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Advocates of the Five-Fold Ministry are generally found within Third Wave Charismatic churches, and the significance of the concept cannot be understood apart from the history of the Pentecostal movement, which began early in the 19th century and now, by some accountings, constitutes the largest propagation of cohesive religious doctrine in the history of the world. The Pentecostal view is that the Charism s of the Holy Spirit of God which were manifestly given to the Church at Pentecost shortly after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ were largely lost to the Church, suppressed by institutionalization, for nearly 2000 years, and restored in a notable way at the Azusa Street Revival in 1906 . (Various analysts within the movement consider the suppression of Montanus to mark the loss.) The evangelical revivalism of the mid-twentieth century constituted a restoration of the office of the Evangelist. This was accompanied by the Latter Rain movement of the 1950s, represented significantly by the ministry of William Branham , which included an element of Prophetic practice. Over the following decades, the influence, acceptance, and prevalence of prophets within Pentecostal and Charismatic congregations increased gradually, in the absence of high-profile leadership, and came into full flower (and full controversy) with the Kansas City Prophets , who reified the office of the Prophet, and elaborated the doctrine of the Five-Fold Ministry. The logical missing element in this evolution being the missing Apostles, there thus emerged what is today the Apostolic-Prophetic Movement . Opponents of this trend consider the reification of the offices of Paul's list to be a mistake. They consider that the author intended a list of contemporary example ministries and not a definitive and exhaustive one for all time, and the passage is not therefore a spiritual institution of these offices. Traditionalists within all of the major classical divisions of Christianity oppose the reification of the offices on the grounds that they are not manifest as part of the historical practice of the Church. Cessationists hold that the offices may have existed as spiritual institutions at the time of the writing, but ceased to exist as the supernatural giftings provided to the original Apostles and Disciples of Jesus for the purpose of the original propagation of the faith are no longer given to human beings; therefore, the offices, while historically real, are no longer extant. |
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