Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn’s famous 3-self indigenous church principles have significantly influenced the field of missiology. In the late 1800s, Venn and Anderson both argued that missionaries should plant churches in foreign mission fields that would be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. That is, native churches should support themselves financially, govern themselves without reliance on foreign dictation, and assume responsibility for the evangelistic spread of the gospel in their areas.
Since then, other missiologists have added to these principles. The most notable perhaps was Paul Hiebert, who, in 1985, argued in favor of a fourth self—self-theologizing. Hiebert believed that the spirit of indigeneity should not just affect church polity but should also work itself out in theology. For Hiebert, “younger” churches, rather than rely on borrowed theology from the West, should take ownership of the theological task and bring Scriptural truth to bear on the issues they face in their context.
Such indigenous church principles have not been without detractors, however. Some have fairly pointed out that the 3-self principles do not guarantee indigeneity, and that self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating churches—though “indigenous” according to such formal metrics—can still maintain a foreign orientation in deeper, perhaps more subtle, ways.
An oft-quoted critique of Venn and Anderson’s principles came from William Smalley. Writing in 1958, Smalley declared, “I very strongly suspect that the three ‘selfs’ are really projections of our American value systems into the idealization of the 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.”[i]
Yet Smalley’s critique here lacks merit. For one, his statement—despite its popularity among missiologists that followed him—was merely a tangential comment rooted in conjecture. Smalley did not provide any support for this claim in the rest of his essay.
While advocates of indigenous church principles, including Venn and Anderson, inevitably bore marks of their own Western cultures, ardent supports of such principles often rooted their arguments in New Testament patterns of church planting. Thus, if Smalley’s claim that the “3 selves” were merely a projection of American values is to hold any weight, then one would need to demonstrate that framers and proponents of indigenous church theory proof-texted their arguments and/or mishandled the text of Scripture—something which Smalley did not show.
A more legitimate concern with the 3/4 “self’s” of indigenous church theory revolves around the issue of isolation. Some missiologists and practitioners remain suspicious of promoting principles that might isolate local churches from the wider Christian tradition, and, at first glance, an emphasis on “self” might appear to do just that. In other words, by advocating for churches to be self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating, and self-theologizing, are we not encouraging a state of affairs in which local churches remain untethered from the wider church?
Yet such isolation from the Christian tradition across time and space was certainly not the intention of early advocates of indigeneity in church planting. Regarding Rufus Anderson, for example, R. Pierce Beaver asserts, “[O]ne must be careful not to read into his statements later ideas about ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ in the relationship between churches nor to confound self-government with self-interest and self-sufficiency. The three-self formula was originally devoid of many of the connotations later supposedly derived from it. A church which lived to itself would be abhorrent to Anderson.”[ii]
The purpose of indigeneity in church planting is not to promote a kind local autonomy which undercuts interdependence and mutual correction between churches across the world. Rather, the purpose is to allow local churches to take ownership of church polity and theological reflection in their context and thus grow into maturity—a maturity that was often hard to come by during the Modern Missions Movement, when outside missionaries often dictated ecclesial matters.
The kind of independence which many indigenous church advocates seek is not a total independence from all outside influence but an independence from heavy-handed outside control that renders “younger” churches as perpetual children reliant on their “mother” church for their ongoing life.
In other words, indigenous church principles ought not lead to isolation. Rather, at their best, they promote local church maturation and can thus open up an avenue by which local churches can become valuable contributors to the wider Christian tradition—a hermeneutical community in which each member plays a role. Thus, although they are neither the sum total of biblical ecclesiology nor the sole metrics by which we should gauge church health and maturity, such principles remain valuable for missionary church planters still today.
[i] William A. Smalley, “Cultural Implications of an Indigenous Church,” in Readings in Dynamic Indigeneity, ed. Charles H. Kraft and Tom N. Wisley (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1979), 35.
[ii] R. Pierce Beaver, ed., To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 31.