When the Church was the mission organization

I will be presenting a paper next weekend at the Southeast Regional Evangelical Missiological Society meeting, which will deal with the theme "Mission(s) and the Local Church." I will be engaging the question by looking at historical models of mission sending with a paper entitled, "When the Church was the Mission Organization: Rethinking Winter’s Two Structures of Redemption Paradigm." My abstract follows. 

​Critical observers of mission history will remark that following the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe, one reason for the overall inaction of Reformed Protestants in mission was the lack of mission sending structures. Roman Catholics on the other hand possessed a number of sending structures—most notably the monastic orders (e.g., Franciscans, Augustinians, Dominicans, Cistercians, and Jesuits) that were formed in the medieval period for the purpose of sending witnesses into the world. So how did mission sending happen and what structures were in place in the early and medieval church prior to the rise of monastic missionary orders? In this paper, I will argue that the church itself was the key organism and catalyst for mission sending. In doing so, I will offer an alternative conclusion to Ralph Winter’s (cf. Winter 1999, 220-229) popularly accepted notion of two structures of redemption in mission history—modalities (e.g., churches) and sodalities (e.g., monastic movements)—and argue that the church was the sole means of mission sending. To make the case, I will highlight the representative examples of four missionary-monk-bishops who served between the fourth and eighth centuries: Basil of Caesarea (fourth-century Asia Minor), Patrick (fifth-century Ireland), Augustine of Canterbury (sixth and seventh century England), and Boniface (eighth-century Germany). 

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