Church Roles
Church Roles
Throughout the Bible, we see different descriptions of the church.
The church is a body (1 Cor 12:12, specifically this body is the bride of Christ - Eph 5:25)
the church is a building
the church is a family (God is our Father - Rom 8:14-15; fellow Christians are called our brothers and sisters - Matthew 12:48-50, 1 John 5:1-2)
When we read through the Bible, the description that is missing in the Bible is the description of the church as a business. That probably has several implications. But one lesson we could take from that is we should probably think about job descriptions in the church less like a job description - a set of tasks that need to be accomplished - and more like roles in a family. The church is a family, and inside the family their are roles. It's not as if there aren't certain tasks attached to each role (chores that need to be done, places that we need to be), but roles in a family aren't just about what we do, but who we are. We aren't just a person doing dishes or mowing the grass, we are Father and Mother and Children. And the Bible teaches us about the kind of person we are supposed to be in each role we have:
Husband and wife are supposed to display submissiveness and sacrificial love as they carry out their "tasks" of leading and following (Eph 5:22-33).
Parents and children are supposed to discipline and obey respectively, but they are supposed to do it in a certain way - children honor your parents, fathers do not provoke your children (Eph 6:1-4).
Servants and masters are instructed to have this same character orientation (Col 3:22-4:1; 1 Peter 2:18-25)
Older men, older women, younger women, younger men - each of these roles is not just given a task (to teach / learn from the other), but they’re mainly instructed to display a certain kind of character (Titus 2).
Pastors and Deacons also have their role description driven by their character, not their task sets (1 Tim 3).
When we look at the witness of the Bible, we see that we are not just given a list of tasks to complete, we are told to be a certain kind of person. Our roles are not just about tasks, but about character. And so as a church, it would seem fitting that our “job descriptions” - the description of each role within our church - would not just have the tasks people are responsible for, but also the kind of person that we should be as we carry out that task.