Henry Venn (Church Missionary Society)

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Henry Venn (February 10, 1796 - January 13, 1873), was honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 to 1873. He expounded the basic principles of indigenous Christian missions later addressed and made widespread by the Lausanne Congress of 1974.

Venn and Rufus Anderson of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were the first to use the term "indigenous church" in the mid-nineteenth century. They wrote about the necessity for creating churches in the missions field that were self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating (Venn used the term "self-extending").^[1] Venn is often quoted as encouraging the "euthanasia of missions," which meant that missionaries were to be considered temporary workers and not permanent.^[2]

[edit] References

1. ^ Terry, John Mark (2000), “Indigenous Churches”, in Moreau, A. Scott, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, pp. 483-485 
2. ^ Shenk, Wilbert R. (1977). "Henry Venn's legacy". Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 1 (2): 16–19. 

[edit] See also

• Henry Venn (Clapham Sect)
• Rufus Anderson
• John Livingstone Nevius
• Three-Self Patriotic Movement