The missionary nature of the Church served to propel the Early Church into new places throughout the world. The Christian message spread throughout the world. When Christianity was embraced by the Roman emperor Constantine and later made the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion and the political structure of the state were joined together in a relationship known as Christendom. Over time, this union became so strong that all persons within the Roman Empire were baptized into the Church and, therefore, declared to be Christians (with the exception of the Jews). (1) Even after the Protestant Reformation, the influence of Christendom continued as the European nations continued to be wedded to the church. Even in North America, where there has been no official union between church and state, the church received a privileged position, and it was generally assumed that the United States was a Christian nation.(2) Christendom has continued into the twenty-first century, although its influence is gradually diminishing.(3)
Within Christendom, the Church became the guardian of the Christian faith. Just as all persons living within a Christian nation were understood to be Christian, all those who lived outside the Christian nations of Europe (and later America) were considered pagans in need of conversion. It was, therefore, the church’s responsibility to send missionaries to distant (pagan) lands in order to convert the heathen to Christianity. Along the way, Western ideals of culture and technology were imported to foreign lands, both by missionaries and by those outside the church.
During the past two hundred years, as the modern missions movement changed the face of missions, a specialized meaning was given to “missions.” Missions societies came into existence to work through or alongside churches in the West. Missions was viewed as a one-way street. The Western churches sent missionaries, and the non-Western nations received the missionaries. Such an arrangement easily led to paternalism and other dependencies which treated non-Western churches as second-class churches.
On the local church level, missions has been present as one of many programs within the church, often competing with other programs for personal commitments from parishioners as well as for financial resources. Churches have a missions budget which supports missionaries in foreign lands. In this model, missions, discipleship, evangelism are often separate from one another. The modern missions movement did much to promote the spread of the Gospel to distant parts of the world, especially during times when the average person did not travel far from their hometown. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, a gradual shift has occurred in the development of a global church.
Developments in the world have led to the widespread mobility of persons, the effects of globalization, religious pluralism in the West, missionary activity of other religions, cultural and ethnic diversity, suspicion of traditional institutions such as the state and the church, the growing maturity of Christians in non-Western churches, and the declining influence of churches in Western nations. (4)
A new paradigm for approaching missions is forming, as younger non-Western churches have slowly been recognized as equals with the churches in the Christian nations of the West. The Christendom model of the Western church as the church for others is turning into the church with others, as the missio Dei is understood as the source of mission rather than the source being in the Western Church. Missions can no longer be viewed as one-way traffic from the West to the two-thirds world, for non-Western nations have begun to send missionaries as well. Missions still involves crossing cultures to spread the message of the Gospel, but it is a two-way street now. Every church, everywhere, is being understood to be in a state of mission. (5)
1. Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, Mission: An Essential Guide (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 32.
2. Darrell L. Guder, ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 48-49.
3. Cardoza-Orlandi, 32.
4. Ibid., 35.
5. David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York: Orbis Books, 1991), 379.
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