More word cloud art used as illustrations
TL;DR:
In the mid-1800s, Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson proposed that churches established through expatriate missionary work should become self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating—the Three-Self principles. Their aim was to end dependence on foreign leadership, funding, and control, enabling local believers to build churches that were sustainable, culturally rooted, and biblically faithful. Later, missiologists such as Paul Hiebert and David Bosch emphasized a fourth principle—self-theologizing—which calls indigenous churches to express theology in ways that address their cultural contexts. In China, however, authoritarian leaders co-opted the Three-Self principles to control churches.
More than a hundred and sixty years ago, Anglican missionary strategist Henry Venn insisted that the churches resulting from foreign missionary work—including that of his own denomination, the Church of England—should be sustainable "indigenous" or "native" churches.
That doesn't sound all that revolutionary, does it? However, in the 1800s, many people thought missionaries were sent to other countries to pastor churches of new believers. If and when local people from newly evangelized areas became pastors, their financial support was provided by or at least supplemented with foreign money. In addition to controlling finances, missionaries remained the voice of authority on many levels. As one might guess, such churches frequently felt like foreign transplants to the people they were trying to reach.
Venn and American missions leader Rufus Anderson argued that New Testament-style churches should have local leaders. In addition, those churches should be financed locally and engage effectively in evangelism, discipleship, and church planting using local resources.
Venn said these native or indigenous churches would be:
Formulating the Three-Self principles was an attempt to explain the need for churches to move away from being permanently tied to missionary leadership and funding. Venn wanted to spur churches to forsake a deadening dependence on foreign initiative, foreign money, and foreign personnel. He wanted churches in Kenya to feel like Kenyan churches and churches in Brazil to be recognizably Brazilian.
The Three-Self principles were not out-of-reach, pie-in-the-sky ideals that few, if any, congregations could ever achieve. Nor did Venn believe that decades had to pass before churches could consider each principle fully achieved. Venn and others promoted self-support, self-government, and self-propagation as core values that would shape congregational life and ministry from each church's earliest days. The Three-Self principles were guiding standards intended to help church leaders envision what would be sustainable, culturally appropriate, and reproducible in every context.
Over time, questions arose about whether Venn's three "selfs" were comprehensive enough. After all, it was possible for a self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating congregation still to seem somewhat foreign to its cultural context. For that reason, in the late 1900s, missiologists such as Paul Hiebert and David Bosch emphasized that truly indigenous churches should also be self-theologizing. This fourth principle means that indigenous congregations thoughtfully apply biblical values, ethics, and principles to the issues and challenges of their cultural contexts.
Three or four other principles have been proposed, including self-expressing. Self-expressing means worshiping and ministering in ways that reflect church members' culture, including music styles, approaches to teaching and preaching, meeting places, and programming.
A case can be made that Venn's original list of self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating needs to be a bit longer. Still, we must acknowledge that Venn did the Church of Jesus Christ a great service by suggesting three characteristics of truly indigenous churches—characteristics that in no way prevented them from being unashamedly biblical while also being firmly connected to a global denomination.
—Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
This 500-word brief essay on a key issue in world missions outreach is one of 20 articles in the "Mission briefing" series published in Engage, a monthly online magazine produced by the Church of the Nazarene.
The Three-Self principles—the concepts of self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation that have produced healthy churches worldwide—were co-opted by the Chinese government and used to control Christian churches. Initially presented as a means of freeing religious organizations from undue foreign influence, the principles became a mechanism for controlling Christians through the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement.
Here is how a corrupted version of the Three-Self principles has been used to isolate and control churches in China:
In short, although the distortion of the Three-Self principles in China was initially presented as a way to make churches autonomous, those principles—or, rather, a warped version of them—were used to isolate and control churches, compel their allegiance to the government, and suppress challenges to the ruling party's policies and authority.
