Model of missions

The vocabulary of modality and sodality has been around in missiological circles for nearly 40 years, but is not widely known in God’s church, even among its pioneers, let alone incisively and strategically applied by denominational authorities. As a result some pioneers are frustrated by the wider Church and some authorities are unnecessarily alarmed by pioneers. Neither values the other as highly as would be helpful and the Church’s participation in the mission of God is limited, because the models by which it can happen have been restricted.
 
Prior to and during the first century, the synagogue then, provided the basic model for the structure of early Church congregations. For Jews, it was the synagogue. For non-Jews who came in later, it was a slightly modified version of the synagogue. To understand how the early Church was organized, we must therefore understand the combined influence of the Jewish home and the synagogue. The Jewish home provided the model for the early house churches, of which there were many. In some areas, where low visibility was mandated by persecution, house churches, as opposed to congregations, were the main vehicle for group worship, teaching and prayer. In other areas, synagogue-style congregations were added to the social mix.

We can see the church's model developing further within Roman influence. Originally the term diocese (Gr. dioikesis) signified management of a household, thence administration or government in general. This term was soon used in Roman law to designate the territory dependent for its administration upon a city (civitas). What in Latin was called ager, or territorium, namely a district subject to a city, was habitually known in the Roman East as a diœcesis. But as the Christian bishop generally resided in a civitas, the territory administered by him, being usually conterminous with the juridical territory of the city, came to be known ecclesiastically by its usual civil term, diocese. 

The medieval period saw more changes. In Western and in much of Central Europe formal paganism was theoretically on the way out. Not far from the same time efforts were begun to bring the nominal Christianity closer to the standards set forth in the New Testament. They were seen in reforms in monastic communities, in the emergence of new types of monasticism, and in the endeavor to make the Papacy an instrument for helping the European peoples and the entire structure of the Church more nearly to approximate these standards. Efforts proliferated to approach the goals held up in the New Testament. Some Christians remained within the Catholic Church. Numbers of others were denounced by that church. In every aspect of the collective life earnest souls strove to bring conformity to the ideals of the faith: in the State, in the realm of the intellect, in economics, in the family, and in the relations between the sexes. Heroic attempts were also seen to win European peoples not yet in Christendom and to plant the faith outside Europe.

With a look at Protestant recovery, Ralph Winter, in a fascinating historical tour of modalities and sodalities, notes that the Protestant Reformation tried to eliminate the distinction.  Maybe it was a good idea in theory, but the practical result was that for three hundred years the church’s mission floundered. Only in the nineteenth century, with the birth of the modern missionary movement and the proliferation of countless Christian reform and relief organizations, did the church benefit from the recovery of sodalities.

Today, there are still areas of contemporary misunderstandings. The question we must ask is how long it will be before the younger churches of the so called mission territories of the non-Western world come to that epochal conclusion (to which the Protestant movement in Europe only tardily came), namely, that there need to be sodality structures, such as William Carey’s “use of means,” in order for church people to reach out in vital initiatives in mission, especially cross-cultural mission. There are already some hopeful signs that this is already taking place all around the world.