Co-Labouring with Evangelists

I am so grateful for Godly friends! While chatting with one of them today we each realised that we have had very similar experiences this week, that God wanted to speak to us about. It’s to do with evangelists.

But first I need to backtrack a little. Over the last couple of years, since we heard God declare “Forget the former things” and “Behold I am doing a new thing!” (Isaiah 43:18-19), many of us have consciously laid down our old mindsets of religious structure masquerading as ‘church’ to look for his new wineskin – choosing to forget our previously held assumptions and committing to pioneering towards something we have never seen. And one of the lessons that we have heard loud and clear is from Eph 2:19-22…

“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.  In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.  And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” (NIV)

This is God’s kind of building. In our old-wineskin mentality, I think we sometimes forgot that He was talking about a spiritual building here – we placed far too much emphasis on our literal, physical buildings. But the New that God is focused on is that of the SPIRITUAL building He is looking to establish – His one true Church – one Body of people, all built together into one household where God’s Spirit dwells. It’s a metaphor for His Kingdom.

And one of the aspects of this metaphor that He highlighted was the verse that talks about the apostles and prophets laying the foundations. I think it has been clear to those paying attention that God has been re-establishing the prophetic at this time, and calling both apostles and prophets to take their place in the new. Why have they been prioritised? Because when you are building something new, if there is anything old in the way (like the old building near me that I referred to a couple of weeks ago in ‘The Church is Dead! Long live the Church!‘), it needs dismantling safely. Then the next step is to dig down below ground level, to form the foundations. And that role is given to the apostles and prophets. They are the ones called to seek God’s blueprint and to establish spiritual structure. And that is the season we have been in over the past few years.

But lately, as my friend and I were discussing this morning, very recently there seems to be a new emergence of evangelists coming forward. We are seeing the first signs of them being raised up to now take their place. And just as the apostles and the prophets have been needing to find new ways of honouring each other’s giftings, and finding new ways to co-labour together, so now do they need to draw in the evangelists. Because if they do not, we are at risk of losing the harvest.

You see, in the old wineskin, the gifts that were most commonly accepted were the ‘nice, tidy’ gifts: the teachers and the pastors. An undue emphasis was placed on them, with apostles being often seen simply as ‘chief pastors’, and prophets & evangelists being largely misunderstood and rejected as too noisy or too messy. Many prophets left the church, wounded by there being apparently no place for their voice, and many evangelists did the same, disillusioned by the church seeming to be more focused on its own comfort than reaching the lost. And many apostles burned out from having to manage physical structures rather than their true calling to build & father spiritual families.

With the once homeless apostles and prophets now free from the old structures, rediscovering their callings, and forging forward to lay foundations for the New, the remaining ‘outcasts’ are the evangelists: those who saw no passion for the harvest within the old established church and so took their commission out onto the streets to do what God has called them to do there. We need to welcome the evangelists into the New, to co-labour with us.
Because the problem is, if you harvest wheat/ fish/ anything else without having a safe space to gather it all into, the harvest gets ruined. And a very real issue right now is that if those evangelists doing their work for God don’t co-labour with the rest of the five-fold, the new baby believers will be left without discipleship, and will be vulnerable to the enemy picking them off.

But the evangelists have been rejected for so long that they need us to reach out to them, to draw them into the NEW wineskin: the new way of co-labouring where all voices are welcomed and heard; where they are encouraged to flow in all their glorious gifting, not controlled & told to be what they are not; where we recognise each other’s strengths and weaknesses and truly work together: one plants, one waters, another harvests – and God is over it all. We are not all called to harvest, but we are all called to build Kingdom.

And like the metaphor of the building, where the apostles and prophets have been busy digging foundations on the rock of Jesus Christ (there is no other foundation), the evangelists are now being released to bring in the harvest, in the form of living stones (1 Pet 2:5), ready to be placed into God’s spiritual building. The evangelists are not skilled to build – they are gatherers, bringing living stones to the building site so we can build. But if they don’t work with the prophets with the blueprints and the apostles with the oversight (and the pastors and teachers soon to take their place in the New), we will simply be left with random piles of stones, isolated and not established in their ordained place. Let’s welcome the gatherers and encourage them to do their job, but let us make sure we are ALL working together, doing what we are called to and encouraging each other to do the same, so that together we are formed into God’s one true spiritual building: His Kingdom.