Sacraments for Growth in Mission: Eucharistic Faith and Practice in the Theology of Roland Allen

Introduction

Malnutrition is a serious thing. Without a frequent access to healthy, nutritious food there is a great risk for retarded growth, bodily as well as mentally, with devastating consequences, both for the individual person and the surrounding human environment. – Even spiritual malnutrition will lead to severe consequences. Without sufficient sacramental nourishment in the local Church there will be no proper growth in faith. Sacramental starvation can never result in mission and expansion.

This was the kind of perspective that Roland Allen was confronted with already during his service as a young missionary priest in northern China by the end of the 19th century, and the connection between a frequent sacramental life and the witness of the local Church in mission was to him a dimension of fundamental importance which followed him throughout his life, both as a priest of an Anglo-Catholic brand and as an independent prophetic voice in the field of missiology.

In his research and writings, Roland Allen was very much ahead of his contemporaries, but in the decades after his death in 1947 his prophetic and critical voice has successively been rediscovered and listened to anew, both in the field of missiology and in the praxis of the Church in a secularized world. His importance as a sacramental theologian, not primarily a mission strategist, has been rediscovered ¹ and therefore the present edition of Transformation on the legacy of Roland Allen, about 100 years after the publication of one of his first books, is an important ‘sign for the times’ in the new situation of the witness of the Church at the outset of a new century.

Childhood and Youth

Every person has got a background which forms his thinking and actions. Childhood and youth are formative periods for the understanding and further profile of life. Some people, trying to get a perspective through a retrospective outlook, are dealing a lot with these periods. Some even write their own biographies. Roland Allen was nothing of that kind of person. Rather he was extremely reluctant to tell the world about his childhood and upbringing. Just in a few glimpses, en passant, he hints to the context of his early childhood in an Anglican minister’s family. ² Fortunately, his grandson, Mr. Hubert J. B. Allen, with access to family archives and his own personal memories, has been able to do extensive research and to give us more details on the life of his grandfather, also concerning his childhood, in an important biography in 1995 with the title Roland Allen: Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet. ³ With gratitude I do refer the interested reader to this unique source of hitherto unknown aspects within the Allen research.

A few glimpses are nevertheless important to be mentioned here. Roland Allen had his roots in the Church of England. His father was an Anglican priest, who sadly enough died under uncertain circumstances at the age of 38, when he, as far as we know, was just about to start up a new duty abroad as a Chaplain to the British community in the country of Belize, in British Honduras, with his family left behind back in England. The young Roland was by then less than 5 years old. His upbringing was then solely put into the hands of his mother, who was a very strict person with a strong Evangelical persuasion. Within her tradition, Mission work was an important task for the Church, and there is no doubt that Roland Allen’s further aim on the duty of being a missionary abroad can be traced to this Evangelical spirituality of his mother which formed the family context.

At school, first in Bath and later in Bristol, he showed his interest and ability for studies and intellectual debates. This ended up with a scholarship which gave him entrance and economical possibilities for further studies at St John’s College in Oxford, starting in 1887.

Spiritual Formation and Preparations for Ministry

When Roland Allen went to Oxford to start his theological studies, he entered into a situation of change, both within the field of sciences and of theology and Church life. The theological Oxford that he encountered was stamped with the ongoing Anglo-Catholic Revival with its roots in the Tractarian movement, a revival that affected not only the Church of England, but had its impact and influence far beyond.

Across the street from St John’s College in Oxford, Roland Allen found his spiritual home in Pusey House, which had recently been founded in 1884, in memory of Dr E. B. Pusey, one of the founders of the Tractarian movement. The intention of the High Church Pusey House was to be an independent centre for liturgical sacramental life, theological studies and pastoral practice along the Catholic traditions as received within the tradition of the Church of England. In this context Roland Allen found his spiritual mentors, and here his concepts on the sacramental life as a basis for growth and expansion in mission were formed.

Two of the leaders of Pusey House became Allen’s theological mentors. The Principal was by then Dr. Charles Gore, who became his guide and advisor, and the Librarian was the Rev. F. E. Brightman, ‘in his day the leading liturgical scholar of the Church of England’, ⁴ whom Roland Allen regarded as ‘my dear Father in God’. ⁵ Even if the Tractarian heritage was manifest and maintained by the Catholic leaders in Oxford, a new stage of theological thinking was in process. Two years after Allen’s arrival in the city, a theological work of great importance was published, Lux Mundi A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, with Charles Gore as the chief editor. ⁶ Another Oxford person of great importance to Roland Allen was Father Philip Waggett of ‘The Society of St John the Evangelist’ (SSJE) in Cowley, with whom he later cooperated in the writing process of ‘Missionary Methods’ (1912).

Already during his early studies in Oxford, Roland Allen proved himself to be a careful historian and writer. In 1891 he presented his thesis, for which he in the same year was awarded with ‘The Lothian Prize’ in Modern History: ‘Gerbert, Pope Silvester II’, a booklet of 46 pages, not mentioned in the bibliographies before, which I, during my research in 1987, was fortunate to discover, hidden in the Pusey House Library, with a personal dedication to Father F. E. Brightman. ⁷

After having finished his studies in Oxford, Roland Allen moved to Leeds for training for Holy Orders. He joined The Leeds Clergy Training School which had a clear Tractarian profile and which cooperated closely with the Parish Church of Leeds, where E. S. Talbot was the vicar, one of the contributors to ‘Lux Mundi’. The corporate worship with Matins, Sext, Evensong and Compline was for the students a part of their spiritual training, and the Holy Communion was celebrated frequently. The Holy Eucharist was regarded as the main service on Sundays, which was by then not the normal pattern of the Church of England, where Matins had taken the place as the main Service and the Mass usually had to be celebrated in the early morning service. This clear sacramental profile of what should be regarded as the normal pattern of the local Church could very well have given an impetus to Roland Allen, a sacramental pattern which he later on carried with him and developed further, both in his curacy in Darlington and furthermore in his missionary praxis in China and in his missiological writings.

Challenges In China

During his time at the Clergy Training School in Leeds, Roland Allen decided to apply for missionary service. In 1892, at the age of 23, he wrote two letters to the SPG Mission Secretary Mr. Tucker in order to introduce himself and make known his willingness to be sent out in the mission of the Society, which was of a clearly Anglo-Catholic brand. Already in those letters he underlined a certain theme, ‘The expansion of the Church’, a theme which would follow him throughout his life and which later on made him a severe critic of the existing missionary methods of his own time.

Roland Allen’s encounter with the missionary challenge in the Chinese context could very well be summarized by the words used much later by the worker priests in France: see, evaluate, act. He saw the enormous challenges of building an indigenous Church in the whole of the six northern provinces of China, with very limited resources at hand. He reflected on the possible mechanisms of expansion in mission, and he started to try to find and apply a mission pattern which had the local Church and the local Christians in focus. Later on he described his own approach, possibly in the parish of Yung Ch’ing, with the following key words: ‘He treated the church as a church. . . The secret of success in his work lay in dealing with the church as a body’. ⁸

In the missionary context that Roland Allen encountered in China, there was already a critical thinking and model-making process going on. The American Presbyterian missionary, Dr. John L. Nevius, was at the end of the 19th century reconsidering the traditional methods for missionary work. In 1885 he had published a series of articles in The Chinese Recorder which turned out to be of great influence on the missionary debate. Against what he called ‘the Old System’, Nevius advocated ‘the New System’. His emphasis was on the function of small groups of indigenous Christians as the primary agents for mission work. Their identity should be enforced along the lines of the three selves of the current missionary debate: self-government, self-support and self-propagation/self-extension, not to be regarded as a goal in a distant future but as a pattern to be applied locally from the very beginning. To make this into a reality the local congregations should ordain elders of their own to lead and foster the spiritual life and growth.

Obviously Roland Allen, during his early years in China, got in touch with what he later on called ‘the Nevius method’, possibly the contact was mediated through his missionary Bishop and friend C. P. Scott of North China, who was positive to the way in which he handled his pastoral duties. Allen saw the advantages of Nevius’ model as well as its disadvantages. To some extent his own work in Yung Ch’ing seems to have been influenced by Nevius’ thoughts, but the criticism which he many years later gave word to is that Nevius, as a Prebyterian, did not understand the necessity of a frequent sacramental life in the local Church from the very beginning. In accordance with his Catholic understanding of the Church, Allen criticized ‘the Nevius method’ for ending up with ‘the constitution not of a Church, but of a group of Christians without the rites of the Church inherent in the body. . . Any definition of a Church must include the power to administer the Sacraments’. By not fulfilling his ideas of the necessity of locally ordained elders/presbyters, Nevius became, according to Allen, against his own will, in fact a prisoner of ‘the Old System’ which he had criticized, a system subordinated to external resources of money whilst the basic resource should be seen and found in the sacramental life of the local Church. ⁹

Besides his duties as a missionary, Roland Allen had also been appointed to act as a Chaplain to the British Legation in Peking (now: Beijing). When the Boxer Rising in 1900 turned the life of the foreigners into turmoil, Allen from inside of the Legation described the situation, notes that in 1901 ended up in the book The Siege of the Peking Legations. In the aftermath of the situation of unrest in the country, Allen was sent back to England on a furlough which lasted for about 2 years, a period which he used for studies in biblical theology, mainly the missionary principles and methods of St Paul, and the historical context of the growth and expansion of the early Church.

During his studies, Roland Allen discovered two great figures of the contemporary theological arena, both with a great reputation in biblical and historical research, and both clearly interdependent on each other: William M. Ramsay and Adolf von Harnack. Both had carried out careful studies in the life and context of St Paul and the mechanisms of the expansion of the early Church of the first century in the Roman Empire. ¹⁰ Ramsay’s investigations were readily at hand to Allen already during his furlough after the Boxer Rising, and von Harnack’s work was studied by him after his second return to England. Nevertheless, the findings by von Harnack were available already in Ramsay’s books as the two authors heavily depended on the findings of each other. Even if von Harnack in his general theological outlook was a representative of the Liberal Protestant School in Germany, he had an international reputation for being a careful and reliable scholar in the field of Church History. His findings have a lasting impact even today when the analysis of the situation and the challenges to the Church in a post-Christian society should be made. ¹¹

Two quotations from von Harnack’s book deserve to be noted, both of great importance to Allen in his search for a biblical and workable model of the local Church in its contemporary context of mission. Concerning the life of the early Church during the decades after St Paul, von Harnack writes:

In the church alone all blessings are to be had, in its ordinances and organizations. It is only the church firmly equipped with bishops, presbyters, and deacons, with common worship and with sacraments, which is the creation of God. . . . The common worship, with its centre in the celebration of the Supper, is the cardinal point. . . . Here every experience, every spiritual need, found nourishment. ¹²

There is no doubt Roland Allen found here some important cornerstones for his missiological building of a workable model for the growth and expansion of the Church in mission!

After returning to China in the end of 1902, Allen started a new work in Yung Ch’ing, a small city about 50 miles south of Peking. There he tried to put into practice the Pauline principles and methods which he had studied during his furlough. The concepts of self-support, self-government and self-extension were from the very beginning the guiding principles in his work. At an early stage he successively increased the withdrawal of his duties as a missionary, in order to promote the responsibility of the local Church and its growth, with the clear intent ‘to lead the Chinese to convert the Chinese’. ¹³ His key principle was ‘to treat the Church as a Church’.

The work in Yung Ch’ing was of great importance to Roland Allen. In one of his missionary reports, he made his evaluation: ‘The results exceeded my expectations’. ¹⁴ From there, he was prepared to move forward to new challenges elsewhere in the vast areas of northern China, but his weak health hindered him, and he had to return to England, a position from where he never physically again could face the Chinese challenges and see the possible fruits of his endeavours. ¹⁵

Back Home – Repatriated But Yet a Foreigner

To return ‘home’ after a period of intense work as an expatriate missionary in a distant land can often result in a hard experience. Sometimes it is easier to initially enter into a different cultural context than to return back to a situation which is no longer the same as the one you once upon a time left behind, partially because of your own internal change in the meantime. Re-culturation can therefore be harder than the initial in-culturation.

To Roland Allen his return to England became a difficult experience. He did not want to leave China, but he had to do so in 1903 for medical reasons. Having arrived back in England he began working as a parish priest in Chalfont St Peter, in the deep country of Buckinghamshire. He enjoyed his pastoral duties, but after some time he started to feel uneasy about what he regarded as a lax handling of the preparations and conditions for the Holy Baptism in a secularized context. His internal struggle finally ended up in a letter of resignation addressed to his parishioners dated 25 November 25, 1907, with the conclusion: ‘I cannot and will not do these things any longer’. ¹⁶ It was no easy decision to make, neither for himself nor for his family, but he felt at the end that he could not compromise any further with his basic sacramental principles.

After his resignation from Chalfont St Peter, Roland Allen never again took up ordinary parish work within the stipendiary system but sometimes he ministered in different parishes on a voluntary basis. Some of his time he spent working for the SPG in England but more and more he profiled himself as an independent freelance missiological writer and debater for some time connected to the interdenominational World Dominion Press where quite a number of his articles and reports were published.

During the years to come, without cutting off his contacts with his Catholic heritage, he developed a friendship and partnership with two Evangelical men, closely connected to the mentioned World Dominion Press: Mr. Sidney J. W. Clark, a Congregational layman and businessman, and Dr. Thomas Cochrane, a Presbyterian who had served as a missionary doctor in Peking, sent out by the London Missionary Society. Together they founded The Survey Application Trust in 1924 to a great extent financed by the private means of Sidney Clark. By its existence, this ‘Trust’ made it possible for Roland Allen to survive and to support his family and it was mainly ‘The Trust’ which financed his vast international exploration journeys, carried out in order to find out the conditions of the local Christians in different parts of the world, where priests were scarce and the Christians scattered around and without a frequent access to the celebration of the holy Eucharist in a local Church community. ¹⁷

The Local Church: ‘Fully Equipped’

What was the driving force behind Roland Allen’s writings and the debates which he wanted to initiate? Like so many other reformers within the worldwide Church his starting point was in the discovery of the spiritual needs of the local ‘pauperized’ Christians. Through his ‘incarnationally’ founded Catholic sacramentality, which he had encountered in the Tractarian tradition in Oxford, he had means for an analysis to see the necessity of the Sacraments in order to promote spiritual growth and expansion in the mission of the everyday Christian life. Confronted with the realities in China, and with further development through his biblical and historical studies in mind, he saw a pattern and a model which was at odds with the present Church system, based on a stiff dependency to the stipendiary system, and backed and enforced by the Western missionary societies.

What he saw in his vision was, in brief, a local Church, run according to the principles of self-government, self-support and self-propagation from the very beginning of its foundation, a visible Eucharistic community ‘fully equipped’ with voluntary ministers, ordained and subordinated to the Bishop, not with ‘Lay Readers’ because that system had made the local Christians ‘un-churched’ being deprived of the sacraments. The sign and identity of the local Church, as Allen’s vision had described it, was ‘a fully constituted Church’ and therefore the

life in the church . . . means life in a body in which the sacraments are inherent, organized so that the sacraments may be ever present in it. . . . Wherever an altar is set up, wherever a congregation is gathered together the Church should be in its fullness.

In such a community there is an inherent source of growth, because ‘the apostles established . . . churches fully equipped for growth and expansion’. ¹⁸

This was the model which Roland Allen had seen. His basic argument for advocating it was as simple as this: he felt a compulsion from the Holy Spirit to articulate what he had seen. He therefore could not keep quiet. ‘I was simply compelled . . . I had no choice’. ¹⁹

‘I Have a Profound Belief In the Power of the Sacraments’

Roland Allen’s thoughts and writings have been quoted by many missiologists of different backgrounds and spiritualities. He has for many years been referred to as a mission strategist, a prophet of a charismatic theology or an odd debater with a particular desire to tease Bishops. Of course, there are glimpses of truth in many of those characteristics but the basis of his theology is definitely to be found elsewhere. As I have shown in my dissertation of 1988/1989, Allen is basically a sacramental theologian with his roots in an incarnational Anglo-Catholic understanding of the Church. In his works we encounter a Church-centred missiology where the universal/Catholic Church is present and made visible in the Eucharistic faith and practice in the local Church. As he put it: ‘The universal is in the particular as truly as the particular is in the universal Church’. ²⁰ When gathered for the celebration of the Eucharist, the local Church makes the Catholic Church into a visible reality.

In order to make the local Church into a visible reality, four things are required, according to Allen: ‘A tradition of an elementary Creed, the Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion, Orders and the Holy Scriptures’. ²¹ These characteristics are not optional. Rather ‘the Ministry of Christ and the Sacraments of Christ are the foundations, not coping-stones, of a Church’. Therefore they are ‘necessary at the very beginning as at any time’. ²² Therefore the missionary task has a clear Catholic purpose: To ‘establish the Catholic Church in the world’. ²³

With this view on the Church as the fundamental factor in mission, Roland Allen turned out to be a severe critic of the system of ‘Mission Societies’, more or less independent from the established Church: A Society can never give birth to a Church. The basic missionary body is the Church. This biblical aspect from the time of the early Church should be followed even today: ‘Apostolic Churches begat Churches’. ²⁴

The Eucharist is the heart of the local Church. Therefore every Church, irrespective of its membership numbers, should be ‘fully equipped’ with the Word of God, the Sacraments, the Ministry, Prayers and daily Christian fellowship. This ‘equipment’ should be at hand, and the mutual responsibility for its implementation is in the hands of the local Bishop and the Christians who meet for the Eucharistic celebration. This is what Roland Allen meant with his pastoral summary: ‘To treat the Church as a Church’.

In consequence with this vision he could be quite harsh on Bishops who didn’t understand – or did not want to understand! – what he meant when he argued for the necessity of a diversified Ministry of both stipendiary priests, with a genuine theological education, with the duties of supervision, spiritual guidance and doctrinal responsibility, and voluntary clergy, recruited and chosen from within their own Church and presented to the Bishop for ordination in order to maintain the sacramental life in the local community. By refraining from facing the realities of ‘pauperized’ Christians, who have to live in a situation of spiritual malnutrition, the Bishops took a heavy responsibility on themselves. The access to the Eucharistic life then turned out to become a matter of economy, which Allen described with the formula: ‘No priests – no Sacraments’, inspired by his Anglo-Catholic friend Father H. H. Kelly (SSM) of Kelham, who already in 1916, from his missionary perspective, had criticized the consequences of a rigid adherence to the stipendiary system as the only possible model: ‘The poor are largely deprived of the Sacraments because priests are so expensive’. ²⁵

As an old man, living in the outskirts of Nairobi, with a very limited contact with the established Church of the place, Roland Allen seems to have given up his hope on the Bishops. He spent most of his time at home with his wife, writing on theological matters and working diligently with translating Swahili poems. His sacramental faith and practice remained with him all through his life, but during his last years he used to celebrate the daily Eucharist at home, in the context of his family and with occasional visitors, a service which he sometimes preferred to call ‘The Family Rite’.

Critical Reflections

Of course it is possible to call Roland Allen’s presentation of the missionary principles and methods, which he had found in his studies of St Paul and in his regrettably too short period of field experience, a simplification, but I would not agree to call it an oversimplification. With his strong persistency in arguing for his models of Church and Mission he confronted his readers to take a standpoint and start thinking further on the ways which he had marked out. Nobody, who seriously listens to his arguments, can remain unaffected. In that sense he was, to quote the words of his grandson Hubert J. B. Allen, a ‘prophet’, with all the advantages and problems which are included in that term.

Concerning Allen’s view on the recruitment and selection of candidates for Voluntary Clergy in the local Church it can very well be argued that his views are very idealistic and far from human realities, which are at stake also in a Christian community. Rivalry and other social conflicts are not absent from Christian contexts. Sometimes the problems are sublimated into a level where conflict and divisions are fostered instead of building unity and growth. This risk should be observed with great realism, but it is, as we all know, not restricted to the level of the local Church and its Voluntary Clergy. At all levels of the established Churches and denominations the same phenomenon can be found and studied. This fact should therefore not hinder us from a careful listening to the voice of Roland Allen and evaluate what he is advocating.

A certain weakness in Allen’s models can be found in the place of the preaching of the Word of God. When advocating for a model with the sacramental life in focus, the preaching is very often absent. This has been noted out by my former professor and tutor, the late Dean of Linköping, the Very Rev. Lars Österlin, whose father Gustaf Österlin was a priest in the Lutheran tradition of the Church of Sweden and working as a missionary in China shortly after the departure of Roland Allen. In the Chinese context, Rev. Gustaf Österlin to a great extent brought forward models of great resemblances to the ones advocated by Allen, but one of the main differences is, in accordance to his Lutheran heritage, the clear balance between the Word and the Sacraments. This is a very relevant observation, which deserves further reflections in another forum. ²⁶

Finally

In Tanzania there is a saying, in Kiswahili: ‘Kuandika ni kuchagua’, which translates as ‘to write is to select’. This proverb is indeed applicable to a limited article like this one on Roland Allen’s missiology as founded in the Eucharistic faith and practice of the local Church. During his lifetime, Allen wrote a great number of books, articles in different magazines, missionary reports, missionary surveys, ‘Letters to the Editor’, together with a number of published and refused manuscripts, typed as well as in his own handwriting. To cover all of it in one single article is of course not viable, but fortunately his own personal documents are well kept and ordered in the USPG Archives, deposited in a number of boxes in the Rhodes House Library in Oxford and thereby available for further research by interested scholars.

In a conversation with his grandson Hubert, in their house in Nairobi, the old Roland Allen tried to explain the possible impact of his books: ‘I don’t think anyone is going to understand them until I’ve been dead ten years’. ²⁷ He proved to be fairly right. Very few people understood his writings during his lifetime, but later on, slowly but persistently, his views and his findings have started to gain the importance which they deserve. I therefore dare to quote some words from my own summary in my dissertation from 1988/1989:

Roland Allen in his writings clearly and frequently emphasizes the necessity of the sacramental life as the foundation of the mission of the Church. The eucharistic experience is to Allen a necessary consequence of baptism. The frequent celebration of the eucharist as a corporate act of worship is regarded as the normal pattern in the local Church. This sacramental dimension was to him a matter of course and a condition necessary for the growth and expansion of the Church in Mission. ²⁸

The death of Roland Allen on 9 June, 1947, could be seen as the end of his mission, but in fact it was just a beginning. One of his faithful proponents, the late missionary Bishop of the Church of South India, The Right Rev. Dr. Lesslie Newbigin, should therefore be given the space to conclude this study with some wise episcopal words:

His voice has not been silent during all these years. Quietly but insistently it has continued to challenge the accepted assumptions of churches and missions, and slowly but steadily the number of those who found themselves compelled to listen has increased. ²⁹