The missionary’s goal is “establishing Christ-centered churches that are sufficiently mature to multiply and endure among peoples who have had little or no access to Jesus’s message.” The missionary’s task, then, is to go in Christ’s authority as ambassadors of his kingdom, to communicate his message to the nations.

Ambassadorship in the New Testament

Ambassadorship is a major New Testament theme. We miss this because, when we read that Jesus called the twelve his apostles (apostolos, in Greek), we imagine that he must have been inventing a brand-new word to describe a spiritual gift or an office that existed only in the church. But the Greek word apostolos had existed long before Jesus’s birth; it was a perfectly secular word until Jesus used it. It connoted something along the lines of an ambassador,¹ one who was sent (apostellō) to represent a nation, with the power to negotiate on its behalf.² For example, the Greek historian Herodotus writes,

Then, when the Delphic reply was brought to Alyattes, straightway he sent a herald to Miletus, offering to make a truce with Thrasybulus and the Milesians…So the envoy [from Greek apostolos] went to Miletus.³

The envoy is sent with power to negotiate a truce. Similarly, Josephus writes,

For a delegation of the Jews was come to Rome…that they might petition for the liberty of living by their own laws. Now, the number of the ambassadors [from Greek apostellō] that were sent by the authority of the nation was fifty.⁴

The apostles are sent by a nation and have the authority to represent it and negotiate on its behalf. Apostles, then, are similar to ambassadors, and the message Jesus gives to these apostles focuses on God’s coming kingdom: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 10:7). Jesus sends his ambassadors to negotiate peace. His terms of peace must be accepted, or destruction will follow.

This is why, in 2 Corinthians, when Paul appeals to his own authority, he seems to treat his status as an “ambassador for Christ” (2 Cor. 5:20) and a “true apostle” (2 Cor. 12:12) somewhat interchangeably.

His duty as an ambassador to bring the “message of reconciliation” to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:19) is no different than his “apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations” (Rom. 1:5).⁵

This helps us make sense of the apostles’ unique ministry giftings. They’ve been given miraculous powers (2 Cor. 12:12), they have firsthand knowledge of Jesus’s message (Acts 1:21–23), and they’re eyewitnesses of the risen Christ (Acts 1:21; 1 Cor. 9:1). These characteristics validate the apostles as ambassadors. They can believably say, “I have been sent by God!” because they come with clear signs from God. They can believably claim to know Christ’s message because they’ve been there “during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us” (Acts 1:21). And most importantly, they can believably proclaim the resurrection because they’ve seen him with their eyes and touched him with their hands (1 John 1:1). Why did early Christians collect the writings of the apostles and those who worked directly with them? Why did they treat those writings as Holy Scripture? Because as Christ’s direct ambassadors, the apostles could be fully trusted to deliver his authentic message.

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