John Nevius

Life

Nevius was born on March 4, 1829, on a farm in western New York State. He studied at Union College and Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1854 he was sent to China by the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterian), and he served there as a missionary for about forty years. His principal field of work was Shandong Province. He died on October 19, 1893, in Chefoo (Zhifu, present-day Yantai), a port city on the Shandong Peninsula.

Ministry and Work

At the time, missionaries commonly used foreign funds to hire local evangelists and to pay church operating expenses. Nevius believed that this approach made local churches dependent on missionaries. He therefore devised a method of planting indigenous churches that local believers would establish and develop themselves from the very beginning. He published a series of articles comparing the old and new methods in the missionary journal The Chinese Recorder; these articles were later collected in the book Planting and Development of Missionary Churches. He also wrote several other books on the religions, customs, and social life of China.

His method is commonly summarized as the "three-self principles":

• Self-propagation: Local believers evangelize their own people.
• Self-support (also called self-sufficiency): Local believers bear the costs of operating their churches.
• Self-government: Local believers manage church affairs themselves.

Scholars hold that the three-self principles themselves were first advocated by Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson. In their view, the distinctive feature of Nevius's method was its addition of systematic Bible study and training of believers at the congregational, regional, and national levels.

Influence on the Korean Church

Most of the early missionaries to Korea were young men in their twenties with little missionary experience. In June 1890, Northern Presbyterian missionaries, including Horace Underwood, invited Nevius to Seoul, where he stayed for about two weeks and explained his mission methods. The principles he presented were incorporated into the rules of the Northern Presbyterian Mission in 1891 and into the policy adopted by the Council of Missions Holding the Presbyterian Form of Government in 1893. Missions that arrived later, including the Southern Presbyterians, generally adopted them as well. This became known as the Nevius Mission Policy.

Under this policy, Korean believers evangelized their neighbors while continuing in their ordinary occupations, and they built their own church buildings. Evangelists were appointed only as far as the believers' financial means allowed. The policy also included a system in which all believers studied the Bible under the guidance of yeongsu (lay leaders in the early church) and josa (paid evangelists who assisted the missionaries).

Assessment

Nevius's method is widely regarded as having played an important role in the rapid growth of the Korean church in the early 1900s and in laying the foundation for a self-supporting church. Some analyses, however, note that the method achieved little in Shandong, his main field of work, and proved far more successful in Korea.

The method has also drawn criticism. Southern Presbyterian missionary William Reynolds proposed principles for training Korean ministers based on this method. These included not employing ministers with foreign funds and keeping ministers' level of education only slightly above that of the average Korean. These principles have been criticized for deliberately setting a low standard for theological education. In mission work today, some also express reservations about applying the three-self principles without modification.