Evangelism & Missions

The New Testament does not give the church a later technical distinction between evangelism and mission. It speaks instead of announcing good news, bearing witness, being sent, making disciples, baptizing, teaching, serving, and gathering churches. Matthew 28:16–20 is one commission among several: Luke stresses repentance and forgiveness, John continues Jesus’ own sending, and Acts promises Spirit-empowered witness to the ends of the earth.

The eleven receive Matthew’s command directly, but its worldwide horizon and promise ‘to the end of the age’ led Christians to hear an enduring vocation. Acts and Paul show that vocation taking several forms: apostles cross boundaries, scattered believers speak about Christ, households host congregations, and new churches become witnesses in their own places. The text was ancient; the title ‘Great Commission’ was not.

Western monks evangelized among Germanic and northern European peoples; Byzantine Christians carried the faith among Slavic peoples; and the Church of the East established communities across Central Asia and in China. Gregory the Great’s instructions for the mission to Kent and Cyril and Methodius’s work in Slavonic illustrate a durable missionary problem: how much of a culture should be received, corrected, translated, or replaced?

The period also exposes why mission cannot be told only as a story of heroic preachers. A ruler’s baptism could draw a people into Christian institutions before sustained catechesis, while forced conversion among Saxons and later Baltic crusades confused discipleship with political submission. Franciscans and Dominicans crossed into Muslim and Mongol settings through preaching, study, diplomacy, and service, sometimes with genuine curiosity and sometimes with the assumptions of Christendom.

William Carey’s Enquiry (1792) argued that Christ’s command still obligated later Christians and that prayer should lead to organized action. Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, interdenominational, and women’s societies mobilized money, training, printing, translation, schools, medicine, and long-term residence. Catholic missionary orders and associations expanded in the same century, while the Orthodox mission to Alaska joined worship and catechesis to Indigenous languages and clergy.

This expansion was neither simply heroic nor simply colonial. Missionaries sometimes resisted slavery, settler violence, or abusive companies and helped preserve local languages; others assumed European superiority or benefited from imperial force. Indigenous catechists, translators, clergy, evangelists, and families usually carried Christianity farther than foreign personnel. Edinburgh 1910 enabled unprecedented Protestant cooperation, yet its delegates remained overwhelmingly British and American and gave younger churches limited voice.

The Lausanne Covenant (1974) gave evangelical cooperation a memorable formula: the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world. It treated evangelism—proclaiming Christ so that people may repent, believe, and enter his church—as primary within mission, while also naming social responsibility a Christian duty. Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi used evangelization more broadly for renewal, witness, explicit proclamation, adherence, community, sacrament, and apostolic initiative.

Ecumenical Protestants increasingly describe evangelism as explicit gospel articulation within God’s wider mission of worship, unity, justice, peace, and care for creation. Orthodox accounts begin with Trinitarian and Eucharistic life expressed in proclamation, holiness, translation, and service; Pentecostals stress Spirit-empowered testimony, conversion, healing, and church formation. Migration and Christianity’s demographic growth beyond the West now make mission ‘everywhere to everywhere.’ Major global bodies also reject coercion, deception, and exploitation even as they continue to disagree about conversion, dialogue, and the priority of proclamation.