Imported Buildings and Subsidy Pauperize Converts Into Passive Recipients
When the mission supplies what the local church cannot itself provide, Allen argues in Missionary Methods, it teaches the convert to receive rather than to give. By importing buildings and ornaments the people could never procure for themselves, the missionary tends to pauperize them. They learn to accept the position of passive recipients, and the proper impulse to supply what they actually can supply is checked at its source. The generosity that builds a church atrophies before it can form.
Allen ties this to a wider misreading of the gospel’s nature. Securing a permanent site by the powerful influence of foreigners makes the surrounding population suspect an ulterior motive, and in China especially it spread the idea that becoming a Christian meant submitting to foreign domination. So the subsidy that was meant to plant the church instead builds up the foreign dependence the missionary should most want to destroy, and it lets the people judge the inward spirit by an external form that misrepresents it. Allen also rejects unity bought this way: gifts given to check the recipient’s freedom of action produce only submission to bondage for secular advantage, never the unity of the Spirit, which alone is worth preserving.
This is the financial face of Allen’s charge that the mission station replaces the native church with a foreign institution, and it gives an early theological frame for the dependency critique the vault later sharpens, where it parallels the warning that donated goods act like a drug recipients must quit.
Related
- Missionary Methods: source
- The Mission Station Substitutes a Foreign Institution for the Native Church: the institutional version of the same harm
- Donated Goods Function Like a Drug That Recipients Must Quit: the modern dependency parallel
- Three-Self Church: the self-supporting alternative subsidy undermines
- Missionary Methods - Summary: the wider argument