“Apostolic Function and Mission”

At the grassroots level Pentecostals are in danger of losing their sense of clarity about the nature of missions. For the people who make up our constituencies— local church members, pastors, churches, people who go on short term teams—we are perilously close to the condition that Stephen Neill warned about nearly 50 years ago, “When everything is mission, nothing is mission.”1 The focus of this paper is on how we can address this lack of clarity. I will begin with a brief overview of how this conceptual confusion is manifest, propose some reasons for how we got here, and then suggest the idea of apostolic function as a way forward.