Today at FORGE we dug around in the APEPT (apostle/prophet etc) stuff for quite a while with Hirschy and Andrew doing a great job of sparking our thinking.

Part of the exercise was to locate ourselves in the APEPT matrix, something I never find easy.

I was sharing with Alan on the way home that my sense of calling is very clear – to communicate the gospel to ordinary Australian people in ways they can understand and then to create church communities that they will want to be part of.

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download this is england movie That has been my sense of calling for over 10 years now and I have no doubt about where I am to be investing my life.

But… when it comes to trying to fit myself into an APEPT framework it gets tricky. I feel like I am driven by a passion for seeing people come to know Jesus (evangelism), but I am also deeply aware of the need to develop church communities that are indigneous to them (apostolic). Both these things seem to sit in tension for me. Some days I am more apostolic, some days more evangelistic. Currently its a pretty even game between these two functions in my own life. Of course then you add teaching and it gets confusing. I actually feel a significant aspect of the apostolic role is to be a teacher – to communicate and protect truth. I do a lot of teaching – enjoy it and feel like I am pretty ok at it.

There are also times when I feel called to be prophetic – to call a spade a spade even if it is going to annoy a few people. I do this less, but by the nature of what we do there is a prophetic edge. Lately I feel this has been growing rather than lessening.

Then there’s the pastoral side of things. I don’t think this is my primary calling at all, but I can do it. Its not that I don’t care, its just that it doesn’t rate as high a priority as the other stuff in my psyche. I am not a gifted pastor, but I would strongly argue that if we don’t care, then we don’t look much like Jesus!

So – I feel the tension that always exists between being an evangelistic apostle who loves to teach or an apostolic evangelist who loves to teach. At times I wish the whole thing was simpler!

But I wonder if this isn’t how God intend it…

Let’s face it – whatever gifts he has given to me – whatever the make up – at the end of the day it is up to me to do what he calls me to, and be that any part of the APEPT schema.