The Three-Self Model, Christ’s Headship and Christian Unity: Bengali Christians Seeking and Reforming the Nineteenth-Century Indigenous Church Ideal

Abstract

This article focuses on the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary ideal of an indigenous church, particularly in its articulation by missionaries of the Free Church of Scotland, and how three Bengali Christians connected to the Free Church endeavoured to reform the ecclesial ideal for North Indian contexts. The study seeks to show how the Western origins of the indigenous church ideal, commonly summarised in the ‘three-self’ model and supported by the Free Church’s doctrine of Christ’s headship, was received and reappropriated by the ‘native’ Christians for whom the ideal was intended. The Bengali Christian engagement with the indigenous church ideal is shown to be both consistently Protestant in its appeal to the church’s spiritual independence and uniquely contextualized to Indian contexts in its focused pursuit of Christian unity.