Ministry in the New Testament (Overtures to Biblical Theology)

Written by David L. Bartlett Reviewed By Philip Satterthwaite

The nature of Christian ministry, as the author notes in his introductory chapter, has in recent years been the subject of much reflection by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. How do our church leadership structures relate to patterns of leadership as we find them in the NT? How do we handle the NT data relating to leadership? In five chapters which form the heart of this book Bartlett examines in succession the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew, the Johannine literature, Luke-Acts and the Pastoral Epistles (regarded as non-Pauline), asking what patterns of church leadership each of these strands of the NT implies. In each chapter the discussion is structured around five questions: what is the historical and social context? what understanding of apostleship and/or discipleship do the texts reflect? how are conflicts resolved within the congregations addressed? what kinds of officers or leaders are found in the congregations, and what are the grounds of their authority? and what are the dominant images of the church? The five chapters each end with a section relating the NT texts to ministry today. A concluding chapter summarizes previous discussion under the headings ‘Service’, ‘Unity and Diversity’, ‘Sacraments’, ‘Gifts’, ‘Apostleship’ and ‘Discerning the Times’.

In applying NT data to today’s churches, Bartlett advocates a ‘typological’ approach. NT models and images are not blueprints, and the patterns of leadership in the NT are too diverse to be synthesized into a single ‘NT pattern of ministry’: in Paul the dominant image of the church is as body, with great emphasis laid on gifts; Matthew suggests the model of the minister as interpreter of Scripture and Christian tradition; in the Pastorals false teaching is countered by a hierarchical leadership pattern and a stress on faithfulness to apostolic teaching. The NT patterns are better seen as a rich and varied resource which different churches might draw on in different ways at different times, and by teasing out underlying principles rather than by anachronistic mimicry. However, if the NT patterns cannot be directly applied today, they pose striking questions for today’s churches: the idea of the minister as a ‘professional Christian’, the sharp division between minister and people, and the view that only ordained ministers may administer communion are all, as the author notes, questioned by the NT.

I had one question relating to method: are all the texts Bartlett surveys equally transparent to his approach? He argues, for example, that the Gospel of John advocates an egalitarian, familial model of the church: the dominant images of the church are as flock and vine, with Christ as the only leader and no attempt made to differentiate believers by office (by the time of the Johannine epistles some of the dangers of a relatively unstructured model have become apparent). But this verges on an argument out of silence: one could equally well argue that both Gospel and epistles, though they have much to say on how Christians should relate to one another, simply do not address the question of leadership structures in detail, making it precarious to draw conclusions on this topic. A possible weakness of Bartlett’s approach may be that he has sought answers to his five questions even where no clear answers are possible.

However, this is a well-written study, up to date with both NT scholarship and issues facing the church today. Though written in a North American context, it contains little that could not be read with profit world-wide.


Philip Satterthwaite

Biblical Graduate School of Theology, Singapore