# Why the Church Needs All Five Ministry Gifts Pastors Adam Mesa and Julian Lowe talk about the fivefold ministry, why churches tend to copy their leaders, and how to receive the people God sends. Source: Pray.com — https://www.pray.com/articles/why-the-church-needs-all-five-ministry-gifts Author: Adam Mesa Category: Faith & Wisdom Published: 2026-10-22 Last revised: 2026-10-22 --- ## Key takeaways - **Assignment and purpose can differ.** Your job and your deepest calling may not be the same thing, and you are responsible for tending both. - **Every leader leans toward one gift.** Left alone, a church ends up looking like the people who lead it. - **The fivefold gifts work together.** Shepherds, teachers, prophets, apostles and evangelists each see something the others miss. - **Receiving a person is an act of trust.** Pastor Julian Lowe says it begins with trusting what God shows you about someone, before you know them well. - **Prophetic gifts show up in different ways.** Foresight, insight and hindsight are activated by different things, and a good question can wake one of them up. - **Gifts need love.** The church can swing toward chasing gifts or toward doubting them, and both leave something out. ## Checking the grace before saying yes Pastor Adam Mesa welcomed Pastor Julian Lowe of Oasis LA to the Beyond the Letter studio, and the conversation began with a question about saying yes. Mesa said he checks his sense of grace before he agrees to things. This year he accepted many speaking trips and found that some were ones he had no oil for, while others took little effort and brought a lot of outcome. Lowe said his strongest grace right now is speaking to staff and teams, and he compared it to having the bases loaded with two outs. Mesa remembered the summer when Lowe spoke to his team and their guests. Some people who had served in ministry for fifteen or twenty years told him the word finally clicked. Mesa observed that a person can do something for fifteen years without clarity about why, and that this happens in business as well as ministry. ## Assignment and purpose Lowe explained how he came to lead Oasis. His pastor was trying to recover from cancer and asked him to take the church, and Lowe had only several months of notice. He described moments of feeling unfulfilled in the role even though it was bearing fruit. That led him to see a difference between the two ideas. As he put it, "My assignment is to lead Oasis. My calling is to come alongside leaders and bring strength." Lowe said he has had to make room for that purpose outside his weekly duties. If there is a relationship and a kids, youth or young adult event has no budget, he goes for free, and his church has built that into its budget. He also gave a warning to anyone who tries to turn every calling into income: "many of us are so busy trying to monetize our purpose that we forfeit it." ## One crowd, five kinds of care Mesa told of a mentor of his father's who doubted that Mesa should travel at all, and of another mentor who asked what it would mean if Mesa had an apostolic call for the wider church. Mesa said his local leaders needed time to see his travel as work. His wife Ashley once went along and came home exhausted. Lowe said the church spent about forty years building around pastoring, evangelism and teaching, with little room for the prophetic and the apostolic. He read the feeding of the five loaves and two fish as a picture of all the gifts working in order. In his telling, Jesus taught so long that the people grew faint. A shepherd noticed they were hungry, the prophetic moved to feed them, and the pastors said there was not enough money. Then the apostolic mind said to seat the crowd in groups of fifty. His conclusion was that, as he put it, "in a healthy church, all of those dynamics work together to mature the saints to the unity of the faith." Lowe said he leans toward prophetic shepherding and Mesa leans apostolic, which is why they work well together. ## Churches that look like their leaders Mesa said that when he works with churches and businesses, he often sees a team that is all one kind of person. He described a church of only deliverance and evangelism, one of only teaching, one where the apostolic leader is always away and has no shepherd in his place, and one where every service must bring a fresh word. Lowe said every leader has an instinct to push out one form of ministry, and that if you have not found yours, you are probably doing it. Shepherds can hold many coffees without helping someone stand on their own. Evangelists can keep reaching people without maturing them. His answer was to surround yourself with people who are strong where you are weak. He added that in most churches, the apostolic is what is missing. ## Receiving the people God sends Lowe said it is hard to listen to an apostle if you have no revelation that they are one, because they will tell you what is holding you back. He said apostles are sent to a church rather than invited like a consultant, and that people who want the advice without the authority miss the point. He was clear that he was not talking about spiritual abuse. Mesa related. He once ran a marketing company and stopped charging members of his church after clients he consulted for hours often did not follow his advice. He said, "I wasn't always received." He added that one man applied everything from an eight hour session and later bought a nice car because of it. Eventually he felt the Lord asked him to give the company up. Lowe said receiving someone is a covenant that you then work out through relationship. He tied it to the words of Jesus: > My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. > > ([John 10:27](/bible/web/john-10/#v27), WEB) Lowe argued that with an apostolic leader, you should become familiar with what they say before you become close to them. If you cannot recall a few points from their last three sermons, he said, do not ask for coffee yet. He described the order this way: "Listen to me, and then maybe we'll have a coffee." ## Prophecy in more than one form Mesa said he spent the first ten years of his faith doubting that anyone was prophetic. In 2012, an elderly woman his father called a spiritual mother told him God would send his wife when he stopped looking. He did not take it as prophecy then. At twenty two, he told his father he was content where he was, and the next day he met Ashley. Years later, Lowe spoke to him at a church in Orange County and named the very thoughts he had been having about his father's plan to hand him the church. Lowe pointed out that Scripture says this about one gift in particular: > Don’t despise prophecies. > > ([1 Thessalonians 5:20](/bible/web/1-thessalonians-5/#v20), WEB) He said that may be because immature prophets do things that make people want to dismiss the gift. He described three forms: foresight, insight and hindsight. "Prophetic insight requires a question mark," he said, and hindsight needs space and time to reflect. As an example, Mesa told how a pastor friend asked him to read a legal document about a possible church merger. Mesa sent eleven questions and a long voice memo, and the friend said he would not have thought of any of it. Lowe called those questions prophetic, though no one would have described them that way. ## Gifts without losing love Both men said the church tends to swing between extremes. One side chases gifts and loses love, which Lowe connected to what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 and 14. The other side is skeptical of anything miraculous. Mesa told of a friend raised Catholic who found his Protestant church's closing prophetic words strange. Mesa agreed some examples were general enough to fit any large room, but he shared moments where a mature gift led people toward Christ, repentance and peace. Both men agreed that the church needs more open conversation about gifts. ## What this means for you You may serve in a church, a business or a family, and the same questions apply. Which gift do you lean on, and which one are you quick to push out? Who around you sees what you cannot? It may also help to ask where your grace really is, and whether your purpose is getting your time. If someone has been sent to speak into your life, consider whether you are listening before you decide whether you like them.