Reading: Methods, Chapter 8: The Teaching

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

From what has already been said it is manifest that St. Paul did not go about as a missionary preacher merely to convert individuals: he went to establish churches from which the light might radiate throughout the whole country round. The secret of success in this work lies in beginning at the very beginning. It is the training of the first converts which sets the type for the future. If the first converts are taught to depend upon the missionary, if all work, evangelistic, educational, social is concentrated in his hands, the infant community learns to rest passively upon the man from whom they receive their first insight into the Gospel. Their faith having no sphere for its growth and development lies dormant. A tradition very rapidly grows up that nothing can be done without the authority and guidance of the missionary, the people wait for him to move, and, the longer they do so, the more incapable they become of any independent action. Thus the leader is confirmed in the habit of gathering all authority into his own hands, and of despising the powers of his people until he makes their inactivity an excuse for denying their capacity. The fatal mistake has been made of teaching the converts to rely upon the wrong source of strength. Instead of seeking it in the working of the Holy Spirit in themselves, they seek it in the missionary. They put him in the place of Christ, they depend upon him.

In allowing them, or encouraging them, to do this, the missionary not only checks the spiritual growth of his converts and teaches them to rely upon a wrong source of strength; he actually robs them of the strength which they naturally possess and would naturally use. The more independent spirits amongst them can find no opportunity for exercising their gifts. All authority is concentrated in the hands of the missionary. If a native Christian feels any capacity for Christian work, he can only use his capacity under the direction, and in accordance with the wishes, of that supreme authority. He can do little in his own way; that is, in the way which is natural to him. Consequently, if he is to do any spiritual work he must either so suppress himself as to act in an unnatural way, or he must find outside the Church the opportunity which is denied to him within her borders, or he must put aside the desire which God has implanted in his soul to do spiritual work for Christ, and content himself with secular employment. If he does the first, he works all his life as a cripple: if he takes either of the two other courses, the Church is robbed of his help. It is almost impossible to imagine that a native 'prophet' could remain within the church system as it exists in many districts. If a prophet arose he would either have all the spirit crushed out of him, or he would secede. The native Christian ministers who remain are those who fall into lifeless submission to authority, or else spend their lives in discontented misery, feeling that they have lost themselves not to God but to a foreign system. Thus the community is robbed of its strength: its own forces are weakened whilst it depends upon the most uncertain of props and the most unnatural. As a result, the missionary is left to deplore the sad condition of a Christian church which seems in danger of falling away the moment he leaves it.

If there is a striking difference between St. Paul's preaching and ours there is a still greater difference between his method of dealing with his converts and that common among us today. Indeed, I think we may say that it is in his dealing with his converts that we come to the heart of the matter and may hope to find one secret of his amazing success. With us today this is the great difficulty. We can gather in converts, we often gather in large numbers; but we cannot train them to maintain their own spiritual life. We cannot establish the church on a self-supporting basis. Our converts often display great virtues, but they remain, too often for generations, dependent upon us. Having gathered a Christian congregation the missionary is too often tied to it and so hindered from further evangelistic work. This difficulty unquestionably arises from our early training of our converts, and therefore it is of supreme importance that we should endeavor to discover, as far as we can, the method of St. Paul in training his. For he succeeded exactly where we fail.

The first and most striking difference between his action and ours is that he founded 'churches' whilst we found 'Missions'. The establishment of Missions is a peculiarity of our modern methods of which I have already pointed out many disadvantages in the chapter on finance. Here it must be added that they have not proved themselves in practice to be very convenient or effective instruments for creating indigenous churches. They are intended to be a means to that end. The theory is that the Mission stands at first in a sort of paternal relationship to the native Christians: then it holds a coordinate position side by side with the native organization; finally, it ought to disappear and leave the native Christians as a fully organized church. But the Mission is not the Church. It consists of a missionary, or a number of missionaries, and their paid helpers, supported by a foreign Society. There is thus created a sort of dual organization. On the one hand, there is the Mission with its organization; on the other is the body of native Christians, often with an organization of its own. The one is not indeed separate from the other, but in practice, they are not identified. The natives always speak of 'the Mission' as something which is not their own. The Mission represents a foreign power, and natives who work under it are servants of a foreign government. It is an evangelistic society, and the natives tend to leave it to do the evangelistic work which properly belongs to them. It is a model, and the natives learn simply to imitate it. It is a wealthy body, and the natives tend to live upon it, and expect it to supply all their needs. Finally, it becomes a rival, and the native Christians feel its presence as an annoyance, and they envy its powers; it becomes an incubus, and they groan under the weight of its domination. In the early stages, it maintains a high standard of morality, and in all stages, it ministers largely to the advancement of the native community by its educational and medical establishments, but it always keeps the native Christians in check, and its relations with them are difficult and full of perils. A large part of modern books on Missions is concerned with the attempt to justify these relations and to find some way of escape from these difficulties. For St. Paul they did not exist, because he did not create them. He set up no organization intermediate between his preaching and the establishment of a fully organized indigenous church. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened, if, at the end of his first missionary journey, St. Paul had hastened back to Antioch to entreat for the assistance of two or three presbyters to supervise the growth of the churches in South Galatia, pleading that unless he could secure this help he would be unable to enter the open door which he saw before him; or if instead of ordaining elders he had appointed catechists, keeping the administration of the sacraments in his own hands. From our own experience, we can easily guess. But our experience was not his experience, because our practice was not his practice.

The facts are these: St. Paul preached in a place for five or six months and then left behind him a church, not indeed free from the need of guidance, but capable of growth and expansion. For example, according to Ramsay, St. Paul preached in Lystra for about six months on his first missionary journey, then he ordained elders and left for about eighteen months. After that he visited the church for the second time, but only spent a few months in the province. Then for the last time, after an interval of three years, he visited them again, but again he was only a month or two in the province. From this, it is clear that the churches of Galatia were really founded and established in the first visit. The same fact is also clear from the language used in the Acts concerning St. Paul's second visit. When he was about to set forth, St. Luke says that he proposed to Barnabas to 'go and visit our brethren in every city where we have preached the word of the Lord, and see how they do', and he is described as passing through Galatia delivering the decrees of the Jerusalem Council with the result that 'the churches were established in the faith and increased in number daily'. This is not a language which could be used as a missionary, visiting congregations which could not stand without his presence, or which lacked any of the fundamentals of settled Christian life: it is language that speaks of organized and established communities. Similarly in Macedonia, Professor Ramsay calculates that St. Paul did not stay in Thessalonica more than five months, and he did not visit the place again for over five years, yet he writes to 'the church of the Thessalonians' and speaks of it as being on the same footing as 'the churches of God in Judea'. At Corinth St. Paul spent a year and a half at his first visit and then did not go there again for three or four years, but he wrote letters as to a fully equipped and well-established church.

Now, these are typical examples of his work. The question before us is, how he could so train his converts as to be able to leave them after so short a time with any security that they would be able to stand and grow. It seems at first sight almost incredible. In the space of time which amongst us is generally passed in the class of hearers, men were prepared by St. Paul for the ministry. How could he prepare men for Holy Orders in so brief a time? How could he even prepare them for holy baptism? What could he have taught them in five or six months? If anyone today were to propose to ordain men within six months of their conversion from idolatry, he would be deemed rash to the verge of madness. Yet no one denies that St. Paul did it. The sense of stupefaction and amazement that comes over us when we think of it is the measure of the distance which we have traveled from the apostolic method.

We commonly attempt to alleviate the sense of oppression by arguing, first, that his converts were people wholly and totally different from ours, and, then, that as a matter of fact, he did not really leave them, because he was constantly in touch with them by messengers and by letters. In this way, we escape from the difficulty, but it is only by blinding our eyes. I have already attempted to describe some characteristics of the society from which his converts were taken. It is quite impossible to imagine or believe that they came to St. Paul with any special advantages. If we take the highest possible view of the condition of the people at Lystra, or Thessalonica, or Corinth, a few had some acquaintance with the Old Testament, and the requirements of the Jewish Law, a few had some knowledge of Greek Philosophy, the vast majority were steeped in the follies and iniquities of idolatry and were the slaves of the grossest superstitions. Not one knew anything of the life and teaching of the Saviour. In India and China, we are constantly in touch with material as good as any to be found at Lystra. Before now we have received high caste, educated men, before now we have received mortal men endowed with profound spiritual capacities, who would compare well with the best of the people with whom St. Paul had to deal. Moreover, our converts today possess one advantage of great importance which was denied to his. Today the whole Bible is printed in the vernacular of nearly every person, and in addition, there is a considerable and rapidly-growing theological literature. This advantage is so great that, by itself alone, it should make us cautious of arguing that we cannot follow the Pauline method because his converts were in a better position than ours.

Neither is it just to minimize St. Paul's work by over-estimating the extent of the supervision exercised by the Apostle over his converts by means of letters and messengers. The only possible case in the Four Provinces, on which can be based an argument to guide and direct the organization of a new church for any length of time, arises out of our ignorance of the movements of St. Luke from the time at which he arrived at Philippi with St. Paul on his second missionary journey till the time at which St. Paul met him there on his third journey. St. Luke says that 'we', including himself, arrived at Philippi, and that 'they', i.e. St. Paul and Silas, left for Thessalonica. Five years later St. Paul and his company arrived at Philippi, and the 'we', including St. Luke, sailed away to Troas. This has seemed to many a sufficient reason for arguing that St. Luke was left at Philippi all that time. In that case, he must, without doubt, have been a pillar of strength to the church in that place. If that was really the case, it does not affect the truth of the statement that it was not St. Paul's usual practice to establish his fellow-workers as ministers to the infant congregations which he founded. If St. Luke stayed at Philippi, it was on his own initiative, either, as Professor Ramsay suggests, because he had a house there, or for some other private reason. It is impossible to argue from an isolated and doubtful incident of this kind against the whole course of St. Paul's action elsewhere.

St. Paul left Timothy and Silas at Beroea, but only for a very short time, with orders to rejoin him as quickly as possible. He sent Timothy from Athens to Thessalonica. He sent Timothy at least once and Titus two or three times to Corinth. But there is no mention of any messenger being sent to Galatia, and the terms in which these visits of his fellow-workers to Macedonia and Achaia are spoken off at once reveal the fact that they were not sent to minister to and to educate congregations ignorant of the fundamental truths and incapable of maintaining their own life. St. Paul was careful not to lose touch with his new converts. They sorely needed visits and instruction, and they received them. I have no doubt that he was in constant communication with them by one means or another. But there is an immense difference between dealing with an organized church through letters and messengers and occasional visits, and exercising direct personal government. Visits paid at long intervals, occasional letters, even constant communication by means of deputies, is not at all the same thing as sending catechists or teachers to stay and instruct converts for a generation whilst they depend upon the missionary for the ministration of the sacraments. Nothing can alter or disguise the fact that St. Paul did leave behind him at his first visit to complete churches. Nothing can alter or disguise the fact that he succeeded in so training his converts that men who came to him absolutely ignorant of the Gospel were able to maintain their position with the help of occasional letters and visits at crises of special difficulty. We want then to consider: (1) What St. Paul taught his converts; (2) How he prepared them for baptism and ordination.

(1) I have already tried to set forth the elements of the simple Gospel contained in the public preaching of St. Paul. That Gospel involves a doctrine of God the Father, the Creator; a doctrine of Jesus, the Son, the Redeemer, the Saviour; a doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling source of strength; but these in the simplest and most practical form.

Besides this St. Paul left a tradition to which he constantly refers. In the next Epistle to the Corinthians this tradition, as touching two points of Christian practice and doctrine, is set forth in some detail. We see there that the teaching on the Holy Communion involved a careful statement of the institution of the rite and of the manner in which it was to be observed; we see that the teaching of the resurrection included an account of the appearances of the Lord to the disciples after His death, beginning with the appearance to St. Peter and ending with the appearance to St. Paul on the Damascus road. Hence we may conclude that the doctrine involved in the preaching was reinforced, in the tradition delivered to converts, by more or less detailed teaching of the facts in the life of Christ upon which the doctrine rested.

It is unfortunate that we cannot determine whether this tradition was written down. Professor Harnack tells us that 'the Jews had already drawn up a catechism for proselytes', and anyone who has had the slightest experience in the difficulty of teaching heathen converts will at once naturally understand how the need of a book of instruction, which could be left in the hands of the leaders of these early churches, must have pressed upon St. Paul. The first work missionaries commonly do, when they approach a new country, is to translate such a book. We should naturally incline to imagine that St. Paul would have been compelled by the circumstances of the case to procure a short life of Christ with an appendix on Christian morality. Yet there is no sure ground for arguing that in these early years such a book existed. It is strange that St. Paul makes no references in his writings to any parable or miracle of Christ; and references to, or quotations from, His sayings are extraordinarily scanty. On the other hand, references to His death and resurrection abound. We can only suppose then that St. Paul relied upon an oral teaching of those fundamental facts.

Further, St. Paul accepted and delivered to his converts as an inspired book the Jewish Old Testament. With him began that strange process by which a book, originally the peculiar property of one people, was taken from them and made a foundation stone of the religion of another people; all its references to the original tribe being reinterpreted so as to be applicable to the new people, all its rites spiritualized so as to have a meaning and instruction for a people who did not observe them in the letter; until at last the new people so made the book their own that they denied to the original possessors any part or lot in it. St. Paul taught his converts to read the Old Testament and to read it in a mystic sense as applying to Gentile Christians. That does not seem to us easy. We do not as a rule find it easy to teach heathen converts to use the Old Testament properly even when they have the whole of the New Testament with which to illuminate it. It does not seem to us the most convenient of text-books to put into the hands of new converts. We wonder how St. Paul could have taught the common people, the slaves, the laborers, to use such a book in six months, even if they could read at all when they came to him?

St. Paul plainly lectured, using the Old Testament as his textbook. The more intelligent speedily caught his method of reading and interpreting it. The meetings of the church were gatherings for mutual instruction. Anyone who had been reading the book and had discovered a passage which seemed to point to Christ, or an exhortation which seemed applicable to the circumstances of their life, or a promise which encouraged him with hope for this life or the next, produced it and explained it for the benefit of all. That was the secret, there lay the source of all the early Christian literature.

That is better than sending a catechist to instruct a congregation. The catechist conducts a service and preaches a sermon: the others listen, or get into the habit of not listening; the local prophet is silent. St. Paul did not send catechists to teach. Timothy, Titus, Secundus, Gaius, and the rest, after a short time, left their native congregations and followed St. Paul, ready to be sent anywhere with special instruction, or exhortation, or direction, to any congregation which was in a difficulty; but he did not set them over congregations of Christians as catechists are set by us. By this means St. Paul was always calling out more and more the capacities of the people in the church. But he might have established Timothy at Lystra or at Thessalonica; in that case, people who, in Timothy's absence, were forced to think and speak, would have remained silent.

Finally, he taught them the form of administration and the meaning of the two sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. There is not a shadow of evidence to support the notion that these sacraments were considered optional in the early Church. In the writings of St. Paul it is taken for granted that every Christian has been baptized and that all meet habitually at the Table of the Lord. To wrest the passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians into a depreciation of baptism, in the face of the whole teaching of all the other Epistles, is simply to deny the use of words to convey meaning. Further, it is universally taken for granted that those to whom St. Paul wrote were familiar with the form of administration of these sacraments and with the essential doctrine implied in them. Thus far St. Paul must have taught his first converts himself.

Thus St. Paul seems to have left his newly-founded churches with a simple system of Gospel teaching, two sacraments, a tradition of the main facts of the death and resurrection, and the Old Testament. There was apparently no form of service, except of course the form of the sacraments, nor any form of prayer, unless indeed he taught the Lord's Prayer. There is no certain evidence of the existence of a written gospel or of a formal creed. This seems to us remarkably life. We can hardly believe that a church could be founded on so slight a basis. And yet it is possible that it was precisely the simplicity and brevity of the teaching which constituted its strength. There is a very grave danger in importing complete systems of worship and theology. We lay great stress on the constant repetition of formal services; we make it our boast that our Prayer Book, year by year in the orderly cycle, brings before us the whole system of the faith, and we import that Prayer Book and hand it over to new congregations. But it is too complete. It contains too much. The new converts cannot grasp anything securely. They are forced to go through the whole cycle. Before they have learned addition they must study division before they have mastered division they must face fractions and decimals, and then round again and again, until they cease to make any effort to master the truth. By teaching the simplest elements in the simplest form to the many, and by giving them the means by which they could for themselves gain further knowledge, by leaving them to meditate upon these few fundamental truths, and to teach one another what they could discover, St. Paul ensured that his converts should really master the most important things. Catechists with Prayer Books cannot take the place of long meditation and private study and united search, and oft-repeated lessons in the simplest and most necessary truth. We are sometimes astonished at the knowledge and zeal of a man who has heard one simple sermon on one Christian doctrine, and has taken home with him one simple book, a gospel, or a catechism. After two, or three, or many years he returns and displays a spiritual insight which astonishes us. He has made his one truth his own, and that illumines the whole of his world, whilst our Prayer-Book-fed Christians often have a smattering of knowledge of all the faith, and yet have little light by which to walk. The Creed is really very simple, and very brief; but it may be made very long and very obscure. A man does not need to know much to lay hold on Christ. St. Paul began with simplicity and brevity.

In doing this he ran grave risks. It is characteristic of St. Paul that he had such faith in Christ and in the Holy Spirit indwelling in the Church that he did not shrink from risks. How great those risks were, is illustrated by the Judaistic controversy in Galatia, and by the moral and eucharistic scandals at Corinth. On a most serious point of doctrine, on most important points of practice, two of his churches fell into grievous error.

The first shows how lightly the Galatians were armed with controversial weapons against a class of preachers whom St. Paul knew to exist, and with what ease they were misled on one of the most vital points of St. Paul's doctrine. The new teaching cut away the very foundation of St. Paul's work and the difficulty arose on a question with which St. Paul became familiar quite early in his career. Yet his converts fell. It has been argued by Bishop Mylne that this catastrophe was due to the fact that St. Paul in his first missionary journey had not yet learned the necessity of laying a deep foundation, that he had not appreciated the danger of trusting the future of the church to ill-instructed converts.

I do not think that this argument is tenable. There is no sign of repentance in all St. Paul's dealings with the Galatians. He visited them again and again, and he wrote them a letter, but there is no suggestion that he regretted that he had too hastily committed the Gospel to their care. On the contrary, his letter is full of the most earnest insistence upon the necessity of preserving their freedom. From beginning to end it implies that he desires for them more freedom, not that he regrets that he had given them freedom.

Still less is there any sign in the Acts that St. Luke thought St. Paul had made a mistake in his practice on his first journey. There is not a hint of any kind that such was his opinion. St. Luke sets forth St. Paul's journeys as journeys guided by the Holy Ghost to a successful issue; he shows us St. Paul using one method everywhere, in Antioch and in Thessalonica, in Lystra and in Corinth; and everywhere alike he shows us the fruit which resulted. There is no suggestion whatever that St. Paul made a mistake in committing the future of the churches in Galatia to ill-instructed converts, or that he afterward saw his error and repented of it.

I have often heard missionaries use the argument of Bishop Mylne to justify their interminable government and instruction of their converts; but the argument is vain unless we are prepared to maintain that St. Paul remained all his life quite ignorant of true missionary methods. He stayed, it is true, longer at Corinth than he did in Galatia, but the history of the Corinthian church might equally be used as an argument that he had not learned the danger of entrusting the future of the church to ill-instructed converts.

At Corinth we find the astonishing fact that the whole church could tolerate the grossest immorality of life and the most disgraceful conduct at the celebration of the Lord's Supper. There is no question that St. Paul was horrified. The doctrine of the Lord's Supper was a subject, as he himself declared, of his most careful teaching. In his epistle he recalls to them exactly what he had taught them about it, and says that he himself had received it directly from the Lord. He had been teaching in that church for eighteen months, that is, three times as long as he had taught any of his earlier congregations. During all that time he must frequently have celebrated the Lord's Supper. The Corinthian church was renowned for its learning; it should, therefore, have known best the teaching and practice of the Apostle. Yet we find in that church the most appalling and flagrant violations of his fundamental teaching in the matter of the simplest and most necessary church practice. We should naturally have expected that if St. Paul had stayed only a month or two with his converts, if they had learned anything at all about the Lord's Supper, they would have learned how to celebrate it. We should naturally have expected that if St. Paul had taught them anything at all about morality he would have taught them not to tolerate conduct universally condemned by their heathen neighbors. It is quite certain that if any missionary today established a church in which such flagrant violations of the simplest church rules of practice occurred, we should at once be told that his methods were hopelessly bad. Consequently, if the apostasy of the Galatians is proof that St. Paul on his first missionary journey knew nothing of missionary methods, the failure of the Corinthians in practice will equally prove that he knew nothing of them at the end of his second. Yet the fact remains that he was the most successful founder of churches that the world has ever seen.

Paradoxical as it may seem, I think that it is quite possible that the shortness of his stay may have conduced in no small measure to St. Paul's success. There is something in the presence of a great teacher that sometimes tends to prevent smaller men from realizing themselves. They more readily feel their responsibility, they more easily and successfully exert their powers, when they see that, unless they come forward, nothing will be done. By leaving them quickly St. Paul gave the local leaders the opportunity to take their proper place, and forced the church to realize that it could not depend upon him, but must depend upon its own resources. We have already seen how he did this in all matters of local finance. By retiring early, he did the same thing in matters of government and education.

One other effect of St. Paul's training is very clear. His converts became missionaries. It seems strange to us that there should be no exhortations to missionary zeal in the Epistles of St. Paul. There is one sentence of approval, 'From you sounded out the word of the Lord', but there is no insistence upon the command of Christ to preach the Gospel. Yet Dr. Friedlander is certainly right when he says, 'While the Jews regarded the conversion of unbelievers as, at the most, a meritorious work, for the Christians the spread of the doctrine of salvation was the highest and most sacred duty'. The Christians of the Four Provinces were certainly zealous in propagating the faith, and apparently needed no exhortation on the subject. This surprises us: we are not always accustomed to find our converts so zealous. Yet it is not really surprising. Christians receive the Spirit of Jesus and the Spirit of Jesus is the missionary spirit, the Spirit of Him who came into the world to bring back lost souls to the Father. Naturally, when they receive that Spirit they begin to seek to bring back others, even as He did.

The reason of our failure is, I believe, largely due to the fact that we quench that Spirit. We educate our converts to think, as we, accustomed to a long-established and highly-organized church, naturally think, that none but duly appointed ministers may preach. We dread the possible mistakes of individual zeal. The result is that our converts hesitate to speak of religion to others. They throw the responsibility upon the licensed evangelist and 'the mission'. They do not feel any responsibility themselves to evangelize the world. Their mouths are closed. Here and there, of course, we find a man so full of the Spirit of the Lord that he cannot hold his peace, but he is a comparatively rare exception.

We need to begin again to teach ourselves and our people what Spirit we are of, and to give liberty that the word of the Lord may have free course. When we do that, the church will again reveal itself in its true character and become self-propagating.