E. Stanley Jones
But in the years following Edinburgh, interest in missions waned in most mainline denominations. The 1920 annual meeting of the SVM in Des Moines was tension-filled. Here, according to C. Howard Hopkins, it began the process of “correcting that fateful fascination with … the Orient that had hypnotized their forebears and sent them off to China” far away from “the slums of Chicago or the injustices of sweated labor.” The focus for the future would be “the visible pressing social maladjustments at hand rather than ‘traditional questions of missionary work.’”20
Mott had all along stressed the social dimensions of world evangelism, but never to the extent of making it a primary focus. Yet he was forced to come to terms with the “social gospel shift” that was emerging in missions. Social service, he insisted, is “one of the most distinctive calls of our generation,” and one intrinsically tied to personal evangelism: “There are not two gospels, one social and one individual. There is but one Christ who lived, died, and rose again, and relates himself to the lives of men. He is the Savior of the individual and the one sufficient Power to transform his environment and relationships.”21
It was Mott’s more traditional stance that led to his declining influence during the last years of the SVM. The younger generation was more concerned with social problems on the home front. There were others who criticized Mott as well. His name was associated with the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry and its report, Rethinking Missions, and for that reason he was viewed by some as having become too open and progressive in his mission outlook. That report sought to redefine the aim of missions: “To see the best in other religions, to help the adherents of those religions to discover, or to rediscover, all the best in their own traditions, to cooperate with the most active and vigorous elements in the other traditions in social reform and in the purification of religious expression. The aim should not be conversion.”22Although Mott acknowledged the value of the inquiry and subsequent report, it clearly did not reflect his own position. Throughout his life he viewed conversion of non-Christians to be the most important aim of missions.
The last years of Mott’s life were filled with activities at home and abroad. He took part in the formation of the World Council of Churches, an organization he believed could strengthen the influence of Christianity in the world. Though he sought to remain above the bitter fundamentalist-modernist debate, he, along with Robert Speer, became a target for criticism among fundamentalists.
John R. Mott at the Whitby World Conference meeting in 1947.
Throughout his life, despite all his travels, Mott remained a strong family man. Leila, his wife of sixty-two years, traveled and worked with him, often speaking to groups of college women and ministering to women missionaries all over the world. Her death in 1952, at the age of eighty-six, came as a heavy blow to Mott, but he continued his travel in behalf of world evangelism without her. In 1953, at the age of eighty-eight, he remarried, and in 1954 he made his final public appearance at the World Council of Churches assembly in Evanston, Illinois. But his traveling days were not over. “Death,” he told a reporter, “is a place where I change trains.” He made that transfer on January 31, 1955.
A close associate and lifelong friend of Mott and a man described as “the incarnation of the spirit of the Student Volunteer Movement” was Robert E. Speer, who, like Mott, served the foreign missionary cause as a layman. Unlike Mott, his ministry was dedicated largely to a single denomination—the Presbyterian Church—serving for forty-six years as the Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions. The Presbyterian Church was one of the most fervent of the mainline denominations in its missionary zeal, and Speer’s own enthusiasm for foreign missions only enhanced the church’s stand. Though Speer was a highly respected and popular figure within his own denomination and in ecumenical circles, his ministry spanned a stormy period of his denomination’s history; and despite his efforts to play the role of peacemaker, he was often the brunt of criticism. Nevertheless, during his tenure the denomination greatly expanded its role in overseas evangelism.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1867, Speer was the son of an attorney and two-term Democratic congressman who brought up his children in a strict Puritan-Presbyterian atmosphere. Educated at Andover and Princeton, he twice held the office of class president and gained a reputation as a hard-hitting defensive tackle on the varsity football team. During his second year at Princeton, Speer, under the persuasive preaching of Robert Wilder, became a “pledge-signing” student volunteer, along with several of his classmates. He left behind his ambition to follow his father into the legal profession and began setting his sights on overseas missions. “There are many who regard us as possessed of a strange delusion,” he confessed, “many who count us carried away by some fanatical madness.”23
After graduation from Princeton, Speer became the traveling secretary for the Student Volunteer Movement; and though he served for only one year in that capacity, he signed up more than a thousand volunteers for foreign missions. With the intention of serving abroad himself, he returned to Princeton for seminary training. But after less than two years his studies were interrupted when he unexpectedly received a call from the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions to fill its highest administrative post. The call, according to Sherwood Eddy, “upset Speer’s equilibrium, and he fought hard against it. He certainly did not want to stay at home when he had asked a thousand volunteers who had signed the declaration to undergo the hardships of the foreign field.”24 But he reluctantly accepted the offer, challenged by the potential influence he could exert for missions through such a key position.
Though an activist, he is best remembered for his philosophical influence on missions. During a time when many voices from the younger generation were calling for social activism in missions, he insisted that the “Supreme and Determining Aim” of missions be religious:
We cannot state too strongly in an age when the … body has crept up on the throne of the soul, that our work is not … a philanthropic work, a political work, a secular work of any sort whatsoever; it is a spiritual and a religious work…. Religion is spiritual life. I had rather plant one seed of the life of Christ under the crust of heathen life than cover that whole crust over with the veneer of our social habits … of Western civilization.25
Speer took a strong stand against the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry Report of 1932, separating himself from many of his more liberal colleagues. But the real clashes that he confronted as a missionary statesman were not with the so-called modernists but with the fundamentalists, though he himself had helped write the last volume of The Fundamentals. The modernist-fundamentalist controversy that was being waged in the Presbyterian Church at home was also being waged abroad, and Speer was caught in the middle, distressed by the unfortunate effect the infighting was having on the work of evangelism. “I wish we could get up such a glow and fervor and onrush of evangelical and evangelistic conviction and action,” he wrote to a missionary in China, “that we would be swept clear past issues like the present ones so that men who want to dispute over these things could stay behind and do so, while the rest of us could march ahead, more than making up by new conquests for all the defections and losses of those who stay behind.”26
During this time Speer himself was attacked for alleged unorthodoxy and was accused by J. Gresham Machen and others of “malfeasance in appointing allegedly unorthodox missionaries.” It was a trying time for one who had served so long and so faithfully for his church (filling its highest position as moderator in 1927), but he weathered the storm and was vindicated by the General Assembly, which gave him an overwhelming vote of confidence.
Unlike many other denominational leaders of his day, Speer strongly supported women in ministry. “It would be strange and anomalous to deny to women equality in the church,” he argued, “which is the very fountain of the principle of equality. It is Christ who has made women free and equal. Is she to be allowed this freedom and equality elsewhere and denied it in the Church, where freedom and equality had their origin?” Likewise, he praised “the Christian Churches on the foreign mission field” that were “apprehending the measure of the Gospel in this better than we…. God shuts no doors to His daughters which He opens to His sons.”27
At the age of seventy, after forty-six years of service, he retired from his leadership position in Presbyterian missions. For the next decade he traveled, lecturing at campuses and conferences, never relinquishing his all-consuming commitment to world evangelism. The intensity that had so characterized him in his earlier years continued to the very end. “When he boarded a train,” according to his biographer, “his bag of papers and books were with him. Out of the battered brown bag came papers and reports from the office, or a book. He plunged at once into their perusal.”28 Although terminally ill, suffering from leukemia, he insisted on keeping a previously arranged speaking commitment only three weeks before he died in 1947. To the end he was self-deprecatory—particularly in comparison to those who were serving on the front lines. When a friend requested to write his biography, he responded: “Nix on the biography … merely say the cuss lived; he worked; he died; there are others coming along.”29
The thrill of seeing the brilliant young men of the Student Volunteer Movement dedicate their lives to foreign missions was tempered when the methods and ideology of some of their numbers became known. Conservative evangelical missionaries were often distressed by the new concepts introduced by the young intellectuals. This conflict was particularly evident in China, and one of the young missionaries who vocally expressed his progressive views was Fletcher Brockman.
Brockman was reared on a cotton plantation in Georgia and educated at Vanderbilt University, graduating in 1891. On graduation he served as the national secretary for the YMCA, working with college students in the South and promoting overseas missions. As a Methodist, Brockman first offered his services to his own denominational mission board, but his bishop suggested that interdenominational sponsorship of the YMCA might be more appropriate for the broad-based ministry he hoped to have with students in China. The YMCA accepted his services, eager to respond to the invitation of many China missionaries who had called on the organization to enter that field.
In 1898, along with his wife and small son, Brockman sailed for China, arriving at a critical time just prior to the Boxer uprising. Although he survived the terrors of that violent period, other student volunteers did not. Horace Pitkin, the leader of the Yale volunteer band, had been in China only four years when he was executed in Paoting by Boxer insurgents in the summer of 1900. But his death was not in vain. Fourteen years later, Sherwood Eddy, another Yale volunteer, visited that same city in China at the invitation of Brockman, and he reminded his audience (which included some three thousand students) of Pitkin’s sacrifice:
When I came to the story of the cross and of Pitkin’s death the interpreter broke down under deep emotion and stood silent, unable to speak. It is considered a shameful disgrace for a Chinese to weep in public. The audience bowed their heads in sympathy and shame. Many were in tears. When, after a pause, we quietly gave the invitation, some decided for Christ and many became honest inquirers. More than ten thousand Christian books were sold in a single day in the city where Pitkin had been martyred.30
With the Boxer uprising over, Brockman settled into missionary work, but he soon discovered that his personal philosophy of missions was rapidly changing. “In America,” according to Sherwood Eddy, “Brockman had been preparing to go out and work for the conversion of what he then called the ‘heathen’ in the Orient. It was only after he had reached China and had humbly sat at the feet of Confucius, in his language study, that he learned that ‘all within the four seas are brothers.’”31In his book I Discover the Orient, Brockman wrote of his search for the meaning of Chinese philosophy and religion: “The next ten years were largely taken up with discovering and untangling the true from the false without destroying my sense of mission.”32Brockman, like many other student volunteers in China, was well received by the Chinese literati because he was tolerant and sympathetic toward Confucianism, Buddhism, and other Oriental religions—an attitude that was a bold departure from traditional evangelical missionary perspectives. Though he always remained a Christian missionary and evangelist, he shocked many of his fellow missionaries and supporters back home by his open view toward other world religions and their leaders. “I am rich,” he wrote in I Discover the Orient. “I have come into a great inheritance. My wealth has been gathered for thousands of years. Confucius, Mencius, Mo Ti, Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Paul, Jesus—I have entered into their inheritance. I am heir of the ages. I am sent not to dig up roots but to gather in the harvest.”33
As Brockman studied the Chinese writings and learned from Chinese scholars, he won their hearts. But learning was not enough. He believed that he should reciprocate and teach them of his way of life, which included sharing his Christian faith; but more importantly from the Chinese standpoint, it also included teaching them of modern science and technology—a subject students craved to learn more about. Realizing his own deficiency in this area, he wrote to Mott and, in the words of Eddy, “implored him to secure the best man in America with scientific training to meet China’s need.” C. H. Robertson, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, who had been in the Christian Association during his student days, was sent, and “within a few years Brockman’s dream was realized in a remarkable way. The popular young educational genius Brockman had secured from America was addressing the largest audiences of officials, gentry, ancient scholars, and modern students that had ever listened to any man, Chinese or foreign, in all the history of China.”34
Fletcher Brockman (left) and John R. Mott with a Chinese Christian leader.
One of Brockman’s main tasks in China was to establish the YMCA in cities across the land. This required financial backing, and Brockman relied heavily on the Chinese—particularly the more tolerant Confucianists—for this help. Although the control of the YMCA was to be in the hands of the Christians, some of the organizations later fell into the control of other segments of the population, and today the YMBA (Young Men’s Buddhist Association) has become a part of Asian society.
So respected was Brockman in China that after less than fifteen years there he was offered the post of presidency of Peking University. At the advice of Mott, he declined the offer. Mott believed that Brockman’s organizational ministry with Chinese students was too great a calling to forsake for a secular pursuit. Then, only three years later, Mott called upon Brockman to leave China in order to help shore up theYMCA in America. Brockman left China with deep regrets. “Mott,” according to Latourette, “almost forced him to do so,” and the years that followed were not happy ones. Brockman’s tenure under Mott’s direct authority was “self-denying,” “difficult,” and “exhausting.”35 Before he retired in 1927, Brockman was able to make return trips to China and to again work among the people he so loved and respected.
The enthusiasm that Brockman had for introducing Western science and technology to China found no parallel in E. Stanley Jones’s effort to reach the intelligentsia of India. In fact, Jones shunned any effort to align Christianity with Western civilization, believing rather that Christ should be interpreted by the Indian people according to their own customs and culture. Even using science lectures as an opening for the gospel, he believed, was making an association that was misleading. One of the greatest detriments to the growth of Christianity in India, he believed, was the presumed relationship between Christianity and Western civilization, and missionaries were the culprits in perpetuating this ill-advised union.
Jones, born in Maryland in 1884, was only two years old when Wilder inspired the hearts of the “Mount Hermon Hundred.” His commitment as a student volunteer came many years later while attending Asbury College, and his first inclination was to serve as a missionary in Africa (a calling that Jones humorously related was fulfilled only in the mind of a student who wrote on an exam that it was “Stanley Jones” who was sent to find Livingstone after his long disappearance). But the Methodist Missionary Society requested that he serve in India.
Before going to India, Jones endured a humiliating experience that changed the course of his ministry. The occasion was his “very first sermon”:
The little church was filled with my relatives and friends, all anxious that the young man should do well. I had prepared for three weeks, for I was to be God’s lawyer and argue His case well. I started on rather a high key and after a half dozen sentences used a word I had never used before and I have never used since: indifferentism. Whereupon a college girl smiled and put down her head…. Her smiling so upset me that when I came back to the thread of my discourse it was gone. My mind was an absolute blank. I stood there clutching for something to say. Finally I blurted out: “I am very sorry, but I have forgotten my sermon,” and I started for my seat in shame and confusion…. As I was about to sit down, the Inner Voice said: “Haven’t I done anything for you? If so, couldn’t you tell that?” I responded to this suggestion and stepped down in front of the pulpit—I felt I didn’t belong behind it—and said, “Friends, I see I can’t preach, but you know what Christ has done for my life, how He has changed me, and though I cannot preach I shall be his witness the rest of my days.” At the close a youth came up to me and said he wanted what I had found. It was a mystery to me then, and it is a mystery to me now that, amid my failure that night, he still saw something he wanted. As he and I knelt together, he found it. It marked a profound change in his life, and today he is a pastor, and a daughter is a missionary in Africa. As God’s lawyer I was a dead failure; as God’s witness I was a success. That night marked a change in my conception of the work of the Christian minister—he is to be, not God’s lawyer to argue well for God; but he is to be God’s witness, to tell what Grace has done for an unworthy life.36
Jones began his missionary career in 1907 as an ordained Methodist minister of an English-speaking church in Lucknow. He preached on Sundays and immersed himself in language study the rest of the week. After three years he transferred to Sitapur, where he ministered to outcasts, which was where most mission work was concentrated because there was less resistance to the gospel. But as Jones lived among the people, he realized that India was far more than a land of impoverished outcasts. He turned his attention to high caste intellectuals.
Working among educated caste Indians was challenging but also debilitating. Jones often found himself on the defensive, being challenged by some of the keenest intellects he had ever encountered. The strain was too much. After eight and a half years and more than one mental breakdown, he returned to the United States to recuperate and rest. But back in India after his furlough, his mental problems continued. “I saw that unless I got help from somewhere I would have to give up my missionary career…. It was one of my darkest hours.” Soon after, Jones underwent a deep spiritual experience:“A great peace settled into my heart and pervaded me. I knew it was done! Life—abundant life—had taken possession of me.” Never again was he afflicted with the agony of mental illness.37
With his life changed, Jones became one of the world’s most renowned evangelists, and as his reputation spread he traveled beyond the borders of India—always with the message of Christ. Christ was the focal point of Jones’s evangelism, not Christianity. And he was quick to emphasize the difference. Christianity as the world knew it was a Western institutional church; and it was Christianity, brought to India by the Western missionaries, not Christ, that had been rejected by the Indian intellectuals. Jones was convinced that if the educated Indians had the opportunity to see Christ without all his Western garb, they would gladly receive him.
But Jones went further than merely disassociating Christ from Western civilization; he also disassociated him from the Old Testament: “Christianity must be defined as Christ, not the Old Testament, not Western civilization, not even the system built around him in the West, but Christ himself.” Jones viewed his own mission as to “refuse to know anything save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Sidestepping difficult passages in the Old Testament was a matter of pragmatism:
I still believed in the Old Testament as being the highest revelation of God given to the world before Jesus’ coming; I would inwardly feed upon it as Jesus did. But the issue was further on. A Jain lawyer, a brilliant writer against Christianity, arose in one of my meetings and asked me a long list of questions regarding things in the Old Testament. I replied, “My brother, I think I can answer your questions, but I do not feel called on to do so. I defined Christianity as Christ. If you had any objections to make against Him, I am ready to hear them and answer them if I can.” He replied, “Who gave you this authority to make this distinction? What church council gave you this authority?” I replied that my own Master gave it to me…. Revelation was progressive, culminating in him. Why should I, then, pitch my battle at an imperfect stage when the perfect was here in him? My lawyer friend saw with dismay that a great many of his books written against Christianity had gone into ashes by my definition.38
Neither the Bible nor Christian doctrine, according to Jones, made Christianity unique among the world’s religions; it was Christ. Therefore he believed that Christ alone should be exalted. On one occasion, when he was complimented by a Hindu for being a “broadminded Christian,” he responded: “My brother, I am the narrowest man you have come across. I am broad on almost anything else, but on the one supreme necessity for human nature I am absolutely narrowed by the facts to one—Jesus.” Jones went on to explain, “It is precisely because we believe in the absoluteness of Jesus that we can afford to take the more generous view of the non-Christian systems and situations.”39
Jones’s “generous view of the non-Christian systems” made him a target for criticism, especially among fundamentalists, who believed he was compromising Christianity in order to make it more appealing to other religious groups. “Jones accommodates himself to sinful pride, heathen thought and the growing nationalism,” wrote Chester Tulga, a Conservative Baptist. “His Christ looks much like an Indian nationalist. His Biblical universality shrinks to Indian nationality…. The Christ of the modernist missionary … becomes a false Christ, with no saving power and no historical authenticity.”40
In presenting Christ to the non-Christians of India, Jones sought to use methods that were a natural part of Indian society. His Round Table Conferences and his Christian ashrams were examples of this. The Round Table Conferences began after he had been invited to a Hindu home to join other intellectuals in philosophical discussions as they all sat in a circle on the floor. With that example, Jones began doing the same thing, inviting Christians as well as adherents of Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam. These discussions, though intellectually oriented, became an avenue for evangelism: “There was not a single situation that I can remember where before the close of the Round Table Conference Christ was not in moral and spiritual command of the situation.”41
The Christian Ashram movement that Jones founded was also an accommodation to Indian social life—an alternative to the Western church:
The Church is for the most part a worshipping institution used once or twice a week. This makes the fellowship a momentary thing of an hour or two in seven days. After those few hours, each goes back into his compartmentalized life. The Indian mind—in fact, the human mind—wants something that will gather the whole of life into a central control and make it into a fellowship which will not be for an hour or two, but something continuous and all-embracing.42
The setup of the Christian ashram was very similar to its Hindu counterpart. The “family” was required to rise at 5:30 A.M. and spend its day in a combination of activities, including private devotions, manual labor, and group discussions, the latter being eliminated on the one day a week that was specified as a day of “complete silence.” While the main purpose of the ashram was for personal spiritual growth, its greatest effect in India was to break down caste and political barriers that otherwise separated Christians in their daily workaday life. By 1940 there were some two dozen Christian ashrams located throughout India.
Jones’s reputation as an evangelist and Christian statesman made him a highly respected individual in India and all over the world. He counted Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru among his friends, and both men paid him great respect, though neither converted to Christianity. But Jones was more than just a missionary to India. In the words of Sherwood Eddy, “No one can more appropriately be called a world evangelist, no one has more consistently maintained his evangelistic work—for over forty years—in the spirit of a crusader, than E. Stanley Jones.” Japan was just one of the countries he visited on his evangelistic tours, and according to J. Herbert Kane, the meetings there “attracted vast audiences in all parts of the country and tens of thousands registered their decision for Christ.”43
As a renowned world evangelist and Christian leader, Jones was an influential voice in the twentieth-century ecumenical conferences, but he was frequently at odds with his colleagues—particularly on the issue that Jesus, rather than institutional Christianity, must be paramount. At the Madras Conference in 1938 he took issue with Hendrick Kraemer and others who supported the proposition, “The Church is, under God, the hope of the world.” Only God, as seen through Jesus Christ, Jones argued, was absolute. “The Church is a relativism…. The Conference was thus betrayed.”44 Because of his weak view of the institutional church, Jones did not entirely fit in with other ecumenically minded missionary statesmen, and he was often criticized by both liberals and conservatives.
Although Jones had long since turned away from denominational exclusiveness in his ministry and had embraced a broad concept of Christian unity, he was nevertheless regarded highly among peers in the Methodist Church and was elected bishop at the General Conference. Before the consecration ceremony, however, he resigned. “I am an evangelist,” he wrote, “not a bishop.”
First and foremost, Jones was always an evangelist. Though he “revered all that was good and true in Oriental religions and did his best to meet them halfway,” according to Kane, “he spoke on the finality of Jesus Christ and the uniqueness of the Christian Gospel” and “always ended up with ‘Jesus and the Resurrection.’ “ His task as an evangelist was not to expand the institutional church but to introduce people to Jesus and then let them come to know Him in their own way, as his writing so powerfully conveyed:
There is a beautiful Indian marriage custom that dimly illustrates our task in India, and where it ends. At the wedding ceremony the women friends of the bride accompany her with music to the home of the bridegroom. They usher her into the presence of the bridegroom—that is as far as they can go—then they retire and leave her with her husband. That is our joyous task in India: to know Him, to introduce Him, to retire—not necessarily geographically, but to trust India with the Christ and trust Christ with India. We can only go so far—He and India must go the rest of the way.45
That philosophy of world evangelism was the theme of Jones’s widely circulated book, The Christ of the Indian Road, a book that had a significant impact on twentieth-century missions. When he died in 1973, he was mourned by Christians around the world.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brockman, Fletcher S. I Discover the Orient. New York: Harper & Row, 1935.
Eddy, Sherwood. Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade. Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1945.
Fairbank, John K., ed. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Grubb, Norman P. C. T. Studd: Cricketer & Pioneer. Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1972.
______. Once Caught, No Escape: My Life Story. Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1969.
______. With C. T. Studd in Congo Forests. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1946.
Hogg, William Richey. Ecumenical Foundations: A History of the International Missionary Council and Its Nineteenth-Century Background. New York: Harper & Row, 1952.
Hopkins, C. Howard. John R. Mott, 1865–1955: A Biography. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979.
Johnston, Arthur P. The Battle for World Evangelism. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1978.
Jones, E. Stanley. Along the Indian Road. New York: Abingdon, 1939.
______. The Christ of the Indian Road. New York: Abingdon, 1925.
Mackie, Robert. Layman Extraordinary: John R. Mott, 1865–1955. New York: Association, 1965.
Mott, John R. The Larger Evangelism. Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1944.
Tulga, Chester E. The Case Against Modernism in Foreign Missions. Chicago: Conservative Baptist, 1950.
Wheeler, W. Reginald. A Man Sent from God: A Biography of Robert E. Speer. London: Fleming H. Revell, 1956.