Spontaneous Expansion by Roland Allen
A little more building up to why I bought this book again and read it all the way through. My dad recently offered to help people fill out their taxes for free. He has an accounting background and has helped plenty of people in the past. So someone from church came as a translator and men began coming to get help. What he saw and was telling me about, is that these men whom he never met and had no direct connection to church or ministry, had heard about him already in the community and also had a lot of respect for him. My dad was genuinely surprised by this. In this I saw what I remembered from my first attempt at reading this book when I was an associate pastor: that the bureaucratic structures of mission organization (and churches) do not work because they take no account of the local structure and tradition ... they don't seek to win respect of an entire community, but pluck out the converts, westernize (churchize) them, "nurse" them and then continue the effort to make more converts. Roland Allen writes:
“Spontaneous expansion begins with the individual effort of the individual Christian to assist his fellow, when common experience, common difficulties, common toil have first brought the two together. It is this equality and community of experience which makes the one deliver his message in terms which the other can understand, and makes the hearer approach the subject with sympathy and confidence – with sympathy because the common experience makes approach easy and natural, with confidence, because the one is accustomed to understand what the other says and expects to understand him now. He speaks from his heart.” (10)
This book was written in 1927 and offers a strong critique of mission societies and churches. This is all before Leslie Newbigin and others argued for and succeeded in joining the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council because "missions" separate from "church" was losing its meaning. Newbigin's argument had a similar spirit to this book, that the condescending nature of Western nations sending missionaries to the heathen was wrong.
OK, so enough set-up. The book is about spontaneous expansion … about the zeal of someone who is converted and whether that zeal needs to be suppressed and checked at every turn because of our fears (fears for doctrine, morality and our own missionary organization).
I honestly know very little about missions, but if we go with Newbigin's logic that the churches and indeed, every individual Christian is a missionary to some extent, then I found the book had a lot of wisdom for church leaders. What was more obvious and less hidden in the 30s which Allen is criticizing is the view that an elder/pastor is to rule his flock. Nowadays, no one would ever go on record saying they believe they should rule, but nonetheless, this seems to be a common problem. For example, doesn't this sound like the way most preachers and church leaders view their ministry:
"The conception of the Church … bishops as great officials governing and directing, more or less, large numbers of clergy, most of whom they scarcely knew by sight, in dioceses so large that they could not possibly visit the parishes except at rare intervals. They thought of parish priests as officials of the Church who ruled almost autocratically in their parishes, responsible not at all to the laity for their conduct, and only partially to their bishops. They thought of the laity not so much as members of the Church as people whose duty it was to obey the Church as represented by her bishops and priests. The apostolic conception of the bishop as the father of a Spiritual Family, as the Pastor of a flock every member of which he should know by name was lost. Men still used the titles "Chief Pastor" and "Father in God"; but they did not expect him to know his family, or his flock, personally and intimately. Both bishop and priest were officials, and paid officials, separated widely from the laity by training and by conventional manners and customs." (121)
This two tier leadership of ruling without any intimate knowledge is the structure I have known in the past. Personal knowledge and any kind of "spiritual family" is seen as utterly impossible/impractical and so there is really nothing else to do but rule autocratically, even if that comes out as "strategizing" and "training leaders."
Another interesting idea he is criticizing is viewing ministry as "a purely personal gift" as opposed to seeing it inextricably linked to church. "In appointing ministers for a congregation, it is as important to consider the needs of the church as it is to consider the character and the education of the individual; but by looking solely at the individual we forget the church. In the early Church we find local men ordained for the local church. .. But in our system, when ministry is viewed as a purely personal gift, men seek for themselves to occupy this post or that, without any regard to the link which is thus snapped, and the consequence is that they often look upon 'churches' simply as places which offer them opportunities for the exercise of their gifts, or as steps in a ladder of preferment." (130)
Not only is the person who attempts spiritual leadership a stranger, but it creates a false view of ministry for the minister, one that we see at work. I have a friend who forsook a church he began so that he could take a job that was certainly higher up in the "ladder of preferment." Instantly his words to the church rang hollow and even close friends found it difficult to believe he was "called" to this new work.
Allen writes about the structures of missions and how they create and train for dependence. Even where spontaneous expansion has taken place and a church springs up someone (a group of people who have come to believe and gather to share their faith) the organization quickly sends a half-trained seminary graduate to "take over" for the lay people who are leading the group. Allen cannot see anything more unbiblical and stupid. You trade Western training for zeal and experience and it inevitably leads to discontent and a withering of the spontaneous church.
He also makes the point that we ultimately say we want independence (consider again that the drive of this book is that there is not enough money or missionaries to actually continue the mission work as it is now done … meaning missionary-depedent missions), but this is just a tack on at the end of a giant structure that trains in dependence (dependence on white missionaries for the sacraments, training, money, etc.)
This irony is one I have known and witnessed in my own church experience. There is frustration upon the part of the leaders that the people aren't more independent, frustration that among their flock they can identify no future church planters, and maybe frustration that the people seem so needy. And yet, the leadership structure itself is often built to train this dependence and kind of bottle necked constraint.
Allen argues that the missionary (and bishops) should give to local leaders "the Creed, the Gospels, the Sacraments, and the ministry (officiating funerals and marriages) … Having done this the missionary and the bishop should leave that newly constituted church to find out for itself what being a church means in daily practice, to find out that it can do things as a church … I do not mean that he should neglect it; for he ought to take thought for its education. We must learn the distinction between leaving Christians to learn what they can only learn for themselves, and abandoning them. It is a distinction which we find hard to make; it is a lesson which we find hard to learn. … To leave new-born Churches to learn by experience is apostolic, to abandon them is not apostolic: to watch over them is apostolic, to be always nursing them is not apostolic: to guide their education is apostolic, to provide it for them is not apostolic." (150)
There is also very important discussions of doctrine and morality and its place in the missionary venture (which again is also the churches work). There is important discussions about organizations in general and how they become ends in themselves. Maybe I can write about this at another time. Below are a few more quotes from the book if you are interested.
"Without further words we should have proved to all men that we do not preach Christ in order to extend our dominion as our enemies assert: we should have proved that we really mean the words which we now too often use without any demonstration that we really know their meaning--that we desire to be helpers, not lords over other men's souls." (3)
The conviction that new converts can beget new converts leads them from strength to strength: the conviction that they will fall if they are not nursed leads them from weakness to weakness. The difference lies not in the nature or in the environment of the converts; but in the faith of the missionaries. (34)
We treat sins of the flesh as matters for the enforcement of law, sins of temper and spirit we do not. Yet in the Gospels, Christ is not represented as observing this distinction. He denounces sins of pride and self-assertion with a severity no less condign than sins of the body; but we do not refuse to admit men who give way habitually to a hot temper, or indulge a supercilious, insolent, haughty and contemptuous manner towards those whom they consider their inferiors. Why? Is it because these sins are in truth less dangerous and immoral than sins of the flesh? Is it certainly true that a man who commits these offences is less guilty before God than a man who, having followed the custom of his tribe, has more than one wife, or even than a man who, following the custom of his tribe gets drunk at a feast? Is a man who gives way to fits of impatience whenever things do not go to his liking less a sinner because he conforms to our standard of external purity, than a man who can show a most Christ-like patience and meekness under ill-treatment, yet is bound by circumstances to a life which we call a life of sin, a condition from which he cannot escape except by an act of most questionable morality? Why do we act so differently towards these two? Why do we point the one to the example of Christ and assure him that if he will receive the grace of Christ, Christ will enlighten and strengthen and release him, while we present the other with a law, exclude him, and demand obedience to the letter of the law before we admit him? Is it because the one offence shocks us, whilst the other, because it is a besetting sin of our own race, does not shock us? Is it not because our moral sense is perverted and one-sided? The people to whom we go have their own moral scruples; and, if they could exclude us as we exclude them, they would exclude us for showing impatience and racial pride in word and act; they would forbid our dances as we forbid theirs. Is not this sufficient proof that our demands are arbitrary? (61)
"We must," we say, "maintain the Christian standard of morality." We cannot. It does not lie with us. Morality for us as Christians should be truth in the inward parts. And that we cannot maintain. All that we can do is to enforce an external law; and that we must not do. But because we say we must, we do exactly that very thing which we condemn the judaizing Christians for doing; and we come near to committing that very fault which we applaud St. Paul for opposing. (73)
There is a horrible tendency for an organization to grow in importance till it overshadows the end of its existence, and begins to exist for itself. (98)
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