Missionary methods

In little more than ten years St Paul established the Church in four provinces of the Empire, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. Before AD 47 there were no churches in these provinces; in AD 57 St Paul could speak as if his work there was done, and could plan extensive tours into the far west without anxiety lest the churches which he had founded might perish in his absence for want of his guidance and support.

The work of the Apostle during these ten years can therefore be treated as a unity. Whatever assistance he may have received from the preaching of others, it is unquestioned that the establishment of the churches in these provinces was really his work. In the pages of the New Testament he, and he alone, stands forth as their founder. And the work which he did was really a completed work. So far as the foundation of the churches is concerned, it is perfectly clear that the writer of the Acts intends to represent St Paul’s work as complete. The churches were really established. Whatever disasters fell upon them in later years, whatever failure there was, whatever ruin, that failure was not due to any insufficiency or lack of care and completeness in the Apostle’s teaching or organization. When he left them he left them because his work was fully accomplished.

This is truly an astonishing fact. That churches should be founded so rapidly, so securely, seems to us today, accustomed to the difficulties, the uncertainties, the failures, the disastrous relapses of our own missionary work, almost incredible. Many missionaries in later days have received a larger number of converts than St Paul; many have preached over a wider area than he; but none have so established churches. We have long forgotten that such things could be. We have long accustomed ourselves to accept it as an axiom of missionary work that converts in a new country must be submitted to a very long probation and training, extending over generations before they can be expected to be able to stand alone. Today if a man ventures to suggest that there may be something in the methods by which St Paul attained such wonderful results worthy of our careful attention, and perhaps of our imitation, he is in danger of being accused of revolutionary tendencies.

Yet this is manifestly not as it should be. It is impossible but that the account so carefully given by St Luke of the planting of the churches in the Four Provinces should have something more than a mere archaeological and historical interest. Like the rest of the Holy Scriptures it was 'written for our learning'. It was certainly meant to be something more than the romantic history of an exceptional man, doing exceptional things under exceptional circumstances—a story from which ordinary people of a later age can get no more instruction for practical missionary work than they receive from the history of the Cid, or from the exploits of King Arthur. It was really intended to throw light on the path of those who should come after.

But it is argued that as a matter of fact St Paul was an exceptional man living in exceptional times, preaching under exceptional circumstances; that he enjoyed advantages in his birth, his education, his call, his mission, his relationship to his hearers, such as have been enjoyed by no other; and that he enjoyed advantages in the peculiar constitution of society at the moment of his call such as to render his work quite exceptional. To this I must answer: (1) That St Paul’s missionary method was not peculiarly St Paul’s, he was not the only missionary who went about establishing churches in those early days. The method in its broad outlines was followed by his disciples, and they were not all men of exceptional genius. It is indeed universal, and outside the Christian Church has been followed by reformers, religious, political, social, in every age and under most diverse conditions. It is only because he was a supreme example of the spirit, and power with which it can be used, that we can properly call the method St Paul’s. (2) That we possess today an advantage of inestimable importance in that we have the printing press and the whole of the New Testament where St Paul had only the Old Testament in Greek. (3) That however highly we may estimate St Paul’s personal advantages or the assistance which the conditions of his age afforded, they cannot be so great as to rob his example of all value for us. In no other work do we set the great masters wholly on one side, and teach the students of today that whatever they may copy, they may not copy them, because they lived in a different age under exceptional circumstances and were endowed with exceptional genius. It is just because they were endowed with exceptional genius that we say their work is endowed with a universal character. Either we must drag down St Paul from his pedestal as the great missionary, or else we must acknowledge that there is in his work that quality of universality.

The cause which has created this prejudice against the study of the Pauline method is not far to seek. It is due to the fact that every unworthy, idle and slip-shod method of missionary work has been fathered upon the Apostle. Men have wandered over the world, 'preaching the Word', laying no solid foundations, establishing nothing permanent, leaving no really instructed society behind them, and have claimed St Paul’s authority for their absurdities. They have gone through the world, spending their time in denouncing ancient religions, in the name of St Paul. They have wandered from place to place without any plan or method of any kind, guided in their movements by straws and shadows, persuaded they were imitating St Paul on his journey from Antioch to Troas. Almost every intolerable abuse that has ever been known in the mission field has claimed some sentence or act of St Paul as its original.

It is in consequence of this, because in the past we have seen missionary work made ridiculous or dangerous by the vagaries of illiterate or unbalanced imitators of the Apostle, that we have allowed ourselves to be carried to the opposite extreme, and to shut our eyes to the profound teaching and practical wisdom of the Pauline method.

Secondly, people have adopted fragments of St Paul’s method and have tried to incorporate them into alien systems, and the failure which resulted has been used as an argument against the Apostle’s method. For instance, people have baptized uninstructed converts and the converts have fallen away; but St Paul did not baptize uninstructed converts apart from a system of mutual responsibility which ensured their instruction. Again, they have gathered congregations and have left them to fend for themselves, with the result that the congregations have fallen back into heathenism. But St Paul did not gather congregations, he planted churches, and he did not leave a church until it was fully equipped with orders of ministry, sacraments and tradition. Or again, they have trusted native helpers with the management of mission funds, and these helpers have grievously misused them; but St Paul did not do this. He had no funds with which to entrust anyone. These people have committed funds in trust to individual native helpers and have been deceived; but St Paul left the church to manage its own finance. These people have made the helpers responsible to them for honest management; but St Paul never made any church render an account of its finances to him. Or again, Europeans have ordained ill-educated native helpers and have repented of it. But they have first broken the bonds which should have united those whom they ordained to those to whom they were to minister, and then have expected them to be ministers of a foreign system of church organization with which neither the ministers nor their congregations were familiar. St Paul did not do this. He ordained ministers of the Church for the Church, and he instituted no elaborate constitution. When these false and partial attempts at imitating the Apostie’s method have failed, men have declared that the apostolic method was at fault and was quite unsuited to the condition and circumstances of present-day missions. The truth is that they have neither understood nor practised the Apostle’s method at all.

There is yet another and a more weighty reason: St Paul’s method is not in harmony with the modern Western spirit. We modern teachers from the West are by nature and by training persons of restless activity and boundless self-confidence. We are accustomed to assume an attitude of superiority towards all Eastern peoples, and to point to our material progress as the justification of our attitude. We are accustomed to do things ourselves for ourselves, to find our own way, to rely upon our own exertions, and we naturally tend to be impatient with others who are less restless and less self-assertive than we are. We are accustomed by long usage to an elaborate system of church organization, and a peculiar code of morality. We cannot imagine any Christianity worthy of the name existing without the elaborate machinery which we have invented. We naturally expect our converts to adopt from us not only essentials but accidentals. We desire to impart not only the Gospel, but the Law and the Customs. With that spirit, St Paul’s methods do not agree, because they were the natural outcome of quite another spirit, the spirit which preferred persuasion to authority. St Paul distrusted elaborate systems of religious ceremonial, and grasped fundamental principles with an unhesitating faith in the power of the Holy Ghost to apply them to his hearers and to work out their appropriate external expressions in them. It was inevitable that methods which were the natural outcome of the mind of St Paul should appear as dangerous to us as they appeared to the Jewish Christians of his own day. The mere fact that they can be made to bear a shallow resemblance to the methods of no method is sufficient to make the 'apostles of order' suspicious. In spite of the manifest fact that the Catholic Church was founded by them, they appear uncatholic to those who live in daily terror of schism. It seems almost as if we thought it uncatholic to establish the Church too fast.

But that day is passing. In face of the vast proportions of the work to be done, we are day by day seeking for some new light on the great problem how we may establish the Catholic Church in the world. In this search, the example of the Apostle of the Gentiles must be of the first importance to us. He succeeded in doing what we so far have only tried to do. The facts are unquestionable. In a very few years, he built the Church on so firm a basis that it could live and grow in faith and in practice, that it could work out its own problems, and overcome all dangers and hindrances both from within and without. I propose in this book to attempt to set forth the methods which he used to produce this amazing result.

I am not writing a book on St Paul’s doctrine. I do not feel it necessary to argue over again the foundations of the faith. I am a churchman, and I write as a churchman. I naturally use terms which imply church doctrine. But the point to which I want to call attention is not the doctrine, which has been expounded and defended by many, but the Apostle’s method. A true understanding of the method does not depend upon a true interpretation of the doctrine, but upon a true appreciation of the facts. About the facts there is very general agreement: about the doctrine there is very little agreement. E.g.— It is almost universally agreed that St Paul taught his converts the rite of baptism: it is very far from agreed what he meant by baptism. I use about baptism the terms of the Church of which I am a member. but my argument would be equally applicable if I used terms which implied a Zwinglian doctrine. Similarly I use about the orders of the ministry the terms natural to one who believes in apostolic succession. But the general force of my argument would not be affected if

I used the terms natural to a Presbyterian or a Wesleyan. I suppose that I should scarcely need to alter more than a word or two, if I believed in 'the Churches' as firmly as I believe in 'the Church'. I hope, then, that, if I am happy enough to find readers who do not accept my ecclesiastical position, they will not allow themselves to be led away into the wilds of a controversy which I have tried as far as possible to exclude; and will rather seek to consider the method of the Apostle’s work which I set forth than to find fault with the use of terms or expressions which imply a doctrine which they do not hold.

Neither am I attempting to describe the character of the Apostle or his special qualifications for the work, or his special preparation for it, still less am I attempting to write his life. I propose to deal simply with the foundation of the churches in the four provinces of Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, Asia, in the ten years which covered the three missionary journeys. I wish to suggest an answer to the following questions: