IT'S NOT HARD to find grim predictions about the future of mainline Christianity in Northern Hemisphere countries. Sociologist George Barna says that the US is awash with former churchgoers who refuse to be tied down to a single denomination (see Revolution, Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2005). And church growth expert Paul Nixon writes, "Most of the denominational faith communities that first evangelized North America are now rapidly downshifting toward oblivion and near extinction" (I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church! Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2006). But here's the headline from Nixon's book: There's a deceptively simple solution to the problem of free-fall church membership figures. What's needed, he argues, is a corps of passionate "apostles" drawn, not so much from the trained ministry, but from people of all backgrounds who will fight for the future of their faith. In other words, apostles who look like you and me!
Actually, apostleship—an unrelenting, on-fire missionary spirit—is the very phenomenon that saved early Christianity from dying off in the first place, after the Master's resurrection. Christ Jesus, of course, was the very first "Apostle and High Priest of our profession," chosen by God to preach the good news, or "Gospel," of God's healing and saving love for all humanity (Heb. 3:1). Then he called 12 apostles to take this message to their fellow Jews. After the Master's crucifixion, they substituted Matthias for the treacherous Judas. Finally, Jesus himself commissioned Paul as an apostle to the vast Gentile population beyond Israel, converting him from persecutor to pupil, in a blinding moment of revelation.
And although the idea that you and I could be apostles may sound radical, or even blasphemous, to 21st-century thinkers, Mary Baker Eddy urged Christian Scientists over a century ago to think and act like apostles. "Keep in mind the foundations of Christian Science—one God and one Christ. Keep personality out of sight, and Christ's 'Blessed are ye' will seal your apostleship," she wrote to the founders of a new Christian Science church in Atlanta, Georgia (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 191).
