Mission in the Early Church

Mission in the Early Church

Introduction

Jesus was on a mission from God! God created the world and humanity out of love, but people unfortunately distanced themselves from God's love and from one another. God made a promise through Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and other holy men and women of Israel to reestablish that right relationship of love and that way of salvation. God sent Jesus Christ, who had existed from the beginning of time, to our world to show human beings who we are and how we are to live. Jesus taught us about God's love, which embraces all people, including the “impure” lepers and tax-collectors, which calls us to treat everyone as our neighbor and brother or sister, including our enemies, and which requires all of us as sinners to turn from our old ways to the new life of God. Jesus Christ was God's love, forgiveness, salvation, healing, justice, and compassion in the flesh, and he reestablished the right relationship with God through his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus was on a mission from God, and we Christians need to continue that mission in the flesh.

The question of the Church and its mission is forcing itself upon the Christian community, and it can not be ignored. The rising importance of nations and peoples traditionally non- Christian - such as China, India, Japan, and much of Africa - is bringing home the fact that Christians are a minority of the world's population. And more ominously, the traditional bulwarks of western Christian culture - Europe, the United States - are without question reverting to what Christopher Dawson has termed "a new kind of paganism." The underpinning of ideals and mores, engendered by the Christian gospel, upon which modern Western cultures were constructed is showing massive fissures. The bowels of Western civilization are being exposed and they are no longer Christian. The manifestations are everywhere about us: the demand for state-supported abortion, declining church membership, increasing Church-State confrontations (i.e. the question of women's ordination in the Church of Sweden, the abortion question in Norway). The Church no longer enjoys the luxury of spontaneous general acceptance. It will increasingly have to proclaim its way, explain its way, and even suffer its way into the hearts of a hostile world. We are, let there be no doubt, returning to a pre-Constantinian era in which the Church is an outcast society whose sole support is the Gospel, whose sole comfort is hope in the resurrection? If such is the situation, a study of the mission endeavor of the early Church may be beneficial and instructive.

New Understanding of Mission

Since the renewal of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), many things have changed within the Catholic Church. The liturgy is celebrated in a language and style that promote fuller understanding and participation; lay people have become more actively involved; the attitudes of Catholics toward Protestants have shifted from competition and suspicion to cooperation and understanding. Vatican II likewise marked a dramatic turning point in ...