Ephesians 4: Equipping the Saints, a Mission of the Church

Introduction

Cornhill Scotland is celebrating its 20th anniversary. For the occasion, a special episode of the Talking Points podcast brings together, around a host, Willie Philip, president of Cornhill Scotland, who returned to Scotland more than 22 years ago to serve at The Tron Church in Glasgow, and Andy Gemmill, director of the pastoral training course. This is not a sermon but a conversation between three voices. Their subject: training men and women for a ministry faithful to the Bible.

The opening question is simple: why is this something the Church must do, and not merely something it can do? For Willie Philip, everything comes back to a basic point: “the supreme authority in the Church, and for all of faith and all of life, is the Scriptures.” The Bible comes before everything else.

This first episode lays out the convictions. Equipping the saints is not the concern of a few candidates spotted for the pastorate: it is a culture that every local church is called to build.

Discussion outline

1. The Bible comes before everything

• Theology, church history and the practical disciplines all matter, but they all flow from the first thing: Scripture.
• If someone is not first taught to handle Scripture with skill, commitment and care, it does not matter what else they can do: they lack the essential.
• Willie Philip sees two mistakes. The worse one is to ignore this need. The second, far more common, is to assume it is already met and to focus on something else. “You can’t ignore it, but you can’t assume it either.”
• Andy Gemmill adds an observation: churches do well when the Scriptures are well taught in them. Not training future teachers would be like a company that does not invest in research, or an organization that does not prepare those who will lead it tomorrow.
• So it is not enough for the Bible to be well preached from the pulpit today. There must be a commitment that this continues for the generations that follow.

2. Equipping the saints: team work to be handed on

• What is well-taught Word for? Andy Gemmill points to Ephesians 4: the saints are equipped for the work of ministry.
• When we say “ministry,” we often think of the church employee. But the work of the Gospel is “a team sport,” and the team must be developed. If it is not, it does not matter what happens in the pulpit.
• The goal: that Christians live together, speak to one another and act toward one another and before the world in such a way that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus spreads.
• Our words shape our thoughts. We reserve “ministry” for the pulpit and “training” for a small group. The result: most congregations do not think of themselves as equipped together for the Gospel. “We skim off a few promising people without developing everyone.”
• The job of the person employed by the church is to help everyone grow. “Why wouldn’t you do it?”
• Willie Philip cites 2 Timothy 2: what Timothy has heard, he is to entrust to faithful men, able to teach it to others. You pass it on, then you pass it on again.
• But it does not stop at a chain of pastors. The aim is to widen it to the whole Church: to train pastors who, in turn, create in their congregations a culture of training and development of all the saints.
• Historically, most pastors did not see training other pastors as part of their primary responsibility, even though Paul says so explicitly.
• If the local church is the organ of evangelism, it is also the organ of training. This requires a church culture, not just individual initiatives.
• Andy Gemmill acknowledges that it is an uphill battle: ask a member of an evangelical church where training for ministry happens, and they will almost never answer “here.” The host qualifies this: a growing number of churches are moving in this direction, even if the battle remains hard.

3. The ABC of training: academy, brothers, church

• Willie Philip tells, with humor, how the idea came to him one day in his bath: a three-legged stool, an “ABC.”
• A is for academy: a course of study, things to learn. The aim is excellence in teaching the Scriptures, centered on the exposition of the Bible, to equip people who will equip others.
• B is for brothers: you do not learn alone. Community brings exchange, encouragement and a network of people you know and trust.
• C is for church: it is there that you see a real ministry of exposition and equipping, that you receive opportunities to serve and that experience grows. “It’s the weirdest thing in the world to train someone for ministry by taking them away from where ministry happens.”
• The church is also the place where you are most usefully assessed. Paul tells Timothy: your progress must be evident to all. You can be the brightest in the class and be very deficient in what ministry demands. In the life of the church, that does not pass.
• Separating the academy from the local church has been, according to Willie Philip, one of the most disastrous things for training for ministry. Cornhill deliberately seeks to reverse this trend.

4. Growing in every area at the same time

• Andy Gemmill acknowledges that full-time training away from the church allows you to cover a lot, faster. But separating what should go together has a cost.
• For the person being trained first: you can be very good in books and weak relationally. According to him, most pastors who fall in the United Kingdom do not fall for lack of theology, but under the weight of the relational demands of ministry.
• Placing someone in responsibilities for which they are not relationally equipped, after years of training, “is just unkind.” It is better to discover things early and to grow knowledge, responsibilities and relational maturity together.
• For the congregation next: it is very encouraging to see your own people progress. One of the speakers mentions the apprenticeship program launched in a church where he was pastor: a young man the congregation had known throughout his adolescence, now 25, preached a decent sermon one year, then a very good sermon the following year. The church said to itself: “We can do things here.”
• From a practical point of view too, it is far simpler to train your own members and hire them than to go looking for someone outside: everyone knows what to expect.

5. Preaching for faces, not for professors

• A brilliant student may not know how to open the Scriptures for an ordinary congregation. Coming out of his theological training in the Church of Scotland, Willie Philip preached for his professors: “I wasn’t writing sermons, I was writing essays.”
• It took him a long time to get out of it. That is why he still writes his sermons by hand: at the keyboard, he could not stop himself from writing a text to be read rather than a message to be spoken. His job was not to impress professors, but to teach the Lord’s people.
• Preaching before people you know, whose struggles you are aware of, is a reminder that the goal is not people’s learning, but their life.
• “There is a danger of confusing the means with the end.” Having taught a passage well is not enough if it has not transformed anyone. The goal is for the life of Christ to develop in people. Preaching and applying the Scriptures is not less than teaching, it is more.

6. A need that remains as great in Scotland

• Willie Philip spent five years in London at the Proclamation Trust before returning to Scotland a little more than 22 years ago. He saw a growing gap in training for ministry, and he knew that such a project could not be born without a church to carry it, just as Cornhill in London had been born out of the ministry of St Helen’s.
• He imagined a ten-year project. In God’s providence, it went much faster: an almost chance conversation with Edward Lobb, while Willie Philip was still in London. Edward Lobb arrived in Scotland in 2005, a year after him, and Cornhill Scotland was launched at that point.
• Andy Gemmill asks churches a direct question: where will your next pastor come from? “On paper, he doesn’t.” Pastors no longer grow like fruit in an orchard. According to him, not much more than a dozen people a year in the country come out trained with a real conviction for expository ministry.
• The need is not only a question of numbers. Evangelical churches ask whether a candidate really needs to go through Cornhill before the pastoral course. This betrays a culture that assumes it knows the Bible and looks for the “secret recipe” elsewhere: a seminary program, the original languages or something else.

7. The edge of the axe and the voice of God

• Andy Gemmill compares ministry to an axe. You need a sharpened edge and some weight. A theological system and the ability to think well add weight. But doing biblical ministry without knowing how to teach the Scriptures well is like felling a tree with a sledgehammer: precision is missing.
• Willie Philip sees here the danger of success: the next generation thinks it has absorbed expository preaching, when it has absorbed only a veneer, the tip of the iceberg.
• Putting together a talk that bounces off a passage is easy. Asking why the author of 2 Kings, or Paul in Romans, wrote this text this way, for whom and to what end, is “a whole different ball game.”
• Paul asks Timothy to present himself before God as “a workman who doesn’t need to be ashamed.” Dick Lucas explained that this word evokes a laborer breaking stones on the road, sweating. A maxim quoted during the conversation sums it up: “The Scriptures do not yield their treasures to a random search.” It is not about polishing a sermon, but about digging to extract the truth that this text speaks to this people.
• The books of the Bible are documents written with an intention. Looking for that intention gives precision: it is the Bible that sets the church’s agenda, not the pastor.
• This is the highest view of the Word: Scripture is not only a source of doctrine, it is the living word by which God speaks today, through the Holy Spirit. There is no need to look for God’s voice elsewhere. The preacher’s task is to make that voice heard with precision. That is why, for Cornhill, it is the heart of the program.

Key takeaways

• Scripture is the supreme authority of the Church: training people to handle it well can be neither ignored nor assumed.
• According to Ephesians 4, ministry is team work: every local church is called to equip all the saints, not just a few candidates.
• The strongest training unites the academy, the brothers and the church, and grows knowledge, experience and relational maturity together.
• The goal of teaching is not people’s knowledge but their life: the life of Christ formed in them.
• Teaching the Bible well is a workman’s labor: seeking what God meant to say and do through this text, so that his voice is heard today.

Personal application

1. When you hear the word “ministry,” do you think first of the pastor, or of your own place on the Gospel team?
2. In your church, who is being trained to open the Bible to others, and what part can you play in this momentum?
3. Are you content with a veneer of Bible knowledge, or are you willing to dig into a text to understand what it meant to accomplish?
4. If you teach or lead a group, do you seek to pass on information or to see lives transformed?
5. Where will your church’s next leader come from, and how can you pray and act so that he or she is trained among you?

Scriptures cited

• Ephesians 4:11-12
• 2 Timothy 2:2
• 2 Timothy 2:15
• 1 Timothy 4:15

Frequently asked questions

What does “equipping the saints” mean according to Ephesians 4?

For Andy Gemmill, the work of the Gospel is team work. Ministry is not limited to the person in the pulpit: all Christians are equipped to live together, speak to one another and speak to the world in such a way that the Gospel spreads. The role of the person employed by the church is to help everyone grow.

Why train pastors within the local church?

Willie Philip speaks of an “ABC”: the academy (a course of study), the brothers (a community that learns together) and the church. It is in the church that you receive opportunities to serve, gain experience and are assessed on your character and relationships, not only on your results in class.

Why does learning to teach the Bible well take so much work?

It is easy to build a talk that takes its cue from a passage. It is far harder to understand why the biblical author wrote this text this way, for whom and to what end. The books of the Bible were written to accomplish something. As Paul tells Timothy, you have to work like a workman to rightly divide the word of truth.