Category Archives: Missiology

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Living simply to serve the poor–Luke 12:33

Christianity Today published Craig’s article, “When Jesus Wanted All my Money,” at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/may/when-jesus-wanted-all-my-money.html. It was supposed to be about a verse that impacted him, so he chose Luke 12:33 and developed it in light of a theme that runs throughout Luke’s Gospel, sharing also how it impacted him.

Later note: this article is now locked for nonsubscribers to CT, so that only the opening paragraphs are visible. For nonsubscribers, a full copy of a related article will be posted here, probably in August 2015.

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The whole armor of God–Ephesians 6

There are various dimensions of what people often call “spiritual warfare,” but one dimension we sometimes miss is the mundane, day-to-day way we treat each other and walk with God … things like truth, justice, faith, sharing our faith, and so forth. That is, some of the very things that Ephesians 6 discusses when it talks about the full armor of God.

I wrote a fuller essay on this subject–longer than the normal blog post here–for a book edited partly by my friend Rob Plummer of Southern Seminary. The essay is available free at the following location (as well as some other references on the internet):
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/files/2013/02/Keener-chapter-from-Pauls-Missionary-Methods-2.pdf
Although I touch on some other elements of spiritual warfare, I emphasize here the practical, day-to-day dimensions involved. Of course, I still have much to learn in practice; but I believe you will find the Bible study helpful.

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Jesus’s Mission—Luke 4:18-19

Jesus declares that one of several aspects of his mission is to preach good news to the poor. In so doing, he echoes Isaiah’s theme of good news about restoration and the deliverance of God’s people.

On the day of Pentecost, Peter applies Joel’s prophecy to the church’s mission: God’s Spirit empowers us to speak for God like the prophets of old (Acts 2:17-18). In the context of Jesus’ words in the previous chapter (Acts 1:8), the most important element of this mission involves testifying of Christ to all peoples.

But while evangelism is central to our mission, the parallel with an earlier scene in Luke’s work suggests that we should not neglect another prophetic theme that is also part of Spirit-empowered mission. As Joel’s prophecy provides the text for the church’s inaugural message in Acts, a prophecy of Isaiah provides the text for Jesus’ inaugural message in the Gospel of Luke.

Luke 4:16-30 recounts the opening scene of Jesus’ public ministry in Luke’s Gospel. The placement of this scene at this point in Luke highlights the important role that it fills in Luke’s Gospel. Luke elsewhere usually follows the same sequence as Mark, where Luke includes the same events that Mark does, even though no one expected ancient biographies to follow chronological sequence. On this occasion, however, Luke provides a scene not only more detailed than Mark’s parallel but earlier than in its place in Mark. Luke’s scene prefigures some key elements in Jesus’ ministry.

Here Jesus applies the words of Isaiah 61 to his own ministry: the Spirit anointed him to bring liberation to those in need. First, his mission was to proclaim good news to the poor. Throughout Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel of Luke, he indeed emphasizes God’s care for the poor (Luke 6:20; 16:22) and the responsibility of others to care for them (12:33; 14:13; 18:22). (Sometimes he even miraculously provides food for hungry crowds.)

Jesus also came to free captives and liberate the oppressed; while Jesus did not literally break people out of prisons (perhaps to John the Baptist’s chagrin), Jesus certainly freed those who were oppressed by the devil (Luke 13:12-14; Acts 10:38). Likewise, in line with Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus came to heal the blind, like the blind man by the Jericho road (Luke 18:35). Indeed, he later healed Saul of both physical and moral blindness (Acts 9:18; 26:18).

The announcing of good news in Isaiah 61, which Jesus quotes, harks back to a theme that appears earlier in Isaiah (see for example Isaiah 40:9; 41:27; 52:7). In these passages, God comforts suffering Israel with a promise of restoration. Israel will be taken captive, enslaved and impoverished, but God will liberate and bless his people. This is a good news about peace for God’s people, a message that God is ready to demonstrate his reign, or kingdom (Isaiah 52:7). By Jesus’s day, many Jewish people had settled again in their land, but they still longed for God to redeem, restore, and exalt Israel. Jesus, in his person, not only preaches that good news but embodies it, for he is the savior of the world.

When Jesus announces this part of his mission, his home town initially responds pleasantly (Luke 4:22). But then Jesus begins to apply Isaiah’s prophecy beyond the oppressed of Israel. Jesus warns that, like earlier prophets, he will face unbelief at home (Luke 4:24). Elijah, for example, had been sent to a widow in the land of Phoenicia—from the same region as the hated Jezebel (4:26). Elisha had not healed the lepers of Israel, but only the foreign general Naaman (4:27). (After 2 Kings 5 spoke of Naaman, 2 Kings 7 spoke of uncured lepers in Israel’s capital, Samaria. In Luke 17, Jesus heals a Samaritan leper along with Jewish ones, even though Samaritans in his own day were often hostile to his people.)

Once Jesus challenges his people’s nationalism, they are no longer pleased with his words, but in fact wish to kill him (Luke 4:28-29). They have suffered enough from the Gentiles, and do not want to hear about God’s concern for outsiders. This opening scene prefigures Jesus’ mission in the Gospel: to reach the outsiders, even at the expense of incurring the enmity of the “insiders.” This activity paves the way for the church’s (often reluctant) mission to non-Jews in the Book of Acts. Thus in Acts, for example, it is Jesus’s own followers who need to be reminded to welcome outsiders (Acts 11:1-3).

Jesus’s message in the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4 offers a stark warning for us today. The Spirit has empowered us to cross cultural and other barriers with Jesus’s message, a message of concern for people, a message of justice, liberation, and salvation. To do so effectively, however, we must be ready to go beyond the assumptions of our own nation or culture, to side with whatever God declares in his word. Jesus wants to bring his followers into unity with one another, beyond all our ethnic, nationalistic or other prejudices. May we continue to carry on the mission of bringing the good news about God’s kingdom and caring for people’s needs.

For further details, see Craig’s IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, now in its second, revised edition (2014).

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Who are Christ’s ambassadors?—2 Corinthians 5:20

Who are Christ’s ambassadors in 2 Cor 5:20? When Paul says “we are ambassadors for Christ,” does he refer to all believers, or only to himself?

In every or almost every instance of “we” in the preceding chapters, Paul refers to himself and his ministry colleagues. Probably in 5:20, then, Paul also refers not to all Christians as ambassadors, but only to those who are bringing God’s message of reconciliation. After all, those he is entreating to be reconciled to God are the Christians in Corinth, who are not ambassadors but those who are in need ambassadors to them. That is why he urges them to be reconciled to God (5:20; 6:1-2, 17-18)!

Perhaps ideally all Christians should be bringing God’s message of reconciliation, but in practice most of the Christians in Corinth weren’t. The Corinthian Christians were acting like non-Christians, so Paul and his colleagues act as representatives for Christ’s righteousness to them, just as Christ represented our sin for us on the cross (5:21). Paul may be using hyperbole, a figure of speech in which one rhetorically overstates something to graphically emphasize a point. The Corinthians may not be unconverted, but they are acting that way, so Paul urges them to be converted.

The Corinthians should recognize that they themselves attest Paul’s ministry (3:1-3), a ministry of God’s new covenant in Christ by the Spirit (3:4-18). Paul and his colleagues have suffered to bring others the gospel (4:7-12, 16), including for the sake of the believers in Corinth (4:12, 15; 5:12-13). The division between “us” and “you” has been sustained through most of the preceding context.

This section of 2 Corinthians is primarily a defense of Paul’s apostolic ministry; Paul summons the Corinthians to recognize his role and to reject his critics.

Nevertheless, Paul and his colleagues do offer us an example. Those who are reconciled to God may in some way carry the message of reconciliation (5:18), as Paul did. Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation (5:17), and thus has the Spirit that guarantees our future with Christ (5:4-5), the trust on the basis of which Paul is ready to suffer and die for the gospel. Not only Paul, but all of us for whom Christ died should no longer live for ourselves but for Christ (5:15). Like Paul, we who fear the Lord must seek to persuade others (5:11). Paul elsewhere presented himself as a model for the Corinthians (1 Cor 4:16; 11:1). We may not all be apostles like Paul, but all of us can live and speak like ambassadors, representing Christ’s name to others.

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Paul’s Asian mission to Europe—Acts 16:9

The first missionaries were not Europeans, but were from a part of Asia just a few days’ walk north of Africa. Yet even at an early time, they brought their message to Europe.

When God gave Paul a dream of a Macedonian inviting him to Macedonia (Acts 16:9), Paul and his companions set sail for Macedonia and began the first recorded missionary successes Paul had experienced since he parted ways with Barnabas. Yet there is a possible geographic significance of this journey that we might miss.

Paul was in Alexandria Troas when he had this vision, and Greeks and Romans typically associated this large city with nearby Troy. Greeks had long considered Troy the entry point for Greek invasions of Asia. In Greeks’ most prominent epic story, the Greeks warred against Troy. Centuries later, the Macedonian prince Alexander the Great claimed to repeat the earlier Greek conquests when he invaded the Persian empire—starting at Troy.

Troy was on the northeast coast of Asia Minor, and Greek and Roman sources regularly treated it as a major boundary point between “Europe” (their own continent) and “Asia.” These boundaries had always been arbitrary—early Greeks had defined everything to their east as Asia, and to their south as Africa, and themselves as Europe. By this period, Greek and Asian culture had interacted with each other for centuries.

Paul’s movement into Europe from Troas might strike many first-century readers as significant. By Greek and Roman standards, Paul and his companions were Asian, and preached an Asian religion (Judea and Galilee were part of the Roman province of Syria in the continent of Asia).

Greeks and Romans sometimes boasted that they were conquerors of Asia, although by this they could mean only part of Asia. (Rome’s most serious military challenge long remained the Parthian empire, which controlled regions now including Iran. Beyond Iran, Rome merely had trade ties, for example with India, Vietnam and China.) Yet now Asian representatives of a universal, but initially Afroasiatic, faith were moving in the reverse direction. Yet these messengers did not go simply as colonialists in reverse. In this case, they brought not violent conquest but good news about God’s universal, transforming kingdom.

Since that time the message about Jesus has spread among many nations. In the first few centuries, north Africa and what is now Turkey were the places where Christianity was strongest; later it spread elsewhere, sometimes diminishing in areas where it was once strong. The east African empire of Axum, in what is now Ethiopia, converted to Christianity in the early fourth century, and has remained predominantly Christian since that time; Syrian Christians evangelized further east, including parts of India. Later, for a period of time, the west was a dominant center of Christianity, but all scholars now agree that Christianity is stronger and growing much faster in Africa, Latin America and much of Asia.

It has never been correct to view Christianity as a “western” religion. Geographically, it originated in what Europeans called Asia, not far from what Europeans defined as Africa. Yet from the beginning, God intended it not only for Israel, not only for Asia, not only for the Mediterranean Roman empire. From the beginning God intended a people for his name from among all the nations. God who created all peoples also sent his Son to redeem members of all peoples. Paul’s dream in Macedonia was just one reminder of this: “Come over into Macedonia and help us.” God loves all peoples. If we love him, we must also love and serve all peoples.

Craig Keener is author of 17 books, including the IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament and a four-volume commentary on Acts, as well as coauthor with Glenn Usry of Black Man’s Religion.

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A missionary meets the mother church—Acts 21:20-25

When Paul visited the church in Jerusalem, its leaders reaffirmed their acceptance of his Gentile mission: Gentiles did not have to become culturally Jewish to become followers of Jesus (Acts 21:25). Those in any culture who become Christians—whether the culture is geographically distant, immigrants near us, or even young people in our churches—are called to give up their sins, but not non-sinful elements of their culture.

What the Jerusalem church’s leaders understood, however, was more difficult for much of the Jerusalem church to fathom. Their local suffering had understandably shaped their approach to Gentiles. Roman governors had exploited Judea for years; the brief tenure of a Judean king, Agrippa I, had restored Judeans’ self-respect and desire for freedom, but his early death had been followed by even worse repression from irresponsible governors. Most Judeans, whose contact with Rome was entirely negative, felt they had good reason to mistrust Gentiles—and any Jews who compromised too much with them. Even in more recent history, this has been a natural response to colonial oppression.

Unfortunately, it rendered plausible rumors about Paul, a Jewish missionary among the Gentiles who was not back in Jerusalem often enough to defend himself (Acts 21:21). Today, no less than then, some Christians are ready to criticize other Christians without taking the time to understand how they often are relating to different situations than the critics face. Sometimes this criticism misrepresents those criticized and becomes slander.

Consciously or unconsciously, the church in Jerusalem had adopted some of the perspectives of its culture, just as most of us do in our various cultures today. Their identification with their culture was helpful in reaching their culture, to the extent that the values they shared were positive or neutral. After years of Jerusalem believers’ faithful witness within their culture (21:20), the message of Jesus was not as controversial there as it had once been; Paul’s audience in the temple later listened intently as he talked about Jesus (22:2-20). Once he talked about going Gentiles, however, many of his hearers demanded his death (22:21-22).

Paul himself was willing to accommodate local Jerusalem culture to reduce offense (21:20-26). He did this with Gentiles and was certainly ready to identify with his own heritage. (Even in the colonial era the best missionaries, who were often at odds with colonial authorities, related to local cultures much better than did contemporaries from the colonial cultures; e.g., William Carey, David Livingstone, Mary Slessor, and Hudson Taylor.)

But Paul was not willing to compromise the demand for unity with believers from other cultures or the need to preach to other peoples; to do so was to compromise the gospel itself. (From Paul’s letters we may even infer that he was in Jerusalem precisely on a mission of ethnic reconciliation, Rom 15:27.) When any local culture’s nationalism refuses to love people in other cultures, unity with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ comes before unity with our culture. Thus Paul spoke about going to the Gentiles even though it was likely to arouse his hearers’ anger (22:21-22).

The danger of overidentifying with our culture at the expense of the gospel was not distinctive to the Jerusalem church; it is a temptation in most cultures. Missiologists distinguish contextualization from syncretism. Contextualization involves making the gospel message culturally relevant, translating it in such a way that people in a given culture understand it thoroughly. Syncretism is where one replaces or mixes the gospel with cultural elements religiously incompatible with it. Paul identified with local culture, but would not compromise his gospel message. Elsewhere, he rejected false gods and sexual immorality even though they were widespread in local cultures. In Jerusalem, he refused to compromise the universality of Christ’s claim (seeking followers from all nations) to fit the expectations of his own culture.

Only God knew how much the future lay more with Paul’s mission than with the megachurch in Jerusalem. Within a decade, Jesus’ followers had to flee Jerusalem in view of its impending destruction. The Diaspora churches eventually outgrew the Judean churches. In the centuries that immediately followed, Christianity grew especially in western Asia, north Africa and southern Europe; then it spread further west in Asia, north in Europe and south into east Africa. In the nineteenth century, western nations sent most missionaries. Today, many younger churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America far outnumber churches in the west, often outpace them in devotion to prayer and evangelism, and often send more missionaries. More believers live in these regions than in the west, and much of the gospel’s future lies with them. Mission today requires heeding the voices of the church throughout the world. No one culture’s church has everything. We need one another, and must partner together for Christ’s gospel.

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Mission strategy and church reality — Revelation 1:4-8

The fact that Revelation was sent first to the most strategic cities of Asia Minor, trusting that its message would spread from there, invites us to think strategically in our plans to spread God’s message to our communities and the world. We should think as strategically as possible as we mobilize believers for world mis­sions, develop strategies for serving our communities, organize target­ group evangelism, and so forth.

Yet our vantage point in history may also allow us to draw an additional application that would have been less clear in John’s day. When Revelation was written, Christianity flourished in western Turkey, but over the centuries each of these churches gradually succumbed to pressures until the last was virtually  stamped out  by  Islam. The regions where the early church was strongest (Turkey, Syria, and North  Africa) are now Islamic strongholds.

Yet by and large it was the church rather than Islam that destroyed the church; Muslim invaders simply mopped up after them. In North Africa, Christianity weakened itself through internal doctrinal and ethnic divisions, heresies, and the insensitivity of Byzantine and Latin Christians to local cul­ture. Nubia remained a richly Christian African culture until its growing weakness in both missions and Christian education led to its collapse to Islam in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The disunity of the church led to the demise of a glorious Eastern Orthodox culture before Islam. Regions relatively barren of the gospel two centuries ago are now flourishing with the gospel, while parts of the Western world struggle to maintain a Christian voice.

Lampstands can be moved from their place (Revelation 2:5), and this should serve as a warning to believers in various parts of the world today: We dare not take our role in God’s plan for granted. When part of the church abandons its mission, God will raise up others to fulfill it.

(Adapted from The NIV Application Commentary: Revelation, published by Zondervan. Buy the book here.)