CHAPTER 82

Cultural Implications of an Indigenous Church

William A. Smalley

William A. Smalley worked 23 years for the United Bible Societies and as a consultant to the Bible Societies in his retirement. He was also active in the formation of the Toronto Institute of Linguistics and was professor emeritus of linguistics at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was editor of the journal practical anthropology from 1955 to 1968.

Adapted from readings in Missionary anthropology II, ed. William A. Smalley. Pasadena: William Carey Publishing, 1978.

It seems to have become axiomatic in much missionary thinking that a church that is “self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating” is by definition an “indig-enous church.” It further seems to follow in the thinking of many people that such an indigenous church (and so defined) is the goal of modern missions. This is a point of view that can be misleading unless we examine some of the cultural implications.

First of all, I think we can agree that the three features of being “self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating” are all found in indigenous movements. But these features do not, on their own, define an indigenous movement.

Misinterpretation of Self-Government

It may be very easy to have a self-governing church that is not indigenous. Many presently self-governing churches are not. All that is necessary is to indoctrinate a few leaders in Western patterns of church government and let them take over. The result will be a church governed in a slavishly foreign manner (although probably modified at points in the direction of local government patterns), but by no stretch of the imagination can it be called an indigenous church.

It is further possible for a genuinely indigenous Christian movement to be “governed” to a degree by foreigners. Even in the large-scale Christward movements that have taken place in the world, movements that have been so extensive that the foreign body has had more difficulty in controlling them than what it has had in most of its mission work, the mission body has often exerted its governing influence upon the upper level of society, at least, where it was related in any way to the movement. This may have been by the direct action of missionaries or by the action of church leaders who were trained in the foreign patterns of government. Although such government may be unfortunate in many cases, it does not necessarily detract from the indigenous nature of such a Christward movement on the part of a group of people.

Misapplication of Self-Support

It is unlikely that there would be any disagreement with the idea that the Jerusalem church in the first century was an indigenous church. The Jerusalem Christians were so strongly Jewish in their attitudes that they resented the conversion of gentiles unless they joined the Jewish ritualistic performance of the law. That church, however, in its time of need, received gifts from abroad, from Europe—in modern-day terminology, from the West. Paul himself carried some of those gifts to Jerusalem. No one would argue that the receiving of such gifts infringed upon the indigenous nature of the Jewish church.

Neither can one argue, I believe, that the receiving of such gifts by the younger churches today will necessarily infringe upon their indigenous character. This is true in spite of the very real dangers which exist in the subsidy of the younger churches by the mission bodies.

I was in Southeast Asia as a missionary during a civil war. Those were days when the entire country was in turmoil. Congregations could suddenly be cut off from foreign mission leaders as the battle lines shifted. Groups that had been under mission subsidy could suddenly lose their access to funds and find themselves in a very difficult position. Most of my colleagues recognized the tremendous weakness of foreign financing of national workers.

Self-support is, wherever possible, the soundest method of church economics. There are situations in which self-support is not advisable or in which self-support can inhibit church growth. In such situations outside funding does not necessarily imply the lack of an indigenous church. Financing is an independent variable within the pattern of the mission and church. The indigenous nature of the church depends on how the temptation to control church life through the manipulation of funds is resisted by the churches and mission leaders. Whether or not such things enter into the life of a church in an “indigenous manner” is entirely dependent upon how the changes take place, not the source of income.

Misunderstanding of Self-Propagation

Of the three “selfs,” it seems to me that self-propagation is the clearest indicator of an indigenous church, but here again, the correlation is by no means complete. In a few areas of the world it may be precisely the foreignness of the church which is the source of attraction to unbelievers. There are parts of the world where aspirations of people lead them toward wanting to identify themselves with the strong and powerful West and where the church provides such an avenue of identification. Self-propagation in such a case may be nothing more than a road to a nonindigenous relationship.

The Nature of an Indigenous Church

I strongly suspect that the three “selfs” are really projections of Western value systems onto an idealization of church, that they are in their very nature Western concepts based upon Western ideas of individualism and power. By forcing them on other people, we may at times have been making it impossible for a truly indigenous pattern to develop. We have been Westernizing with all our talk about indigenizing.

What, then, is an indigenous church? It is a group of believers who live out their lives, including their socialized Christian activity, in the patterns of the local society, and for whom any transformation of that society comes out of their felt needs under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures. There are several basic elements in this tentative formulation. For one thing, the church is a society. As a society, it has its patterns of interaction among people. If it is an indigenous society, an indigenous church, its patterns of relationship will be based upon patterns already existing in the local society. Normal processes of enculturation and habits learned while growing up are carried over into church structure. If other patterns are forced upon a church by missionaries, consciously or unconsciously, such a church will not be an indigenous one.

Because the Holy Spirit brings transformation both of individual lives and of society, He is another part of an indigenous church. This transformation occurs differently in each society.

Missionaries generally appreciate cultural changes that make people more like themselves. An indigenous church is precisely one in which the changes taking place under the guidance of the Holy Spirit fulfill the aspirations of that society and not those of an outside group.

Many have said things like this, and such a statement should and could be elaborated considerably to provide a more adequate description of the nature of an indigenous church. Sometimes in our search for an understanding of the nature of the church, we turn to the New Testament (as we rightly should) and seek for it there. But it is not in the formal structure and operation of the churches in the New Testament that we can find a definitive pattern of the indigenous church.

Missionaries Do Not Like It

But having said this much, I would now like to stress some of the implications of an “indigenous church,” implications which have often not been realized. One is that missionaries often do not like the product. Often a truly indigenous church is a source of concern and embarrassment to the mission organizations in the area.

An example is that of the Toba people. The mission organization was disturbed and unhappy about the indigenous church which spread so rapidly among the Toba people because it assumed a form very different from that of the foreign mission group. It was not until the foreign missionaries recognized the Holy Spirit at work that they became reconciled to the indigenous church and sought to harmonize their program with it, to the greater glory of God. The culture and practices of the Toba people included giving away possessions and sharing with their relatives. These practices were not recognized as being valuable or virtuous because of the way they were expressed, so foreign missionaries failed to recognize the work of the Holy Spirit. In contrast, some movements in China have displayed outstanding qualities of frugality, cleanliness, and thrift, which rate highly in Western society. These practices were swiftly considered to be the fruits of a Christian movement. These were, however, ideals present in non-Christian Chinese life.

An analogy will help us grasp the all-too-common practice of identifying what people are doing wrong. As someone put it some time ago, most of us want to join the jury while God is making His judgments upon people and cultures, even if we don’t even understand the meaning of the trial. We are quick to make our evaluations and quick to decide what course the new church should follow or what course a new Christian individual should take, but we are neither competent nor qualified to make such decisions, having little or no real knowledge of the cultural background of the people or individual.

It is our work, first of all, to see the Bible in its cultural perspective, to see God dealing with different peoples in different ways. There is no single biblical culture. It is our responsibility to help people learn how to pray to find what God would have them do as they study His word and to seek the interpretation and leadership of the Holy Spirit.

It is the missionary’s task, if the missionary believes in “the indigenous principle,” to proclaim that God, in Christ Jesus, is reconciling the world unto Himself. That message transcends all cultures. The gospel applies to every culture and place, but the way it is communicated must be within culture. The way that Christ is followed must be expressed within the framework of particular habits and values of people in every culture. To deliver the transcendent message of Christ—the message that turned the world upside down and continues to do so—is the task to which the missionary is called.

The missionary’s responsibility is also to be a source of cultural alternatives for people to select if they want and need them. Missionaries with their knowledge of history, the Scriptures, and churches in other lands can often suggest ways for local groups to find their way out of their dilemma. They can recommend ways of a better life in Christ than what the local people are living. Making such recommendations is a legitimate missionary role in cultural transformation. But for genuine change to take place, the decision has to be made by the people themselves. In a truly indigenous church, the selection is made in the light of the needs, problems, and values of those people.

It is the church that will have to decide whether boiling water, abstinence from alcohol, the wearing of clothes, and monogamy are the proper expressions of a Christian in that society. The church, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, can determine the best ways of fostering its own growth, spreading its own witness, and supporting its own form of leadership.

As we have already suggested, the problem of the implications of the indigenous church is as old as the Judaizers of Jerusalem. Those Judaizers saw Greek Christianity through Hebrew eyes. They are like many missionaries in that, if they were content that any gentile should be converted at all, they saw conversion in the light of filling a formal mold.

The New Testament, however, clearly repudiated that view and set up the church as a group of believers within its own society, like salt, instead of becoming a subgroup, as the Judaizers might have done. This is not to contradict the exclusiveness of Christianity. The church is a separate group, but it is separate in spiritual kind, in relationship to God. It is through the indigenous church that the Holy Spirit works in society. This is the New Testament church.

The converts of an indigenous movement are not necessarily cleaner than their neighbors, not necessarily more healthy, not necessarily better educated. It is, furthermore, often the moment at which they become cleaner, healthier, and better educated that the barrier begins to grow which makes their indigenous interaction with their neighbors less likely, and the growth of the movement begins to taper off. As McGavran has pointed out in his tremendously significant book The Bridges of God, missions have traditionally poured their funds not into the people movements but into the station churches, into the huge mission compounds, into the churches which are their satellites, rather than into the grassroots growing development of an embarrassing indigenous church.

Not only do many missionaries not like some of the outstanding examples of indigenous church movements, but to an even greater degree, their supporting home constituencies are likely not to approve of them. Our cultural values as applied to our churches are so strong that we feel that a corporate structure, a profit motive, individualism, and thrift are ipso facto the expressions of Christianity. That God should work in any other forms than our own is inconceivable to most of us.

An implication of the indigenous church which I think is very unwelcome to many missionaries is that the missionary can make no cultural decisions for the Christians. By this I do not mean that the missionary does not make value judgments. Individual missionaries cannot help doing so, nor should they wish not to do so. Their value judgments, if they are to be worthwhile, have to be cross-culturally oriented, but they will be there. Neither do I mean by this that missionaries cannot exercise an important measure of guidance, of suggestion, on the younger church as they fulfill their functions of teaching and preaching and, in many respects, advising.

An Indigenous Church Cannot Be “Founded”

The next implication which has often not fully penetrated into the thinking of missionaries who discuss indigenous movements is that it is impossible to “found” an indigenous church. The biblical figure of planting and harvesting is far more realistic than our Western figure based on our Western values and expressed in the idea of the “establishment” or “founding” of a church.

No, indigenous churches cannot be founded. They can only be planted, and the mission is usually surprised at which seeds grow. Often they have the tendency to consider the seeds that do grow in any proliferation to be weeds, a nuisance, a hindrance in their carefully cultivated foreign mission garden; meanwhile, the carefully cultivated hot-house plants of the mission “founded” church are unable to spread roots and to derive their nurture either from the soil of their own life or from the word of God in the root-confining pots of the mission organization and culture.

Indigenous Churches Start Apart from Missions

Another implication of the whole idea of an indigenous church is that the great indigenous movements are often not the result of foreign work in any direct way. Sometimes they are the result of the witness of someone who was converted by the efforts of foreign missionaries, but usually it is not the foreign missionary whose witness brings about the establishment or beginning of an indigenous movement. Saint Paul was not a foreigner to the Greek world. He was a bicultural individual, one who was as much at home in the Greek world as he was in the Hebrew world, and whose preaching carried to the Greek world the message which came to him from the Christians of the Hebrew world.

Prophet Harris, who wandered along the west coast of Africa preaching about the people who would come with a Book, was not a foreign missionary. The people from whom the Tobas heard the gospel as it came to them in its Pentecostal form were not foreigners. True, they were not Tobas, but they were the poorer-class Latin-Americans and mixed Spanish-Indian inhabitants of the areas where the Tobas lived. They were very much a part of the cultural picture in which the Tobas found themselves. They were not foreign missionaries. The people movements in China were usually the result of the energetic faithful work of a Chinese Christian, not the result of foreign missionary evangelism except as he may have been a convert of missionaries.

The Hmong movement described by G. Linwood Barney was not brought about through the preaching of a missionary but through the cooperative work of a Hmong shaman who had been converted (under a missionary) and who took another tribesman of the area with whom the Hmong were very familiar from village to village, preaching from town to town. Our distance from most other cultures is so great, the cultural isolation of the West is so extreme, that there are almost no avenues of approach whereby the work that we do can normally result in anything of an indigenous nature. It is ironic that the West, which is probably most concerned with the spread of Christianity in the world today, and which is financially best able to undertake the task of worldwide evangelism, is culturally the least suited for its task because of the way in which it has separated itself to a point where it is very difficult for it to have an adequate understanding of other peoples.

Conclusion

Until we are willing for the church to have different manifestations in different cultures—rather than export the denominational patterns rooted in our history and often irrelevant to the rest of the world—we will not have indigenous churches. It does not matter whether they are “self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating” or not. It is not until we are willing to let churches grow that we have learned to entrust the Holy Spirit with society. We are treating the Holy Spirit as a small child with a new toy too complicated and dangerous to handle. Our paternalism is not only a paternalism toward other peoples; it is also a paternalism toward God.

CONTINUE READING Sidebar: The Fourth Self

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