Ephesians 4:11-13 · Featured Study · Christ's Gifts to His Church
The Fivefold Ministry
When Christ ascended, He did not leave His church empty-handed — He gave gifts, and the gifts were people: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, sent out not for their own sake but "for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ." Every tradition agrees the last three gifts are still given. The whole church divides on whether the first two ever stopped.
The Charter
— three verses — the gift, its purpose, and its goal- IEphesians 4:11The Gift
“And he gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;”
- IIEphesians 4:12The Purpose
“for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ:”
- IIIEphesians 4:13The Goal
“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:”
Paul's own frame for the list is 4:8-10 — Christ "led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men" (quoting Ps 68:18), the ascension itself the ground of the giving. The gift is not a title to hold but a work to do: the saints are perfected, not the officers alone.
Five Gifts, One Instrument
— the Greek words behind the five, gathered as one typed setOne Office or Two?
— the pastor-teacher grammar of 4:11, presented honestlyLook closely at the Greek grammar of Ephesians 4:11's list and a small but real question surfaces. The first three gifts each carry their own article — tous men apostolous ("the apostles"), tous de prophētas ("the prophets"), tous de euangelistas ("the evangelists") — three distinct, separately-articled groups. Then the list closes with a shift: "pastors and teachers" share a single article, tous de poimenas kai didaskalous, joined by one plain "and" under one "the."
Many readers take that shift as a signal — one office, "pastor-teacher," a shepherd whose care of the flock is itself doctrinal instruction, rather than a fifth gift standing separately alongside the other four. Other readers hold the shift is simply Paul's Greek tightening as the list closes, with no claim about office intended — after all, teaching turns up elsewhere in the New Testament as one qualification among several for the elder/overseer (1 Timothy 3:2's "apt to teach"), not a stand-alone office, which fits either reading of Ephesians 4:11 without forcing the question. MannaFest presents the grammatical fact plainly and leaves "one office or two" open — pastor and teacher are, at minimum, closely paired in Christ's gift-list, however the offices are finally counted.
The Contested Center
— do apostles and prophets continue as offices? — presented at full strengthContinuing — the apostolic-prophetic network
All five gifts remain operative, apostles and prophets included — not a one-time apostolic-age phenomenon but ongoing, credentialed, trainable ministries. The Pentecost promise runs "to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call" (Acts 2:39) — the gift is co-extensive with the call, i.e. with the whole age, not sealed off at the founding generation.
The distinction that carries the argument: this stream does not claim there are new members of the Twelve. It reads Ephesians 4:11 as naming an ongoing function — foundation-laying and oversight — while granting that the unique foundational apostles of Ephesians 2:20, eyewitnesses of the risen Christ whose testimony became Scripture, are unrepeatable. Continuing office, closed circle: John Eckhardt answers the Ephesians 2:20 objection precisely here, arguing that apostolic function continues per Ephesians 4:11 distinct from the foundational Twelve, and Bishop Bill Hamon's framework says the same — modern apostles and prophets are not identical to the unique foundational Twelve but stand in continuous-office function. Whether that distinction holds is exactly what the column beside this one denies.
Among the voices MannaFest cites: Harold Eberle, John Eckhardt, and Chuck Pierce each hold all five offices operative today, and Dutch Sheets, Bishop Bill Hamon, Jane Hamon, and Cindy Jacobs stand in the same apostolic-prophetic stream — Jane Hamon a senior Christian International leader (with her husband Tom, of Vision Church @ Christian International, and a teacher in CI's School of the Prophets), and one of the stream's substantive women's voices alongside Jacobs (Hamon, The Deborah Company; Dreams and Visions, 1997; Jacobs, Possessing the Gates of the Enemy: A Training Manual for Militant Intercession, 1991).
Foundational — the office closed at the canon
"Being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner stone" (Eph 2:20) — a foundation, once laid, is not laid again; apostle and prophet named canon-revelatory offices that closed with Scripture's completion. Two forms: strict cessationism (Sproul — the foundational sign-gifts ceased with the apostolic era; sharply critical of apostolic-prophetic-network claims) and a softer, moderate-continuationist middle ground (Piper — the gift of prophecy continues as fallible, Spirit-prompted impressions to be tested, but explicitly distinguished from the foundational apostolic-prophetic office of this very verse, Eph 2:20) alongside soft cessationism (Packer — the sign-gifts ceased; the Spirit's ongoing work in conviction, illumination, and sanctification does not).
“The apostles and prophets are the foundation of that building. They may be so called in a secondary sense, Christ himself being the primary foundation; but we are rather to understand it of the doctrine delivered by the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New.”
Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible(1710), on Ephesians 2:20 — public domain.
MannaFest flag — MannaFest's founder doctrine (locked ecclesiology position) reads all five gifts as continuing, governmental ministries: the fivefold ministry of Ephesians 4:11 operates governmentally, with apostles and prophets foundational — foundational in the sense of load-bearing for the church's ongoing government, not a closed, one-generation event. The flag is not abstract: MannaFest's own church lineage runs through Christian International, the network Bishop Bill Hamon founded, which provides its apostolic oversight — so the position above is the stream Marcus Brown stands in, named plainly rather than presented as a neutral survey result. The foundational-era reading is presented beside it at full strength; MannaFest's own flag stands with the network, not against it.
The pattern argued in full — Acts and the continuationist heartland →
How the Continuing Stream Tells Its Own Story
— Bill Hamon's restoration-of-the-offices sequence — the framework MannaFest's own network was built onThe continuing position is not merely a claim that the offices never stopped. In its most-systematized form — Bishop Bill Hamon's, the framework behind Christian International and therefore behind MannaFest's own oversight — it is a claim about history: that the church lost the fivefold ministry and God has been progressively giving it back through successive moves, in a specific order, with the apostolic and prophetic offices returning last because they are hardest to receive. Read the sequence as Hamon's own account of the last century, and the disagreement with the column above sharpens: one side is reading church history as recovery, the other as a foundation already laid and rightly left alone.
- 1The Latter Rain Movementdate not fixed in our source
The first of the moves Hamon numbers — the beginning, on his reading, of the church's recovery of ministry gifts it had long stopped expecting.
- 2The Healing Revivaldate not fixed in our source
The recovery of healing as an ordinary expectation of ministry rather than an apostolic-age relic.
- 3The Charismatic Renewaldate not fixed in our source
The spread of Pentecostal experience past Pentecostal denominations and into the historic churches.
- 4The Prophetic Movementbirthed 1988
The date Hamon's own framework fixes for the prophetic office's formal restoration — the point his network dates its prophetic training-and-accountability apparatus from.
- 5The Apostolic Movementlate 1990s
The apostolic office restored after the prophetic, in that order — the sequence matters to the framework, since Ephesians 2:20 names both together as foundation.
- 6The Day of the Saintsarticulated 2002
The phase Hamon argues the offices exist to produce: every believer equipped and released into ministry, not a professional class doing it for them — which is Ephesians 4:12's own stated purpose.
The sequence is Hamon's, traced across The Eternal Church, Apostles, Prophets and the Coming Moves of God (1997), and Day of the Saints (2002) — cite-only. MannaFest presents it as this stream's own reading of its own history, not as settled church history: the three earliest moves are given in Hamon's order without dates because our source does not date them, and readers outside the stream will contest both the periodization and the premise that the offices were ever lost. What is not in dispute is that the framework is load-bearing here — it is the account of the fivefold ministry that MannaFest's own apostolic covering operates on.