“The Purpose, Mission, Reason for Governmental Leadership in the Church”
By: Emmanuel Threatt
School of Ministry
Imagine, a beautiful Sunday morning. You hop in you car, heading for a great day of worship, prayer, teaching, and fellowship. You can’t wait to enter to an atmosphere of Christ filled believers that love God and love you too. As you pull up to the church, you hear an unusual sound coming from with in the stain glassed structure. You think to your self “what could that be?” As you are about to exit your vehicle, a chair (a chair from the sanctuary?) crashes through the church window onto the pavement. Following the chair is a crowd of people, running, screaming, jumping, crying, flipping, and any other action word you can think of. You think to your self “What is going on?” and then you remember “At this church there is no structure. No Pastor, or prophet, or teacher, or evangelist, or apostle. At this church we believe that we don’t need to be lead by a set person, but just lead by God. We just listen to God. But He rarely speaks, so we basically do what we want, just as long as some one doesn’t loose an eye, because that’s happened before and it wasn’t pretty.”
This illustration is on the extreme side, but it communicates the importance of have a “set person” that God has ordained over the local church. In 1 Corinthians 12: 28 the author clearly conveys that God has set leadership in the local church. It reads “And God set some in the church, firstly, apostles; secondly, prophets; thirdly, teachers, then works of power, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, kinds of languages”. The importance of having God ordained leadership, I believe is a two part answer. I believe the reason is to communicate a vision to the set leadership that their focus would be to solely lead the people, in the direction God would lead. Secondly, I believe that with Godly leadership in place, the people of the church are accountable to the leader...