APOSTOLIC
FUNCTION AND
Alan R. Johnson
Posted in www.globalmissiology.org
July 2007 by permission
I view my address today for this inauguration of
the J. Philip Hogan Chair of World Missions as an opportunity to initiate a
public dialogue about missiology. Thinking about missions is a communal
activity and one that requires continual reflection. While it is based on
unchanging principles in Scripture, the world setting in which we operate is
constantly changing, and this demands that we regularly think together about
who we are and where we are going. The thoughts that I will share today
represent the public and more carefully formulated version of meditations,
conversations, readings, and writings that I have been doing over the past 20
years as a missionary in
Missions as a Contested Idea
I have entitled this address “Apostolic Function
and
I want to frame my assertion in an idea that I
first heard expressed by John York, which actually comes from Stephen Neill: “When everything is mission, nothing is
mission.”[2]
In order to set the stage for the analysis that follows I will briefly set
forth how the current confusion regarding missions is manifest. I will start
with the most anecdotal evidence that is rooted in my own experience and move
towards the more empirical material.
At the most personal level, when I am associating
with people in the States talking about “missions” I often feel like I am
becoming a dinosaur; that I am some kind of strange and ungainly creature from
another era intruding on a world that changed and no longer provides a
supportive environment for my survival. When I was a 20-year-old university
student God called me by a spoken voice to devote my life to preaching the
Gospel. I had no clue about what shape that would take. While in
But things have changed. I have been in a missions
convention where I was the only person who knew a foreign language, where I was
the only field based worker, where I was the only person actually engaging lost
people on a regular basis. During a year at one of our schools and in touring
10 of our colleges on a preaching and teaching tour sharing the vision for the
least-reached in Asia Pacific I have not yet once been approached by a person
of any age who says, “I want to go to a place and spend the rest of my life where
the church does not exist and preach the Gospel and plant the church of Jesus
Christ.
People tell me they want to lead teams, that they
want to travel to “lots of countries,” that they want to get a seminary degree
and go teach somewhere, that they want to find a place that uses English to go
pastor, that they want to travel and do crusades, or hold babies in an
orphanage. The list goes on and on. These activities are not wrong in and of
themselves. In the context of Assemblies of God missions we have always done these things, and for the
most part they are good things. But at the same time we did not get to 50-plus
million adherents world wide with a cross-cultural staff that saw any of these
activities as the controlling center of what they were about. The center of our
labors has always been evangelism, church planting, and the training of
national ministers.
Let me move towards more empirical evidence now. I
have run into a growing number of cases where it is clear that national church
movements, of which I number our American church as one of them, are conflating
the ideas of the evangelistic outreach of a local church or movement within its
own sociocultural setting with missions. Thus any kind of outreach at all becomes
missions, with the deadening effect of equalizing all types of evangelism. This
idea is accompanied by concepts such as missions relating to the crossing of
geographic borders, working with our own people in locations outside of our
geopolitical borders, and where the term “missionary” is used, with the
ubiquitous aphorism, “everyone is a missionary.” This results in people being
sent outside of their country to preach the Gospel to their own people who are living
abroad, while ignoring within their own borders those groups of different
religious, social, and linguistic background who do not have church movements
at all. It also devalues the cross-cultural worker because since we are all
missionaries our field is wherever we live, thus giving all places equal
priority no matter what the strength of the church is within that sociocultural
setting.
This perspective affects how missions is perceived
when Western missionaries mobilize non-western church movements to do
cross-cultural missions. One person working in an African context told me that
believers in the movement he is working with think that being a missionary
means going to a Bible school. Years of seeing westerners come from the outside
to work with an existing church movement has left this national church without
any conception of pioneer work where there is no preexisting church movement. Thus
missions becomes going to some town or village of the same group and reaching
out there, while Muslim and animist groups without any church movements at all
in their group are completely ignored.
Within AGWM itself, our commitment to building indigenous
national churches and to partnering with them has naturally led most of our career
cross-cultural missions staff at this point in our history to work where the church
already exists and with the primary focus of that work being connected with those
national church movements in some way.[3] One result of this is
that people repeatedly exposed to missionaries who work in Christian contexts
in a supportive fashion begin to conceive of missions in these terms.
Finally, the reflections of then Executive
Director of AGWM, Loren Triplett, in his November of 1995 monthly letter to the
missionary family, marked the beginning of my own journey in starting to think
seriously about missiological issues within our own movement. The letter ended
with a request for ideas, and I responded with a detailed letter where I
spelled out in writing for the first time some of the ideas that I am sharing
with you today. Since it is so critical to the point I am making I am citing
Brother Triplett’s thoughts in full here.
The list of nations [we have missionaries in] continues to grow, but oh, so very slowly. I am headed back to the office wondering if the King could say “well done” regarding Assemblies of God Missions.
Our missionary presence in some lands is agonizingly thin. Yes, we can say we are there, but we know in our hearts that it is only with token presence. Beyond that is the list of nations where we have never “raised the flag” and begun the battle. Could it be true that we are more apt to pursue offices, titles, and organizational turf than new frontiers in reaching the lost? Are roots, security, and place more attractive than pioneering for the King? Are capital cities more acceptable than unreached regions within the lands where we are working?
The challenging reality of missionary placement never goes too far away. Our nagging concern is, “What is missionary work all about?” Aren’t we supposed to be always moving toward “the regions beyond?” Do we have the courage to honestly assess our positions? Do we have less-than-fully-challenged missionaries working with well-developed national churches?
All this suggests that the understanding of the
term missionary and missions at grassroots levels within our context is
confused. My argument here is that the current confusion on these ideas
represents a move away from the much sharper sense that existed among the
handful of people who began this movement at the turn of the century. I will
illustrate here with some material from our history.
One of the reasons cited for organizing as a
movement was given by E. N. Bell, editor of the Word and Witness in 1912: “our people are tired, sick, and ashamed
of traveling, sight-seeing, experimenting missionaries, who expect to make a
trip around the world and come home … We want missionaries who go out to live
and die on foreign fields.”[4] In 1915 at the third
General Council it was noted that we promote the evangelization of the heathen
according to New Testament methods.”[5] In 1920 J. Roswell
Flower said, “the vision of our Pentecostal missionaries is becoming more
clarified and it is realized we have a distinctive mission in the world,
differing from that of all other people. An apostolic ministry in apostolic
power and fullness is the aim of our Pentecostal Missionaries.”[6]
Then in 1921 at the General Council in
An Analysis of Why Views of Missions Have Changed
These
comments from the first years of our history show an emphasis on sending long
term cross-cultural workers whose work is evangelization in neglected regions. The
question that needs to be raised at this point is how did from there to where
we are today? While there are a number of possible reasons, I suggest that many
people now view missions as supportive roles to already existing national
churches as a result of the success of our cross-cultural endeavors on a scale
unimaginable to those who founded the movement.
In
January 2006 Randy Hurst published an article on the growth of the Assemblies
of God worldwide in the Pentecostal
Evangel. It includes an amazing graph that documents the number of
Assemblies of God adherents starting with 300 pastors and their congregations in
1914 to some 53 million total adherents worldwide in 2005.[9] That graph makes clear
that growth started in the decade of the 1960s but it exploded from the 1970s
and beyond. Let me make some observations about this growth. First, I do not
think anyone would disagree with me when I say that the explosive growth since
the 1970s is based in certain values and practices of our missionary team. There
was a pioneer ethos, people went to places where there were few Christians, preached
the Gospel with the intention of creating an indigenous local movement capable
of governing, supporting and propagating itself, and did the kind of generic
work in evangelism, church planting, discipling, and training of ministers that
built church movements capable of reaching their own people. The Pentecostal
fire within these early pioneers was passed on into the spiritual DNA of the
converts and leaders they trained by both teaching and modeling.
My
second observation is that any missionary going out before 1970 was almost by
definition going to be somewhere where the church movement was relatively small,
and probably by a rigorous definition of indigeneity not yet fully capable of
functioning without outside help to evangelize their sociocultural setting.[10]
In 1960 half of all the Assemblies of God adherents were still in
On
the other hand missionaries going out after 1970 were confronted with a new
situation, national church movements that were increasingly large, robust and
powerful. No longer needed in evangelism and church planting, and even first-tier
Bible training, missionaries became advanced education specialists, managed
(and helped finance) various institutions, became conduits to connect
short-term teams from the west, supervised various construction efforts, and worked
in various forms of media and communications. Our doctrine of indigeneity
valued and predicted strong, robust, Pentecostal, zealous, evangelistic,
national church movements. But from a mission standpoint, we were literally
caught off guard by our success. Being surprised so to speak by our success
means that it is rather natural that two missiological points did not arise in
our thinking.
The first is that we never developed a missiology
of success. By this I mean how we respond as a mission to the successful
formation of strong indigenous national churches which is our stated goal. Let
me illustrate for a moment the nature of indigenous national church movements, of
which we in
Without a theology of success we have no decision-making
tools to help us decide what needs to be done and how to respond to the demands
of national churches long after they are fully indigenous or as they are in
last stages of the transition time moving towards it. The result is that over
time the New Testament dimension of crossing cultural boundaries to present
that Gospel and the Pauline theme of going where the Gospel is not yet present becomes
obscured.
A second point is that one reason for the success
we have enjoyed in mission is because we have targeted responsive populations,
going where the Spirit is working sovereignly and bringing in the harvest. With
national churches springing into being all over the globe, and a value of being
responsive to the work of the Spirit, it again seems natural that we did not
foresee the resistant and those separated from the Gospel by barriers of language,
religion, and social standing. As I noted above, our original missiology was
forged in the idea of going to reach the lost. It did not have to be much more
refined than that simply because in 1914 large parts of the world still lacked
indigenous church movements that were faithful to Jesus and the Bible. This
juxtaposition between our original missiology and the circumstances in which we
now live illustrates the need for a dynamic missiology based on unchanging
principles but responsive to the changing missiological terrain as the church
grows. What we now require is a missiology that is in harmony with our original
vision but that expands the notion to include going where the church does not
exist and challenging indigenous
national churches to not simply reach their own, but to join us in this
apostolic and cross-cultural task.
Shaping Our Missiology in the 21st
Century
To this point I have made the assertion that at
the grassroots level understanding of missions and the role of the missionary is
no longer as clear as it was at the founding of our movement. I have also offered
a partial account of how that problem concerning the meaning of missions came
about. Now it is time to look at how we can address this lack of conceptual
clarity. Let me review where we stand at this moment in our history as a
movement. Here in October 2006 our missiological reality is as follows:
1. We exist as a worldwide fellowship of over 54 million people aggregated
into entities that we call national churches, many of which are indigenous in
our classic sense of being self-supporting, self-propagating, and
self-governing. These adherents reflect the global shift of Christianity
towards the south out of the north and west. Only around five percent of these
AG believers reside in
2. There are major blocks of humanity woven across and through the tapestry
of nation-states and national churches that have no relevant witness of the
Gospel within their sociocultural setting. They have no near neighbor to tell
them of Christ because no Christians exist there or if there are believers,
they are only a tiny minority in that setting.
3. There are large segments in our worldwide fellowship where the concept
of missions and missionary are increasingly unclear, and where missions is seen
primarily as Christians working with other Christians rather than the planting
of the church where it does not exist.
How should we respond to this moment? I want to
suggest that we need to ask for the Holy Spirit’s help to listen to and be
moved by three powerful sources that shape our practice of mission: Scripture, our founders and forerunners in
mission, and the missiological data of the present. I will not do this in separate
points, but rather will weave these three things together around the theme of
apostolic function and mission. I am choosing the idea of apostolic function
intentionally because: in Scripture
it represents the work of the apostles who proclaimed the Gospel; our
Pentecostal forefathers understood their experience as a restoration of
apostolic power and practice; and because apostolic function is what the
missiological data calls us to today as major blocks of humanity continue to
live without a near-neighbor witness.
What do I mean by apostolic function and mission? Let
me first say that I have carefully chosen my terminology here to sidestep some
sticky issues that are associated with the use of the term apostle and
apostolic. Unfortunately these fine words from the Bible have often been
appropriated by some as a cloak to lend legitimacy to their efforts to exercise
authority over others. I do not want to make any commentary here on the myriad
of issues ranging from whether or not there are apostles today, arguments about
the contemporary use of the five-fold ministry terminology of Ephesians 4, to
the “apostolic networks” being heralded by some as the next answer to the
growth of the church.[12]
By apostolic function I mean that at both the
level of the individual cross-cultural worker and the sending agency there is a
focus on the apostolic task of preaching the Gospel where it has not been
heard, planting the church where it does not exist, and leading people to the
obedience of faith so that they to will express Jesus Christ in their social
worlds and participate in God’s global mission. It is a catalytic and
comprehensive function that shapes cross-cultural work so that whatever local
expression it may take, the ultimate goal is to see the church planted where it
does not exist and to see local bodies of believers become fully obedient to
Christ and missional themselves. Apostolic function has to do with both
practice and the sense of self-identity of cross-cultural workers and their
sending agencies that forms the wellspring for what they do.
In the sections that follow I am going to expand
and explain what I mean by apostolic function and look at some of the
implications that this view holds for our missions practice.
Apostolic
Function Means There are Some Things We Choose Not to Do
Recently while doing some work in I Corinthians I
was captivated by a statement that Paul made at
What I want to highlight here is Paul’s
understanding of the work of an apostle as focused on “gospelizing;” it carries
the sense of being very narrow and focused. Here are a few more of Paul’s
statements that show a narrow focus on his sense of task:
Romans
Romans
II Corinthians
Now let me link this with some of our own history. Our movement drew
heavily upon the idea of the restoration of the apostolic church and the proclamation
of the Gospel with signs and wonders. In November 1914 the early leaders of the
Assemblies of God met in
If Paul were with us today, where the Church
exists so powerfully in so many settings and is so weak or non-existent in
other settings, is it not possible that he might develop another ad hoc
argument like he did in I Corinthians chapter 1? In
Apostolic Function
Owns All of Acts 1:8 and the Distinctions it Implies
What I have developed in the point above makes
absolutely no sense and is of no strategic value unless it is linked with a
clear definition of the different types of evangelism. Pentecostals we have
long enjoyed the “Ye shall receive power when the Spirit comes” part of Acts
1:8, but we have not fully explored or applied what the latter part of the
verse implies. Jesus says that we are to be his witnesses in
If you take a geographic sense of evangelism then
all evangelism is equal in two senses. The first is that you can approach it in
the same fashion and use the same methods—it does not matter if you are talking to someone in
Taking these distinctions to heart means that we
can talk very clearly and precisely about two different kinds of evangelism.
One happens within a monocultural context and is a natural part of the outreach
of local bodies of believers and is done by near-neighbor witnesses—meaning
that the witness is from the same cultural background as the listener. The
second happens in a cultural setting that is not only different from that of
the gospel messenger but also does not have a culturally relevant near-neighbor
witness within it. This very specific kind of cross-cultural evangelism is best
reserved to refer to the apostolic task of preaching Christ where he is not
known.[21]
In my mind this is a simple but crucial
distinction that brings a powerful focus to our evangelism efforts and holds
the potential to clear up our current confusion about missions and
missionaries. Once you accept this distinction then it automatically changes
the nature of the condition that we call lostness or the state of being
unreached. Let me illustrate my point in the form of a question. “Why are the
non-Christians Irem, a Turk, Ahmet, a Banjar and Tin Sau, a Bama, lost or
unreached in a way that the non-Christians John in Springfield, José in Costa Rica and Sun Yung in South Korea are not
lost or unreached?”
Before I answer that question I must clarify what
I mean by “lost” and “unreached.” We take the idea of lost from Jesus who
talked about coming to seek and save the lost (see Luke 15:1-10,
So what is the answer to this query? If all six of
these people are equally lost theologically, what other perspective is there to
consider? Here is where another important subtle point about the distinction
between evangelism within a sociocultural setting and cross-cultural evangelism
needs to be made. The implication is that in
Apostolic function in the 21st century
means that there will be people called primarily to reach their own people as
Peter was, the apostle to the Jews, and there will be those called to reach
those who are different than them in different sociocultural settings, where
the church does not yet exist. I think Paul’s statements about going where
Christ is not known and not building on another’s foundation means that were he
assessing the terrain today he would rejoice in the powerful indigenous
churches that exist in many settings and focus his sites on going to
sociocultural settings where the church is non-existent or a tiny, enclaved minority.
If we as a movement are to stay true to the vision
of the founders expressed in doing great evangelism and following the Pauline
model, then we will need to grapple with the implications of Acts 1:8 for
drawing distinctions between evangelism and cross-cultural evangelism and
working where the church exists and where it does not exist. In my thinking
these distinctions are critically important for our movement both for a
refocused vision of what we are doing cross-culturally outside of the borders
of the United States, and for what we do among our own national and indigenous
church movement, the Assemblies of God, USA.
Rather than trying to argue for the importance of
outreach in America using “unreached” as a buzzword and missing its technical
definition in missiology, it would be more effective in the long run to embrace
this distinction between the evangelistic outreach of a local church within its
sociocultural setting and the essential missionary task of cross-cultural
evangelism planting the church in sociocultural settings without a church
movement. This would bring the challenge to a fresh experience of Pentecost
leading to two critical fronts. The first is turning our 12,000 plus local
churches into lighthouses within their own
This has the benefit of preserving evangelistic
passion for outreach to Americans without attempting to pit it against the
truly critical cross-cultural evangelistic task of bringing pioneer breakthrough
where there is no church movement. While 200 million Americans are lost
theologically and are unreached in the sense of not yet belonging to Christ,
their potential access to the Gospel is a completely different issue compared
to the large blocks of ethnolinguistic peoples that have either no church
movements or exist as small and embattled minorities.
Let
me illustrate another area where the distinctions of Acts 1:8 bring clarity to our
cross-cultural work. I have often heard people say in one form or another that
nationals do things like evangelism better than missionaries. If we are talking
about evangelism in their own sociocultural setting to people who are like
them, then that is an absolutely correct concept. The problem is when this idea
is applied across the board to everything, including cross-cultural evangelism.
It can become a barrier to our own involvement and sense of responsibility. It
is quite possible for us to be equipping group A to reach their own people, and
never deal with the stereotypes, racism, hatred, and misunderstanding that keep
them from seeing group B, who reside within the borders of their own nation
state, as being those who Christ loves and died for and in need of the gospel
message. Once you truly cross a cultural boundary you are no longer “national”
even if it is within your own nation-state.[24] When an American, Korean, Brazilian, Angolan, or
Indian crosses a cultural boundary to proclaim the Christ the advantages
derived from being “national” and thus a near-neighbor witness disappears for
all of them. Thus apostolic function does not mean that we alone do the
proclamation of the Gospel, but that we also work as catalyzing agents to help
Christians in one setting “see” the others who are around them who are
different than them and have not heard the message of Christ. It means that we
as cross-cultural workers should be grabbing the hands of local believers and
taking them with us as we seek out those who do not have near-neighbor witness.
The concept of the nationals doing it better cannot be used to justify our own
inertia in reaching the least-reached simply because when it comes to crossing
cultural boundaries, most of the time they are not doing that type of work.
Apostolic Function
is a Heuristic that Defines for us What, Why, and How We Work
There is a natural objection that flows from my
first two points. By suggesting a narrow definition of missions as being
cross-cultural evangelism, and going a step farther to assert that such
evangelism should be based in the Pauline sense of going where Christ is not
known, I have suddenly problematized the labors of cross-cultural workers who
are not directly involved in such activity and who work in indigenous church
movements. This is an issue that needs to be answered clearly and carefully.
Let me begin by saying that I believe the
extremely difficult and complex work of proclaiming the Gospel, gathering
disciples into churches, and training leadership so that an indigenous church
movement can be formed where one did not previously exist is a work that
demands all the gifts in the body. The body metaphor used by Paul in I
Corinthians 12:12-26 is just as true in a cross-cultural setting as it is
inside of one’s own culture. Paul concludes that section in 12:27-31 by asking rhetorically,
“Are all apostles?” with the answer being of course no! So what is my argument
then about apostolic function if not everyone has the same gifts and functions
in the body of Christ? I have advocated an understanding of the missionary task
that is tight, narrow, and focused on cross-cultural evangelism where the
church does not exist. I now want to root that view of cross-cultural
evangelism in an apparently contradictory omnibus concept of cross-cultural
worker activity. I will argue here that apostolic function serves as a
heuristic for individual cross-cultural workers, and as the ethos for the
apostolic band or team of workers that sees itself performing the Pauline task
of missiological breakthrough whether by doing it themselves, doing it in
conjunction with a national church movement, or envisioning and equipping a
national church movement to do it on their own.
Let me back up and review some ideas to set the
stage for my arguments here. I noted above that beginning in the 1970s and
particularly since the 1980s to the present the phenomenal growth of the
national churches we work with has meant that our cross-cultural workers have
increasingly come to see themselves and are seen by our constituents as serving
the national church in some capacity. There has been a concomitant move from
generalist-type work to more specialist-type functions, particularly as these
national churches have grown and become more fully indigenous. I want to
suggest here that specialist workers tend to have a different ethos from
generalist pioneers who adapt to meet the need in a context where the church is
being birthed or nurtured in its early stages. This is not bad, nor does it
call into question their sincerity or commitment to the work they do, but it is
a much different ethos than our founders or people like Brother Hogan had about
what a missionary should be and do.
Listen to his response to the debate in the early
1960s about whether to split the terminology and call “fraternal workers” those
going to work with already existing church movements, reserving the term
missionary for those going to plant the Gospel among the non-Christian peoples
of the world:
Today, in some ecclesiastical circles, … The missionary
that is needed now, they say, is really a worker in some technical or
pedagogical skills; and, really a helper to the indigenous church. Instead of
being call a “missionary,” he is called a “fraternal worker.” This emphasis
would put the Great Commission in storage while the church adopts a kind of “buddy”
system, and the real heroes of the Cross are not men who confront heathen
religions with the message of
While the 1963 proposal to make a distinction between fraternal workers and
missionaries was not widely adopted,[26] I think that Brother
Hogan would be concerned to see that 40 years later, while still using the
terminology of a divine call to missions, increasing numbers of our missionary
team do indeed function as fraternal workers to very powerful indigenous
churches.
How do we rescue Paul’s, our founder’s and
forerunner’s in mission, and Brother Hogan’s view of missionary service in our
context today with powerful national churches in existence and many that are in
the final stages of becoming so? I want to suggest that apostolic function in
the sense I have described it above should become the heuristic for our work. I
am using “heuristic” here in the sense of an interpretive rubric for helping us
to understand what we do, why we do it, and how we operate. I see a number of
advantages in this. First, it recognizes that not all are apostles and that
there are a variety of different callings that are critical to the functioning
of the body of Christ. It affirms the giftings and callings that people have,
does not force everyone into the same mold, and yet as a heuristic it shapes
the identity of the worker which in turn shapes practice. However it also means
that every individual cross-cultural worker owns the apostolic vision of making
sure the Gospel is preached where it is not heard. When this kind of spiritual
DNA gets inside of people the “what” may continue to be the same-printing,
media, teacher training, Bible school teaching, curriculum development,
children’s ministry, training youth leaders-but the “why” is radically altered
as the worker sees their role as bringing the believers, local churches, and
the entire national church movement they are working with and among to embrace
the vision of reaching not only every person in their sociocultural setting but
of taking the Gospel to places where it has never been. This also changes the
“how” in our work because it puts each worker in the catalytic role of making
sure that cross-cultural evangelism does happen among the least-reached as all
their efforts are bent in this direction and with this ultimate goal. Stirring
up apostolic function does not mean redeploying already existing cross-cultural
workers but rather bending their expertise, giftings, and passion so that a
church movement in all of its parts can be mobilized for both evangelism in its
sociocultural setting and
cross-cultural evangelism.[27] Thus apostolic
function can best be expressed through a missionary fellowship that has
multiple giftings that are all committed to either bringing about an initial
breakthrough if it is needed, challenging and modeling a national church to
step out in such work, or teaching and training so that the national church can
send their own cross-cultural workers. In the sense that I am using it,
apostolic function requires that individual cross-cultural workers and
missionary fellowships are guided in their work by a “big picture” vision of
how what they are doing relates to the overall scheme of seeing missiological
breakthrough among the least-reached of our world.
Apostolic function leads us to address the imbalance of
missionary placement in the world.
In my previous point I argued the apostolic
function as a heuristic helps us to focus the work of already existing
cross-cultural workers. Here I want to suggest that stirring up apostolic
function at the agency level means addressing the imbalance that exists in
terms of where cross-cultural workers are located in the world. This is not
done by moving around those already serving, but believing God for a new
generation of harvest workers to go where church movements do not exist. It is
inherent in Paul’s vision of what being an apostle meant that there were
priorities for him to go where the Gospel had not yet been rooted. His
statements about going where Christ is not known (Romans
The database of the world’s least-reached people
groups is increasingly clear and cries out as an indictment against the
Christian world as to why we collectively in the body of Christ worldwide have
been so slow to bring the message of the Gospel to these groups.[28]
Some would argue that it is not the Pentecostal way to rely on data to
determine what we do, that we must listen to the Spirit. Others have decried
the call to go to the least-reached as managerial missiology.[29]
While there have indeed been excesses and much that is unwise and short-sighted
propagated in the name of reaching the least-reached, we as Pentecostals need
to tread carefully lest our assertion of being led by the Spirit does not end
up to be mere rhetoric in the face of all the places we have manifestly not
gone. It is inconceivable that the Holy Spirit, who loves all people and is not
willing that any should perish, would not be calling laborer into the harvest
fields of the least-reached. The imbalance in the world today reflects more our
inability to hear, and our hardness of heart, than God the Father, Son, and
Spirit overlooking millions of people who have no one in their sociocultural
setting to tell them the story of salvation.
Listen to Brother Hogan again:
In time and resources, we have come a long way from
May God help us to link a fresh Pentecost in the lives of 50-plus million
Assemblies of God Christians around the world with the Pauline insight of going
where the church is not yet rooted. I cannot help but think that people like
Paul and Brother Hogan would bristle at the thought of funneling the bulk of
precious new personnel and financial resources to places where we have
manifestly succeeded in our missions efforts.
Apostolic Function
Means Teaching, Modeling and Practicing Care for the Weak.
It is interesting that the intense debate found
among Christians who believe in the authority of Scripture regarding the
relationship between evangelism and social responsibility was not problematic
for either Jesus or Paul. You cannot pick up a book on missions without having
to deal with the issue of evangelism and social action. McGee notes that:
Missionaries and church leaders have long struggled with the tension between preaching the gospel and establishing charitable ministries (schools, orphanages, and hospitals) overseas. Should the missionary focus on saving souls or saving lives? Can one be done without “lionizing” the importance of the other?[31]
People of good will and firm commitment to Scripture come down on very
different sides of the issue and sometimes the debate becomes rather
acrimonious.
It seems much different to me when we come to
Jesus and Paul. Both of them noticeably lack the compartmentalization and
dichotomistic thinking that in my mind so readily characterizes both sides in
the debate. It is never a case of either/or, of one before the other.[32]
I want to suggest that the concern in our movement about the erosion of
evangelism in the face of taking care of physical needs[33]
grows out of our penchant for constructing institutional answers, seeing money
as a single-vector answer, and our corresponding neglect of relationships with
the poor. As one writer put it so memorably, when it is a case of family, you
never would even think about choosing between evangelism and social action.[34]
If you unpack that a bit, it becomes clear that
the all the necessity for maintaining a distinction in order to make sure that
the Gospel is preached disappears when the total context is an ongoing
relationship. In a relationship you do not have to make choices because you are
there face-to-face over time and there is no fear that either caring or proclamation
will be diminished, nor does one have to “set-up” the other. The relationship
provides the context for the interpretation of any given deed. Where there is
relationship there is the ability to explain the “why” of the deed, or for the
deed to illuminate the proclaimed word. Listen to Paul again in Acts 20:34-35:
You yourselves know that
these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions.
In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help
the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: “It is more blessed to give than to
receive.”
Paul’s concern for the Jerusalem poor (Galatians 2:10), his work on
collecting an offering for them (I Corinthians 16:1-4), his concern that widows
be cared for by the local church (I Timothy 5:3-16), and his admonition to help
the weak (asthenes—the same word as
in the Acts passage which can refer to economic weakness and poverty in both
contexts) shows that he did not conduct himself in an either/or fashion. The
experience of being reconciled to God, and living as a community under the rule
of God, meant that these things were the natural expressions and implications
worked out in human relationships of the message that he preached. The
predication of an ongoing relationship makes the temporal relations of
preaching and caring a moot point because in a relationship viewed as a whole
you can be doing both all of the time, even though chronologically there are
moments where you are proclaiming and moments where you are helping people.
Having said that, I want to follow by making a
seemingly contradictory point. We need to listen very carefully when people
like Brother Hogan and Melvin Hodges warn of the pitfalls that come when there
is a long-term focus on social improvement rather than the planting of
indigenous church movements. Here again I think one of the underlying
assumptions that makes their points much clearer is to see them related to a
time horizon and institutionalism.[35] A humanitarian
institution can be started by its founders for excellent reasons and with a
holistic ethos for presenting the Gospel and working it out in social
relationships. However, as is well known, institutions can take on a life of
their own and within a short time after the founder is gone begin to pursue an
agenda that is far different than the original purpose and vision that led to
its inception.
Where do we go from here? How do we chart a course
and maintain apostolic function and apostolic balance in the Pauline fashion
where proclamation and caring are lived out? I want to propose an incomplete
and sketchy outline of how to bring about an integration of our values to show
compassion in Jesus name with our other three core values of evangelizing,
planting churches, and training leaders.
First, let the prayer Jesus taught us be not only
our prayer but our motivating passion and guiding principle in pursuing our
work. We rarely unpack the implications of the first three imperatives of the
Lord’s Prayer in our prayer lives or our conduct. In part I think this is
because “hallowed be your name” is not a common phrase used in English. This is
an imperative that means “let your name by considered holy.” Here is the
concern that humans be reconciled to God, count his name holy, and bow their
knee to him. But this is followed by two more imperatives to let the rule of
God come and his will be done, that heaven might invade earth. This
revolutionary prayer brilliantly weaves together Jesus’ concern for all aspects
of the human condition. Apostolic function means that in whatever setting we
find ourselves we are going to work for the hallowing of his name and the
coming of his rule and will.
This leads naturally to a second point, the
critical importance of local churches as the instruments of the Kingdom. Listen
to Brother Hogan again:
If the missionary
enterprise is to be instrumental in transmitting the life of the Spirit, an
essential and everlasting aspect of this task must be the establishment of the
church. If the New Testament teaches us any one thing, it teaches that the life
of Christ must be taught and transmitted through the witness of the Church of
the Living Christ.
The relief of suffering
and aid to the impoverished are normal fruits of Christian love. The early
church undertook the responsibility of feeding its own poor and supporting the
widows and the unemployed who were not able to care for themselves. The
material effect, however, were never the chief motive—they were only an
important by-product of the greatest task of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ
to the ends of the earth. [36]
I think that what some of our leaders in the past were intimating in their
writings in an age when we were doing pioneer work and helping struggling
emerging national church movements has now become a reality. That is the
doctrine implied in the indigenous church principle that the expression of
compassion and the incarnating of Jesus in sociocultural settings should
ultimately flow from the indigenous church. The aphorism “nationals can do things
better” needs to be applied to humanitarian concerns as well.
Now I am not discounting partnership (our concept
of indigeneity has never stopped us from working in evangelism and discipleship
with other national churches), nor institutional or programmatic approaches
entirely, but think for a moment of the power of 50-plus million people and
over 280,000 churches worldwide being ignited to work individually and
collectively to turn ourselves to caring for our own and our neighbors who are
the weak, poor, widows, aged, exploited, those suffering from HIV/AIDS,
drought, famine, victims of war and violence.
Emphasizing the role of the local church leads to
my final point: that as a missions
agency we need to remain wary of institutionalism and a naïve view that simply
throwing money from the West at the complex problems of poverty fulfills our
duty and will solve the problem. Drive-by compassion, just as with drive-by
evangelism, is a truncated version of the real thing, treating people as
objects and imposing answers to problems generated from an outside perspective
rather than from the perspective of the people purportedly being served. Johan
Mostert told me at lunch one day that it is a nightmare financially and logistically
to hire three eight-hour shifts of people to care for children. A loving
family, or foster family can care for children 24 hours a day and do it joyfully,
more effectively, and efficiently. There are inherent limitations to what
institutions can do. I believe that it is an apostolic function to mobilize and
catalyze the body of Christ whether it is in its early stages of existence or whether
it is a powerful and numerically large movement to have an explosion of love
and compassion so that as Jesus’ hands and feet we can bring God’s rule and
will to the worlds of the poor and hurting.
There are many different types of Christian
agencies in the world, and they all have different purposes and objectives
according to their sense of calling. Some are devoted solely to evangelistic
concerns; others are dedicated to transforming social settings. But in some
cases there are agencies that by their very nature, in practice, if not in
explicit philosophy, “do it all.”[37] Our four pillars—reach, plant, train, and touch—commit us to “doing it all,” but as a mission agency and not a local church or
national church movement. As a missions agency with an apostolic calling, which
is the way we have conceived of ourselves from the beginning, preaching the
Gospel and caring for the weak flows out of who we are. Both are activities
that must be led by the Spirit, and I would argue, need to evince a flexibility
and mobility in a strategic sense. Where you start may not be where you want to
finish. Because our goal is to plant church movements we need to infect those
movements with the same apostolic vision that we have—to reach, plant, train, and touch. Institutional
and programmatic functions that grow out of the vision and initiative and
concern of local churches (and partnering with the worldwide body of Christ as
well) are of a completely different nature than similar functions that are
founded by the mission and must be sustained by the mission virtually without
an end in sight.
We
have done and are doing today wonderful and incredible work meeting physical
needs around the world through individual missionaries, local churches,
institutions, programs, and national church movements. Keeping in focus the
first three imperatives of the Lord’s Prayer, emphasizing the role of the local
church, and keeping a light hold on expatriate-driven institutions while moving
to partner with national church-initiated social action will keep us firmly
rooted in apostolic function that includes proclamation and caring.
Apostolic Function
Means Staying a Long Time
My previous point on caring for the weak leads me
naturally to a final point. Paul said in Romans 1:5 that his apostolic calling
involved bringing the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. Jesus
told us not to make converts but disciples, and to teach them to obey all that
he commanded us. Cross-cultural evangelism is incredibly complex, and what the
Pauline example implies is that it takes a long time. In Paul’s context he
moved about planting churches within the Mediterranean world where there was a
common language and the presence of both Jews and God-fearers who became the
first converts. Today, when we go to peoples that require us to learn new and
complex languages with deeply-entrenched religious systems, who have no
background in a biblical worldview, planting an indigenous national church
movement can be hard labor over decades.
Listen to Brother Hogan in the early 1970s:
Today we can get all the prospective missionaries we want
who say, “I want to touch my toe in the water to see if I like it.” This gospel
was not planted in 91 countries of the world by people like that. It was
presented, prayed over, plowed under by people who burned their bridges behind
them and went to lands afar when it wasn’t nearly as easy as it is today to
tell men of the love of Jesus Christ.
Somebody has said, “Well, Brother Hogan, you’ve got all
this mass communication. Isn’t it a push-button war now?” No, it is not! We
need men who will go, identify
themselves with the culture, learn the language, turn their back on
We don’t need people who just want to make a little sortie
into another land so they can come back and be called international
evangelists. We need people who will travel light and pray lots and preach for
the little and preach for the big and stay long enough to tell the dark world
the gospel of Jesus. Give us men who are willing to distribute to the masses.”
(74).
Clearly Brother Hogan was of the opinion that cross-cultural work is both
demanding and requires a lifetime commitment.
Brother
Hogan had a saying, “Find the soft spot, and pour on the resources.”[38]
One of the themes of our missiology is being open to where the Spirit is
bringing in the harvest, and these are the “soft spots” in our world where the
Holy Spirit is breaking through spiritual darkness. We can never forget that a
truly indigenous church movement is a very robust concept. The apostolic
function of developing a church movement that is obedient to Christ, incarnates
Jesus in their world, is white hot with passion to reach everyone within their
cultural sphere, and comes full cycle to do cross-cultural evangelism to those
who have not heard outside of their own sociocultural setting, demands time,
people and resources. It is not simply the work of an individual but embraces
the catalytic function that an entire mission team has with all of its gifts
being purposefully and intentionally expressed to achieve these New Testament
goals.
In
the “flow of the game” apostolic function means that we do many things all at
the same time, and we are in different stages in different places depending on
the circumstances of that setting. There is no one right way, or one singular
cross-cultural worker role. It demands that we be led by the Holy Spirit to
know when a national church is indigenous, when to move on to areas where the
church does not exist, when to shift the emphasis of our work to keep ourselves
on the cutting edge of apostolic ministry as Paul conceived of it.
Concluding thoughts
My guess is that most of
our current career mission staff and the people who are now coming to our
agency as candidates do not “feel” very apostolic. I have tried to argue here
that in order to be true to Scripture, the original vision of our founders, the
early generations of our missionaries, and the missiological reality of large
numbers of ethnolinguistic groups where the church does not exist, we must stir
up among ourselves the sense of apostolic function.
Apostolic function has
nothing to do with authority and everything to do with the pursuit of the
apostolic goals of preaching the gospel where it has not yet been heard, to
plant the church where the potential for near-neighbor witness does not exist, and
to care for the weak and hurting. It has nothing to do with position, rank, and
titles, and everything to do with a catalytic and mobilizing function to waken those
believers that exist in a given setting, or to win the first wave of believers;
it is about team, and about seeing the big picture to know how every gift in
the body works to bring the church to its highest potential in Christ; it is about
teaching and modeling care for the weak, stirring the release of the body of
Christ to be the hands and feet of Jesus in their worlds, and challenging all
forms of self-absorption and prejudice that keep us from reaching out to those
who are different from us.
I believe that stirring
up the sense of the apostolic function of cross-cultural workers is needed for
this time that we live in. Our growth around the world means that we are now
one Assemblies of God mission agency among many, and the number of new agencies
is growing rapidly. We as the Assemblies of God
Recommitting ourselves
to the apostolic function of every cross-cultural worker pounds down a stake in
the midst of the winds of trendiness and anchors us to practices that led to
50-plus million worldwide adherents and will ensure that we will stay at the
cutting edge of what God is doing and longing to do in our world rather than settling
for more manageable and marketable activities among the churched world, turning
the fire of Pentecost into the fizzle of a series of memorable mission
experiences.[39]
At the end of the day
the measure of apostolic function is not going to be so much about what we are
actually doing—the kind of work we are engaged in—because
that will vary as the gifts in the body vary. It is more about what we cry
over. I have observed in my 30 years as a Pentecostal that we love to celebrate
and cheer victories. And we have a lot to cheer about these days. But I think
that we need to cry more. In 1914 when we started there were very few things to
cheer about. Those early Pentecostal pioneers were a despised and misunderstood
minority who dreamt of conducting the greatest evangelization the world would
ever see, and they were burdened by the Spirit for a world that was in
spiritual darkness. I think that it was harder to cheer and easier to cry then.
Now that we have many victories to cheer about, I think we need to remember to
take time to cry over things … like entire people groups without a near-neighbor
witness, people living in our world today in sociocultural systems where they
will never meet a relevant witness in their lifetime, for those who struggle to
survive in grinding poverty and are victims of war, exploitation, and violence.
Some of us have an
easier time at finding our apostolic function and weeping because we are right
in the middle of a host of lost people. I have had the wonderful privilege of
spending the majority of my adult life in a predominantly Buddhist country with
a small Christian movement, working together with a group of people that if you
met us on the street, you would find most ordinary. My friends and colleagues
of the Thailand Assemblies of God Missionary Fellowship do a variety of things,
wear lots of hats, and have spiritual giftings that run right across the board.
Some of my most precious memories are listening to them cry during times of
prayer, and crying with them. These dear friends as individuals and a
collectivity are living out apostolic function. We do not have to use our
imaginations to conjure up people who are not only not believers but who have
extremely limited potential to hear of Christ—we run into them on a
regular basis. We know their names, and we pray that our efforts, that often feel
so feeble to us, will be taken by the Spirit and used to introduce people to
the living God and his Son Jesus Christ. I work among the urban poor who are
Muslims and Buddhists, who live in slums where for the most part the small
church that exists does not venture. When I close my eyes I can see their faces
and their eyes, and it is not hard to cry.
But we are a people of
the Spirit. I trust the Holy Spirit to stir our minds and spirits even when we
are far from the least-reached. I trust that the Holy Spirit will indeed burden
our hearts for these we have never met, and put his burden—for
not just the lost, but the lost who have no access to the saving message—upon
our hearts.
May the Spirit who gave passion and boldness to
tell the story of Jesus to the early church, to our founders in 1914, and to the
waves of our early missionaries, the fruit of whose hard labor we now stand
upon, work in our hearts to be consumed by a desire to see his name hallowed,
his kingdom come, and his will be done.
APOSTOLIC FUNCTION
Alan R. Johnson
Originally published in AGTS News: Professor Asks Difficult Questions About Meaning of Missions
http://agts.edu/news/news_archives/2006johnson_inaugural_lecture.html
Posted in the July 2007 issue of www.globalmissiology.org with permission
|
Dr. Alan R. Johnson was inaugurated as the first J. Philip
Hogan professor of world missions on |
|
|
|
|
|
Listen to Johnson's Inaugural Lecture: "Apostolic Function and |
||
Length
|
Download
|
File Size
|
|
1 hour, 20
minutes |
18.8 MB |
|
|
|
320 KB |
|
_____________________________________________________
About Dr. Alan R. Johnson
Alan was born and raised in
In addition to his work with the urban poor, Alan has been involved in several functions at a broader level that coalesce around least-reached peoples. These ministries include the Strategic Church Planting Initiative in the Asia Pacific region which focuses on developing new church planting teams among least reached groups, the Institute for Buddhist Studies that trains people working among people groups influenced by Buddhist worldviews, and the Acts 1:8 Project which is an international committee focusing on emerging missions movements and unreached people groups in the Assemblies of God worldwide fellowship.
Alan is a graduate of Northwest University (B.A. in Pastoral Ministry), AGTS
(M.A. in Biblical Studies), and Azusa Pacific University M.A. in Social
Sciences). He has recently defended his PhD dissertation at the Oxford Centre
for Mission Studies/University of
Alan and Lynette have two grown daughters, Laura and Becki, who are both
alumni of
The Johnson's look forward to returning to