A Three-Self Church is one that is self-supporting (financially independent of outside subsidy), self-propagating (able to multiply itself without external missionary personnel), and self-governing (led by its own local leaders under its own authority). The framework was developed through 19th-century missionaries Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn, refined by John Nevius, and given its most influential articulation by Roland Allen in the early 20th century. Allen argued from Acts and Paul that the first-century pattern was precisely this: churches that were indigenous from the start, not wards of a foreign mission society.
The three-self framework is the structural backbone of Church Planting Movement missiology. A movement is not merely numerically large; it is indigenous by definition. Every major CPM definition Farah surveys in Genesis and Evolution of Church Planting includes “indigenous” as a non-negotiable criterion, drawing directly from Allen.
Related
- 2026-09-29 Western Missions Never Entrusted the Mission So the Global Church Waits for the West to Fund It: what a missing self-support and self-propagation looks like in Chad
- Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?: Allen’s polemical case for the three-self approach
- The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church: Allen’s fuller theological argument
- Roland Allen’s Three-Self Church and the Seedbed of Indigenous Multiplication: how the framework feeds CPM missiology
- Church Planting Movement: the tradition that inherits the three-self logic
- Obedience-Based Discipleship: the formation complement to the three-self structure