A Mature Approach To 5Q
As the 5Q Symphony continues to grow, this week we are happy to introduce Jessie Cruickshank. Jessie is part of the 100Movements team and here to outline the upcoming workbook to help you really get 5Q going in your Church or Organization: Activating 5Q.
The foundational and realistic must heal for the church’s five-fold ministry is Ephesians 4:11-13. When considering the text of these verses, we often readily acknowledge and agree with the stated goal of “unity in our faith” and “maturity in Christ.” But heretofore, the Western church has often considered unity and maturity as separate and distinct concepts (though scripture regularly correlates the two: Ephesians 1:10; John 17:23; Colossians 3:14). The notion of maturity apart from unity has created a blind spot for us regarding the five-fold ministry, which is only now being uncovered and challenged.
“Unity and Maturity are not meant to be practiced separate in the Church”
Click to Tweet ↗We live in a highly individualized society. We think about ourselves as being separate and distinct from others. The space between us and others are our relationships, which are negotiated, to fill boundaries and easy-to-use social contracts. Our individualism is even encoded in our brains. Research has shown that, for Americans, we often think about ourselves, and that that is a distinct function from thinking about other people1.
It's All About Me, Jesus
This individualized mindset is the lens through which we interact with everything - people and ideas. It is also the way we think about our faith, Jesus, and APEST. We live out an individualized version of Christianity. We make a personal decision for Jesus. Many consider their faith to be private. And we view our relationships within the church and other Christians from an ego-centric point of view. (Where am I failing God? What has God called to us do?)
“5Q frees the Church from an anemic, individualistic version of Christianity”
Click to Tweet ↗This individualized mindset has also highly limited our understanding of APEST. When people learn about APEST, their usual line of thought is to first wonder who they are and what is their role. There is nothing wrong with this, but this is as far as the APEST conversation has come - until now. With the release of 5Q, Alan Hirsch takes a quantum leap forward from the individualist expression of APEST, to the collective one. And our understanding as believers must take that jump as well.
Phasing Between Functions
We must move beyond thinking about APEST through the lens of “my role” and “my function” to how we work together as living tissues that make up a body (1 APEST) in the DNA of the church. Here we must also remember that circumstances dictate how DNA is read and interpreted by the body. Depending on what environment you encounter, your genes turn on and off. The same is true of APEST – depending on what season and place you are sent in, you will grow and express different functions of the APEST capacities.
This means that “your role” and “your function” is not static. It is dynamic and shifting. For example, I seem to go in the apostolic, prophetic, and teachers capacities. But when I am out in career and when we are out in repentance on the local church level, if I have trusted apostle/relay, it allows space to bump apostolic capacities. If I am speaking and running, and outside the leadership of others, I operate as a teacher. If I do not have an official avenue to facilitate change and development, I can take on the voice and heartache of the prophetic. How Jesus uses me depends on the assignment. I have also learned that I am there to compliment what is already present by being willing to serve in the capacities that are missing.2
“How Jesus uses me depends on what assignment God gives me in APEST”
Click to Tweet ↗Being A Gift For The Body
The more we are able to move beyond an understanding of APEST as individualistic expressions (of role, title, office, etc…) and understand it as the collective expression of a group, the more we will move towards the goals of unity and maturity stated in Ephesians 4:13.
1 This is not true for people from collective, particularly Asian cultures. The same research study showed that when Asian people were thinking about themselves and thinking about others (specifically their mother), the same region of the brain was activated in both cases. When they thought about themselves, they thought about others, too. (See Han, S., Northoff, G., Vogeley, K., Wexler, B. E., Kitayama, S., & Varnum, M. E. (2013). A cultural neuroscience approach to the self. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 8(1), 87-94; and Zhu, Y., Zhang, L., Fan, J., & Han, S. (2007). Neural basis of cultural influence on self-representation. Neuroimage, 34(3), 1310-1316.)
2 For more on the Send and Place diagram see Page 116 in 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence.
If you would like to join the conversation right here in an upcoming post, pick up a copy of the book here and then head over to Amazon and leave a review. If you are a blogger, please drop the link in the comments below and we will read, reply, and possibly use your posts in a future article.
Hey church! We would love to hear from you. What thoughts/ideas have sparked you along the 5Q journey? What steps are being taken to unleash something pretty powerful… How about you?