The Great Commission - Who Does It Apply To, and in What Ways?

The following is adapted from "The Great Commission," in What's Wrong with Outreach.

The Great Commission is one of the most frequently referred-to passages in the Bible. I’m also convinced that it is one of the most misunderstood and misapplied. Let’s look at the text:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” --Matthew 28:16-20

The common evangelical interpretation of the Commission involves several features. First, the Commission is understood to be the driving missions statement of the church—its placement at the end of Matthew’s gospel, spoken by the post-resurrection Jesus, makes it clear that this is Jesus’ mandate to all who follow him. Second, evangelicals apply the Commission to all believers individually: it is each disciple’s responsibility to live out this mandate in his or her life. Third, the Commission is directed specifically toward reaching the lost—that is, bringing people to saving faith in Jesus. It is generally understood in terms of rescuing people from an eternity in hell. Finally, the Commission is primarily accomplished by personal witnessing—sharing one’s faith with others—in combination with supporting preaching and missionary ministries (or directly engaging in such ministries), sometimes also in combination with such “pre-evangelism” activities as service projects that are intended to gain a receptive hearing for the gospel.



All of these features contain elements of truth, and challenging them runs the risk of being misunderstood as being unconcerned about those who are lost. Nonetheless, this understanding of the Commission actually hinders the work of evangelism in the long run, and presents a reductive and superficial view of the Christian life and of the role of the Church in the world.

In Acts, we don't see the church growing through a pattern of everyone in the church sharing their faith with everyone they can. Instead, we see two significant things: the believers in general exhibited a greatly changed character, signified by generous sharing with one another and taking care of one another's needs; and certain specific individuals like Peter, Stephen, Philip, and Paul, divinely gifted and empowered to do overt missionary and evangelistic work, breaking into new territories with the power of the Gospel. In the epistles, we see a great deal of emphasis laid on the character and behavior of believers in general, and practically no instruction, encouragement, advice, or command regarding sharing one's faith with others. The time period of Acts and the epistles covers over thirty years, during which time all kinds of errors in belief and practice had crept into the church and had to be dealt with, so it's unreasonable to assume that the fervor of the early believers was such that encouragement to share their faith was completely unnecessary.

The record of Acts and the epistles leads to an inescapable conclusion, if we are willing to look at it: the Commission simply does not apply to each particular believer, at least not in the way evangelicals typically take it. It turns out that we can’t simply lift the Commission out of its historical context and apply it to everyone individually. What we need to do when applying the passage is to look at the people Jesus was actually speaking to, and see whom they might represent.

Matthew 28:16 makes clear that Jesus addressed the Commission to “the eleven disciples,” i.e., the twelve minus Judas Iscariot. The people they could reasonably be supposed to represent are:

1. Only themselves. This would make the Commission into a simple historical narrative: Jesus is merely telling those who were closest to him in his earthly life what their mission is, now that he is about to be gone. In this view, it would have no further application in the present day.
2. Church leaders. In this view, the apostles represent later elders and overseers—the leadership of the church. The charge to make disciples therefore would be the responsibility of the ordained clergy. This might fit nicely with a high-church polity that makes a significant distinction between clergy and laity.
3. All believers individually. The eleven here simply stand in for all believers in generations to come. This is the view of the evangelical church as the Commission is usually taught. In this view, it is the responsibility of each one of us personally to win as many people as possible to salvation.
4. The whole church corporately. The eleven here stand for the church as a whole, but not every aspect of the Commission applies equally to each individual person. The church as a whole is charged with the commission, and each individual plays his own part in carrying it out.

Options one and two would seldom be advocated by anyone. Option three is the commonly held assumption in evangelical churches, and the one which I’ve already attempted to refute: namely, that evangelism is everyone’s responsibility individually. Simply put, there is actually very little about overt evangelism in the New Testament, compared with the central importance that the evangelical church has placed on it.

Because of this dearth of actual material in the New Testament, contemporary exhortations toward evangelism tend to focus on a few passages, like the Commission, and lean heavily on rhetoric describing masses of lost people hurtling toward an eternity in hell. Don’t we care about them? Don’t we have the heart of Jesus toward them? Can you imagine your friends / coworkers / neighbors / family members, in line for the White Throne Judgment, looking at you with tears in their eyes, asking you, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Surely, even if evangelism is not dealt with in so many words, isn’t it still implied by the overall narrative and the clear missionary impulse that underlies the entire New Testament?

If there were no other options, then I would say Yes. It is, simply put, the heart of Jesus to care about the lost. But the fourth option listed above recognizes the nature of the Body as a group of differently-gifted individuals who don’t each do the same thing but all work together toward a common goal. It also takes seriously what the Commission states about making disciples—not merely making converts. Finally, it makes sense of the wording of the Commission itself, which (in combination with other passages) actually precludes the idea that the Commission is directed toward every believer individually.

The focus of the Commission is to “make disciples.” Those who emphasize individual responsibility in fulfilling the Commission invariably focus that phrase on evangelism of the lost and bringing people to a point of conversion. However, both the implications of making disciples (not merely converts) and the way in which Jesus fleshes out the concept in the Commission itself preclude such a narrow application. Jesus divides making disciples into two main subordinate actions: “baptizing” and “teaching.” Baptism was the mode of entry into the community of believers and would thus be located more or less as the end result of the efforts that we now call “evangelism.” Presumably, Jesus is putting all these efforts—pre-evangelism, witnessing, preaching, invitation, and guidance into baptism itself—under the heading of “baptism,” since he can hardly be imagined to advocate baptizing unwilling people who have no idea what baptism signifies.

Teaching is the second aspect of making disciples that Jesus denotes. Its placement after “baptizing” makes it reasonably clear that already-baptized believers are to be the ones who are to be taught. Jesus states that the object of the teaching is that the disciples “obey everything I have commanded you.” Some have inferred that all the teaching envisioned is to be practical, in the sense that it is basically a matter of commands to be obeyed, not doctrine to be learned. But if we examine how the church actually carried out Jesus’ mission as it appears in Acts and the epistles, it seems that just as baptism encompassed more than simply the act of baptism itself, so “teaching them to obey” involves much more than simply commands and outward compliance.

The Apostle Paul, in particular, both in Acts (for example, in his address to the Ephesian elders in chapter 20) and in his epistles, not only gives commands to be carried out, but also teaches those to whom he is speaking or writing the theological “whys”—the concrete information necessary for establishing a theological basis and worldview in which the commands find their place and rationale. His letters often have a primarily doctrinal section (e.g., Romans 1-11 or Ephesians 1-3) expounding upon an aspect of the gospel needed to be understood by that church, followed by a primarily practical section (e.g., Romans 12-15 or Ephesians 4-6) describing how the truths in the doctrinal section may be practically lived out.

So in the Great Commission, Jesus divides the command to “make disciples” into “baptizing” and “teaching,” two headings that evidently involve a great deal more than those terms may seem to imply on the surface. The two aspects of what Jesus commanded might in a modern context be called “evangelism” and “discipleship,” although even those two terms as they are practiced today hardly do justice to the breadth of the mission Jesus was entrusting to his church. It encompasses everything from laying the groundwork in order to obtain a hearing for the gospel (“pre-evangelism”) to sophisticated theological instruction and practical mentoring in living out the implications of that same gospel.

The more one recognizes the breadth of the charge that Jesus gave to his disciples, the less one can imagine that any single person is supposed to carry out all of it. It is, in fact, precluded by the text itself, viewed in light of other passages. Although Jesus states that a part of making disciples is baptizing, no less a missionary than Paul himself was able to say to one of the congregations he had founded,

I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel…. --1 Corinthians 1:14-17

So even though the process of evangelism should culminate in baptism, Paul himself did not physically baptize very many people. Neither did Jesus, according to John 4:2.

Similarly, making disciples also involves teaching, yet James writes, “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1). So an aspect of the Great Commission, as Jesus describes it, is being recommended against by one of the most important leaders of the early church, presumably someone who is actively engaged in fulfilling the Commission himself.

So if Jesus’ final command to his followers was to make disciples, and if making disciples involves both baptizing and teaching, and if leaders in the church are themselves not practicing both of them, or advocating that we not practice one of them, then the fact is inescapable: not every believer is to be engaged in every aspect of the Great Commission. Various people will be engaged in fulfilling various parts of it, but no one person will fulfill all of it.

However, this does not mean that the Commission does not apply to all believers. In fact, this should give excitement and hope to many people who feel unable to fulfill the Commission as it is typically understood. While not everyone will be involved in direct evangelistic outreach, everyone has a part to play in fulfilling the commission in a larger sense. Some will lay the groundwork by making connections to people who would be otherwise hostile or indifferent to the gospel. Some will share their own testimonies of what God has done in their lives. Some will overtly preach the message of salvation through Jesus. Some will actually shepherd people through the process of being baptized itself. Some will nurture new believers in the basic aspects of living for Jesus. Some will mentor people into a deeper relationship with God. Some will speak or write things that help others develop their faith or live it out more completely. Some will come alongside and assist all of these endeavors in various ways, as supply lines physically assist an army and are an indispensable aspect of any military endeavor.

This is the point. In its largest sense, the Great Commission does involve everyone. Each member of the body of Christ has his or her own part to play. No one is left out; no one is unnecessary. But we all don’t have to be the same sort of person, doing the same sort of thing, in order to accomplish the goal. In fact, the more we try to fit people into a cookie-cutter mold, the less able each person will be to fulfill the aspect that he or she was intended to fulfill. The entire job simply can’t be done by all of us doing the same thing. And God never intended for us to even try to do it that way.


If you like this post, you may be interested in my book, What's Wrong with Outreach?