Christianization: What Matthew 28:18-20 Really Commands
Short answer: Christianization is the historical and ongoing process by which individuals, families, and societies come to profess and practice the Christian faith. Its biblical charter is the Great Commission, where the risen Jesus says, as Matthew 28:18-20 records, that all authority has been given to him and sends his followers to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to observe all he commanded. Scripture presents this as a work of proclamation, persuasion, and patient teaching, not conquest. The New Testament pattern is the apostles reasoning with people, calling them to repentance and faith, and forming churches. Where Christianization has been advanced by force or political pressure, it has departed from the model Jesus gave and from the character of the kingdom he announced.
The word itself and why it needs care
Christianization is a modern term, not a biblical one. It describes what happens when a person, a household, a region, or a culture becomes Christian in its identity and practice. Used descriptively, the word is useful; it names a real historical process that has shaped languages, laws, calendars, and art across many centuries. But the word carries baggage, because much of what historians describe as Christianization involved kings, armies, and state pressure. That history is real and should not be denied or glossed over. The question for a Bible teacher is not whether the word is tidy, but whether the thing it names matches the pattern Scripture gives. Wherever the New Testament speaks of the faith spreading, the means are proclamation and persuasion, and the responses are belief, repentance, and baptism.
It is important to distinguish between the spread of Christian belief and the imposition of Christian labels. A population can be counted Christian by census while knowing almost nothing of repentance, faith, or the lordship of Christ. A person can be baptized without ever having heard the gospel explained. These are not the same thing, and the New Testament writers never treat them as the same thing. When Peter preached at Pentecost, the response he sought was not a change of religious category but a change of heart expressed in repentance and baptism. Christianization in the biblical sense is therefore a matter of genuine conversion worked by the Spirit through the word, not of statistics or territory.
There is also a legitimate sense in which cultures are shaped by Christian faith over time. Where the gospel takes root, assumptions about human dignity, marriage, care for the poor, and the value of the individual are affected. But these effects are downstream of converted people living faithfully, not the goal of the church's mission. The church is not sent to Christianize a culture in the sense of managing its institutions. She is sent to make disciples, and disciples then live as salt and light in whatever society they inhabit. When the church confuses the two, she tends to adopt the methods of the state, and the methods of the state are not the methods of the cross.
Careful language matters here because the topic is so easily polarised. Some use Christianization to mean the great missionary movement of the church across history, and in that sense, they point to real sacrifice and real fruit. Others use it to mean the coercive imposition of religion by colonial powers, and in that sense, they point to real sin and real damage. Both uses are found in ordinary conversation, and a reader deserves to know which one is in view. This article uses the term in its descriptive sense, the spread of Christian faith and practice, and tests that spread against the pattern of Matthew 28:18-20 and the practice of the apostles in Acts.
All authority belongs to the risen Christ
The Great Commission opens with a declaration before it issues a command. The risen Jesus says, as Matthew 28:18 records, that all authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth. That sentence is the foundation of everything that follows. The mission of the church does not rest on the church's resources, cultural influence, or political leverage. It rests on the authority of the one who sends. If Christ possesses all authority, then his people go not as supplicants hoping to be tolerated, but as messengers of a king whose jurisdiction is universal. This is why the commission is not limited to one nation or one class of people.
Notice that the authority is given, not seized. In the Gospels, Jesus consistently refuses the path of coercive power. When tempted in the wilderness, he declines the offer of the world's kingdoms on the devil's terms. When the crowd wants to make him king by force, he withdraws. His authority is real and total, but it is exercised in a way that leaves room for human response. He does not conscript disciples; he calls them, and they follow. This pattern should shape how his people think about the spread of the faith. If the head of the church refused to rule by force, his body cannot claim a mandate to do what he refused to do.
Matthew places this declaration at the very end of his Gospel, after the resurrection and before the ascension. The disciples had watched their teacher arrested, tried, and executed. Now he stands before them alive and claims a throne. The contrast is deliberate. Rome had authority, and Rome had used it to kill him; the Sanhedrin had authority, and it had handed him over. Now he says that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. Whatever Rome or any other power thinks it possesses is derivative and temporary. The Great Commission is issued in that light, and the church's confidence in mission has always rested on that same conviction.
For the ordinary believer, this means that evangelism is never a matter of apologising for the faith as though it were a private opinion. It is a message delivered under the standing authority of the risen Lord. At the same time, that authority does not license arrogance in the messenger. The one who holds all authority is also the one who washed feet, welcomed children, and told his followers to learn gentleness from him. The authority of Christ and the humility of Christ are not in tension; they belong together. Paul captures this when he tells the Colossians that God has delivered us out of the power of darkness and translated us into the Kingdom of the Son of his love, as Colossians 1:13-14 puts it.
Going, baptizing, teaching: the shape of the commission
The command of Matthew 28:19-20 is grammatically a single imperative, make disciples, supported by three participles: going, baptizing, and teaching. English translations sometimes render going as an imperative, which is not wrong, but it can obscure the fact that the central command is disciple-making. The church is not primarily commanded to travel, or to administer a rite, or to run a curriculum. She is commanded to make disciples, and going, baptizing, and teaching are the means by which disciples are made. This matters for how Christianization is understood. The goal is not religious affiliation but people who follow Jesus and are being taught to obey him.
Baptism is named explicitly, and it is not optional. The risen Christ joins baptism to disciple-making because baptism is the visible, public entry into the community of his followers. When Peter preaches at Pentecost, his hearers ask what they should do, and he answers, as Acts 2:38 records, that they should repent and be baptized, every one of them, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and that they will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Baptism is not a ceremony that makes someone a Christian by itself; it is the outward sign of a repentance and faith that the Spirit has worked inwardly. But it is the ordinary boundary marker of the disciple community.
Teaching follows baptism, and it is a lifelong work. Jesus says that disciples are taught to observe all that he commanded, not merely to recite it. The word observe carries the sense of keeping, guarding, and practicing. This is why Christianization that stops at baptism is a truncated thing. A person can be baptized into a church and never discipled into obedience. The Great Commission envisions congregations where the words of Jesus are read, explained, applied, and obeyed over decades. This is slow work, and it is largely invisible. It happens in homes, in small gatherings, in ordinary conversations, and in the patient preaching of the Scriptures week after week.
Notice also the scope: all nations. The phrase translates a Greek word that means the peoples, the ethnic groups, the nations of the world, not the political states of the world. Jesus is not sending his followers to capture governments. He is sending them to every kind of people, across every language and border, so that a countless multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language will worship him. The universal authority of verse 18 grounds the universal scope of verse 19. Because all authority is his, no people group is off limits, and no culture is beyond the reach of the gospel. This is the engine of Christian mission in every age.
Persuasion, not coercion, in the apostolic pattern
The book of Acts shows how the apostles understood the commission in practice. They preached, they reasoned, they argued, and they pleaded, but they did not coerce. When Paul stands before the Areopagus in Athens, he does not threaten or command. He observes the city's objects of worship, quotes their own poets, and then announces the God they worship in ignorance. He calls for repentance because God has fixed a day of judgment, and he grounds that call in the resurrection of Jesus. The whole speech, recorded in Acts 17:22-31 and following, is an exercise in persuasion. Paul aims at understanding and consent, not submission under pressure.
This pattern runs through the New Testament. Paul tells the Corinthians that he did not come with eloquent wisdom, and that his speech and message were not in plausible words of wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that their faith would not rest in the wisdom of men. He describes his ministry among the Thessalonians as gentle, like a nursing mother caring for her children. He appeals, he encourages, he charges, he reasons from the Scriptures. Nowhere does he organize a mob, threaten a magistrate into baptism, or use the sword to swell the church. The weapons of this warfare, he says elsewhere, are not of the flesh. The kingdom advances by the word and the Spirit.
This is why Romans 10 is so important for the topic. Paul writes that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved, as Romans 10:9 puts it. Faith, not force, is the instrument by which salvation is received. And faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of God. That chain leaves no room for compulsion. You cannot believe on someone's behalf. You cannot believe at sword point. A coerced confession is not a confession at all; it is a mouth moving without a heart behind it. The apostolic method is therefore necessarily one of proclamation and invitation, because the response God seeks is trust.
None of this means the apostles were timid. They were arrested, beaten, and killed, and they kept preaching. Paul reasoned in synagogues and marketplaces for years. The point is not that the church should be passive, but that her means must match her message. A message about a crucified king who refused to call down legions is not credibly advanced by legions. Where Christians have used state power to compel conversion, they have not extended the kingdom of Christ; they have obscured it. The sad fruit of such methods, nominal Christianity, resentment, and unbelief, has been borne out again and again in history, and faithful teachers should name it honestly.
What Christianization looks like in ordinary life
If the Great Commission is the charter, then Christianization in the biblical sense is what happens when ordinary Christians live as witnesses in ordinary places. Peter writes that believers should sanctify the Lord God in their hearts and always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks them a reason concerning the hope that is in them, with humility and fear, as 1 Peter 3:15-16 puts it. Notice the posture: readiness, reason, humility, and reverence. The hope is visible in the life before it is defended in words. People ask because they see something different. The answer is given gently, not aggressively, and it is given to those who ask, not forced on those who have not.
The household is often the first place this happens. A believing parent teaches a child the Scriptures, prays with them, and models repentance and forgiveness. A converted spouse quietly lives out the faith in a home where the other partner does not yet believe, and Peter says that such a wife may win her husband without a word by her conduct. This is slow, unglamorous work, and it is exactly what the Great Commission looks like at ground level. Empires are not converted in a day, but households are, and households are the building blocks of churches, and churches are the lampstands in the midst of the world.
Beyond the home, the workplace and neighbourhood are the ordinary fields. A Christian who works honestly, speaks truthfully, refuses to gossip, and treats the powerless with dignity is doing something the New Testament calls good conduct among the Gentiles. Paul tells the Philippians to shine as lights in the world, holding forth the word of life. The witness is not always verbal, but it is never merely silent in the long run. At some point, the reason for the hope must be spoken. Christianization, in its healthy form, is simply the accumulated effect of thousands of such lives, each one a small point of light, until whole communities are affected.
This also means that the measure of Christianization is not numbers but disciples. A congregation that baptizes many and teaches few has not fulfilled the commission. A congregation that teaches deeply and baptizes none has not either. The two belong together, because baptism without teaching produces shallow religion, and teaching without baptism produces a kind of detached admiration that never joins the community. The risen Christ joined them in a single sentence, and pastoral wisdom is to keep them joined. Where this is done patiently, over generations, the faith takes root, and cultures are gradually leavened from within rather than remade from above.
Where faithful Christians differ
Honest teaching requires acknowledging that believers have not always agreed about the relationship between the church and the wider society. Some Christians have argued that the goal of mission includes the transformation of social institutions, and they point to the influence of the gospel on law and culture as evidence of God's common grace. Others have argued that the church's mandate is strictly to proclaim the gospel and form local congregations, and that attempts to Christianize institutions have repeatedly compromised the church. Both views can be held by serious, Bible-believing people, and the difference is often one of emphasis and strategy rather than of the gospel itself.
What is not legitimately disputed is the use of force. The New Testament knows nothing of compelling anyone to profess Christ. It knows nothing of punishing dissenters with civil penalties in order to produce conformity. Those who have done such things have appealed to the Old Testament theocracy, but that covenant was tied to a particular land, a particular people, and a particular stage of redemptive history. The church is not Israel, and her sword is the word of God, not the sword of the state. Where this distinction is blurred, the results have been disastrous, and honesty about that history serves the gospel rather than harming it.
There is also disagreement about how quickly one should expect results. Some ministries report large numbers, and others labour for decades with little visible fruit. The New Testament itself contains both patterns: three thousand converted in a day at Pentecost, and Paul preaching for years with many rejecting the message. Faithfulness, not visible success, is the standard Jesus sets. The parable of the sower teaches that the same seed falls on different soils, and that the outcome is not always visible at the time of sowing. A teacher who promises guaranteed results from a particular method is promising more than Scripture does.
Finally, Christians differ about the extent to which a society should be described as Christian. Some point to shared assumptions and institutions, and others insist that only regenerate people are truly Christian, and that labels applied to nations are misleading. On this point, the biblical vocabulary is a helpful guide. The New Testament calls individuals and churches holy, and it speaks of the world as the world. It does not call the Roman Empire a Christian nation, even after it began to favour the church. Language that blurs that distinction tends to create confusion, and it is better to speak plainly about believers and unbelievers than to use labels that imply more than the New Testament does.
Biblical fidelity check
Matthew 28:18-20 establishes several things plainly. It establishes that the risen Jesus possesses all authority in heaven and on earth. It establishes that his followers are sent to make disciples among all nations. It establishes baptism in the triune name and ongoing teaching of all that Jesus commanded. It establishes his presence with his people to the end of the age. It does not, however, establish that governments may compel religious conformity, that entire nations become regenerate by legislation, or that political power is a legitimate tool for producing professions of faith. Those ideas must be imported from somewhere else, and they contradict the pattern of the apostles.
A common misreading treats the Great Commission as a mandate for cultural conquest, as though disciples are made by reshaping institutions from the top down. This is wrong for at least three reasons. First, the text commands disciple-making, and a disciple is a person who follows Jesus, not a policy or an institution. Second, the means named are baptism and teaching, which presuppose willing hearers; you cannot baptize or teach someone into the kingdom against their will. Third, the New Testament consistently portrays conversion as the work of the Holy Spirit through the word, and the Spirit is not administered by the state. The commission is expansive in scope and gentle in method, and a faithful reading keeps those two truths together.
Other passages that speak to Matthew 28:18-20
The commission does not stand alone. Paul's sermon in Athens shows how the message was preached to a pagan audience, and it is explored in What Does 1 Peter 1:2 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The call to be ready with an answer is developed in What Does 1 Peter 1:13 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The holiness that makes such a witness credible is treated in What Does 1 Peter 1:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. And the redemption that grounds all Christian proclamation is unfolded in What Does 1 Peter 1:18 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. Together these passages show that the mission of the church is carried out by redeemed, holy, hopeful people who speak the truth with humility.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Great Commission require Christians to convert nations by political means?
No. The commission commands disciple-making, and it names baptism and teaching as the means. Both presuppose willing hearers. Jesus himself refused political power when it was offered to him, and the apostles never used the state to compel belief. The New Testament presents conversion as the work of the Holy Spirit through the proclaimed word. Political coercion can produce outward conformity, but it cannot produce faith, and it has often done great harm to the reputation of the gospel. Faithful mission works by persuasion and prayer.
Is baptism necessary for someone to become a Christian?
Baptism is commanded by the risen Christ and practiced throughout Acts, where Peter calls his hearers to repent and be baptized. It is the ordinary, public sign of union with Christ and entry into his people. Christians have differed historically over the precise relationship between baptism and salvation, and those differences should be discussed honestly. What Scripture does not permit is treating baptism as a mere formality or as a substitute for repentance and faith. The New Testament everywhere joins the outward sign to the inward reality, and it warns against empty ritual.
How long does faithful Christianization take?
It varies. At Pentecost, three thousand were baptized in a day, but most mission work in the New Testament and in church history has been slower, measured in years and generations. Paul preached for years in some cities with modest visible results. The parable of the sower teaches that the same seed meets different soils with different outcomes. Faithfulness, not immediate success, is what Jesus requires of his servants. A teacher who guarantees results from a method promises more than Scripture does, and patience is part of the commission itself.
