The second feature of Paul’s time in Ephesus that is worth noting follows as a natural consequence of his dedicated diakonia: his tears. Paul had ministered with tears (Acts 20:19, 31). It had been painful to build the Church in Ephesus, there were dimensions of its culture that were deeply unaccommodating to the gospel. And after all they had been through together it was a painful process for Paul and the elders to bid their farewells to each other (Acts 20:37), intensified by the uncertainty that faced them all. Again the example of Jesus was the backdrop to their ministry. His self-depiction as a servant of others was a conscious adoption of the suffering servant motif in the Isaianic prophecies. Jesus knew that to serve the people in the messianic ministry of God’s new order carried with it the mantle of suffering. Servanthood and suffering were yoked together as surely as motherhood and the pain of labour in the birth of God’s kingdom.
When the Polish priest, Maximillian Kolbe, confessed to a crime he had not committed to save another person from death in a Nazi concentration camp, he was stepping into the footprints of Jesus, the suffering servant, and joining the many martyrs of every century who have been ready to follow the logic of Christian diakonia.
Third, Paul shows a radical dependence on the Holy Spirit. We saw earlier how his time in Ephesus was marked by dramatic activity of the Spirit. Now, in his farewell to the elders, he describes himself as ‘captive to the Spirit’ (Acts 20:23), hints at his attentiveness to the voice of the Spirit guiding and leading him to new opportunities for ministry and reminds them it is the Holy Spirit who has made them overseers in the Church. I remember speaking to John Wimber, another extraordinary church planter, about the dynamic of the Church’s ministry. Describing the way that throughout the book of Acts the Spirit guides, enables and orders the life of the Church, he said, ‘we need an ecclesiology that recognizes the Spirit as the true administrator of the Church’. Sitting in St Paul’s Cathedral some years later while attending a consecration of a bishop, I was reminded of our conversation and his challenge when I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury quote from Acts 20:28 in the ordination liturgy as he handed the new bishop his pastoral staff: ‘Keep watch over the whole flock in which the Holy Spirit has appointed you shepherd’. At its best, Anglican ecclesiology is profoundly pneumatological, and its liturgy prays what it once agreed in dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, ‘the Church is that Community which lives by continually invoking the Holy Spirit’.8 Only ministry that is empowered by the Spirit can claim to be sharing in the ministry of Jesus the Christos, the anointed one.
The exhortation in 1 Peter 5 to the presbyters in other churches in Turkey is remarkably similar to Paul’s advice to the Ephesian elders. They are instructed to ‘tend the flock in their charge (kleros)’, to exercise ‘the oversight’ and to be ‘examples’ to those in their care. The mention of the kleros is interesting. It is the word from which we derive our word clergy, which is generally but quite unhelpfully used to distinguish the ordained from the laity. Of course, the presbyters were as much a part of the laos as every other member of the body of Christ. Laos simply means ‘people’ and strictly refers to all God’s people, whatever their particular ministry. The kleros of the presbyters is not a right of privilege but a rite of responsibility. Within the laos, the people of God, the presbyters are given a particular kleros, a charge or responsibility, literally a ‘lot’. As Acts 20:28 reminds us, it is a charge of immense value, it is the care of ‘the Church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son’. Presbyters are not a caste outside the laos, they are a category within the laos. They are members of the laos who are placed in a particular pastoral relation to other members of the laos. It is not a position that gives them any right to ‘lord it over the people’ (1 Peter 5:3), rather it places on them the pattern of the ‘chief shepherd’ (1 Peter 5:4) Christ’s servanthood. The spirit of 1 Peter 5 and Acts 20 is well expressed in the bishop’s words to those about to be ordained priest in the Anglican Ordinal (1550/1662):
Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his Spouse, and his Body.9
We said at the beginning of the chapter that Christian identity is fundamentally relational. We concentrated on the believer’s relation to Christ and on the calling to follow him in ministry. The place of the presbyters in the people of God helps us to see the interrelationality between all the members of the body and its different ministries. Presbyters are defined by their relationship to other members of the laos. Their calling by Christ and their appointment by the Holy Spirit into this ministry among the people is an ecclesial event. It happens as the Church recognizes its need and discerns the call of God upon these people. Their ministry is given to them and received from them by the Church. Within this overall context of calling, consent and collaboration, presbyters are related to other specific ministries in the life of the Church. In the New Testament communities they have a derivative relation to the apostles. This is not to say that every elder was appointed by an apostle, though some were. It is rather a case of the ministry of presbyters being part of the apostles’ plan for preserving the integrity of the newly planted communities and for propagating their life. The future of the delicate shoots of new life depended on the dynamics of grace by which they were founded. The apostolic gospel holds within it the genetic information for the health and growth of the churches. The presbyters were to serve these generative capacities of the apostolic faith in the way gardeners work to ensure that what is sown is allowed to grow with its natural energies (Titus 1:9).
In some church communities there were deacons – Philip in Jerusalem, Phoebe in Rome and those referred to in the letter to Timothy probably in a number of churches in Turkey. Several other distinctive ministries can be observed in various New Testament communities, such as prophets and evangelists, and all sorts of other giftings such as healing and hospitality, compassionate care and generous giving, operated among the people in a common experience of life in Christ’s body. Presbyters fitted into this network of ministry, each ministry finding its place in relation to the other. ‘A fundamental principle of Christianity is that of social dependence,’ said Charles Gore.10 Each person, though uniquely gifted and equally privileged to stand and serve in God’s presence, is dependent on the ministries of others, not only to give to God but to receive from God. The co-inherence of one ministry in another is a profound manifestation of the recovery of God’s image in Christian existence. It is evidence of our participation in the Trinitarian life of God in which each divine person lives in and through the other, for the other in the ultimate pattern of priestly identity.
No doubt there were differences in structure of ministry from church to church in the New Testament period and it is quite possible that presbyters appeared on the church scene earlier in some places than in others. Probably there was some tension between the more spontaneous giftings and ministries of the Spirit discovered by Christians as they worshipped and witnessed together and their more formally designated office. We are not attempting a watertight historical case or trying to prove a pattern of ministry established in the early life of the Church that can just be lifted