Church is mission

At the conclusion of an intriguing overview of the haphazard form of the church’s mission in Acts, John Howard Yoder concludes ( Theology of Mission: A Believers Church Perspective ) that “the church is not simply a vehicle” of mission. Rather, in Acts, “the events of the church’s life are themselves the fact of mission.” It’s not that they first have a message, and then they form an institutional vehicle to get that message out. Rather, “the scattered believers talk about Jesus, and then they have to deal with the fact that some of the people who listen to them accept him; and that makes them move. They gradually come to see that this movement was what God was doing with them. Then they have to interpret the Jesus they are talking about in the new language of the people around them” (89).

The disciples recognize those movements as the work of the Spirit. As Yoder says, “this is a different perspective on the Holy Spirit than we usually have in modern Protestant thought.” In Acts, the Spirit doesn’t assure, convert, regenerate, or otherwise do subjective work. Rather, “In Acts the work of the Holy Spirit is outside the person. The Spirit calls on people, and the Spirit’s working is discerned not in their feelings but in their talking. The decisions that have identified with the Holy Spirit are outward decisions, social decisions, travel plans.”

In our modern culture, Yoder says, we need to talk in subjective terms that speak to the people around us, but we need to recognize “a certain degree of modesty” in the Bible’s own treatment of the experience of the Spirit.