John R. Mott
STUDENT VOLUNTEERS:
FORSAKING WEALTH AND PRESTIGE
Unlike the single women who typically raised their status in life by entering overseas missions, the student volunteers were primarily young men who in the eyes of the world lowered their status; and unlike the women, they generally entered the mission married or married soon after they arrived. In the minds of many people it was commendable that the Gladys Aylwards and the Johanna Veenstras went to the distant shores to evangelize the “heathen,” for all they would have amounted to was to be parlor maids or stenographers anyway; but to send brilliant young university graduates to “waste” their lives among the pagans was a crying shame.
The Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) was born in Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, in 1886, though the impetus for its development occurred even earlier when seven Cambridge University students turned their backs on their career ambitions and committed their lives to foreign missions. The movement prospered for some fifty years, during which time, according to J. Herbert Kane, “it had been instrumental in sending 20,500 students to the foreign mission field, most of them from North America.”1 During the early twentieth century it is estimated that student volunteers constituted half of the total Protestant overseas missionary force. Most of them worked among the people of the older developed civilizations of Asia—particularly China, where approximately a third of them served. The next largest concentration was in India. Mission leaders passionately pleaded for “men and women of literary tastes” to go to China, and the call was answered.
By 1920, at the Des Moines Convention, the movement had passed its peak, and from then on it declined. “It was inevitable,” writes Harold R. Cook, “that the same liberal trend affecting the major denominations should touch the Student Volunteer Movement. By the late 1920s it was already losing ground. Then came the Great Depression and the critical ‘Laymen’s Report’ on foreign missions with disastrous effects on the whole missionary enterprise.”2
Despite their failures, the student volunteers were among the most dedicated missionaries ever to enter missionary service. In an era when some (or “most,” in the evaluation of Hudson Taylor) missionaries had become “self-indulgent and idle,” the student volunteers were a striking contrast. They were driven by an intensity of purpose that has rarely been equaled, and they were committed to evangelizing the world by whatever means was necessary.
Such intensity, combined with their liberal university training, often lead the student volunteers to be far more accommodating to other religions and religious practices in order to show respect and bring greater numbers under the umbrella of Christianity. They were different from their missionary forebears, whose chief education had been centered in the Bible. Many of the student volunteers had also spent their formal education grappling with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Darwin’s Origin of Species and had not been ordained to the ministry.
Because of the regularly scheduled Quadrennial Conventions sponsored by the StudentVolunteer Movement, there was an interdenominational bond among the student volunteers that had never before occurred in a broad-based missionary movement. The outcome of this association was a beneficial cooperative effort among missionaries that had rarely been seen before, and it also paved the way for the ecumenical movement. This concern for unity, along with a modern critical approach to Scripture, had long-term effects on world evangelism. “Protestant liberalism, de-emphasizing and demythologizing miracles and biblical authority, introduced the powerful but crippling secularism into Chinese Christianity.”According to Kenneth S. Latourette, this “secularizing movement” was the most important factor influencing Christianity’s losses in China in the face of communism.3
For many student volunteers, the whole world rather than one country was their mission field. While many did settle in one location and dedicate their lives to one small area, others traveled throughout the world in an effort to reach the elite—the educated classes who could wield the most influence on their fellow citizens. With them the student volunteers brought the YMCA and other organizations that provided a network for Christian students throughout the world.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the student volunteers made an indelible impact on foreign missions. Their names—C. T. Studd, J. E. K. Studd, Robert Wilder, John R. Mott, Joseph H. Oldham, Robert E. Speer, W. Temple Gairdner, William Paton, Fletcher Brockman, E. Stanley Jones, and others—will forever be remembered in the annals of missionary literature as ones who willingly forsook professional careers, wealth, and comfort to serve in a cause to which they were wholeheartedly committed.
Sherwood Eddy spoke for many student volunteers when he wrote of his own experience and of the movement as a whole:
In retrospect, I find I have spent half a century along the far-flung battle line of missions. I was one of the first of sixteen thousand student volunteers who were swept into what seemed to us nothing less than a missionary crusade. We were considered fanatical by some, and we made numerous mistakes which we ourselves came to realize later in bitter experience. Many sacrificed early plans and ambitions for wealth, power, prestige or pleasure, to go to some distant country about which they knew little save its abysmal need. Not wholly unlike the unity of Christendom achieved during the Middle Ages was the feeling of these student volunteer missionaries that they were one team, working for one world, under one Captain. We felt much as Wordsworth did about the French Revolution—which he doubtless idealized as we did our crusade:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!4
One of the most famous of the student volunteers was C. T. Studd, an illustrious college athlete and son of a wealthy Englishman. Charlie Studd strikingly exemplifies the willingness of the student volunteers to sacrifice wealth and prestige and to boldly confront the task of world evangelism with intense dedication. He possessed almost fanatic zeal—particularly in later life—zeal that caused him to disregard his own well-being and the well-being of his family in his self-imposed effort to further the kingdom of God. This unrelenting discipline, combined with personality flaws, made him one of the most controversial missionary figures the evangelical church has known in modern history. His management style as the founder and director of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade illustrates the critical importance of leadership in cross-cultural mission endeavors.
Wealth and luxury surrounded the young C. T. Studd as he grew up in the 1870s on Tedworth, the family estate in Wiltshire. Edward Studd, his father, had made a fortune as a planter in India and then returned to England to live a life of leisure. Horse racing was his passion, and it was a day of celebration when his own horse won the Grand National. With such a reputation, it came as a surprise to many when word spread that Edward Studd had been converted at one of D. L. Moody’s evangelistic campaigns. The effect was immediate. He sold his horses and gave up racing, began holding gospel meetings at Tedworth, and invested his energy in seeking to convert his friends and relatives. His three sons were special targets of his persistent witness, and according to C. T., “Everyone in the house had a dog’s life of it until they were converted.”5
All three sons were converted before their father’s untimely death two years later, but it was not until some six years later, following a near-fatal illness of his younger brother, that C. T. went to a Moody campaign on his own and there committed his life to missionary service. His decision created a sensation. He was the captain and best all-around player of the famed Cambridge Eleven, considered by many to be “England’s greatest cricketer.” Added to the sensation of his decision was word that six other brilliant and talented Cambridge students had made the same commitment. The “Cambridge Seven,” as they were dubbed, were determined to sail to China together to serve with the China Inland Mission. “Never before in the history of missions,” wrote a newspaper reporter, “has so unique a band set out to labor in the foreign field.”6 To many people, including members of Studd’s own family, the decision of the seven university students was a rash move and a tremendous waste of intellect and ability.
The “Cambridge Seven” after they arrived in China (with C. T. Studd standing on the left).
Studd’s tenure in China lasted less than a decade, but it was filled with activity. Soon after he arrived, he met and married Priscilla Steward, who was serving in China with the Salvation Army. Four daughters were born to them on Chinese soil, but their time in North China was filled with difficulties. “For five years,” lamented Studd, “we never went outside our doors without a volley of curses from our neighbors.”7 But as they established themselves their ministry expanded—Priscilla in her evangelistic work with women, and C. T. in his work with opium addicts. Although he had received a substantial inheritance (equivalent to more than a half-million dollars by today’s standards) from his father’s estate, he gave it away in order live entirely by faith as other CIM missionaries did, many times facing severe financial hardship.
Ill health forced the Studds to return to England in 1894, and the next six years were spent speaking in behalf of the Student Volunteer Movement in the United States and England. According to Kane, “students by the thousands flocked to his meetings, sometimes six a day, … and hundreds, caught up in the revival movement, volunteered for missionary service.”8 In 1900 Studd moved with his family to India for six years to minister to planters and English-speaking people there, but again plagued by ill health, he returned to England and continued his itinerant speaking ministry.
A sign on a door inscribed with the words “Cannibals Want Missionaries” changed the course of Studd’s life. On further inquiry, he heard of hundreds of thousands of tribal people in Central Africa who had never heard the gospel because “no Christian had ever gone to tell of Jesus.”The shame sank deep into his soul: “I said, ‘Why have no Christians gone?’ God replied, ‘Why don’t you go?’ ‘The doctors won’t permit it,’ I said. The answer came,‘Am I not the good physician? Can I not take you through? Can I not keep you there?’ There were no excuses, it had to be done.”9
C. T. Studd, missionary to China, India, and Africa.
His decision to go to Africa was devastating to Priscilla, who was suffering from a debilitating heart condition. How could he just leave her and pursue such a wild scheme? He was fifty years old, sickly, and without financial backing. She strongly objected, but convinced of his calling, he left for an exploratory trip in 1910, returning the following year to make plans for his new mission to Africa, HAM—the Heart of Africa Mission. In 1913, with one assistant, Alfred Buxton, who would later become his son-in-law, Studd began his eighteen-year venture to the Belgian Congo in “the heart of Africa.” Though he received word on his journey that Priscilla had suffered further heart complications, he refused to turn back. The work of the Lord, he firmly believed, came before family concerns. When he returned home in 1916 (his only furlough) to secure new recruits for Africa, he found Priscilla no longer an invalid and more active than she had been in years, effectively carrying out the work of the home office.
In the years that followed, more recruits arrived in Africa, including his daughter Edith, who married Alfred Buxton, and his daughter Pauline, who arrived with her husband, Norman Grubb. But as more missionaries came, doctrinal and personal differences surfaced that continually plagued the infant mission. Even his daughters and sons-in-law found him to be a most difficult individual to work with. He had sacrificed everything for Africa, and he expected his missionaries to do the same. He worked eighteen-hour days, and, according to Norman Grubb, “There was no let-up … no diversions, no days off, no recreation.”The missionaries were expected to live African style, avoiding any appearance whatever of affluent European lifestyles.10
Doctrinal controversies also arose between Studd and many of the missionaries—particularly between him and new recruits arriving in Africa. Studd had written home about the incredible breakthroughs he was making. In fact, in 1918, after only five years on the field, he wrote: “The progress is simply wonderful; people are coming to us from every quarter and from very long distances. We are having pretty nearly weekly baptisms. The converts are evangelizing far and near.” But when the missionaries arrived, according to Grubb, they found a very different situation:
But what shocked us most was his attitude toward professing African Christians, five hundred of whom would gather on a Sunday morning. Where we had been told to expect a concourse of shining saints, C. T. was saying that sin was rampant, and nobody who continued in sin entered heaven, no matter how much he was supposed to have been born again; and that he doubted, holding up the fingers of his two hands, whether ten of these five hundred would really get there. We thought this awful. Our theology was … that once a person was born again … he could not be unborn. C. T. took no count of that. His stand was “without holiness no man shall see the Lord.”11
Living in sin, to C. T., did not just mean gross immorality. It included a wide range of “sins,” including ones related to a man’s work ethic. “One of the worst sins of these people,” wrote Studd, “is a terrible laziness. To sit about on a chair and talk is the desire of everybody. To work is folly.” For Studd, the regular work day began at 6:00 A.M., and he expected Africans and missionaries alike to follow suit. Personal devotions were to be over with by then, so that the day’s activities could begin. When Grubb suggested on one occasion that the Africans and missionaries hold special prayer meetings for revival, C. T. responded, “I don’t believe in praying in work hours. Let’s have a meeting at 4 A.M.” When Grubb rose at 4 A.M. for his own devotional time, he could hear from across the compound “the old man’s banjo going. He had gathered a 4 A.M. prayer meeting of some of the Africans.”12
Priscilla Stewart Studd, wife of C. T. Studd.
Living such a rigorous Christian life was too much for many of the Africans and missionaries as well, but Studd had no time for anyone who, in his mind, was less than totally committed, even if it meant dismissing his own daughter and son-in-law, Edith and Alfred Buxton. It was a demoralizing time for them, especially for Alfred, who had sacrificed so much to begin the work in Africa with Studd. Other close relationships of past years were also deteriorating, and by the late 1920s, despite his hard work and dedication, Studd was rapidly losing the support of the home committee—particularly after Priscilla’s death in 1929. His rigorous demands on missionaries and his negative view of African Christians were well known to the home committee, but now other issues were creating controversy—one surrounding a booklet he had written, entitled “D.C.D.” In response to the lethargy he had found among Christians, he wrote, “I want to be one of those who doesn’t care a damn except to give my life for Jesus and souls.” D.C.D. stood for “Don’t Care a Damn,” which offended many of his staunchest supporters.13
If the pamphlet was not enough to prompt committee action against him, reports that he had become a morphine addict were. His ill health and eighteen-hour days were taking a toll on him physically and emotionally, and after discovering the relief that a shot of morphine gave him, he began taking tablets dispensed by a medical doctor from Uganda and brought in by missionaries “without declaration because of difficulties which might have been raised.” “With this news reaching home … the Committee,” according to Grubb, “decided that the only thing to do was to remove him from the mission.” What followed, in the words of Grubb, “was the darkest chapter in the mission’s history.”14 With the home committee prepared to reorganize and start a new mission without Studd, Grubb (who, with Studd, had also been dismissed from the mission) and David Munro, also Studd’s son-in-law, took the “drastic action” of going into the mission headquarters early one morning and removing the records to their own safekeeping.
But even with the records in hand, the mission was in shambles, and there seemed to be little hope of recouping the losses. Was there anything that could give the fledgling WEC (the Heart of Africa Mission was now the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade) a fresh start? There was. Within weeks came the news of Studd’s death. A tumultuous era was over, and with the leadership of Norman Grubb the mission got a fresh start—though never to forget the tireless dedication of the mission’s founder, C. T. Studd.
What went wrong? How could one of Britain’s most prestigious young missionaries come to such an end? Certainly the intensity of his dedication contributed to his downfall—an intensity that was characteristic of the student volunteers. “We do need to be intense,” wrote Studd, “and our intensity must ever increase.”15 But it was that intensity, viewed by many as “fanaticism” or “extremism,” that brought him down. C. T. often referred to himself as a “Gambler for God.” But it could be said that he gambled and lost.
Following C. T. Studd’s death in 1931, Norman Grubb became the director of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade. Four years later he went through his dark night of the soul.
I HAD begun to have a thirst for enlarged understanding and deeper reading, the kind of student mentality I should have had fifteen years before. I could only be a dabbler in my busy life, but one book I picked up was William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. It hit me like a boxer’s knock-out blow. That itself is an evidence of my immaturity in thinking things through; for as I read the psychological explanation of Paul’s conversion on the road at Damascus, it suddenly struck me that perhaps this was only some inner change in Paul’s psychological make-up, and that there is no reason to postulate a divine revelation; and that perhaps there really is no God—just the human race. I don’t think James himself meant this if I had gone on to finish the book; but here was I, a missionary of fifteen years’ standing, and a secretary of a missionary society, and I was questioning the existence of God…. Life blanked out on me…. I did try once to speak at a meeting for which I was booked, and it was simply hell—to speak of one whose existence I was doubting…. By the end of a year the mist had cleared. I can’t exactly say how except that it was while I was reading John of the Cross’s Assent of Mount Carmel, and the result has been worth all the agony of that year.”
(Norman Grubb, Once Caught, No Escape: My Life Story)
In the years after Studd’s death, the World Evangelization Crusade grew steadily, and by the 1970s it was reaching all over the globe with more than five hundred missionaries—among them the noted doctor Helen Roseveare, who began her service in Ibambi where Studd himself served. In analyzing the phenomenal comeback of the WEC, it would be difficult to overestimate the leadership of Norman Grubb, a man possessed of a rare honesty in admitting his own shortcomings and who, though a relentless defender of his father-in-law, was wise enough to recognize his flaws and to learn from them.
While C. T. Studd and his fellow classmates of the “Cambridge Seven” captured world attention as student missionary volunteers, John R. Mott, perhaps more than any other individual, influenced the surge of students into overseas missions in the decades that followed. Though a layman and never an actual missionary in the strictest sense of the word, his influence was enormous. His role model was David Livingstone, “whose heroic, Christlike achievements,” in the words of Mott, “furnished the governing missionary motive of my life.”16 Like so many of the student volunteers, Mott passed over opportunities of wealth and prestige in his commitment to world evangelism. He declined diplomatic posts and opportunities for financial gain, but he could not elude fame. He was a friend and counselor of presidents, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and one of the most influential world religious leaders of the twentieth century.
Mott was born and raised in Iowa, the son of a prosperous lumber merchant. He was converted as a youth and became active in the local Methodist church. In 1881, at the age of sixteen, he left home to attend Upper Iowa University, where he became a charter member of the YMCA, an international organization then committed to Christian evangelism. He then transferred to Cornell, where he studied political science and history. There, under the preaching of J. E. K. Studd, he underwent a life-changing experience, committing himself to evangelism. J. E. K. Studd, the brother of C. T., had come to the United States to tour university campuses at the invitation of D. L. Moody and YMCA leaders. According to Mott’s biographer, it was hoped that Studd “would attract students to hear his missionary message and description of the ‘Cambridge Seven’ who had rejected status and wealth to volunteer for foreign missions.”17
Although Studd emphasized missions, Mott did not personally commit himself to the cause until the following summer, when he attended the first Christian Student Conference at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts (sponsored by D. L. Moody and later held at the nearby Northfield conference grounds). As a delegate from Cornell, along with some two hundred and fifty other students from nearly one hundred colleges and universities, he spent a month under the tutelage of Moody and other Bible teachers. On the last day of the conference, Robert Wilder, a missions enthusiast from Princeton, presented a missionary challenge that turned into an aggressive appeal for personal commitment. As a result, one hundred students, later dubbed the “Mount Hermon Hundred,” signed the “Princeton Pledge” (“I purpose, God willing, to become a foreign missionary”) that would soon become the initiation oath into the Student Volunteer Movement. Mott was among the one hundred who signed, and that meeting was the beginning of the StudentVolunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (officially organized in 1888), an organization that he would lead for more than thirty years.
Following this meeting, Wilder, at the encouragement of Moody and others, began a tour of college campuses to make his challenge nationwide. With his emotional appeal, his urgent slogan (“The Evangelization of the World in This Generation”), and his “Princeton Pledge,” he provided the impetus for the movement. Wilder had grown up in India with his missionary parents. His concern to motivate students was inspired in part by his father, who had been a member of the “Society of the Brethren” at Andover, a missions-oriented club that had originated in 1806 with Samuel Mills and the Haystack Group (an informal mission fraternity formed while waiting out a thunderstorm). Following his tour, Wilder returned to India to work with students, while Mott and others took over the leadership on the home front.
As a leader and organizer of the SVM, Mott confronted an enormous task, especially if the movement’s slogan was to be taken seriously. He was determined to mobilize thousands of students to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. He was convinced that the SVM was uniquely suited to carry out this task because the movement encompassed young adults from a wide spectrum of religious backgrounds.
Closely associated with Mott’s activities with the SVM were his activities with the YMCA, an organization he served for more than forty years, sixteen of them as general secretary. In these capacities travel became a way of life, and as soon as one world tour was over, he was already planning for another. As he traveled, he worked with resident missionaries as well as international students and sought to develop a worldwide network of unified missionary activity. In realizing this goal, he helped to organize the World Student Christian Federation, a loose international organization of Christian students that under his leadership grew to include societies in some three thousand schools.
One of the most receptive areas for Mott’s appeal to students was China, among the literati, “the scholars of that great land of scholars.” During his first tour of that country in 1896, the prospects for reaching that class seemed dim, but according to Mott, the atmosphere soon changed:
Five years later the walls of Jericho were beginning to crumble…. The ancient literati were beginning to give way to the modern literati…. When I reached Canton, I found to my surprise that they had hired the largest theater in China, a building that holds thirty-five hundred people. On the night of the first meeting as we neared the theater, I saw crowds in the streets and asked, “Why do they not open the doors?” Someone came to tell us that the doors had been opened for an hour and that every seat was taken…. On the platform were about fifty of the leading educated Chinese of Canton, many of them young men who had studied in Tokyo and in American universities.18
By the time the series of meetings was over, more than eight hundred had become “inquirers,” and within a month nearly one hundred and fifty of those “had been baptized or were preparing for baptism.” In two other Chinese cities where Mott conducted meetings, he received a similar response.19
The highlight of Mott’s career as a missionary statesman was the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910, which he organized and chaired. This ten-day conference, composed of 1,355 delegates, was the first interdenominational missionary conference of its kind and became the impetus for the ecumenical movement that took shape in the decades that followed. The conference was a high point of missionary enthusiasm; and the call to evangelize the world “in this generation” was still in the air. With some forty-five thousand missionaries on the field and the prediction that the number might be tripled in the next thirty years, delegates were optimistic about the prospects for world evangelization.