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Western Enculturation and the Modern Church

This form of organization is natural to men with our character and experience: it is not in any sense a universal mode of expression. The erection of buildings, the management of property and the creation of an army of professional preachers is to us at this moment of the world’s history the natural and obvious method of carrying on our work. This kind of organization suits, our capacities, appeals to our sense of fitness, satisfies our eyes. But an elaborate material machinery for the propagation of ideas seems to most of those to whom we go almost absurd. You do not want buildings and machinery to propagate ideas or a faith: you want ideas and a faith. Organization and buildings ought to follow and spring out of the working of the ideas and the faith. Our organization seems to them to put the wrong things first. We collect money and pay men to preach and teach. Outside our circle nearly all men think that very strange. All knowledge, above all, religious knowledge, is a divine gift and to connect it with money is a sort of simony. A paid preacher is suspected as a preacher paid to teach what he is told to teach by those who pay him; not the inspired possessor of a divine gift.

Roland Allen, Spontaneous Expansion of the Church

ABOUT THE KEYSTONE PROJECT

The Keystone Project is a global missions network of churches and leaders committed to the fulfillment of the Great Commission in this generation.

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