The Church of Rome makes the ministry the end, and the church the means; Protestants reverse this order, and make the ministry the means, and the church the end. Ministers are indeed the rulers of churches or congregations, invested in conjunction with other  ecclesiastical office-bearers, with a certain ministerial, not lordly, authority over them. But while this is true of actual ministers and congregations, it is not the less true that the ministry in the abstract may be said to occupy a position of subordination, and not of superiority, to the church, inasmuch as the formation of a church by calling men out of the world, and preparing them for heaven, was God’s great design in sending His Son into the world, and in all His dealings with men; and as the institution of a ministry, and the raising up and qualifying of a ministrs, was just one of the means which He has been graciously pleased to employ for effecting that great end. And this is in substance the idea intended to be conveyed by the declaration in the Confession [WCF, XXV], that Christ has given the ministry to the church. This doctrine is not in the least inconsistent with that of the divine institution of the ministry, or with that of the due rights and authority of ministers, as rulers, distinguished from the ordinary members of the church.

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First, that the absence of a regular ministry, appointed in the ordinary prescribed way, or even the absence of a ministry altogether for a time, is not necessarily, and in all circumstances, a sufficient proof of itself that a society of professing Christians is not a church of Christ: — and secondly, that any company of faithful or believing men is entitled to a ministry, since Christ has given the ministry to the church; and if they are so placed in providence that they cannot have a ministry in the ordinary, regular, prescribed way, are entitled to make a ministry for themselves, and that that ministry, though not regular, is a valid one (William Cunningham, Historical Theology, Vol. 1, 27-28 & 30-31).