Can the Holy Spirit Do It?

We we are evangelizing and planting churches in new cultures, do we have the responsibility to lay down a specific set of ethical standards for the developing community, making all ethical and moral decisions for them? Is that our role as the foreign aposles to the nations? What all is included, and what is included in the task of making disciples, baptizing them, and teaching them to command all that Jesus commanded his apostles?

Lesslie Newbigin reflects on the writings of the late Roland Allen for partial guidance on this subject. Let's listen to what he has to say...

The central thrust of all Roland Allen's writing is expressed in the title of a posthumously published work, The Ministry of the Spirit. Allen's charge against modern missions was that they had been tempted by their alliance with colonial powers to act as though the mission of the church could be pursued in the style of a cultural and educational campaign, as though the object was to multiply replicas of the sending churches. In contrast to this Allen rightly saw that in the New Testament portrayal of mission the central reality is the active work of the living Holy Spirit himself. It is the Spirit who brings about conversion, the Spirit who equips those who are called with the gifts needed for all the varied forms of ministry, and the Spirit who guides the church into all the truth. The Spirit is not the property of the sending church of the missionary who is sent. It is not part of the missionary's duty to mold the new church into the style of the old. The Spirit is sovereign and free, and the missionary must trust the Spirit to do his own work. Where Christ is confessed, where the word of the gospel is preached and the sacraments of the gospel are administered, and where there is a ministry that links the new community to the wider fellowship of the catholic church, there Allen believed, the Holy Spirit must be trusted to provide all that is needed, and the missionary has done his or her work and can move on.*

What do you guys think?

*Lesslie Newbigin. The Open Secret: an Introduction to the Theology of Mission. William B. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Mich., 1995, 130.