ABSTRACT
A mature appreciation of history and tradition enables Christians to stand on the shoulders of the giants who have preceded them. Theoretically this should mean that every generation of Christians sees with greater clarity than the one before. What Venn did in essence was to wrestle with the reality of cultural distinctiveness and to map out a missionary strategy that both took this seriously and sought to extrapolate and implement biblical and historical principles of church growth. A much more recent and more bruising failure was the resistance of the European missionaries in West Africa to his proposals that they should serve under an indigenous bishop. But critical reflection on that drove him to conclude that the objective of insisting that missionaries serve under a native bishop might not only be unrealistic but also inappropriate. The Intelligencer wondered whether China had brought such issues to the fore for the first time.
