Ephesians 4:8-16

Ephesians 4:8

The Origin of the Christian Clergy.

No doubt from the first the Christian society which we now call a Church existed in Christ's faithful followers, even from the beginning, and wheresoever, in any time or country, two or three were gathered together by the communion of love or faith, they also would be a Christian Church, and even for years after our Lord's departure such a society existed without the separate order of clergy.

I. Yet there was a sense in which the Christian ministry was the gift of our Divine Master. Not in His earthly life, not as a part of the original manifestation of Christianity, but as a result of the complex influences which were showered down to the earth after its Founder had left, as part of the vast machinery of Christian civilisation, created by the Spirit of Christ for filling up the void of His absence, came the various gifts of Christianity, and among these was the great vocation, the sacred profession, of the Christian ministry. And various grades of the Christian clergy had sprung up in Christian society in the same way, by the same Divine cause, the same natural necessity as the various grades of government and law and science a necessity only more urgent and more universal, and therefore more Divine, so far as the religious wants of mankind were of a more general, a more simple, and therefore a more Divine kind than their social and intellectual wants.

II. The two great functions of the Christian ministry are those of pastor and teacher. The object of their existence was, as the Apostle told them, that they might take their part in the complex but glorious work in which all Christians were called to share: the edifying or building up of the whole body of Christ. The Church, as thus put before them, was not to be an unreasoning infant, or a stunted dwarf, or an old crone, tossed to and fro with every blast, but it was to be a solid, well-built, manly, full-grown man. It was not to be a dead, dry system, but a well-compacted living organisation, in which every part should be knit together, every muscle should move in accordance with its natural bent, where there should be the active hand, and the feeling heart, and the ready foot, and the resolute backbone.

A. P. Stanley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 17.

References: Ephesians 4:9. Preacher's Monthly,vol. iii., p. 365; J. Vaughan, Sermons,4th series, p. 221.