Awakening the Five Innate Purposes of the Body of Christ
"From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work." — Ephesians 4:16
Every acorn carries an oak tree. Hidden within that small, hard seed is the whole unfolding story of a tree that will one day spread its limbs over a field, shelter generations of birds, drop its own acorns, and seed a forest. Nobody needs to explain to the acorn what it is for. Given soil, water, light, and time, it moves steadily toward the form already folded up within it, and it will keep pressing toward that form through drought, frost, and neglect for as long as life remains in it.
The ancient Greeks had a remarkable word for this phenomenon. Aristotle called it entelecheia, entelechy, a term built from the idea of having one's purpose (telos) within oneself. An entelechy is the inner principle that guides a living thing toward its fulfilled state, the purpose that is present in the organism from the very beginning and that directs its development and functioning from within. The oak is the entelechy of the acorn. Maturity is the entelechy of the child. And, as I want to suggest here, the fullness of Christ is the entelechy of the church, expressed and carried forward through the five purposes Jesus has built into his Body.
This way of seeing things has enormous implications for how we understand the church, how we lead it, and how we might recover the extraordinary movemental life that God has already placed within it.
The Onrushing Force of Life
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson gave this ancient intuition fresh expression. In his Creative Evolution he spoke of the élan vital, the vital impulse of life, a creative principle immanent in all living things and responsible for their growth, adaptation, and evolution. For Bergson, life is a surging, inventive current that pushes through matter, organizes it, lifts it, and carries it toward ever greater freedom and complexity. It has been described as an onrushing force throughout creation, straining toward a purer and more rarified freedom.
Bergson observed that this vital impulse moves along two great lines of development. One line flows through instinct, reaching its most perfected expression in the insects, where the colony of bees or ants knows, with astonishing precision and without instruction, how to build, forage, defend, and reproduce. The other line flows through the development of intelligence, reaching its height in human beings, who learn, reflect, invent tools, and consciously shape their world. Instinct is knowledge built into the organism. Intelligence is knowledge developed and extended by the organism. Both are expressions of the same life pressing toward its fulfillment.
Christians reading Bergson will recognize a genuine insight here, and will want to take it further still. Scripture gives this surging life a personal face and a personal source. The life that animates creation is the life of the God who breathed into the dust and made a living being (Genesis 2:7). The life that animates the church is the Spirit of the risen Christ, the Lord and giver of life, who raised Jesus from the dead and who now dwells within his people to give life to their mortal bodies (Romans 8:11). The élan vital of the church is the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit always moves the Body toward one telos: conformity to Jesus, the fullness of the one who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:22–23).
The Ascension Gift: Purposes Built Into the Body
It is precisely here that the fivefold ministry of Ephesians 4 comes into its full significance. When Paul describes the ascended Christ giving apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers to his church, he uses a single ruling verb, edōken, "he gave," which governs all five together. The tense and mood of that verb carry the ring of constitutionality. This is the language of a once-for-all bequest, a permanent endowment, something that has happened and continues to define the identity of the church in every time and place. Christ gave the apostles, he gave the prophets, he gave the evangelists, he gave the shepherds, he gave the teachers, and in doing so he wove his own fivefold ministry into the very constitution of his Body.
This is why I have long argued that APEST is part of the foundational DNA of the church. Jesus himself lived out all five of these ministries in perfect fullness, and in his ascension he distributed that ministry to his people so that the Ministry of Christ, given to the Body of Christ, might result in the Fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:11–13). The fivefold is the mode of Christ's ongoing presence and activity in his church. It is present insofar as Jesus himself is present.
Now bring the idea of entelechy to bear on this, and something luminous comes into view. The five APEST purposes can be understood as a system of entelechies: inherent principles built into the very nature of the church as a living organism, each one carrying its own inner telos, each one pressing the Body toward a particular dimension of its fulfilled form. They function much like instincts or impulses, deep and generative drives that belong to the church by virtue of what it is, drives that were placed there by Christ and that are animated continually by the Spirit. They are the ways the one life of the Body expresses itself as it grows toward maturity.
Five Impulses of the Living Body
When we view APEST through this lens, each of the five functions becomes an inbuilt movement of the Body toward its end in Christ:
The apostolic impulse is the entelechy of extension. It is the drive of the Body to be sent, to cross boundaries, to plant the gospel in new soil, to multiply and move outward, and to guard the DNA of the faith as it reproduces across cultures and generations. It carries the church toward its telos as a missionary people spread throughout the whole earth.
The prophetic impulse is the entelechy of faithfulness. It is the drive of the Body to align itself with God, to listen for his voice, to recover covenant loyalty, to pursue holiness and justice, and to keep the community honest before the face of God. It carries the church toward its telos as a people wholly given to the will of God.
The evangelistic impulse is the entelechy of invitation. It is the drive of the Body to share its joy, to recruit others into the good news, to extend the welcome of the kingdom, and to reproduce the life it has received in the lives of others. It carries the church toward its telos as a people through whom the world hears and receives Jesus.
The shepherding impulse is the entelechy of communion. It is the drive of the Body to heal, to protect, to reconcile, to nurture belonging, and to form deep and lasting community. It carries the church toward its telos as a people bound together in love and peace.
The teaching impulse is the entelechy of understanding. It is the drive of the Body to comprehend, to remember, to integrate truth into life, and to grow in wisdom and discernment. It carries the church toward its telos as a people who know God and walk in his ways with maturity and clarity.
Each of these is an expression of the one life of Christ in his Body, and each needs all the others in order to fulfill its own purpose. The apostolic drive toward extension is kept faithful by the prophetic, made fruitful by the evangelistic, sustained by the shepherding, and deepened by the teaching, and the same mutual interdependence runs in every direction across the whole system. This is exactly what Paul describes when he speaks of the whole Body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, growing and building itself up in love as each part does its work. The Body builds itself up. The growth is generated from within, by the interplay of the purposes Christ has placed there.
Instinct and Intelligence in the Church
Bergson's two lines of life offer us one further and deeply practical insight. The fivefold purposes live in the church in both modes that Bergson described.
They live first as instinct. Because Christ has built APEST into his Body, these impulses are always already present in the people of God, often at a pre-reflective level. Ordinary disciples who have never heard the language of APEST will instinctively reach out to the lost, instinctively care for the wounded, instinctively cry out for justice, instinctively seek understanding, and instinctively move toward the edges where the gospel has yet to take root. Wherever the Spirit of Jesus is at work, these movements of the Body begin to stir, much as the colony of bees begins to build the moment it finds a place to dwell.
They are also given to us as intelligence. This is what I have called 5Q, the fivefold intelligence of the church, a form of corporate wisdom that can be recognized, articulated, cultivated, measured, and developed with intention. Here the instinct of the Body is taken up into conscious understanding and faithful practice. Leaders learn to discern the fivefold purposes at work in their communities, to identify the callings present in their people, to design structures and rhythms that release each impulse, and to develop the whole system toward symmetry, health, and maturity. Intelligence serves instinct by giving it room, form, and direction. Instinct feeds intelligence by supplying it with living energy.
A church that brings both together becomes something remarkable: a living system that knows by nature where it is going, and that grows in wisdom about how to get there.
Dormant Seeds and the Recovery of Life
This brings us to a sobering and hopeful truth. Entelechies can lie dormant. Seeds have been found in ancient tombs and sealed jars, lying inert for centuries, which sprouted and grew when finally placed in soil and given water. The life remained. The telos remained. All that was needed were the conditions for its release.
For much of its history, particularly since the institutionalizing of the church under Christendom, the people of God have operated with a reduced expression of the fivefold, largely confined to the shepherding and teaching functions and heavily concentrated in a professional clergy. The apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic impulses were progressively marginalized, exiled to the edges, or channelled into specialized orders and parachurch agencies. The results are visible all around us: churches that struggle to multiply, that drift from their missional calling, that turn inward, and that attract people who resemble themselves. Such churches are operating with some of their vital instincts suppressed, and they find themselves disabled as a body to the very degree that these entelechies lie dormant.
Here the truth of entelechy becomes a word of profound hope. What Christ has given, he has given once for all. The fivefold purposes remain present in the Body, latent and waiting, carrying their telos within them, as the oak remains in the acorn. They can always be recovered and reactivated. Paul says that APEST is given for the katartismos of the saints (Ephesians 4:12), a rich word that includes equipping, mending what has been torn, setting a broken bone, putting things in order, and making something into what it was always meant to be. The fivefold system is the Body's own inbuilt capacity for self-repair, self-correction, and self-renewal, and it springs back to life wherever leaders create the conditions for it to flourish.
Here lies the great task of leadership in our time. The leader's calling is to tend the life that is already there, to clear away what obstructs it, to water what has lain dormant, and to call forth in God's people the purposes Christ has already planted within them. We are gardeners of a living system, servants of an entelechy that belongs to Jesus.
Toward the Fullness of Christ
Bergson spoke of life as an impulse straining toward ever purer freedom. Scripture speaks of a whole creation groaning as it waits for the revealing of the children of God, and longing to be brought into the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:19–21). The deepest entelechy of the church, the telos that gathers up all five of its inbuilt purposes, is the fullness of Christ himself: "until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13). The church grows toward Jesus because Jesus is already its life, its source, its form, and its destiny. He is the Alpha who plants the seed and the Omega toward whom the whole organism grows.
So let me ask you, as leaders, some searching questions. Which of the fivefold impulses are alive and flourishing in your community, and which have been lying dormant for a generation or more? Where do you see the instinctive stirrings of the apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic life in your people, and what would it take to give those stirrings room, recognition, and resource? What structures, habits, and assumptions in your church are pressing down on the seed, and what would change if you began to see your role as cultivating the life Christ has already placed within the Body?
The church carries within itself everything it needs to become what Jesus intends it to be. The whole oak is in the acorn. The whole movement is in the seed. The Spirit is moving, the purposes are given, and the Body is straining toward its fullness in Christ. Our great and urgent calling is to join the life that is already rising.
Key Takeaways
Entelechy describes the church's inbuilt telos. Every living thing carries its purpose within itself, and the church carries within its very nature the purposes that guide it toward the fullness of Christ.
APEST is a system of entelechies. The five fivefold purposes function as inherent impulses built into the Body by the ascended Christ, each pressing the church toward a distinct dimension of its maturity.
The Spirit is the church's true élan vital. The life that animates the Body is the Spirit of the risen Jesus, moving the whole organism toward conformity to Christ.
The fivefold lives as instinct and as intelligence. APEST stirs instinctively wherever the Spirit is at work, and it can be consciously cultivated and developed as 5Q, the fivefold intelligence of the church.
Dormant purposes can always be reawakened. What Christ has given once for all remains present in his Body, and the fivefold system includes the church's own capacity for mending, renewal, and reactivation.
Leadership is the cultivation of given life. The calling of leaders is to recognize, release, and tend the purposes Christ has planted, so that the Body builds itself up in love as each part does its work.