Some

A pastor at our church has been telling me for years that I’d make a great pastor. It started one Sunday when he saw me sitting in the pulpit for a second, taking notes. He came to me mid-sermon — sincerely, generously — to tell me that what I was doing was the kind of thing that ends up in the pulpit. He has said some version of it every time we’ve crossed paths since.

For years, I couldn’t find the language to disagree with him.

Then, two weeks after I published an essay arguing I’m not called to pastor, a man named O Jermaine Simmons left a comment under my post on Facebook. I’d never met him. He’d never met me. He wrote:

Jermaine handed me the language I couldn’t find.

A piece of writing that does the work of preaching, written by someone publicly declining the pulpit. He saw what most readers miss. And the irony he caught is exactly the thing this essay is about.

Because the church has trained us to confuse the shape of ministry for ministry itself. If a thing teaches scripture, frames it for application, and lands as conviction in the reader, the church’s reflex is to call that preaching — and the person doing it a preacher. That reflex is wrong. And it is costing the body of Christ a generation of believers who keep apologizing for serving in lanes they were actually called to.

This essay is for those people. The ones still apologizing.

In I Am Not My Father’s Pulpit, I called it the vocabulary problem: the church says “called to ministry” and means “called to preach.” I said it then about myself. I am a pastor’s son who has never wanted to be a pastor, and I had to spend years pulling the word ministry out of the word pulpit before I could see what was actually mine to do.

But the more I sat with that diagnosis, the clearer it got that the vocabulary problem doesn’t just mislead PKs. It misleads everyone in the room.

It misleads the man who has spent two decades teaching middle-school algebra in a district that nobody who could leave has stayed in. He has shown up every day for kids whose parents don’t read. He has been the only adult some of them trust. And he still considers seminary every couple of years because he isn’t sure his work counts.

One phrase does most of the damage. Vocational ministry. It is supposed to mean ministry as a paid, full-time occupation — pastoring, missions, parachurch leadership. But by the time the phrase lands in a Sunday sermon, it has collapsed into something else: real ministry, the kind that counts, the kind serious believers eventually graduate into. Everything else is hobby.

The phrase smuggles a hierarchy in under the cover of a job description.

It misleads pastors too — into believing every sincere believer in the room is silently auditioning for their job, when in fact most of them are sitting with a different gift, in a different lane, trying to figure out why nobody has named it.

This essay is the long version of the right word.

There is a second conflation underneath the vocabulary problem, and it is the one Jermaine actually caught.

The phrase in his comment most people scroll past is “the work all of us should do before we post.” That sentence is the diagnosis.

Most Christians have not been taught to examine their beliefs through an intellectual lens. Most Christians have been taught to receive their beliefs — from organized Bible studies, from Sunday sermons, from devotional apps, from the mouth of whichever teacher they decided to trust. The result is a faith that runs on memorable sayings — “let go and let God,” “when God closes a door, He opens a window” — and the muscle memory of throwing them back, not on personal study and the slow, often disorienting work of reading scripture yourself.

That is not a moral failure on the believer’s part. It is a formation failure on the church’s. We have built a discipleship pipeline that hands people finished interpretations. We rarely hand them the tools to make their own.

So when somebody shows up comfortable breaking down a passage — pulling the Greek, naming the historical context, holding two commentaries against each other to see where they disagree, landing an application without a stage to land it on — the church’s pattern-match has only one category for that competence. That’s a teacher. That’s a pastor. That’s somebody who should be on a stage.

It cannot see the other possibility, which is the one Peter has been holding out for two thousand years. Every believer is a priest. Direct access to God, by 1 Peter 2:9, includes direct access to His word. There is no tier of Christian who is exempt from reading scripture honestly, slowly, and with their whole brain on.

When that work gets rare, the few who do it look like clergy.

That is not because clergy is the natural home for that work.

It is because the rest of us have not been doing it.

Paul writes the load-bearing line in Ephesians 4:11:

The English doesn’t tell you what the Greek does.

In Greek, some is τοὺς μὲν. Paul uses it four times in one sentence. Some, some, some, some. He could have said all. He didn’t. He could have said each. He didn’t. He chose a word that means a portion, not the whole — and he used it four times to make sure no one in the church at Ephesus could miss it.

Tony Evans, in his commentary on Ephesians 4, frames the whole passage under “Unity and Maturity in the Body of Christ” and points out the obvious thing the church keeps forgetting: unity in the body comes from diversity of gifts, not sameness of role. The eye does not become the hand to be useful. It becomes itself, more deeply, and the body works.

The Scottish theologian John Eadie, writing in the 1800s, sharpened the point further. In Ephesians 4:11, the people themselves are the gifts. Christ did not give a spiritual gift of pastoring to everyone. He gave pastor-persons to the church as gifts. Pastors are a thing the church receives. They are not a thing every believer is supposed to grow into.

Eadie even noted that pastors and teachers in Eph 4:11 were “stationary ministers appointed for the continuous edification of the flock” — a defined, localized, ongoing role, distinct from the apostles and evangelists who moved.

The whole architecture of the verse is selective.

Paul could have said all. He said some. The grammar is the argument.

The other half of the church’s vocabulary problem is what we have done to the Great Commission.

Matthew 28:18-20 is the verse most often quoted to people who feel they should “do more for God.” Most of us have heard a version of it from a stage. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. The English makes it sound like marching orders for clergy.

The Greek tells a different story.

The main verb is μαθητεύσατε — make disciples. That is the imperative. That is the command. The participles that follow — going, baptizing, teaching — describe how disciples are made, not who makes them.

The verb is make disciples.

The verb is not pastor. It is not preach. It is not go to seminary. It is not get ordained.

It is make a learner. Make an apprentice. Make a follower of Jesus.

That can happen through countless forms of work. Teaching, serving, hospitality, building, administrating, giving, mercy, justice. Mentoring a kid. Sitting with someone in their grief. Running a payroll cleanly so the missionaries get paid. Designing the room. Writing the line.

The Holman New Testament Commentary on Mark 16, where the same Commission appears in Mark’s voice, puts it as plainly as scripture ever puts anything: “this commission is for all of us.” Not the eleven only. Not the apostles only. Not the credentialed only. All.

The promise that follows the command — I am with you always, even unto the end of the world — extends the mandate far beyond the lifetimes of the men standing on that mountain. Jesus is talking to every believer in every century.

There is no Christian who is exempt from the Great Commission.

There is also no Christian for whom the Great Commission is satisfied only by becoming a pastor.

Then Peter widens the frame even further.

1 Peter 2:9:

Peter is not improvising. He is reaching back to Exodus 19:6 — God’s promise that Israel would be a kingdom of priests — and applying that language directly to the church.

Every believer.

Not every pastor. Every believer.

This was never going to land cleanly in Christian vocabulary, because by the time Peter wrote it, the word priest had baggage. Priests offered sacrifices. Priests stood between God and the people. The whole point of Hebrews is that Christ alone is the great High Priest who has fulfilled the sacrificial system.

So when Peter says you are a royal priesthood, he is not saying every Christian gets to perform sacrificial rites. He is saying something more radical. He is saying every Christian has direct access to God, and bears the priestly responsibility that comes with that access — to declare God’s excellencies to the world, to offer spiritual sacrifices, to intercede.

If you have direct access to God, you have priestly weight on you. Not by ordination. By baptism.

There is no observer tier.

There is no spectator section in the body of Christ.

There is the Lord, and there is His priesthood, and that priesthood is every believer.

If Ephesians 4 says some are pastors and some are not, and if the Great Commission belongs to all of us, the next obvious question is: fine, what then? What does the rest of us actually do?

Romans 12:6-8 gives the menu:

• prophecy
• ministry
• teaching
• exhortation
• giving
• ruling (administration, leadership)
• mercy

Read that list slowly. Not one of them is pastor.

Every one of them is essential.

Every one of them is divine — given by the Spirit, distributed across the body, designed to function in concert with the others.

Take mercy. The gift the church has the hardest time recognizing as ministry. The believer with the gift of mercy is the one who shows up at the hospital at 4 a.m. and stays. Who can sit beside grief without trying to fix it. Who hears confession over coffee and metabolizes it without flinching. Who notices the person in the pew no one else notices and crosses the room.

Most churches do not name this work as ministry. They build no platform around it, no annual recognition, no announcement slide. The believer carrying it usually does not believe they are in ministry until somebody on the receiving end of it tells them — and even then it takes a few hearings.

Mercy is not a personality. It is a gift of the Spirit. It is, in Paul’s accounting, divine work.

Paul does not present these gifts as a hierarchy. He presents them as a body. The eye, the hand, the foot, each functioning the way it was made to function, none functioning by becoming the other.

He even pre-empts the comparison anxiety in verse 3 — do not think more highly of yourself than you ought, but think according to the measure of faith God has dealt to each. This is the verse the church usually quotes against pride. It is also the verse that quietly speaks against false humility — the kind that disqualifies itself from a gift it actually has, on the grounds that the gift doesn’t look pastoral enough.

When Jermaine closed his comment, he offered me a generous frame:

He saw the discipline. I want to name what it actually is.

The discipline is not restraint. I am not a pastor person quietly holding back from a pulpit I could fill. I am a some person standing in the lane I was actually given.

Restraint says I could be doing more but I’m holding back. That is humility about a higher tier. Discernment says I am doing exactly what was given to me. That is honesty about a specific assignment. Scripture only gives us the second — because scripture does not present pastoring as the higher tier.

This essay is not against pastoral ministry. It is for it.

The argument I’m making — that pastoring is one calling among several, given to some and not all — only holds together if I take the pastoral calling more seriously than cultural Christianity usually does. Not less. More.

Because here is what scripture actually says about being a pastor.

1 Timothy 3:1-7 lists the qualifications: above reproach, husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money, manages his own household well, not a recent convert, well thought of by outsiders. Titus 1:5-9 layers another set of demands on top of those.

2 Timothy 1:6 tells us how Timothy’s pastoral gift was activated — through the laying on of hands. A communal act of recognition. The church confirming what God had already begun.

Eadie called pastoral ministry the work of continuous edification — the local, ongoing, often quiet work of feeding a flock that does not always know it is hungry, of carrying the weight of people’s worst days alongside their best, of being available in a way most jobs do not require.

This is a sacrificial gift to the body of Christ.

It is not a default upgrade for spiritually serious believers. It is not the highest tier of devotion. It is not the cleanest path to obedience. It is a specific calling, with specific demands, given to specific people, who are then given to the church as a gift from God.

Respecting that calling without feeling called to it is itself a form of spiritual maturity. It means you understand both the weight of pastoral ministry and the reality that God has different work for you.

Telling someone they should pastor when they have not been called to pastor is not a compliment.

If you are some — if Eph 4:11’s repetition lands on you as relief instead of disqualification — you are still going to want a frame for what you are called to.

Scripture gives you a triangle.

Your gifts. Romans 12 names them. 1 Corinthians 12 names more. The first question is plain: which of these has the Spirit deposited in you? Honest self-assessment, not false humility, not inflation. What can you do that does not require permission to come out of you?

Your placement in the body. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. You did not place yourself. You were set there. Where has He set you? What are you adjacent to? What is in your reach right now that He has not given to anyone else with quite your access?

Your obedience to the Great Commission. This is the non-optional axis. The first two questions belong to you. The third belongs to Christ. Make disciples. Whatever your gift is, whatever your placement is, the work of forming followers of Jesus is the river all of it has to flow into.

Your assignment lives where those three things meet.

It is not the same as anyone else’s. It is not your father’s. It is not your pastor’s. It is not the version of you that the church accidentally trained itself to expect.

It is what God specifically gave you to do, in the place He specifically put you, for the Commission He gave the entire body.

If you have spent any portion of your Christian life apologizing for not being a pastor, hear me.

You are not behind.

You are not less.

You are not someone who almost obeyed but didn’t have the nerve.

You are some.

Some carry the prophetic edge. Some carry mercy. Some build the systems. Some teach the kids. Some run the books. Some make the rooms. Some show up at the hospital at 4 a.m. Some write the line that gets quoted back to a stranger in their worst week. Some hold the door open. Some sit with the grief no one else can sit with. Some preach. Some don’t.

All of you minister.

The church owes a generation of you an apology — for the soft, recurring sermons that implied if you really loved Jesus, you’d be in vocational ministry. For the missions trip pitch that sounded like a guilt audit. For the thirty-second altar call that flattened the hundred different things God might be calling people to into a single vocational ask.

But the church also owes you a better question.

Not “are you in ministry?” — that is the question with the wrong word in it. Whatever you have been told, you are.

The question is what form does your ministry take?

Walk through the triangle. Name your gifts. Recognize your placement. Step into the Commission as the entire body’s mandate, not the clergy’s. Stop apologizing for the lane you were given.

And read the word for yourself.

Not because you might find a different answer from your pastor’s — though sometimes you will. Not because you have to credential yourself before you can serve — you don’t. Read it because it is your book. Direct access is your inheritance. The work of interpretation is not somebody else’s job that you outsource. It is part of what priesthood of all believers actually means in practice. Pull the Greek when it matters. Hold two commentaries against each other when they disagree. Trust your own slow reading more than a borrowed slogan.

You are some.

That is not a deficiency.

That is an assignment.