Ecclesial Indigeneity and the Semantics of 'Self'

s indigenous church principles constituted a major shift in missiology in the mid-nineteenth century and continue to influence missionary methods. 1 Anderson served as the general secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Protestant missionary society in the United States.During the course of his duties as leader of the ABCFM, he began to recognize that American missionary activity often proceeded by means of cultivating Western civilization among native populations in ways that left local churches dependent on outside resources 1 Anderson's principles of self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation have become known almost ubiquitously as "indigenous" church principles, though Anderson primarily employed the term "native" to describe components of his ecclesiology (e.g., native pastorate, native ministry, etc.).Considering the pervasive use of the moniker indigenous within missiological discussions of Anderson's argument, however, this essay will continue to use that term to describe Anderson's principles, even though the term did not feature prominently in his writing.GCBJM Vol. 4 No. 1 (SPRING 2025) for their ongoing maintenance. 2In response to this issue, Anderson argued that missionaries, rather than pursue civilizing endeavors as the means of missions, should instead focus their primary attention on establishing local churches that are self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating.Anderson's principles-which were also espoused in Europe by fellow missionary statesman Henry Venn 3 -proliferated widely in the missions community and have remained a formative influence on missionary church planting methodologies through the present day. 4These principles, though embraced by many, have met with criticism from others who have been leery of semantic implications associated with Anderson's indigenous church theory.Indeed, as missiologist Hans Kasdorf observes, "The problem of semantics is not easily overcome in a study of literature on the indigenous church principles.What seems to be positive in 2 Rufus Anderson, Memorial Volume of the First Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: ABCFM, 1862), 250; Regarding the issue of local reliance on foreign resources, Melvin L. Hodges, "Why Indigenous Church Principles?," in Readings in Dynamic Indigeneity, ed.Charles H. Kraft and Tom N. Wisley (Pasadena, CA: William Carey, 1979), 9, notes, "In some places missionaries have labored for fifty years and still the local congregation is unable to carry on alone.Why is it that after ten, fifteen, or twenty years of missionary effort in a given area, we must still appeal