I began teaching on the subject of the Leadership Ministries before the end of the last century. And much of what I taught back there is still totally valid.

But along the way I have learned a few things that I did not know at the beginning. Having worked with and trained many leaders in the Body of Christ, I have come to a greater understanding of how these ministries work.

So now especially for those who are called to be Apostles, I would like to present the latest teachings on this subject. I will be going over some old ground, but also breaking a lot of new ground. So what you hold in your hands is a book containing materials that have never been presented before to the Body of Christ.

The leadership ministries include but are not confined to what has always been called The Fivefold Ministry. But we will start with the Fivefold Ministry and then introduce some of the new kinds of Leadership Ministries.

Let’s look then at the definitive Scripture for the Fivefold Ministry. Ephesians 4:11 to 15 says,

And He Himself gave some apostles, and some prophets; and some evangelists; and some pastors and teachers;
For the equipping of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the Body of Christ:
Till we all arrive at unanimous agreement concerning the faith, and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the level of maturity of the complete Christ:
That we should no longer be children, tossed about and driven with every wind of doctrine, by the subtle deception of men which is designed to lead you astray;
But speaking the truth in [agape] love, may grow up in all things into Him, who is the head, [namely] Christ.

What the Fivefold Ministry Is

After Jesus had died and then ascended into heaven, He sent the Holy Spirit to come down and to take His place. And He also gave some things to the church.

I want to make one little thing clear before we start, which I will explain more later. When I refer to the church, I am not referring only to the gathering that you may attend on Sundays, or the place of worship where you meet, which you might call church.

The Church is the Body of Christ in all nations and includes all peoples. To distinguish this, I will always refer to that as the Universal Church.

However, the group that you meet with in a particular location; the one that you probably call your church home, is referred to in Scriptures as the Local Church. Don’t ever confuse these two, because God works totally different in each of these.

I assume that you are called to a higher calling, which means that you will never be confined to a local church. The apostle is not confined to a local church and does not pastor a local church. They don’t run a local church, nor do they stay in a local church.

The apostle is called to the Church Universal. In a sense the pastor is also, but the pastor also has a function in the local church which we will see later on.

Gifts to the Church

All of these Fivefold Ministries were Jesus’ gifts to the Universal Church. The Holy Spirit came as a gift from the Father, because Jesus said that the Father would give them another Comforter.

The Holy Spirit also brought a new manifestation or gift of the Spirit that wasn’t there before. It was manifest on the Day of Pentecost, and it was speaking in other tongues. The other gifts of the Spirit had been there before.

Within the Holy Spirit reside all the gifts of the Spirit. But Jesus, through the Holy Spirit who came, brought some new callings. We call these the Fivefold Ministry calling which consists of the five ministries which we saw listed in the Scripture that I just shared.

The Father, through the Holy Spirit and through Jesus, brought some new levels of authority within those five ministries which we call the Ministry Offices.

I trust that you have read my book Launch Your Ministry, which is somewhat of an introduction to all ministries and which I consider compulsory reading for anyone who is called to the Fivefold Ministry. If you have not read it, I would highly recommend you get your hands on it before you proceed through the rest of this book.

In Launch Your Ministry I covered all of this information in some detail. I showed you how all of these are put together, so I am not going to explain it all in this teaching.

I expect that you already know it. But I am going to show you a few things that I haven’t taught you before. I touched on some of it in Launch Your Ministry, but I am going to expand on the Fivefold Ministry in this book.

Illustrations of the Fivefold Ministry

The Fivefold Ministry has been illustrated in different ways. One of the best ways to remember it is to think of the human hand which has five fingers, each of them representing a ministry. Starting with the little finger, you can go from evangelist, pastor, teacher and prophet, and end at the thumb, which represents the apostle.

Notice that amongst the five ministries, one finger is different to the others. That finger is your thumb. If they cut off your thumb, your hand is pretty useless because you can’t grab anything.

The thumb actually embraces the other four and adds to them what is needed. So the thumb is the apostle. It is very different to the other four.

Notice what happens now when you clench your fist as though you are going to punch somebody. Did you notice that your thumb automatically goes over two of your fingers?

That again will help you to remember something which you are going to learn more about later on. That is the fact that three of those five ministries stand apart.

In Launch Your Ministry I showed that there are actually three Ministry Offices. Amongst the five, only three of them reach an office level. So when you make a fist, the first two fingers are just sitting at the bottom, but the main thrust of your fist is the second two fingers and your thumb.

The Scripture says,

God has set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers.

The apostle, the prophet and the teacher are the dominating ministries amongst the five. The five already are Leadership Ministries, but those three can move up to a higher level which we call Ministry Offices. The picture of the fist will help you to remember this.

Identifying Ministries

There are differences between the Fivefold Ministries, and each of them requires a different approach in ministry. You can often identify a ministry by the kind of person who carries out that ministry.

You will find that each of the ministries tends to work better with a different kind of person. When you see someone standing up and ministering, you say,

"Oh, he is an evangelist."

"She is a prophet."

"He is clearly a pastor."

How do you know that; because a person stands up and says,

"Hi, I’m Pastor Crause."

No, you can tell it by the way they deliver their ministry. You can pick them out very clearly. You can normally see what evangelists look like. They are very excitable and emotional. Teachers are not so emotional. They just come and share the Word.

The pastor is the nice guy. He or she is there to care, and to show you that they love you and care for you. The prophet is loud and says,

"Thus says the Lord, Behold… Get your life in order! God says this…"

They are very strong and assertive. Have you seen it?

Ministries and Temperaments

If you have a closer look at it, you will notice that these ministries actually line up very much with human temperaments. You will find that each of those ministries tends to function very much largely in one temperamental group.

So what is a temperament? Anyone going through our courses receives some teaching on the temperaments. In fact I can hardly do any teaching without covering the temperaments, so I have covered it in many different places.

Probably the foundational teaching is in my book Psychology in Business and Ministry. There I have laid all the temperaments out in some detail.

In this first section of the book I am going to reteach you the temperaments in as much detail as I can, so that you can understand them better when we come to discussing the ministries. I am assuming that you don’t already know or understand the temperaments. So I am going to start from scratch.

Different Ways to Identify Temperaments

Human temperaments have been identified throughout the years, but there is very little clear, concise teaching on the temperaments. One of the famous thought leaders of the past was Hypocrites. He said that the temperaments were based on the fluids in the body.

So he took blood, phlegm and yellow and black bile, and he said,

"These are representative of different kinds of temperaments."

He identified what he called the sanguine temperament which was based on the blood. There was the phlegmatic which was based on the phlegm, and the choleric which was based on the yellow bile. The final one he identified was the melancholic temperament based on black bile.

He actually had them wrong though, because he simply identified what he saw as characteristics in people and tried to allocate a body fluid to them. When you try to assess a person’s temperament that way it gets very complicated, because most of us are a mixture of temperaments.

There are others who have tried to take different kinds of animals and liken each temperament to an animal. So you have a lion and a bear and other kinds of animals. In fact there is a whole variety of systems out there that have all tried to allocate a symbol to one of these temperaments.

The temperaments themselves are fairly clear, but they overlap. Nobody has been able to explain it fully, because all of us have a bit of a mixture of temperaments as I will show you shortly.

Even the astrologists come with their stars. If you read the horoscopes, it will tell you what kind of person you are based on your birth sign. What they did is they allocated each of those star signs to a different temperamental mix.

Although there are four temperaments, they are mixed together to form a possibility of 12 different temperaments. And so there are 12 star signs. The world is full of confusion where temperaments are concerned.

I am going to teach you about temperaments the right way. I am going to teach it to you a Scriptural way, although temperaments themselves are not in Scripture. However I am going to use a knowledge of Scripture and a knowledge of human nature to show you how they work.

If you will learn and embrace properly what I am going to teach you now, you will never be confused about temperaments again. You will be able to assess your own temperament, and understand what motivates you and the changes that take place within you.

You will also be able to understand other people as you begin to work with them. This is very necessary if you are in ministry, and especially essential if God has called you to be an apostle.

They Come from the Soul

Where do temperaments come from? They come from the human soul. Because of that, animals also have temperaments, because animals also have a soul.

Temperaments are not spiritual things, and they are common to believers and unbelievers, because we all have the same kind of soul. So there is nothing super-spiritual about temperaments. It is the way God made us.

If you look into the human soul, you will see that there are three main functions that take place in the soul. The one is the mind or the intellect. The other one is the emotions which are the feelings and desires. And the third one is the will or the volition; the ability to choose.

Temperaments are the way we manifest what is in our soul. If I stand still, am totally unemotional and say nothing, it is impossible for you to tell my temperament. But the moment I begin to act and speak and do things, I do it by manifesting whatever temperament I am functioning in at the moment.

As I stand behind the pulpit, can you tell what is in my mind? No you can’t tell, because the thoughts of the mind are always hidden. If you do express your mind through words and actions, people still don’t know fully what is in your mind.

You Can See Emotions

You can’t tell by listening to a person what is in his mind. You may have some idea of what he is thinking about, but you don’t know what he’s thinking about right now. Because you see he could be thinking about something else while he is talking.

However, when a person’s emotions and feelings change, they cannot be hidden. You can close your eyes now and think a happy thought. Think about something that is really nice, or about a person you really love.

Can you see how a smile comes to your face? You can’t stop it. It just happens automatically.

Now think about somebody who has really upset you and that you are angry with. You might say,

"That boss at work! Grrr!"

Or, "That horrible elder at church!"

There is a frown coming now. You can’t help it. In one of my courses I teach people to take a mirror and to practise this. I tell them,

"Think different kinds of thoughts and watch what happens to your face."

You cannot help it. Emotive expression will show itself in some kind of action, whether it is conscious or unconscious. So it is very easy to tell when a person is in the habit of expressing their feelings.

But not everybody does that. Some people remain dead pan all the time. They don’t let you know what they are feeling and they hide it.

I can sometimes tell just by looking at a person’s photo whether they really show their feelings or not. Just have a close look at a person.

I have a lot of lines on the top of my face. They are not produced by frowning. They are produced by a lot of smiling. You can get those lines around the eyes and the mouth.

You might see a person who smiles a lot. You might also see a person who changes their facial expressions a lot. A person like that is accustomed to expressing their feelings. A person who is not accustomed to this is more dead pan.

The third part of the soul that you can manifest is your will. Because when you have a will and you want to do something, you will tend to do it.

If people get in the way of what you want to do, you will respond to that in some way. You will overrule their will, impose your will on them and go ahead and do it anyway. Or you will submit to them and back off.

In other words you either assert your will, or you hold it back and you don’t assert it. These two parameters are very clearly seen in our interactions with people in this world, and this is how you identify the temperaments.

People who tend to assert their will or not assert their will have different kinds of temperaments. And people who tend to express their feelings or hold them back have a different kind of temperament.

Looking at the Two Parameters

Let’s look at these two parameters. These are the only two parameters that you are going to need in order to identify your temperament.

I have tried to teach this before and I have explained to people what temperaments are. Afterwards I say to them,

"Please tell me what your temperament is?"

They then go and pick out all the characteristics and end up deciding on two or three temperaments. All I said is,

"Do you assert your will or don’t you? Do you express your emotions or don’t you - yes or no?"

They are two very simple questions. Do you assert your will? Yes or no? Do you express your feelings? Yes or no? That is all you need to decide what your temperament is.