What follows is an excerpt from episode four of season three of the Blessed Hope Podcast which covers Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

In verse 17 of the first chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul defines his mission as apostle to the Gentiles. “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.”

There are a number of points about the cross of Christ we can draw from his declaration.

First, the great commission includes the command from our Lord to make disciples by baptizing them in the name of the triune God (Matthew 28:18-20). But as apostle to the Gentiles, Paul understands that his divinely-appointed mission is to preach the gospel and not to become overly involved in the day to day affairs of church life. The office of apostle was centered in the responsibility of preaching in an evangelistic context (establishing churches), with the day to day responsibility for church life assigned to the successors of the apostles–the ministers of word and sacrament, elders, and deacons. The calling of the first church officers begins with Jesus’s call of the twelve disciples during Jesus’s Galilean ministry, and moves on to the establishment of the office of deacon (as recounted in Acts 6:1-6), then to those who hold the office of elder identified in the book of Acts, throughout the letters of Paul, and with the qualification and duties of the church offices of elder and deacon defined in 1 Timothy 3:1-13.[1]

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