The prophet's handbook

ordained prophets, stressing to them that there was a marked difference between the official and the gifted. Indeed, the office is superior to the gift because it predates every other biblical ministry. From the time of Abel to the present day, the prophet’s charge was a special one that only those suited to its service could bear. The office determines its official entrants, not the other way around. As with any public service or means of serving the public, the offices are created for the benefit of their authorities and their community, in that order. The empowering authorities’ best interests are to be served continually and the public to benefit from that service is to be provided for and protected. The offices have their own duties, descriptions, standards, performance guidelines, and entrance criteria that serve as eligibility requirements for those who enter and serve in them. Compatibility with the office’s stated qualifications must be exhibited upon entry and proven sustainable over time. The Lord spelled out the qualifications He required in detail for those who would voice His mind to His people in early Israel. Stringent qualifications and extensive training paths were always stipulated for the one appointed to represent another. You could not just stand up before the public and serve them without credentials that showed you were authorized to do so by a higher authority. In those days, no one was officially accepted as a public voice or agent apart from demonstrating his or her possession of these qualifications. The same cannot be said about today’s gift-obsessed church. People sing, write, draw, lead, and minister at will. They are encouraged do so freely, and to exercise their gifts as amateurs, appearing primarily as entertainers. Here is the difficulty with this practice: these gifts are not regulated and cannot be, because they are outside of an official (office) capacity. They are freelance, independent expressions of one’s natural talents available to be used at the owner’s will. That is not the case with an office. Offices are dictated by those who establish them. The entity that delegated a measure of its mission or commission to an agency sanctions the official use of a particular gift or talent on its behalf. It usually starts by setting the parameters, boundaries, purposes, functions, and objectives for its agents’ proposed duties and responsibilities. Once this is done, the distinct talents, abilities, skills, and experience needed for successful execution are then defined, to become, in turn, the service qualifications for those authorized to act on its behalf. To employ the most qualified people for the job, screening takes place to attract and gather the skills, talents, and gifts that best match the position’s qualifications.