“The popular understanding of the Lord's missionary mandate is simply that it calls the church to send out missionaries to distant places. Clearly, that is inherent in the task given us, but this is not all that is implied. What is expressed in Jesus’ words is really a commissioning of the whole new people of God. It is the emphatic demand of the risen Lord placed on His people as a whole, and it has reference to the values, priorities, habits, and programs of every member of every congregation. In a word, it means that we are all commissioned by the Lord in the Great Commission.”

—Jack Miller, Outgrowing the Ingrown Church

“The shape of the early church described in Acts, quartered together like an army garrison or a troop of nomadic pilgrims in an alien land, reflects a corrected sense of mission which apparently persisted through the early Christian era until Roman civilization was permeated with witnesses to the gospel....Gradually the great mass of the laity and the regular clergy attending them became a system concerned not so much to advance the kingdom of God as to decorate the occasions of ordinary human existence with religious meaning. Nobles and commoners fixed their attention on tangible goals: survival, security, wealth, power, eminence. At the same time, they employed the church to set moral guidelines for this competition, to illuminate birth and marriage and death with supernatural meaning, providing a kind of insurance policy covering individual sins committed in this pursuit and holding out the probability of a happier existence after death.”

—Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life