I continue to work my way through Schnabel’s excellent two volumes on Early Christian Mission.
In the second volume he examines Paul’s writings for his self-understanding as a missionary-church planter. Here are Schnabel’s conclusions from just 1 Cor 3:5-9.
Here are Schnabel’s conclusions from a wide range of passages on Paul’s understanding of his call.
They should shape our understanding of the call of church planters and missionaries today, whatever the context.
1. God is the the Lord of missionary work (1 Cor 3:5).
God gives to each believer, each apostle, missionary, pastor and teacher particular tasks and particular (spiritual) gifts.
Success in missionary work is solely due to God’s power and grace, as only he grants growth (1 Cor 3:6-7).
Paul relies in his missionary work consistently and solely on the power of Jesus Christ, Son of God (Rom 15:18).
2. Effectiveness in missionary work and in church ministry does not depend on people or on programs, nor on rhetorical techniques or elaborate methods, but is the result of God’s activity.
Churches that arrive from missionary work are not the possession of Paul or of other teachers: the church is and always remains God’s field, God’s buildingĀ (1 Cor 3:9).
3. The crucified and risen Jesus is the content of missionary preaching and thus the foundation, the criterion and the measure of church planting and church growth (1 Cor 1:23; 2:2; 3:11; 15:2).
The decisive factor of missionary work, therefore, is not the missionary but Jesus Christ, who is proclaimed, not the messenger but the message.
4. Paul understands himself as a servantĀ of God and of his word, as a servant of Jesus Christ and of the gospel, and as a servant of the church (1 Cor 3:5; Col 1:23, 25).
This self-understanding excludes all self-reliance and self-interest and all boasting with regard to his missionary work and his successes.
Missionaries are servants whose life is completely and constantly devoted to serving their Lord.
Missionaries who preach the gospel are, like clay jars, weak, unimposing, ultimately irrelevant (2 Cor 4:7). The suffering and the weakness of the missionaries whom God uses to proclaim the gospel and to establish new churches demonstrate that success and growth are solely the result of God’s power, the effect of the truth of the word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 4:7-15; Col 1:24).
5. Paul understands his missionary work as public proclamation of the victory of God, who had conquered him, the persecutor of the messianic people of God, who led him through the world in his triumphal procession (2 Cor 2:14-16).
His self-understanding is fundamentally controlled by the encounter with Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul understands himself as an ambassador of Jesus Christ who speaks as a representative of the Messiah (2 Cor 5:20; 13:3; Rom 15:18).
This status is all the reputation he requires: he does not need to boast of himself or increase his importance with letters of introduction (2 Cor 3:1; 5:12).
Early Christian Mission (2 Volume Set) (Eckhard J. Schnabel), 981-2.
That was the first five. Seven more to follow in the next post. . .
“Early Christian Mission (2 Volume Set)” (Eckhard J. Schnabel)
