EMMANUEL RESEARCH REVIEW

In this issue: The Urban Apostolic Task

Introduced by Brian Corcoran
Project Director, Emmanuel Gospel Center
Managing Editor, Emmanuel Research Review

In this issue, Rev. Ralph Kee, a well-seasoned church planter in Boston, illuminates the vision, practical instruction, and urgency of an apostolic ministry that engages the entire church in new-world building movements within contemporary cities. We've also included a few suggestions from Ralph's bookshelf for resources and further reading.

As always, we welcome your feedback! Contact us using the various methods on the right side of this page.

The Urban Apostolic Task

by Ralph Kee, Animator, Greater Boston Church Planting Collaborative

The church planter, of course, is not planting churches. Let me explain.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The point of planting churches is to implement on earth the Lord’s Prayer. You might even say the church planter is not really planting churches as such,¹ but rather the church planter is bringing a bit of the Kingdom down to earth, planting that little bit of the Kingdom on a little bit of the earth, and of course bringing people into that Kingdom, “hallowing the Name of God on earth.” Jesus gave the disciples the Lord’s Prayer first, apparently a priority word for them if you will (“what should we talk to God about?” they had asked Jesus). Then later Jesus gave them the Great Commission. (“This is what God wants you to do.”) The Great Commission carried out properly implements, fleshes out, incarnates the Lord’s Prayer on earth. Doing what we’re supposed to do after talking with God. Church planting is not an end in itself. The church planter is new-world building, calling forth the inner resources and embodying the teleologic² prophetic imagination of ordinary Christians; architecting, birthing and making visible microcosmic new worlds: “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

This little paper is about the Great Commission, the missionary task, the apostolic task to be carried out in the cities in which we serve. And the Great Commission task, the church planting task, belongs to all believers, not just those with an apostolic calling, with a missionary calling. As hundreds of “ordinary” Christians in our cities ask themselves, “What resides in me that I can contribute to ecclesiogenetic³ world building movements in and, yes, flowing out from my city?" we’ll know that new world building (revival) in this generation is quickening. As churches in our cities reflect on the deontology⁴ of Jesus’ Great Commission, identify and learn from the taxonomies⁵ of emerging filial church planting movements in and out from a city, and further engage as active etiological⁶ agents for metropolitan and global church planting, worldbuilding, movements, we’ll know the revival task is flourishing.

Of course we know church planters are indeed planting churches. And church planting is a team effort. What does that team look like? Think like this for a minute: imagine you are the Apostle Peter, standing with 10 longtime friends on the mountain and hearing Jesus tell you to go into the whole world and disciple everybody. “Do it,” he says. Then Jesus says to you, “Bye. See ya later.” How would you go about doing what you were just told to do, how are you and your few friends going to visit everybody in the world and disciple everybody, gathering them into easily accessible 24/7 faith communities and making sure they become mature believers in every way? What would have to be step number one, then step number two, then step number three, and so forth?

Well, step number one, first you would probably say “I’ve got to just go out there and get started, get something started. This is something new I’ve got to get started.” But then the question you’d ask is, “Just exactly what is it I’m supposed to get started? What is it supposed to look like?” Then, third question, third step, “How am I going to get people into this thing I have started? How can I get people wanting to get into this?” Then, next step once these people get into this: “how are these people, this growing group of people, going to be sustained and nurtured as they continue together?” Then, probably, “What is it they are going to need to know if they are going to continue to develop as an understanding community? What do we need to teach them? And who is going to teach them? This is getting to be a big job, even we 11 guys can’t do all this all by ourselves. And then, what if some problems come up within our growing group, like we don’t have enough food to feed everybody, for instance? How are we going to meet that need?”

Well, if you look at Ephesians chapter 4 you will notice that verse eleven names those very same steps in the very same order that you just now worked out in your own head, in your own logic. Five tasks are listed in Ephesians: apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic, pastoral, pedagogical. The apostolic task, get something started. The prophetic task: define what it is that is being started. The evangelistic task: get people into what is happening. The pastoral: nurture those people. The pedagogical task; teach them. The sixth task was added later, described in Acts 6: feed those who are not getting enough to eat. Those five tasks in Ephesians, then the one in Acts 6 are intentionally listed in the chronological order in which they logically need to be applied in church planting and church planting movements, even church planting in today’s 21st century.

The first five tasks listed here are the tasks performed by called and gifted individuals, individuals given one (or more than one) of the five ascension gifts, named in Ephesians 4:8, and 11. The sixth task, the diaconal task, was instituted to meet an emerging need in the embryonic church, calling gifted individuals to carry out the diaconal task. The tasks are listed in the chronologic, common sense order in which they are ever to be implemented. The six tasks, all six being ever carried out collaboratively, effectively meet all the needs of a living humanity: healthy reproduction, healthy purpose, healthy heart, healthy soul, healthy mind and healthy body. Healthy reproduction—that’s the apostolic. Healthy purpose—that’s the prophetic. Healthy heart—the evangelistic. Healthy soul—pastoral. Healthy mind—pedagogical. And healthy body—diaconal. Everything is essential, and everything is covered.

Summarizing these tasks:⁷

• Apostolic task – birthing communities; expanding the Church by multiplying churches; awakening the inner church planter.
   
• Prophetic task – determining purpose; imagining the Church, designing, defining, refining the Church as the embodied, purposeful Kingdom of God, the content, the shape of the Church; awakening and satisfying the prophetic imagination;⁸ awakening the inner Eutopian⁹ impulse, turning the oneiric¹⁰ Eutopian impulse into the doable Eutopian project (the project being the eschaton made present, the Kingdom of God embodied in the local church). Insisting the church bring the eschaton into the present, making it a right now reality visible to both believers and (critically important) unbelievers, the repertory¹¹ for doing so the action of Jesus in the Gospels.
   
• Evangelistic task – piercing hearts, peopling the Church; awakening the inner desire to know God, winning people to Jesus and introducing them to a Jesus-permeated church.
   
• Pastoral task – nurturing souls, nurturing the Church: sustaining, guiding, reconciling and healing;¹² awakening and satisfying the inner nurturant (the basis of the wildly successful Small Group movement of the last 40 years).¹³
   
• Pedagogical task – informing minds; educating the Church as to the truthfulness, the application of Christian faith to the totality of human life, from childhood to grave, of Christianity; the facticities¹⁴ of the faith, and what Christianity means applied across the whole spectrum of life; putting the sapience¹⁵ back in Homo sapiens; awakening and satisfying the inner thirst for understanding, championing the lifelong learner. (Since pedagogy etymologically speaks to the education of children [literally: to lead the child] there is debate in linguistic circles over whether words like androgogy or anthrogogy might be more accurate terms to use when speaking of adult education.)
   
• Diaconal task – serving bodies, serving, servicing the Church and the larger society; awakening and satisfying the inner desire to serve others.

Maybe it’s all right there in Acts 1 and 2, implemented on the Day of Pentecost, the first day of the Church. The wind of the Holy Spirit sweeps across the whole gathered community, filling the whole new, cooperate community of faith. Then the fire of the Holy Spirit falls, divides and sits on the heads of each of the assembled believers. The one fire divides, enflaming every head and every heart in the community. Maybe the flame that falls on your head imparts, on that day that the church is coming into existence and on the very day the Great Commission is first and immediately enacted, the apostolic gift, the apostolic calling. On your head, the prophetic gift, on your head the pastoral gift, on your head the pedagogical gift, etc. (other gifts are named in the New Testament as well). And undoubtedly a given individual can be gifted in more than one way: maybe he or she has two or three gifts. And the boundaries are undoubtedly porous; at one point in life and ministry, even in a given situation one gift may dominate, at another point another gift. Paul for example set aside his apostolic task, his apostolic gift if you will, to pick up the diaconal task, the diaconal gift (getting the money for the poor down to Jerusalem, a commitment he had made way back when he was first ordained: Galatians 2:10). Morally assuming the diaconal task, expected to be assumed temporarily, ended up costing him his life. But generally speaking we each have a primary gift, a primary calling, a primary task to carry out over many years. This paper is about the apostolic task, and those that contribute to carrying it out.

“Apostles are translocal rather than local leaders, and their focus is on mission rather than maintenance. It is this focus that differentiates them from bishops, cardinals, moderators, superintendents and others with roles that are not restricted to local churches. All denominations have leaders with translocal responsibility. But in most contexts, these leaders tend mainly to exercise administrative and pastoral roles.” Brock and Parker report that “until well after the time of Constantine, churches usually elected their own bishops, and they expected them to use their power to build up the entire community.” (Note the inward focus, the focus on the community, entire though it be, that already is.)¹⁶

“The perennial need for the recovery of apostles with church planting movements is testimony to the persistent tendency for mission to be swallowed up in maintenance. Sometimes this takes three or four generations; sometimes it happens much more quickly. Anabaptist apostles were replaced by Mennonite bishops. Roger Hayden traces the disappearance of English Baptist messengers to the unwillingness of local churches to release their most gifted leaders to this translocal role (Hayden, English, p. 75). There are indications that some (though by no means all) house church apostles are increasingly involved in maintenance roles, and may have become bishops in all but name. Perhaps the contemporary church planting movement can help to recover this ministry once more, not only within the house churches, but throughout the church.¹⁷ The challenges such movements offer to the wider church are to release those with appropriate gifts into pioneering and translocal roles, and to redress the imbalance between mission and maintenance roles in their denominational appointments.”

If the 4.5 billion (or more) people in the world who are currently outside of Jesus communities are to be enfolded into His Body in our lifetime (they die the same time we die), if the multitudes outside the faith in Boston and in many American cities are to be enfolded in the Body of Christ, then church planting movements are absolutely essential. And those with the apostolic calling are the very people principally commissioned by God to inspire and catalyze and contribute to right now church planting movements.

The apostolic task is so necessary that aggressiveness is called for. Mission agencies usually wait for people to volunteer themselves as candidates for mission appointment. The Church needs to energetically go after people, people who are entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs in business, say, or in industry: go after people who know how to make things happen: the Sam Waltons, the Bill Gates of the Church, and call them, charitably impress them, into apostolic ministry. We don’t need missionaries who can only maintain that which already is. A missionary who can only maintain what is is a contradiction of terms. A marathoner who can’t run a marathon is not a marathoner. He may be a runner, may love the marathon, may be a student of marathons past and present, but if he has not or cannot finish a marathon himself he is not a marathoner. A man may be hiker, may do some climbing, may have crampons and ice ax and rope, but if he has not or cannot climb a real mountain he is not an alpinist. He may be a climber, but he is not an alpinist. A missionary, an apostle, who loves missions, is a student of missions, who teaches missions to others, who writes books about missions, but who himself has never contributed significantly and personally to a church planting movement in any fashion is not an apostle no matter how much he wants to be. An apostle who cannot noticeably expand the Church is not an apostle, as an alpinist who cannot climb a mountain is not an alpinist. The term apostle is applicable not just to call or hope or wish or dream or training or credentialing or employment, but to achievement. One is not an apostle unless one has or does deliver the goods. Cities like Boston are clearly positioned to start and multiply church planting movements that can spread throughout their own city and even to other parts of the world. The apostolic task is there for our taking.

This, it seems to me, is at the heart of the missionary enterprise and a missionary organization.

© Ralph Kee 2010

RALPH KEE has lived and served as a missionary in Boston since 1971, with sequential church planting at the heart of his ministry over those four decades. A missionary with Missions Door of Denver, Colo., he has also had a close and happy working relationship with the Emmanuel Gospel Center in one way or another over most of those forty years. Forty years have brought many positive changes to Boston, and Ralph is grateful to God to have been able to witness many of those changes as they have come about.

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Notes for this article:

¹ Perhaps the essential essence would be stated more clearly if instead of calling it church planting it were called planting a greater Jesus-presence in a specific geographical area or neighborhood.

² Teleologic: perceiving, imagining phenomena according to their ends or purposes.

³ Ecclesiogenetic: church generated.

⁴ Deontology: the science relating to duty or moral obligation.

⁵ Taxonomy: the classification of organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships. Clavel describes taxonomy this way: “a list of features and accomplishments that, sufficiently well drawn, might help map the way toward replication or even further steps.” Activists in City Hall, Pierre Clavel, Cornell University Press, 2010, p. 174.

⁶ Etiology: the philosophical study of causation. Onelook Dictionary Search.

⁷ The first five tasks listed here are the tasks performed by those given one (or more) the five ascension gifts, named in Eph. 4:8, and 11. Speculation: could the first three tasks listed reflect the “masculine” aspects of God, and the last three tasks the “feminine” aspects of God. (We [Gen. 5:2 calls both the man and the woman by the one name of Adam: “He called their name Adam”] could be created in God’s image as male and female because both gender characteristics—though that may be a funny way to put it—are in some sense found within the essence of God, God-self.) The first three tasks are aggressive tasks, confrontational tasks, outward-looking tasks, outside-the-home tasks—the apostolic: working on the frontier; the prophetic: confronting the evils of society; the evangelistic: “going out into the highways and hedges and compelling them to come in (Luke 14:23). The last three tasks are within-the-home tasks, inward-looking tasks, community development tasks, tasks that tend and nurture the household of God - the pastoral: nurturing, shepherding the congregation; the pedagogical: teaching the children of God; the diaconal: serving the people of God and others. Let’s illustrate. Stackhouse speaks of pastoral and prophetic ministries as looking in opposite directions: critical of liberation theology, he nonetheless acknowledges the good pastoral ministry liberation clergy provide their poor, even while stating their ministry is “not in the least prophetic.” Max L. Stackhouse, Globalization and Grace, Contimuum, 2007, p. 31.

⁸ A New York Avenue Presbyterian Church advertisement in The Christian Century, Nov. 14, 2006, p. 49; the title of a book by Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination. Ganz describes Brueggemann’s phrase as “the combination of criticality of the world as it is and hope in the world as it could be that inspires action.” Marshall Ganz, Love, Power and Justice, 2008, Bulletin of the Boston Theological Institute, Spring 2008, p. 9.

⁹ Eutopia means “beautiful place.” Utopia means “no place,” so is perhaps a pun Moore devised from the word Eutopia. (Eutopia is to be contrasted, as the reader knows, with Dystopia, which means “bad place.”) Wayne A. Rebhorn, Introduction, Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005, p. xxviii, xxxii. This essay is of course thinking of prophecy in its most general and perhaps modern sense: its focus and fierce insistence that the moral nature of Jesus be replicated in the Christian or Jesus community. “Prophet: c. 1175, from O.Fr. prophete (11c.), from L. propheta, from Gk. prophetes (Doric prophata) ‘an interpreter, spokesman,’ especially of the gods, from pro- ‘before’ + root of phanai ‘to speak,’ from PIE bha- ‘speak.’” www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=prophet. Accessed March 2, 2007. Drawing on Freire, Ruy Costa in his handout at a Freire workshop at Episcopal Divinity School, Dec. 7, 2005 says Utopian thinking comes from “the conviction that the present state of affairs is not necessary.”

¹⁰ Oneiric: of or relating to or suggestive of dreams. Onelook Dictionary Search.

¹¹ Repertory: the entire range of skills or aptitudes or devices used in a particular field or occupation. Onelook Dictionary Search.

¹² William A. Clebsch & Charles R. Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective, Prentice-Hall, 1964, pp. 8-10.

¹³ The New International Version and some other versions translates Mark 16:15 preach the gospel to all creation, opening up the intriguing (and most timely) thought that perhaps the pastoral task includes nurturing, shepherding and husbanding, not only people but also the whole created order: that the pastoral task includes the care of the earth as well as its people. Remember, livestock were to keep the Sabbath too (Exod. 20:8-11).

¹⁴ Jeong-Hee Kim explains facticities: “According to Denzin (1989 edited by Sparkes 1990), facts refer to events that are believed to have occurred, and facticities describe how those were lived and experienced by the informants,” a critically important distinction, it seems to this author, for the cause of Christian education.

¹⁵ Sapience: ability to apply knowledge or experience or understanding or common sense and insight. Onelook Dictionary Search.

¹⁶ Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise, Beacon Press, 2008, p. 179.

¹⁷ Murray’s footnote adds: ‘Graham Dow recognizes the relevance of this ministry among Anglicans, in Scotland, Recovering, p. 124; Nigel Wright advocates its recovery among Baptists. Nigel Wright, Challenge to Change, Eastbourne, UK: Kingsway, 1991, pp. 172-190.

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Resources and Links

Additional Resources

Eckhardt, John. Moving in the Apostolic: God's Plan to Lead His Church to the Final Victory. Ventura, Ca. : Renew, 1999.

Guder, Darrell L. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Grand Rapids, Mich. : W.B. Eerdmans Pub., 1998.

Hirsch, Alan. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church. Grand Rapids, Mich. : Brazos Press, 2006.

Murray, Stuart. Church Planting: Laying Foundations. Scottdale, Pa. : Herald Press, 2001.

Simson, Wolfgang. Houses That Change the World: The Return of the House Churches. Waynesboro, Ga. : OM Pub., 2001.