On the Conduct of Missions

Missionary administration—On " witnessing" as the church's chief function— Education vs. Evangelization— Government grants to mission schools— Philadelphia address on "Decentralization"

WITHOUT doubt Dr. Gordon's conviction of the imminence of Christ's return affected his advice on matters of administration. " He believed," wrote one of his associates on the board, " that some of the types of mission policy prevailing were formed without due regard to what he thought a preliminary stage of missionary operation, and that this view of the present dispensation as final practically nullified any expectation of the Lord's return. With many people the advent of civilization and a broad view of mission work are practically identical. Not so with Dr. Gordon. He believed that the gospel was to be preached in a profound sense 'as a witness,' as a provisional stage of effort, and that to turn aside to various forms of higher education and to other semisecular methods of work was to minimize the chief function of the church of Christ in this age. He entertained, however, no superficial or shallow view of what that witness included. He believed that the word 'witness,' as used in the New Testament, is descriptive of the profoundest form of human effort possible to the Christian— effort endowed with the very power and energy and wisdom of the Holy Ghost. His conception of the witness embraced the idea of witnessing churches and institutions. He believed that many forms of quasi-missionary enterprise were representative of a partial departure from apostolic standards and New Testament conceptions of evangelizing the world." ^* He was not, however, unmindful of the representative character of his office or of the constituency behind him which dissented from this view. He sought accordingly to emphasize those phases of mission work which are necessarily acceptable to all. Evangelism he considered beyond all the proper and pressing work of the Union. Primary education, too, he felt to be a legitimate function, in that Protestantism and illiteracy cannot coexist. But the higher education ought, he contended, to be a development of the life of the native chiu-ch. Its superimposition by the home board he considered untimely in view of the black masses of the unevangelized. With the policy of educating heathen from the contributions of American Christians he would have nothing to do. He questioned whether, in any large degree, conversions followed as a result of the extensive educational propaganda which is carried on in India and elsewhere. And, apart from considerations of expediency, he denied to it the spiritual and essentially Christian note which should characterize missionary operations. He compared the missionary professor who devotes his days to teaching Brahman lads English literature and algebra and physics, that in a Christian atmosphere they may be attracted to Christian truth, to the sacramentarian who hales the multitude into " the church " that they may by its intermediary influence be saved.

" Has this dispensation of teaching," he asks, " after all, proved really helpful in preparing the heathen mind to receive the Word of life? No more, probably, than a gymnasium in

* " The work distinctly appointed for this present time is the gathering of the ecclesia, the called out. Not that we would question for a moment the ultimate conversion of the world. When ' that which is in part shall be done away,' and when 'that which is perfect is come,' then indeed shall our Lord Jesus have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." (Article " Education and Missions," A. J. Gordon, " Missionary Review," December, 1893.) the basement of an American church, with its curriculum of dumb-bells and vaulting-bars, has conduced to a change of heart in the young men who have entered therein. The tendency is inevitable for these preparatives to become substitutes. Education, by all means! But in the school of grace the law seems to be, not 'know in order that you may believe,' but 'believe in order that you may know.' Culture, when set forward as a forerunner of Christ, has constantly failed to

become such, because it lacks the humility to say, ' He it is

who, coming after me, is preferred before me, whose shoelatchet I am not worthy to unloose.' It being true, according to our Lord's own words, that the Father hath ' hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes,' it cannot be the missionary's business to make men wise and prudent in order that they may receive the gospel, but rather to tell the wise and prudent that, except they repent and become as little children, they shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven."

To the custom of receiving government grants for mission schools he was likewise heartily opposed. He felt that there was an insidious danger in this bond between church and state. He clearly saw that there can hardly be a conscience other than the nonconformist conscience, since state religion tends, by a natural gravitation, to become the organ of expression for officialism, and therefore for the majority, for the controlling element in the state, and for the almost invariable opponents of reform opinion. He had seen how, on the mission field, the government grant had often dulled the moral sense of missionaries, making them wabble and trim and flutter like a pigeon whose brain has been partly removed.*

^* As, for example, in the case of the Anglican bishop and clergy of Calcutta, who testified recently in favor of the continuance of the state opium trade, and certain missionaries in the last Decennial Conference at Bombay, who deprecated agitation against licensed vice in the Anglo-Indian army.

" The stipend rarely fails," he wrote, " to assert its authority over the stipendiary; subsidies are almost certain, sooner or later, to subsidize. Therefore let missions be on their guard against the encumbrance of state aid.... To give secular teaching in exchange for government grants may be an honest transaction, but is the missionary of the cross commissioned for such a business? As a matter of fact, the missionary societies of free churches and established churches alike have fallen into the habit of receiving government grants in aid on the foreign field. The system of secular education among our missions is largely related to this usage. The wrong principle —alliance of missions with the state—has led to what many regard as a wrong result. It was through this principle, gradually and almost imperceptibly adopted, that the early church, from being ' more than conqueror,' became more than conquered, since, instead of Christianizing paganism, her Christianity was paganized. The law of the kingdom of heaven is not the law of the kingdom of earth. The world's motto is, ' In union there is strength; ' the church's motto is, ' In separation there is strength.' "

For many years Dr. Gordon represented the board at the May meetings of the denomination, voicing as spokesman its appeals for greater activity, and presenting the results of the year's work to its constituency. His addresses constituted a striking feature of the yearly gatherings. " Always unique in character, they were given without apparent self-consciousness, without the least effort to make a great impression. They were the overflow of his mind and heart respecting the biblical conception of missions and the obligations of the servants of Christ to pour out their lives in the very spirit of their Lord himself in behalf of the most abandoned and abject races of the earth. There was a quiet, awe-inspiring majesty about them that gave them a character entirely their own. Their moral and spiritual force was always invincible. As a rule, Dr. Gordon, in his public addresses, rarely adverted to the details of policy or to his own special views. His appeal on these occasions was to those instincts and convictions which are common to all Christian minds. He held his audience to the profoundest yet most simple and primary obligations." ^*

The address at Philadelphia in ¹ 892 was one of exceptional power. One hundred years of mission work had been finished. The future, with all its hopes, its anxieties, its responsibilities, was opening a new volume for the record of new enterprises, of new dangers, of new victories. The moment was of a solemnity and import which Gordon clearly realized. For nearly two hours he held an audience of four thousand people in the Academy of Music, unfolding to them the conclusions of twenty years' experience, pointing out the lines which the program of the new years must follow, dwelling on the portentous needs of the world, and stimulating his hearers to better things by the recital of the triumphs of self-sacrifice and of missionary heroism. " I wanted to say more in regard to the work of the Moravian missionaries," he said afterward, with a perceptible tremor in his voice, "but I could not trust myself." For on that day his heart was full!

A part only of that address can we quote here, the part which deals with the policy of decentralization in missionary administration

" I am to speak to-night of the missionary outlook. Need I say how much depends upon an intelligent apprehension of our past, in order to an intelligent forecast of our future? The century of missions is closing; and what inspirations, what resources, what preparations, what opportunities, has this century brought to us! At the beginning of the century there were only two or three missionary societies in all Protestant Christendom; now there are upward of one hundred such societies, whose representatives are preaching the gospel

^* Dr. H. C. Maine.

to every nation under heaven. Then less than fifty versions of the Scriptures comprised the entire work of Bible translation since the days of the apostles; now the Word of God has been translated into more than two hundred and eighty languages, and the whole Bible made accessible to nine tenths of the human race. In the beginning of the century j[^\2> '^^• 6d. was cast into the treasury, at the house of Widow Wallace at Kettering, for inaugurating the enterprise of modern missions; at the close of the century the societies which have sprung from that humble beginning are contributing eleven

million dollars annually for evangelizing the heathen. A

hundred years ago women's missionary societies were unknown; to-day there are nearly thirty such societies in America alone, with twenty-five thousand auxiliaries, contributing a million and three fourths dollars annually for spreading the gospel. At the beginning of the century, though the doors of several of the heathen nations stood ajar, hardly one had been securely opened; now every nation under heaven is to such degree accessible that missionaries of the cross have entered in. Well may we write the word ' opportunity ' over the closing decade of this nineteenth century; and well may we be admonished that opportunity is but another name for importunity, as though God were beseeching us by every open door to open our- hearts and to open our hands and to open our purses, that we may worthily meet the crisis of missions which is upon us.

" Now, measuring our fidelity on the scale of our opportunity, what estimate do we reach? The field is the world, and the whole world is accessible; and in all the world we have at the present time about seven thousand missionaries. But the same constituency which has seven thousand missionaries in the foreign field has a hundred and twenty-seven thousand ordained ministers laboring at home. In parishes of Great Britain and America there are repeated instances of two or three ordained preachers to the thousand and two thousand souls; while it is estimated that every ordained foreign missionary has a parish of three hundred thousand souls. Does this look as though the Shepherd and Bishop of souls were bearing rule in the diocese of the world, and receiving loyal obedience from those who are under him?

"Again, the wealth of Protestant Christians has increased so enormously during the century that the evangelical Christians of the United States are credited with possessing thirteen billions of dollars. But do they possess this wealth, or are ihey possessed by it? is the question which must be raised when I tell you that these same Christians contribute annually only twenty-five cents per capita for foreign missions, and that this contribution is computed to be but one thirty-second part of one per cent, of their wealth.

" In spite of the meagerness of our contributions of men and money, missionaries have won marvelous triumphs. The converts from heathenism and their families are estimated at three millions— a result for which we should thank God and take courage. But, according to the statistics of Mr. Johnstone, in his ' Century of Missions,' the gain in heathen and Mohammedan population has been seventy times greater than this. Considering, then, that of earth's one thousand four hundred millions of population a thousand millions are yet destitute of any saving knowledge of Christ; and considering, moreover, that every success already won constitutes a new call for laborers and contributions and evangelical zeal, is it not clear that the demand upon us in the closing decade of this century is greater than ever before? And what shall be our answer to this demand? In replying to this question, I may disarm prejudice by saying that I repeat what many of our wisest men thought at the beginning of the century, and what more think at the close, when I give this threefold challenge: churches to the front, reserves to the front, pastors to the front!

" First, in regard to the duty of our churches. In a very able article in a recent number of the ' British and Foreign Evangelical Review,' I find this somewhat startling statement 'The churches of Great Britain have never as yet made foreign missions a part of their work. The great missionary societies in England are all outside the churches, which, as churches, have nothing to do with their management or maintenance. It is true the money comes from members of the churches, and church-members are the managers of the societies; but all that the churches do is to manifest a benevolent neutrality or to bestow a benevolent patronage. Missions to the heathen are not made the work of the churches.' This statement is just as applicable to America as to Great Britain. As churches we are not directly participating in the great work of foreign missions, though we are doing so by representation and by delegation. And yet I sincerely believe that our divinely given polity commits us to such participation. ' For ye, brethren, became followers \i7nitators\ of the churches of God which in Judea are in Christ Jesus,' says the apostle. I have no doubt that the church at Antioch is our inspired model as a missionary church as truly as a gospel church. That church, under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, set apart and sent forth its own members as missionaries of the cross. And I have the strongest conviction that, if every church would do the same to-day, we could multiply our missionary activity a thousandfold.

" ' But single churches would be unable to undertake such a work,' it may be said. ' How many do you count me for? ' asked the Macedonian general, as his soldiers expressed their fear of going into battle against great odds. ' How many do you count me for? ' asks the Holy Ghost, who still abides in the church with his undivided presence and his undiminished power. If it were not for this last consideration I would not broach this subject at this time. Christ, in the person of the Holy Spirit, dwells in every church in the fullness of his presence. ' Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,' is the Magna Charta of the local church. Christ is not divided; he has not distributed himself among his churches, giving a part of himself to each, so that only by a union of all the churches can we secure the presence of the whole Christ.

" Herein is the immense difference between spiritual force and physical force. You can obtain a hundred horse-power by harnessing a hundred horses into one team; but you cannot secure a hundred church-power by uniting a hundred churches into one society; and for this reason: by separate church action that sense of weakness and dependence is promoted by which Christians are driven to take hold on God by united church action that sense of denominational strength is nourished by which Christians are led to take hold of one another. My brethren, need I tell you that responsibility is the mother of activity— that necessity is the spring of prevailing prayer? Therefore I affirm that the greatest problem which we have to solve is that of putting the weight of spiritual obligation, which belongs to every church and to every Christian, upon every church and upon every Christian. And I believe that our divinely appointed church polity was ordained for this very purpose, and if rightly carried out can effect it as no presbyterian or episcopal government can do. By a wonderful arrangement of natural law the atmosphere presses with a weight of fifteen pounds to the square inch on every human body. Unite a thousand people in one body and you do not relieve the pressure by a single ounce from any single individual. Would that the same law held good in regard to the weight of moral and spiritual responsibility!

But, as a matter of fact, organization and association tend to take off the pressure from the local churches and from the individual Christians, and our vast machinery of secretarial agencies has been invented in order to restore this pressure as best we can.

" President Wayland, speaking on this subject more than forty years ago, predicted, with the wisest missionary statesmanship, that the tendency among us would be more and more for churches to turn over their missionary obligation to societies, for societies to turn it over to boards, for boards to delegate it to executive committees, and executive committees to secretaries; so that, in the last result, the chief responsibility for the great work would come upon the shoulders of a dozen men. As one who has been honored for twenty years to stand under this burden at the center, I can say that I do not desire to see an ounce of it lifted; but it would be a new era for missions if the same pressure could rest upon every local church which rests upon the favored twelve men at the center. Nor do I for a moment plead that our noble Missionary Union should be set aside or its present functions curtailed. Without such organizations the great missionary movement could not, humanly speaking, have been inaugurated. As in the building of railroads there must be a combination of labor and capital, so here the organized union and cooperation of all our churches was needful. But, the railroad being completed, it is adapted for private traffic as well as for public transport. Such was evidently the thought of the fathers and founders of the Missionary Union, as shown in the sixteenth article of our constitution, which requires the Executive Committee to ' afford such aid and encouragement as may be suitable to such individuals, churches, or local associations of Baptist churches as may prefer to support missionaries of their own appointment.'

" If we could only come to this— that each church would take up missionary work directly, making the Union its commission house for the transaction of its business, its banking house for transmitting funds, and its Bible and publishing house for supplying literature— who doubts that we might do vastly more than we are now doing?

" Do you accuse me of being an idealist, going back to a remote Antioch for an example instead of considering the changed circumstances and conditions in which we are living? I reply that it is the actual which has awakened my interest in this question rather than the ideal— the exhibition of what has really been accomplished where churches have undertaken direct missionary work.

" By universal consent, Moravian missions hold a unique place among the evangelizing agencies of the world. When I remind you that the Moravian Brethren send one out of every sixty of their members to the foreign field, that they are credited with raising ten dollars per member annually for foreign missions, and that their success has been such that they have three times as many communicants on the foreign field as in the home churches, you will admit that they deserve the peerless honor which has been accorded to them by the historians of missions. What is the secret of this astonishing preeminence among all the missionary enterprises of Christendom? I believe that this secret is told in a single sentence, which I take from their own official declaration. That declaration says, ' There is never a church among the Brethren without a mission to the heathen; a?id there is never a mission of the Brethren which is not the direct affair of the church? In other words, while all other Protestant bodies carry on missions through societies, the Moravian Church is its own and only missionary society. Dr. Wameck, of Germany, a very high authority on the subject of foreign missions, believes that this fact furnishes the real secret of the unique position and the unparalleled success of Moravian missions. Is not here a question, then, deserving the most serious and unprejudiced consideration? Our great societies were needed for pioneering the modern missionary enterprise, and they would still be needed if every local church were to take up missions for itself — needed for conducting and perpetuating the work. For, though the church, as the body of Christ, is complete in itself and can develop no new organs, it can create for itself the tools and implements of its spiritual husbandry. Such exactly are missionary boards. But we need constantly to be reminded that our strength is not in tools, but in life; not in outward organization, but in the indwelling Spirit of God.

" With our exaggerated confidence in the power of association, I imagine some one asking impatiently, ' Do you mean to imply that one church acting alone can do one one-hundredth part of what a hundred can do acting through an organized society?' Giving the answer of history, I might truly say that a single church, acting in union with the Holy Spirit and in supreme dependence on his power, can do as much as a hundred churches depending on the power of organization.

" I make good this affirmation. Pastor Harms, of Germany, because he could get no sympathy from men in his missionary idea, was constrained to turn his own peasant chiu-ch of Hermannsburg into a missionary society. He was appalled at the greatness of the undertaking; and he tells us in graphic language how, in the crisis of his life, he prayed far into the night that God would anoint him for the mighty enterprise. At midnight he rose from his knees and said, ' Forward, now, in God's name,' and from that moment he never faltered. And what was the result? His church of poor artisans and farmers took up the work in prayerful cooperation with their pastor; and at the end of forty years they had put into the foreign field more than three hundred and fifty missionaries, supporting them in their work, and building a ship for transporting them to and from the field; and they had nearly fourteen thousand living communicants whom they had won from heathenism. Is there one of our great missionary societies, with a constituency of thousands of churches, which can surpass for its first forty years the record of this single missionary church? The experience of Pastor Gossner and his Bethlehem Church in Berlin is hardly less wonderful. He sent out and maintained one hundred and forty-one missionaries— two hundred, including the wives of those married —who did a work among the heathen second to none.

" It may be said that these are exceptional men. They were so only in this, that they believed implicitly in the immanence of the Holy Spirit in the church, in the unlimited power which they may have who depend upon him and who throw themselves unreservedly upon him. I believe such examples as these are given us as divine object-lessons for recalling us to primitive missionary methods, reminding us how much greater is consecration than organization; how much mightier the personal responsibility which compels us to take hold on God, than the association which leads us to take hold on one another. I repeat it, then, the greatest problem which confronts us for the opening century is that of distributing the missionary responsibility which has become congested in the official centers. As touching the duty of giving and of praying and of going, this is the question of questions.

" If an obligation of half a million annually resting on our executive board only registers twenty-five cents a year on the individual pocket-book, does it not prove the necessity for a transference of pressure? Think how some insignificant church enterprise, like the purchase of a new organ or the hiring of an incomprehensible soprano, unlooses the purse-strings. Oh, if Christians would only lift for the needs of a perishing world as they lift to supply the luxuries of their own church worship, what should we not see accomplished!

" And praying, like giving, needs the pressure of direct obligation to sustain it. If, somehow, the Hfe of the missionary could be bound up with the life of the local church, so that his success should be their success or his failure their failure, what an impulse it would give to their intercessions! Prayer is the last thing which should be put into a joint-stock company in which we invest general supplications for all men, and from which we take out only general dividends with the church universal. I believe that God designed to lay the burden of the whole world upon every church, that every church might thus find out that it has a whole Christ with whom to bear that burden. Then would it not only pray and give, but it would go and send of its own instead of depending on a central bureau to attend to all this.

" This, then, is the problem to be solved. If my suggestion toward its solution seems visionary and impracticable, depending for its demonstration upon examples borrowed from remote times and places, I strongly insist that it is most practicable. I think you must acknowledge the vast inequality of the pressure, and the possibility at least of correcting this inequality, when I tell you that I know of a single church—by no means wealthy, but which has begun the enterprise of supporting its own missionaries and otherwise coming under the most immediate responsibility for the foreign work— whose contributions last year equaled the combined gifts of either one of three New England States with their hundreds of local churches. At all events, what I have suggested is a harmless endeavor toward the solution of a difficult problem; and I pray that if any church or pastor should be moved in loyal fellowship with our Missionary Union to take up this plan, he may not be frowned upon as an innovator....

" And, finally, how imperative is the summons for pastors at home to enter with whole-souled consecration into the work of foreign missions! Until the great body of ministers do this, making foreign missions their chief business, and investing all their capital in the business— time and money and energy and influence— the mighty missionary impulse which is now called for will not be gained. I believe that we have now reached a crisis, and that, with worldliness and rationalism coming in like a flood on the one hand, and missionary enthusiasm moving out like a flood on the other, we must inevitably be carried in one of the two directions. I say worldliness and rationalism. These are but the two names of one and the same thing. Rationalism is worldliness on its Godward side, as worldliness is rationalism on its earthward side. As invariably as pietism has been the mother of missions at every rebirth, so invariably has rationalism stood ready to destroy the young child as soon as it has been born. As certainly as the great commission was sounded anew in the ears of our fathers a hundred years ago, so certainly is it sounding anew in our ears to-day. We may well tremble to think what had been the result had William Carey's brethren silenced his missionary appeal, as at first they tried to do. But, by the providence of God, they listened, consented, and cooperated, and the result is that the English-speaking race has become the missionary army of the world.

" But let us remember that there were Careys before Carey. More than a hundred years before his day. Baron von Weltz had sought to rouse the German Protestant church to its duty of renewed obedience to the great commission. In what pathetic, almost frantic appeals he voiced his conviction, surrendering his title and his wealth, and offering himself to go to any part of the world if only his brethren would take up the work of giving the gospel to the heathen! But his cry was silenced, Lutheran clergymen and university professors uniting to suppress him as a dreamer and a fanatic; and so, with broken heart, he turned from his church and his country, saying in spirit, ' Behold, your house is left desolate,' and went forth to fill a solitary missionary grave in a foreign field. Is it accidental that such an age of dreary rationalism should have followed this rejected opportunity in Germany? a rationalism relieved, indeed, by the holy lives and teaching of a little company of Pietists, like Francke and Spener, who were hated and denounced as bitterly as Von Weltz had been. Is it an accident that Germany, instead of being the chief fountain of missionary influence, as it might have been had it not rejected its opportunity, has become in some sense a missionary field, the co-religionists of Carey now supporting missionaries and evangelists in the heart of the Lutheran Church in order to win back the people to an evangelical faith in Christ? Let us be afraid of lost missionary opportunities! Such a one may be just before us. The church which is not a missionary church will be a missing church during the next fifty years, its candle of consecration put out, if not its candlestick removed out of its place. As ministers and churches of Jesus Christ, our self-preservation is conditioned on our obedience

to the great commission. Now it is preach or perish! evan-

gelize or fossilize! be a saving church, with girded loins and burning lamp, carrying a lost world on the heart day and night; or be a secularized church, lying on the heart of this present evil world, and allowing it to gird you and carry you whithersoever it will. Which shall it be? "