The Timothy Conference

T H E T I M O T H Y C O N F E R E N C E

Indigenous Churches

The following article is taken from Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions . A. Scott Moreau, Harold Netland & Charles Van Engen, eds. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000. Pp. 483-85.

Italics of text added for emphasis

The term “indigenous” comes from biology and indicates a plant or animal native to an area. Missiologists adopted the word and used it to refer to churches that reflect the cultural distinctive of their ethnolinguistic group. The missionary effort to establish indigenous churches is an effort to plant churches that fit naturally into their environment and to avoid planting churches that replicate Western patterns. Missionary efforts to establish indigenous churches are attempts to do missions as the apostle Paul did. A brief recital of Paul’s missionary methods demonstrates this fact. Paul served as an itinerant missionary, never staying more than three years in any city. Paul’s approach to evangelizing regions was to plant churches in cities from which the Gospel would permeate to surrounding areas. He never appealed to the churches in Antioch or Jerusalem for funds with which to support the new churches. Rather, he expected the churches to support themselves Paul appointed and trained elders to lead all the churches he planted. He gave the churches over to the care of the Holy Spirit, but he also visited them and wrote to them periodically. HENRY VENN (1796-1873) of the CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY and RUFUS ANDERSON (1796-1880) of the AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS OF FOREIGN MISSIONS first used the term “indigenous church” in the mid-nineteenth century. They both wrote about the necessity of planting “three-self churches—churches that would be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating (Venn used the term ”self-extending"). They exhorted missionaries to establish churches that could support themselves, govern themselves, and carry out a program of evangelism and missions. They cautioned missionaries about becoming absorbed in pastoring and maintaining churches, insisting that the missionary’s primary task must be planting new churches that would be “self-reliant” and “purely native.” They instructed their missionaries to train national pastors and hand the care of the churches over to them at the earliest opportunity. Venn coupled the concept of indigenous churches with euthanasia in missions. By euthanasia he meant that missionaries should plant churches, train leaders, and then move on to new unevangelized regions. Henry Venn believed that missionaries should always be temporary workers, not permanent fixtures. JOHN L. NEVIUS (1829-93), a Presbyterian missionary to China, built on Venn and Anderson’s indigenous principles in his classic work, Planting and Development of Missionary Churches . Nevius developed a set of principles that came to be called “The NEVIUS PLAN”: (1) Christians should continue to live in their neighborhoods and pursue their occupations, being self-supporting and witnessing to their co-workers and neighbors. (2) Missions should only develop programs and institutions that the national church desired and could support. (3) The national churches should call out and support their own pastors. (4) Churches should be built in the native style with money and materials given by the church members. (5) Intensive biblical and doctrinal instruction should be provided for church leaders every year. In his writings Nevius criticized the heavily subsidized work that most missions carried on in China. Nevius’ principles had little impact in China, but when the American Presbyterians began their work in Korea the new missionaries invited Nevius to advise them. They adopted his plan and enjoyed great success.

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