Sowers of the Gospel as Rich Men or Starving

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to read a book I wish to soon reread, Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (Wm. B Eerdmans Pub Co., 1962). Writing in the middle of last century, Allen, an Anglican missionary to North China, spoke ahead of his time on issues of control and indigenization. He calls his readers to abandon paternalistic snobbishness in the missionary movement for a deeper faith in the ability of the Spirit of God to build His Church and indwell national leaders to successfully own the work entrusted to them. It’s a worthy read. One particularly rich statement in the book has stuck with me. Allen writes:

We have not understood that the members of the Body of Christ are scattered in all lands, and that we, without them, are not made perfect. We have thought of the Temple of the Lord as complete in us, of the Body of Christ as consisting of us, and we have thought of the conversion of the heathen as the extension of the body of which we are members. Consequently, we have preached the Gospel from the point of view of the wealthy man who casts a mite into the lap of a beggar, rather than from the point of view of the husbandman who casts his seed into the earth, knowing that his own life and the lives of all connected with him depend upon the crop which will result from his labour (142-3).

Is Allen exaggerating here? Do our lives really depend on the gathering in of more sons and daughters of God in Christ from the far corners of the earth? If one considers that there is a fuller insight gained on the creative and all-encompassing wisdom of God with each new tribe and tongue redeemed, and that the final redemption of the people of God will not transpire until the last of the elect enter the Kingdom, Allen’s striking and bold vocabulary is worthy, I believe. May there be in us an increase of godly “selfishness” in the work of calling out a people for God from East, West, North and South, because without them we are not complete!

~~posted by Ambassador