Review of Roland Allen's Spontaneous Expansion of the Church

Allen, Roland. The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 1997,

c1962.

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 Roland Allen makes a stinging call for the missions movement to take a more hands-off approach to control and an initiation of rapidity and indigeneity. His primary thesis is that because our traditional missionary methods “have sprung into existence as the almost inevitable consequence of our own attitude and training and that in employing them we have unconsciously, and often unwillingly, created an atmosphere in which spontaneous expansion is almost impossible” (p. 41), we should make an intentional effort now to “establish native churches free from our control” (p. 5). Allen’s argument is forthright and finds its target in the modern missions movement.

  Allen begins his argument by defining spontaneous expansion. To him, it is “the expansion which follows the unexhorted and unorganized activity of individual members of the Church explaining to others the Gospel which they have found for themselves” (p. 7). It is the natural outworking or unorganized, attractive church planting, free from the burden of professional missionaries who inadvertently place cultural restrictions on church development. Our problem, according to Allen, is the control western missionaries have exercised in church planting.

  He defends his argument by referring to Christ’s method of raising up leaders. Whereas Christ spent a couple of years with a potential leader and then released him for ministry, modern missionaries have tended to be long-term agents who do not release control. A healthy church is one which is self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating, but missionaries have tended to favor institutions and unions over the apostolic church.

 Allen lists several barriers to this spontaneous expansion. Our fear for doctrinal purity has led some to extend the time for receiving baptism, to offer special training for national clergy, to ordain the best and give only them authority, to make extra-biblical requirements for being a Christian. Instead of furthering the pure gospel, a code of morals has been set that defines Sabbath observance, which meats to eat and how many wives a national might have. This, in Allen’s opinion, is nothing more than the restricting attempts of Judaizers in the early church.

Missionaries themselves have contributed to the adversity to spontaneous expansion. They have set up foreign homes instead of being incarnational. They minister to third or fourth generation national Christians instead of reaching the lost. They build western hospitals and schools or identify with western philosophical ideas rather than pushing for indigenous expansion. They unwittingly set up standards for clothing styles that lead to syncretism. They establish missionary organizations that promote a professional few who may engage in missions. Even their converts become paid agents of that organization and further this destructive method.

Allen, on the contrary, calls for a different method. He believes that a newly constituted church should “find out for itself what being a church means in daily practice, to find out that it can do things as a church” (p. 150). Although much progress has been done in the area of world missions, Allen suggests much more needs to be done to push indigeneity. This, in turn, will produce more healthy churches that can reach the world for Christ.

Allen’s book is a classic that should be read by any serious student of missiology as well as any practitioner. Much of what other missiologists have identified in studying church planting movements echoes what Allen suggested for indigeneity. His call for releasing control to individual national churches does not fall upon deaf ears. It is as applicable today to the modern missions field as it was at the turn of last century.