EMQ » October–December 2018 » Volume 54 Issue 4
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder”]J. D. Payne
Roland Allen (1868–1947) was one of the greatest missionary thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings have influenced most missionaries today. Even outside of missiological literature, his works show up in the bibliographies of Pauline scholars and theologians.
Many principles and guidelines accepted as commonplace today were foreign during Allen’s time, and he worked doggedly to change that. In a poignant story, Hubert J. B. Allen recalls asking his grandfather if he could read his books, to which the senior Allen responded, “Oh, yes, you can read them by all means—but you won’t understand them; I don’t think anyone is going to understand them until I’ve been dead ten years.”[1]
It was after the 1952 joint conference of the WCC and the International Missionary Council at Willingen (Germany) that Allen’s works became more influential. It fact, his popularity increased in some circles to such a degree that “he’d have been horrified to find himself transformed almost into a cult figure.”[2] Now, the Church is at a point where many people are under Allen’s sway and do not know it.
The irony is that little biographical information exists on such an influential man.[3] This paucity of data makes the hunt for his spiritually somewhat challenging. The researcher is able to consult a few secondary sources for insight, but mostly has to wade through a large number of Roland Allen’s books and articles. A cursory glance at a few of his book titles quickly informs the researcher that the Allen bibliography consists of works consumed mainly with missionary activity and not personal devotion: Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?, Missionary Principles, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, and The Ministry of Expansion. Therefore, discernment of his spirituality has to be pieced together from various writings.
Family and Formation
The best place to begin to understand Allen’s value of matters of the soul is to start with his family heritage. The spiritual inheritance he received established a foundation on which matters of his heart developed. Though his thinking did mature and change over the years, he never moved too far from his spiritual upbringing. I am indebted to Allen’s grandson, Hubert J. B. Allen, for the biography Roland Allen: Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet. Unless otherwise noted, the biographical information in this article is taken from his book.
Allen was born to Charles Fletcher (1835–1873) and Priscilla (1839–1935) Allen in England on December 29,1868. He was the sixth of seven children. At four weeks of age, he was baptized in the building of St. Werburgh’s Church. The senior Allen was a clergyman in the Church of England and died in Belize while his son was four years old. Allen’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Henry Malpas, was vicar of Awre in Gloucestershire. In addition to knowing little of his father, Allen’s grandparents died before he was ten years old. His mother was the formative influence in his life. Three of the Allen boys became clergymen after college.
Priscilla Allen had relatives who were Plymouth Brethren, including her younger sister who was known to carry gospel tracts in her bag and share them with the poor who loitered in parks. While Priscilla was not Brethren, she was of a “strongly evangelical persuasion.”
One wonders if Priscilla’s influence was related to Allen’s missionary calling. Allen wrote that from childhood, he wanted to serve God. Holding “a conviction that to be ignorant of God’s Love revealed in Christ was to be in a most miserable state,” he understood the importance of making disciples. This conviction manifested itself when he was four years of age. After hearing “there were men who had never been told the Gospel,” Allen cried out, “Then I shall go and tell them.”[4]
Long into adulthood, Allen would make a passing comment to the Bishop of Assam connecting his willingness to stand on his convictions—even bucking cherished traditions—with his upbringing. “My mother,” he wrote, “was certainly right when she taught me that to speak of oneself as obeying the Church, and to speak of oneself as obeying Christ are not identical.”[5]
Convictions and Calling
Allen’s convictions would often bring him into conflict with others. One only has to read the title of his most popular book, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?, to understand the author clearly had provocateur-tendencies. But Allen was not prone to conflict for conflict’s sake. The actions that manifested themselves from his convictions were deeply rooted in his walk with God. And this spirituality was grounded deeply in the Scriptures and experience.
It was during his undergraduate studies at Oxford that Allen was greatly influenced by the Anglo-Catholic faculty at Pusey House, near the college. Its principal, Charles Gore was one of the founders of the “Liberal Catholic” tradition among High Anglicans. In addition to Gore, Father Philip Waggett, a sacramental theologian, and librarian, F. E. Brightman, were other influences. Brightman was a scholar and interested in the spiritually of the Eastern Churches. Hubert Allen notes it has been argued that Brightman’s influence may have attributed to Allen’s ecclesiocentric understanding of mission. Allen was heavily influenced by the Tractarian tradition, which David M. Paton described as an “old-fashioned Anglican Catholicism—sober, restrained, scholarly, immensely disciplined” Reflecting on this influence in Allen’s life, Paton commented, “There is no trace anywhere in him of the preoccupation with secondary matters of ceremony into which the high Tractarian position sometimes degenerated.”[6]
Following college, Allen attended the High Anglican clergy training school in Leeds. In 1892, he was ordained a deacon, and one year later became a priest and served his curacy in the Durham diocese in the parish of St. John the Evangelist, Darlington. Within a short period of time, he applied to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) to serve as a missionary. Allen’s application included a plea revealing his deep desire to take the gospel to the nations. “I am simply thirsting to go to the Foreign Mission Field,” he wrote, “and I am ready to go wherever and whenever the Society has a vacancy.”[7] However, his zeal did not persuade the board. Due to a heart condition, the Society refused to send him as a missionary.
Determined to begin service as soon as possible, Allen, applied to the Society’s associated mission, the independent Church of England to North China. Again, his physical health did not meet the standards. This time he was determined to challenge the implications of his diagnosis. Speaking to the doctor, he noted, “If, as you say … I have so bad a heart that I am likely to die soon, can you tell me why I should be likely to die sooner in China than in England?” The Church of England Mission to North China accepted him the following year in 1894.
Allen often took a stand in the face of opposition. He was good at debate. Alexander McLeish observed that he did not “fit well into the accepted scheme of things,” and that he “was always a rebel in spirit.”[8] While Allen pushed against many cultural preferences, he did so because of deep biblical convictions. Lesslie Newbigin described Allen’s arguments as having a “bulldog grip,” one that “you could not shake” off.[9] And with haunting words, Newbigin warned the reader of Allen’s writings is likely to hear a voice “more searching than the word of man,” one that questions the reader’s cherished thoughts about missions.[10]
It should be noted that Priscilla M. Allen, Allen’s daughter, noted her father was “never a rebel where the teaching of the church was concerned. The Prayer Book and the Bible satisfied him completely. He knew nearly the whole of the Prayer Book and large portions of the Bible by heart.”[11] Referring to his service in China, she commented that “I have never heard any suggestion that he was considered a rebel or in any way difficult to work with in those days.”[12] If Allen was a rebel, it was because he believed in reform that could lead to a more excellent way.
Allen eventually returned to Britain due to health problems. He served as a vicar in the rural Buckinghamshire parish of Chalfont St. Peter. However, on November 25, 1907, he “publicly and pugnaciously resigned.” He believed the Church was to practice biblical church discipline, which included withholding ecclesiastical services from the unrepentant, particularly Holy Communion and the Burial Offices. While the Church of England provided services to even nominal Christians, Allen refused to offer his ministry to “people who make no profession of believing in the doctrines of the Church, or who make no profession of keeping the laws of the Church.”[13]
Thirty-two years later, he resigned from St. Mark’s Church in Nairobi’s Parklands suburb. The departure was based on the reality that as a paid clergyman, he was being asked “to fill gaps.” Instead of Africans being raised up to serve the church, the church was content to pay him for his clerical services. Allen believed this to be an unhealthy situation, writing “I would gladly serve St. Mark’s if my service helped you out of the mire; but I cannot serve, if my service helps you to remain in it.”[14]
Basics and Bible
Allen believed the Christian faith was to be experienced. The basics of the faith were to be lived out in the world. Spiritual knowledge was to result in spiritual actions. From his childhood, he heard people talk of “experimental religion,” one that is based on personal experience. Drawing from his years of study and piety, he discerned “if we widen our conceptions of experience beyond the region of sensibility, and include within it the realms of thought and will and spiritual desire, I believe that this teaching of experimental religion is profoundly true.” People truly owned their doctrine when it was experienced.[15] While these statements may lead one to believe that Allen embraced neoorthodoxy, such was not the case. His point was if there were no actions related to one’s faith, then such was not true faith. Whenever the believer acted on his or her orthodoxy, it was at that moment theory became realized.
Even as a High Church Anglican, he became convinced the Bible offered an apostolic simplicity that could be applied to any society at any time in history and that the organization of a local church was a simple New Testament idea. The basics found in the Scriptures were to influence all ecclesiastical practices on the mission fields of the world. The Bible’s reach was inescapable.
An example of his biblical simplicity is found in a letter he wrote in Kenya in 1932:
I say what seems to me obviously true, but they do not know what to do about it. … I hold that truth must win its own way, and I stand aside when I have pointed to the truth. To me, “He must increase and I must decrease” is a lively word. All I can say is that “This is the way of Christ and His Apostles.” If any man answer, “That is out of date,” or “Times have changed,” ˙… I can only repeat “This is the way of Christ and His Apostles,” and leave him to face that issue.[16]
Allen advocated that “a certain character of universality” must be allowed to the methods of the Apostle Paul. He was convinced that no one had discovered a better way to establish churches and no one had experienced greater results, for “the Apostle’s methods succeeded exactly where ours have failed.”[17]
Western institutions with their forms were not to be forced upon Majority World peoples. Healthy growth was to come from giving people freedom in the early days. The “proper work of the missionary” was to be the “direct propagation of the Gospel.” [18] Missionaries were to do little more than what the Apostle did. Following evangelistic work, they were to establish indigenous (i.e., contextualized) churches with national leaders and teach/model before new believers a life and ministry dependent on the Holy Spirit. Missionaries had to manifest a great faith in the Holy Spirit to seal, sanctify, empower, and protect the new churches. This was the way to the spontaneous expansion of the Church.
Disappointment and Devotion
Allen was a misunderstood prophet. Like most people who are able to see around corners, nearby acquaintances and distant strangers often think such people are peculiar and sometimes frustrating. These people are ahead of their time. They are the innovators. They have strange visions, ones that cannot be applied to contemporary structures and organizations. The systems they speak of do not exist. These people are often told “no,” “impossible,” “never,” or simply ignored. Allen was such a person. And such people are often called to a life of constant discouragements. Yet, even with such disappointments, Allen remained devoted to Christ and His mission.
Allen’s family lived with his disappointments and saw the effect of them upon his heart. Priscilla Allen wrote, “All through his life he was conscious of the activity of the Holy Ghost preventing him and all God’s people. He was given to fits of depression, being, I suppose, a typical cyclothymic; but I remember his saying to me that there was no need to be depressed because (I do not remember the exact words) he was on the winning side (or something to that effect).”[19]
She continued to describe the effect of his writings and resignation from Chalfont St. Peter’s:
He was, as you see, cut off from ordinary active service. He could not be a professional missionary, even if his health allowed it, after the way he had written about their work; and now he could not hold any office in the church. He was getting isolated and confined more and more to mere theorizing, because he could not test out his ideas in practice. It is very sad that a man of such gifts and so full of ideas and so full of the Holy Ghost should have been thus banished from active life.[20]
Allen published Missionary Principles in 1913, but according to Hubert Allen, he “felt frustrated and disappointed because, although the merits of his arguments were acknowledged, even people he greatly admired seemed to be impervious to the need for change.” He was troubled and noted that “I could not understand how wise men could see what I saw and not change their whole manner of action.” He also found himself frustrated by both the clergy and laity that had “more zeal for missionary societies than for the mission of the Church.”[21]
In 1930 Allen published Voluntary Clergy, containing thoughts that were a culmination of his years of work and reflective of the needs in pioneer areas of the world. However, the family was greatly disappointed when the book “failed to sell or to make much impression.” Yet, even with this reality Allen continued to trumpet his convictions about voluntary clergy to his bishop, so much so that Priscilla commented “he harried our poor bishop about voluntary clergy until I am afraid the bishop came to dread the sight of him.”[22]
Conclusion
An examination of Allen’s spiritually reveals a man deeply committed to Christ, His word, His mission, and the Anglican tradition. He often felt like a lonely voice crying in the desert and a prophet without honor. He believed faith without works was dead. And it was faith in God’s radical truth that would transform not only the life of the unregenerate but the entire missionary enterprise. People heard Allen’s words during his lifetime, but they listened to them after his death.
J. D. Payne, PhD, is an associate professor of Christian Ministry at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He has published thirteen books on missions, including Roland Allen: Pioneer of Spontaneous Expansion and Roland Allen’s the Ministry of Expansion. He may be contacted at jd.payne@samford.edu.
Endnotes
[1]Hubert J. B. Allen, Roland Allen: Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet (Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), vii.
[2]Hubert Allen, “The Continuing Relevance of Roland Allen,” http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/roland_allen%20by%20hubert-1.pdf; Accessed August 16, 2018.
[3]The first book-length biography was written by his grandson, Hubert J. B. Allen, Roland Allen: Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet (Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995). The only other book-length biography is Steven Richard Rutt, Roland Allen: A Missionary Life (London: Lutterworth Press, 2018). A few biographical chapters exist in the following works: Alexander McLeish, “Biographical Memoir,” in David M. Paton, ed., The Ministry of the Spirit: Selected Writings of Roland Allen, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1960), ix-xvi; David M. Paton, ed., Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen, (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 11-45; Noel Q. King, “Last Years in East Africa,” in David M. Paton, ed., Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen, (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968): 165-77; J. D. Payne, Roland Allen: Pioneer of Spontaneous Expansion (n.p.: CreateSpace, 2012); and J. D. Payne, ed., Roland Allen’s The Ministry of Expansion: The Priesthood of the Laity (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2017).
[4]Roland Allen, “The Family Rite,” in David M. Paton Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 206.
[5]Roland Allen, Letter of March 1, 1928 to Bishop of Assam in David M. Paton Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 153.
[6]Paton Reform of the Ministry, 24.
[7]McLeish, “Biographical Memoir,” x.
[8]Ibid, xv.
[9]Lesslie Newbigin, “Foreword,” in Hubert J. B. Allen, Roland Allen: Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet (Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), xiii.
[10]Lesslie Newbigin, “Foreword,” in Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? American edition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1962), iii.
[11]Priscilla M. Allen, “Roland Allen: A Prophet for this Age,” The Living Church 192#16 (April 20, 1986): 9.
[12] Ibid., 10.
[13]Roland Allen, “To the Parishioners of Chalfont St. Peter,” in David M. Paton, The Ministry of the Spirit: Selected Writings of Roland Allen (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1960), 193.
[14]Roland Allen, “Letter Withdrawing Assistance from St. Mark’s Church, Nairobi,” in Hubert J. B. Allen, Roland Allen: Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet (Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 216.
[15]Roland Allen, Educational Principles and Missionary Methods (London: Robert Scott, 1919), 103, 104.
[16]McLeish, “Biographical Memoir,” xv.
[17]Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?, American ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962), 147.
[18]Roland Allen, “A Church Policy for North China,” written in 1902 in David M. Paton Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 51.
[19]Priscilla Allen, 9. She did not elaborate on what she meant that Allen was conscious of the Spirit “preventing him and all God’s people.”
[20]Ibid., 10.
[21]Hubert Allen, “The Continuing Relevance of Roland Allen”.
[22]Priscilla Allen, 11.
