Reading: Methods, Chapter 3: Class

Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?
By Roland Allen

In these days there is a strong and apparently growing tendency to lay great stress on the importance of directing attention to some particular class of people in a country which we desire to evangelize. We had a striking illustration of the wonderful results which may be obtained by a judicious appeal to an influential class in the history of the 'Natural Foot Society' in China. The success of that movement was largely due to the fact that the promoters of the Society did not spend their time in preaching to the ignorant and conservative rustics of the villages, but began by enlisting the support of enlightened and well-to-do official and commercial families. As a consequence of that policy a movement started by a few foreigners became in ten or twelve years so firmly established in the country that foreign encouragement and support were no longer necessary.

Similarly, it was the appreciation of the value of a special class for the achievement of certain ends that led to the foundation of movements like the Student Christian Movement, and the same thought really lies at the back of nearly all educational missions in the foreign field as well as of special missions to official classes, whilst at the other end of the scale we are often told that in India we should concentrate all our efforts on the upraising of the depressed castes in the belief that the sight of the recovery and civilization of the most degraded and most despised will exercise an irresistible attraction over the other sections of society.

A common explanation of the success of St. Paul's preaching in the Four Provinces is that he followed this method. There was, we are told, in the Four Provinces, a special class of people specially prepared for the reception and establishment of the Gospel, and it is used as an an argument against the employment of St. Paul's method in modern days under modern conditions that such a class does not now exist, and that our converts have none of the special advantages which they enjoyed. It is therefore important to inquire whether there was any special class to which he did in fact appeal, and whether the adherents which came to him from any special class were sufficiently numerous to justify us in rejecting his method, on the ground that method was used by him under such peculiar circumstances and applied by him only in dealing with converts of such special and peculiar character.

Is it possible to maintain that St. Paul established Christianity in the Four Provinces by enrolling in its service the gifts and influence of any particular important class of men? This would scarcely appear to be the case. St. Paul always began his work by preaching in the synagogue, to Jews and God-fearing Greeks. But neither Jews nor proselytes provided him with such a class. It very soon became apparent that Christianity could not take root in Jewish soil. The Christian spirit was in harmony rather with the freedom of the Greek mind than with the narrow legality of the Jewish. It was altogether too large to be bound by the shackles of Judaism. From the very first, it was driven out of the nation in which it was born to find in a strange country not only its own life but the lives of those to whom it came. St. Paul preached in the synagogue, indeed, but he was not allowed to preach there very long, nor did many Jews join themselves to him. It is not necessary here to examine the history of the founding of the church in the Four Provinces, it is not necessary to examine the epistles of St. Paul to the churches in the Four Provinces, to show that those churches were composed almost entirely of Greek converts, for there, is almost complete agreement on this subject. Again and again St. Luke draws a sharp distinction between the obstinate refusal of the Jews, and the eager readiness of the Greeks to listen to St. Paul's teaching. Again and again St. Paul refers to his converts as men who knew idolatry by personal experience.

But St. Paul's attempts to preach to the Jews were not only for the most part unsuccessful, they also stirred up great difficulties in his way. Not only did they invariably result in personal violence offered to him and sometimes to his converts, not only did they involve the sudden suspension of his work, whilst he fled for refuge from the fury which he had aroused; but they also brought into prominence a difficulty with which we today are only too familiar. They raised in the most acute form the question of the Apostle's own authority and the truth of his message. St. Paul entered the cities as a Jew, and as a teacher of a form of Judaism. He claimed to be preaching a revelation given to men by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He came to proclaim that the Messiah of the Jews was come, and had shown Himself to be not only the Saviour of the Jews but of all men. Yet the moment he delivered this message the whole Jewish community rose up against him, expelled him and sought to take his life as a blasphemer of God. Now if with us today the great stumblingblock in the way of our missions is the practical denial of Christianity, the indifference of men of our own blood, who yet call themselves Christians, this violent persecution of St. Paul, by the religious teachers of his own nation, must have been a far greater stumblingblock; for it must have appeared to large numbers of people a sufficient refutation of the truth of his message. If from Jerusalem, and round about to Illyricum St. Paul had preached the Gospel, from Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum that Gospel was denied by all the people who were naturally best qualified to judge. When St. Paul turned to the Gentiles it must have appeared that he had given up the attempt to convince the Jews, who really knew this Jesus of Nazareth, and that he was now wandering round the world, continually getting further from the place where the facts were known, trying to teach those who did not know something which those who did know rejected with scorn.

This difficulty would have been largely avoided if St. Paul had not begun his preaching in the synagogue. It was when the Jews saw the multitudes, who had been worshippers in their synagogues, following the Apostle that 'they were filled with envy' and went about contradicting and blaspheming. No doubt the difficulty was necessarily there and could not have been avoided, but by his preaching in the synagogue St. Paul brought the difficulty at once to a head in its acutest form.

So it was that St. Paul was constrained to advertise publicly the breach between himself and the Jews, proclaiming in the synagogue his severance from the Jews. The tendency to do this became more marked as time passed, until he went so far as to force the attention of all men to the separation by opening his preaching-room next door to the synagogue. This act of St. Paul seems at first sight deliberately calculated to stir the passions of his countrymen, -- and it is difficult to understand why St. Luke should have called our attention to it so carefully, unless he had seen in it a distinct advance in the relation between St. Paul and the Jews, between Christianity as represented by St. Paul and Judaism.

In order that Christianity might be fairly represented to the Greeks, it was necessary for St. Paul to emphasize the truth that Christianity was not a sect of Judaism, and that its truth or falsehood was wholly independent of the attitude of Jewish authorities towards it. There may be thus some reason in the contention that St. Paul preached first in the synagogue from a sense of religious obligation as much as from any motives of policy, and this seems to be the natural force of his words in the synagogues of Antioch and Corinth and his general attitude towards the Jews in the Epistle to the Romans. The preaching in the synagogue may have been a religious duty; it was certainly not an unmixed advantage. St. Paul may have felt that he owed a debt to the Jews, but he can hardly be said to have deliberately aimed at the conversion of the Jews as a class.

Nevertheless, though St. Paul did not make many Jewish converts in the synagogue, yet it was from the synagogue that he received a certain number of converts whose adherence must have been of great importance to the Church. Proselytes and God-fearing Greeks brought into the Church elements which were of the utmost value for the future life of the body. They had already an established conviction of the Unity of God and of the folly of idolatry. They possessed a conviction and experience of the necessity of morality for true religion. They had an acquaintance with the theory and practice of public worship and some knowledge of the Old Testament. St. Paul was already using the Old Testament, not only as a textbook of controversy; he was also transferring it from the nation to which it naturally belonged to the new Israel to which it spiritually belonged. Already he was treating the story of Hagar as an allegory, already he was treating circumcision as a spiritual, not a carnal, rite, already he was proclaiming Abraham the father of the faithful. All this, some, at least, of the God-fearing Greeks, were prepared to receive and understand and teach.

At the same time, it is possible to exaggerate the influence which these people exercised in the Church. They cannot have been very numerous, for St. Paul speaks of the majority of Christians in his churches as having been idolaters. The epistles to the Macedonian churches are the epistles which demand no acquaintance with the Old Testament for their understanding, and the moral warnings in those epistles refer to the vices which are common to heathen surroundings. When, then, we take it for granted, as we so often do, that the existence of a synagogue and the presence of some God-fearing Greeks in a city so alter the problem of church building that methods used by St. Paul under these circumstances cannot possibly be applied to any modern conditions, I think we are laboring under a delusion. The existence of the synagogue and the presence of God-fearing Greeks enabled St. Paul to receive into the church a few people who could read the Old Testament and were acquainted with the Law, a few people who were before dissatisfied with idolatry or heathen philosophy and were seeking after a truer and purer teaching. The Jews who joined St. Paul had enjoyed this knowledge from their infancy, the Greeks who had become proselytes had enjoyed it for a few years. But this is not enough to justify us in imagining that the presence of these few people in a church made so vast a difference, that there can be no comparison between a church in which they were and a church in which they were not.

Outside the synagogue St. Paul does not seem to have addressed himself to any particular class. He certainly did not give himself up almost exclusively to preaching to the loafers, the porters, the ignorant and degraded, the casual laborers in the streets. He does not seem to have preached at street corners to the idle or curious crowd. It is true that the lame man at Lystra, who was apparently sitting by the wayside begging, heard St. Paul speak. It is true that the soothsaying girl at Thessalonica had apparently heard him, and that we are told that he preached in the Agora at Athens, but whatever we may say with regard to the lame man at Lystra, it is by no means clear that the soothsayer at Thessalonica was doing more than repeating the popular estimate of St. Paul and his preaching. At any rate, it is particularly stated that he was not preaching at the time, but was on his way to the place of prayer, where he was accustomed to preach. As for the Agora at Athens, that was certainly not what we ordinarily mean by the street corner. If then the fact that the lame man at Lystra heard St. Paul speak necessarily implies that St. Paul taught in the street, we must conclude that this was an exception to his general practice, for as a rule St. Paul preached first in the synagogue and afterward in the house of some man of good repute. It is curious how careful St. Luke is to tell us exactly where St. Paul lodged, or in whose house he taught, e.g. we are told that at Philippi he lodged with Lydia and preached at the prayer-place. At Thessalonica he lodged with Jason, and apparently taught in his house; at Corinth he lodged with Aquila, and preached in the house of Titus Justus, and at Ephesus he preached in the School of Tyrannus. St. Luke evidently desires us to understand that St. Paul was careful to provide things honest in the sight of all men, and took thought for what was honorable and of good report, as well as of what was true, and of what was pure, and of what was just.

On the other hand, St. Paul did not seek particularly to attract the scholars, the officials, the philosophers. He certainly did not address himself to them. If he did so once in Athens, he deliberately refused to take that course at Corinth. He himself says that he did not receive many converts from those classes. 'From the middle and lower classes of society,' says Bishop Lightfoot, 'it seems probable that the Church drew her largest reinforcements.' Similarly, Professor Ramsay declares that 'the classes where education and work go hand in hand were the first to come under the influence of the new religion'. This conclusion is supported by St. Paul's reference to the deep poverty of the churches of Macedonia; and St. Luke by his careful note of the conversion of 'chief women' at Thessalonica, and of 'women of honorable estate' at Beroea, seems to suggest that men of rank and importance were few. Moreover, the frequent references to slavery in the Epistles show that many of the Christians belonged to that class. I conclude then that the majority of St. Paul's converts were of the lower commercial and working classes, laborers, freed-men, and slaves; but that he himself did not deliberately aim at any class.

Moreover, it is difficult to believe that he did not also attract many people who make the least desirable converts. We are all familiar with the experience that people who are most ready to receive new impressions, to follow new ideas, to embrace new creeds, to practice new rites, are by no means always the most stable and admirable, sober and trustworthy, high-principled and honest-hearted of men. And one form of St. Paul's preaching was of a kind peculiarly suited to attract many undesirable elements. Miracles draw a gaping crowd of idle, superstitious, and inquisitive folk. They make converts of those who are on the look-out for any means of gaining and exercising an influence over their fellows, people like the sons of Sceva, men who have a craving for power, without the natural ability which will enable them to win and exercise it in a natural way. They make converts of the weak-minded and credulous.

That many such did approach St. Paul seems inevitable. If the churches of Galatia were anything like the churches of Achaia and Macedonia and Asia there were certainly many members whose ideas of religion and morality were far from high. St. Paul did not exclude such. But he did not make his first converts of such. He so taught that no church of his foundation was without a strong center of respectable, religious-minded people. These naturally took the lead and preserved the church from rapid decay.

Thus it would appear that St. Paul made no attempt to seek after any particular class of hearers. He had his place of preaching and addressed himself to all who would listen, and, just as in China today, men of different classes came in whilst he was preaching or called upon him for a private conversation. His converts were no better and no worse than ours in any Eastern land. Not here is the secret of his peculiar success to be found. We cannot excuse our failure in the East on the ground that we have no synagogues to preach in, no proselytes to convert. If half our converts had been Jews or proselytes I think it would have made little difference. We have had plenty of good and able converts. In this St. Paul had no advantage over us.

But it may be said that if this is true of the civilized East it is certainly not true of many other parts of the world. If St. Paul's method of establishing churches is conceivably applicable to civilized peoples, it is certainly inapplicable to the uncivilized, the savage, the illiterate. To this, one answer is that we have never tried, and therefore cannot tell, what may be the power of the Holy Ghost in such cases. But it is at least strange that we should hitherto have applied exactly the same rule to those whom no one ventures to call uncivilized and to those whom no one would call civilized. And further it is true that, where uncivilized men have accepted the Gospel, a very few years have wrought a most amazing change in their mental and moral outlook. They are often not incapable of education of the highest order, they are not destitute of natural ability to lead, they are no mean evangelists. Examples can be found in the South Seas, in Papua, in New Zealand, in Central, South and West Africa, and among the low castes of India, in fact, everywhere. Is it true that the missions to the civilized people of the East are established more quickly or surely than those amongst the uncivilized? Our difficulty is that we have not yet tried St. Paul's method anywhere, and have used the same argument to bolster up our dread of independence everywhere. For such an attitude St. Paul's practice and the accounts of his work handed down to us lend no authority.