A Muggy Afternoon…

I wrote the following story as a part of an ongoing discussion in my Doctor of Ministry program at George Fox University back in 2004 as to whether the letter to the Ephesians was an ad hoc letter, i.e., written to take care of local problems, or a universal letter, i.e., suggestive of a timeless model for the church to follow. The conversation centered around verse 11 of Ephesians 4 (was it a five-fold ministry or a four-fold ministry that Paul intended). We were also discussing with some interest whether present tools to help folks in the church discover what giftings they have were useful or not. I discovered it again as I was researching for the book that I am writing about Spiritual Gifts.

It was a muggy afternoon in Ephesus as Paul approached the Hall of Tyrannus for his four or so hour meeting with the church at Ephesus. He was rather tired this specific day because he had been up for many previous nights working with a legion of scribes preparing a “new tool” for the church at Ephesus, in addition to his tentmaking job every morning and evening.

As he entered the hall that day, he was a bit anxious. He had created a tool and had it reproduced by the scribes on many pieces of papyri and he was going to walk through it with the church at Ephesus that afternoon to help them discover which of the four gifts that they might possess that he had been teaching them about.

He knew in his heart that he would one day bear his “soul” and write a universal letter to every church that he was going to plant and to all the churches unto the ages. This seemed like such a strange thought to him because he had not yet sat down and made a five year plan. Up to this point he had helped Barney in Antioch of Syria and team planted a few churches in the Galatian area. He was stressed about such a thought because he believed that he was going to be alive when Jesus returned anyway, so why plan ahead? The idea that a group of universal books was his life’s destiny so that the church of the ages could function with this model was strange to him indeed.

Of course, today he was interested in helping the church at Ephesus to understand which of these four gifts each had been given. As a pre cursor to his tool, he had written a sentence listing the giftings and then provided a definition for each from which he had created some questions to ask the folks in the Ephesian church. His sentence construction helped his listeners and readers to understand that there were only four giftings in this structure. However, he wondered if others would take his idea and alter his definitions so that when their churches took the fantastic Spirit-led tool and filled it out, they might end up thinking they were gifted in ways that they were not gifted, not to mention that some readers might be confused about the number of gifts.

Alas, these thoughts had to be placed on hold. The time had arrived for this charismatic congregation to use this newly devised reductionistic tool to help them understand what the Spirit was doing. It seemed more muggy than usual as Paul began to pass out the papyri, trying not to drop his sweat on the document and blur the ink just in case in some future time one of these documents might surface to help the church of whatever century continue this noble task of using tools.

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