5 Unleashing the Gospel

Studying this lesson will help you:

• Explain how God helped the early church to be faithful to Christ’s mandate to be His witnesses.
• Describe what Jesus meant when He said, “You will be my witnesses.”
• Describe the crucial importance of the Acts 15 council for understanding how to present the gospel to the nations without presenting cultural obstacles to following Christ.
• Explain why the conversion barrier is greater than the communication barrier in pioneer mission work.
• Explain why Paul’s two cross-cultural principles of “become like” and “remain like” are crucial to seeing breakthroughs of the gospel.
• Describe the difference and relationship between the apostolic and congregational structures of the church.
• Learn how a person can develop an “apostolic passion” for the worship of Jesus among the nations.
• Explain the strategic value of suffering and martyrdom in terms of the triumph of truth, the defeat of evil, and the glory of God.

We have seen that whenever God’s people have been unfaithful, God has remained persistent in His purpose. Through many generations God is the faithful one, unfolding His plan to bring light to the nations with steady continuity. All history comes to a breakthrough moment in Jesus. We have seen how Christ trained His followers. His death broke the power of sin in a decisive way. His resurrection meant the power of His life could be extended to all nations. He commissioned them with power and clear purpose. As Jesus departed, the entire purpose of God seemed to be in the hands of a few ordinary men and women with a spotty track record of faithfulness. What would happen? Would they fulfill God’s purpose? Would God’s purpose come to a standstill?

Some have judged that these early leaders failed for long years, delaying the advance of the gospel. The real matter is not whether the disciples stopped the progress of missionaries going out to the nations. The wonderful thing to behold is that the nations were not hindered from following Christ. The Holy Spirit was at work, opening “a door of faith” for the peoples and helping the apostles to hold it open. The crucial moment of unleashing the gospel to advance throughout the nations was the Jerusalem Council, described in Acts 15.

In this lesson we will see how God launched the World Christian Movement. We will discover that the church is a double structure that endures to this day. We will watch how ordinary people chose a strategy of suffering, which they learned from Jesus, and will consider how we can live with that same apostolic passion. We will examine the biblical grounds of hope for an enormous ingathering at the end of the age.

I. A Small Following Becomes a Global Movement

Were the disciples slow to extend the gospel to distant nations? Steven Hawthorne presents the idea that they were incredibly faithful and swift to obey, as God helped them to be obedient to do what He had given them.

A. Persistence in Big-Picture Vision. Jesus gave them orders “by the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:2). The encounter on the Emmaus Road prefigured how the resurrected Jesus continues to speak to His church even though He may go unseen. At that time He recounted the entire biblical story of His glory and the kingdom as a backdrop for the specific instructions they were to carry out. The initial assignment was to do a strategic yet dangerous thing: stay in Jerusalem. It’s a common misconception to imagine that instead of reaching out to the nations, the disciples stayed home. But Jerusalem was not their home! In fact, by staying, they subjected themselves to great danger.

B. Boldness in Public Witness. Staying in Jerusalem was the surest and most public way to encounter the pressure of political and religious powers. Standing this test by their clear testimony is exactly what Jesus meant by the word “witness.” The idea of “witnessing” in our day usually means attempting to communicate the gospel to others. But the use of this term was much different in biblical days. To “witness” was to offer prolonged public testimony. The court setting was not a way to get a public venue to preach “sermons.” The trials were not really about conveying gospel information. Instead, the ordeal of public trials revealed the willingness of people to suffer. In this way, they established the value of following Christ and thus confirmed the validity of the Christ-following movement to many people.

C. Faithfulness to Accelerate Gospel Breakthrough. One of the most crucial moments in Acts is certainly the Jerusalem Council. The gospel movement could have evolved to become nothing more than a small splinter sect of Judaism. Instead, it became a movement of faith that centered on Jesus and extended the heritage and hope of the Hebrew people to all the earth. Yet it also encompassed the cultural expression and diversity of every race and language of the world. How God achieved this required of the disciples a perceptive wisdom that we still need today. The issue amounted to this: Did God require non-Jewish people to become Jewish in cultural ways in order to follow Christ?

D. The Priority of Gospel Breakthrough. Acts highlights both the importance of declaring the word of God and the greater priority of facilitating movements of obedience to Christ. The issue of Acts 15 is alive today. Does God intend to divorce people from their home culture? If instead, God desires to draw many throughout an entire community to follow Jesus without shaming their families, what can we learn from Acts that can help us facilitate gospel movements today?

II. The Critical Turning Point

M. R. Thomas, because of his work in his native India, is no stranger to the issues of gospel and culture. He describes the great significance of the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. He aptly calls it the “greatest crisis” of the church (p. 103). He unfolds the story of how the disciples had to “sort out the universal glory of Jesus from the cultural patterns of Judaism before they could obey the Great Commission and take the gospel to all nations” (p. 105). Thomas is not the only one to surmise that if the debate had gone otherwise, the movement of Christ followers would have ended up as one of the hundreds of “splinter sects of Judaism which are now defunct” (p. 105). Thomas explains how the decisions of this Acts 15 council unleashed the gospel to spread “unhindered” (Acts 28:31).

III. Both Parts of the Task: Communicating the Message and Facilitating Movements

A. The Wall and the Canyon. Steven C. Hawthorne distinguishes two parts of the missionary task. The first part is communicating the gospel. The second is facilitating a following of Christ that can flourish in the local society and culture. Overcoming the barrier of understanding to communicate the gospel (the “Wall”) is a great challenge for cross-cultural missionaries. But the greater challenges (the “Canyon”) are the difficulties faced by would-be followers of Christ, searching for ways to openly serve and obey Christ while remaining an integral part of their people.

B. Become Like, Remain Like. Harley Talman tells how he came to understand his role as a missionary much better when he read 1 Corinthians while attempting to bring the gospel to Muslim people. Paul’s words to “become like” those he desired to evangelize took on new importance. But Talman went on to recognize the critical importance of helping new followers avoid taking on foreign cultural practices as if they were the substance of the gospel. He realized that it was important to urge believers to “remain like” their people, just as Paul had urged in 1 Corinthians 7:17–20.

David Anthony tells a similar story, visiting some of the same passages. He adds his insight concerning a basic principle that Paul called a “rule” (in some translations of both 1 Cor 7:17 and Gal 6:16) that ensured the new churches from becoming cultural mongrels who emphasized some particular religious traditions. Instead, by following the simple “rule” of encouraging obedience of faith to Christ, rather than meritorious compliance with customs, they brought about “a new creation” in the midst of the existing people.

IV. Bringing Forth Maturity: Helping Others Follow the Holy Spirit

The Great Commission focuses on bringing about movements that obey everything that Jesus commands. How can missionaries encourage radical obedience to Christ without imposing their own cultural ideals as an example of perfect Christian maturity? How can missionaries be patient when new believers appear to be in no hurry to repent of sins that seem so abhorrent from a Western viewpoint? How do missionaries collaborate with the Holy Spirit to bring about strong movements of dedicated, life-transforming obedience to Christ?

A. The Challenge: The Initial Point of Repentance. T. Wayne Dye and Salley Dye describe a missionary named Pete who made the issues of polygamy, smoking, and betel nut chewing central in the initial steps of repentance and maturity. These were behaviors that bothered Pete the most. However, they were not items about which the Holy Spirit brought conviction or which the people of that culture regarded as matters of primary importance.

B. The Standard: A Universal Definition of Sin. Scripture does offer universal moral principles. How these are followed may differ in various cultural settings. This does not mean that missionaries should embrace situational ethics. There is right and there is wrong. While the essence of the commands and principles is clear, the cultural “edges” are defined differently in different societies. How can missionaries help people follow Christ according to Scripture and in keeping with their culture?

C. The Progressive Change: The Role of the Holy Spirit. The key truth in the Dyes’ article is that God is continually guiding each person into greater spiritual maturity, love, and obedience. There are, in fact, many occasions for repentance in the life of any believer. If this is true of an individual believer, it is just as true regarding the journey of a people following Christ together. The growth in righteousness of a church, and therefore of an entire society, is progressive. The role of the missionary starts to become clearer. Instead of imposing a set of standards of behavior, the missionary can help bring about a growing allegiance to Christ by training leaders to follow the Holy Spirit in accordance with Scripture.

D. An Approach: Allowing the Holy Spirit to Convict and Transform. The Dyes offer a six-point list that offers a way for missionaries to encourage Christ-focused obedience.

V. Apostolic Passion

Floyd McClung defines the words “passion” and “apostolic” in a compelling way. Take note of McClung’s observations of God as the source of passion. Watch how he says passion can be chosen and cultivated—not as a feeling but as a fulfillment of life. McClung says that no one should assume that God does not want them to be directly involved in apostolic church planting. Instead of negotiating with God for a “safe” assignment, why not delight God by seeking to be directly involved in planting churches where Christ is not yet worshiped? Let God be the one who limits, who says, “Stay.” Read the last three paragraphs to yourself out loud.

VI. The Apostolic Band

The churches that the apostles and Paul planted were, for the most part, light and lean “house churches” without much institutional trappings. Such house churches multiplied easily throughout whole cities. But when God desired there to be a cross-cultural extension of the gospel, beyond the range of existing churches, another church structure emerged, which some have called “the apostolic band.”

A. Jewish Forms of Synagogue and Mission Band. Ralph D. Winter explores the double structure of the early church. He observes that the structures of both congregation and mission were largely borrowed from Jewish traditions of synagogue and Jewish missionary bands.

B. Modality and Sodality. We’re going to get a head start on the upcoming history section by continuing to read Winter’s “The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission.” Winter follows how the two structures were expressed after New Testament times within the social organization and culture of the Roman Empire. Local congregational structures recognized bishops with territorial jurisdiction after the pattern of the Roman magisterial territories. The Roman term used for these territories was “diocese.” The mission structures that emerged—the monastic movements—borrowed patterns from Roman military practice. Protestants generally have stereotyped impressions of monasteries as places where ascetic monks fled the world. In reality, the monastic movements were largely responsible for bringing the blessing of the gospel to the world.

Winter applies some simple terms from the discipline of sociology to the double structure of congregation and mission. The two terms are modality and sodality. We’ll use these terms in upcoming lessons.

• Modality refers to nurture-oriented congregational church structures.
• Sodality refers to task-oriented mission structures.

VII. Apostolic Suffering

Paul suffered wherever he founded churches. He allowed himself to be beaten at Philippi. He could have revealed his Roman citizenship, but he did not. Why? What objective was so valuable that his comfort and security counted for so little? He would later tell the same church that they were “graced” by God, not only to believe, “but also to suffer . . . experiencing the same conflict which you saw in me, and now hear to be in me” (Phil 1:29–30). Paul must have known that the church he was planting in Philippi would need to stand boldly through a blast of hostility. His readiness to stand openly for the gospel, without using the privilege of citizenship to dodge the backlash, prepared the church to enjoy “participation in the gospel” from that “first day” until “the day of Christ” (1:5–6). That fellowship in the gospel would always mean a fellowship in the sufferings of Christ Himself (3:10).

A. God’s Strategy in Apostolic Suffering. More people suffer persecution for Christ today than at any other time in history. Suffering is particularly intense in places where the gospel is advancing among unreached peoples. Josef Tson defines suffering as something not self-inflicted, but nonetheless voluntary. Martyrdom is God’s gift to some “to die for the sake of Christ and His gospel.” What is God’s purpose in martyrdom? Suffering and sacrifice are God’s methods of overcoming rebellion and evil. Most notably, Christ has not changed His strategy of answering hell’s hatred with suffering love. “His method is still the method of the cross” (p. 142).

In lesson 1, we described God’s purpose in this way: For His glory in global worship, and for the blessing of all nations, God purposes to overcome evil by redeeming a people who will love and obey Him within every people.

Josef Tson, a leader in Europe, says that suffering is part of God’s way to defeat Satan and destabilize his kingdom. Tson also says that suffering enables the truth to come to redemptive clarity so that God is recognized and glorified. Suffering and martyrdom are in line with God’s purpose at the end of the age. We should “think it not strange,” as Peter puts it, that many of our brothers and sisters in Christ are encountering phenomenal suffering. The best-formulated strategies for advancing the gospel will take this factor into account. Tson sees three things achieved by this suffering. As you read, it will help you a great deal to look up the passages that he refers to. Some of them are passages that are not often brought to our attention.

1. The Triumph of God’s Truth. When an ambassador speaks the truth in love and meets death with joy, eyes are opened to the gospel. Christ’s own death had this effect on one of His executioners.

2. The Defeat of Satan. When martyrs meet their death without fear, they demonstrate that Satan’s ability to control us by fear is broken. Tson suggests that an important dimension of Satan’s defeat and shame in the heavenlies was revealed in the account of Job. Paul echoes this purpose when he says that he was “a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men” (1 Cor 4:9).

3. The Glory of God. In a powerful paradox, the shame of death brings about God’s glory. According to church tradition, both Paul and Peter had this destiny.

B. To Enter Suffering by Prayer. Brother Andrew’s comments are rich with seasoned wisdom. Why have so many Christians been willing to suffer? The report of “the vanished church” today might parallel the report that Nehemiah heard in his day. Examine Nehemiah’s response as an example for engaging in the work of the gospel in hostile environments. Andrew notes that Nehemiah’s example combines a zeal for the glory of God with a deep compassion for the well-being of people.

VIII. Apostolic Hope

The last three paragraphs of the Lausanne Covenant beautifully summarize the significance of the Spirit’s outpouring for the church. The hope of the Holy Spirit visiting, filling, and renewing His church should stir us to pray and to anticipate days of working together in His power. The hope of Christ’s coming should motivate us to rededicate ourselves to fulfilling the mission He has given us.

Conclusion of Certificate Readings for this lesson.

After studying this section you should be able to:

• Describe the importance of the Acts 15 council establishing that people can follow Christ without first becoming Jewish.
• Describe how Paul’s missionary band was patterned after Jewish mission endeavors.
• Explain how modern mission organizations followed the example of Paul’s missionary band.

IX. Paul’s Approach to the Missionary Task

Arthur Glasser describes Paul’s way of pursuing mission as mobile missionary teams that considered themselves as envoys of God to the world.

A. The Double Structure of the Church. Glasser reviews the emergence of the apostolic bands. Such teams set their own membership, charted out their goals, were economically self-sufficient, and were not expected to answer to a local church. They were a distinctive structure of the church in parallel with the congregational parish structure. Glasser argues that the congregational parish structure and the mobile missionary band structure should both be considered the “church” since both express the life of God’s people.

B. Paul’s Band Followed Jewish Precedent. It is important to recognize that Jewish missionaries had preceded the church throughout much of the world with the objective of strengthening scattered Jews in the Jewish faith and proselytizing willing gentiles (that is, to make a proselyte, someone who was circumcised and subscribed to all Jewish cultural practices). Paul’s strategy was to reach those, like Cornelius, who wanted to hear about the God of the Hebrews but were unwilling to become proselytes. Paul had great news for gentiles: They could follow Christ without becoming Jewish! In this way, house churches began to be formed after the pattern of synagogues as an initial structure of what later became the congregational parish church.

X. Missionary Societies

Andrew Walls describes the emergence of modern mission societies. The beginnings of Protestant mission efforts required the formation of organizations that could accomplish what local congregations could not or would not do. Walls introduces us to William Carey, one of the first Protestant leaders in mission. Carey called for believers to unite in prayer but to do much more than pray by forming mission organizations or societies.