Henry Venn (Church Missionary Society)

Henry Venn (10 February 1796 – 13 January 1873) was an Anglican clergyman who is recognised as one of the foremost Protestant missions strategists of the nineteenth century.

He was also a campaigner, in the tradition of the Clapham Sect, who frequently lobbied Parliament on social issues of his day, notably on ensuring the total eradication of the Atlantic slave trade by retaining the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy.

[1] He expounded the basic principles of indigenous Christian missions: these were much later made widespread by the Lausanne Congress of 1974.

[2] Venn and Rufus Anderson of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were the first to use the term "indigenous church" in the mid-nineteenth century.

They wrote about the necessity for creating churches in the missions field that were self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating (Venn used the term "self-extending").

[6] Venn is often quoted as encouraging the "euthanasia of missions," which meant that missionaries were to be considered temporary workers and not permanent.

[2] Venn died at age 76, at Mortlake, Surrey, where he had resided for twelve years, on 13 January 1873, and was buried in the churchyard there.

There was a portrait of him, by George Richmond, in the committee-room of the Church Missionary Society, and a marble relief in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.