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 2
The Challenge and Necessity of New Testament Mission in the 21st Century—
Historical Trends—
Speaking of the advent of voluntary mission agencies, which burgeoned in the 19th century, historian Justo Gonzalez observes that “for centuries virtually all mission was carried out with the official support of the state. But, in the nineteenth century, most western governments had little or no official relationship with the missionary enterprise.” (The Story of Christianity, Vol. II, pg. 307).
That shift had profound implications for missions, most obviously, Gonzalez notes, on the ability to finance the work. Both State and Ecclesiastical financing were disrupted by the change, which came in large measure due to the Enlightenment. In God’s gracious providence, however, powerful movements were afoot as England and the New World experienced spectacular awakenings in the 1700s and then again in the 1800s.
The great Missions agencies of the 19th Century were born out of these tectonic rumblings. As the state withdrew God’s Spirit advanced, and his people’s passion multiplied. Ordinary saints with extraordinary faith partnered and deployed the unbounded energy and optimism of the industrial-modern world in service to the Great Commission. The result was a flurry of entrepreneurial faith and heroic personal risk that brought the Gospel across the World in measures that out did anything we see in the Book of Acts.
The London Missionary Society established in 1795 is a primary example of non-denominational missional faith and energy, but some were denominational. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions is another. The American Board, as it was called, began with the faith of recent graduates from Williams College in response to the Second Great Awakening. What is important for our discussion is that these organizations were voluntary, rather than ecclesiastical or state directed. Believers with a common passion banded together to fulfill the Great Commission.
Of course, the Church’s renewal and expansion are always accompanied by competing forces and the Enlightenment wrought confusion and decay in the Church during the same time frame. While mission agencies sowed seeds across the globe and worked tirelessly to reform prisons and schools and feed the poor, rationalism within the Church became a dry rot. Countless ministers, local congregations and entire denominations would eventually become clouds without rain.
In the 20th Century, the founding of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1950 was the apex of the modern mission movement. By this time, Missions agencies had established themselves as primary movers of Kingdom expansion. They had deployed vast resources and personal energy and faith-based risk. They brought the gospel and social reform to both sides of the Atlantic and across the globe to unreached peoples. Billy Graham’s ministry was a salvation to multitudes and a complete expression of the power of para-church mission.
And so, the Church, always imperfect was now also bifurcated, but not simply along theological lines. Its approach to mission was also divided. Now, a large portion of the vital and effectual missions work was distinct from any ecclesiastical hierarchy. Although very different in expression, this division between the faithful zealot and the decaying Church-proper is reflective of the hermit and monastery movements of the 4th and 5th centuries. They too sought true Christian living and mission outside the decay of a declining Church.
Regardless, it is worth noting that by the 20th Century ecclesiastical wandering and theological declension, led many we would call “missional” to embrace the Great Commission outside of the local church. Ministries like Young Life, where I was converted, and Campus Crusade which also had a profound impact on my life, became vanguards for Kingdom outreach. Inevitably, these trends created tensions among missional thinkers who were wondering what it all said about mission and the Church.
A View from the Para-Church Generation—
Before we identify the central theological question that tension raised, it will be helpful to consider how it played out in the practical life of many ordinary Christians. If I may take a chapter out of Paul’s epistles with a twist, “Surely you haven’t heard of my former way of life among the lost…” Nor did you want to, I’m sure. Still, I grew up in an Irish Catholic family that went to Mass as often as it went to Ireland, which we did, for the record. In God’s sovereign mercies, I came to faith through Young Life and then was discipled by Campus Crusade in college (which notably, eventually began to actually plant churches!).
During that seven-year period virtually my entire Christian life was lived without contact with the local church. I came to faith, engaged mission and first felt the call to ministry in virtual isolation from the Church. And so, I was learning a set of ahistorical and misguided assumptions about the Gospel mission. We saw the historic Church doing nothing while the para-church movement reached multitudes, including us. And that was just about all the “ecclesiology” I needed. I was part of what I call the para-church generation.
Of course, we were wrong theologically and also blind to God’s work in the Church, but the para-church generation would soon be the adults in the room. And for the para-church generations it seemed obvious that that the church was simply not central to the mission. To us para-churchmen, the Church had become para-missional. It may have a hallowed place in the life of the believer; but then again maybe not. Regardless, the Church apparently was not necessary for the Great Commission. This perspective became in large measure the ecclesiastical milieu of a generation of active Christians.
Missiologists Speak—
Thankfully, these matters were not left to 22-year-old ministry volunteers. In more academic circles the conflict was taken up by missiologists who identified the central question. In his magisterial work “Transforming Mission” David Bosch noted that the efforts of these missions’ agencies eventually forced the Evangelical Protestant world to address the question of just what the goal of missions was to be. He writes,
During the heyday of non-denominational missions’ societies, the mission had been understood primarily as conversion gentilium— the conversion of the individual persons. It was only natural that in the defensive reaction of denominationalism missions… … … would again, as in the Medieval Catholic paradigm, be defined as plantatio ecclesiae. The non-denominational societies, heavily influenced by the Great Awakenings, had been preaching “a Gospel without a Church” (S.C. Carpenter…). The remedy was planting distinctly confessional churches… The new slogan was “self-governing, “self-supporting” and “self-propagating” younger churches.
Bosch was not over-enthusiastic about that change and saw, in part rightly, that the Church as Organization can be coopted by its own powers and blind to the cultural biases of its primary geography. Those fears are perfectly reasonable. They are also true of every community, every agency, every person and I would add every movement.
But the question at hand is not simply “What could go wrong?” We are not to ask whether the Church has weaknesses. Of course, she does. We are to ask what the Scriptures offer as the intended outcome of the Church’s mission. Without unearthing the annals of Missiology, theologians have offered a range of answers. A representative list includes the salvation of the individual, the expansion of the Kingdom of God, the defeat of evil spiritual forces, the Glory of God, the realization of the Missio Dei, which is conceived as a comprehensive supra-ecclesiastical, supra-Kingdom and trans-cultural restoration of all things. Sadly, Missio Dei became a rallying cry for liberal denominations in the 1900s and was reduced to looking out for good things happening around the world and then simply lending a hand. “Preach the Gospel. Use words if you must” as the saying goes. As it turned out there was virtually never a “must” moment and very, very few words were spoken.
The fact that I am not a missiologist puts me in the perfect position to provide the definitive answer and announce that the winner is “Yes.” It seems that anyone who loves Jesus and people would want all those things. But our aim is not to discern the ultimate purpose of God in the mission of his people. I am more interested in penultimate matters; specifically, what does the Great Commission require if it would be extended until the whole earth is filled with the Knowledge of God?
The biblical answer to that question is, “Churches, of course. Churches will fill the earth with the knowledge of God.” The Church has been both the agent and the outcome of the mission for two thousand years. It is the agent is as much as it sows the seed from its own fruit. It is the harvest in as much as that seed itself grows into “church,” which in turn sows its seed again. As the 1989 Lausanne II Manila Manifesto declared:
We believe that the local church bears a primary responsibility for the spread of the gospel… … … In this way, the gospel creates the church that spreads the gospel that creates more churches in a continuous chain-reaction. Moreover, what Scripture teaches, strategy confirms. Each local church must evangelize the district in which it is situated and has the resources to do so.
The Church is one earthly entity that Jesus said he would actually build (Matthew 16.18). The word in Matthew is instructive. οἰκοδομέω brings significant weight from the LXX,
which is important for the NT. “To plant” and “to build” are here related concepts (opp. “to root up,” “to tear down,” “to destroy”). God can build, plant, set up or convert Israel, and in judgment… He can also overthrow and destroy His work. The image of building is also common in later Judaism, perhaps because it is suggested by the idea of the “house of Israel.” In the Rabb. God is the builder of the world cf. also Hb. 3:4: ὁ δὲ πάντα κατασκευάσας θεός. (Vol. 5: Theological dictionary of the New Testament).
Clearly the Scriptures use image of building-up for the spiritual growth of individual Christians; however, the Apostles also saw their mission as the means by which Christ would fulfill his promise to build the Church. In Acts 9.31 Luke uses the same term to summarize the progress of the Gospel, “So, the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied” (Acts 9:31).The Apostle Paul uses the same imagery in a passage we’ve already cited to when he writes, “[The Exalted Christ] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,” (Eph4:11–12).Westerners will read that passage through individualistic goggles, and that is not without exegetical grounds. However, the latter portion makes it clear that the saints are equipped so that the Church can be built, just as Christ said he would.
The Church should be both the instrument and in a penultimate way, the outcome of our mission. And as we have seen the Church is more than a koinonia club. It came to us with a body of doctrines, a structure of officers, patterns and elements of worship, a code of life and was given heavenly authority to train, admonish and even discipline.
