At the SEND Family Conference in July, I led a workshop on what we can still learn from Roland Allen’s book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? a hundred years after it was first published. Allen’s key principle of submission and dependence on the Holy Spirit and the Word of God was the focus of the first blog post. In this blog post contemporary application of Allen’s principles will be the subject.
Month: August 2014
At the SEND Family Conference in July, I led a workshop on what we can still learn from Roland Allen’s book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? a hundred years after it was first published. I’m going to highlight our discussion in two blog posts for the whole SEND family.
Why bother with a hundred-year-old book? J.D. Payne wrote in 2012, Roland Allen was “One of the most controversial, yet most influential, missionary thinkers of all time… it was Allen’s insights into the expansion of the church that sometimes equated him as being a prophet, a revolutionary, a radical, or a troublemaker.” (J.D. Payne, Roland Allen: Pioneer of Spontaneous Expansion, Kindle Edition, location 126.)
Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash
In a previous post, we talked about the three main types of teams found in our mission organization. When new missionaries think about teaming, they are generally thinking about what we have called a basketball team. Basketball teams work together closely and interact frequently with each other about their various ministries.
But many of our mission teams are more like track teams than basketball teams. Track teams have a common purpose and team members support one another, but each person on the team works independently. They generally do not do ministry together. For many of our track teams, each team member works in a different church, a different ministry project, or even in a different town. While they are geographically close enough to one another to make it feasible to meet together regularly, team meetings are relatively rare, because there is little need for ongoing coordination of ministries.