The Great Commission is Not the Duty of All Believers

As I have said before, I have not offered to present papers at conferences the last few years (bad career move!). I am breaking this habit. Since I will be at the Tyndale Fellowship NT study group this coming July and since there was a free spot, I volunteered to step in. My paper will be “The Great Commission (Matt. 28.19–20) in History and Today or Why the Great Commission is not the Duty of All Believers.”

As some of you know, I have been working on a book in English on Evangelism that I hope to finish in the fall of 2011. Hopefully a publisher will be interested in the project. I thought I would use the opportunity of the available spot to test the chapter on Matthew 28 in public. So far only a couple of people have read this chapter.

The paper will show that for most of Church History Matthew 28.19–20 was not used to encourage Christians to evangelize and that when read in context there are good reasons it should not be so today as making the passage a universal mandate actually waters down its meaning. I will then make some comments about the consequences of the position defended for preaching and teaching the passage today and for evangelism.

The paper is scheduled for Friday July 8 at 4.30 pm.