This Formation Is Older Than Your Denomination

The five were given. That is the actual claim, and it is made plainly in Ephesians. They were not observed in a study, they were not distilled from effective leaders, and they were not reverse-engineered from a personality instrument. They were handed down, on purpose, for a stated reason: so that a body would come to maturity and stop being blown around by every new thing that sounds clever.

Which means the formation predates every argument anyone is currently having about it.

I say this because it changes what the question is. If the five are a framework, then finding yours is self-knowledge and you may take it or leave it. If the five were given, then finding yours is not self-discovery. It is receiving your posting.

There is a difference between a person who has decided they are a teacher and a person who has been made one. The first can quit when it stops being interesting. The second is still one at three in the morning in a season when nobody is listening, because it was never a preference.

And the ancient thing about it is not decoration either. You are not the first to hold your office. Whichever of the five you are, there is a long line of people behind you who held it, most of them unnamed, and the way it works in you is the way it worked in them.

That is a comfort and it is also a weight. You inherited a post. Someone stood in it before you and someone will stand in it after.

You did not choose your office and you cannot resign from it. You can only find out which one you were given and start standing in it on purpose.