Cheryl Schatz

Mark,
You said:

You asked me as one of your hard questions “Do you or do you not believe that Ephesians 4:11 gives “teacher” as a gift for the body of Christ?”

The short answer is of course. However i do not think it should be separated from the gift of pastor for the reasons i have given already, the greek doesn’t allow for it.

If I understand you right, the gift of “teacher” is not a single gift that is stand alone. It has to be connected with another gift.

The problem with this is that the Greek does disallow “teacher” to be a separate gift as you stated above. That would be taking the Greek further than it allows for. I will be doing a separate post on this issue shortly so I will develop me point further, but the fact that teacher is not permanently connected to another gift should be clearly seen when we compare Scripture with Scripture where “teacher” is listed by itself without any related gift.

You said:

And again you asked me “Secondly do you believe that “teacher” is not a gift on its own but must be amalgamated with pastor so that only pastors can be “teachers”?

I do believe that in Ephesians the two are enormously close knitted together, but i would not say only pastors can be teachers. I think a pastor is a teacher, likewise an evangelist is a teacher. This is how i believe we should understand 1 Cor 12 when it lists ‘teacher’, but neither pastor nor evangelist are listed.

What you are doing here, Mark, even if you are unaware of it, is reading into the passage something that is not there. The Bible doesn’t say that a pastor is a teacher. A pastor is a pastor. The gift of pastor can be very connected to teacher especially in one on one counselling. A pastor may very well also be a “teacher”. Notice I said “also” because the term pastor is not synonymous with teacher. But a teacher may not be a pastor or an evangelist. There is nothing at all in the Greek that demands that a teacher must have more than one gift. If a teacher must be connected to another gift then in essence the “teacher” disappears and what we have is a pastor who teaches and an evangelist who teaches but a “teacher” alone doesn’t exist. It is impossible to sustain this from the Greek without reading into the text.

The fact is that we know that you don’t believe that a woman can be a pastor even though a pastor is a gift that is dependent alone on God’s gifting not on any human decision alone. You have defined women teachers out of existence without God making that decision. For if God didn’t want women teachers all He would have to do is fail to gift women as teachers. Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation would we?

You said in quoting me and then answering:

“Yet in discussions with you, you seem to continually stress that a woman is not allowed to be a teacher because pastors are the ones who are given the responsibility of being teachers in the church. Have I misunderstood you?”

Sort of! I do not believe that women are given the responsibility of oversight of the church or shepharding, and therefore they should not have the teaching responsibility of those in that position (pastors and elders).

We certainly can have a discussion about shepherding and oversight, however since we are talking about a “teacher”, these things are not the same. A teacher may have the responsibility of oversight in the church if that one desires the work of overseer (1 Tim. 3:1) The obvious implication is that although there may be many teachers not all may desire the work of an overseer or not all may have the qualification of an overseer. The fact is that a teacher can be just a teacher. You have given no proof at all that there is no “teacher” that God gifts that will never be an elder.

Secondly the gift of “evangelist” is not the same as the gift of “pastor” nor is it the same as the gift of “teacher” or God would have removed one or more of the gifts if they were the same. “Teacher” is a stand alone gift in 1 Cor. 12 which you have not adequately answered. I would like to ask you, if God had intended to gift some as “teachers” does He have the right and freedom to gift some with only one gift without an additional gift? If God has no right to do that, then you will need to prove that He has no Sovereign right to do as He pleases.