What does Jesus’ ministry itself suggest about how to evaluate the success of kingdom sowing?  It is easy to let the mind turn immediately to numbers:  The three closest to Jesus.  The twelve (or the eleven).  The larger circle of devoted followers to which some of the women mentioned in the Gospels, as well as Barsabbas and Matthias, would have belonged (“those who were around him along with the twelve”; Mark 4:10).  The seventy.  The one hundred twenty believers gathered at the appointment of Matthias.  The five hundred to whom the resurrected Lord appeared.  Unless we consider the dynamics these number represent, however, they will remain superficial as reference points.  If we consider only these numbers, then we one more confuse kingdom sowing with church planting.

There is significance to the selection of the twelve.  A great deal of it is symbolic, as the appointment of Matthias in Luke’s restoration-centered narrative makes even clearer (Acts 1:21-26).  But there is something more to Jesus’ decision to focus on the formation of this small group of disciples, making them into disciple-makers.  This must immediately be tempered with the observation that the seventy are sent out with the same mission as the apostles early in the story (compare Luke 9:1-6 and 10:1-10).  The difference, I would venture, is the degree of intimate relationship with Jesus–and the formation it presumes (“he explained everything in private to his disciples”; Mark 4:34).  Just as only the three witnessed the transfiguration, only the twelve accompanied him on his retreats (e.g., Mark 6:30-31), and it seems only a few more qualified as those who were with the apostles from baptism to resurrection (Acts 1:21-22).  Only seventy were given the power to heal and commissioned to go out to proclaim the kingdom in word and deed.

But returning to the significance of the twelve, we must note the essential difference between the fruit of the kingdom sown through Jesus, the twelve, and the seventy, on one hand and the ultimate commission of the twelve on the basis of their special relationship with Jesus on the other hand.  The former is kingdom sowing, without a doubt, because the arrival of the kingdom is demonstrated and announced in Jesus’ name.  Yet, the latter is qualitatively different, because the command to “make disciples . . . teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19-20) is predicated on the intimate relationship that constituted the “secret of the kingdom” (Mark 4:11).  Beyond making known the presence and power of the king—which in itself can create Jesus-followers—there is enacting kingdom life through communities of obedience to his complete teaching.  The apostles can do this because they were not just called to be sent out (apostellē) but first to be with him in a special way (Mark 3:14).

This suggests two distinguishable sides of kingdom sowing.  To create a hard division between them would be futile as well as pointless, because they are carried out in the ebb and flow of a single ministry.  Yet, they are distinguishable.

First, there is word and deed proclamation of the kingdom—its arrival (Luke 9:2, 11; 10:9).  The evaluation of this ministry is not “Lord, look at the great number of disciples (adherents) we have made—though Jesus made and baptized many (John 4:1).  Rather, the evaluation is (1) “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us,” (2) “rejoice that your [the messengers'] names are written in heaven,” and (3) “Blessed are the eyes that see what you [the messengers] see” (Luke 10:20-24).

The first point is the messengers’ primary evaluation.  The amazing thing about proclaiming the kingdom’s arrival is seeing evil pushed on its heals and overpowered.  When this happens in the life of a single person or a single community, we witness the kingdom advancing.  The third point is Jesus’ agreement that it is an incredible blessing to witnessing this happen.  The second point is Jesus’ corrective to focusing purely on even these results.  The power and effectiveness of Jesus’ name against evil is wonderful, but it is not the ultimate point of evaluation.  Instead, it is the proclaimers’ own faithfulness that counts the most.  Jesus sent them out to announce to everyone—a great number of people were intended to hear and see the kingdom—fully aware that many would simply reject them yet commanding them to proclaim the kingdom anyway  (Luke 10:11).  It is enough that the kingdom is really present and its heralds are faithful.  That is what Jesus wants us to rejoice about.

Second, there is the making of disciples who are “fully qualified (or trained)” (Luke 6:40).  A couple of dispositions that are becoming commonplace in current missiology diminish the import of this notion.  One is the idea of “journey.”  Because discipleship is a journey rather than a destination, there is no expectation that disciples will “arrive.”  This outlook serves some important ends: in summary, it helps Christians cope with their ongoing failures without giving up, and it deflates the power plays of leaders who believe they have it all figured out.  The other disposition manifests in the idea that consent and conversion constitute becoming a disciple; that baptizing believers equals making disciples.  The implicit impulse here, in its best permutation, is to reduce proclaiming or teaching to an absolute minimum (e.g., Jesus is Lord), so as not to complicate or stagnate evangelism, thus quickly empowering “disciples who make disciples.”

These dispositions are not wrong per se, but they do tend to undermine the idea of actually “teaching everything” so that the disciple is “like the teacher.”  Together, they lead to a definition of discipleship that condones high numerical growth at the expense of adequate formation, expecting an eventual, gradual journey of future growth that is unnecessary at present in order to go out and make more “disciples.”  This is often, unfortunately, the very picture of the blind leading the blind (Luke 6:39).

Considering this full-formation side of Jesus’ kingdom ministry, it is clear that he focused on a small group.  He did not attempt to fully form every follower.  He taught large crowds about the kingdom—the Sermon on the Mount is a clear example.  But he did not expect everyone present there to be disciple-makers as he commissioned the twelve to be.  Not yet at least.  Only they had the relationship with Jesus necessary to have received his full teaching.

Of course, they were still on the journey.  Peter was still treating Gentiles like second-class citizens years after his commission to disciples the Gentiles (nations), and after the resurrection, and after the additional kingdom teaching from Jesus, and after the coming of the Holy Spirit, and after a special vision specifically stating that God had made Gentiles clean.  But while that fact indicates that fully-formed disciples are highly fallible, it doesn’t overshadow what Jesus was practically doing with his inner circle.  And that is the criterion by which we should evaluate kingdom sowing.  Let us continue to find essential guidance in the Great Commission: totally contrary to a numbers-oriented notion of “disciple-making,” the commission is to make disciples just as the Teacher made them, by focusing on intimate relationships in order to teach them everything and then commission them to do the same.

Both sides are present: the broad come-all announcement of the kingdom of God in word and deed and the focused, relational disciple-making that fully forms new disciple-makers.  These help us redefine “success” in kingdom sowing.

Continuing with the construction of a theological framework for evaluating the success of mission work, I turn to the parable following the one examined last post.  Mark moves from the uncontrollable dynamics of kingdom growth to the mysterious humility of the kingdom.  It is indeed mysterious, because what we would call “the kingdom of God,” when God is the almighty sovereign creator of the universe, ought to be fairly impressive as far as kingdoms go.  Of course, Jesus being the king in question, we know that his entire story challenges such assumptions.  This parable in particular, though, issues that challenge as directly as a parable can (which is still pretty indirectly!).

He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?  It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (Mark 3:30-32)

The parable pivots on the “yet.”  It asks the hearer whether she can believe that the kingdom will eventually be revealed as far more than its beginnings suggest.  The same point might be made with virtually any seed, of course, but the force of the parable lies in the comparative “smallest” and “largest.”  The kingdom begins in a truly unimpressive way, and it will end in conversely extreme glory.

Undoubtedly, the implicit comparison is with other kingdoms.  The parable is not about “church planting,” as though Jesus were saying, “Expect few conversions” or some such.  Only to the extent that church planting is a part of the whole vision of kingdom sowing can we draw parallels there, and we have a broader scope in view for our work anyway.  It does bring me to ask the question, though, as to what one should expect when sowing the seeds of the kingdom in Jesus’ way with church planting as a part of that.

I’ve no doubt that there will be resurrection moments, when the future manifests in the present.  There will be times when society looks at the effect of faithful, sacrificial proclamation and says, “These people are turning the whole world upside down” (Acts 17:6).  But the parable warns us against false expectations, for the resurrection lies beyond the cross.  I will return to this point, but for now the issue is the parable’s challenge.  Taking it together with the previous teaching, two important truths emerge to qualify our great expectations, as sowers, for God’s kingdom: we cannot make it grow, and it starts off in what we might call lowliness.

The problem, often, is that our egos get wrapped up in our ministry.  We confuse what God will do with what we can do.  Culture plays an important role, which I hope to examine in future posts, but another component is the sin that entangled the twelve throughout their time with Jesus–and the reason that he speaks these parables: pride and ambition.  It is not just that they had a different kind of kingdom in mind; that is a historically accurate claim but a theologically insufficient explanation.  It is that their desire for a different kind of kingdom was deeply rooted in their own hopes to sit at the right and left of the Messiah, to lord over others as Caesar’s minions were privileged to do, to call down fire on the unreceptive, and in general to avoid the death to self to which Jesus called them.  As a one-sided reconstruction, that perhaps seems harsh, but it is certainly no harsher than the Gospels themselves.

This struggle is something that many of us would admit to on a personal level.  We are, it seems, generally willing to talk about how our personal sin wars against the call to take up the cross and die to ourselves, imitate the sacrificial and servicial humility of Jesus, and live the kind of lives the Apostles eventually modeled.  But it strikes me that there is a prevalent failure to apply the same honesty and critical self-evaluation to our corporate existence as church.  Rather, we often reflexively strive for impressiveness, attractiveness, respectability, strength, influence, stability, comfort, and moderation as a social entity.  And here’s the kicker: we do so without recognizing how our sinfulness distorts our expectations about what it is to be representatives of God’s kingdom and without letting teachings such as these parables cause recognition.

Justifications are easy to come by–making them all the more suspect.  We can easily reason that if we are indeed representing God’s kingdom, then of course we do not want to be unimpressive, unattractive, unworthy of respect, and so forth.  But that is not the point, just as Jesus’ teaching about the cross is not a call to suicidal behavior.  The point, rather, is that the kingdom when it is really the kingdom is subject to the sin of those who perceive it, and there is nothing about the seed itself that ensures they will be able to see beyond its obvious and evident “smallness.”  There will in fact be those–sometimes many at once–to whom it is quite attractive, respectable, and the rest.  But that will not be the case because its representatives portray it as such in the other kingdoms’ terms.

How does this inform our evaluation of the work in Arequipa?  I believe it establishes a baseline.  It does not “lower the bar,” because the bar, as it were, is the full-grown mustard tree.  We witness to the already-not-yet kingdom, the unseen glory of God.  But the parable of the mustard seed demands that we recognize the seed we are planting as what it is–profoundly unimpressive by the world’s standards.  We dare not attempt to manipulate the hearer’s perception of the message (which is the seed), and therefore we cannot expect the mustard seed to seem any bigger than it is.  Some will recognize the tree in it; most will not.  But whatever it will grow into, it is the smallest of seeds.  As a baseline, that does not change the conversation completely, because there is much more to say, but it does shift its center.

How does this parable affect your theological framework for evaluating mission work?