Politics & Power Quote by Roland Allen

Allen frames the early church not as a well-drilled institution executing a clear plan, but as a body of leaders stumbling into the scale of their own mandate. The sting is in the phrase "intellectually they did not understand": it punctures any nostalgic fantasy that the apostles possessed a neat theology of global mission from day one. In Allen's telling, they had the commission in their mouths before they had it in their minds.

The rhetoric does two things at once. First, it demotes strategy. The apostles "found that out" only by moving, not by mastering a blueprint. Second, it elevates agency that comes from elsewhere: "the impulse of the Spirit" functions as both explanation and rebuke. If the Spirit is the engine, then human leaders are not the owners of the project, and their confidence is always slightly suspect. This is ecclesiology as anti-managerial critique.

The context matters: Allen, an Anglican missionary thinker, wrote against the early 20th-century missionary apparatus that often exported Western control alongside the gospel. His argument, across his work, is that institutions love clarity because clarity centralizes power. By insisting that the apostles advanced before they fully understood, Allen legitimizes risk, improvisation, and local initiative, while quietly warning churches not to confuse administrative comprehension with faithfulness.

Subtext: the church's most consequential expansions rarely happen when leaders feel "ready". They happen when they obey a call that outruns their categories, then build understanding in the wake of action.