#39;t get overwhelmed don&amp;#39;t get puffed up by it don&amp;#39;t take it as a heavy burden it&amp;#39;s just simply a matter of being faithful to the god who called you to this great vocation the great ministry the great calling that he&amp;#39;s given you faithfulness you

Transcript for:Apostolic Leadership and Every Nation Seminary Development

Transcript for:
Apostolic Leadership and Every Nation Seminary Development