Picturing Christian Witness: New Testament Images of Disciples in Mission

Christian mission in previous centuries often drew on images of imperial expansion and war. Today, foreign mission in so-called restricted-access countries is envisioned as a kind of holy espionage. But are “civilizing” crusades and warfare, even covert, appropriate images to associate with the good news of Jesus Christ? In Picturing Christian Witness, missiologist Stanley Skreslet searches for new, more holistic images of mission from Scripture. Skreslet undertakes a novel exegetical study of mission in the New Testament that focuses on the first followers of Jesus. Skreslet highlights five actions that depict the witness of these disciples: announcing good news, sharing Christ with friends, interpreting the gospel, shepherding, and building/planting. After carefully examining key biblical passages, he draws out the implications of these five images for the theology of mission and lets each image take shape visually through an array of Western and non-Western art. Picturing Christian Witness will provoke students of mission and of the Bible to imagine what mission will look like when actively embodied by contemporary disciples of Jesus.