Discipling or Proselytizing...?

A few months ago I posted the following and want to share it again now. In his outstanding book, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, Roland Allen (Anglican missionary of the early 20th century) contends that we western believers have a "fear for the doctrine"; in other words, our worry about people not getting the "doctrine" right motivates too much of what we do, and Jesus ends up being relegated to a secondary place. He is the First Cause and we tend to stress the secondary causes:

"Fear for the doctrine...leads us to put the doctrine in the wrong place...We speak as if the Gospel and the doctrine, preaching Christ and preaching Christianity, were identical terms.

"There is a difference between the revelation of a Person and the teaching of a system of doctrine and practice.

"...our doctrine so dominates our mind that we can scarcely believe that men can love Christ and be saved by Him unless they know and use our doctrinal expressions. Because we find this difficult we inevitably tend to give the teaching of our doctrine the first place in our work...But the Person is greater and far excels it.

"When we fall into this error, we inevitably tend to make the acceptance of the shadow, the doctrine, the system, the aim and object of our work. In doing that we are doing something of which Christ spoke in very severe terms. To make converts to a doctrine is to make proselytes."