God gives us models to break us out of where we are and give us a new sense of what is coming next. These leaders are next step leaders, and we need them. They are God’s strategy. They are foundational.
That said, such men and women of unusual spiritual power and authority should raise the level of spiritual ministry in everyone, not become superstars of healing, miracles, and harvest.
We do not have a mandate to sit and watch but to be equipped, positioned, and released to function.
In other words, apostles and prophets are not here to make everyone apostles and prophets. They are here to raise the level of prophetic and apostolic ministry so everyone rises with the tide of spiritual power and authority. Nor are they here to become the superstars of ministry we all enjoy watching perform.
That said, the very people who decry the professionalism and spectatorism in the Body fall into the trap of professionalism and spectatorism when they reduce ministry to conference-based hit-and-run instruction and activation.
I love conferences and intend to host more of them. However, the conferences are strategic to break people out of where they are and into what’s coming next. They are not the periodic “now we’re doing it right” weekends that leave people saying, well, when the superstars come back we’ll have another great time!”
Superstars take the best of their two decades worth of experiences, sprinkle a little glamor on them and set them up as new norms. This raises the bar of faith and expectation, but the reality is that everyone is not going to do this. Everyone is not going to experience the best, most outrageous, and blow your mind stories the traveling superstars share at the conference.
All the leaders do this. I do, too! I love to share the best of my experiences, but I also am real with people about the “other side” of ministry that requires you to have something much deeper than a fad anointing and a “high-five” brother and sister mentality.
Everybody can do some of the stuff, but everybody doesn’t do all the stuff. I hear this exaggeration far too frequently from people who are not doing all the stuff but demand that the “church get right with God and do all the stuff.” They use the hypothetical “everybody can do all the stuff” argument to beat up status quo as if they do all the stuff and can put you into position to do all the stuff.
They are not doing all the stuff and they cannot position you to do all the stuff either. The fivefold leaders are given to the Body to equip and position members to function in the gifts, ministries, and operations of the Spirit. They do not turn everybody into fivefold ministry leaders, nor do they put everybody into a pool of superstars so everybody can do all the stuff.
This mentality leads to professionalism and now endangers the new breed of healing and power ministry leaders who have to do another, greater ministry miracle every time they go on tour to validate their claims. That is professionalism. It is the fine line between doing the ministry of Jesus because you are called, sent, and set up and doing something for the cameras so you have some new material for the next conference, the next DVD, or merely to validate your exaggerated sense of who you are.
