The Church's Mission

THIS IS a much more problematic issue than one might suppose, for while the New Testament itself presents a picture of a missionary movement, both during the period of Jesus’ ministry, and after His Death, Resurrection, and especially Ascension and Pentecost—indeed the latter two events seem to be presented as the two events in the history of salvation that empower the distinctively apostolic mission—while this seems indisputably true, it is difficult to uncover any clear teaching on the mission of the Church from the teaching of the patristic period, if we understand this period as following the apostolic period, properly so-called. Let me just give two illustrations of this contrast between apostolic and patristic views on mission.

The New Testament itself contains two very clear assertions of the mission of those who follow Christ. First there is Matthew 28:19f. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” Secondly there is Jesus’ commission in the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel, generally regarded by scholars nowadays as a later addition to the Gospel, but nonetheless part of the Church’s canonical text: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover” (Mark 16:15-18). How are these texts interpreted by the Fathers? Almost invariably they are interpreted historically, that is, they are taken to refer to the historical situation of the apostles to whom Jesus was speaking. So St John Chrysostom, in the last of his homilies on St Matthew, speaks of the way in which the remembrance of that day remained with the apostles to encourage them in all the trials and difficulties of their mission. He then goes on to say how much easier it is for us: all that is laid on us is to observe Christ’s commands—in other words we are the them of the commission, not the successors of the apostles ( Hom. 90 on Matthew, 2-3). It is the same in Eusebius’ account of the mission of the apostles, consequent on the Ascension: he quotes Matt. 28:19 as fulfilled in the history of those years.

When these passages are interpreted as having a contemporary message, that message is not about mission as such: it is about the doctrine of the Trinity(Athanasios, AdSerap. 1.6,8, etc.; Epiphanios, Ancoratus 7. 1; 8. 7), or baptism (Tertullian, de Bapt. 13. 3; Cyprian, Ep. 27. 3), or about the necessity of obeying Christ’s commands (as with Chrysostom, already cited, or Cyprian, Ep. 63.18), or that what Christ commanded the apostles to teach was “Christianity” (Eusebius, Dem. 1.6.74-5).


Another example only sharpens this point. In the Didache, which I think belongs to the first century A.D., there is mention of two groups of Christian ministers: on the one hand, apostles and prophets, and on the other, bishops and deacons. The latter are clearly local officials of the Christian communities (Did. 15), while the former are travelling missionaries ( ibid . 11-13), who are not, as a rule, meant to settle down, though the Didache does envisage the possibility ( ibid . 13). If this reflects the Christian situation in the first century (and I see no reason to doubt that, though I would add the caveat that the Didache probably envisages a particular local situation), then we have a contrast between missionaries—who are called apostles and prophets—and the local officials of the Christian communities—called bishops and deacons—whose ministry concerns the local community that appointed them. If we then look at the Church as it has existed at the end of the second century, if not earlier, then we see a church in which any specifically missionary ministry—that of the apostles and prophets—has died out, and the formal ministry of the Church has been replaced by an essentially pastoral ministry—of bishops, priests and deacons. If then the Church in the decades after the Ascension and Pentecost was fashioned, through the ministry of apostles and prophets, to be a missionary Church, it would seem that by the end of the second century that function had been fulfilled, and the Church became a group of settled communities, with an essentially pastoral ministry of bishops, priests and deacons. If this is the case, then the fact that the Fathers interpret Jesus’ commission to the apostles as historically limited is hardly surprising: it is simply confirmation of the way in which the Church had developed away from being conscious of having any missionary vocation. Put that bluntly, then the patristic presuppositions about mission are simply that it was an historically early phase of the Church, that is now past.

And there is a great deal of evidence that confirms such a judgment. Let us look again at the way the Church had developed by the end of the second century. It was, we have seen, a Church that had settled down with an essentially pastoral ministry. This pastoral ministry, led in each community by a single bishop, served a community defined by the basic unit of Mediterranean civilization from at least the time of Herodotus: the city (formerly the independent city-state) with its hinterland, which formed, in most cases, an economically self-sufficient unit. How deeply this fundamental fact impinged on the Church’s self-consciousness is evident in the petition of the litany: “Υπέρ της πόλεως ταύτης, ...πάσης πόλεως, χώρας, και των πίστει οίκούντων έν αύταις, του Κυρίου δεηθώμεν”—people live in cities and their χώραι, and the local church is the church of the city. This identification of the local church with the fundamental unit of the Mediterranean world—for the Church the Roman Empire—was part of the way the Church nestled into the administrative structures of the Roman Empire, with the local churches grouped into provinces, each governed by a metropolitan, the bishop of the provincial metropolis, something confirmed as “ancient custom” at the Council of Nicaea in 325 (see canons 4 and 6). As the Empire gradually embraced Christianity in the wake of Constantine’s conversion, the modeling of the structures of the Church on those of the Empire yielded a sense of symbiosis between Church and Empire, evident from the way in which the Emperor’s government of the inhabited world (the οίκουμένη) was seen to reflect the cosmic rule of the Word of God, to the ceremonies of lighting candles and burning incense, with which the simplest of the faithful honored the icons. “Christian” and “Roman” became the same thing: an equivalence most startlingly manifest in the way Patrick, one of the few Christians in the early centuries to establish a church outside the Imperial frontiers, uses Romani when he means “Christians.”


If we look at what evidence there is after the second century of what might be called missionary activity, what we find largely, though not entirely, supports the picture that is already emerging. First, there is St Gregory the Wonderworker, Origen’s disciple, bishop of Neocaesarea and evangelizer of Pontus in northern Asia Minor. This case, I must admit, does not fit the pattern I have been painting at all. For Gregory is presented as a bishop who evangelized his diocese: when he arrived there were only seventeen Christians, by the time of his death there were only seventeen pagans! He achieved this success by his preaching, but mainly by his miracles, and in this he conforms to the pattern of apostolic missionary activity depicted in the Acts of the Apostles. Next, there is another Gregory: Gregory the Illuminator, the evangelizer of Armenia. But in this case it is as a lay Christian that he sows the seeds of Christianity in Armenia, and in particular by his own near-martyrdom, when he is tortured by King Tiridates for his refusal to participate in a pagan feast. It is only after the conversion of the King and the kingdom, that he is consecrated bishop of Etchmiadzin, Catholikos of Armenia, as the supreme pastor of a church that he has brought into being. It is similar in the case of Frumentius, the evangelizer of Ethiopia: he is consecrated bishop by Athanasios to be pastor to the church that already exists as a result of his, and his friend Aidesios’, missionary activities as lay Christians. My final example is that of Ulfilas, the apostle of the Goths. This is an interesting case, because of the curious way in which Ulfilas was caught in the contingencies of history. He himself became a Christian in Constantinople in the 340s, when the capital was a center of Arianism, and it was thus Arian Christianity that he preached to his fellow-Goths, who were auxiliaries or federate in the Imperial army, charged with defending the Danube. As more and more Goths entered the Empire, notably during the reign of the ill-fated Valens (364-378), they embraced Imperial Christianity, that is, Arianism. Under Theodosios I, the Empire came to embrace orthodox Christianity, but the Goths remained faithful to their traditions, an Arian Christianity with its Gothic Scriptures. It seems to me that for the next century or so this resulted in an illogical, but very convenient situation: the Goths remained archetypal barbarians, and only individually did they assimilate to the Empire—and their Arianism marked them off from the Catholic Empire, creating a religious apartheid that confirmed a deeply-valued political and social apartheid. So the Goths became Christian, as Roman allies, who at that stage might have become assimilated to Roman ways, as had happened in the third century, but remained Arians, as a sign of the barbarian status to which they were relegated by the political exigencies of the fourth and fifth centuries. It is a curious confirmation of the identity of Roman and Catholic Christian!

But let us look now, not at historical examples of missionary activity (even if presented in a much-mythologized form), but at the stories of missionary activity that were popular in the fourth and later centuries—by which I mean the apocryphal acts of the apostles, many of which are earlier than the fourth century, as well as tales that belong to the fourth century like the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions. Here I think we find further confirmation of my general case: for these popular tales look back to the apostolic age as the age of missionary activity, and see that activity as the preserve of apostles and those “equal to the apostles”—bishops hardly figure at all. There is the story of Abgar of Edessa, his correspondence with Jesus, and subsequent conversion by Thaddaeus, sent at the command of Thomas—the story with which Eusebios ends the first book of his Church History. Then there are the further stories about Thomas that take him to India, as related in the Acts of Thomas. Similar stories are told about other apostles: Andrew finds his way to Patras, where he is martyred, for instance. But these stories do not only concern the apostles themselves, they also tell of those “equal to the apostles,” the isapostoloi , women like Thekla: she is presented in the Acts of Paul and Thekla as a preacher and missionary like Paul, equal to him, isapostoloj . But this brings in another element of the picture portrayed by these apocryphal writings, so popular in the fourth century and later: the rapidly expanding church of the apostolic age is not just the result of the apostles’ teaching, miracles and heroic martyrdom, it is closely bound up with the ideal of virginity, or celibacy. (Thekla's popularity was enormous, and by no means plebeian: the secret name of Macrina, the sister of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, was Thekla.)

It seems to me that there are some general patterns emerging from this extremely impressionistic glance at the notion of missionary activity in the Church of the Fathers, especially the Fathers of the fourth century. First, apostles and bishops seem to represent two different ideals of church leadership: the apostles are roving missionaries, preachers, wonder-workers, martyrs, while the bishops are pastors who remain with their flocks (bishops were forbidden to move from see to see—Nicaea 1, canon 15—though it is a canon followed more in the breach than in the observance). Secondly, this contrast was seen in the patristic period as a contrast between the historical age of the apostles, which is past, and the present age. But this contrast between past and present was a contrast that reached deeply into the consciousness of the Church of Constantine and his successors. It was a contrast between a church at war with the political authorities and a church increasingly hand-in-glove with them—a contrast between the church of the martyrs and a church where martyrdom was no longer called for—a church over and against the world, and a church at home in the world. But Christians knew that they could never be wholly at home in the world—they were to be “strangers and aliens,” “seeking a homeland,” desiring “a better country, that is, a heavenly one: therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared for them a city” (Hebrews 11:13-16). It is interesting—more than that, I suggest—that this sense of being a perpetual alien, the ideal of xeniteia or peregrinano, is the source of some of the striking examples of missionary activity in the later patristic period. The most obvious example is that of the Irish monks: Columba, leaving his native Ireland, and setting up a monastery in Scotland, whence Christianity spread; his disciple Aidan, going to Lindisfarne and bringing Christianity to Northumbria; Columbanus, travelling across Europe as far as Bobbio—a tradition that remained valid for their Anglo-Saxon successors, notably Boniface. But it is not an example confined to the Western fringe of the Roman world. Vailhé spoke of John Moschos, the author of the Leimonarion or Spiritual Meadow, as “ ce juif-errant monastique .” This “monastic Wandering Jew” did not simply travel from monastery to monastery, collecting marvelous stories, but spent a decade or so in Egypt, assisting John the Almsgiver in his attempts to restore his diocese to Chalcedonian orthodoxy—not just from Monophysitism, but also from recalcitrant paganism.

This sense of not being at home in the world can be put another way: we can talk of a sense of the imminence of the coming kingdom of God, of an eschatological awareness. Most modern New Testament scholarship would emphasize the eschatological dimension of the missionary activity of Jesus and the apostles: in Mark 13:10, Jesus says that the Gospel must be preached among all nations before the end comes; and in I Cor. 9:16-23, Paul claims to be under just such a compulsion. Hence it seems to me not at all surprising that the picture of the mission of the apostles in the apocryphal acts links it with miracles, martyrdom and the ascetic ideal of virginity: miracles are “signs,” shmeia , not just works of power, but palpable evidence of the kingdom encroaching on this world: martyrs, in the early Church, were front-line soldiers in the apocalyptic struggle between the forces of evil that hold sway over this world and the forces for good of the coming kingdom (that is why the accounts of the early martyrs are shot through with imagery from Jewish apocalyptic literature); and virginity, within Christianity, is not primarily a piece of personal asceticism, but a sign of the kingdom. It is not surprising, then, that monks have often been in evidence in Christian missionary activity from the fourth century onwards: apart from the examples of the missionary impact of monastic xeniteia , just mentioned, one thinks of the monks St Gregory the Great sent to England just fourteen centuries ago at the end of the sixth century, or of SS. Cyril and Methodios, the apostles of the Slavs, in the ninth century, and their monastic disciples, or of the role of what Professor Dimitri Obolensky has called the “hesychast international” in the evangelizing of Russia.

What then are the patristic presuppositions of missionary activity? Most essentially that “mission,” “preaching,” or whatever, is not at all a human activity whereby one group tries to change the minds of others so that they join the “evangelizing” group. It is not that Christians in the patristic period did not engage in such activity, though we hear much more about it in relation to other Christian groups, but that they did not see such activity as the apostolic mission of the Church. Mission, in that sense, is to proclaim the imminence of the kingdom of God, to awaken a sense of that other world—the city God has prepared for us—which is our homeland, where we truly belong. As a specific activity, mission was seen as something that belonged to the apostolic age—otherwise, it seems to be something implicit in an attempt to live under the shadow of the coming kingdom, of which attempt monasticism came to be the archetype. Perhaps the reason for the lack of much sense of missionary activity as a specific activity, incumbent upon followers of Christ, lies deeper, in the sense that awareness of the imminence of the kingdom does not separate Christians from others, as the saved from the damned, but reveals our deepest solidarity with the whole human race in the realization that all of us, saint and sinner, believer and unbeliever, need to hear the same call—the call to metanoia , repentance.

*Originally published in The Greek Orthodox Theological Review , Vol. 44, Nos. 1-4 (1999): 649-656.