Paul Left Behind Equipped Churches Not Dependent Congregations
Allen draws a clean line in Missionary Methods between gathering a congregation and planting a church. Modern missions, he charges, baptized uninstructed converts who fell away, gathered crowds they then left to fend for themselves, and the people lapsed back into heathenism. Paul did something different. He never left a church until it was fully equipped with its orders of ministry, its sacraments, and its tradition, and then he moved on. He ordained ministers of the church for the church and instituted no elaborate constitution, so the leaders he appointed belonged to the people they served rather than to a foreign system.
The contrast turns on the missionary’s goal. Allen argues that creating permanent foreign-run stations actually postpones the day local believers can take over, because the missionary keeps the responsibility instead of handing it down. Paul aimed at the opposite outcome from the first seed: a church that could stand, govern, and reproduce the moment he departed. The apostle’s success lay precisely in his readiness to leave.
This is the operational heart of the self-governing church and the seed of Allen’s most famous instinct, that the missionary’s task is to make himself unnecessary, which his later book develops as the spontaneous expansion of a church healthy enough to grow without him. It converges with the vault’s wider conviction that ordinary believers carry the expansion of the church once they are properly equipped and released.
Related
- Missionary Methods: source
- Three-Self Church: the self-governing church Paul left behind
- Spontaneous Expansion Is the Natural Activity of Healthy Christian Life: where the make-yourself-unnecessary goal leads
- The Body of Ordinary Believers Carries the Expansion of the Church: the convergent vault conviction
- Missionary Methods - Summary: the wider argument