What do all these words mean? That will greatly help us understand the commission given to Christians to “go and make disciples…teaching them to observe”. And particularly, we need to look at the difference between missions and evangelism.
Missions. Think of the word missive, as in ‘to send out a missive’. It is ‘to send’, which would mean it carries the same meaning as “apostle”, ‘one sent out’. A disciple is a learner, but the Disciples became Apostles when they were sent out. So, missions is when someone is sent. A missionary is the person who was sent. “Mission parish” is a small problem, unless we think of it only as a parish established in a place that required the Church to stretch out and develop a parish in a new place; that could be seen as ‘sending’, I guess.
How is that different from “evangelism”?…
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