CHAPTER 47
The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission
Ralph D. Winter
Ralph D. Winter was the general director of the Frontier Mission Fellowship (FMF) in Pasadena, CA. After serving ten years as a missionary among Mayan Indians in the highlands of Guatemala, he was called to be a professor of missions at the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. Ten years later, he and his late wife, Roberta, founded the mission society called the Frontier Mission Fellowship. This in turn birthed the U.S. Center for World Mission and the William Carey International University, both of which serve those working at the frontiers of mission.
In an address given to the All-Asia Mission Consultation in Seoul, Korea, in August 1973 (the founding of the Asia Missions Association), Ralph Winter describes the forms that God’s two “redemptive structures” take in every human society and have taken throughout history. His thesis has two major implications: (1) We must accept both structures, represented in the Christian church today by the local church and the mission society, as legitimate and necessary, and as part of “God’s People, the church”; and (2) non-Western churches must form and utilize mission societies if they are to exercise their missionary responsibility.
It is the thesis of this article that whether Christianity takes on Western or Asian form, there will still be two basic kinds of structures that will make up the movement. Most of the emphasis will be placed on pointing out the existence of these two structures as they have continuously appeared across the centuries. This will serve to define, illustrate, and compare their nature and importance. I will also endeavor to explain why I believe our efforts today in any part of the world will be most effective only if both of these two structures are fully and properly involved and supportive of each other.
Redemptive Structures in New Testament Times
First of all, let us recognize the structure so fondly called “the New Testament church” as basically a Christian synagogue.1 Paul’s missionary work consisted primarily of going to synagogues scattered across the Roman Empire, beginning in Asia Minor, and making clear to the Jewish and gentile believers in those synagogues that the Messiah had come in Jesus Christ, the Son of God; that in Christ a final authority even greater than Moses existed; and that this made more understandable than ever the welcoming of the gentiles without forcing upon them any literal cultural adaptation to the ritual provisions of the Mosaic law.
Very few Christians, casually reading the New Testament (and with only the New Testament available to them), would surmise the degree to which there had been Jewish evangelists who went before Paul all over the Roman Empire—a movement that began one hundred years before Christ. Some of these were the people whom Jesus himself described as “traversing land and sea to make a single proselyte.” Paul built on their efforts and went beyond them with the gospel he preached, which allowed the Greeks to remain Greeks and not be circumcised and culturally assimilated into the Jewish way of life. Paul had a vast foundation on which to build: Peter declared “Moses is preached in every city (of the Roman Empire)” (Acts 15:21).
Yet not only did Paul apparently go to every existing synagogue in that part of the world. He established brand new synagogue-type fellowships of believers as the basic unit of his missionary activity. The first structure in the New Testament scene is thus what is often called the New Testament church. It was essentially built along Jewish synagogue lines,2 embracing the community of the faithful in any given place. The defining characteristic of this structure was that it included old and young, male and female.
There is a second, quite different structure in the New Testament context. Paul was sent “off “ by the church in Antioch. But once away from Antioch he seemed very much on his own. The little team he formed was economically self-sufficient when occasion demanded. It was also dependent, from time-to-time, not alone upon the Antioch church but upon other churches that had risen as a result of evangelistic labors. Paul’s team may certainly be considered a structure. While its design and form are not made concrete for us, neither, of course, is the structure of a New Testament congregation defined concretely for us in the pages of the New Testament. In both cases, the absence of any such definition implies the preexistence of a commonly understood pattern of relationship, whether in the case of the congregational structure or the missionary band structure.
Thus, on the one hand, the structure we call the New Testament church is a prototype of all subsequent Christian fellowships where old and young, male and female are gathered together. On the other hand, Paul’s missionary band can be considered a prototype of all subsequent missionary endeavors organized out of committed, experienced workers who affiliated themselves as a second decision beyond membership in the first structure.
Note well the additional commitment. Note also that the structure that resulted was something definitely more than the extended outreach of the Antioch church. No matter what we think the structure was, we know that it was not simply the Antioch church operating at a distance from its home base. It was something else, something different. We will consider the missionary band the second of the two redemptive structures in New Testament times.
It may be shocking at first to think that God made use of either a Jewish synagogue pattern or a Jewish evangelistic pattern. But this must not be more surprising than the fact that God employed the use of the pagan Greek language, the Holy Spirit guiding the biblical writers to lay hold of such terms as kurios (Greek for lord, originally a pagan term), and pound them into shape to carry the Christian revelation.
In fact, the profound missiological implication of all this is that the New Testament is trying to show us how to borrow effective patterns; it is trying to free all future missionaries from the need to follow the precise forms of the Jewish synagogue and Jewish missionary band, and yet to allow them to choose comparable indigenous structures in the countless new situations across history and around the world—structures which will correspond faithfully to the function of patterns Paul employed, if not their form.
RETURN TO LESSON 5: Unleashing the Gospel
[read next section again in Lesson 6]
The Early Development of Christian Structures within Roman Culture
We have seen how the Christian movement built itself upon two different kinds of structures that had preexisted in the Jewish cultural tradition. It is now our task to see if the functional equivalents of these same two structures were to appear in later Christian cultural traditions as the gospel was brought to that larger world.
Of course, the original synagogue pattern persisted as a Christian structure for some time. Whereas each synagogue was considerably independent of the others, the Christian pattern was soon assimilated to the Roman context, and bishops became invested with authority over more than one congregation with a territorial jurisdiction often identical to the pattern of Roman civil government. The very Latin word for Roman magisterial territories was appropriated—the diocese—within which parishes are to be found on the local level.
The new Christian parish church still preserved the basic constituency of the synagogue, namely, the combination of old and young, male and female—that is, a biologically perpetuating organism.
Meanwhile, the monastic tradition in various early forms developed as a second structure. This new, widely proliferating structure undoubtedly had no connection at all with the missionary band in which Paul was involved. Indeed, it more substantially drew from Roman military structure than from any other single source. These monastic men and women thus carried forward a disciplined structure, borrowed primarily from the military, which allowed nominal Christians to make a second-level choice—an additional specific commitment.
We have no desire to deny the fact that conditions in monasteries were not always ideal; what the average Protestant knows about monasteries may be correct for certain situations; but the popular Protestant stereotype surely cannot describe correctly all that happened during the one thousand years of the medieval period.
Let me give just one example of how far wrong our Protestant stereotypes can be. We often hear that the monks “fled the world.” Compare that idea with this description by a Baptist missionary scholar:
The Benedictine rule and the many derived from it probably helped to give dignity to labor, including manual labor in the fields. This was in striking contrast with the aristocratic conviction of the servile status of manual work which prevailed in much of ancient society Monasteries [contributed] much [to the] clearing of land and improvement in methods of agriculture. In the midst of barbarism, the monasteries were centres of orderly and settled life and monks were assigned the duty of road building and road repair. Until the rise of the towns in the 11th century, they were pioneers in industry and commerce. The shops of the monasteries preserved the industries of Roman times.3
For all of us who are interested in missions, the shattering of the “monks fled the world” stereotype is even more dramatically and decisively reinforced by the magnificent record of the Irish peregrini, who were Celtic monks who did more to reach out to convert Anglo-Saxons than did Augustine of Canterbury’s later mission from the South, and who contributed more to the evangelization of Western Europe, even Central Europe, than any other force.
From its very inception this monastic kind of structure was highly significant to the growth and development of the Christian movement. By the fourth century there were two very different kinds of structures—the diocese and the monastery—both of them significant in the transmission and expansion of Christianity. They are each patterns borrowed from the cultural context of their time, just as were the earlier Christian synagogue and missionary band.
While these two structures are formally different from—and historically unrelated to—the two in New Testament times, they are nevertheless functionally the same. In order to speak conveniently about the continuing similarities in function, let us now refer to churches, the synagogue, and the diocese as modalities, and the missionary band and monastery as sodalities. A modality is a structured fellowship that includes people of any age or either gender. While a sodality is a structured organization in which membership involves a greater commitment to serve the purpose of the organization. Membership is usually limited by age, sex, or marital status. In this use of these terms, both the denomination and the local congregation are modalities, while a mission agency or a local men’s club are sodalities.
In the early period beyond the pages of the Bible, however, there was little relation between modality and sodality, while in Paul’s time his missionary band specifically nourished the congregations—a most significant symbiosis. We shall now see how the medieval period essentially recovered the healthy New Testament relationship between modality and sodality.
RETURN TO LESSON 5: Unleashing the Gospel
The Medieval Synthesis of Modality and Sodality
We can say that the Medieval period began when the governmental diocese of the Roman Empire in the West started to break down. To some extent the Christian diocesan pattern, following as it did the Roman civil-governmental pattern, tended to break down at the same time. The monastic (or sodality) pattern turned out to be much more durable, and as a result gained greater importance in the early Medieval period.
Again, however, it is not our purpose to downplay the significance of the parish or diocesan form of Christianity, but simply to point out that during this early period of the Medieval epoch the specialized house called the monastery, or its equivalent, became ever so much more important in the perpetuation of the Christian movement than was the organized system of parishes, which we often call the church as if there were no other structure making up the church.
The links between modality and sodality are important to understand. What illustrates it best perhaps is the collaboration between Gregory the Great and a man who will later be called Augustine of Canterbury. Gregory was the head of a modality, as bishop of the diocese of Rome. But Augustine and he both came from a monastic house. (Just as, today, many pastors come from Campus Crusade or InterVarsity.) This proves, already at that time, the importance of sodalities. Still, Gregory appealed to his friend Augustine to undertake a great mission to England. Its aim was to establish a diocesan structure on this earth, where Celtic Christianity had suffered greatly from the invasion of Saxon warriors from the continent
As strong as Gregory was, he was merely the head of his own diocese. He simply had no structure to call upon to reach out in this intended mission other than the sodality, which at this point in history took the form of a Benedictine monastery. This is why he ended up asking Augustine and a group of other members of the same monastery to undertake this rather dangerous journey and important mission on his behalf. The purpose of the mission, curiously, was not to extend the Benedictine form of monasticism. The remnant of the Celtic “church” in England was itself a network of sodalities. No, Augustine went to England to establish diocesan Christianity, though he himself was not a diocesan priest. Interestingly enough, the Benedictine “Rule” (way of life) was so attractive that gradually virtually all of the Celtic houses adopted the Benedictine Rule, or Regula (in Latin).
This is quite characteristic. During a lengthy period of time, perhaps a thousand years, the building and rebuilding of the modalities was mainly the work of the sodalities. That is to say the monasteries were uniformly the source and the real focal point of new energy and vitality which flowed into the diocesan side of the Christian movement. We think of the momentous Cluny reform, then the Cistercians, then the Friars, and finally the Jesuits—all of them strictly sodalities, but sodalities which contributed massively to the building and the rebuilding of the network of dioceses, which Protestants often identify as “the” Christian movement.
We cannot leave the Medieval period without referring to the many unofficial and often persecuted movements which also mark the era. In all of this, the Bible itself seems always the ultimate prime mover, as we see in the case of Peter Waldo. His work stands as a powerful demonstration of the simple power of a vernacular translation of the Bible where the people were unable to appreciate either Jerome’s classical Latin translation or the celebration of the Mass in Latin.
A large number of groups referred to as “Anabaptists” are to be found in many parts of Europe. One of the chief characteristics of these renewal movements is that they developed whole “new communities” of believers and their families, attempting by biological and cultural transmission to preserve a high and enlightened form of Christianity. These groups usually faced such strong opposition and grave limitations that it would be very unfair to judge their vitality by their progress. It is important to note, however, that the average Mennonite or Salvation Army community, where whole families are members, typified the desire for a “pure” church, or what is often called a “believers” church, and constitutes a most significant experiment in Christian structure. Such a structure stands, in a certain sense, midway between a modality and a sodality since it has the constituency of the modality (involving full families) and yet, in its earlier years, may have the vitality and selectivity of a sodality. We will return to this phenomenon in the next section.
In terms of the durability and quality of the Christian faith, the one-thousand-year Medieval period is virtually impossible to account for, apart from the role of the sodalities.
RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement
The Protestant Recovery of the Sodality
The Protestant movement started by attempting to do without any kind of sodality structure. Martin Luther had been discontented with the apparent polarization between the vitality he eventually discovered in his own order and the very nominal parish life of his time. Being dissatisfied with this contrast, he abandoned the sodality (in which, nevertheless, he was introduced to the Bible, to the Pauline Epistles, and to teaching on “justification by faith”). Eventually the Lutheran movement produced a Lutheran diocesan structure, which to a considerable extent represented the readoption of the Roman diocesan tradition. But the Lutheran movement did not in a comparable sense readopt the sodalities, the Catholic orders, that had been so prominent in the Roman tradition.
In failing to exploit the power of the sodality, Protestants had no mechanism for missions for almost three hundred years, until William Carey’s famous book, An Enquiry, proposed “the use of means for the conversion of the heathen.” His keyword means refers specifically to the need for a sodality, for the organized but nonecclesiastical initiative of the Protestant faithful. Thus, the resulting Baptist Missionary Society is one of the most significant organizational developments in the Protestant tradition. Although it was not the earliest such society, it set off a rush to the use of this kind of “means” for the conversion of the “heathen.” In the next few years we find a number of societies forming along similar lines—twelve societies in thirty-two years.4 Once this method of operation was clearly understood by the Protestants, three hundred years of latent energies burst forth in what became, in Latourette’s phrase, “The Great Century.”
The nineteenth century is thus the first century in which Protestants were actively engaged in missions. For reasons that we have not space here to explain, it was also the century of the lowest ebb of Catholic mission energy. Amazingly, in this one century, Protestants, building on the unprecedented world expansion of the West, caught up with eighteen centuries of earlier mission efforts. There is simply no question that what was done in this century moved the Protestant stream from a self-contained, weak European backwater into a world force in Christianity.
The vehicle that allowed the Protestant movement to become vital was the structural development of the sodality, which harvested the vital “voluntarism” latent in Protestantism and surfaced in new mission agencies of all kinds, both at home and overseas. Wave after wave of evangelical initiatives transformed the entire map of Christianity. By 1840, the phenomenon of mission sodalities was so prominent in the United States that the phrase the “Evangelical Empire” and other equivalent phrases were used to refer to it, and now began a trickle of ecclesiastical opposition to this bright new emergence of the second structure. This brings us to our next point.
The Contemporary Misunderstanding of the Mission Sodality
Almost all mission efforts in the nineteenth century, whether sponsored by interdenominational or denominational boards, were substantially the work of initiatives independent of the related ecclesiastical structures. Toward the latter half of the nineteenth century, there seemed increasingly to be two separate structural traditions.
On the one hand, there were men like Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson, who were the strategic thinkers at the helm of older societies—the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in England and American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), respectively. These leaders championed the semiautonomous mission sodality, and they voiced an attitude that was not at first contradicted by any significant part of the leaders of the ecclesiastical structures. On the other hand, there was the centralizing perspective of denominational leaders. So that by the early part of the twentieth century, the once-independent structures that had been merely related to the denominations gradually became dominated by the churches, that is administered, not merely regulated. Partially as a result, toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was a new burst of totally separate mission sodalities called the Faith Missions, with Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission (CIM) taking the lead.
All of these changes took place very gradually. Attitudes at any point are hard to pin down, but it does seem clear that Protestants were always a bit unsure about the legitimacy of the sodality (mission structure).
American denominations have been generally a more selective and vital fellowship. They have felt quite capable as denominations of providing all of the necessary initiative for overseas mission. It is for this latter reason that many new denominations in America have tended to act as though centralized church control of mission efforts is the only proper pattern.
As a result, by the Second World War, a very nearly complete transmutation had taken place in the case of almost all mission efforts related to denominational structures. That is, almost all older denominational boards, though once semiautonomous or very nearly independent, had by this time become part of unified budget provisions. At the same time, and partially as a result, a whole host of new independent mission structures burst forth again, especially after the Second World War. As in the case of the earlier emergence of the Faith Missions, these tended to pay little attention to denominational leaders and their aspirations for church-centered mission. Thus, to this day, among Protestants, there continues to be deep confusion about the legitimacy and proper relationship of the two structures that have manifested themselves throughout the history of the Christian movement.
To make matters worse, Protestant blindness about the need for mission sodalities has had a very tragic influence on mission fields. Protestant missions, being modality-minded, have tended to assume that merely modali-ties, e.g., churches, need to be established. In most cases where mission work is being pursued by essentially semi-autonomous mission sodalities, it is the planting of modalities, not sodalities, that is the only goal. Mission agencies (even those completely independent from denominations back home) have tended in their mission work to set up churches and not to plant, in addition, mission sodalities in the so-called mission lands.5
Astonishingly, most Protestant missionaries, working with mission structures that did not exist in the Protestant tradition for hundreds of years, and without whose existence there would have been no mission initiative, have nevertheless been blind to the significance of the very structure within which they have worked. In this blindness they have merely planted churches and have not effectively concerned themselves to make sure that the kind of mission structure within which they operate would also be set up on the field.
The question we must ask is how long it will be before the younger churches of the so-called mission territories of the non-Western world come to that important conclusion that there need to be mission structures, in order for church people to reach out in vital initiatives in mission, especially cross-cultural mission. There are already some hopeful signs that this tragic delay will not continue.
Conclusion
This article has been in no sense an attempt to decry or to criticize the organized church. It has assumed both the necessity and the importance of the parish structure, the diocesan structure, the denominational structure, the ecclesiastical structure. The modality (church) structure in the view of this article is a significant and absolutely essential structure, just as civil government is essential to private enterprises.
All that is attempted here is to explore some of the historical patterns that make clear that God, through His Holy Spirit, has clearly and consistently used a structure other than (and sometimes instead of) the modality (church) structure. It is our attempt here to help church leaders and others to understand the legitimacy of both church and mission structures, and the necessity for both structures not only to exist but to work together harmoniously for the fulfillment of the Great Commission and for the fulfillment of all that God desires for our time. 
RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement
Notes
1. One can hardly conceive of more providentially supplied means for the Christian mission to reach the gentile community. Wherever the community of Christ went, it found at hand the tools needed to reach the nations: a people living under covenant promise and a responsible election, and the Scriptures, God’s revelation to all men. The synagogue was the place where all these things converged. In the synagogue, the Christians were offered an inviting door of access to every Jewish community. It was in the synagogue that the first gentiles declared their faith in Jesus. Richard F. De Ridder, The Dispersion of the People of God (Netherlands: J. H. Kok, 1971), 87.
2. That Christians in Jerusalem organized themselves for worship on the synagogue pattern is evident from the appointment of elders and the adoption of the service of prayer. The provision of a daily dole for widows and the needy reflected the current synagogue practice (Acts 2:42–45; 6:1). It is possible that the Epistle of James reflected the prevailing Jerusalem situation: in James 2:2, reference is made to a wealthy man coming “into your assembly.” The term translated “assembly” is literally “synagogue,” not the more usual word “church.” Glenn W. Barker, William L. Lane, and J. Ramsey Michaels, The New Testament Speaks (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 126–27.
3. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, vol. 2, The Thousand Years of Uncertainty (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), 379–80.
4. The London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Netherlands Missionary Society (NMS ) in 1795, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799, the CFBS in 1804, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM) in 1810, the American Baptist Missionary Board (ABMB) in 1814, the Glasgow Missionary Society (GMS) in 1815, the Danish Missionary Society (DMS) in 1821, the FEM in 1822, and the Berlin Mission (BM )in 1824.
5. Ralph D. Winter, “The Planting of Younger Missions,” in Church/Mission Tensions Today, ed. C. Peter Wagner (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972).