From the beginning, the commandment contains a certain tension concerning the answer to the question: Does it refer only to fellow Christians or to “all”? The practice of love of neighbour within the inner circle of the disciples was a conspicuous characteristic of the young church. In Christian congregations and, above all, in small fellowships and sects throughout the centuries, love of the neighbour was highly developed in terms of personal pastoral care, social welfare, and help in all situations of life.
The Christian commandment of love, however, has never been limited to fellow Christians. On the contrary, the Christian ethic crossed all social and religious barriers and saw a neighbour in every suffering human being. Characteristically, Jesus himself explicated his understanding of the commandment of love in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who followed the commandment of love and helped a person in need whom a priest and a Levite had chosen to ignore (Luke 10:29–37). A demand in the Letter of James, that the “royal law” of neighbourly love has to be fulfilled without “partiality” (James 2:9), points to its universal validity.
The universalism of the Christian command to love is most strongly expressed in its demand to love one’s enemies. Jesus himself emphasized this with these words: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:44–45). According to this understanding, love of the enemy is the immediate emission of God’s love, which includes God’s friends and God’s enemies. Freedom and responsibility
The Reformation revitalized a personal sense of Christian responsibility by anchoring it in the free forgiveness of sins. Luther summarized this in “The Freedom of a Christian Man” (1520): “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” The second sentence expressed the theme of Christian vocation developed by Luther and Calvin, which they applied to all Christians and to everyday responsibility for the neighbour and for the world. The reformers emphasized that Christian service is not limited to a narrow religious sphere of life but extends to the everyday relationships of family, marriage, work, and politics.
Later Protestantism under the influence of Pietism and Romanticism restricted the social and communal orientation of the reformers to a more individualistic orientation. This met, however, with an energetic counterattack from the circles of the Free churches (e.g., Baptists and Methodists) who supported the social task of Christian ethic (mainly through the Social Gospel of the American theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, who attempted to change social institutions and bring about a kingdom of God), which spread through the whole church, penetrating the area of Christian mission. Love rooted in faith played an important role in the 20th century in the struggle between Christianity and ideologies such as fascism, communism, and jingoistic nationalisms. Ernst Wilhelm Benz Carter H. Lindberg Christian missions
In the early 21st century about one-third of the world’s people claimed the Christian faith. Christians thus constituted the world’s largest religious community and embraced remarkable diversity, with churches in every nation. Christianity’s demographic and dynamic centre had shifted from its Western base to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific region, where more than half the world’s Christians lived. This trend steadily accelerated as the church declined in Europe. The global extent of Christianity represented a new phenomenon in the history of religions. This was the fruit of mission. Biblical foundations
The word mission (Latin: missio), as a translation of the Greek apostolē, “a sending,” appears only once in the English New Testament (Galatians 2:8). An apostle (apostolos) is one commissioned and sent to fulfill a special purpose. The roots of mission, Christians have believed, lie in God’s active outreach to humanity in history—as a call to those able to fulfill the divine purpose, among them Abraham, Moses, Jonah, and St. Paul the Apostle. The New Testament designated Jesus as God’s apostle (Hebrews 3:1). Jesus’ prayer in The Gospel According to John includes the words “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.… [I pray also] for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one…so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:18, 20–21). Moreover, the “Great Commission” of Jesus declares: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20; compare Mark 16:15, Luke 24:47, John 20:21–22, and Acts 1:8). The history of Christian missions
The Christian mission, the church, and Christianity—each distinguishable, but inseparably related—have experienced four major transitions in their history. First transition, to ad 500
The new missionary faith made its first major transition as it emerged from Palestine and spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The apostle Paul became the missionary to the Gentile world. With help from St. Barnabas and a local network of coworkers, many of them women, he evangelized Asia Minor and southern Greece and eventually reached Rome. Dominated politically by the Empire" class="md-crosslink">Roman Empire, the new religion benefited from the stability the empire provided and the language its elite shared—common, or Koine, Greek. Alexandrian Jews had translated (250 bc) the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek for dispersed Greek-speaking Jews. The New Testament writers also wrote in Koine Greek. In that largely literate empire early Christians used and widely distributed the Hebrew Scriptures.
Paul the Apostle, St.St. Paul preaching the Gospel, detail of a 12th-century mosaic in the Palatine Chapel, Palermo, Sicily.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
Several factors brought growth to the faith. From the beginning laypeople—both men and women—conducted the largest part of mission. Congregations grew in homes used as churches. Although the house was owned by the husband, the wife was its mistress, and women throughout the empire opened their homes to newly forming churches. Most evangelization occurred in the daily routine as men and women shared their faith with others. Christianity’s monotheism, morality, assurance of eternal life with God, and ancient Scriptures attracted many to the faith.
Christians daily encountered members of other religions—gnosticism and the mystery and philosophical cults. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries external and internal pressures drove the young church to strengthen itself through creating a structured ministry, formulating beliefs in creeds, and producing a canon of Scripture. That process established critical institutions for the early Christian movement. The major thrust of the early church-mission sprang from the conviction that Christians and congregations were fulfilling a mission and ministry begun in Jesus Christ. Baptism provided induction into the vibrant company of “God’s own people” (1 Peter 2:9–10), which many in the empire gradually accepted.
Rome, however, declared Christianity an illegal religion, in part because Christians refused to engage in emperor worship, and persecutions ensued. In the persecutions so many Christians bore witness (Greek: martyria) that the word martyr quickly evolved into its current meaning. Christian faith—not least that of young women such as Saints Blandina, Cecilia, Perpetua, and Felicity—made an impact, and many who beheld that witness became Christian. In 313 when the new emperor, Constantine I, declared the persecutions ended, Christians probably constituted 10 percent of the empire’s population.