Allen Says the Western Spirit Cannot Stop Itself From Exporting Its Own Machinery
Allen diagnoses the deepest obstacle to apostolic method as a temperament rather than a doctrine. The modern Western teacher, he writes in Missionary Methods, is by nature and training a person of restless activity and boundless self-confidence, accustomed to do things himself, to rely on his own exertions, and to assume superiority over Eastern peoples. That temperament cannot imagine a Christianity worthy of the name surviving without the elaborate organizational machinery the West has invented, so it exports the machinery as if it were the gospel.
The result is a confusion of essentials with accidentals. Allen argues the missionary desires to impart not only the gospel but also the Law and the Customs, expecting converts to adopt Western forms of organization and a peculiar code of morality alongside Christ. Paul moved by the opposite spirit, one that preferred persuasion to authority, distrusted elaborate religious ceremonial, and trusted the Holy Spirit to work out the appropriate external expressions of faith in each new people.
This names the cultural engine behind the practice the vault calls managerial missiology, the substitution of management for trust in the Spirit. It also supplies the temperamental root of Allen’s later charge that the mission station plants a foreign institution in place of an indigenous church, and it stands behind his whole case for the self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating church that owes nothing to imported forms.
Related
- Missionary Methods: source
- managerial missiology: the modern habit this temperament produces
- The Mission Station Substitutes a Foreign Institution for the Native Church: where the exported machinery lands
- Three-Self Church: the alternative that owes nothing to Western forms
- Missionary Methods - Summary: the wider argument