Working Towards an Indigenous Church (3): A Self-propagating Church

John Nevius suggested that an indigenous church ought to have three distinctive characteristics: self-governing, self-propagating, and self-supporting. In this article we focus on the second characteristic, self-propagating. We will do this from the point of view of the missionary's role in this effort. If a mission church is truly going to stand on its own and be able to free itself from dependency upon the sending church, it has to have the desire and ability to grow in numbers....