Reading: Methods, Chapter 13: Application

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

Chapter 13: Application

The question may well be asked, How far is it possible to follow today the Apostle's methods which I have tried to set forth in the preceding chapters? It is plain that our Missions have hitherto proceeded on very different lines. Is it possible then to make any useful deductions? Is it possible to introduce into our Missions any of these methods without destroying the very foundations all that we have hitherto established?

We have seen that the secret of the Apostle's success in founding churches lay in the observance of principles which we can reduce to rules of practice in some such form as this.

(1) All teaching to be permanent must be intelligible and so capable of being grasped and understood that those who have once received it can retain it, use it, and hand it on. The test of all teaching is practice. Nothing should be taught which cannot be so grasped and used.

(2) All organizations in like manner must be of such a character that it can be understood and maintained. It must be an organization of which the people see the necessity: it must be an organization that they can and will support. It must not be so decorating or so costly that small and infant communities cannot supply the funds necessary for its maintenance. The test of all organizations is naturalness and permanence. Nothing should be established as part of the ordinary church life of the people which they cannot understand and carry on.

(3) All financial arrangements made for the ordinary life and existence of the church should be such that the people themselves can and will control and manage their own business independently of any foreign subsidies. The management of all local funds should be entirely in the hands of the local church which should raise and use their own funds for their own purposes that they may be neither pauperized nor dependent on the dictation of any foreign society.

(4) A sense of mutual responsibility of all the Christians one for another should be carefully inculcated and practiced. The whole community is responsible for the proper administration of baptism, ordination and discipline.

(5) Authority to exercise spiritual gifts should be given freely and at once. Nothing should be withheld which may strengthen the life of the church, still less should anything be withheld which is necessary for its spiritual sustenance. The liberty to enjoy such gifts is not a privilege that may be withheld but a right which must be acknowledged. The test of preparedness to receive the authority is the capacity to receive grace.

 

We have seen further that the power in which St. Paul was able to act with such boldness was the spirit of faith. Faith, not in the natural capacities of his converts, but in the power of the Holy Ghost in them.

Now if we are to practice any methods approaching the Pauline methods in power and directness, it is absolutely necessary that we should first have this faith, this Spirit. Without faith -- faith in the Holy Ghost, faith in the Holy Ghost in our converts -- we can do nothing. We cannot possibly act as the Apostle acted until we recover this faith. Without it we shall be unable to recognize the grace of the Holy Spirit in our converts, we shall never trust them, we shall never inspire in them confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit in themselves. If we have no faith in the power of the Holy Spirit in them, they will not learn to have faith in the power of the Holy Spirit in themselves. We cannot trust them, and they cannot be worthy of trust; and trust, the trust which begets trustworthiness, is the one essential for any success in the Pauline method.

But if we make that great venture of faith then the application of the Pauline method is still beset with difficulties because the past history of our converts is, as I have pointed out, very different from the history of his converts. Most missionaries today find themselves in charge of mission stations in the midst of established communities of Christians with often a long tradition of foreign government and foreign support behind them. Those communities will probably look to the missionary in everything. He is assisted by a number of native clergy, catechists, and teachers whose work it is his duty to superintend. These again will look to him for guidance and encouragement, and probably for definite and particular orders in every conceivable circumstance that may arise, even if they do not depend upon his initiative and inspiration to save them from stagnation. In the central station, he will almost certainly find a considerable organization and elaborate establishment which the native Christian community has not created and cannot at present support without financial aid from abroad. He will find that they have been more or less crammed with a complete system of theological and ecclesiastical doctrines which they have not been able to digest. He will find an elaborate system of finance which makes him in the last resort responsible for the raising and administration of all funds in his district. He will find that as regards baptism, the recommendation of candidates for office in the church, and the exercise of discipline, the whole burden of responsibility is laid upon his shoulders alone. He will find in a word that he is expected to act as an almost uncontrolled autocrat subject only to the admonitions of his bishop or the directions of a committee of white men.

He cannot possibly ignore that situation. He cannot act as if the Christian community over which he is called to preside had had another history. He cannot desert them and run away to some untouched field. He cannot begin all over again.

Nevertheless, if he has the Spirit of St. Paul he can in a very real sense practice the method of St. Paul in its nature, if not in its form. He cannot undo the past, but he can amend the present. He can keep ever before his mind the truth that he is there to prepare the way for the retirement of the foreign missionary. He can live his life amongst his people and deal with them as though he would have no successor. He should remember that he is the least permanent element in the church. He may fall sick and go home, or he may die, or he may be called elsewhere. He disappears, the church remains. The native Christians are the permanent element. The permanence of the church depends upon them. Therefore, it is of vital importance that if he is removed they should be able to carry on the work, as if he were present. He cannot rely on, and he ought not to rely, upon having any successor. In many cases, it must be literally true that he has none, at any rate, for some years. The supply of men from home is happily so inadequate that it is impossible to ensure a sufficient number of European recruits to man all the existing stations. It is obvious that there will not be, and ought not to be, enough to man similar stations all over any great country. In some cases it is probable that he will have no successor: in every case, it is desirable that no successor should be necessary to the existence of the church. Consequently, it is of the first importance that he should keep this always before him and strive by all means to secure that the absence of a foreign superintendent should not result in that deplorable lapse from Christianity which we have only too often observed, with shame and grief, to follow upon the withdrawal of foreign support in the past. It is his first duty to prepare the way for the safe retirement of the foreign missionary.

He can do this in two ways: (1) He can associate the people with himself in all that he does and so make them thoroughly understand the nature of the work, and (2) he can practice retirement.

(1) He can associate the people with himself in all that he does. He need not do anything without their co-operation. By that, I mean not merely that he can associate with himself a few individuals who seem suited to his mind, but that he can educate the whole congregation. In the past we have associated with ourselves individuals of our own selection, we have begun our education from the top. What is needful is to begin from the bottom. Leaders must be thrown up by the community, not dragged up by the missionary. It is necessary to make the whole body realize its unity and common responsibility. It is essential that he should not allow, he certainly must not encourage, the whole body to abandon all its responsibility to others, as he certainly will do if he deals only with a few people whom he has selected. He may avoid this danger by referring all business to the whole congregation in the first instance. In this way he will not only force the whole congregation to understand its responsibility, he will also compel those who are natural leaders to understand that just as he cannot act as an autocrat because he has been put over them by the bishop, so neither can they so act because they have attracted his attention by some display of intellectual or social superiority. It is essential that the whole body should grow together. Now in doing this, we shall find that the missionary must, in fact, follow the example of St. Paul very nearly, as we shall see if we take a few instances. Let us take four typical examples of the Pauline method: the management of funds, the administration of baptism, the selection of ministers for the congregation, the exercise of discipline.

(a) Finance. It is important that the missionary should educate the whole congregation in the principles of church finance because this is a question which touches every member directly in a very obvious way, and when the people learn to understand that the control of finance is in their own hands they will more easily and quickly learn their responsibility in other matters. Even where, as in some central stations, a considerable proportion of the annual income is derived from foreign sources we need not hesitate to take this course. The missionary can teach the congregation as a congregation the sources from which all money is derived. He can make them understand what money is wanted and why it is wanted. He can generally give them control of all local expenses. He need not take charge of any money collected by the congregation even at their instant and special desire. He can refuse to accept the administration of money for which he is wholly and solely responsible. The modern institution of church councils will greatly assist him in this, but in the actual administration of money in small communities, he need not even use a council. He can easily teach the whole community; for finance is a subject in which the whole congregation is naturally interested. If the people appoint a council to administer local funds, the council may be responsible to them primarily, and the use and abuse of funds may still be really in their hands. Only here is it unfortunately necessary to remark that it is no use to pretend? To consult the people whilst the missionary intends to carry out his own plans to hand over money to them and to keep control over it at the same time, is fatal. The people at once see the deception and resent it. They must be allowed to learn by making their own mistakes.

Of all local finance, the administration of charity is the simplest and most instructive. The relief of distress should be entirely in the hands of the congregation. The creation of a charity committee is not so good an educational method in a small community as is the alleviation of individual cases as they arise by the whole congregation. Cases of poverty may be referred at once to the whole congregation. Everybody knows everybody else. The congregation knows exactly what is needed. They can reject the appeal or subscribe to meet it on the spot. The missionary, if he will, may subscribe with the others. Nothing is more calculated to draw the congregation together and to help the people to realize their mutual dependence, than the supply of special needs by special acts of charity one towards another. A poor fund, if it is administered by a missionary, only tends to misunderstanding and discontent.

Even in such matters as the foundation of schools, the congregation ought to manage its own business. The first thing is to persuade the people of the need for a school. Until they desire it and are ready to support it, nothing is done. When they want it, they will certainly seek the missionary's help. He can give help, why should he insist upon control? He and they, they and he, should think out the plans, seek for sources of supply, and engage the teacher. It is essential that the people should recognize that the school is their own school, not simply his. If he does the work for them, even though he may induce them to subscribe, the work will be his work, not theirs, and they will feel no responsibility for its success or failure.

Similarly, if a school is to be enlarged the missionary has another opportunity of teaching his people the same lesson. The school is really their school, not his, even if it has been founded in the first instance with foreign money. It is their children who are to be educated in it. They are really more nearly affected by the alteration than we are. Then they should be consulted, and their advice should be taken. It is a grievous loss to the whole Church if the work is done simply by foreigners, when the whole community might be made to realize, as perhaps they never realized before, its importance to them and their responsibility for it.

In finance, as in other matters, the principle of throwing upon the shoulders of the native Christians all the responsibility that they can carry, and more than they can carry, is a sound one. If they have more than they can manage, they will gladly seek advice and help; if they have less, they will, sooner or later, begin to fight for more or to feel aggrieved that they are not given their proper place.

(b) Baptism. The admission of new converts is a matter which very intimately affects the whole Church. It cannot but seriously affect the whole community if improper persons are admitted or proper persons excluded. It is of vital importance that Christians should learn to recognize this. It is possible to teach them and to help them to feel a proper responsibility in the matter. They will recognize the truth and feel the responsibility if the truth is taught them and the responsibility is thrown upon them. No convert should be admitted by baptism into the body without the approval of the body, as a body. If a man wishes to be baptized he must be accepted by the congregation. But someone will say, 'If we do that, men will be rejected whom the missionary is convinced are proper persons'. If that is so, then the missionary must try to educate the congregation, but he will do that not by overruling them with a high hand, but by teaching them true principles. If the convert must go to the church, so must the missionary. He must entreat, exhort, advise with all long-suffering. He may fail to obtain his end in a particular case. But the people may be right and he is wrong. Even if he is right, he may really gain more by allowing the people to overrule him than by overruling them. They will speedily see that they are dealing with one who earnestly seeks their welfare, but will not force his own views upon them, and they will certainly be in greater danger of erring through their desire to please him than through their desire to vex him, or even to drive him away.

(c) The appointment of ministers. If a man is to be trained at a central school as a catechist or teacher, it is of the first importance that he should feel that he is sent by the whole community, not by the favoritism of a foreign missionary, that he is supported by the common assent and approval, that he represents the body, and that he will be received on his return by the whole body. No missionary is compelled to recommend in such cases on his sole authority. It is not enough that he should consult the Christians, he may see to it that the choice is the real choice of the whole congregation, or group of congregations, to which the candidate belongs. Beyond that, the missionary cannot at the present time go. The appointment of catechists, deacons, and priests to posts in the diocese is generally in the hands of the bishop or of a committee, and the people to whom the man is sent are seldom, if ever, consulted. So long as this is the case the missionary is compelled to accept the nominee of that committee, and the people can scarcely be expected to understand the true relations between the pastor and his flock. The situation is grievous, but in old-established missions, it is at present unavoidable. For no one can expect a committee directed by foreigners to act on Pauline principles. The committee will inevitably make the bonds that bind the native ministers to itself as tight as possible, and the bonds which unite the minister to his flock proportionately weak. But if the missionary sees to it that no candidate is sent up from his district until he has really been selected and approved by the people to whom he naturally belongs he will lay a foundation upon which a better system may one day be established. At any rate, he will remove the common complaint that candidates for ordination and clergy are at the mercy of one man and that to displease the superintending missionary even accidentally is certain to result in the ruin of the man's career.

(d) Discipline. Cases of moral failure are more simple. In nearly every case the missionary in charge is left a very large discretion in such matters. He can act as St. Paul acted. If a man falls into grievous sin, if an offense is committed which ought to shock the conscience of the whole Christian community, he need not deal with it directly. He can call the attention of the congregation to it and point out the dangers manifest and pressing of leaving it unrecognized or unreproved. He can call upon them to decide what ought to be done. He can in the last resort refuse to have any dealings with a congregation that declines to do its duty and tolerates gross open immorality in its midst. He can entreat, exhort, advise, he may even threaten, the whole body when it would be fatal to deal with the individual himself. If he can persuade them to do what is right, the whole community is uplifted; but he cannot put them in the right way by doing for them what they alone can

(2) He can train them for retirement by retiring. He can retire in two ways, physically or morally. He can retire morally by leaving things more and more in their hands, by avoiding to press his opinion, by refusing to give it lest he should, as is often the case, lead them to accept his opinion simply became it is his. He can retire by educating them to understand all the workings of the mission and by gradually delegating it. He can retire physically. He can go away on missionary tours of longer and longer duration, leaving the whole work of the station to be carried on without any foreign direction for a month or two. He can do this openly and advisedly because he trusts his people. He can prolong his tours. He can find excuses for being away more and more. He can even create such a state of affairs that he may take his furlough without their suffering any harm. At first, no doubt, he would be anxious, and he would have good cause for anxiety. Things would go wrong. But his people would know his mind, and, though they would grudge his absence, they would see that he was really helping them most by leaving them. Retirement of that kind, deliberately prepared and consciously practiced, is a very different thing from absence through stress of business unwillingly. Only by retirement can he prepare the way for real independence.

But the difficulty instantly arises that in many cases the retirement of the missionary would mean that the Christians would be deprived of the sacraments. That is too often true, and it is apparently an insuperable difficulty. The only way out of it is to persuade the Bishop to ordain men in every place to celebrate the sacraments. There are plenty of suitable men. Everywhere there are good, honest, sober, grave men respected by their fellows, capable of this office, and they ought to be ordained for that special purpose. But meanwhile, even at the risk of depriving the Christians at the center of that spiritual food which is their right, the missionary should retire, at any rate for a few months, in order to evangelize new districts, and above all to teach his people to stand alone.

But in every district, the missionary has not only to deal with settled congregations. If he is an evangelist he is always beginning work in new towns or villages with new converts. Then he can begin at the very beginning. He can make the rule of practice the rule of all his teaching. Wherever he finds a small community of hearers he can begin by teaching them one simple truth, one prayer, one brief article of the Creed, and leaving them to practice it. If on his return he finds that they have learned and practiced that first lesson, he can then teach them a little more; but if he finds that they have not succeeded, he can only repeat the first lesson and go away again so that they may master that one before they are burdened with another. If they learn to practice one act alone they may make more progress than if they had learned by heart all the doctrines of the Church and depended solely upon some outside teacher,

He need not take it for granted that, if men are converted, there is no hope for the conversion of their wives and children until he can get women missionaries and teachers to instruct them in the rudiments of the Gospel. He can tell his first converts that they are responsible not only for their own progress, but for the enlightenment of their wives and families and neighbors. In some places the difficulties of this are apparently insuperable; but men overcome apparently insuperable difficulties by the power of the Holy Ghost. We need not take it for granted that men or women must run away from home, or cannot influence their households and teach them what they have learned. It is better to take it for granted that they can, even to the death. Slaves in heathen households in Rome were in apparently an impossible position, yet they overcame the apparent impossibility.

He need not take it for granted that every small community of hearers must have a catechist settled amongst them. Where there are three people one will inevitably lead. On his visits, the missionary, or his catechist, can give special attention and teaching to these natural leaders and instruct them to hand on to the others the special teaching which they have received. This can be done if the instruction given is given line upon line, and if there is no haste to complete a theological education. So these leaders will grow with their fellows, with those whom they teach. They will learn more by teaching than in any other way. If the missionary is fortunate he may be able to induce his bishop to ordain some of these men of approved moral character and natural authority. In that case, the church in that part will grow naturally into completion: otherwise, his converts will be compelled to wait for his visits to receive the sacraments, the work will be retarded, and the people starved. But even so, he can make them largely independent in all other respects. The visits of the missionary will be welcomed as the visits of a friend who can help them. They will eagerly seek his advice, they will need his encouragement. But whatever they have learned, they will have so learned that they can practice it, even if he never came near them again. It would be better to teach a few men to call upon the name of the Lord for themselves than to fill a church with people who have given up idolatry, slavishly and unintelligently, and have acquired a habit of thinking that it is the duty of converts to sit and be taught, and to hear prayers read for them in the church by a paid mission agent.

The missionary can observe the rule that no organization should be introduced which the people cannot understand and maintain. He need not begin by establishing buildings, he need not begin by importing foreign books and foreign ornaments of worship. The people can begin as they can with what they have. As they feel the need for organization and external conveniences they will begin to seek about for some way of providing them. The missionary, or his helper, can encourage and assist them. They may even subscribe to money, but if they do this, it should be a subscription from them, freely given, and entirely in the control of the little congregation. Their finance so far as they have any common finance may be entirely in their own hands. It will obviously be small, and because it is small it is of great importance that they should learn to manage it themselves, so that they may be prepared to understand the larger finance of a wider area when they begin to find their place in an organization which covers a large district.

Similarly, with all church rules, it is not necessary to begin by insisting upon mere verbal assent to a code of law. The new converts may grow up into it. If they learn to pray in twos and threes, if they learn to read as they may be able the Holy Gospels, and to discuss amongst themselves the lessons of the teacher they will gradually perceive the inconsistency of that which they read or hear with heathen practices to which they have been accustomed. They will inquire amongst themselves and dispute; they will refer the question to the missionary on his visit and he will have the opportunity of explaining wherein the custom in question is agreeable or otherwise to the doctrine which they have been taught. But he need not hurry them. They must learn to change because they feel the need of change, and to change because they see the rightness of the change, rather than to change because they are told to do so. If they change unintelligently, by order, they will easily relapse, because they have never seen the principle on which the change is based. Artificial changes are not likely to be permanent until they have become in process of years habitual, and then they will still be unintelligent. Changes made under the influence of the Holy Spirit are reasonable, and, so made, are the accepted changes of the people themselves. From those, they can only fall away by deliberate apostasy. So we advance at home. We educate public opinion until that opinion is on the side of righteousness and then the change is permanent. So, e.g., we put down slavery. And so we may deal with our converts.

Our past efforts have not been so fruitless but that we have now a great number of Christians who, beginning by accepting Christian law as an external demand of the foreign teachers, have ended by seeing its true meaning and accepting it as a proper expression of the will of God and here we have a powerful influence and example. New converts will speedily strive to attain the level of their fellows. They will see the manifest advantages. By setting the example before them of Christian communities more advanced than themselves, by encouraging them to take their difficulties to their more educated brethren, we can encourage and help them without enforcing authoritative, and to them incomprehensible, demands. Some things they will speedily accept because they are true and natural expressions of the mind of Christ in them; some things they will accept only after a long struggle, because they are not easily understood, and some things they will never accept because they are neither natural nor proper expressions of the mind of Christ in their lives; and such things have never been really accepted, even by those who have outwardly submitted to them?

But there would certainly arise cases in which the people would for a long time observe practices which the missionary would be compelled to condemn as superstitious, immoral, or otherwise iniquitous. Still, the true method is purely persuasive. The missionary must use his judgment as to whether the refusal is deliberate rejection of a truth which the people know to be the truth and will not accept, or whether it is due to ignorance and immature ideas of the nature of Christianity. In the latter case he can go on teaching, exhorting, persuading, certain that so far as he is right, he will lead the people to see that he is right. In the former case, he has no resort but to shake off the dust of his feet, to refuse to teach men who will not be taught. Compulsion is futile and disastrous. There are men who will be taught. He must seek out those and turn to them.

This applies to all missionary preaching. The one test which the missionary should require of his hearers is openness of mind. If he teaches, he teaches as one who is making a moral demand, and if that moral demand is met with a flat determination to resist it, then he cannot well continue his teaching. Willingness to send children to school in order to obtain a material advantage, if coupled with a determination not to submit to the claims of Christ, is not a field in which the doctrine of Christ can be planted. Willingness to listen to the preacher in order to rise in the social scale by becoming Christian is very different. There is a willingness to accept the teaching. The motive is low, but the willingness to accept is present, and the teacher can there plant seeds which will grow up and purify the motive. This has happened again and again. Willingness to hear for the sake of advantage with a determination not to submit to the doctrine is one thing, willingness to hear for the sake of advantage with even a half-hearted intention of accepting the doctrine is another. There must be in the hearers a willingness, not only to hear but to accept, if the missionary is to persevere with success. Everywhere there are those whose hearts God touches and so bring prepared hearts. On those, the missionary may concentrate his attention. For them there is hope. Everywhere there are those who refuse to hear with their souls, who close their hearts. These we must prepare to refuse to teach. We must be prepared to shake the lap.

So far, any missionary who chooses can go today, without upsetting the work of his predecessors, but building upon it. Many things may seem desirable, but this at least is possible.