2. Principles of the Indigenous Church

Missionary-minded believers everywhere are interested in establishing indigenous churches among people who once knew nothing of the grace of God in Christ. Recent years have witnessed a great impetus toward this end. National Christian leaders in what were formerly called mission lands are increasingly and rapidly taking over responsibilities for the support, nurture, government, and extension of churches that originally were established under the blessing of God by Christians from overseas.

This change is as it should be.

What Are The Criteria?

Is an indigenous church, however, necessarily one which admits only nationals as members and deliberately excludes missionaries from other lands? Is not the racial criterion for membership too superficial and therefore an unworthy one? Surely the Lord’s standard is more than skin deep!

In considering the transition from mission enterprise to indigenous church one must remember there are different systems of church government. Each presumably is based on Scripture, and each in any adjustment of program faces certain problems. Is it desirable or right, for example, that churches relinquish an established governmental structure for a congregational system? Often this latter method has greater appeal to overseas Christians; to govern one church autonomously and independently may be simpler than submitting to the authority and corporate control of some conference, presbytery, or synod. It is true, also, that current indigenous ideas are usually tailored more closely to the independent pattern of church government than any other.

Through many generations of missionary activity around the world, missionaries have not only admitted and deplored, but have also sincerely tried to correct, various evils and shortcomings in their ministry. Improvements have indeed come. But however conscientious and earnest these men and women of God may be, they are nonetheless still human and fallible.

A word of caution is timely at this point. In our eagerness to lay aside some particular evil we must be sure we do not invite or make room for a more dangerous and subtle form of the very condition we decry. In trying to eliminate paternalism on the local level, for example, it is quite possible to continue this attitude from a distance in a far less obvious but much more insidious way.

Furthermore, in the scramble to use appealing shibboleths and to follow popular trends in today’s religious thought, people may unwittingly succumb to statements and policies which sound wise enough but which, unless qualified, may really be quite the opposite.

Some Basic Principles

To avoid mistakes and heartache in developing and nurturing the indigenous church, two basic principles of Scripture must constantly be observed.

1. The New Testament clearly teaches that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek.

How often as a child on the streets in China I remember hearing the words “foreign devil!” In this epithet, as in similar expressions in almost every land, brooded the ugly prejudice of racial nationalism. In the church, however, I heard a quite different and significant designation: “Brother” expressed the beautiful and truly Christian ideal of family relationship.

National distinctions persist in the secular world and continue to divide society. In the body of Christ, the Church, however, they are done away. While these diversities still obtain outwardly and physically, the unity and spiritual fellowship in Christ transcend these differences by including and uniting all mankind. Is this why the Apostle Paul appointed young Timothy, who to some may have seemed an outsider, to pastor the church at Ephesus? This church, after all, for years had had its own indigenous elders and leaders. Similarly, Paul appointed Titus to serve the church in Crete and gave him specific instructions concerning church affairs in that place. Did not the Cretan church very likely have its own local leaders? If we are to follow Paul’s pattern of missions, dare we ignore this phase?

His Corinthian and Thessalonian epistles reveal still another pertinent fact. Apparently he, a Jew from Asia, never relinquished his responsibilities and authority over the Gentile missionary churches he had established in Europe. This was the case not only because Paul believed Jew and Gentile are one in Christ; he was sure of his divine commission as well.

The second basic principle in a missionary’s relationship to the indigenous church often is overlooked or, if it is not believed, may he ignored.

2. A missionary is first and foremost under divine appointment.

Either he is God-sent or he is not a missionary in the Christian sense of the word. Few if any evangelicals today would deny the definite call and divine appointment of missionaries even in regard to specific fields and ministries. Should not missionaries, then, be received and acknowledged as part of the churches they serve, and be just as eligible as any other member to participate in their counsels? It seems almost absurd to affirm (as do some evangelical missionary organizations who unwittingly may be following the earlier lead of liberals) that missionaries do not belong to indigenous churches. They may serve only as outsiders, as roving evangelists, as peripatetic teachers of the Word. They may be doctors with mobile units who treat the sick and move on. Even in congregational-type, independent churches this situation should not prevail. And in churches established by a parent church in another land, the idea of severance is all the more open to question. To consider missionaries outsiders seems to be a tacit concession to the spirit of nationalism. Neither is such an attitude of any help to a church, nor can it be sustained by Scripture.

God appoints missionaries to other important ministries in the indigenous church besides those mentioned above. The church, of course, must cooperate willingly. Obviously a new missionary just graduated from Bible college or seminary, or even one with a Ph.D. degree, who has far more than an unfamiliar language to learn in his appointed field, should no more expect immediately to direct affairs in churches overseas than he would in a church at home. While the Lord of the harvest appoints his laborers where and as he wills, he never does so indiscriminately, nor without requiring the maturing disciplines of extremely practical Christian service. Such training takes time both at home and abroad. God’s servants are thoroughly proved before he entrusts them with sacred responsibilities. Nonetheless, even the best equipped must always manifest humility. But the fact that a missionary is from another country should not of itself be a disqualifying factor for real membership and, in time, even for service of high responsibility in any overseas church to which the Lord may send him.

When God appoints someone to serve his Church in another land, whatever the skin color may be, he sends his servant as an insider, not an outsider, as an essential member of the living church organism. Except where the unscriptural idea of excluding missionaries from the indigenous church has been fostered, a vast majority of national believers gladly welcome and acknowledge the foreign missionary as an integral part of the church brotherhood.

Since all race distinctions are removed in Christ, any true church organism anywhere may include black, white or yellow. God is not limited to matching people of the same race and skin in his appointments of workers to churches either at home or abroad. Because God raises up and appoints local church leaders, it does not necessarily follow that missionaries therefore cannot expect to, nor should not, belong to the indigenous church brotherhood.

That emphasis on nationalism which would exclude missionaries from any essential relationship to the overseas church, an attitude strangely prevalent if not dominant in current missionary thought, is certainly not a spiritual let alone a scriptural emphasis. Definitely non-Christian and divisive, this kind of nationalism in no way nurtures the Spirit of Christ. Actually, it brings into the churches that very disunity which Christ’s death abolished. Whenever some policy develops a spirit other than that of the Lord Jesus, any so-called advantages of such a policy, as spontaneous numerical increase even, mean absolutely nothing.

In those foreign lands where the alchemy of grace does indeed make outsiders truly indigenous members of the church and its fellowship, the Lord entrusts missionaries with responsible ministries even though they serve people of different nationalities.

Even the Scot who yearned to serve God in China but was led to the United States instead illustrates our thesis. No one who heard him either as a prominent Presbyterian minister or as chaplain of the United States Senate would deny that Peter Marshall was a missionary. Every bit of this six-foot-two Anglo-Saxon was sent by God from Europe to America. Born in Scotland, he nonetheless became a vital member of the indigenous church in our country. Peter Marshall both came and was received as a true and respected missionary of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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