CHAPTER 23

The Apostle Paul and the Missionary Task

Arthur F. Glasser

Arthur F. Glasser was dean emeritus and senior professor of theology and mission and East Asian studies at the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary for many years. He served as a missionary in western China with the China Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship) and was also OMF’s Home Secretary for North America for 12 years. He was editor of Missiology from 1976 to 1982.

Adapted from Crucial Dimensions in World evangelization by Arthur F. Glasser et al., 1976.

The Apostle Paul, at first a rabid persecutor of the early followers of Christ, became a man called and set apart “for the gospel of God . . . to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of the name among all the nations” (Rom 1:1, 5). It’s an astounding story and is perhaps the most noteworthy transformation in history—the story of how this man laid the foundation for the gentile church and set in motion a missionary movement that continues to this day.

Following Pentecost, the church demonstrated its capacity as a life-communicating presence. The flame of its worship and devotion went from heart to heart. Awe-inspired believers reached outward spontaneously with the good news of Jesus Christ. In Acts 2:12, we trace the exciting possibilities of “near neighbor evangelism.” Messianic Jewish congregations grew in size and number as their members courageously faced persecution. Revival broke out in Samaria, and Peter took the gospel to Cornelius and his household, the first gentile converts. And then came God’s call and transformation of Saul, the fiery persecutor of the church. We now begin his story.

The Apostle Paul first appears in the New Testament as Saul, a young man approving the stoning of Stephen (Acts 8:1), and violently opposing the growing Jewish messianic movement. In the midst of this violent career, while traveling to Damascus, he was suddenly overtaken by Jesus Christ (Phil 3:12). In those moments of initial encounter—of repentance, surrender, and dawning faith—Saul received his call to missionary service. He later wrote: “It pleased God to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles” (Gal 1:16).

Paul had to learn how he was to preach the gospel. He was given the following evangelistic method:

I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power [lit. authority] of Satan to God, that they may receive the forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. (Acts 26:18)

The sequence began with making people conscious of their personal needs, then to alert them to the Lord who is sufficient to meet every need. But to receive salvation and the life of the Spirit, they must deliberately repent of their sin and reject the authority of Satan over their lives by receiving Jesus as their Lord. Only then would they be able to receive the forgiveness of their sins and access the life and worship of a local congregation. Paul gladly embraced this evangelistic method that Jesus had followed in His own earthly ministry. Where previously he had sought to destroy the followers of Jesus, he now sought to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah of the Jewish people and the Savior of the world.

From that time on, Paul remained faithful to every aspect of this “heavenly vision” of the glorified Christ (26:19–20).

The Significance of the Apostolic Team

Acts 11 brings the story to a climax by showing how a largely gentile church was planted in Antioch, the fourth largest city in the Mediterranean world, and how God destined it to become the key to the evangelization of the western Mediterranean. Its cluster of small congregations called “house churches” was so dynamic that Barnabas, sent from Jerusalem to aid in its ministry, sought out Paul, who had the vigor and ability needed to help him establish the new converts. The two men combined their strength to lead the church for an entire year. This church was noteworthy as a cosmopolitan, evangelistic, well-taught, and outstandingly generous company of the Lord’s people. And yet, in Acts 13:1–5 the church is described as burdened and on its knees “worshiping the Lord and fasting.”

What was the problem? The leaders were fasting, which might suggest that they were seeking guidance as to the church’s responsibility to take the gospel beyond Antioch to the diverse peoples of the Mediterranean world. Antioch’s Christians had no doubt as to the suitability of the gospel for all people. But how would they share their message? The earlier method of “near neighbor, spontaneous outreach” would only work in settings in which people share a common culture and language. They now needed a structured way of extending the message of Christ, one that would surmount all the barriers, whether geographic, linguistic, cultural, ethnic, sociological, or economic. So they prayed and fasted. They were truly earnest!

In response, the Holy Spirit led them to take an unprecedented decisive step. They “organized what in later times would have been called a foreign mission.”¹ When Barnabas and Saul were designated as its charter members, the church merely “let them go” (v. 3) because it was essentially the Holy Spirit whose authority and designation were behind “sending them forth” (v. 4).

From this we cannot but conclude that both the congregational parish structure and the mobile missionary team structure are equally valid in God’s sight. Neither has more right to the name “church” since both are expressions of the life of the people of God. Indeed, this record clearly challenges the widely held notion that “the local assembly is the mediating and authoritative sending body of the New Testament missionary.”² Furthermore, there is no warrant for the view that Paul,

for all his apostolic authority, was sent forth by the church (God’s people in local, visible congregational life and in associational relationship with other congregations) and, equally important, felt himself answerable to the church.³

This mobile team was very much on its own. It was economically self-sufficient, although not unwilling to receive funds from local congregations. It recruited, trained, and on occasion disciplined its members. The Holy Spirit provided for its direction; like Israel in the wilderness, it had both leaders and followers.

The team was apostolic; its members regarded themselves as the envoys of God to the unbelieving world. Only when there are no more frontiers to be crossed—only when Jesus Christ has returned and has brought some from every people under His authority—will it be possible to say that the need for such missionary teams has finally come to an end. From this time on, the Apostle Paul’s missionary methodology was an expression of the activities of the apostolic team. Acts 14:21–23 describes the sequence of its activities as:

• preaching the gospel,
• making disciples,
• bringing converts into a corporate life as members of Christ and of one another and as custodians of the gospel of the kingdom, and
• organizing them into local congregations characterized by deep commitment to one another and to the order and discipline of the Spirit of God.

After their first missionary journey was completed, the members sailed to Antioch and “gathered the church together and declared all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles” (Acts 14:27).

The Strategy of the Apostolic Team

But what plan did the team follow in its missionary out-reach? It seems to have had two general objectives. First, in those early years, the team sought to visit all the Jewish synagogues scattered throughout the Roman Empire, beginning in Asia Minor. Since the gospel was “to the Jew first” (Rom 1:16), this was natural. Indeed, Paul was deeply committed to this. In those days, almost every Jewish synagogue had its gentile proselytes and “God-fearers”—gentile men and women who had already broken with pagan idolatry and were attracted to the ethical monotheism of the Jewish people, but who had stopped short of full membership. Paul knew that at these synagogues he would contact evidence of God’s prior work among gentiles. Only in synagogues could he contact both Jews and gentiles. Should the Jewish synagogue community in any one place largely reject his message, he would then turn his attention to the Jews and gentiles in its midst who had responded. We recall his words in Pisidian Antioch to the resistant Jews:

It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold we turn to the Gentiles. For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, “I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the uttermost parts of the earth.” (Acts 13:46–47)

This initial outreach to Jews and gentiles was not “mission” in the modern sense of the term. Mission implies reaching those without faith in God. In contrast, the Jews already possessed “the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.” To them “belonged the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ” (Rom 9:4–5). The Apostle Paul shared the good news of the coming of their Messiah, and the significance of His cross and resurrection. Whenever Jews rejected this gospel, he sought to “make them jealous” by proclaiming what God was doing among the gentiles who were responding (Rom 11:11, 14). God had unfinished business to complete with His ancient people. And this particular responsibility is still a priority task for the church in our day. The gospel is “to the Jew first.”

The second general objective that underlay Paul’s missionary strategy was to begin Christ-following gatherings wherever he found Jewish people responsive to the gospel and gentile congregations wherever the majority of believers were gentiles. We must keep in mind that the first century of the Christian Era was par excellence the great century of Jewish missionary activity (Matt 23:15). The mostly Greek “God-fearers,” although attracted by Jewish moral strength, intellectual vigor, disciplined living, and wholesome family life, generally stopped short of receiving circumcision and becoming Jews. Inevitably Paul was determined to win these spiritually hungry gentiles to faith in Jesus and make them the nuclei of Greek-speaking congregations of the emerging Christian movement.

When Luke wrote that, “all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:10), he probably meant that the team’s outreach extended throughout Asia, the southwestern portion of present-day Turkey. This means that Paul had started many new congregations of Jews who had accepted the fulfillment of messianic promise in Jesus, gathering with redeemed Greeks. Together they were spreading the new faith.

Church and Mission

“I was appointed a preacher and apostle . . . a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth” (1 Tim 2:7). Paul was determined to see the church grow. Indeed, he regarded it her chief and irreplaceable task: to preach the gospel to all mankind and to incorporate all those who believed into her communal life. He felt that only through the deliberate multiplication of vast numbers of new congregations would it be possible to evangelize his generation. As an apostle, a member of an apostolic team, he saw himself laboring on the fringes of gospel advance doing this priority work.

This inevitably meant that Paul made crucial the relation between his team and the new congregations they were bringing into existence through the blessing of God. Indeed, we cannot understand his preoccupation with gathering funds from the gentile churches to bring relief to the Jewish churches (e.g., Rom 15:25–27) unless this was somehow related to his deliberate efforts to fulfill his Lord’s desire that the churches express their essential oneness “that the world may believe” (John 17:21).

In turn, by his personal example and through his teaching, Paul constantly reminded the churches of their apostolic calling. They had been sent by God into the world to reach beyond their local neighborhoods with the gospel. Their task was to bring into God’s kingdom the nations for which Christ died and which had yet to acknowledge Him as their king.

The most striking illustration of Paul’s desire to establish this close relationship between local church and mobile mission is found in his epistle to the church in Rome. When he wrote this letter, he was midway through his great missionary career, and the outreach of his apostolic team in the Eastern Mediterranean had just been completed. Indeed, he could state that “from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum” (present-day Balkan region) “the gospel of Christ” had been “fully preached” (Rom 15:19). In contrast, the Western Mediterranean represented unrelieved darkness with but one point of light: the scattered Jewish and gentile believers in Rome. Apparently, this believing community had been on Paul’s mind for some years as he agonized in prayer and deliberated about his future ministry (15:22–24).

So, he took pen in hand and wrote the tremendous epistle of Romans. As a “task theologian” he carefully selected certain themes and developed them to prepare the Roman Christians for his missionary strategy. Only after his extensive review of sin and guilt before God (1:18–3:20), justification and redemption (3:21–25), grace and the Spirit’s indwelling presence and power (6:1–8:39), and God’s determination to redeem the gentile world through the church (9:1–11:26), does Paul reveal his strategy for the believers at Rome: that they were to constitute themselves a second Antioch, the new base of operations for the mission of his apostolic team to Spain and the Western Mediterranean (15:22–24). As such, they would have a significant role to fill, providing Paul and his team with experienced colaborers and—most important of all—undertaking their financial and prayer support. This epistle was written to give a strong cluster of house churches in a great pagan city a sense of their missionary call to the peoples beyond their borders. Through their missionary obedience, these believers in Rome would attain a new sense of their identity as the “sent” and “sending people” of God (1:11–15). They made up the church and mission—the fixed congregation and the mobile team—so that the “gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Matt 24:14).

The Strategy of Suffering

One final element remains. We cannot trace the Apostle Paul’s missionary career without being impressed with the fact that his whole life was marked by suffering. When the Lord Jesus called him to become an apostle (a sent one), He said, “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16). Although set free by the Lord Jesus, Paul knew that this freedom was only granted that he might take God’s love to all. According to New Testament usage, the word “Lord” means an owner of slaves. Whereas in our day we tend to think of ourselves as the “servants” of the Lord, in Paul’s day Christians saw themselves differently. Paul knew that if he was to be a colaborer with the Lord, he was no less than “the slave of all” (1 Cor 9:19–23).

This brings us to the deepest level of Christian experience and service—where life is lived in tension with one’s times and in spiritual encounter with the forces that seek to hinder the efforts to liberate others with the gospel. Indeed, one cannot enter into the fabric of Paul’s thought and experience without becoming aware that all his letters (with the possible exception of Philemon) reference Satan, who constantly sought to thwart his plans (e.g., 1 Thess 2:18).

Paul writes of the “mystery of lawlessness,” the “elemental spirits of the world,” the “god of this age” and “principalities and authorities.” He was fully aware of their varied strategies against the gospel. Indeed, references to these “world powers” penetrated every dimension of his mission strategy. Although they still sought to posture themselves as his all-powerful adversaries, Paul knew they had been wonderfully vanquished by Christ at the cross (Col 2:8–15). He knew these spiritual powers could be overcome by faith and love, by prayer and obedience—and by suffering. In this connection, he wrote: “We are appointed unto afflictions” (1 Thess 3:3). This points to a cardinal principle: The gospel cannot be conveyed and the people of God cannot be gathered into congregations within the nations (John 11:52) without individuals “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” in order to accomplish this task (Col 1:24).

By “Christ’s afflictions” Paul was not referring to His atoning sufferings on the cross. Those sufferings Christ alone was capable of enduring, and when He completed that awesome task He cried out: “It is finished!” His redemptive work was over “once and for all” (Heb 9:26).

In contrast, His incomplete afflictions are related to all that He encountered physically, emotionally, and spiritually so that He might give himself fully to all the demands of His public ministry. He experienced bodily weariness, much hostility (“he came to his own home, and his own people did not receive him,” John 1:11), and spiritual opposition. Such afflictions confront all who deliberately involve themselves in active service for Christ, especially when they seek to bear public witness to the gospel. They are “incomplete” in the sense that each successive generation of the people of God must willingly embrace sufferings if the missionary task is to be completed. Only then will this privilege be forever ended. Today, however, it is automatically extended to all who “covet earnestly the higher gifts” (1 Cor 12:31). One cannot serve Christ effectively without paying this price!

We must face the full implications of what this means. The spirit world is always present, and the demons are never friendly—especially to those who are determined to serve the Lord. This was Paul’s experience. He suffered in order to overcome them, using the weapons provided by his victorious Lord.

Were he among us today, he would call for our active resistance to all that hinders the ongoing missionary purpose of God—the powers in religious structures, in intellectual structures (‘ologies and ‘isms), in moral structures (codes and customs), and in political structures (the tyrant, the market, the school, the courts, race, and nation).⁴

The good news our generation needs to hear includes the breaking in of the kingdom of God by the One who renders all opposing forces inoperative. But those who serve in His name will suffer. The cross is still the cross. It is not without reason that Paul exhorted fellow Christians to “put on the whole armor of God” so that they might “be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Eph 6:10–18). Putting on armor is the language of warfare. Let us never forget that the service of Christ involves spiritual conflict and suffering!

RETURN TO LESSON 5: Unleashing the Gospel

Notes

1. Stephen Neill, The Church and Christian Union (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 80.

2. George W. Peters, A Biblical Theology of Missions (Chicago: Moody, 1972), 219.

3. Harold R. Cook, “Who Really Sent the First Missionaries?,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1975): 234.

4. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 465.