Category: Apollos

A Plan for Church Planting

4/28/2022

What follows was originally a paper completed as part of my studies through the Antioch School. The objective of this assignment was to demonstrate that I had "designed a model to use as a guide in planting and establishing churches today from the core elements of Paul's strategy used on his missionary journeys, including local churches and mission agencies/apostolic teams."

Formatting Note: Due to headaches, I was not able to convert my thoughts into an article or paper format, and instead turned in a bullet list of major points I felt such a paper would need to cover. I have elected to leave it in this form when posting it here because I kind of like how it works.

All scripture passages are NASB unless otherwise noted.

A missionary should be identified and affirmed through both the sending church and the Holy Spirit.
1. Terms:
  1. A missionary is here defined as someone who is being sent out from an established church to perform the work of establishing another church in another context, regardless of the cultural and physical distance from the sending church.
  2. The sending church is here defined as an established local church that is actively participating in the establishment process of another church.
2. Justification:
  1. Acts 11:22: The news about them reached the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch.
  2. Acts 13:1-3: Now there were prophets and teachers at Antioch, in the church that was there: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were serving the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set Barnabas and Saul apart for Me for the work to which I have called them." Then, when they had fasted, prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.
  3. Acts 16:1-3: Now Paul also came to Derbe and to Lystra. And a disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek, and he was well spoken of by the brothers and sisters who were in Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted this man to leave with him; and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those parts, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.
  4. Acts 18:24-27a: Now a Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man, came to Ephesus; and he was proficient in the Scriptures. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he was accurately speaking and teaching things about Jesus, being acquainted only with the baptism of John; and he began speaking boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the way of God more accurately to him. And when he wanted to go across to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him;
  5. “It is significant that in all the subsequent ‘sendings’ of missionaries in Acts, the emphasis made by Scripture is never upon an individual volunteering or upon his own subjective sense of call, but always on the initiative of others.”1
  6. “Whereas we seem to have emphasized exclusively the individual’s subjective sense of a highly personal call of God, and often reinforced this by emotional appeals for individuals to volunteer, the New Testament by contrast stresses either the corporate initiative of congregations or the informed initiative of missionaries in selecting suitable people.”2
3. Means:
  1. Identification and affirmation of a missionary involves the recognition of maturity and giftedness in an individual that makes them suitable for the work of church establishment. This person is then set apart for the work of mission.
  2. In almost every instance of a person becoming a missionary in Acts, they are identified as such by the Holy Spirit through the means of the local church or an established and informed church leader. This practice is so overwhelmingly common in Acts that it should be taken as the primary means of identifying missionaries.
  3. In the odd case of Apollos, we have no record of who sent him to Ephesus to teach and make disciples, but we can infer that he was not operating under the guidance of a local church, as he is shown to have no existing relationship to any local church. In this instance, the initial push toward mission work seems to have been stirred in the heart of Apollos directly; but this being a solitary event in the scripture record suggests this should be taken as a valid, but unusual, means of initiating the process.
  4. Every leader identified as a missionary in Acts, including Apollos, is affirmed by a local church, which takes on a managerial role in the work of the missionary.
  5. Emphasis on identifying, affirming, and sending the missionary is on the Holy Spirit working through the local church.
The missionary should be trained through a system approved by the sending church.
1. Terms:
  1. Training here refers to all forms of preparation for the work of mission. This includes, but is not limited to, doctrinal education, discipleship, leadership practice, target language study, and target cultural exposure.
2. Justification:
  1. Acts 18:26b: But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the way of God more accurately to him.
  2. “In a very real sense, this is our work for which we feel responsible, as an extension overseas of our own local evangelistic ministry” (emphasis original).3
  3. “Para-church structures are useful to the extent that they aid the Church in its mission, but are manmade and culturally determined.”4
  4. “Since they are manmade and culturally determined, all para-church structures should be subjected to continuous rigorous sociological and theological analysis to determine their effectiveness as instruments of the church” (emphasis original).5
3. Means:
  1. Some aspects of missionary preparation are matters that must be handled within the church. Discipleship, for instance, should not be outsourced in general. Aspects of the mission which directly reflect on the sending church’s understanding and practice should also be handled by the church.
  2. More advanced training can be handled in the church if it has either the internal resources to handle it or a partnership, like the Antioch School, that provides certain resources to be utilized by the church in education.
  3. While there is no scriptural precedent for external seminaries or Christian colleges, they are not inherently an invalid approach. However, the means by which they function and recruit should be revisited in light of the expectation that the sending church is ultimately responsible for the people they send out. This will be covered more clearly in competency 5, but the basic idea is that the church should have some say on what external education program is used by the missionary, or at least the ability to review the education a missionary receives and determine its suitability.
The missionary should be equipped through the participation of the sending church.
1. Terms:
  1. Equipping here includes, but is not limited to, financial support, manpower, and necessary materials.
2. Justification:
  1. Acts 15:39-40: Now it turned into such a sharp disagreement that they separated from one another, and Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas, and left after being entrusted by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.
  2. “Sending churches are there to support a plant, not to control it.”6
  3. “It is crucial that you have the support of your sending church...your sending church has the money, resources, and manpower you need.”7
3. Means:
  1. The sending church needs to take responsibility for sending the missionary.
  2. The sending church can do so in cooperation with other bodies; in Paul’s epistles, he thanks churches beyond Antioch for supporting his work.
  3. Other bodies include missions agencies, provided these agencies serve as a means to support the mission of the sending church rather than an authoritative body over the church.
  4. The specific list of resources a missionary needs in a specific context may vary, and the sending church should be open to exploring those needs with the missionary.
  5. Equipping a missionary means letting go of those resources, with the understanding that they will be applied to the mission field as the field requires, not as the sending church dictates. By this point in the process, the church should be willing to trust the missionary to make decisions in the field that best reflect the mission of the sending church.
The missionary should be adaptable in seeking opportunity to connect to their target context.
1. Justification:
  1. Acts 10:24, 27, 33: On the following day he entered Caesarea. Now Cornelius was expecting them and had called together his relatives and close friends...As he talked with him, he entered and found many people assembled..."So I sent men to you immediately, and you have been kind enough to come. Now then, we are all here present before God to hear everything that you have been commanded by the Lord."
  2. Acts 14:1: In Iconium they entered the synagogue of the Jews together, and spoke in such a way that a large number of people believed, both of Jews and of Greeks.
  3. Acts 16:13: And on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to a riverside, where we were thinking that there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and began speaking to the women who had assembled.
  4. Acts 17:16-17: Now while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him as he observed that the city was full of idols. So he was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be present.
  5. Acts 28:30-31: Now Paul stayed two full years in his own rented lodging and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching things about the Lord Jesus Christ with all openness, unhindered.
  6. “The fact is that faithfulness to unchanging biblical truth often requires changing structures as time passes.”8
2. Means:
  1. The missionary should be prepared to be on mission at all times in their context.
  2. The missionary should seek any opportunities that the Holy Spirit has prepared.
  3. The missionary should seek places where people may be open to the message.
  4. The missionary should not limit themselves to one means of accessing the community, or any number of means that the missionary planned in advance.
  5. The missionary should be free and prepared to adapt methods to changing circumstances, whether that change is initiated by the Holy Spirit or the culture.
  6. The mission must remain constant as circumstances change.
The missionary should make disciples and collect them into a unified body.9
1. Justification:
  1. Acts 2:44: And all the believers were together and had all things in common;
  2. Acts 17:4: And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, along with a large number of the God-fearing Greeks and a significant number of the leading women.
  3. Acts 17:34: But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
2. Means:
  1. As established above, the missionary is by definition someone working to establish a church. With the understanding that the church is the primary vehicle for fulfillment of the Great Commission, that church should have as its target those who are not yet disciples.
  2. Therefore, it is necessary that the work of the missionary involve making new disciples, forming them into a church, and establishing that church.
  3. The closest thing we see in scripture to a churchless Christian is the Ethiopian eunuch, who is saved and then continues on his way to Ethiopia where there is no church at that time. However, the historical record pretty clearly shows that said eunuch went ahead and made some disciples and gathered them into a church.
The missionary should identify and train leaders for the local church.
1. Terms:
  1. The local church is, for the purposes of this paper, a means of distinguishing from the sending church. The local church here refers to the church that is being established by the missionary.
2. Justification:
  1. Acts 14:23: When they had appointed elders for them in every church, having prayed with fasting, they entrusted them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
  2. Acts 20:28, 32: “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood...And now I entrust you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.”
3. Means:
  1. Paul consistently established leaders at each church before leaving it, and sent others to continue establishing leaders when necessary,
  2. The process for ensuring leaders are established is functionally identical to steps 1 and 2 above; with training aimed at work within the local church primarily rather than outside of it.
  3. According to Paul’s command to Titus, a church cannot be considered fully established until it has suitable leaders.
The missionary should report to the sending church.
1. Justification:
  1. Acts 11:4, 18: But Peter began and explained at length to them in an orderly sequence...when they heard this, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, "Well then, God has also granted to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life."
  2. Acts 14:26-28: From there they sailed to Antioch, where they had been entrusted to the grace of God for the work that they had accomplished. When they had arrived and gathered the church together, they began to report all the things that God had done with them and how He had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they spent a long time with the disciples.
2. Means:
  1. Griffiths argues in Missionary that the furlough period of a missionary should be spent primarily with one congregation, preferably the sending church, both to serve the church’s interest in missionary involvement, and to equip and refresh the missionary.
  2. With the rise of modern technology, even a missionary who is not expecting a furlough can more easily visit the sending church and/or maintain communication to share updates.
  3. In the situation of a missionary whose work is not long-term, they should be expected to return to their sending church on the completion of their mission and the church should be expected to be attentive to an overview of what was done.
  4. Regardless of method, this step should be seen as an opportunity for the sending church to have its focus returned to mission, to verify that the missionary is remaining true to the assigned mission, and for the missionary to celebrate successes and receive comfort on difficulties from a body that knows them well and invests in the work.
The missionary should maintain relationship with the new church.
1. Justification:
  1. The entirety of the Pauline epistles and many of the General epistles.
  2. Acts 15:36: After some days Paul said to Barnabas, "Let's return and visit the brothers and sisters in every city in which we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are."
  3. Acts 18:23: And after spending some time there, he left and passed successively through the Galatian region and Phrygia, strengthening all the disciples.
  4. Acts 20:2: When he had gone through those regions and had given them much encouragement, he came to Greece.
2. Means:
  1. The options available to modern missionaries in maintaining relationship with the churches they have established are as varied as the options available to a missionary maintaining relationship with their sending church.
  2. There is also the option that the missionary never leaves the local church after it is established.

1 Michael Griffiths, Who Really Sends The Missionary? Chicago, Ill.: Moody Press, 1974. 12.
2 Ibid., 13.
3 Missionary, 19-20. Griffiths is specifically justifying the responsibility of the local church in supporting missionaries through finances and prayer, but it is not a stretch from his point to include responsibility to prepare those same missionaries, especially if the missionary is viewed through the understanding here quoted.
4 Howard Snyder, “The Form of the Church” in The Community Of The King Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1977. 159.
5 Ibid., 167-168.
6 Peyton Jones and Ed Stetzer, Church Plantology: The Art And Science Of Planting Churches Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021. 368.
7 Ibid., 369.
8 “Form,” 143.
9 This part almost sounds self-explanatory because you can’t make a church without gathering some disciples but then you run across a handful of church plants that recruit almost entirely from other churches and haven’t baptized anyone and you start to realize it really isn’t that clear to some people and you get so annoyed about it that years later you have to be reminded that this thought would be better served in the footnotes than the body of the paper.

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Apollos and the Nature of Missionaries

4/14/2022

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What follows was originally a paper completed as part of my studies through the Antioch School. The objective of this assignment was to demonstrate that I had "developed a biblical definition for missionary and missionary work as taught in Acts."

In defining the Great Commission as a church-based endeavor rather than an individual mandate, and further describing the church as the direct authority in the work of carrying the mission of the Great Commission, and clarifying that the nature of that work is to establish churches, the natural conclusion is that the work of a missionary is fundamentally to work under the authority of the local church in establishing a new local church in a new local setting. That this is the model we see of missionary work in Acts further cements this understanding.

The book of Acts follows a select few missionaries; it largely focuses on the missionary team that included Paul, whether that was with Barnabas and Mark on the first missionary journey or Paul, Silas, Luke, and Timothy by the time the second missionary journey reached Europe. Beyond this, there is a brief aside about the work of Apollos in Acts 18:24-28, and little else. However, that aside does indicate that the means we see Paul utilizing were treated as normative during that period.

Apollos arrives on the scene with skill at speaking, an understanding of scripture (v. 24), established instruction, and a partial grasp on the truth of Christ (v. 25). He is identified by leaders in the church as a potential leader, given further training (v. 26), then commissioned and sent out by a church body (v. 27). When he arrived, he was able to use his gifts and training to help the church that was already active in that area (v. 27-28). We later learn in 1 Corinthians that Apollos goes on to have a significant impact on the early church, to where some misguided believers were grouping themselves by whether they were reached by Paul, Peter, or Apollos (See 1 Corinthians 1:12, 3:4, and 3:22).

It is helpful to consider this story, as it is the main example we have in Acts of what missionary preparation and sending looked like when it did not directly include Paul. It is easy enough, if all we talk about is Paul’s work, to put his work in one category and our own in another; the case of Apollos contradicts this tendency. That Apollos follows the same basic missionary path as Paul, despite neither meeting Paul nor being sent out by the same church that sent Paul, indicates that the model we see from Paul was expected to be the model used by others as well. It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that it is the model we also are expected to use.

Hesselgrave reaches this same conclusion, and defines the model, when he states that “there is explicit teaching in the Epistles which directs us to carry on the same activities in a similar way—namely, to go where people are, preach the gospel, gain converts, gather them into churches, instruct them in the faith, choose leaders, and commend believers to the grace of God.”1 Priscilla and Aquila are part of the church in Ephesus and have been identified elsewhere in scripture as leaders. These leaders find Apollos, instruct him in the faith, identify him as a leader, then send him where people are to preach the gospel, gain converts, and commend believers to the grace of God. Thus, as Paul is sent out by the church in Antioch, Apollos is sent out by the church in Ephesus. Given this relationship to the church in Ephesus and the description that “he greatly helped those who had believed through grace,” we can conclude that he operated under the authority of at least one established local church in his work (Acts 18:27, NASB).

We get very little information in Acts on what Apollos actually did while he was in the field, aside from refuting arguments against Jesus as the Christ and helping the church in Achaia, but given Paul’s description that “I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth,” it appears Paul believed Apollos was participating in the same process of establishing churches that Paul himself was (1 Corinthians 3:6, NASB). Thus, we have Apollos either described as, or hinted at being, someone who was trained by the local church, identified as a leader, and sent out by the local church to establish local churches in a different setting, just as Paul does throughout the lengthy descriptions of his work. That which was displayed by Paul and was handed down to Apollos has also been handed to us. The modern missionary has the same job description and model to follow as Paul and Apollos had, as we serve the same God on the same mission using the same means—the church—as them.

1 David J Hesselgrave, “Church-Planting Strategy—The Pauline Cycle” in Planting Churches Cross-Culturally: North America and Beyond Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000. 46.

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the worst baptist

A Plan for Church Planting

Apollos and the Nature of Missionaries

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