Part 3: Christendom and Mission

B. The Reformers and Mission

In the last part, when we looked at biblical interpretation, we spent some time comparing the approach of the sixteenth century reformers and their contemporaries, the Anabaptists. The Anabaptists rejected the whole Christendom system; the reformers accepted it. No wonder the ways in which they interpreted the Bible were so different! As we examine in this session the impact of the Christendom era and mindset on the subject of mission, we will return to the sixteenth century again and compare the approaches of these two movements. Once again, their approaches are very different.

Actor Michael Caine is famous for the phrase "Not a lot of people know that." "Not a lot of people know that" the reformers did not really see sixteenth-century Europe as a mission field. Protesting against widespread abuses, challenging doctrinal errors and superstitions, the reformers were a first-generation movement of reform and renewal that profoundly affected church and society. But they rarely engaged in evangelism. Most taught that the Great Commission had been fulfilled centuries earlier and was simply not applicable in their generation. They insisted that the office of evangelist had died out with the apostles and prophets, leaving pastors and teachers to lead the churches. They turned Catholic churches into Reformed churches wherever they had liberty and governmental support to achieve this, but they did not generally plant new churches. They did not evangelise their contemporaries. Why?

Fundamentally, the reformers accepted the presupposition of the previous millennium that Europe was Christian. Ever since the adoption, early in the fourth century, by the Roman emperor Constantine, of Christianity as the state religion, and the subsequent decision at the end of that century by the emperor Theodosius to outlaw all other religions, the church had been operating not in mission mode but in maintenance mode, at least within the boundaries of what became known as Christendom. The imperial invitation to the church to become, in effect, the religious department of the empire revolutionised the idea of mission, along with biblical interpretation and many other aspects of Christian faith and practice. Church and state were now the pillars of a sacral society, where dissent was suppressed and almost everyone was assumed to be Christian by birth rather than by choice. Infant baptism marked the obligatory entry into this Christian society.

This revolutionary change is particularly evident in the evangelistic dimension of the church's mission. From being a powerless and sometimes persecuted minority that nevertheless could not refrain from talking about their faith in Jesus and his impact on their lives, the church had become a powerful institution that could impose its beliefs and practices on society. Evangelism was no longer a winsome invitation to choose a deviant and dangerous way of living, and to join a community that was puzzling and yet strangely attractive. The church's mission now involved:

• Ensuring doctrinal conformity;
• Enforcing church attendance;
• Enshrining moral standards in the criminal law;
• Eradicating choice in the area of religion.

David Bosch concludes: "it is only in recent decades that the full significance of those events at the beginning of the fourth century has begun to dawn on us. For mission and the understanding of mission the events of those fateful years had equally drastic implications".

Evangelism in its New Testament sense became irrelevant. If the whole empire (with the perennially awkward exception of the Jews) was now "Christian", it was obsolete. The role of the church was to provide pastoral care and teaching, and to ensure that church members were good citizens. Church leadership was essentially maintenance-oriented. Pastors and teachers were needed, but apostles had died out, evangelists were redundant and prophets were a nuisance in a church committed to supporting, rather than challenging, the status quo. Church leaders declared that, at least within Christian Europe, the Great Commission had been fulfilled.

For over a thousand years this remained the orthodox view, with only marginalised radical groups, like the Waldensians and Lollards, dissenting. Among these groups, the ministries of apostles, prophets and evangelists were sometimes rediscovered, maintenance was set firmly in a mission context, and something closer to New Testament evangelism was restored.

The Protestant Reformation challenged neither the Christendom framework nor the demise of mission. But their contemporaries, the Anabaptists, rejected Christendom as a delusion, engaged in serious ecclesiological reflection, and designated Europe as a mission field. To the Reformers, as to their Catholic opponents, this was an affront, and dangerous to both church and society. One of the few subjects on which Catholics and Protestants agreed in this era was that Anabaptism was subversive and needed to be eradicated. The Catholics tended to burn them, the Protestants normally beheaded them, but both operated on similar Christendom assumptions and applied similar Christendom methods.

Christendom, of course, survived the challenge represented by Anabaptism. The monolithic medieval Christendom was fractured into competing Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed mini-Christendoms, and the seeds of the "free churches" had been sown. In time, under the cumulative pressure of the Enlightenment, secularisation, urbanisation and pluralisation, Christendom would wither. But for centuries still, the Christendom mentality would dominate European Christianity and ensure that the church was still oriented towards maintenance rather than mission. Ecclesiology and missiology were disconnected. David Bosch writes: "The Reformation definitions of the Church were silent on its missionary dimensions. Ecclesiological definitions were almost exclusively preoccupied with matters concerning the purity of doctrine, the sacraments and church discipline. Mission had to content itself with a position on the church's periphery."

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