Missionary Methods: God's Plan for Missions According to Paul

Missionary Methods

God’s Plan for Missions According to Paul

Roland Allen

Contents

Author’s Preface to The Second Edition (1927)

Introduction

PART I

Strategic Points

Class

Moral and Social Condition

PART II

Miracles

Finance

The Substance of Paul’s Preaching

PART III

The Teaching

The Training of Candidates for Membership and Ministry

PART IV

Authority and Discipline

Unity

PART V

Principles and Spirit

Application

A Present-Day Contrast

About the Author

Author’s Preface to The Second Edition (1927)

It is now fifteen years since this book was first published, and I thought that a new and cheaper edition might be useful. In these fifteen years, I have seen, and I have heard from others, that the study of Paul’s methods has influenced the missionary process. I am more convinced than ever that in the careful examination of his work and in the understanding and appreciation of his principles, we shall find the solution to most of our present difficulties. We are talking today of indigenous churches. Paul’s churches were indigenous churches in the proper sense of the word, and I believe that the secret of their foundation lay in his recognition of the church as a local church as opposed to our national churches. He maintained a profound belief and trust that the Holy Spirit indwelt his converts and the churches of which they were members, which enabled him to establish them at once with full authority. We do not trust the Holy Spirit as easily today. We are more apt to believe in His work in us and through us, than we believe in His work in and through our converts; we fail to trust our converts to Him. That is one of the most obvious lessons the study of Paul’s work teaches us, but I believe that we still have much to learn from his example.

In the reviews that appeared when this book was first published, I was surprised and pleased to find that little fault was found with my statement of the apostolic practice. Accepting the statement of the facts as substantially true, critics almost invariably fixed on two points: (1) that the gulf between us and the people to whom we go is deeper and wider than that between Paul and those to whom he preached, and (2) that Paul could rely upon converts from the synagogue to preserve his churches from dangers only too plain to us. The conclusion drawn was that what was possible for him in his day is impossible for us in ours.

To the first of these criticisms, I replied in a book entitled Educational Principles and Missionary Methods, in which I argued that the greater the gulf, the greater was the value of the apostolic method. That argument is too long to summarize here. To the second, I may say here briefly: (1) The dangers that we anticipate, the dangers of lowering a standard of morals or of a confusion of Christian doctrine by the introduction of ideas borrowed from heathen philosophy or superstition, were not less in his day than in ours. (2) The breach between the synagogue and the Christian church arose so early and was so wide that churches were soon being established which certainly were not off-shoots of the local synagogue, and yet the apostolic practice was maintained. (3) At Corinth, and in Galatia and Ephesus, the presence of Jews or proselytes in the church did not prevent the dangers from arising; if Paul relied upon them, they failed him. (4) The argument demands that we admit that Mosaic teaching is a better foundation for Christian morality and theology than the teaching of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. (5) Paul’s faith in Christ and in His Holy Spirit would have forced him to act as he did under any circumstances. He could not have relied upon any power in heathen philosophic or in Mosaic teaching to establish his converts under any circumstances whatsoever. (6) If we went to China or to India and told those people that they were so far beneath the provincial Jews and proselytes of Paul’s day in morality and intelligence, and that he could not have dealt with them as he did with the provincials of Galatia, they would be insulted. And if anyone answers me that when we use such speech we are thinking only of people in Africa and other uncivilized lands, I must reply that we are plainly thinking of all men everywhere, because we employ the same method everywhere and we shrink from establishing the church on the apostolic plan everywhere.

In the light of experience gained in the last fifteen years, I might have enlarged this book, but it did not seem wise to add greatly to its bulk. I have therefore contented myself with making as few corrections and additions as possible, and have carried the argument further in a book now published as a companion volume to this, entitled The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It. In that book I have tried to set forth the secret of an expansion, which was a most remarkable characteristic of apostolic churches, and have examined the hindrances that have prevented us from establishing such churches.

If any of my readers desire to pursue the consideration of missionary methods further, I can only refer them to that book.

June 24, 1927

ROLAND ALLEN

Beaconsfield

Introduction

In a little more than ten years, the apostle Paul established the church in four provinces of the Roman Empire: Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia. Before AD 47, no churches existed in these provinces. In AD 57, Paul could speak as if his work there was done, and he could plan extensive tours into the far west without anxiety that the churches he had founded might perish in his absence for want of his guidance and support.

The work of the apostle during these ten years can therefore be treated as a unity. Whatever assistance he may have received from the preaching of others, he unquestionably established the churches in these provinces. In the pages of the New Testament, he, and he alone, stands as their founder. And the work that he did was really a completed work. As far as the foundation of the churches is concerned, it is perfectly clear that the writer of the Acts of the Apostles intends to represent Paul’s work as complete. The churches were really established. Whatever disasters fell upon them in later years, whatever failure there was, whatever ruin, those things were not due to any insufficiency or lack of care and completeness in the apostle’s teaching or organization. When he left them, he left them because his work was fully accomplished.

This is truly an astonishing fact. That churches should be founded so rapidly and so securely, seems to us who are accustomed to the difficulties, uncertainties, failures, and disastrous relapses of our own missionary work, almost incredible. Many missionaries in later days have received a larger number of converts than Paul; many have preached over a wider area than he has; but none have produced similar established churches. We have long forgotten that such things could be possible. We have long accustomed ourselves to converts in a new country being submitted to a very long probation and training, extending over generations, before they can be expected to stand alone. Today, if a man suggests that the methods Paul used to attain such wonderful results are worthy of our imitation, he is in danger of being accused of revolutionary tendencies.

Yet this is not as it should be. It is impossible that the account given by Luke of the planting of the churches in the four provinces should have nothing more than a mere archaeological and historical interest. Like the rest of the Holy Scriptures, it was written for our instruction (Romans 15:4). This account was certainly meant to be more than the romantic history of an exceptional man doing exceptional things under exceptional circumstances – more than a story from which ordinary people get instruction from the history of El Cid or from the exploits of King Arthur. This record was really intended to throw light on the path of those who should come after.

But it is argued that Paul was an exceptional man living in exceptional times, preaching under exceptional circumstances, and he enjoyed advantages in his birth, his education, his call, his mission, and his relationship to his hearers. He also enjoyed advantages in the peculiar constitution of society at the moment of his call, such as to render his work quite exceptional. To this I must answer: (1) Paul’s missionary method was not peculiar to Paul; he was not the only missionary who established churches in those early days. The method in its broad outlines was followed by his disciples, and they were not all men of exceptional genius. It was indeed universal, and outside the Christian church, it has been followed by religious, political, and social reformers in every age and under most diverse conditions. Only because he was a supreme example of the spirit and power with which it can be used can we call the method Paul’s. (2) We possess today an advantage of inestimable importance in that we have the printing press and the whole of the New Testament, whereas Paul had only the Old Testament in Greek. (3) However highly we may estimate Paul’s personal advantages or the assistance, which the conditions of his age afforded, they cannot be so great as to rob his example of all value for us. In no other work do we set the great masters wholly on one side and teach the students of today that whatever they may copy, they may not copy them, because they lived in a different age under exceptional circumstances and were endowed with exceptional genius. It is just because they were endowed with exceptional genius that we say their work is endowed with a universal character. Either we must drag down Paul from his pedestal as the great missionary, or we must acknowledge that there is that quality of universality in his work.

The cause that has created this prejudice against the study of the Pauline method is not hard to find. It is because every unworthy, idle, and slipshod method of missionary work has been lathered upon the apostle. Men have wandered over the world, preaching the Word, laying no solid foundations, establishing nothing permanent, leaving no instructed society behind them, and have claimed Paul’s authority for their absurdities. They have gone through the world, spending their time in denouncing ancient religions in the name of Paul. They have wandered from place to place without any plan or method of any kind, guided in their movements by straws and shadows, persuaded they were imitating Paul on his journey from Antioch to Troas. Almost every intolerable abuse that has ever been known in the mission field has claimed some sentence or act of Paul as its justification.

Because in the past we have seen missionary work made ridiculous or dangerous by the vagaries of illiterate or unbalanced imitators of the apostle, we have allowed ourselves to be carried to the opposite extreme and have shut our eyes to the profound teaching and practical wisdom of the Pauline method.

People have adopted fragments of Paul’s method and have tried to incorporate them into alien systems, and the failure that resulted has been used as an argument against the apostle’s method. For instance, people have baptized uninstructed converts, and the converts have fallen away; but Paul baptized few, deeming the preaching of the gospel to be most important, which ensured their instruction. He told the Corinthians, I thank God that I baptized none of you, but Crispus and Gaius. For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made void (1 Corinthians 1:14, 17).

Also, they have gathered congregations and have left them to fend for themselves with the result that the congregations have fallen back into heathenism. But Paul did not gather congregations; he planted churches, and he did not leave a church until it was fully equipped for every good work. His parting words of encouragement to Timothy were: All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

Or again, they have trusted native helpers with the management of mission funds, and these helpers have grievously misused them; but Paul did not do this. He had no funds with which to entrust anyone. These people have committed funds in trust to individual native helpers and have been deceived; but Paul left the church to manage its own finances. These people have made the helpers responsible to them for honest management; but Paul never made any church render an account of its finances to him. In fact, he gave instructions to the Corinthians before he came. Now concerning the collection for the saints, . . . let each one of you set aside in store, as God has prospered him, that there be no collections when I come (1 Corinthians 16:1-2).

At times, Europeans have ordained uneducated native helpers and have repented of it. But they have first broken the bonds which should have united those whom they ordained to those to whom they were to minister. They then expected them to be ministers of a foreign system of church organization with which neither the ministers nor their congregations were familiar. Paul did not do this. He ordained ministers of the church for the church, and he instituted no elaborate constitution. His focus was on having qualified leaders as he described in 1 Timothy who were blameless, moral, and upright. It is expedient, therefore, that the bishop be blameless, the husband of only one wife, vigilant, temperate, of worldly affections mortified, given to hospitality, apt to teach; not given to wine, not hurtful, not greedy of dishonest gain, but gentle, not contentious, not covetous; one that rules well his own house, having his children in subjection with all integrity; (for if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the congregation of God?), not a novice, lest being puffed up, he fall into judgment of the devil. Moreover he must have a good report of those who are outside lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. Likewise the deacons must be honest, not doubletongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of dishonest gain; holding the mystery of the faith together with a pure conscience (1 Timothy 3:2-9).

When these false and partial attempts at imitating the apostle’s method have failed, men have declared that the apostolic method was at fault and quite inadequate for the condition and circumstances of present-day missions. The truth is that they have neither understood nor practiced the apostle’s method at all.

There is yet another, more weighty reason for this failure: Paul’s method is not in harmony with the modern Western spirit. We modern teachers from the West are by nature and by training persons of restless activity and boundless self-confidence. We tend to assume an attitude of superiority towards all Eastern peoples and point to our material progress as the justification of our attitude. We are accustomed to doing things for ourselves, to finding our own way, to relying upon our own exertions, and we naturally tend to be impatient with others who are less restless and less self-assertive than we are. We are accustomed to an elaborate system of church organization and a peculiar code of morality. We cannot imagine any Christianity worthy of the name existing without the elaborate machinery we have invented. We naturally expect our converts to adopt from us not only essentials but also accidentals. We desire to impart not only the gospel, but also the law and the customs.

With that spirit, Paul’s methods do not agree, because they were the natural outcome of quite another spirit, the spirit that preferred persuasion to authority. Paul distrusted elaborate systems of religious ceremony and grasped fundamental principles with an unhesitating faith in the power of the Holy Spirit to apply them to his hearers and to work out their appropriate external expressions in them. It was inevitable that methods which were the natural outcome of the mind of Paul should appear as dangerous to us as they appeared to the Jewish Christians of his own day. The mere fact that the methods can be made to bear a shallow resemblance to the methods of no method is sufficient to make the apostles of order suspicious.

In the face of the vast amount of work to be done, we are day by day seeking for new light on the great problem of how we may establish the church in the world. In this search, the example of the Apostle of the Gentiles must be of first importance to us. He succeeded in doing what we so far have only tried to do. The facts are unquestionable. In a very few years, he built the church on so firm a basis that it could live and grow in faith and in practice, that it could work out its own problems and overcome all dangers and hindrances from within and without. I propose in this book to attempt to set forth the methods he used to produce this amazing result.

I am not writing a book on Paul’s doctrine. I do not feel it necessary to argue over again the foundations of the faith. I am a churchman, and I write as a churchman. I naturally use terms that imply church doctrine. But the point to which I want to call attention is not the doctrine, which has been expounded and defended by many, but the apostle’s method. A true understanding of the method does not depend upon a true interpretation of the doctrine, but upon a true appreciation of the facts. About the facts, there is very general agreement; about the doctrine, there is very little agreement. For example, it is almost universally agreed that Paul taught his converts about baptism; however, it is very far from agreed upon as to what he meant by baptism. I use the terms about baptism from the church of which I am a member, but my argument would be equally applicable if I used terms that implied a Zwinglian doctrine.

Similarly, I use the terms about the orders of ministry that are natural to one who belongs to my particular denomination. But the general force of my argument would not be affected if I used the terms natural to a Presbyterian or a Wesleyan. I hope that, if I am happy enough to find readers who do not accept my denominational position, they will not allow themselves to be led away into the controversy I have tried to exclude. I hope my readers will seek to consider the method of the apostle’s work that I set forth, rather than find fault with the use of terms or expressions