Christian leadership is a contentious issue. Not long ago I was having to defend the very concept by posting that Jesus does speak about Christian leaders. Then yesterday the issue came up again as I asked Who is Catholic, but not Roman? – because for many people one of the defining characteristics of the Catholic or universal Church is a particular threefold model of ministry: bishops, priests and deacons. This is claimed to be a biblical model, but others, especially in newer churches, teach a fivefold model of church leadership taken from Ephesians 4:11: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.

The threefold model certainly has the benefit of great antiquity. Indeed its proponents would date it back to the New Testament period. But it is somewhat ironic that the Greek words for these three orders of ministry are in fact all very ordinary words whose meanings are not at all technical: episkopos “overseer”, presbuteros “elder” and diakonos “servant”. Originally they referred to the kinds of roles which people would naturally have taken in gatherings within that society. It is only in church tradition that these three Greek words have been transliterated and distorted into technical terms in English for orders of ministry: “bishop”, “priest” (or “presbyter”) and “deacon”.

There is indeed biblical teaching about these three orders. The qualifications for overseers (KJV “bishops”) are outlined in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:7-9. The role of elders in the church is described in 1 Timothy 5:17 and Titus 1:5-6, among other places. And the requirements for servants (KJV “deacons”) are given in 1 Timothy 3:8-13. From this biblical teaching the three orders developed. But most exegetes today understand the biblical teaching to refer to only two distinct orders of ministry, overseers and servants (bishops and deacons), as apparently in the church in Philippi (Philippians 1:1). The term “elder” may have been synonymous with “overseer”, or may have referred generically to overseers and servants.

It is anyway very hard to argue from the Bible that having these three distinct orders of ministry is an essential characteristic of the true church. Nevertheless it is traditional, and at least to avoid unnecessary divisiveness it is good that the Church of England follows it – although the office of deacon is currently a rather nominal one: almost the only deacons are men and women in effect serving a probationary year before ordination as priests.

So then, how should this threefold model be compared with the fivefold model relatively recently reintroduced into some churches on the basis of Ephesians 4:11? One of the extras in the fivefold model is the recognition that even in the church today there are those who fulfil the roles of apostle (although not of course on the level of the original Twelve) and of prophet.

In practice this new ministry of apostle corresponds to some modern ideas about bishops: they are leaders in the church at a higher level than the local congregation and with a broader perspective. But there has been a tendency in the church to expect every priest working with a local congregation to fulfil within it the tasks of prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher. There has been no real recognition in the church that these are four different ministries requiring different giftings, best exercised by different people. This has led to ineffectiveness and burnout, as priests, or those with the title “pastor”, attempt to fulfil ministries for which they are not gifted – and frustration among the “laity” who know they could do a better job than their pastor in some areas of his ministry, but are not given the opportunity because they have not been formally trained and recognised.

The sheer variety of biblical descriptions of leadership and ministry in the church, with no one model clearly repeated in more than one place, should caution us all against trying to set up any one model as the correct one and the mark of the true church. As Christians we are good stewards of the manifold grace of God (1 Peter 4:10 KJV). We should not try to squeeze this grace into the constraints of a threefold or a fivefold model, but instead allow it to be expressed in manifold ministry, each believer serving the Lord not according to a predefined job description but as he calls each one individually.