The next class [in Eph. 4:11] pastors and teachers-is brought together as one (for watching and feeding and that with the Word) and is most clearly united and identified.
Pastorship includes guidance in holy wisdom and grace and applying teaching to the state of the saints. (We have seen the subordinate part of this distributed by itself; Rom. 12:7.) But the gift here [in Eph. 4] is guiding as a pastor, shepherding and feeding the flock, applying the Word in wisdom, watching against intruding heresies, building up by the Word, guarding and securing from evil, guiding the feet of the saints into straight paths in a word, the care of the saints. It is not here government controlling the flesh, but the ministration of grace, nourishing and cherishing, guiding and feeding. Some were pastors and teachers.
These were ministrations: the first two (apostles and prophets) being in their primary sense the foundation-extraordinary and the last three (evangelists, pastors and teachers), the ordinary abiding ministrations of the church to build them up in Christ’s known and thus ministered fullness, that the body of Christ might be edified, “grow up into Him.”
The primary and full object was the perfecting of the saints their being formed and fashioned according to the pattern of this fullness and into it, that “we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men” (Eph. 4:14).
J. N. Darby (Collected Writings, Vol. 3, excerpted)