Chapter 3

Slowness of the Disciples to Grasp Their Mission

Consider how slow the disciples were to even grasp who Jesus was:

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? (John 14:8-9)

Even though Christ had commanded his disciples to make disciples of “all nations,” it was only after the intervention of an angel that the Italian centurion Cornelius came to faith. Peter himself required a confirming vision, repeated three times, that what God makes clean must not be called common. After the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles as Peter preached to the gospel to them, “the believers from among the circumcised were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out even on the Gentiles” (Acts 10:45). When Peter reported back to the church in Jerusalem, he had to argue the case to finally get the Jewish believers to accept the fact that Christ’s vision included the Gentiles: “If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God’s way?” (Acts 11:17). The Jewish church only reluctantly conceded that the gospel was for all nations.

It was not until the Council of Jerusalem c. 48 AD, some 15 years after Pentecost, that the issue of the Gentiles would finally be resolved.

Missing the Centrality of God’s Mission in Interpreting the Bible

Translations of the Bible also have often downplayed the centrality of God’s mission in the way certain key words have been translated. For example, in the Greek New Testament, the essential Great Commission verb evangelize (euangelizo) appears 56 times. However in the King James Version (KJV) and English Standard Versions (ESV), the word does not appear. Similarly the words for “mission” and “missionary” never appear in the KJV or ESV translations of the Bible. Even though the word itself does not appear in the Greek text, the concept is central. (See Appendix B, which shows the mission of God is the central theme of the Bible.)

The word “apostle” appears 80 (KJV) or 90 (ESV) times. The underlying Greek word apostolos occurs 80 times in the New Testament. In general, an apostle is “one who is sent out on a mission.” In Church history, it means one who is sent out to be “a witness to the risen Christ and his finished work.” Used in this way, once the last eyewitness died, the office of apostle could not continue.

The word “apostle” in the more general sense of “one who is sent out on a mission” has largely fallen into disuse in the mainstream because of the ambiguity of the term. Furthermore, most Protestants don’t use the term in relation to missions because they are understandably leery of assigning too much authority to those who would be designated as modern “apostles.”

Therefore, it has often been difficult to even find biblical language to talk about the mission, even though the mission of God and its continuation through the work of the Church comprise the central theme of the Bible. See Appendix B.

Minimizing God’s Mission in Theology

Many of the Christian confessions and creeds were used to clarify Christian truth in relation to heresies and to correct common misunderstandings of scripture. They typically clarified the doctrines about the person and work of Christ and the nature of salvation.

Unfortunately, this reactive method led to a major omission. Almost all of the various major confessions and creeds from the first century up to the post-Reformation period do not say a single word about the mission of the Church. An example is the Apostles Creed, the Christian Creed most widely read in the church. Here is a sampling of the major Creeds and Confessions and their treatment of the mission of the Church:

120-250 Apostles Creed No mention of the Church’s mission

381 NIcene Creed No mention of the Church’s mission

500 Athanasian Creed No mention of the Church’s mission

1563 Heidelberg Confession No mention of the Church’s mission

1566 Belgic Confession No mention of the Church’s mission

1618-19 The Canons of Dort One mention (Second Point, Article 5)

1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church One mention (Section Two, Article 3, III)

Even the unparalleled, theologically sound Westminster Shorter Catechism (1646-47) makes mention of praying for the Kingdom but makes no mention carrying out the mission of bringing the gospel of the Kingdom to the nations in the answer to Question 102, “What do we pray for in the second petition?”. Similarly, the Larger Catechism answer to Question 191 makes a single mention of the church’s mission as something to pray for, in explaining the meaning of the second petition, “Thy kingdom come.” The Westminster Confession (1646) itself makes no reference to the Church’s mission or the Great Commission.

Similarly, the first century Didache (“Teaching”), the oldest extant Christian catechism, makes no mention whatsoever of the mission of the Church.

Patrick Johnstone sums up the profound effects of this theological blind spot: “This astonishing lack of reference to the resurrection ministry of Jesus or the task of the Church for world evangelization is an error of enormous proportions, and has distorted theological education to the present day.”

Missing and Minimizing the Global Mission Vision in Church History

Some in the Church have been slow to grasp Christ’s global mission vision almost from the start. We tend to idealize the early Church because God did such wonderful and amazing things through it. We think of the visitation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the 3000 “devout men from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) and how they received the gospel with repentance and were baptized. Yet the early church leaders and believers were ordinary fallible human beings as we all are.

We tend to overlook the fact that the disciples remained in Palestine for at least 5-6 years before carrying out the command of Jesus to bring the gospel to all nations. Though an apostle is “one who is sent out on a mission,” ironically the apostles still remained in Jerusalem during the persecution of 35-37 AD:

And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles…Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ (Acts 8:1,4)

Here we see it was everyone except the apostles who went about preaching the word. It is easily overlooked that these ordinary Christians, who were scattered as a result of the persecution, took the lead and were the first to carry out the Great Commission beyond Palestine by planting a church cross-culturally beyond Judea and Samaria:

Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews.  But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus.  And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. (Acts 11:19-21)

Even though the Apostles got off to a slow start, it never occurred to these ordinary Christians that they could follow Christ and at the same time ignore the commission he gave them. Mission engagement was part of their identity as followers of Christ. And two deacons, Stephen (Acts 7) and Philip (Acts 8:5) first took the initiative to preach the gospel in Palestine at the time of the persecution.

In spite of their slow start, the Apostles amazingly brought the faith to about 30% of the known ancient world within 50 years of the resurrection.  Each of the eleven apostles helped bring the gospel to the ancient world from Asia Minor to Persia to India. And of course the Apostle Paul preached the gospel and planted the Church throughout the Mediterranean region, including Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Malta, Crete, Cyprus. All except John would be martyred in the process.

It might be surprising to some modern Christians that the missionary methods of the ancient church differed significantly from those of the of the modern church:

…for the ancient church knew nothing of “evangelistic services” or “revivals.” On the contrary, in the early church worship centered on communion, and only baptized Christians were admitted to its celebration. Therefore, evangelism did not take place in church services, but rather, as Celsus said, in kitchens, shops, and markets.”

As mentioned, when the Emperor Constantine embraced the Christian faith in 312 AD, the Christian faith began to change from being a persecuted dynamic outsider movement to an established but more static religion. The number of people being evangelized had been increasing until that time, but once the Christian faith became in effect the religion of the establishment in Central and Western Europe, the number of unreached likely began to increase until the time of the modern Protestant missions movement initiated by William Carey in the 1790’s. There were exceptions of course, such as the Coptic Church’s bringing the gospel to Africa during times of persecution, but the exception proves the rule.

During the sixteenth century Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church assigned the mission to elite orders of professional missionaries in religious orders such as the Jesuits to bring the Catholic faith to new territories. While the Catholic branch of the Church established structures for carrying out the Great Commission long before the Reformed branch, the problem inherent in their approach was that it tended to exclude ordinary believers from participating in the mission. The use of religious orders for Great Commission work established a paradigm which generally excluded the participation of local congregations. While establishing missional structures to advance the faith was a very positive step, it served to establish the special call to missions at the expense of the general call.

After the Reformation, the Protestant Church, except during renewal movements, did little in carrying out the Great Commission for all nations, mainly because most in the Reformed church mistakenly believed the apostles had already fulfilled Christ’s Commission. The error was not corrected until Carey’s Enquiry was published in 1792. He pointed out that since the promise of Christ’s presence in Matthew 28:18-20 was “to the end of the age,” the mandate to which it was attached must likewise be binding throughout the Church Age until the gospel was preached to all nations. After the publication of the Enquiry, the Protestant Church began to create structures in the form of mission societies to advance the Christian faith to new areas. However, for the most part, it also recovered only one of the two paradigms seen in Acts, the special call but not the general call to missions.

Before leaving the topic of the Church’s failure in relation to bringing the gospel to all nations in spite of having 2000 years to do so, it’s helpful to consider how the Lord deals with our sin and failure.

He does not deal with us according to our sins,

    nor repay us according to our iniquities.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth,

    so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him (Psalm 103:10-11)

Though we have passed from death to life, we are not instantly or completely sanctified in this life. For this reason the Father deals with us patiently and graciously. Think about how Jesus dealt with Peter and his initial failure to stay with Jesus through his great trial. Not really knowing his own heart, Peter had boasted, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will” (Matthew 26:33). But when the test came, Peter fled in fear only to end up weeping bitterly. God used the episode to wean him off his self-confidence and to position him to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus didn’t abandon Peter when he failed. He understood him perfectly, engineered his failure for the greater good, restored him gently in due time and reinstated him in his place of leadership in the Church. In the power of the Holy Spirit, Peter would go on to be used of God to advance the Kingdom in great and mighty ways. The Lord deals with his Church today in the same way, gently leading and not condemning, sovereignly working all for good. As Tim Keller often said, “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

In the next section, we’ll look at the solution to this great problem of the rising number of unreached. Not surprisingly, the solution is found not in ourselves but in Christ. In Jesus’ Last Discourse, he plainly tells us how to effectively carry out his final command.