Reading: Methods, Chapter 6: Finance

Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?
By Roland Allen

Chapter 6: Finance

It may, at first sight, seem strange to speak of finance as one of the external accompaniments of the preaching, rather than as part of the organization of the Church. But it is as it affects St. Paul's approach to his hearers that finance assumes its real significance and throws its most interesting light upon our missionary work today. The primary importance of missionary finance lies in the fact that financial arrangements very seriously affect the relations between the missionary and those whom he approaches. It is of comparatively small importance of how the missionary is maintained: it is of comparatively small importance how the finances of the Church is organized: what is of supreme importance is how these arrangements, whatever they may be, affect the minds of the people, and so promote, or hinder, the spread of the Gospel.

By modern writers, this is often overlooked, and the finance of St. Paul's journeys is treated as an interesting detail of ancient history, not as though it had anything to do with his success as a preacher of the Gospel. St. Paul himself does not so treat it. It is strange how often he refers to it, what anxiety he shows that his position should not be misunderstood, but he speaks as if its importance lay wholly in the way in which it might affect those to whom he preached, never as though it made any personal difference to him.

There seem to have been three rules which guided his practice: (1) That he did not seek financial help for himself; (2) that he took no financial help to those to whom he preached; (3) that he did not administer local church funds.

0) He did not seek financial help. In his first contact with strangers and in his dealings with the Church he was careful to avoid any appearance of money-making. Amongst the heathen, there was a large class of teachers who wandered from town to town collecting money from those who attended their lectures. There was also a large class of people who wandered about as mystery-mongers, exhibiting their shows and collecting money from those who attended them. For these men, philosophy and religion was a trade. St. Paul would not be accounted for as one of them. He refused to receive anything from those who listened to him. Similarly in the Church, there was a class of people who made their living by preaching. St. Paul did not condemn these; on the contrary, he argued that it was legitimate that they should do so. Heathen religion, the Jewish law, Christ's directions, all alike insisted on the right of the minister to receive support. But he himself did not receive it, and he was careful to explain his reason. He saw that it would be a hindrance to his work. 'We bear all things,' he says, 'that we may cause no hindrance to the Gospel of Christ.' He was anxious to show his fatherly care for his disciples by refusing to burden them with his maintenance. 'As a nurse cherisheth her children, we were well pleased to impart unto you not the Gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye have become very dear unto us.' 'For ye remember, brethren, our labor and travail: working night and day, that we might not burden any of you, we preached unto you the Gospel of God.' He was anxious to set them an example of quiet work, 'We did not behave ourselves disorderly among you: neither did we eat any man's bread for naught'. 'But above all he was anxious to avoid any appearance of covetousness,' and 'What I do, that I will do, that I may cut off occasion from them which desire an occasion.' So, too, in his last speech to the Ephesian elders he lays great stress on the fact that he had not made money by his preaching, but had supported himself by the labour of his own hands. 'I coveted no man's gold or apparel. Ye yourselves know that these hands ministered unto my necessities.'

Yet St. Paul did receive gifts from his converts. He speaks of the Philippians as having sent once and again unto his necessity, and he tells the Corinthians that he 'robbed other churches, taking wages of them, that he might minister to them'. He does not seem to have felt any unwillingness to receive help; he rather welcomed it. He was not an ascetic. He saw no particular virtue in suffering privations. The account of his journeys always gives us the impression that he was poor, never that he was poverty-stricken. He said indeed that he knew how 'to be in want', 'to be filled, and to be hungry'. But this does not imply more than that he was in occasional need. Later, he certainly must have had considerable resources, for he was able to maintain a long and expensive judicial process, to travel with ministers, to gain a respectful hearing from provincial governors, and to excite their cupidity. We have no means of knowing whence he obtained such large supplies, but if he received them from his converts there would be nothing here contrary to his earlier practice. He received money; but not from those to whom he was preaching. He refused to do anything from which it might appear that he came to receive, that his object was to make money.

In this, our modern practice is precisely the same. Our missionaries all receive their supplies from home, and cannot possibly be thought to seek financial support from their converts. If they ever seem to be preaching for the sake of their living, that can only be because their attitude towards the preaching gives some cause or occasion for the charge.

(2) Secondly, St. Paul not only did not receive financial aid from his converts, but he also did not take financial support to his converts. That it could so never seem to have suggested itself to his mind. Every province, every church, was financially independent. The Galatians are exhorted to support their teachers. Every church is instructed to maintain its poor. There is not a hint from beginning to the end of the Acts and Epistles of any one church depending upon another, with the single exception of the collection for the poor saints at Jerusalem. That collection had in the mind of St. Paul a very serious and important place, but it had nothing to do with church finance in the ordinary sense. Its importance lay in its demonstration of the unity of the church, and in the influence which such a proof of brotherly charity might have in maintaining the unity of the church. But it had no more to do with church finance in the ordinary sense of the word than a collection made in India for Christians suffering from famine in China would have to do with ordinary Indian Church finance. That one church should depend upon another for the supply of its ordinary expenses as a church, or even for a part of them, would have seemed incredible in the Four Provinces.

From this apostolic practice, we are now as far removed in action as we are in time. We have indeed established here and there churches which support their own financial burdens, but for the most part our missions look to us for very substantial support, and it is commonly taken for granted that every new station must do so, at any rate for some considerable time. Our modern practice in founding a church is to begin by securing land and buildings in the place in which we wish to propagate the Gospel, to provide houses in which the missionary can live, and a church, or at least a room, fitted up with all the ornaments of a Western church, in which the missionary may conduct services, sometimes to open a school to which we supply the teachers. The larger the establishment and the more liberally it is supplied with every possible modern convenience, the better we think it suited to our purpose. Even in the smallest places we are anxious to secure as speedily as possible land on which to build houses and churches and schools, and we take it for granted that the acquirement of these things by the foreign missionary, or by foreign society, is a step of the first importance. Since it is obviously impossible that the natives should supply all these things, even if they are anxious to receive our instruction, it naturally follows that we must supply them. Hence the opening of a new mission station has become primarily a financial operation, and we constantly hear our missionaries lament that they cannot open new stations where they are sorely needed, because they have not the necessary funds to purchase and equip the barest missionary establishment.

This habit of taking supplies with us is due chiefly to two causes: first, the amazing wealth of the church at home and the notion that reverence and devotion depend upon the use of expensive religious furniture to which our luxury has accustomed us, and, secondly, the prevalence of the idea that the stability of the church in some way depends upon the the permanence of its buildings. When we have secured a site and buildings we feel that the mission is firmly planted; we cannot then be easily driven away. A well-built church seems to imply a well-founded, stable society. So the externals of religion precede the inculcation of its principles. We must have the material establishment before we build the spiritual house.

As we begin, so we go on. Hence the frequent appeals to be found in church newspapers for organs and bells, cassocks, surplices and candlesticks, and such like, for mission stations in India or in Africa. How can we teach the new converts the majesty of worship without the materials for dignified ceremonial? Dignified ceremonial is ceremonial as practiced in the best churches at home. The best churches use these things. The natives cannot supply them. It follows that we must take these gifts to our converts.

Thus, the foundation of a new mission is primarily a financial operation. But it ought not properly to be a financial operation, and the moment it is allowed to appear as such, that moment very false and dangerous elements are introduced into our work.

(i) By our eagerness to secure property for the church we often succeed in raising up many difficulties in the way of our preaching. We sometimes, especially perhaps in such a country as China, arouse the opposition of the local authorities who do not desire to give foreigners a permanent holding in their midst. We occasionally even appeal to legal support to enforce our right to purchase the property, and thus we begin our work in a turmoil of strife and excitement which we might have avoided.

(ii) We load our missionaries with secular business, negotiations with contractors, the superintendence of works, the management of a considerable establishment, to which is often added anxiety about the supply of funds for providing and maintaining the establishment. In this way their attention is distracted from their proper spiritual work, their energy and power are dissipated, and their first contact with the people whom they desire to evangelize is connected with contracts and other purely secular concerns. It is sad to think what a large proportion of the time of many of our missionaries is spent over accounts. It is sad to sit and watch a stream of Christian visitors calling upon a missionary, and to observe that in nearly every case the cause which brings them is money. They are the financial agents of the mission.

(iii) But in creating these missionary establishments we not only overburden our missionaries with secular business, but we also misrepresent our purpose in coming to the place. It is of the utmost importance that the external manifestation of our purpose should correspond with the inward intention and rightly express it. We live in a world in which spirit is known through material media. When the Son of God desired to reveal Himself to us, He took upon Him the form of a servant, and He made a material body the manifestation to all men of the Eternal God who is Spirit. That fact must govern all our thought. That is why the religion of Christ, who is Himself a Sacrament, is sacramental, and all our use of material things is sacramental. We, in our measure, do what He did. I know nothing of missionary zeal except as expressed in words and gifts and deeds. We cannot express ourselves otherwise in this world. Desire must employ words and glances and such like material vehicles. That is the reason why material apparatus is capable of spiritual uses. In themselves, words and buildings have no power to produce spiritual results. If we will not preach we cannot convert, but no preaching in itself can convert. The value of the outward things is derived from the spirit which animates them and gives them being. They are manifestations of the Spirit of Christ who desires the salvation of men, working in us. It is the Spirit of Christ indwelling us who operates through them. Therefore, that external instrument is best which reveals the Spirit. The Body of Jesus was such an instrument: the Sacraments ordained by Christ are such. The Sacraments of the Gospel are not contrary to nature, but they are Divine.

A method of working, or a material instrument, may reveal or conceal, or misrepresent, the Spirit: e.g. in France the offer of the left hand is an act of cordial goodwill; in India, it is an insult. If then a Frenchman in India was to offer a man his left hand, his goodwill would be interpreted as ill-will. In ignorance, we may use unsuitable expressions, but the moment we become aware that they are unsuitable we can no longer use them. That is why reformers constantly reject the use of things that have been long employed as the expressions of a spirit which they do not want to express. They must alter the form of the sacrament in order to reveal the change in their point of view. Today in India many of our younger missionaries are beginning to revolt against the big bungalows used by their predecessors. They look at them and say, 'That does not quite represent the spirit in which I wish to approach these people'. If that feeling grows, they must sooner or later abandon the bungalow. For if we are persuaded that the material vehicle misrepresents the spirit which we would express, and yet continue to use it, it checks the spirit in us. If we want to express respect and goodwill we cannot continue to offer the left hand, when we know that it will certainly be misunderstood. If we do so, we do violence to our feeling of goodwill, and our goodwill is checked and injured.

Moreover, because we cannot express ourselves, cannot manifest our real purpose in them, the use of wrong materials repels those whom we might draw to us. All men everywhere judge the inward spirit by the external form and are attracted or repelled by it. They are apt to be much influenced by the first glance. If then, the material form really does not express the true spirit, we cannot be surprised if they are hindered.

Now the purchase of land and the establishment of foreign missions in these establishments, especially if they are founded in the face of opposition from the local authorities, naturally suggest the idea of a foreign domination. The very permanence of the buildings suggests the permanence of the foreign element. The land is secured, and the buildings are raised, in the first instance by the powerful influence of foreigners. That naturally raises a question in the native mind why these people should be so eager to secure a permanent holding in their midst. They naturally suspect some evil ulterior motive. They suppose that the foreigner is eager to extend his influence and to establish himself amongst them at their expense. In China, particularly, the common idea prevalent amongst the people is that to become a Christian involves submission to foreign domination. This conception has a most powerful effect in deterring the people from approaching the missionary or from receiving his teaching with open minds. I think it is now almost universally admitted that the permanence of foreign rule in the Church ought not to be our object in propagating the Gospel. But by taking large supplies with us to provide and support our establishments and organizations we do in fact build up that which we should be most eager to destroy.

Moreover, we do not want to produce the impression that we design to introduce an institution, even if it is understood that the institution is to be naturalized. Christianity is not an institution, but a principle of life. By importing an institution we tend to obscure the truly spiritual character of our work. We take the externals first and so we make it easy for new converts to put the external in the place of the internal. Attendance at a house of prayer may take the place of prayer. It is easy to mistake the provision of the ornaments of worship for the duty of worship. The teachers seem to think these things so important that they must be really important things. The duty of the Christian is to learn to attend to these things and to go through the proper forms. The heathen naturally looks at religion from that point of view, and when he sees the externals provided at a cost which seems to him very great, and things imported which the country cannot provide, he inevitably tends to suppose that our religion is as his own, and the organization and the institution take just that place in his thought which was formerly occupied by his own organization and institutions of religion. But this is precisely what we want to avoid.

Nor is this all. The first glance at these missions financed from abroad naturally suggests that the religion which they represent is foreign. They are supported by foreign money, they are often foreign in appearance. Eastern people almost universally look upon Christianity as a foreign religion, and they do not want a foreign religion. This is one of the very chiefest and most insidious of our difficulties. We are not the preachers of Western religion, and anything which tends to create or support that misunderstanding is a thing rather to be avoided than encouraged. By the introduction of Western buildings and Western religious furniture we can hardly avoid strengthening that misunderstanding. Of course, if we are prepared to maintain that our Western ornaments are essentially Catholic and must be adopted everywhere as integral parts of the Catholic Faith, there is no more to be said: but for my part I am not prepared to take up that position.

(iv.) By importing and using and supplying to the natives' buildings and ornaments which they cannot procure for themselves, we tend to pauperize the converts. They cannot supply what they think to be needful, and so they learn to accept the position of passive recipients. By supplying what they cannot supply we check them in the proper impulse to supply what they can supply. Foreign subsidies produce abroad all the ill effects of endowments at home, with the additional disadvantage that they are foreign. The converts learn to rely upon them instead of making every effort to supply their own needs.

(v.) It is often said that these financial bonds help to maintain unity. Native congregations have before now been held to their allegiance by threats of the withdrawal of pecuniary support. But unity so maintained, by an external bond, is not Christian unity at all. It is simply submission to bondage for the sake of secular advantage and it will fail the moment that any other and stronger motive urges in the direction of separation. There is all the difference in the world between gifts freely made by members of the one body one to another, as manifestations of the spirit of mutual charity which moves in them, and gifts or subsidies made with the intention of checking freedom of action on the part of the recipients. Spiritual forces are more powerful than external bonds, and external bonds never have preserved, and never will preserve unity. The only unity which is worth preserving is the unity of the Spirit.

(vi.) By the establishment of great institutions, the provision of large parsonages, mission houses, churches, and all the accompaniments of these things, we tie our missionaries to one place. They cease to be movable evangelists and become pastors. From time to time they go out on tour, but their stations are their chief care, and to their stations, they are tied. Even if they find that the station is not well chosen, so much money is invested in it that they cannot easily move. Even if some new opening of larger importance is before them they cannot enter into it without serious and difficult financial adjustments.

(vii.) Further, these establishments make it very difficult for any native to succeed to the place of a European missionary. The Christians gathered round the station are very conscious of the advantage of having a European in their midst. He has influence with governors, merchants, masters. He can give valuable recommendations. He can return home and plead for his people with societies and charitably-disposed individuals. He can collect money for his schools and hospitals. In times of need and stress, he can afford to expend much. He is, or is supposed to be, above the common temptations of the people. He is naturally free from local entanglements. He cannot be accused of seeking to make places for his relations. His judgment is impartial, his opinion unbiased by any divisions or jealousies of local society. All these things incline the native converts to prefer a European to a native as the Head of their station. Consequently, it is very difficult for any native to succeed him. The native has none of these advantages. He cannot tap the sources of supply, he cannot exercise the same charitable liberality, he cannot expect, as a right, the same confidence. He is liable to attack from all sides. He has not even the prestige which attaches to a white face. His position is well-nigh impossible. Moreover, if a native is put in charge of a station, he naturally expects to be paid at the same rate as his white predecessor. If he is not so paid, he feels aggrieved. It is useless to explain to him that a native ought to be able to make one rupee or one dollar go as far as six or seven in the hands of a European. To him, the salary for this work, this post, has been fixed at so much, and if he occupies the post he should receive so much. But native Christians, left to themselves, would never have created such a post, and sooner or later they will abolish it. They are accustomed to other standards, and other methods of payment, or support, for teachers. Thus by the establishment of these posts, we are creating serious difficulties. We say that we hope the day is not far off when natives will succeed in our places and carry on the work which we have begun. But by the creation of these stations, we have put off that day.

From this point of view it is plain that the creation of mission stations with large parsonages and churches is a far more serious difficulty than the establishment of large schools and hospitals. Great colleges and hospitals can more easily be treated as extraparochial. They are not bound up with the ordinary life of the church. Church life can go on without them, or beside them, and special arrangements made for them do not so nearly touch the community. There must be difficulties with these; but the difficulties connected with parsonages and churches, e.g. in India and the Far East, are already pressing.

(viii.) Finally, these endowments will sooner or later become a source of fresh difficulties. These buildings, etc., are legally held by foreign missionary societies, which have their headquarters in foreign countries. Sooner or later the native church will grow strong and will insist on managing its own affairs. Are there then to be in the future foreign patronage boards holding buildings in trust, and appointing to posts in the dioceses of native bishops in the territories of independent States? Some of the foreign missionary societies could, and no doubt would, hand over the buildings and patronage to the native church, but others could not, and would not, do that, because they hold the property for the propagation of the peculiar views held by their subscribers at home, and the trustees at home could not be sure that the native bishops would continue to hold those peculiar views whether of doctrine or ritual. Yet it is scarcely conceivable that native churches will tolerate the interference of foreign patronage boards, and a grievous strife may arise over the endowments and the buildings. Of all sources of strife, material possessions are the most prolific. If there have been in the past difficulties between the committees of missionary societies at home and bishops and other leaders in the field, whilst those bishops and leaders were of the same race and speech and habit of thought as the members of the committees, how much more are we to fear difficulties when the bishops and other leaders are natives of independent States. We speak much of the establishment of independent native churches; but the increase of endowments may not prove to be the best means of attaining that end in the future, any more than it has proved to be the best means of attaining it in the past.

(3) Thirdly, St. Paul observed the rule that every church should administer its own funds. He certainly never administered any local funds himself. He did indeed bear the offering of the church in Antioch to Jerusalem in the time of the famine; he also, with others, carried the collection of the Four Provinces to Jerusalem. But in the first instance he was acting as the minister of a church on a business for which he had been specially appointed by the Church under the direction of those in authority. In the second, it is extraordinary what pains he took to make it clear that he was acting simply as the messenger of the churches, and even so, he did not take the responsibility of administering their charity without associating with himself representatives of all the provinces which contributed to the fund and taking every possible precaution to ensure that his action should not be misunderstood. In both cases, moreover, he was carrying funds collected by the churches for charitable purposes in a distant place. He certainly did not receive and administer any funds within their own borders. The whole argument of 2 Corinthians 11. 8-14, and 12. 14-18, would have broken down if he had been in the habit of so doing.

With us, today, a very different rule obtains. As soon as a congregation is established, collections are made, and some at least of the money so obtained is sent to the diocesan or district fund. It is taken out of the place in which it is collected under the direction, if not in the hands, of the foreigner. If money is collected for local uses, it is administered under the direction of the foreigner who feels himself responsible for its proper expenditure and requires a most careful account of it, and he renders an account of its use to his society at home. In other words, the responsibility for the administration of funds rests upon the shoulders not of the local church but upon the stranger. Is it possible for human ingenuity to devise a scheme better calculated to check the free flow of native liberality, to create misunderstandings, to undermine the independence of the church, and to accentuate racial distinctions?

This modern practice is based partly upon our distrust of native honesty and partly upon our fear of congregationalism. But our distrust of native honesty ought not to exist, and has nothing to do with the case. If the natives administer their own funds, it is their own funds that they administer. They will administer them in their own way, and they will be responsible for the administration to those who supplied them. That they are capable of administering public money the existence of guilds and societies for mutual benefit is proof. They may not administer it at all to our satisfaction, but I fail to see what our satisfaction has to do with the matter. It is not our business. By making it our business we merely deprive our converts of one of the very best educational experiences, and break down one of the most powerful agencies for creating a sense of mutual responsibility. We also load ourselves with a vast burden which we are ill able, and often ill-fitted, to bear.

Our fear of congregationalism is really the terror of a bugbear. We have had no experience of congregationalism except at home, and there is no reason to suppose that the peculiar motives which lead to congregationalism in England would operate anywhere else. Our fear of congregationalism is, I shrink from saying it, only another name for our fear of independence. We think it quite impossible that a native church should be able to exist without the paternal care of an English overseer. If it were financially independent it might be tempted to dispense with his services, and then, we are persuaded, it would at once fall into every error of doctrine and practice.

The congregationalism that we dread is the form of congregationalism which we know in England. The evils of that have bred in us a terrible fear of the very mention of congregational responsibility. Our experience at home has not taught us to dread the suspicion of peculation. We take with us from the West the fear of the one and the ignorance of the other, and we suppose that the danger which arises from each is the same abroad as it is at home. Even at home suspicion of clerical finance exists amongst the laity to a far larger extent than we sometimes imagine, and it were well if our clergy took greater pains to avoid it. But the fact remains that we do not really fear it, whilst we do fear the slightest taint of congregationalism. St. Paul's attitude to these two dangers was the exact opposite of ours. He was more afraid of suspicion of false-dealing than he was of congregationalism. Perhaps in dealing with newly converted people his judgment on the relative danger of the two evils was more sound than ours. Perhaps in dealing with Eastern people we should do well to follow his example.