Lecture 7: The Gifts of the Church

The lecture, section by section

1. A divisive gift, handled graciously

   The teachers open with history. Before the 1990s the literature was polemical: some books argued the supernatural sign gifts had ceased and demonized their modern practice as satanic; others answered that a church without tongues and prophecy was no true church, and a Christian without them had not evidenced the baptism of the Spirit. Each side manufactured a new essential and used it to question the other’s salvation. The inclusiveness of the 1990s, partly the fruit of postmodern culture, ended the bickering, but at a cost: now almost no one writes on the gifts at all, for fear of looking divisive. The course’s stance: these questions are non essential for salvation but genuinely important, because the gifts are the primary means by which the ministries of the church are accomplished, so stopping at the ministries would leave the whole structure unexplained.

2. What the class is and is not doing

   A quick review sets the sequence: the nature of the church grounds its purpose, the purpose is fulfilled through the five ministries, and the ministries are accomplished by the gifts. The teachers cite George Barna’s polling: 71 percent of churchgoing Christians have heard of spiritual gifts, but of those, only 31 percent can name their gift, 12 percent claim not to have one, and 57 percent do not know theirs. Even so, this is not a gift inventory session; the aim is the theology of the gifts. Four passages carry the subject, easy to remember as 4, 4, 12, 12: Ephesians 4, 1 Peter 4, 1 Corinthians 12, and Romans 12. And the first hurdle is honest: every one of these passages assumes its readers already know what the gifts are; nowhere does Scripture stop and define them with a complete list, and 1 Corinthians 12 through 14 in particular is written to correct a church already practicing them.

3. A manifestation for the common good

   1 Corinthians 12 gives the working material: varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, varieties of ministries but the same Lord, varieties of effects but the same God, and to each one is given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. Manifestation means a showing: the gift is the way God shows himself through you, and since the term spiritual gift carries decades of baggage, the teachers commend the plainer phrase, the primary way God wants to work through you. The Spirit distributes as he wills, verse 28 ordering apostles, prophets, teachers, then miracles, healings, helps, administrations, tongues. And the purpose clause governs everything: for the common good. Your gift is not finally yours; it belongs to the body. Rhome presses it personally: if God gifted him to teach, the gift is owed to the church, delivered with his own personality attached, and the same for every member. Which also answers the perennial question of whether a Christian needs the church: only in the body do you ever see the breadth of how the Spirit works, because no one member carries it all; if all were one member, where would the body be?

4. Equipping, not hoarding

   Ephesians 4 adds the second governing principle: Christ gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to build up the body. The gifted are given to enable, prepare, and train others, never to hoard the ministry. A pastor who gathers every ministry to himself neglects the body and, the teachers say bluntly, is not functioning as a true local church; the hardest discipline for the genuinely gifted is giving ministry away to people who will do it worse at first. Rhome sketches the natural life cycle of a gift: a home study, then a four week series, then recognized teaching, and then the mature turn, training others to teach, which is exactly why the theology program runs its own teacher training. The counterexample is familiar: churches where, unless you are the pastor, in the choir, or watching children, there is nothing for you to do.

5. Mapping the gifts

   The teachers offer the classic map, useful whatever camp you land in. The supernatural sign gifts divide into revelatory, apostleship, prophecy, and perhaps the word of wisdom and word of knowledge, and confirmatory, miracles and healings, with tongues hard to place and appearing in both columns. The logic of the division: revelation demands confirmation. If a man claims to speak for God or to carry apostolic authority, no one is obliged to believe him, and Scripture says we should not, until something confirms the claim, which is what the confirmatory gifts did. The remaining gifts fall into speaking gifts and serving gifts, which nearly everyone agrees continue.

6. Three positions

   From the introduction course the three positions return. The continuationist holds the miraculous sign gifts are still given: prophets, apostles, tongues, and people who can heal, because that is how God manifests himself through them. The hard cessationist holds they ceased with the death of the last apostle and the completion of the New Testament: since the canon is closed and revelation has, at least for now, ceased, the confirmatory gifts that existed to authenticate revelation have no remaining function. The soft cessationist, also called open but cautious, holds the gifts could still be given but claims must be tested and the gifts should never be treated as normative, since revelation has, in the main, ceased.

7. The cessationist argument from confirmation

   The hard cessationist case is walked through on its own terms. Why did Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Jesus, and the apostles work miracles? The texts tie the miracles to authentication: Jesus came proving who he was, and empowered the Twelve to prove the authority he had given them. Paul, defending himself against the so called super apostles in 2 Corinthians 12:12, appeals to exactly this: the signs of a true apostle were performed among you, signs and wonders and miracles, which assumes such signs mark true apostles and their absence unmasks false ones. John uses the word sign almost as a technical term for the confirming works of Christ, and when the disciples ask in John 9 whose sin caused the man’s blindness, the answer is neither: he was blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him. Healing, on this reading, was never given primarily as benevolence, else Christ would have healed everyone at the pool of John 5, but as confirmation; and when confirmation’s object, new revelation, ended, the confirming gifts ended with it.

8. What hard cessationism does not say, and fairness to the other side

   Two corrections guard against caricature. First, hard cessationism is not the claim that God performs no miracles today. Every hard cessationist the teachers know affirms present miracles; the claim is only that God works them directly, not through individuals gifted to heal at will. God may lay a burden of prayer on someone and heal in answer to it, and no cessationist objects; what has ceased is the person who can walk a hospital ward emptying it. Second, continuationists deserve their best representation: since the signs and wonders movement of the 1990s associated with John Wimber, most tie the signs to the message, so that healing serves evangelism as it did for Christ, who likewise did not heal everyone on the mats but moved at the Spirit’s leading; and those who class healing as a benevolence gift rather than a confirmatory one are making a coherent move that changes which ministry the gift serves.

9. Open, but under the rules

   Patton locates himself in the third camp and explains the terms of his openness. He will never say God cannot give these gifts again, and a futurist reading of Revelation expects prophets again in the future. But a modern claimant must submit to the biblical rules, and the biblical confirmations were never trivial: water turned to blood, a staff to a serpent, the lifelong lame walking, the dead raised after days, works so undeniable that even Jesus’ opponents disputed only their source, never their occurrence. Backaches easing and a leg lengthening an inch do not meet that bar. And the stakes are the third commandment: to take the Lord’s name in vain is, at its root, to attach God’s name to words he did not speak, the very thing pagan prophets did in the names of their gods. Say thus says the Lord and you have seated yourself in the prophet’s chair, under the prophet’s rules in Deuteronomy 13 and 18, where a failed prophecy carried death, because God does not like being made to say what he did not say. Saying instead, I think God has moved me to tell you this, is an entirely different and honest thing: subjective, and possibly wrong. Patton’s own experience: many self announced prophets, moving audiences to tears, and not one confirmed. As for the neat chart of temporary versus permanent gifts, he adds the honest caveat: no verse says outright which gifts were temporary, which is exactly why caution, not dogmatism, fits.

10. Where do the gifts come from?

    A quieter question follows: are the gifts brand new endowments at conversion, or God’s use of who you already are? The supernatural view says the gifts are given by the Spirit at salvation for the church’s edification. The supernatural natural view says the Spirit gives natural talents at birth and gifts at salvation, and that at conversion God takes the talents you carried into the faith and turns them to the body’s good. The teachers argue from the image of God, recalling the humanity course: at conversion you did not receive a new image, you began to excel in the old one, restored toward Christlikeness; the same, usually, with gifts. The musician who converts is not typically rerouted away from music. Gift inventories, they note wryly, are essentially personality tests, and your personality the day after salvation looks much like the day before, though it changes as Christ changes you. A student supplies the sharpest observation of the night: the sign gifts could not be expressed through pre conversion personality, and the ordinary gifts could, which is a natural dividing line inside the gift lists even for those who want none. Patton accepts the charge that this sounds anti supernatural and reverses it: he holds a higher view of the supernatural already present in the image of God, and his anthropology shapes his view of the gifts. Church history agrees in practice: no era took gift tests; the church simply recognized what people were good at and set them to it.

11. How many gifts are there?

    The counts betray the problem: Leslie Flynn finds 19, Charles Ryrie 16, Peter Wagner more than 30, including the gift of music and the gift of martyrdom, which, the teachers deadpan, is the gift that does not keep on giving, Robert Thomas 18 or more, and John MacArthur answers that you cannot really know, which the teachers think is the wisest answer. The lists are representative principles, not a taxonomy: gifts overlap and combine, encouragement and teaching may meet in preaching, and hunting for your exact label misses the point.

12. The gifts defined: the named and the obscure

    Working through Ephesians 4: apostleship, one sent with authority, carrying divine revelation and unquestioned authority for establishing and nurturing the church, authenticated by miracles per 2 Corinthians 12:12. Prophecy, receiving messages directly from God by special revelation and declaring them uninterpreted, an office still governed by the untouched rules of Deuteronomy, since nothing in the New Testament repeals them. Evangelism, the ability and desire to present the gospel clearly, creatively, and sensitively, serving the outreach ministry. The pastor, from the shepherd picture: guarding, guiding, feeding, and exhorting a people in the word, under the interchangeable titles pastor, elder, teacher, bishop, shepherd. Then the obscure gifts of 1 Corinthians 12, and the teachers model honesty about obscurity. The word of wisdom: defined ten ways by ten people, and if defined as prophetic disclosure it collapses into prophecy, which is why Patton files it with the gifts he suspects are no longer given; he is openly amused at teachers who define so obscure a gift in confident detail. The word of knowledge: the same fog, every proposed definition collapsing into teaching or prophecy, and Patton admits he has no encouragement for its claimants because he does not know what it is. Faith, the supernatural ability to believe God through extraordinary circumstances, with the honest puzzle that this should describe every believer. Healing: visible, immediate, supernatural restoration from illness, handicap, or death, a confirmatory gift if confirmatory, a benevolence gift of the inreach ministry if not. Miracles: visible supernatural acts bringing astonishment, a word chosen deliberately, since no biblical miracle was small. Discerning of spirits: the ability to judge whether a teaching’s source is God or another spirit, reached partly by elimination since it is named only once.

13. Tongues: four views and Paul’s argument

    Tongues gets the longest treatment because the definitions multiply: a known foreign language unknown to the speaker, for proclaiming the gospel; an unknown divine prayer language that only God understands; ecstatic utterance that edifies the church; or a known language in Acts and ecstasy in Corinth. Acts 2 anchors the discussion: at Pentecost the crowds heard their own languages, yet the region shared common tongues in which everyone could already have been addressed, so the point was not communication but sign, something undeniably supernatural. In 1 Corinthians 12 through 14 Paul corrects abuses, and his governing theme is the one the whole session has pressed: the gifts are for the common good, not private use, which in the teachers’ judgment cuts against the private prayer language; and the verse often quoted for it, that the tongue speaker speaks to God and not to men, sits in a context of rebuke, Paul condemning a use nobody can understand, not defining the gift. The word’s usage is tallied: often the physical organ, often a known language, with the debated occurrences concentrated almost entirely in 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, so consistency argues for the known language view, which Patton takes, and interpretation of tongues follows suit as interpretation for an audience to whom the language is foreign.

14. The serving gifts, the dangers, and discovering yours

    Romans 12 rounds out the list: service, the desire to serve behind the scenes; teaching, transmitting the truth of Scripture so people grow, a principle that subdivides endlessly, from academics to family ministry; exhortation, the Greek paraklesis carrying both the warm and the hard sense, encouragement by words and even by sheer presence, and the rarer ability to tell painful truth well, which Patton cheerfully admits he lacks; giving, wisely sharing resources; leadership, sometimes administrations, wisely handling the necessary details; and mercy, joyfully showing compassion to those who suffer, so that others are comforted. The dangers: letting your one bright light excuse neglect of everything else; ranking gifts as the Corinthians did; and the arrogance of the up front gifts toward the hidden ones. The closing principles: everyone has a gift, and probably more than one; the gifts are mutually dependent and overlapping, so do not agonize over the label; leaders must not hoard ministry; weigh passions and natural abilities without limiting God, who answered Moses’ objection about his mouth by asking who made the mouth. And the path to discovering your gift: give yourself to God first, involve yourself in various ministries, focus on one and develop it, talk with others in the body, and seek God’s guidance the whole way, so that you can then help others find theirs.

1. Your gift is not yours: it belongs to the body, delivered through your particular personality. What is the primary way God wants to work through you, and who in your church is currently going without it because you have kept it to yourself?

2. The teachers modeled being open but cautious: refusing to say God cannot, while testing every claim by the biblical rules. Where do you land among the three positions, and has your position been formed by Scripture, by an experience, or by a reaction against someone else’s error?

3. Rhome described the mature turn of a gift: training others to do what you do. If you have exercised a gift for years, who are you developing in it, and what one step would begin that this season?