A New Social Contract Relating Mission Societies to Ecclesiastical Structures

The Protestant mission paradigm, as conceived by Luther and Calvin and taking classic shape in the generation of Reformers that followed them, assumed that church administrative bodies should retain for themselves the authority to initiate God’s mission to all the world. However, another paradigm will be shown to be more biblical, more predictably effective as measured by an inductive study of mission history, and truer to what is really there in societies everywhere.

The research provides evidence-based support for the desired outcome of this thesis, that Protestant churches-modalities-should recognize the indispensable contribution of, and biblical basis for, sodalities-voluntary mission structures-thus bringing about the necessary favorable conditions to normalize a relationship between them.