The Missionary Society as an Apostolic Team

Abstract

Some churchmen view missionary societies as a historical contingency of the nineteenth century. Others see them as Protestant counterparts of the Catholic missionary orders — and both as successors of the missionary bands so prominently chronicled in the book of Acts. Mission executive Murphy and his colleagues, in their struggle for organizational self-understanding, have probed beyond the mere fact of those first century bands; they have also sought to identify their apostolic function and their relationship to the early congregations. Such an analysis of the apostolic team as a structural prototype can bring a theological dimension to the needed reevaluation that mission agencies face today.