Saint of the Week: Roland Allen
6/11/2025
Roland Allen
1868 - 1948
Mission Strategist
Roland Allen (December 29, 1868 – June 9, 1947) was born in Bristol, England, the son of an Anglican priest but was orphaned early in life. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and after winning a scholarship to study at St. John's College, Oxford, he studied at the Anglo-Catholic Leeds Clergy Training School. He was ordained a priest in 1893. Roland spent two periods in northern China working for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The first from 1895-1900 ended due to the Boxer Rebellion, during which he sought asylum at the British Legation in Beijing. He was the Legation’s chaplain throughout most of the siege. After a short period back in England, he returned to north China in 1902 but again returned home due to illness. These early experiences led him to reassess his own vocation and the theology and missionary methods of the Western churches. He became an early advocate of establishing Churches which from the start would be self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing, adapted to local conditions and not merely imitations of Western Christianity. These views were confirmed and reinforced during a trip to India in 1910 and by later research in Canada and East Africa. These experiences also influenced Allen to write his seminal work, Missionary Methods, which was first published in 1912. Allen’s approach to Mission strategy for indigenous Churches is based on his study of Saint Paul’s missionary methods, which he insisted contained solutions to most of the difficulties of the day. It is also possible that the Brethren movement and earlier primitivist writings of Anthony Norris Groves significantly influenced Allen’s thinking. He believed it was the recognition of the church as a local entity and trust in the Holy Spirit’s indwelling within converts and churches that were the capstones of Paul’s success. In contrast, Allen believed that most clerics in his day were unable to entrust their converts to the Holy Spirit, relying instead on Jesus’ work through them. Allen’s views became increasingly influential, although he personally became disillusioned with the established churches. He spent the last years of his life in Kenya, establishing a reclusive church of his own devising, centered on an idiosyncratic family rite. Allen died in Nairobi. His gravestone in Nairobi's City Park is a simple stone cross with the inscription on the pedestal: “Roland Allen, Clerk in Hoy Orders, 1868-1947, I am the Resurrection and the life saith the Lord.”
