Abstract
The impetus toward an indigenous Church missiology in the 20th century was defined and defended within Roland Allen’s missionary ecclesiology. This paper attempts to understand Roland Allen’s missionary ecclesiology which emerged from his apostolic ecclesiology and evangelical faith.
The focus of this article is to examine the missionary ecclesiology within the ministry of Roland Allen (1868–1947). Throughout the 20th century, Allen’s writings significantly challenged the methodology of Church mission – established and independent – disclosing hegemonic causes which hindered indigenously-led Church expansion. Today, a paradigmatic realignment has occurred wherein previous Christendom forms often associated with colonialism have given way to changing ecclesiastical structures within Global Christianity. In light of the unprecedented growth within non-Western Christianity in what is called the majority world – Africa, Asia and Latin America – Christianity’s centre of gravity has shifted from the dominant West to the majority world.
The facts disclose how some of Allen’s ideas of ‘biblical apostolic practice’ 1 previously rejected as unacceptable within Anglican ecclesiology are now considered mainstream practice, such as (1) the transference of missionary churches to indigenous converts; (2) the ordination of priests to a non-stipendiary ministry as an incipient step toward his voluntary clergy emphasis; (3) the weekly celebration of the eucharist; and (4) the replacement of denominational sectarianism with a proactive affirmation for Christian unity where all ‘share the one Spirit’ 2 within the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Anglican ecclesiology has made some significant adjustments to engage with Allen’s ideas concerning early Church practice. Today, the question is: Do Allen’s missionary ideas still have some contemporary relevance or are they passé?
Some years ago, Lesslie Newbigin recognized ‘a strange relevance’ 3 in Allen’s ideas. Firstly, he noted that Allen believed in the existence of universal apostolic principles which were relevant for the Church in any age. Allen foresaw the possibility for these principles to create spontaneous indigenous Church growth in the non-Western world a century ago while he was ministering within a colonial context. Current facts disclose that he was right, as independent and established churches have emerged out from under foreign hegemony which Allen predicted. This article attempts to understand the missiological situation which shaped Allen’s missionary theology and missionary ecclesiology.
Secondly, Allen’s apostolic principles have provided substance for ministerial flexibility within the indigenous Church in the new state of affairs. His vision for indigenous Church expansion transcended the changing Christendom milieu. What is so unique about Allen’s vision? Essentially, his vision encased a combination of Spirit and order – that is, pneumatology and catholic ecclesiology. His compelling faith in the ministry of the Holy Spirit to empower the Church to apply apostolic principles in any given situation was always seen through the lens of catholicity. On the one hand, his missionary theology encouraged freedom from unnecessary structures which tended to obstruct the ministry of the laity. On the other hand, he proposed the restoration of an ancient custom of apostolic order which he believed would advance the Church’s evangelism, particularly through the laity, to pioneer regions where the Church had no current witness. An engagement with the archival 4 evidence will attempt to show how the following two issues set the stage for Allen’s contribution to missionary ecclesiology: (1) the historical significance for what Allen believed were universal apostolic principles; and (2) how these apostolic principles provide flexibility within a framework of Spirit-driven catholicity to a changing environment.
World Christianity’s Need for a Missionary Ecclesiology
It was during Allen’s missionary experience in China (1895–1903) that his pneumatology was becoming more intertwined with his missiology, thus compelling a hope for the empowerment of a global indigenous Church. This incipient missionary theology – rooted in Anglican catholicity – began to embrace a seminal understanding for joint partnership in world mission. Within that decade, the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh (1910) assembled and Allen was thrilled to see how 1,215 delegates 5 gathered from various denominational persuasions and evidenced a ‘complete unity of spirit,’ 6 which he said ‘they discovered, not. . . made’. 7 Allen viewed this as an expression of unity among the delegates from the Western world. However, only 19 of these delegates, as Brian Stanley says, were from ‘the majority or non-Western world’. 8
A century later, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of Edinburgh’s World Missionary Conference, Christian leaders met in Cape Town, South Africa, for the CT2010 Congress. Something remarkable occurred at this congress which echoes Allen’s vision for the spontaneous expansion of the Church into frontier regions. Sixty-eight percent of the ministry representatives who attended Cape Town were from the non-Western world. 9 Allen’s missionary vision – referred to by many as prophetic – 10 is now being realized in non-Western Christianity through newer ecclesial forms dissimilar to former paternalistic structures, although, arguably, similar to elements of early Church practice. Today, African leadership realizes that the younger Churches have not yet faced ‘the reality of post-colonial Anglicanism, not just in terms of national Churches in the non-Western world, but in terms of Churches with increasing numbers, and the power that attends such growth’. 11 The point here is that Allen anticipated a need to develop a missionary theology which could augment the new situation of changing ecclesiological representations within global Christianity.
Toward a Missionary Theology and Missionary Ecclesiology
David Bosch’s work Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission 12 continues to be useful for understanding historic mission models. Yet, it was Michael Goheen 13 who drew attention to an essay Bosch wrote in 199114 which set out to address western culture’s need for its own missiology: Bosch’s ‘first order of business is a missionary ecclesiology’ 15 (emphasis added). Bosch’s analysis of how missiologists tend to separate mission from theology when studying the theology of mission, in contrast to, for example, Asian theology, which ‘has to some extent become missiology, while at the same time missiology has become theology’. 16 The same could be said of Africa. The difference is in the placement of emphasis on the nature of the Church. On the one hand, the Church is, as Walter Hobhouse stated ‘a missionary Church’. 17 On the other hand, during the early part of the 20th century when Western Protestantism was continuing to promote mission through its established agencies and voluntary mission societies, Allen began to analyze and confront various missionary methodologies which he believed had little to do with operating from what he believed to be a Pauline missionary theology for the planting of the Church. He made a fine distinction between ‘the organization of the Church as a missionary body and our modern missionary organization’. 18 For Allen, how the Church practices mission is either enhanced or diminished by its missionary ecclesiology.
Statement of the Problem
For Allen, imposing one’s cultural baggage on those of other cultures was not part of biblical evangelism, but a form of neo-Judaizing similar to what Paul addressed in Galatians 19 : ‘I mean converts who are not semi-Europeanised by conversion’. 20 Allen made distinctions between personal customs which he attempted to keep to himself and the customs of those to whom he ministered. However, how could he as a missionary and Chaplain to the British diplomatic mission 21 function within a corner of Christendom without imposing foreign customs on, in this case, the Chinese? Before answering this question it’s important to define ‘Christendom’ as Allen used the term.
Christendom
European Christendom mission for centuries operated out of organized structures – Empire and Church – designed to incorporate its converts into what Goheen described as ‘an official ecclesiastical status through legal establishment’. 22 The lines of authoritative structures between Church and state were often blurred. On the one hand, political powers struggled with Christendom ecclesiology and vice versa. On the other hand, both Church and state quite often disregarded institutional boundaries and operated in unison to push their own agenda. In terms of how Christian mission functioned in conjunction with colonialism, many authors highlight the positive developmental nature of this undertaking while many others view this as a negative influence and imposition by the foreigners.
Firstly, take for example the two sides of this Christendom distinction as articulated by Melanie Phillips
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when she made this contrast between the archbishops of Canterbury and York concerning colonialism
As secular society denounced the crimes of British cultural and political imperialism, so the Church of England abased itself for its own crime of religious imperialism. The archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams . . . Addressing the Anglican conference in Cairo in 2005, he said that the Church had taken ‘cultural captives’ by exporting hymns and liturgies to remote parts of the world.
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. . . It took a black Ugandan cleric, Dr. John Sentamu, when he was enthroned as archbishop of York in 2005, to scorn publicly this white postcolonial and post-missionary guilt by denouncing multiculturalism, defending the British Empire and praising the English culture it spread around the world.
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These two different perspectives from Church of England archbishops concerning the effects of British colonialism are indicative of current cultural trends which attempt to make sense of Christendom’s blessings and curses. It would be essential to see this in light of, secondly, a commentary on Roland Allen’s ministry in China and India. On the one hand, when commenting on Allen’s analysis of colonial rule in both China and India, the historian Lamin Sanneh directs attention to ‘prohibitions and impositions of Christendom’
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which eventually caused the converts to confront the foreign missionaries, Allen said,
It is you who hold us down: it is your insistence upon your Western creeds which has crippled our thought: it is you who will not put us into positions of authority: it is you who will not trust us with the money which you have taught us is necessary for any religious expansion.
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Sanneh’s citation of Allen above gets to the heart of Christendom’s weakness when it perpetuated paternalism. On the other hand, Sanneh points out Christendom’s strength of ‘voluntary’ missionary societies within a modern context which sent missionaries – like Allen – and ‘received less support from governments than in any period of the history of the religion since the enthronement of Charlemagne’. 28 One ought to come to terms with this tension.
It was within the British Empire that Allen began to propose a missionary ecclesiology which he believed was apostolic and transcendent in comparison to practices within the colonial environment in which he concluded was non-Pauline and demeaning. For instance he wrote extensively about the existing missionary practice of ‘mission stations’. He interpreted these ‘mission stations’ as an imposed system designed to extend a foreign sub-culture within an indigenous setting. In other words, the ‘mission station’ system could be interpreted as an ‘ecclesiastical nanny state’ in miniature form. For Allen this was not the Church. Allen questioned the validity of this practice by pointing out that it produced a dependency on foreign controlling subsidies and was demeaning to personal dignity because of ‘the complaint that the natives are unable to stand alone’. 29 This form of missionary hegemony is what Allen passionately opposed.
Allen’s argument for an indigenous Christianity, that being, a self-governing, self-supporting and self-extending Church 30 was foremost in his missiology. Allen was never opposed to the sending of foreign missionaries anywhere so long as they faithfully communicated the Christian faith in a facilitating way. Even so, after missionary work in China he described the time when a missionary in his opinion ought to retire when ‘Chinese thought is permeated with Christian doctrine and belief’. 31 And then, as soon as a faith community took ownership of the apostolic faith, Allen believed it was the responsibility of bishops to ordain native 32 leadership and enable the resident missionaries to transfer all ecclesiastical responsibilities to the indigenous churches. This procedure would hasten the missionaries’ retirement 33 from current work and relocate them to other missionary frontiers.
What happened to Allen during this time was a formation of a missionary ecclesiology defined through the lens of Christendom’s model and today’s emphasis of ecumenical missiologies and missional ecclesiologies. 34 This set the stage for Allen’s Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (1912) where he perceptively challenged the validity of Western mission societies’ methods of paternalism and devolution. This publication radically demarcated a missionary theology based upon apostolic principles and was designed to empower the indigenous Church from its inception.
Post-Christendom Missionary Theology
Now that Christianity’s centre of gravity continues to shift toward the majority world with a narrative of new indigenous Church growth – precisely reflecting Allen’s earlier predictions – can there be a blending of the new with the old? Allen thought so.
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In 1913 he wrote:
Only in the last few years have we begun to grasp at all clearly what a world-wide communion might mean. . . We begin to understand what the foundation of native Churches in China or in Japan, in India and in Africa may mean for us all, bringing to us new conceptions of the manifold working of the Spirit of Christ.
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Now, almost 100 years later, there continues to be an expressed need for a new missiological paradigm to address current changing structures within non-Western countries. There is a need, as Newbigin put it, ‘to escape from the rigidities of the old “Christendom” patterns’. 37 Again, the question is, can a missiology rooted in Allen’s apostolic principles for missionary ecclesiology contribute to this changing context?
Why a Missionary Ecclesiology?
Roland Allen’s missionary ecclesiology organically developed out of his missionary theology. When Allen studied at St. John’s, Oxford, he did not read theology
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rather he was mentored by the historian, W. H. Hutton.
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So what contributed to Allen’s formative theology? By the time he was sent as a missionary priest to China in 1895, it was obvious how committed he was to theological education. After 2 years in China it was reported:
The opening of the college at Peking for the training of Chinese youths for the Native Ministry of the Church is the first subject of permanent interest. It is under the care of the Rev. Roland Allen, and it is earnestly hoped that his health may stand the strain of the work, and that good fruit may result from it.
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Allen and others began to translate into Chinese various portions from the Apostolic Fathers for a course of study on ‘the first three centuries of Church history’. 41 This commitment to patristic historical theology was ‘deeply influenced by the Anglo-Catholic faculty at Pusey House’ 42 while studying at Oxford. This influence led Allen to show how the churches in China were spiritually united with the historic Church.
What was so unique about Allen’s missiology to influence a broad base within Christianity? Michael Nazir-Ali seems to think it was due to his ‘primitive catholicity’ for both the local congregation and the universal Church to embrace not only ‘an ecclesiology of the Spirit but also one of order’. 43 If Nazir-Ali is correct, then Allen’s work ought to contribute to Christianity’s shift from the West to the majority world. Allen’s compelling belief in a pneumatological catholicity – Spirit-directed apostolic order – has shaped his missionary ecclesiology. And, it is this type of missionary ecclesiology that can provide elements of continuity with apostolic Christianity – outside of empire categories – while at the same time experience the charisma within the life of the whole Church.
As to which of his ideas contributed to the construction of modern missiology, succinctly, as Newbigin has stated, it was Allen’s emphasis on what constitutes an established congregation, namely ‘the Bible, the sacraments, and the apostolic ministry’. 44 Actually, Allen included a ‘basic creed’ 45 along with these other three essentials. Other historians have recognized Allen’s specific emphasis on principles. For example, Lamin Sanneh has commented that ‘Allen wrote perspicaciously on Missionary Methods and principles as well as on the philosophy of cross-cultural mission . . . at a time when the church and his contemporaries thought almost exclusively in Eurocentric, Christendom terms’. 46 Sanneh’s comment here isolates Allen’s cross-cultural missiology as a pivotal theology for a changing global environment from former Christendom models toward a developing Church within the non-Western world. For Allen, mission was not a task of the Church but an outgrowth of her very being. In other words, he believed that mission is defined not by what the Church does but what it is, and therefore, it is not a task but an organic expression of its very being. Modern theologians today refer to this as the Church being missional, that being, a missional ecclesiology. 47 A further disclosure of this missionary ecclesiology is necessary; however, a closer examination of Allen’s ecclesiology takes priority.
Allen’s Ecclesiology: E Pluribus Unum
Allen understood the relationship between particular churches and the universal Church as follows: ‘The Church is a Body, the Sacraments are the rites of the Body, and the Priesthood is in the Body. The universal is in the particular as truly as the particular is in the universal Church’. 48 First of all, the prevailing ecclesiology, according to Allen, was that there is only one Church which contains all particular or local Christian churches – e pluribus unum (out of many, one). This conception of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, he believed, was biblically rooted in an understanding that the apostles, prophets and teachers – ‘wandering evangelists’ 49 – were the gifted missionaries that planted and equipped the local churches and that they were responsible for establishing the foundation of the Church. Allen argued that these ‘wandering evangelists’ were basically itinerant missionaries who frequently operated ‘outside’ the established order, 50 even though they were capable of functioning ‘within’ the established structure if the resident elected leadership (that is, bishops and deacons) 51 accepted their vocation. Interestingly, a similar line of reasoning has recently been developed by Stuart Murray: ‘Apostles are translocal rather than local leaders, and their focus is on mission rather than maintenance’. 52 Their vocation focuses on establishing the pioneer church for a short term, then, delegating authority as soon as possible thereafter, thereby enabling retirement from the young church, in order to plant other churches. This is a critical point in understanding Allen’s ecclesiology.
Secondly, Allen believed that since the Church is one, Christian unity is inescapable. In his day, especially during the conferences in Edinburgh and Calcutta, along with the Pan-Anglican Conference where ‘Christians met and felt not simply that they must find a way out of their divisions, but that they were much more united than they expected’
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he rejected sectarianism and embraced Christian unity. Allen argued against the idea of ‘national’ churches if it meant that these churches were not united to the universal Church. That would mean, to use as an example, there is no mandate for an ‘American’ Church or ‘British’ Church as separate or distinct from an ‘African’ Church or ‘Asian’ Church. Allen’s arguments for ‘indigenous’ bishops in Africa meant that these ‘African’ bishops would be peers in full-standing with fellow bishops in America and Britain in the one Church. In other words, Allen argued against ethnic identities that asserted patronizing characteristics and hegemonic customs, as evidenced in Paul’s refutation of the Judaizers’ practices outlined in his epistle to the churches of Galatia. Allen said:
We have seen that St Paul did not set out on his missionary journeys as a solitary prophet, the teacher of a solitary individualistic religion. He was sent forth as the messenger of a Church, to bring men into fellowship with that body. His converts were not simply united one to another by bonds of convenience arising from the fact that they lived in the same place, believed the same doctrine, and thought it would be a mutual assistance to form a society. They were members one of another in virtue of their baptism. Each was united to every other Christian everywhere, by the closest of spiritual ties, communion in the one Spirit. . . He constantly spoke of the churches of Macedonia, of Achaia, of Galatia, of Syria and Cilicia, of Asia as unities.
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Allen argued that Paul and Peter emphasized the equal forsaking of ethnic identity for the sake of their common or non-culturally mediated identity in what he believed was the holy nation (I Peter 2:9–10), that being, the Church (Galatians 3:26–29). To illustrate Allen’s argument here, consider the sophisticated marginalization by the Archbishop of Canterbury over the past decade of ‘fellow’ African bishops and archbishops, who, although they numerically represent the highest percentage of Anglican membership, are treated as though Canterbury’s leadership knows best (papal or paternalistic?). In April 2012, this inequality among fellow Primates was addressed by the Primates of Nigeria (Nicholas Okoh) and Kenya (Eliud Wabukala), who, speaking to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) in London on 6 April, 2012, where delegates – representing some 55 million ‘churchgoing Anglicans’ from 30 countries – said:
It seems that the Church of England is not carrying along everybody in the Communion, and that is why you can see there is a crisis; if we solve the problem, we have to change the system. . . We have to go back to the basic principles and develop new structures while remaining firmly within the Anglican Communion. Our Communion has come of age, and it is now time that its leadership should be focused not on one person or one Church, however hallowed its history, but on the one historic faith we confess.
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Roland Allen could not have said it any better than what was said by these two African archbishops. Two fundamental phrases came through their statements: (a) ‘we have to change the system’; and (b) ‘we have to go back to the basic principles and develop new structures’. This succinctly argues Allen’s case concerning the Church as one.
Thirdly, Allen spoke of the distinction and unity between the Church and churches. ‘For him the Church was prior to the churches. The churches did not make up the Church, but the Church established the churches’.
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A similar line of reasoning is found in the writings of the Anglo-Catholic Charles Gore. Gore’s contribution to the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh (1910) had a specific impact on this catholic understanding of the Church’s existence within all nations. Brian Stanley, in his discussion of Gore’s influence as chairman on Commission III and the Commission’s report regarding the education of Asian indigenous leaders, draws attention to the problem of how the Church might avoid ‘appearing as an “exotic” European implant while still maintaining the demands (so important to Gore) of catholicity’.
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Gore argued for a clear gospel contextualization so that indigenous leadership where:
all Churches hold the same faith, use the same Scriptures, celebrate the same sacraments, and inhere in the same universal religion, each local Church should from the first have the opportunity of developing a local character and colour. . . In this way can ‘the glory and honour of all nations’ – that is, their own distinctive genius and its products – best be brought within the circle of the Holy City.
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Stanley correctly recognizes Gore’s eschatological allusion to Revelation 21, 59 which discloses how representatives – ‘the kings’ (οί βασιλϵĩς) – from all nations bring distinct gifts to the Holy City (that is, the Church). Gore’s catholicity presupposed an eschatological Church – the Holy City – or what the Apostle Peter called ‘an holy nation’ (I Peter 2:9) which consists of Christians from every ethnicity. Gore’s ecclesiological belief embraced an ‘interracial catholicity’. 60 Gore’s contribution to the Conference seemed to generate an incipient vision of world Christianity even though only small percentages from non-Western nations were represented. The next century would tell a different narrative.
In 1920, 10 years after The World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, the Anglican Communion’s encyclical letter for the Lambeth Conference of 1920, addressed ‘Missionary Problems’
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as follows:
No community of Christians has a right to attempt to produce a replica of itself in a foreign country which it evangelizes. . . . Foreign missionaries should set before themselves one ideal, and one only: to plant the Catholic Church needs the fullness of the nations. . . . He must leave to the converts the task of finding out their national response to the revelation of God in Christ, and their national way of walking in the fellowship of the Saints by the help of the One Spirit. Thus will the glory of the nations be brought into the Holy City.
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The evidence of the Lambeth Conference of 1920 appears to point to Gore’s influence earlier, especially his specific ‘theme of global catholicity’ 63 and eschatological understanding of the ‘one’ Church from all the nations. The same understanding is articulated in Allen’s ecclesiology.
Roland Allen’s Missionary Ecclesiology
Allen’s credo was ‘I believe in “the Church”’
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which unpacked even further meant that in ‘the beginning the Church was a missionary society’.
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Allen said:
But there is another view of missionary work. Some people have sometimes been inclined to believe that the duty of the missionary is not to reproduce Anglican parties and English manners and forms, but rather to plant amongst the people the principles of the Gospel. Some have dreamed of native Churches united to the Anglican body by unity of faith, creeds, orders, sacraments, charity, rather than by outward organization and external form; that the Churches of the future shall be infant daughters of the older body, not slavish copies of a full-grown society and stereotyped institution.
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Hubert Allen believes that his grandfather’s ecclesiology was influenced by the idea of:
handing over to people what F.D. Maurice called the ‘Signs of the Kingdom’ – the Creed, the Bible, the Ministry, and the Sacraments – and then leaving the Church’s further growth to the Holy Spirit, without seeking constantly to train and to control. . .
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Is there any evidence to suggest that Allen’s use of Maurice’s ‘Signs of the Kingdom’ comes as a direct influence of Allen engaging with Maurice’s ideas? After examination of Allen’s archives, the only evidence to make this assertion are seen in two specific emphases which both writers use: (1) as mentioned already, the Creed, the Bible, the Ministry, and the Sacraments; and (2) the constant use of ‘principles’ in contrast to ‘systems’. Both of these emphases permeate Maurice’s magnum opus The Kingdom of Christ.
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Apart from Maurice’s assumed influence on Allen’s ecclesiology it is necessary to make the following distinction. It would be inaccurate to say that Maurice’s ‘quasi-universalism’
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with a liberal interpretation of eternal damnation had any impact on Allen’s theological formation. Allen’s belief relied upon the Pauline eschatological Day of Judgment. Allen said that Paul:
proclaimed that the man who was ‘in Christ’ was ‘in the way of salvation’ ‘saved,’ and the man who was not in Christ was perishing. . . One day I think we shall return to these stern doctrines, realizing in them a truth more profound than we now know; and then we shall preach them with conviction, and being convinced ourselves we shall convince others. ‘Knowing the terror of the Lord’ we shall persuade men, to the great advancement of the Kingdom of God.
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These are the words of a Biblicist, not a universalist. For example, Susan Harper argues that Allen’s Pauline influence encouraged Bishop Azariah and the diocese of Dornakal to embrace ‘the ancient church as a model’ to follow and subsequently calls Allen ‘a biblical primitivist’. 71 For Allen, everything was critiqued through the grid of a traditionally catholic understanding of the Bible, Church tradition and reason. How did Allen incorporate these principles within his missionary ecclesiology?
The Signs of the Kingdom as a Framework For Missionary Ecclesiology
After years of training indigenous leadership in North East China (1895–1903), Allen recognized the dilemma between supervising a well-intentioned institutional ministry and planting ‘the principles of the gospel’ among indigenous leadership. As early as 1901 he made reference to these four ‘fundamental principles concisely articulated by the Lambeth Conference of 1888’.
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These essential principles are located throughout Allen’s writings though quite often contextualized and modified for indigenous use and define his understanding for the ‘core’ requirements of catholic Christianity, previously discussed by Maurice but later articulated at Lambeth. Due to the significant nature for Allen’s use of these fundamental principles, it is incumbent to articulate these points which are rooted within the historical context of 19th-century Anglican thinking originally proposed by the Protestant Episcopal Church’s earlier work drawn up at The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886) and subsequently submitted at the Lambeth Conference (1888) as Resolution 11. Upon examination of the preface to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral the evidence points to certain core beliefs that the House of Bishops believed were the essentials of ‘Catholic’ unity, that being:
. . . the Christian unity can be restored only by the return of all Christian communions to the principles of unity exemplified by the undivided Catholic Church during the first ages of its existence. . . As inherent parts of this sacred deposit, and therefore as essential to the restoration of unity among the divided branches of Christendom. . .
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The substance of this Quadrilateral was submitted to Lambeth (1888) and resulted in accepting the following:
a) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as ‘containing all things necessary to salvation’, and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.
b) The Apostles’ Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
c) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself – Baptism and the Supper of the Lord.
d) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church. 74
In what way did Allen’s ecclesiology stem from these four principles? Firstly, upon analysis of Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (1912), Allen understood these principles to be rooted in Pauline ecclesiology when he said ‘Four things, then, we see St Paul deemed necessary for the establishment of his churches. . . A tradition or elementary Creed, the Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion, Orders, and the Holy Scriptures’. 75 The substance of Resolution 11 underpins Allen’s thought – seen through his prescriptive Pauline lens – with few exceptions: (1) Resolution 11 emphasizes the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, whereas, Allen specifies that only a basic ‘tradition or elementary Creed’ is necessary for the planting of an indigenous church; and (2) Resolution 11 necessitated the ‘undivided’ Church’s practice where the ‘Historic Episcopate’ provided oversight, whereas, Allen only makes reference to ‘Orders’. However, one cannot assume a non-episcopal ecclesiology here due to Allen’s references to the necessity for and responsibilities of bishops within the Church. 76
Secondly, some years later, when discussing how the missionary ought to relate with the diocesan bishop concerning a network of indigenous churches, Allen says the ‘little group must be fully equipped with spiritual power and authority; and the bishop ought to deliver to them the Creed, the Gospel, the Sacraments and the Ministry by solemn deliberate act’ (emphasis added). 77 In terms of differences Allen’s catholic ecclesiology necessitates, (1) the episcopal office to deliberately oversee the affairs of the diocesan churches as a senior father and defender of the Christian faith; (2) the bishops intentionally administer the ‘Orders’ even though here Allen used the interchangeable word ‘Ministry’ to describe the offices of deacon, presbyter and bishop; and (3) the bishops calling for delivering to the diocesan churches what Allen here calls ‘the Gospel’ – not negating Resolution 11s emphasis on the ‘Holy Scriptures’ – but rather alluding to the Anglican Ordinal. During the consecration of a bishop the archbishop prays ‘. . .Grant, we beseech thee, to this thy servant such grace, that he may evermore be ready to spread abroad thy Gospel, the glad tidings of reconciliation with thee’ (emphasis added). 78 Here is Anglican order describing the bishop’s responsibility to spread the ‘Gospel’.
Allen’s ecclesiology maintains a distinct episcopal order which assumed the bishop’s pastoral nature of service and guardianship. According to Allen, this concept for enormous diocesan jurisdictions is contrary to early Church practice. For example, Allen said ‘When Ignatius wrote “Do nothing without the bishop,” the bishop was not a remote person who might, or might not, be able to visit the place once or twice in his lifetime’. 79 The ‘professionalism’ in episcopacy which negates the relational ‘spiritual’ shepherding presence and interaction with ‘the flock,’ Allen argued, is an abdication of the nature of the episcopal office.
Conclusion
The intention of this article was to explain the dynamics which helped shape Roland Allen’s missionary ecclesiology. His vision for the expansion of the indigenous Church combined through – Spirit and order – was seen to transcend the changing Christendom milieu. Allen’s ability to systematically confront missionary methodologies of paternalism and devolution originated from his missiology which was rooted in his understanding of Pauline practice. And, his tenacious vision for missionaries to work in conjunction with responsible local bishops by applying substantive principles for the establishment of the Church through – Bible, Creed, Sacraments, Ministry – he believed could facilitate the new state of affairs in global Christianity. These factors are presented to provide an historical understanding of Roland Allen’s missionary ecclesiology.