ADVANCING THE KINGDOM (Santamaria)

ADVANCING THE KINGDOM OF GOD

FOREWORD

Religious phrases have a strange half-life. They start as honest attempts to say something true, then they harden into slogans, and eventually they become a kind of verbal incense—pleasant, familiar, and capable of covering almost any smell. “Advancing the kingdom of God” is one of those phrases. In the best sense, it can mean something reverent: Christ is gathering His people, His gospel is being published, His churches are being strengthened, and His name is being confessed in places where it was not confessed before. In the worst sense, it becomes a sanctified way of saying, “Our program is working,” or, “Our machinery is producing results,” with God’s name attached like a ribbon.

That is why this little phrase deserves a whole book.

The problem is not that Christians long for God’s reign to be known, loved, and displayed. That longing is as biblical as the Lord’s Prayer. The problem is that the word advance easily slips a new driver into the seat. It can make the kingdom sound like a project we push forward—by technique, organization, influence, fundraising, branding, and the sort of strategic talk that feels practical precisely because it feels controllable. The modern age loves whatever can be measured, scaled, and managed. When that spirit enters the church, the kingdom of God is treated as if it grows the way businesses grow: by leverage, by optimization, by the right partnerships, by the right campaigns, by the right people in the right positions. The language becomes energetic, confident, and busy—yet the “grammar” quietly changes. God moves from Actor to Mascot. Man moves from servant to manager. And the glory that belongs to Christ alone gets redistributed among methods.

Scripture will not let us talk that way without consequence. The kingdom of God is not a human construction project. It is God’s reign—announced by prophets, embodied in the Son, manifested in His death and resurrection, and made effectual by the Holy Spirit. The King does not need a public relations team to become King. He is King. His kingdom comes because He brings it. It is revealed because He reveals it. It triumphs because He triumphs. The church’s calling is real and weighty—preach, baptize, teach, gather, discipline, love, endure, pray, suffer, rejoice—but our calling is not to supply the power. Our calling is obedience that refuses to steal the crown.

This is where Old School/Primitive Baptist instincts become a useful alarm system. Those writers were not allergic to preaching, prayer, or gospel labor. They were allergic to spiritual boasting disguised as religious efficiency. They watched their Baptist world fill with boards, societies, and centralized religious engines—complete with money levers, professionalized leadership, and the promise of “results”—and they recognized the temptation immediately. When the church begins to talk as if the kingdom expands by human machinery, it is only a short step to treating Christ’s gospel as a tool for producing spiritual outcomes on demand. That step does not merely tweak our vocabulary; it reshapes our theology. It turns the gospel from glad tidings into a lever. It turns ministers into operators. It turns churches into funding platforms. And it turns God’s sovereignty into a polite doctrine we affirm while building systems that function as if it were not true.

At the same time, this is not a book written to excuse passivity. A false choice haunts many discussions: either we build “kingdom-advancement” machinery, or we do nothing but sit still and talk about sovereignty. Scripture knows nothing of that modern binary. The apostles preached. Churches sent help. Saints gave. Elders watched over souls. The poor were remembered. Doors opened, and servants walked through them. The difference is not whether Christians act, but how Christians speak and think about the action. Do we act like servants whose success depends on God, or like engineers whose success depends on a system? Do we pray like men who believe God must do it, or do we pray like men who mostly want God to bless what we already planned? Do we preach as heralds announcing what God has done, or as technicians trying to produce a spiritual effect?

That is the knife-edge this book walks on purpose.

It also explains why we will spend time on the history of the phrase. Words have genealogies. They pick up assumptions from the worlds that use them. “Advancing the kingdom” has an older, more devotional register in the Christian tradition—often tied to prayer, to God’s own work, to the spread of the gospel as the Lord opens the way. In later eras, especially as modern mission structures and revivalist energies rose, the same language could become more programmatic and managerial. The phrase didn’t necessarily change because everyone got wicked overnight; it changed because new institutions and new habits of thought needed language that matched their sense of purpose. When the church begins to build, it begins to speak like builders. When the church begins to market, it begins to speak like marketers. And when the church begins to measure itself the way the world measures success, it begins to speak like a corporation that prays.

So this book is not merely a complaint. It is a diagnostic. It asks: What do we mean by “kingdom”? What do we mean by “advance”? Who is the Actor in our sentences? What hidden theology is sitting behind our favorite religious slogans? Are we guarding the line between Christ’s kingship and man’s machinery? Are we maintaining the difference between the church—simple, local, governed by Scripture—and the religious empire—centralized, funded, strategized, and perpetually hungry for expansion?

The reader will also notice a deliberate refusal to treat “kingdom” as a synonym for “culture war victory.” Christians are called to be salt and light; they are not promised the keys to earthly dominance. The New Testament does not present political control as the engine of the kingdom. It presents Christ crucified and risen, preached among the nations, gathering a people who worship in Spirit and truth, and who overcome by faithfulness—often by suffering, not by winning. The kingdom advances the way yeast works, not the way an empire advertises. It grows with a quietness that humiliates human pride and with a power that does not ask permission from our methods.

If this book succeeds, it will not merely make you cautious about a phrase. It will make you jealous for the honor of Christ. It will make you suspicious of religious speech that flatters man. It will make you love the ordinary means God actually ordained—preaching, prayer, the fellowship of the saints—without turning those means into idols or treating them as mechanical causes of spiritual life. It will teach you to speak carefully, so that your language keeps pace with your doctrine. Most of all, it will re-train your instincts so that when someone says, “We’re advancing the kingdom,” you will immediately ask, “By whose power? By what authority? With what definition of the kingdom? And who gets the glory?”

The kingdom of God is not fragile. It does not need our exaggerations. It does not need our bravado. It does not need our fog machines. It needs our faithful obedience—and even that obedience is a gift purchased by the King who reigns. Let Him be the Actor. Let us be the servants. And let every honest prayer remain what it always was: “Thy kingdom come.”

Guillermo Santamaria

INTRODUCTION

“Advancing the Kingdom of God” is one of those phrases that can mean something glorious… or become a fog machine, depending on what someone smuggles into the word advance. So the first honest move is to define terms the way Scripture uses them, not the way modern religious marketing does.

In the Bible, the “kingdom of God” isn’t mainly a geopolitical project, and it isn’t identical to “whatever Christians are busy doing.” It’s God’s reign—His rule breaking into history in a climactic way through Christ. Jesus can say “the kingdom of God is at hand” because the King Himself has arrived, and His works (teaching, healing, exorcising, forgiving, raising the dead) are signs that God’s rule is invading enemy territory. That “invasion” has two horizons at once: it’s already present in Christ and in the Spirit’s work, and it’s not yet fully manifested until the final consummation when every rival rule is put down.

So what could “advance” mean without getting weird? At minimum, it can mean the kingdom becomes more visible and more confessed in the world through the spread of the gospel, the gathering of Christ’s people, and the fruit of the Spirit in real lives. But that “advance” is not humans pushing God’s reign forward like we’re moving a couch. Biblically, God advances His kingdom; we bear witness to it, announce it, and live as citizens of it. That keeps the grammar right: God is the actor; we are instruments.

Different Christian traditions cash this out differently. Some put heavy emphasis on cultural transformation—laws, institutions, arts, “Christianizing” society. Others emphasize personal conversion and church life as the main theater of the kingdom’s display in this age. A cautious, Scripture-tethered approach notices that the New Testament expects Christians to do good works and be salt and light, but it does not treat political control as the kingdom’s engine. It treats Christ’s death, resurrection, ascension, and the Spirit’s work as the engine—and it treats the church’s calling as proclamation, discipleship, worship, discipline, mercy, and endurance.

From an Old School/Primitive Baptist instinct (especially the anti-“machinery” instinct you see in writers like Beebe and Trott), the phrase needs even more guarding. “Advancing the kingdom” can quietly become code for human religious machinery—boards, campaigns, techniques, and metrics—where success is measured like a business. Old School writers would typically insist that Christ builds His church and gathers His elect by His own power, and that the gospel is preached not as a lever that makes regeneration happen, but as the glad announcement and nourishment of what God has done. That doesn’t make preaching optional; it makes boasting impossible.

Practically, then, “advancing the kingdom” looks less like conquering and more like faithful witness: truth told plainly, worship kept simple and sincere, the poor helped without theater, saints built up, wolves resisted, repentance lived, and hope held steady when the age looks like a dumpster fire. The kingdom advances the way yeast works, not the way an army press release sounds—quietly, relentlessly, often unimpressively to the world, and sometimes most powerfully when it looks like weakness.

If you want to use the phrase in writing without it becoming mush, a good habit is to attach it to concrete biblical realities: “by preaching Christ,” “by gathering and edifying the church,” “by the Spirit’s work in regeneration and sanctification,” “by acts of mercy that adorn the gospel,” “by suffering faithfully,” and “by praying ‘Thy kingdom come’ with the humility that admits God is the one who brings it.”

WHEN WAS THE PHRASE ADVANCING THE KINGDOM OF GOD OR ITS SEMANTIC EQUIVALENT USED?

The exact “advance the kingdom of God” wording (in English) is older than most people think, but it’s not Bible phrasing—it’s a later metaphor that treats God’s reign like something that can be “promoted” or “pushed forward” in history.

The earliest clear, dated English instance I can point to in a searchable early-print source is 1656, in a published exposition by John Cotton (printed in London). In discussing corrupt worship, he says it “doth not advance the kingdom of God.”

A second very early example is 1667, where John Corbet writes, “This is to advance the Kingdom of God among men,” in a tract printed in London. (Quodlibet)

If you broaden to a close semantic equivalent in Latin theology, you can push it back earlier. A modern edition preserving the Latin includes the phrase “promovere regnum Dei” (“to promote the kingdom of God”), attributed to Amandus Polanus; Polanus’s Syntagma theologiae Christianae is attested in print by 1610 (Vol. 1). (monergism.com)

So, the English “advance the kingdom of God” is in print by 1656, and the “advance/promote God’s kingdom” idea appears at least by 1610 in Latin scholastic usage. The modern slogan-y gerund form (“advancing the kingdom of God”) looks like a later stylistic evolution of that older “advance/promote” wording. Still, the conceptual engine was already running in the early 1600s.

WHAT DO OLD SCHOOL BAPTISTS THINK OF THIS PHRASE?

Old School (Primitive) Baptists would usually hear “advancing the kingdom of God” with a raised eyebrow, not because they disliked Christ’s kingdom (they loved it), but because the phrase often hides a human-powered assumption: that the kingdom is a project we expand by technique, money, institutions, and “religious machinery.” In their polemics, that assumption is precisely what they thought was wrong with modern missionism. Gilbert Beebe, for example, mocked the whole idea that the kingdom can be “improved” by our financial and organizational hustle—he describes “missionary” operators as acting on the belief that they could “greatly enlarge, and essentially improve the kingdom of Christ, by their exertions and treasures.” (Sovereign Redeemer Books)

At the same time, Old School Baptists were not saying, “Don’t preach.” The Black Rock Address (1832)—a foundational Old School manifesto—goes out of its way to say they regard Christ’s command to preach as “of the first importance,” and they want to be found obeying it as God’s providence opens doors. (Bethlehem PBC OKC) So their objection isn’t to preaching the gospel, or even to helping support ministers; it’s to recasting the kingdom as something run through extra-church boards and national societies, as if Christ’s rule advances the way a corporation scales.

That’s why the Black Rock Address insists, in so many words, that “the kingdom of Christ” is “altogether a kingdom not of this world”—and they use that to argue against treating spiritual work as a worldly power-structure with officers, money-levers, and centralized control. (Bethlehem PBC OKC) In the same section, they say they cannot “fellowship the plans for spreading the gospel…under the name of Missions,” because they see those plans as “a subversion of the order marked out in the New Testament.” (Bethlehem PBC OKC)

So if an Old School Baptist heard the phrase used in a modest sense—meaning, “Christ is gathering His people; the gospel is preached when God opens a way; the church is strengthened; God gets the glory”—they could live with it (they talk about Christ’s reign, conquests, and the gathering of His subjects constantly). But if the phrase is being used the modern way—meaning, “we’re going to make the kingdom grow by campaigns, machinery, metrics, and money”—they would treat it as the kind of “means” religion that sneaks human power into what belongs to God alone. Beebe explicitly frames that intrusion as “ascribing salvation to means…efforts, missions, funds…or human power.” (Sovereign Redeemer Books)

EXAMPLES OF THOSE WHO THINK THEY CAN ADVANCE THE KOINGDOM THROUGH THEIR OWN EFFORTS

Yes—this “advance the kingdom” language is everywhere in modern evangelicalism, and it often frames human action (giving, organizing, evangelizing, lobbying, etc.) as a means by which the kingdom “moves forward.”

Here are concrete examples (short excerpts, with context):

Church mission statement (evangelism/discipleship): “The Mission… is to advance the Kingdom of God by preaching the Gospel, making disciples…” (Bright Hope Baptist Church)

Church campaign language (strategy + steps): “Our Vision is… witnesses who see God’s ‘kingdom advance.’ Our Strategy for advancing God’s kingdom is…” (Mission Church)

Fundraising/participation framing: “Prayerfully consider how God wants you to participate… We will make a huge impact together…” (titled “Advance the Kingdom”). (Grace Church)

Ministry training (equipping to advance): “Equip more students… to advance the kingdom in their spheres of influence.” (encounterministries.us)

Inter-church partnership value statement: “Committed… to partner with other churches that desire to advance the Kingdom.” (transformationchurch.tc)

Denominational cooperation (collective effort): working together to “advance the Kingdom in a manner that no single church could accomplish.” (Baptist Press)

Mission statement (love + conversion): “Advance the Kingdom of God through… love… and leading them to a relationship with Jesus Christ.” (kingdomadvancementcm.com)

Monthly giving pitch: “Join us… and help us advance the Kingdom of God and reach the lost…” (wellchurchnetwork.com)

Even critical usage (warning about wrong ‘methods’): MacArthur critiques “efforts to advance the kingdom by political lobbying… social change…” (Grace to You)

What’s interesting (and relevant to your “means” concerns) is that the phrase often functions as a bridge between God’s reign and our programs: give → the kingdom advances; partner → the kingdom advances; campaign → the kingdom advances. That’s exactly where Old School Baptists typically start sharpening their knives—because the wording easily slides into human instrumentality as the engine rather than God’s sovereign work as the cause.

View of Baptists on this Phrase

Baptists have been using “kingdom-advance” language for a long time, but the meaning of the phrase has shifted depending on the era.

1) The phrase is older than Baptists (mid-1600s)

A big chunk of classic English Protestant phrasing comes from the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647). In its explanation of “Thy kingdom come,” it explicitly says we pray “that the Kingdom of Grace may be advanced” (alongside Satan’s kingdom being destroyed, etc.). (Internet Archive)

So the conceptual template (“kingdom… advanced”) is standard Reformed catechetical language before it’s “Baptist language.”

2) Particular Baptists adopted it clearly by the late 1600s

Particular Baptists took over essentially the same catechetical phrasing in what’s commonly known as Keach’s/Baptist Catechism (often dated c. 1693). It uses the same line: “that the kingdom of grace may be advanced.” (qsl.net)

That matters for your question because it shows the language is not a modern marketing invention; it’s been sitting in Baptist teaching tools for centuries — originally in the register of prayer, not “strategic conquest.”

3) The “through our efforts” missions feel ramped up hard in the late 1700s

If what you mean is the more activist-flavored claim — we should deliberately exert ourselves to spread/extend Christ’s kingdom — that becomes very visible in the modern missions movement, especially among the “Fullerite” Particular Baptists.

In 1792, William Carey could write (in An Enquiry…) that it’s worth “laying ourselves out with all our might” in promoting “the cause, and kingdom of Christ.” (decadeofpentecost.org)

That’s basically the DNA of a lot of later Baptist/evangelical “advance the kingdom” rhetoric: not merely praying for the kingdom, but mobilizing for its spread.

The punchline

As phrasing: Baptists are using “kingdom… advanced” by the late 1600s (and they inherit it from broader Reformed catechisms). (Internet Archive)

As a programmatic slogan (“through our efforts…”): it becomes culturally loud and movement-defining with late-18th-century missions (Carey/Fuller world). (decadeofpentecost.org)

And the real interpretive knife-edge is this: older confessional/catechetical usage is often theological + devotional (“God advance the kingdom of grace”), whereas later usage can slide into managerial (“we will advance the kingdom”), which is exactly where Old School/Primitive Baptist writers start to bristle — because it smells like humans taking credit for what they’d insist is God’s work.

Specific Baptists used the term in this way?

If by “advance the kingdom through human efforts” you mean Baptists who explicitly argued that Christians are obligated to use means—organizing, funding, sending, strategizing—then the classic cluster starts with the English Particular Baptists around 1792. William Carey is the loudest voice: in his Enquiry, he urges Christians to “lay ourselves out with all our might… in promoting the cause, and kingdom of Christ,” and his argument helped ignite the Baptist Missionary Society. (Southern Equip) That same “Kettering” circle included Andrew Fuller (the BMS’s first secretary), John Sutcliff, John Ryland Jr., and Samuel Pearce—men who deliberately yoked prayer to practical organization for overseas missions. (Boston University)

In America, the same “means” instinct shows up in early national Baptist mission structures tied to Adoniram Judson and Luther Rice; their work helped drive the formation of the Triennial Convention (a national Baptist body organized largely to fund foreign missions) and associated mission-board machinery. (abhsarchives.org) And in later Southern Baptist life, Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong became iconic “mobilizers”: Moon’s appeals helped spur large-scale giving to send and sustain missionaries (the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering explicitly exists to fund missionary support), while Armstrong helped organize women’s mission mobilization and an offering that channels funds directly to support North American missionaries. (IMB)