It has become common, especially among evangelicals, to consider church planting as a duty of the Church and as the best evangelism method.
Yet there is near unanimous consensus among Bible commentators, even evangelicals, that there is little or no explicit mandate or encouragement to evangelize and plant churches in the New Testament and in the Early Church texts. Where they differ is on the reasons to explain this silence.1 In my opinion, most suggestions for this silence are without historical or solid exegetical evidence. The contemporary use of the shape-shifting amorphous “missional” vocabulary brings little clarity to this issue.
The central and often only passage used to promote a duty of church planting is Acts 13:1–3, where the church of Antioch is said to have felt a sense of mission and sent Barnabas and Paul on a church planting journey. This is a misreading of the historical evidence and of the text. If Antioch was one of biggest cities in the Roman Empire then, we know very little of its Christian community beyond what we read in Acts and Galatians. Though it is often mentioned in Ignatius and Eusebius, it is never referred to as Paul’s sending church or mentioned as a church planting community.
I wrote a somewhat detailed article on this which was published by Neotestamentica in 2022. I have now received permission to distribute the article, which you can freely download.
Having been involved in church planting directly or indirectly and written and taught about this topic in the past (see my publication page), I am planning to write another article on this site with more practical reflexions.
Here is a slightly reworked version of the paper’s conclusion.
The article’s conclusion
Antioch is often presented as a missional church aware of its responsibility, a pioneering community which strategises its call to plant churches, and a model to be followed. As we have seen, this is an unwarranted reading of the data available. Furthermore, it downplays or even contradicts theological patterns in Acts and in the NT.
Though Luke knows the vocabulary of sending, neither Antioch nor Jerusalem are the subjects of verbs of sending people for evangelism and mission work, except in the cases of Peter and John in Acts 8:14 and Barnabas in Acts 11:22. What is remarkable is how passive a role Antioch is given in Acts. Neither Jerusalem nor Antioch seem to have any proactive mission strategy. Antioch is not the active subject of verbs in 11:27–30; 14:24–28 and 18:22–23. In 13:1–3 the Spirit takes the initiative to send Barnabas and Paul, not the church. Nothing in the text indicates that Antioch’s leaders were serving and fasting to receive missionary direction. Antioch’s only active role is to send aid to Jerusalem (Acts 11:29–30) and Paul, Barnabas with a few others to the Council of Jerusalem (15:2–3). Elsewhere, the church’s role is to release Barnabas, Paul, Silas, and Judas (13.3; 14:26; 15:33). All in all, we learn almost nothing about the church of Antioch from the book of Acts. Nowhere in the New Testament and in the Early Christian Literature is the Church of Antioch actively linked to Paul ministry, whether by Paul or other Church leaders.
Making Antioch a sending church and giving it any control or active role in church planting in Acts runs counter to the patterns developed in Acts. The spread of the word in Acts is not due to any church’s strategy or initiative but to the Spirit and, secondarily, to individuals. Luke insists in presenting God as the director of His story. Apostles in Acts, and in the rest of the NT for that matter, are God’s apostles only. Depicting Antioch as model of church planting is missing the point of Luke’s narration, which is concerned with the growth of the word by God’s initiative and by his sending individuals, not with strategies of mission and church planting by the church.
Furthermore, making Antioch a missionary church finds little support in the available evidence in the rest of NT and in the early Christian literature and is often advanced without paying full attention to what is explicit in the text, as is often the case with ἀπολύω in Acts 13:3. This should not be construed as an argument from silence (see note 47 in the article). It is not argued here that Antioch had no missional role in the early church whatsoever. Whether it did or not, we simply cannot say from the available evidence. For whatever reason, if Luke and the early Christian authors were aware of any active and directive missional role by Antioch, they chose not to mention it. What matters is what Luke did report: that the impetus for mission and church planting in Acts, when it occurs, comes from God.
If a model for church planting by a mother church is to be found in Acts, one must look elsewhere than in Antioch. There are, of course, many implications to the reading defended there. Their development and discussion are for another place.
- See among countless examples: “It is striking that the numerous, often rather specific exhortations that Paul addresses in his letters to the churches that he established or knows do not include appeals to be active in mission and evangelism and to work toward winning additional inhabitants of their cities and of the surrounding villages to faith in Jesus Christ. This silence has been variously explained. “ Schnabel, Eckhard J. Early Christian Mission. 2 vols. Downers Grove, Ill Leicester, England: InterVarsity Press Apollos, 2004, p. 1452. ↩︎