Henry Venn(Image: © CMS)A few months ago, when we informed the government that we were starting a co-operative, they didn’t quite know where to place us.
It was unlike a typical co-operative (such as co-operatives for milk farmers) and it was more complex than a Co-operative store.
It was not really a for-profit business but neither was it a non-profit charity. It was one of those new hybrid organisations, which crosses the boundaries of public, private and charity sectors to find itself in what people are now calling the “fourth sector”.
Fourth-sector models include co-operatives and social enterprises and other models of “for-benefit” organisations that have long been a common feature of missions and a point of heated discussion.
This tension between missions and economics came to a conclusive moment 70 years ago at the International Missionary Council Meeting at Tambaram, Madras, in 1938.
The Economic Basis of the Church
(Image: © CMS)Of the seven volumes compiled after the conference, the largest was entitled
The Economic Basis of the Church, which aimed to “provide such information on the economic and social environment of the Younger Churches as will throw light upon their power to maintain themselves as self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating bodies”
1.
One of the most pressing challenges for missions during this period was the issue of self-sustainability in the face of decreasing funds from Western churches and increasing suspicion of foreign church structures in a political environment charged with nationalism. The concept of self-supporting mission had to move from theory to reality.
The ‘three-self’ phrase (“self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating”) used here, and in particular the unquestioned assumption of a self-supporting church, occur in the writings of Henry Venn, the Honorary Clerical Secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 to 1872.
Venn saw the objective of a mission to be the establishment of a “Native church under Native pastors upon a self-supporting system”. Passing on leadership to nationals signalled what he called the “euthanasia of a mission”.
He was often misquoted as suggesting the euthanasia of the mission society itself, but, as Max Warren made clear, Venn believed a self-supporting national church would free the mission society to continue its ministry by shifting its focus to the “regions beyond”
2.
To accomplish this, the mission society’s role had to involve creating structures that were self-governing, self-supporting and self-extending — and that meant crossing the lines that often divided commerce and ministry to remove dependency on foreign resources.
He urged caution as to the nature of the business and in the delegation of a missionary’s time devoted to commerce, and, it may be argued, he could not have anticipated the complicity of mission with colonisation as clearly as we see it now, but his advice is strikingly sound and prophetic, especially if we realise that the Co-operative movement derived its beginnings from a small group of weavers in Rochdale only a few years before Venn penned his thoughts.
Venn’s directives for the work in Sierra Leone in the early 1850s give us a good insight into what kind of structures would allow the level of self-maintenance needed for a healthy ‘euthanasia’.
He suggested five structures for sustainability: a savings bank for investing and lending; the use of industrial or provident societies to provide social welfare and medicine; the encouragement of agriculture and industry; a free storehouse to enable fair trade; and education through libraries, reading-rooms, and lectures.
3 Even a hundred years later, Roman Catholic missionaries such as Father Topshee, also seeking to remove foreign dependency and suspicion from their mission work by establishing co-operatives, suggested a similar pattern and agreed with Venn’s principles of initiating the work with a co-operatively-run credit union.
4 And, of course, the 1938 gathering in Tambaram not only picked up the mantle of self-sustainability for missions but also highlighted best practices for mission organisations in implementing these principles.
The report ends by highlighting new forms of co-operative living, such as the Christian
ashrams in India and the Cotswold Bruderhof in England, and new forms of co-operative business ventures --- the shining example being Dr Kagawa’s Christian Co-operative movement in Japan.
5 In summing up the Co-operative movement and its role in helping mission become self-sustaining, the report states that “the whole movement is based on the conviction that man in Christ Jesus can be made free in ‘mind, body and estate’, and it is incumbent on Christ’s followers (should they find themselves in a highly organised society) to labour to create the environment in which alone the whole man can in fact be free”.
“Its success depends on covering every relationship of production, distribution and consumption, requiring at least seven co-operatives — namely, Producers, Marketing, Public Utility, Insurance, Consumers and Mutual Aid. Especially it is urged that Credit Co-operative activity is necessary if the experiment is to be able to make itself independent of the system it seeks to replace.”
6 I find it interesting to hear Venn’s directives echo through history into the conversations of the 20th century and, now, the 21st century too.
The report from Tambaram ends with these words, to which, I am sure, Venn would accede, as would a new generation of missionaries in a complex, post-modern world:
“For Christians then to deal in economic activities is not to cross the barrier of their rightful domain but to create the only circumstances in which the whole man can be built up.”
7 Andrew Jones is a part-time missional cell developer with the Church Mission Society. Among other things, Andrew and his wife Debbie are launching a co-operative in 2008 called “The Old Sorting Room”. References 1 The Economic Basis of the Church, compiled by J. Merle Davis, International Missionary Council Meeting at Tarambam, Madras, December 12th to 29th, 1938, Oxford University Press,1939. Forward, page vi
2 To Apply the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Henry Venn, edited by Max Warren, Eerdmans, 1971, page 29
3 To Apply the Gospel, Warren, page 186-188
4 The Missionary’s Role in Socio-Economic Betterment, edited by John J. Considine, Newman Press, 1960, page 202-203
5 The Economic Basis of the Church, Davis, page 606-607
6 ibid., page 607
7 ibid., page 608