Roland Allen – Why We Need Missiologists

I’m reading through Roland Allen’s famous book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? which celebrates the centenary anniversary of its first edition next year I believe. In reading through the book, I noticed this cute quote on how some missionaries tend to attribute their deliberately spontaneous and unplanned missionary strategies to Paul himself, but without ever studying Paul’s actual missionary methods:

It is due to the fact that every unworthy, idle and slip-shod method of missionary work has been fathered upon the Apostle. Men have wandered over the world, ‘preaching the Word’, laying no solid foundations, establishing nothign permanent, leaving no really instructed society behind them, and have claimed St Paul’s authority for their absurdities. They have gone through the world, spending their time in denouncing ancient religions, in the name of St Paul. They have wandered from place to place without any plan or method of any kind, guided in their movements by straws and shadows, persuaded they were imitating St Paul on his journey from Antioch to Troas. Almost every intolerable abuse that has ever been known in the mission field has claimed some sentence or act of St Paul as its original. (p. 5).

Harsh … but very true!