The Equipping Ministry, Student Workbook, SW15

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T H E E Q U I P P I N G M I N I S T R Y

As pastor Wiersbe suggests, God’s people, all of them , are members of a royal priesthood. All of God’s people have the same status and role, equal access to God through our Great High Priest, Jesus Christ, and all are given the unbelievably high privilege of representing one another to God through our care, intercession, and love. Peter, in this striking text above, relates God’s testimony of his people Israel to the new Israel, the Church, who represents in this age a fulfillment of the people of God in this way. We are a royal priesthood, both men and women, girls and boys, all who by faith have been joined to Christ and who proclaim together through our acts and good works the light of the one who delivered us from the kingdom of darkness. As Gentiles, we in fact were not a people at all, but through faith in Christ we have become a people, and though before we had not received mercy from God, now, through faith in the shed blood of Jesus of Nazareth, we have obtained mercy. The teaching ministry of the Church is built upon and assumes the universal priesthood of the believers. It seeks to equip each member of the Church into their God-gifted and God-appointed role as servants and care-givers to others, and seeks to outfit them in this role in order that they may fulfill creatively their role in the body. In the Church of God there are only two kinds of members: equippers and ministers. All the members of the body of Christ are ministers of the Gospel, all are gifted by the Spirit to love and care for others, and God has granted gifted leaders the power to equip the priesthood in order that they might not only enter into the presence of God without any mediator save Jesus himself, but also be released to care for the needs of others, even as the priests of the Lord cared for the people of God in Israel. Rather than interpreting the priesthood in selfish terms, we ought to rediscover the priesthood in terms of its dynamic power to transform our lives from a selfish orientation to a service orientation. The teaching ministry is synonymous with making disciples. To be a teacher is to act as a priest or priestess of the Church in order that you may represent the interests of God in the midst of the body, as well in the world where we live, work, and play. Teachers are to commit themselves not just to share information, but to make disciples, not merely to cover material but to use the Word of God to equip members for the fulfillment of their duty in the universal priesthood; nothing can possibly be higher in terms of status and privilege for those of us who teach than to outfit the people of God for the work he has called them to do. The teaching ministry, therefore, links with one of the most precious and important articles of our Christian belief, that God has granted gifts to the people of God in

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