Calvin and Missions - World Evangelical Alliance

120 Calvin and World Mission
pel (v.23). The liberty in which Paul serves is the liberty of a citizen of
heaven, a new creature in Christ Jesus.
The gospel brings men into that liberty and forges a new fellowship, the
fellowship of the Spirit-filled people of God. Again the key to our understanding
is in Jesus Christ himself. The true circumcision are the people
who worship by the Spirit of God, glory in Christ Jesus and have no confidence
in flesh (Phil. 3:3). The ties that join those born of the Spirit to Jesus
Christ free diem from the dominion of any earthly structure. Christians
conform to social structures for the Lord’s sake, but that very qualification
is the sign of their deepest freedom.
The Christian’s ultimate loyalty belongs to Jesus Christ alone. He is not
a nationalist of an earthly state who finds in Christ the religious resources
to enable him to fulfill his calling as a political being. He is a citizen of the
heavenly polis who sustains his civic responsibilities here as a stranger and
an alien; he has no abiding city but seeks after that which is to come (Heb.
13:14).
Through centuries of conflict the church has learned (we may hope!) the
biblical lesson that the community of the people of God cannot be identified
with the political state. But now the church must learn that it has an
identity, a ‘theopolitical’ form of the community of Christ’s kingdom in
the world. Those who were once aliens, strangers from the covenant and
the commonwealth, are now fellow-citizens with the Old Testament saints,
members of the commonwealth, God’s covenant people.
The form that the church takes cannot be an indifferent matter. The Holy
Spirit who filled and fills the new people of God directed Christ’s apostles
as they established his assembly in the world. The New Testament provides
form with freedom; among the ‘all things’ of Christ’s commandments
to be taught to the nations is the pattern of fellowship in worship,
edification and witness that Christ has appointed for his people. Church
growth is church growth – the building up in the world of the new people
of God according to the word and will of the Spirit.
Here is an urgent concern. If our growing understanding of sociology
outstrips our grasp of biblical theology, we may seek to build Christ’s
church from the wrong blueprints. Concretely, it is evident that in our efforts
to respect sociological structures in evangelism we may unintentionally
deny the biblical doctrines of the unity and catholicity of Christ’s
church. Christ’s teachings are an offense to the mind of the natural man,
and Christ’s community is a rebuke to the tribalism, ethnocentricism and
prejudice of the world’s social orders.