BEFORE HE WAS A SAINT, ANDREW WAS A MISSIONARY

Why the Idea That God Sent Andrew to Caledonia Is Not Strange at All

GLASGOW, UK—Somewhere along the way, Saint Andrew stopped being a man and became an icon.

He became a flag.

A feast day.

A cathedral.

A cross.

A relic.

A national symbol.

He became someone painted into church windows, carved into stone, placed into religious artwork and remembered through ceremonies that developed centuries after his death.

But before any of those things, Saint Andrew was something much simpler.

He was a missionary.

Saint Andrew was not a mythical figure floating around in stained glass. He was a man who followed Jesus, believed he had been commissioned to take the gospel outward, traveled, preached, gathered people, and went where he believed his calling took him.

For modern Christians, that idea is not exotic at all.

Churches still send missionaries across the world every year.

Someone stands before a congregation and says:

“God called me to Myanmar.”

Or:

“God called me to Israel.”

Or:

“God called us to plant a church in Scotland.”

Nobody in the congregation finds the concept difficult to understand.

They understand exactly what the missionary means.

The person believes God has given him a place, a people and an assignment.

So he goes.

Why should Saint Andrew suddenly become incomprehensible merely because he lived in the first century?

Jesus Told Them to Go

The entire early Christian movement was built around movement.

Jesus did not tell his followers to remain comfortably in one city and preserve their memories of him.

He told them to go.

The command Christians later called the Great Commission was extraordinarily expansive.

Make disciples among the nations.

Carry the message outward.

Move beyond the familiar.

Cross boundaries.

Go.

For the apostles, that was not an inspirational slogan printed on a church missions brochure.

It was their assignment.

Saint Andrew had followed Jesus personally.

He had watched him teach.

He had traveled with him.

He had witnessed the events that transformed the lives of Jesus’ followers.

Then Saint Andrew became part of a movement whose entire direction was outward.

So when ancient Christian tradition remembers Saint Andrew traveling far beyond Judea, there is nothing peculiar about that.

That is exactly what an apostle was supposed to be doing.

Distance Was Not the Problem

One objection to Saint Andrew reaching ancient Scotland is often implied rather than stated.

Scotland was so far away.

Caledonia was remote.

Surely an apostle from Galilee would not have gone all the way there.

But think about what that objection assumes.

It assumes that distance made a missionary destination less believable.

For the Great Commission, the opposite was true.

Caledonia was not too far away to make sense of the Great Commission. Distance was the point of the Great Commission.

The message was supposed to travel beyond familiar territory.

Beyond Judea.

Beyond the eastern Mediterranean.

Beyond comfortable cultural boundaries.

Toward peoples who had not heard it.

To the ends of the earth.

When modern missionaries board airplanes for countries thousands of miles from their homes, Christians do not say:

“That country is too far away. Therefore God could not possibly have called you there.”

Distance is often part of the calling.

Why should Saint Andrew be evaluated by a completely different standard?

Missionaries Go Where They Believe God Sends Them

Ask almost any missionary why they chose a particular country and eventually the conversation reaches something deeply personal.

They believe they were called.

Sometimes they describe a moment in prayer.

Sometimes a burden for a particular people develops over years.

Sometimes circumstances repeatedly point them toward the same place.

Sometimes they cannot explain the calling perfectly.

They simply know:

That is where I am supposed to go.

Christians understand this language instinctively.

A missionary does not necessarily choose a destination because it is convenient.

Often it is inconvenient.

It may be expensive.

Dangerous.

Politically unstable.

Culturally unfamiliar.

A missionary may leave family, language, security and everything familiar behind because he believes obedience requires going somewhere else.

That basic human experience has not changed very much.

Saint Andrew belonged to that world too.

We Have Made the Apostle More Mysterious Than the Missionary

Sometimes the word apostle makes these men seem almost supernatural.

They become religious characters rather than human beings.

But an apostle still had to wake up in the morning.

He still had to decide which road to take.

He had to find food.

Cross water.

Meet strangers.

Find places to sleep.

Learn customs.

Depend on hospitality.

Speak to people who did not know him.

Face rejection.

Build relationships.

Leave one community and travel to another.

Missionaries still do versions of all those things.

The technology changes.

Human beings do not.

The Saint Andrew who traveled through the ancient world was not floating mysteriously from one stained-glass window to another.

He was walking.

Sailing.

Talking.

Listening.

Teaching.

Praying.

Depending upon people.

Meeting new communities.

Then traveling onward.

That makes Saint Andrew considerably easier to understand.

He Would Not Have Traveled Alone

Modern readers also tend to imagine ancient religious figures moving through the world alone.

That is probably too simplistic.

The early Christian movement operated through relationships.

People traveled together.

Households became involved.

Believers hosted travelers.

Converts joined communities.

Messengers carried information between groups.

Missionary teams formed and changed.

People moved through trade routes, family networks, ports and settlements.

The New Testament itself repeatedly portrays Christian mission as a network rather than the work of isolated individuals.

So if Saint Andrew traveled toward distant peoples, the natural question is not only:

Where did Saint Andrew go?

It is also:

Who went with him?

Friends?

Fellow believers?

New converts?

Families?

Interpreters?

People escaping instability elsewhere?

People who joined the group along the way?

Some may have traveled onward.

Others may have settled.

Some may have carried teachings into neighboring communities.

That is how movements spread.

Not merely through one famous person, but through the people around him.

They Were Living in a Dangerous World

There is another part of Saint Andrew’s world that modern stained glass tends to hide.

The first generations of Jesus’ followers did not live inside comfortable Christian societies.

They lived amid enormous political and religious upheaval.

Jesus had been executed by Roman authority.

Conflict intensified throughout Judea in the decades that followed.

Jerusalem itself would eventually be devastated by Rome.

Communities scattered.

Families moved.

Believers fled dangerous areas.

Mission and displacement could exist at the same time.

A person could leave because remaining had become dangerous and also believe that God was using that movement to accomplish something larger.

Modern Christians understand this too.

Some churches have been planted because refugees arrived somewhere unexpected.

Some missionaries first encountered a nation through war, migration or political upheaval.

Human history is full of people whose displacement became somebody else’s encounter with a new faith.

The early Christian world was no different.

Jerusalem, Not Rome

There is also something that becomes obscured when Saint Andrew is remembered primarily through later European institutions.

Saint Andrew’s faith did not originate in medieval Rome.

It did not originate in England.

It did not originate in a European cathedral.

It began in the Jewish world of first-century Israel.

Saint Andrew followed a Jewish teacher named Jesus.

The earliest followers of Jesus emerged from that world.

Their Scriptures, language, festivals, understanding of God and expectations about the Messiah came out of Israel.

So if Saint Andrew eventually preached among northern peoples, the direction of spiritual transmission matters.

The original movement was not:

Rome gives Christianity to Scotland.

It was:

A movement born in Israel goes outward among the nations.

That is a completely different picture.

It means that if Saint Andrew reached the Picts, Scotland’s earliest connection to Christianity would not have begun as a gift from a later European political establishment.

It would have begun much earlier, through the apostolic movement itself.

That distinction is one reason the question matters so much.

The Living Saint Andrew and the Dead Andrew

Consider how differently two versions of Saint Andrew function.

In one version, Saint Andrew is dead.

Centuries have passed.

Other people carry alleged fragments of his body to Scotland.

His physical remains become the connection.

The story centers on a relic.

In the other version, Saint Andrew is alive.

He believes he has been commissioned to preach.

He travels toward people he believes he has been sent to reach.

He speaks with them.

Lives among them.

Teaches them.

Prays with them.

Builds relationships.

Then perhaps moves onward.

The first “Saint Andrew” is an alleged object being transported.

The second Saint Andrew is a missionary fulfilling an assignment.

Which one sounds more like the Saint Andrew described in the earliest Christian movement?

That question is worth asking.

“God Called Me There”

Perhaps Christians should imagine Saint Andrew in language they already understand.

A missionary visits a church.

He tells the congregation:

“I believe God has called me to Scotland.”

People pray for him.

Some give money.

Some travel with him.

Someone helps arrange transportation.

Another person introduces him to people already living there.

He arrives.

He begins meeting families.

He gathers people in homes.

He teaches.

Some believe him.

Some do not.

Eventually a community forms.

Then perhaps he leaves trusted people behind and travels elsewhere.

Nobody watching that happen would find it mysterious.

It is missions.

Now move the scene backward two thousand years.

Take away the airplane.

Take away the email.

Take away the passport.

Take away the missionary newsletter.

Keep the calling.

Keep the journey.

Keep the people.

Keep the preaching.

Keep the belief that God has sent someone somewhere.

Suddenly the concept becomes very simple.

Why Would Saint Andrew Go to the Picts?

Perhaps the better question is:

Why wouldn’t he?

If Saint Andrew believed the command was to carry the message outward, why would an unreached northern people have been outside that mission?

If early tradition associated Saint Andrew with northern missionary territory, why would movement farther north toward the edge of the known world be inherently absurd? He was called by Jesus to take the gospel “to the end of the earth.” At that time, Scotland was viewed as “the ends of the earth.”

If medieval Scots remembered Saint Andrew as connected with the Picts, why should their memory be dismissed before being investigated?

And if Scotland’s own historical traditions preserved the belief that Saint Andrew had personally been there, why begin with the assumption that he could not have gone?

There is no theological reason.

There is no missionary reason.

There is no logical reason.

The real debate is historical evidence.

And as the previous investigation demonstrated, there is more historical testimony than the phrase “there is no record” would suggest.

Missionaries Rarely Leave Complete Records

Even missionaries living today do not document every meaningful thing they do.

Imagine reconstructing one missionary’s life five hundred years from now.

Perhaps only a few letters survive.

A church remembers that she founded a congregation.

Another community preserves an oral story about her visit.

A family remembers that their ancestors traveled with her.

A later historian questions whether she ever went there because no airline record survived.

Would the absence of a complete itinerary prove that the community invented her?

Of course not.

Historians would compare the surviving evidence.

They would ask when the tradition appeared.

Whether multiple sources preserved it.

Whether the geography was plausible.

Whether it fit the larger pattern of her life.

That is how historical reconstruction works.

Saint Andrew should receive the same treatment.

Not blind acceptance.

Not automatic dismissal.

Investigation.

The Great Commission Was Not Symbolic

Modern Christians sometimes speak about the Great Commission so frequently that it becomes almost abstract.

It appears on church walls.

Mission conference banners.

Websites.

Offering envelopes.

Sermon slides.

But for Saint Andrew’s generation, going to the nations was not branding.

It was movement.

Somebody actually had to leave.

Somebody actually had to cross the sea.

Somebody actually had to enter unfamiliar communities.

Somebody actually had to encounter people who had never heard what he believed.

Otherwise the command meant nothing.

The apostles were those somebodies.

They went.

That is why the ancient traditions about Saint Andrew’s missionary travels exist in the first place.

Christians remembered him as someone who went outward.

The debate concerns exactly where those journeys took him.

Not whether missionary travel itself fits who Saint Andrew was.

It fits him perfectly.

Before Scotland Had a Flag

Imagine Scotland before Saint Andrew’s cross became its national symbol.

Before the Saltire flew over government buildings.

Before St Andrews became a cathedral city.

Before pilgrims traveled to venerate relics.

Before medieval kings.

Before Westminster.

Before the union of The United Kingdom.

Before anyone had constructed the layers of ceremony through which Saint Andrew is now remembered.

There were simply people.

Families.

Communities.

Tribes.

Leaders.

People living in a difficult northern landscape beyond the secure reach of Roman government.

And somewhere else was a fisherman from Galilee who believed Jesus had told him to go.

Perhaps that is where the story should begin.

Not with the box of bones.

With the man.

Saint Andrew Was Not Trying to Become Scotland’s Patron Saint

This may be one of the easiest things to forget.

Saint Andrew was not walking around thinking:

Someday my face may appear on Scottish seals.

He did not know about Saint Andrew’s Day.

He did not know about the Saltire as a future national flag.

He did not know that cathedrals would carry his name.

He did not know tourists would someday photograph ruins associated with him.

He was not building a national brand.

He was trying to obey what he believed Jesus had told him to do.

That makes the story far less mystical.

And far more human.

The Calling Came Before the Legend

Legends accumulate afterward.

Institutions grow afterward.

Relics appear afterward.

Political interpretations come afterward.

But before any of that, there must be a reason Saint Andrew became associated with particular places and peoples at all.

Some associations may have developed through alleged relics.

Some through churches dedicated to him.

Some through later political needs.

Others may preserve memories of much older missionary traditions.

The task of history is to distinguish among them.

But Christianity itself gives us no reason to find the basic proposition strange:

Saint Andrew believed he had been sent to people far from home.

That is what missionaries do.

Perhaps We Have Complicated Something Very Simple

Maybe that is the greatest irony surrounding Saint Andrew.

Centuries of institutional religion have made the story seem enormously complicated.

Relic translations.

Medieval chronicles.

Papal politics.

Royal seals.

Foundation legends.

Cathedral traditions.

Competing historical theories.

All of those things matter.

But underneath them is an extraordinarily simple human possibility.

A man followed Jesus.

Jesus told his followers to go.

The man believed particular people were part of that assignment.

So he traveled.

He preached.

He gathered people.

Then he continued onward.

Christians still do exactly that.

Before He Was a Saint

Saint Andrew was not a mythical figure floating around in stained glass.

He was a man who followed Jesus, believed he had been commissioned to take the gospel outward, traveled, preached, gathered people, and went where he believed his calling took him.

Before he was a national symbol, he was a missionary.

Before he was a relic, he was alive.

Before churches argued over his bones, he had feet.

And those feet went somewhere.

Scottish tradition says they came north.

It says his mission included the Picts.

It says most Scots once believed he had been among them alive.

The Declaration of Arbroath later placed him near the beginning of Scotland’s Christian story.

Those claims deserve historical investigation.

But the fundamental idea itself should never have sounded strange to Christians in the first place.

Saint Andrew believed Jesus had commissioned him to go.

So he went.