| | I just finished the second week of my summer class entitled "World Missions and the Local Church." So far the class discussion has primarily been a big let's-bash-the-way-missions-is-currently-done fest. The big complaint that seems to be driving most of this is something along the lines of: "Just look how the church at Antioch and the apostle Paul 'did missions' in the book of Acts. Modern missions is nothing like that!"
Even ignoring the clear overstatement of "nothing like that," I think this is an unwise way to approach the subject of missions (or any other aspect of theology or methodology for that matter). The book of Acts is presented primarily as an account of the history of the early church (see Acts 1:1-2). It is primarily descriptive: it recounts what happened in the early years of Christianity in a narrative manner.
The book of Acts is not presented as a prescriptive book. That is, it is not presented as a manual on how a church should be run (you'll find a lot of that in the epistles) or missions should be conducted. It describes what did happen, not what should/must/will happen in every time and culture.
This does not mean that we cannot learn from this book things about God or about the general kind of actions and attitudes that should be going on in the church. However, it does mean that we should be very careful about pointing to any one part of the book and declaring that it is the only methodology/result/whatever that we should be doing/seeing/whatever in Christianity today! We must remember that life in the first century Roman Empire was significantly different than life in the 21st century world. Additionally, this was a transitional period in history as it relates to God's plan (from Law to Grace/Church if you care to look at it from a dispensational point of view): The Holy Spirit now began indwelling Believers in a new way, Gentiles were being brought into God's family without having to follow the OT Law, authenticating signs and wonders accompanied the new message of the Gospel, etc.
"Cherry picking" individual examples from the book of Acts that support your own personal view of how church should be run (or missions conducted) and denouncing any ministry we dislike as "not being found in the book of Acts"/"not the practice of the early church" and therefore invalid does not seem to be accurate, honest treatment of God's Word. If this kind of argument were consistently applied I'm not sure too many people would agree with the results. We would have no church buildings, no Sunday school, no VBS, no mission agencies, no church camps, no faith based drug rehab programs, no Bible colleges, no seminaries, etc. and we should be speaking in tongues, healing the sick, raising the dead, receiving visions and prophecies, holding all property in common, etc. ...and while some people might agree with some of the things on that list I think few people would really want to go that far.
Are there some aspects of modern missions that should be "tweaked" (or even undergo major change)? Probably. Do we need to ditch the whole current system because "it's not how the early church and the apostle Paul did it?" I really don't think so.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? When I tried to bring it up in class discussion no one really responded.
P.S. I just proofread this and some of the transitions in there are kind of rough/disjointed, but after two weeks of class my brain is already shot so I'm just going to apologize and not bother making it more coherent right now...sorry. |
| | Posted 5/23/2009 5:46 PM - 49 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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