Allen’s Strategic Centres Were Strategic Because He Made Them Seedbeds of Self-Propagation
Paul did not try to preach in every town of a province himself. In Missionary Methods Allen shows that Paul planted churches in two or three important centres and counted the whole province evangelized, which is why Paul could tell the Romans he had “fully preached the Gospel of Christ” from Jerusalem to Illyricum and had “no more place in these parts.” The centres carried Roman administration, Greek civilization, Jewish influence, or commercial weight, so people flowed through them constantly.
Allen presses a point most readers miss: a busy crossroads is worthless unless the converts there learn the gospel in a form they can pass on. He warns that missions have planted a church in a great city and left the surrounding country untouched, because the gospel was preached so that the convert who received it never grasped that it was entrusted to him to spread. A strategic centre can become a prison that locks the gospel up or a mint that puts new coin into circulation. Paul chose natural centres, yet Allen insists the Spirit led him, and that the centres became strategic only because Paul made them seedbeds of self-propagation.
This reframes location as a function of reproducibility rather than mere geography, which connects it to Church Planting Movement thinking and to the self-propagating half of the three-self formula. It also anticipates Allen’s later demand to plant churches, not missions, from the first seed, since a centre is fruitful only when the church inside it can multiply without him.
Related
- Missionary Methods: source
- Church Planting Movement: the multiplication logic this feeds
- Three-Self Church: the self-propagating principle at work
- Planting Churches Not Missions From the First Seed: Allen’s parallel demand in his later book
- Missionary Methods - Summary: the wider argument