3.2.2 - The mission of the Church
Christian mission has moved far beyond a one-way picture of Western missionaries carrying faith overseas. The history runs from early twentieth-century evangelism through missio Dei and Vatican II's Ad Gentes to holistic or integral mission, where proclamation, justice, reconciliation and service belong together. These developments raise a live question: do they recover God's worldwide mission or blur the Church's distinctive call to make disciples?
What Mission Means
In Christianity, mission is the Church's sent purpose in the world. It is connected with Jesus sending his disciples, with the command to make disciples, and with the belief that the Church should bear witness to the gospel in word and action. That means mission is broader than a "missionary trip", but it is also more specific than any good deed done by Christians.
Mission
In Christian theology, the Church's participation in God's work of witness, evangelism, service and transformation in the world.
Church
The Christian community as the body of believers, expressed through local congregations, denominations and worldwide traditions. In this lesson, "the Church" does not mean only one denomination.
The AQA wording asks for developments in Christian ideas of mission. The key word is developments. A strong answer should show change over time, not merely list activities that churches do. It should also avoid saying that mission has one meaning for every Christian. Catholic, Protestant, evangelical, Anglican, Pentecostal and ecumenical churches often overlap, but they may give different weight to proclamation, conversion, sacramental life, social justice, dialogue or service.
| Aspect of mission | What it means | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Evangelism | Proclaiming the gospel and inviting faith in Christ. | Many Christians see this as central to mission, especially in evangelical traditions. |
| Discipleship | Teaching, baptising, forming and nurturing believers. | Mission is not only first conversion; it includes shaping Christian life. |
| Service | Responding to need through education, healthcare, relief, pastoral care or community work. | Shows mission as practical love of neighbour. |
| Justice and reconciliation | Challenging oppression, conflict and exclusion. | Develops mission beyond private belief into social transformation. |
| Creation care | Treating environmental responsibility as part of Christian witness. | A more recent emphasis in many holistic mission statements. |
Two mistakes should be avoided. First, it is too narrow to say mission only means preaching abroad. Secondly, it is too broad to say mission means anything helpful that Christians do. The development to track is how Christians have argued about the relationship between proclamation, church growth, service and social transformation.
Early Twentieth-Century Mission
At the start of the twentieth century, many Western Protestant and Anglican churches imagined mission mainly as foreign mission. Missionary societies sent workers from Europe and North America to other parts of the world to preach, translate the Bible, plant churches, run schools and hospitals, and form Christian communities. Catholic missionary orders also carried out mission across the world, often through education, healthcare, preaching, sacramental ministry and the founding of local churches.
The 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh is a useful starting point. It brought together mainly Protestant and Anglican missionary leaders and is often treated as important for the modern missionary and ecumenical movements. Its focus shows the early twentieth-century pattern: cooperation between missionary societies, a strong concern to evangelise, and a tendency to speak of mission as work directed from the Christian West to the "non-Christian world".
| Early twentieth-century emphasis | Accurate explanation | Careful evaluation |
|---|---|---|
| Overseas evangelism | Mission was often imagined as sending missionaries to distant territories. | This gave urgency and organisation to mission, but it could make Western churches appear to be the owners of mission. |
| Church planting | Mission aimed to establish worshipping Christian communities. | This could create lasting local churches, but those churches were sometimes controlled by foreign agencies. |
| Education and healthcare | Missionaries often founded schools, clinics and hospitals. | This shows mission was never only preaching, but service was sometimes tied to paternalistic assumptions. |
| Ecumenical cooperation | Missionary cooperation helped shape later ecumenical movements. | Cooperation was significant, but Catholic, Orthodox and non-Western voices were not equally represented in early Protestant conferences. |
| Colonial entanglement | Mission sometimes overlapped with European empire, cultural superiority and "civilising" language. | This became a major reason later Christians rethought mission, power and culture. |
This early model should not be caricatured. Missionaries and local converts were diverse, and many made costly commitments to education, healthcare, translation and church life. At the same time, later Christians rightly questioned whether mission had too often confused the gospel with Western culture, colonial power or denominational expansion.
Early twentieth-century mission was often organised as Western-led overseas evangelism and church planting, but later developments challenged its colonial and paternalistic assumptions.
Missio Dei
A major mid-twentieth-century development was the idea of missio Dei, meaning "the mission of God". This changed the starting point. Instead of saying, "The Church has a mission and asks God to bless it," Christians began to say, "God is already active in the world, and the Church is invited to participate."
Missio Dei
The idea that mission begins in the nature and action of the triune God, not first in the plans, institutions or expansion of the Church.
The International Missionary Council meeting at Willingen in 1952 is usually treated as a key moment in this shift. The theological point was trinitarian: mission is rooted in God's sending action, in the sending of the Son and the work of the Spirit, and the Church is sent because God is already missionary. This helped move mission away from a purely ecclesiocentric model, where mission is centred on the Church's own expansion.
| Before the shift | After the shift |
|---|---|
| Mission is mainly the Church sending missionaries. | Mission is participation in God's prior action. |
| The Church can appear to be the owner and organiser of mission. | The Church is a witness and servant within God's mission. |
| Mission may be measured mainly by geographical expansion and conversion numbers. | Mission may also include signs of God's kingdom: reconciliation, justice, healing and renewed creation. |
| Western missionary agencies often set the agenda. | Local churches and Christians in every culture can discern mission in their own context. |
This development matters because it changes the Church's identity. The Church is not simply a religious organisation with an outreach department. It is meant to be a community shaped by being sent. Mission therefore belongs to the whole Church, not only professional missionaries.
There is an AO2 tension, though. Missio Dei can deepen mission by grounding it in God rather than empire or church self-interest. But if it is defined too broadly, almost any social or political change might be called "God's mission", even when the link with Christ, the gospel and the Church is unclear. A careful judgement is that missio Dei is powerful because it corrects church-centred triumphalism, but it still needs clear theological content.
Catholic Renewal
Catholic thinking about mission was reshaped strongly by the Second Vatican Council. The decree Ad Gentes taught that the pilgrim Church is missionary by its nature because it comes from the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit. This means mission is not an optional extra for a few specialists. It belongs to the identity of the whole Church.
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