Roland Allen (December 29, 1868 – June 9, 1947) was an English missionary.
Christ had given the apostles a world-wide commission, embracing all the nations; but intellectually they did not understand what He meant. They found that out as they followed the impulse of the Spirit.
Of course all advance depends upon money, when we depend upon paid workers for any advance. Teach men as one of their first lessons in the gospel that pastoral work and evangelistic work ought to be paid, and will they not believe it? They would all believe it if the Holy Ghost did not dispute our teaching. It is a powerful proof of the presence and grace of the Holy Ghost that they do not all believe it and act accordingly.
Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love.
We must be willing to begin with positive teaching, not with negative prohibitions, and be content to wait and to watch whilst the native Christians slowly recreate their own customs as the Spirit of Christ gradually teaches them.
In arriving at a decision in a question of doubt, the apostles in the Acts were guided solely by their sense of the Spirit behind the action, not by any speculations as to consequences which might ensue. And so they found the truth.
We want Paul's theology and his results but not his methods.
What we need to be assured of is not that we possess an excellent system of doctrine and ritual, but that the gift of the Holy Spirit is a reality.
I have a profound belief in the power of the Sacraments. I believe that in a Divine way the use of them teaches the teachable their inward meaning and therefore I think we need be in no hurry to attempt to teach new converts all that we think we know about them.
The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a very simple thing. . . What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire.
If we allow the consideration of heathen morality and heathen religion to absolve us from the duty of preaching the gospel we are really deposing Christ from His throne in our own souls.
The apostles were moved, not so much by an intellectual apprehension, as by a spiritual illumination. They met men, and the need of those men whom they met cried aloud to them.
The church was first established and organized with a world-wide mission for a world-wide work.
There is in St. Paul's definite, soul-stirring assertion of the wrath of God and the reality of the judgment at hand, a truth more profound than any that underlies our somewhat enfeebled ideas of universal benevolence and the determined progress of the race.
Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact.
The Spirit is Love expressed towards man as redeeming love, and the Spirit is truth, and the Spirit is the Holy Spirit. Redemption is inconceivable without truth and holiness.
To preach the Gospel requires that the preacher should believe that he is sent to those whom he is addressing at the moment, because God has among them those whom He is at the moment calling; it requires that the speaker should expect a response.
Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love. If I do not love a person I am not moved to help him by proofs that he is in need; if I do love him, I wait for no proof of a special need to urge me to help him.