How the New Testament Did the Great Commission and
What it Means for the Church Today
—by—
Rev. Michael Kelly
Executive Director of the Northwest Church Planting Network
Part 1
The Structure of New Testament Koinonia—
The Bible is full of “fly over” passages we skim on our way to more famous destinations. The lay reader is understandably looking for help along her way. Moreover, her pastor is often looking for insights that will capture the flock’s attention for 35 minutes. The result is that we miss some of the Spirit’s secret treasures. Here is an example.
When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, 22 strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. 23 And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed. Acts 14:21–23 (ESV)
There’s a lot in that passage that will preach; the strengthening of souls, exhortation to endure in the Faith, warnings of tribulations to come and, of course, the promise of the Kingdom. That is a three-point sermon that could end with a flourish exalting the reign of Christ and move a congregation. But as exciting as all that is, our interests today will bring us to the last verse, where we find that God has given us everything, we need to save the Church from the ash heap of history where so many movements have ended up.
Now, before you throw me out let me assure you that I know that the Kingdom of God is not just another movement and Jesus was not just another great leader. The Decrees of God assure us that there was no chance that this Kingdom would fade into the appendices of tenth-grade history books. But our God is the God of means as well as the God of ends and verse 23 gives his people, especially their leaders, a profound insight into how the King intends to fill the earth with the Knowledge of God.
He will give his people more than a message, more than a code to live by and even more than the Spirit. He will give order and structure to the covenant community. In other words, by his command the Apostles fulfilled the Great Commission by planting churches. To put it in the most controversial terms possible today for the millennials in the Church; he will build a global institution.
As you know, Paul is returning to the cities he had preached during his first missionary journey. The importance of this passage is that despite the presence of vibrant, spiritual communities filled with people who shared a common profession of faith and experience of grace, Paul did not see the ecclesia as completed until it had elders. The Apostle to the Gentiles deployed his divine authority to build the org-chart of the church. A common faith was, it seems, not enough. The church needs shape, structure, even hierarchy.
It is easier for biblically minded Christians, at least, to understand that the Church needs to keep Jude’s Law and “hold to the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (1.3).” And for the most part our people accept the centrality of mission as well as the ethic of love and fellowship. And if not always with the zeal we would hope for, they more or less understand the call to holiness.
However, the Community of Faith is not finished once these things are in place. The Apostolic Church was as concerned with its own organizational infrastructure as any dotcom startup. Consider the very first thing that happened after Christ’s Ascension. Many would assume that the King went right to the work of pouring out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. But, before that great moment, heaven’s HR department evidently felt compelled to fill an important and empty box in the Kingdom’s Org-Chart and so Matthias was chosen to answer the Psalmist’s call for “another to fill his office.”
Just a short time later in Chapter Six the Holy Spirit leads the Apostles to add to the emerging ecclesiastical infra-structure. And midway through the book in Chapter 15 at the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (smile brothers) we can see office-holding leaders making authoritative decisions and sending their ruling to the churches. Soon Paul will codify the qualifications for the office of elder and deacon and even delineate who should be entered on the roles of the widows. These are the actions of an intentional, self-aware organization, not the innovations of a free-form community interested in simple fellowship.
And it continues. Peter charges and orders the work of Elders in his first Epistle (1 Peter 5.1-4). James clearly gives the office its place in the healing and repentance of the flock (James 5.14-15). And who could study John’s vision of heaven in the Revelation and conclude that God is all this time creating flat, organic, non-hierarchical community of individuals in simple horizontal association. No, the King is building a kingdom more akin to Louis XIV’s court than we Americans are comfortable admitting.
There is no need to get lost in the details of church polity to see the point clearly. When the Apostles preached, they started communities that had more than a Creed. They were launching an organization that was designed to cover the earth with the knowledge of God. And the pattern they left us is beautifully balanced between structure and fluidity. They built a platform that can integrate seamlessly into the local ethos of its immediate environs and at the same time tap into the historic, global and heavenly form we see emerging already in the New Testament.
Where two or three are gathered in his name makes a prayer meeting, but it does not make a Church. The New Testament’s vision of Church included organizational boundaries and job-descriptions and assigned authority to various individuals over specific tasks. The authority its leaders had was as real in heaven as it was on earth. Peter and Paul fulfilled the Great Commission by planting Churches.
Good people will differ about the precise nature, relationships and the duties of the New Testament church leaders, but it is undeniable that from its inception the Church was more than a simple koinonia of converts. The Spirit had given it Apostles, Prophets, Pastors and Teachers and each of these had recognized roles, real authority and a formal place in the Covenant community (Ephesians 4.10-14). What’s more, there was a Creed to which one must adhere. The shape of the New Testament koinonia also included a prescribed way of life, and according to Jesus own instruction, a pattern of authoritative discipline (Matthew 18.15-18).
These observations turn a common criticism of Acts 14.23 on its head. As F.F. Bruce noted in Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, some critics find this verse anachronistic since the Church “obviously didn’t establish organizational structure until much later.” That critique has cache for the contemporary cynic who can’t believe such primitives could think organizationally. To assume that first-century people were too simple-minded to organize themselves says more about the critic’s arrogance, than the Disciples. After all, they could draw on the extensive organizational elements of the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the ubiquitous and powerful apparatus of the Roman Empire as models. Organizational development is an ancient art, not a modern innovation.
Nor was the result of the preaching of these unknown [i.e. post-apostolic] missionaries the creation of a multitude of detached groups of believers in cities and villages over the Empire. All these groups were fully equipped Churches… There was order in the expansion; the moment converts were made in any place ministers were appointed from among themselves, presbyter Bishops, or Bishops who in turn could organize and bring into unity the visible Church any new group of Christians in their neighborhood. (Kindle location 101)
Allen is not the only author to both struggle with and appreciate the institutional reality of the Church. We will hear from David Bosch again, but he is worth quoting at length here. At one point in his classic book Transforming Mission, he identifies the early church’s failures as he understands them. Although Bosch was a brilliant missional thinker, he gets a few of them dead wrong.
The first on his list is that the early church assumed Jesus wanted to start an actual religious community. While his take on that error is complex and not altogether clear Bosch thinks that was a miss-read of the Savior. He then goes on with the second, apparently natural follow-on “oops” the early Church committed.
“…it ceased to be a movement and turned into an institution. There are essential differences between an institution and a movement, says H. R. Neibuhr (following Bergson); the one is conservative, the other progressive; the one is more or less passive, yielding to influences from outside, the other is active, influencing rather than being influenced; the one looks to the past, the other to the future.” (pg. 51-53)
Well, it seems that institutions are really bad. And of course, they can be and so can food and houses and families and sports and everything else. Institutions, like all things people need and hate at the same time, are easy to caricature. And movements are easy to romanticize. Would you rather be a Movement Leader or an Institution Manager? Thankfully, Bosch understands the Church and the world better than that passage might indicate.
After lamenting the rigidity of institutions, he acknowledges the historic, organizational and I would add spiritual reality of the Church. He goes on to make the case that the “Josephes and Nicodemuses” of the infant Church were in unique positions to understand the gospel community and to establish its place in the social fabric of the ancient world. He writes that they,
…helped to smooth the transition from a charismatic movement to a religious institution. In the same way, they also helped to guarantee the survival of the movement. Without that, and speaking humanly and sociologically, the Jesus movement would perhaps have been absorbed into Judaism or have disappeared.
We cannot have it both ways, then: purely and exclusively a religious movement, yet at the same time something that will survive the centuries and continue to exercise a dynamic influence. Our main point of censure should, therefore, not be that the movement became an institution but that, when this happened, it also lost much of its verve. Its white-hot conviction, poured into the hearts of the first adherents, cooled down and became crystallized codes. (pg. 51-53)
Our brief look at the Book of Acts surveyed these realities and outlined the shape of the New Testament Church. We established that the Apostles saw their mission as more than the pursuit of individual souls, but also more than the establishment of simple koinonia meeting places. In significant ways, they were building an institution.
And so, we can see both the necessity and the danger of the Church’s architectural shape. We want movements even while we also need institutions. Our quest is to find how to marry the two in an unlikely union filled with love and life.
Obviously, this observation has direct implications on our mission. In order to explore those, we will need to consider our historical context.
