October 22, 2026
I am deeply involved in the effort to restore the missional vitality of the local church. I long to see its capacity to live out the Kingdom of God in the marketplace and create real cultural impact restored.
But there is a systemic problem. Theologians, sociologists, and missionologists all agree that churches and church movements fall into a predictable pattern. What begins with a prophetic, evangelistic, or pioneering movement over time becomes an administrative system. It's a macro trend that has degraded the missional effectiveness of ministries and denominations over time.
It's a micro trend, too, occurring in individual churches and church plants. It is well known that in most new churches, after two to three years, those who helped start the church will leave. Tim Cole of Virginia-based Waypoint Church Partners says that after two or three years, the "overwhelming majority" of the people who are on a church's plant team will have left. He hedged only slightly: "I wouldn't go so far as to say, everybody. But man, it's most (ref)."
And while I have read these ideas, and heard them directly from missiologists like Alan Hirsch, I hadn't recognized it firsthand until a recent series of experiences and discussions. It started when a local entrepreneur asked to have lunch. She shared how they had offered to fund and support a vital ministry in the church (a summer VBS), based on the need and their previous experience, but were summarily told they should go and volunteer in children's church. That same church ran a VBS later that year but didn't invite this entrepreneur to participate. This experience wasn't based on the lack of character of the individual, but simply the administrative system in the church rejecting a novel idea. Although it's hard to call VBS very novel.
They asked an important question: "What is wrong with my gifts?" The answer is: nothing, but there is something wrong with the church.
That story has been repeated to our team hundreds of times. We've heard it in almost every context and from almost every entrepreneur that we've talked with in the last 4 years.
These stories helped me to better understand my own experiences of having my own catalytic gifts misunderstood or disregarded. The personal experiences of being called a "pastor with weird gifts," or having my church budget zeroed out after launching a program reaching thousands of children, started to make more sense. I've seen it up close and personal in my own local church experience, too.
Alan Hirsch calls this the Exiling of the A.P.E.s. A.P.E. refers to the Apostolic, Prophetic, and Evangelistic gifts of Ephesians 4. Here's what he says about this: "Innovators are seen as the rebels, dissenters, and upstarts. They are almost always marginalized because their very existence and nature imply that things aren't as they should, or could be" (5Q, Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ).
What results from the movement from mission and innovation to routine and administrative control is the expulsion of those who are gifted with apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic gifts. Alan Hirsch calls this the exiling of the A.P.E.s. On a practical but not exclusive basis, many of these are entrepreneurs, explaining why we have heard so many of these stories and why we focus on reengaging entrepreneurs in the local church context.
The cure for making the local church more missional and effective in living out the mission of Jesus is the very catalytic people that are being resisted and ignored.
Built into the system of content and care that we call the local church is a bias. It is the bias toward safety, routine, and control. In order for us to make a change, we have to see this bias and recognize that it comes from the combination of organizational structure and the ways that shepherds and teachers see the world. Shepherds see the world through the lens of community and safety, and that is invaluable. Teachers see the world through the lens of systems and order — we need that too. But those aren't the only ways of seeing and living. We need the other viewpoints and voices of the apostolic who sees networks and mission that take us and the gospel to new places and people as normal. We need to hear the heart of the prophet who calls us to line up with God's heart, and we need to unleash the energy of the evangelist to tell the stories of God's power and lead us to reach new kinds of people.
To put away the A.P.E. repellent, it requires a willingness to experience things that go against what's comfortable in our own gifting. For shepherds it's the willingness to embrace risk, and for teachers it means seasons of disruption to systems of control. But the A.P.E.s have to be willing to embrace the values of shepherds and teachers — which can feel like constraints to their catalytic soul.
Left unchecked, this process becomes a cycle that weakens the church and strips away its ability to think and act missionally. It also moves the church staff into the role of being the "no police" instead of life-giving equippers and risk partners. For A.P.E.s, it often embitters them and leaves them without the essential connection to being shepherded and guided in truth.
Here are some of the steps that churches can take to begin reversing this reality:
There's a real body of work on this, coming from three directions that reinforce each other: missiology (the A.P.E.ST/fivefold literature), sociology of religion (Weber and his successors), and church history. There's also recent survey data on the marketplace version of the problem.
The best-known framing comes from Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost, beginning with The Shaping of Things to Come (2003) and developed in The Forgotten Ways and 5Q. They read Ephesians 4:11 as describing five core functions of ministry. Their central claim is that Western churches have often focused on the shepherd (pastor) and teacher roles, while neglecting the apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic functions. Hirsch singles out the apostolic and prophetic giftings as the two most often overlooked in churches. His term for this is "precocious development," for churches that emphasise one function (or two) over the others.
The argument goes beyond imbalance to what happens to the sidelined people. In Hirsch's account, a predominate shepherd/teacher model has led many of the apostles, prophets, and evangelists to seek their place of ministry in parachurch organizations. He also links this to decline. Summaries of his teaching describe the imbalance as contributing to organizational decline, as the generative functions of apostles, prophets, and evangelists are essential for pioneering, innovation, and maintaining covenantal faithfulness. Hirsch has even called the shepherd-teacher pairing a sort of HR function, and says that alone simply isn't enough to catalyze a movement.
The pipeline matters too. A Reformed reviewer agrees with Hirsch that many seminaries have trained shepherd-teachers. They have not recognized or trained apostolic leaders, evangelists, and prophets. If credentialing selects for one temperament, the people who hold authority will tend to share it and to see other temperaments as disruptive.
Max Weber gives the deepest structural explanation, and it doesn't depend on any particular reading of Ephesians 4. Weber contrasted two kinds of authority. The prophet's authority is charismatic, involves a radical reorientation of values, can only originate, cannot sustain, and must eventually become "routinized." The priest, by contrast, upholds the status quo, and his authority rests in his office rather than in his person.
Weber's point is that every movement starts with prophetic energy and then stabilizes into office, budget, and routine. In one writer's summary, the prophet thus tragically gives birth to a new priesthood. Weber himself noted that routinization is not free of conflict. In his words, the conflict between the charisma of the office or of hereditary status with personal charisma is a typical process in many historical situations.
Seen this way, a church resisting an apostolic or prophetic leader is often not acting out of malice. It's the predictable immune response of an institution whose legitimacy now rests on office and process, meeting someone whose authority rests on calling and vision. That threatens the system's way of granting authority, and not only the people in charge.
H. Richard Niebuhr's church-sect cycle and Ichak Adizes's organizational lifecycle make similar points: innovators found institutions, administrators inherit them, and administrators tend to screen out the next generation of innovators. Edwin Friedman's A Failure of Nerve adds a family-systems layer. When a leader takes a clear, differentiated position, the system tends to respond with sabotage aimed at restoring the old equilibrium.
The pattern recurs often enough to be a theme in its own right. Jesus observed that a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown, and lamented Jerusalem as the city that kills the prophets. The second-century church's reaction to Montanism left lasting suspicion of ongoing prophecy. John Wesley was barred from Anglican pulpits and pushed into field preaching. William Booth left Methodism to start what became the Salvation Army. In each case the evangelistic or apostolic energy didn't disappear; it moved outside the parent body. This matches Hirsch's parachurch observation.
Recent data suggests the same dynamic now shows up between pastors and entrepreneurs, many of whom fit the apostolic, builder profile. A Barna study with Faith Driven Entrepreneur found that while over 73 percent of U.S. adults believe churches and entrepreneurs could work together to foster community growth and solve societal issues, many pastors feel under-equipped to support and disciple their entrepreneurs. The same coverage notes that entrepreneurs sometimes feel that the groups do not understand their professional instincts, challenges, or experiences.
FDE's own materials describe the mismatch on both sides: Entrepreneurs are frustrated wondering why their pastor doesn't get them, while pastors struggle to understand why the entrepreneurs in their congregations aren't more involved in their programs at church. Carey Nieuwhof calls this mutual intimidation, and says the answer involves moving beyond volunteer tasks to meaningful engagement for high-capacity leaders. Seth McBee, writing as both practitioner and business owner, observed that many entrepreneurs have decided to fulfill the great commission through para-church organizations and non-profits. That is the parachurch drift again, in a new setting. This bears directly on Founder's Table's model, since the dinner-table format effectively offers churches a structure for welcoming apostolic, builder types without asking them to fit a shepherd-teacher program.
The literature isn't one-sided, and an honest treatment should include the pushback.
First, there's exegetical debate. A Gospel Coalition Canada column notes that A.P.E.ST has become ubiquitous within the church planting and missional movement, but it's not without its critics, and it urges some caution in applying this text as the model for how churches should be structured today.
Second, there's the danger of abuse. Hirsch himself sharply separates his decentralized model from the New Apostolic Reformation's version. One discussion frames the difference as: one is about empowering the body, the other is about crowning a few. Some church resistance to self-titled apostles and prophets is legitimate protection against exactly this.
Third, each gift has its own failure mode. One writer notes that an apostolic-dominated ministry can become autocratic, that a prophet-heavy culture can become sectarian or burn people out, and that evangelism alone can produce shallow discipleship.
Finally, Scripture commands both openness and testing. As one reviewer puts it, Scripture teaches us not to despise the prophet or put out the Spirit's fire, but churches are called to discerningly "test the spirits."
The most defensible conclusion is that the resistance is real, structural, and well documented. But the answer most writers propose isn't to let A.P.E. leaders win over shepherds and teachers. It's to build structures where all five functions check and complete one another.
Key sources to read in full: Hirsch & Frost, The Shaping of Things to Come; Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways and 5Q; Hirsch & Catchim, The Permanent Revolution; Weber, Economy and Society (the sections on charisma and its routinization); Friedman, A Failure of Nerve; Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains; and the Barna/FDE report Entrepreneurs: Untapped Problem Solvers in the Church.