CHAPTER VIII

CONCLUSIONS

Tue main conclusion that we draw from the facts stated in the preceding chapters is that the one thing needful, the one thing of absolutely vital and essential importance in India at the present time is the thorough education, training, equipping and inspiring of this rapidly growing Church to enable it to go forward with faith and power to achieve the tremendous task of winning India for Christ.

Nothing else can compare with this in importance.

It is the one thing upon which the educated Christians in India and the missionary Societies of the west need to concentrate their thoughts and plans, their energies and resources.

If this task is done thoroughly and well, all else will follow.

If it is not done well, or worse still not done at all, all else that is attempted by the missionary Societies or by educated Indian Christians will be of little value for the furtherance of the Kingdom of God.

It is a task of great magnitude and peculiar difficulty.

Year by year many thousands of the outcastes and aborigines are being swept into the Church.

And in South India the new movement among the caste people promises a still more rapid

CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES

increase in numbers and a whole sheaf of new problems in education and pastoral care.

In view of these facts it is high time for the missionary Societies in the west and the Church in India itself to overhaul their machinery and see how far it is adequate not only to present needs but also to the larger work of the future.

First, there is the machinery for village education.

It obviously needs considerable extension even now.

According to the census of 1921 only about 25 per cent. of the whole Christian population, Indian and European, in town and village, was then literate.

In the villages alone the percentage is very much smaller.

It is difficult to find out what number of Christian children are at present at school, as many of the missionary Societies give no statistics on this important point.

But in the Dornakal diocese there are 17,000 out of a Christian population of about 160,000, rather more than one-tenth.

In European countries it is reckoned that about onesixth of the population are of school-going age.

There is, therefore, room for considerable extension in the Dornakal diocese. And education is far less advanced in many of the village areas where the Christian Church is established than it is in Dornakal

But a far more serious question than the extension of education is the provision of a kind of education suitable to the villages.

Parents will not send their children to school beyond the first two or three classes because they feel, and in most cases rightly feel, that the education given is of no use to village folk.

CONCLUSIONS

The Report of the Indian Statutory Commission on Education in British India, presented to Parliament in October 1929, says with regard to Mass

Education:

"Even when we make all possible allowances and discount the figures liberally, the hard facts of wastage and stagnation are shocking." !

"On the assumption which we have made that on the average no child who has not completed a primary course of at least four years will become permanently literate, we find that, taking British

India as a whole, the present system produced in 1925-26 only eighteen potential literates out of every hundred who joined Class I in 1922-23."

In other words 82 per cent. of the education given in the village primary schools was largely wasted.

'The "hard facts" of missionary education in the villages may not be as bad as this: but even in them the wastage may well be termed shocking.

For example, in the Anglican diocese of Dornakal there are 1500 village schools with about 17,000

Christian pupils enrolled.

Of this number 87 per cent. are in the first two standards and 97 per cent. are in the first three standards.

In a report of the Wesleyan Mission in the Hyderabad State it is stated that out of 6147 children in their schools,

5650, that is 91 per cent. of the total, are in the infant and first classes.

These statistics show that a very small percentage indeed of the pupils reach the fourth class and are likely to become " permanently literate."

This state of affairs is, with few exceptions, 1 Report, p. 48.

CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES

universal in the village primary schools of the © Christian Churches throughout India.

And the reason for it is that the education given in village schools is out of touch with the conditions of village life.

Experiments are now being made in most rural missions to rectify the main evils of the present system.

Vocational schools and industrial schools are being started and efforts are being made to bring the schools into close touch with village life and make the education given in them to bear directly upon the welfare and uplift of the rural community. What is needed in order to establish a better system on these lines is :— i. A body of educational experts, men and women, from Great Britain, Europe and America, and, we would add, from India itself. ii. A more highly trained and better paid body of teachers, both men and women, who know the conditions of village life. iii. A new curriculum, which is not simply the first rung of a ladder leading up to high schools in the towns, but which is designed to play an effective part in rural reconstruction and directly promote the prosperity and well-being of the villagers.

This improved system of primary education will undoubtedly cost more money than the existing one; but it is better to spend more money on an education that will be really useful to the Christian

Church and will also make a valuable contribution

CONCLUSIONS

to the regeneration of village life in India, than to go on spending a much smaller sum on a system that involves a waste of over 80 per cent. of the money and labour expended.

Then secondly, there is the pastoral work.

In the building up of the life of the Church the ministry of the word and sacraments is of primary importance. The Church cannot be built up apart from the Christian life of its individual members.

The Christian life of the individual cannot ripen and fructify apart from the Church. If the Church in rural India is to be an effective witness for the Lord, attention must be paid to the spiritual condition of the individual and the. Church.

At bottom, the problems of the rural church are spiritual problems. Given a passionate devotion to the Lord and a love that constrains men and women to bear witness for Him, self-support, self-government and self-extension become easy problems to solve. How can this spirit be fostered? i. By the Ministry of the Word.

" The entrance of Thy Word giveth Light"'; and the foundation of all spiritual life is the knowledge of God's will and purposes as revealed in the Scriptures, in our

Lord Jesus Christ and in the Church.

The important rule in all rural work is Teach, TEAcH, TEACH.

Daily services, carefully planned lectionary, the use of song, verse and plays as means of instruction, distribution of literature—all these are indispensable means of increasing in the people the knowledge of divine things.

CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES

ii. By the Ministry of the Sacraments.

We believe that the sacraments are gifts of the Lord to His Church.

The sacrament of Holy Baptism is the sacrament of entrance into the sacred Fellowship and the sacrament of the Lord's Supper that of intimate communion with the Lord and with one another.

The Apostolic Church " broke bread" daily during the early days of the Church and later it was their custom to come together to break bread each Lord's Day. How can we expect our Christians to grow strong in their devotion to the Lord, if we deprive them of the sacrament of holy communion?

It is, however, a fact that a large proportion of baptized Christians do not have a chance of coming to this oftener than once in two or three months. The breaking of bread in each church every Lord's Day is impossible as long as we confine the celebration to a highlytrained pastor who often has ten to twenty separate and distant village congregations to minister to.

And yet the Indian people are sacramentarian by temperament and religious training. We know of nothing that inspires devotion, touches the emotions and strengthens the will of the village folk so powerfully as the reverent and intelligent observance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

At present the provision made in almost all tural areas for this regular, systematic ministry of the Word and Sacraments is woefully inadequate.

Even in the Dornakal diocese, where there are about eighty Indian clergy, at least sixty more are required to minister to the existing congregations; and IIO

CONCLUSIONS

new converts are coming in at the rate of 8000 a year.

But here, again, there is the difficulty of increased cost. The people cannot at present pay the salaries of both teachers and pastors, and it is not desirable that the pastoral work of the Indian Church should become increasingly dependent on foreign money.

Has not the time come when vigorous experiments ought to be made to make village work independent of outside support, standing on its own resources?

The following measures are suggested :— i. Serious attempts should be made from the initial stages to make the converts build their own places of worship, and their own village schools.

All Oriental nations have a passion for templebuilding.

Indian Christians are not free from it.

This passion should be fostered and the people ought to be encouraged to build a place of worship

—plain or ornamental, cheap or expensive—something which they can call their own. ii. An unpaid, honorary ministry for the Church should be systematically developed.

Men with independent means should be encouraged to give of their service freely to the Church. The ambition to serve the Lord " without charge'? must be inculcated in boys who learn a trade, so that when they go back to their villages they may undertake as honorary workers the responsibility for the local congregations.

Village elders, too, ought to be encouraged to learn to read and to teach, so that III

CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES

they may lead the worship and instruction in the . village of which they are the natural leaders.

The ordination of such village elders and honorary workers, commissioning them to administer the sacraments, has been vigorously advocated by the Rey. Roland Allen in his well-known books on mission policy.1 Doubts have been expressed as to the practicability of these proposals for rural India where illiteracy dominates.

But Mr Allen's main contention need not be set aside simply because of the abnormal conditions at the initial stages of mass movements.

The encouragement of the honorary ministry ought to be the aim of all rural missions.

We have only touched briefly on the most outstanding needs of the village work at the present time and in the immediate future. But what has been said above will be sufficient to show both the magnitude and difficulty of the problems that confront us in the great task of building up the Church in India.

Does it not also show the urgent need for both foreign missionaries and Indian Christian leaders alike to concentrate their resources and energies on this main issue on which depends the future of Christianity in India? This concentration does not necessarily mean that methods of work which have been employed in the past should be entirely abandoned; but it does mean that they should all be brought to bear directly upon and made more

1 Missionary Methods—St Paul's or Ours? ; The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church.

Both published by the World Dominion Press, 1 Tudor Street, E.C. 4.

Ii2

CONCLUSIONS

effective for the one main purpose—the building up of the Church of Christ.

For example, the present system of higher education was started by Dr Duff nearly a hundred years ago with a view to the conversion of Hindus and Moslems in the cities and larger towns.

At that time it was assumed that Christianity would first be accepted by the intelligentsia and would filter down from them to the masses and spread from the towns to the villages.

This assumption has been proved to be fallacious.

But to-day High Schools and Colleges are needed partly to produce leaders for the Christian Church, and partly as strong centres of Christian life and light to influence the non-Christian intelligentsia.

And it is clear that for both purposes our institutions need a far more intensive Christian atmosphere.

The delegation of the Church Missionary Society that visited India in 1921-22 said in their Report:

"The essential thing in mission education is the creation of a Christian atmosphere in its institutions."

And they added: " We have not yet, nor have we the power to produce the far-spreading Christian atmosphere that should pervade all our institutions."'

The Society cannot under existing conditions secure a sufficiency either of Christian teachers and tutors or of Christian pupils to produce such an atmosphere. The first thing needed then is to reorganize the system so as to make this possible.

Till that is done we cannot expect the institutions to be effective instruments either for the education of Christians or for the conversion of non-Christians to faith in Christ.

CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES

é So, again, with regard to medical work.

The mission hospitals were originally established mainly in the towns at a time when there was very little provision of medical aid for the mass of the people either in town or country.

But to-day they are far more urgently needed in the village districts, especially in areas in which there are large numbers of Christians.

They have an important part to play there in the social, moral and spiritual progress of the village Church. At the present time Government hospitals and doctors are provided for almost all the large towns, and it is not uncommon to find a mission hospital in a town where there is a wellequipped Government Hospital, while thousands of te Christians and non-Christians in adjacent villages are left without any medical aid of any kind.

It is the same with the evangelistic work. Seventy years ago this was regarded as the special province of the foreign missionaries and was carried on over many areas with little or no relation to the Christian community.

The illustration given above from the experience of the Missionaries on the NorthWest Frontier reveals the weakness of this system.t

Professor Harnack and Dr Glover, as we have pointed out above, emphasize the truth that in the Roman Empire it was not the mere preaching of the word, but the witness of changed lives that enabled the gospel of Christ to triumph over the ancient world.

That was true, says Dr Glover, 1 See Chapter XII.

2 See Chapter XIII; and The Influence of Christ in the Ancient World, p. 96. By T. R. Glover.

PB=-07202

wks do15 '

CONCLUSIONS

even of the preaching of the Apostles.

"The witness of the resurrection was not the word of Paul (as we see at Athens) nor of the eleven; it was the new power in life and death that the world

Saw in changed lives."

What is needed in our ; evangelistic work in India to-day is to bring this new power to bear strongly and effectively upon all classes of Indian Society. To do so will not only make evangelistic work more effective, but, what is even more important, will greatly develop the missionary zeal and foster the spiritual power of the Church itself.

Tt is natural to shrink from such a large reconstruction of our methods of work; but it is long overdue.

We have already in the past lost many golden opportunities.

There is no reason why what has been achieved in the Telugu country or among the Lushais should not have been done with equal power and similar results in many other parts of India.

In a recent report of the Santal mission it was stated that there were 8000 Christians connected with the Anglican Church and might have been 80,000.

But it is useless now to lament over what might have been. Many doors are still wide open.

It is still a great day of opportunity.

But if opportunity is persistently neglected, the day comes at last when the door is shut.

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