Theopedia

Missions

Definition

Missions, also called missiology, is the branch of practical theology concerned with the church’s participation in God’s mission to the nations: personal evangelism, church planting, apologetics, and cross-cultural, contextualized gospel ministry among peoples who have not yet heard the gospel.1 The Great Commission supplies its mandate (Matt. 28:18-20), and its theological center is God’s own mission, carried out through the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit, in which the church is called to participate rather than to originate.1

Confessional Witness

Neither the Second London Baptist Confession nor the Westminster Confession devotes a chapter to missions as a discipline or a practice. Chapter 26, “Of the Church,” addresses congregations already gathered: their officers, worship, and discipline within a “particular society, or church,”2 not the work of carrying the gospel to peoples who have not yet heard it. That missionary mandate rests instead on Christ’s own Great Commission and on the confession’s description of the gospel church as no longer confined, as Israel was, to one nation.

Biblical Basis

Scripture presents missionary sending as an act of the gathered church, distinct from personal evangelism. At Antioch, the Holy Spirit instructed the church at worship, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2), and the church responded by fasting, praying, and formally sending the two men out (Acts 13:3). Paul explains why sending itself is necessary:

“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?” (Rom. 10:14-15)

Historical Development

Missiology’s own history as a formal theological discipline began later than the Reformation confessions themselves. The Dutch Reformed theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) is credited with the first sustained Protestant treatment of mission as a subject in its own right, distinguishing God’s own activity in mission from the church’s subordinate role in carrying it out.3 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of the modern Protestant missionary movement; Reformed and Calvinistic churches produced many of its leading figures, among them William Carey in India.4

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the Reformed doctrine of predestination remove any real motive for missionary effort? If God has already fixed who will be saved apart from human effort, the objection runs, then sending missionaries and preaching the gospel can add nothing to the outcome. This confuses the ends God has decreed with the means he has decreed alongside them: Reformed theology holds that God ordains the means together with the end, not the end apart from the means, so that if he has ordained a person to be saved, he has equally ordained that the person will hear the gospel preached.5 Refusing to go and preach on the ground that the outcome is already fixed is no more rational than a farmer refusing to sow because he does not know God’s secret purpose for the coming harvest.5

The historical record corroborates the logical point: confidence in God’s unfailing purpose has fueled missionary effort rather than discouraged it.4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Brian A. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis: Theological Reflections on the Origin, Plan, and Purpose of God’s Mission,” Themelios 50, no. 3 (2025): 577. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 5. ↩

  3. DeVries, “Missio Trinitatis,” 564. ↩

  4. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 306. ↩ ↩2

  5. Boettner, Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 186-87. ↩ ↩2