Your Sons & Daughters Shall Prophesy - Prophetic Gifts Today In The New Testament Church

15

WHEN BISHOPS

REPLACE PROPHETS

Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Galatians 3:3

THIS CHAPTER ADDRESSES a process much considered and often repeated during Church history: institutionalization.Two Protestant ministers, one a Presbyterian and the other a Lutheran, open our discus sion with some serious questions. First, from Ernest Best: "There is a residual question for the Presby terian [and every other Christian] who believes that his system of Church order reproduces that of the New Testament....If there was an order of prophets in the first two centuries, why has it disappeared? If our pattern of ministry is the same as that of the first two centuries, should we not still possess it?" 1 Second, from Larry Christenson: "Can free-flowing charismatic power live under the discipline of the church without losing its spiritual dynamic? Can a church rejoice in the free exercise of spiritual gifts and yet retain structure and order?" 2 The institutionalizing of the early Church accompanied (perhaps even caused) the squeezing out and ultimate demise of prophecy and prophets. It is also probable that undisciplined and unrestrained prophecy forced 243.