Chapter 52. The Jaffray Pattern
Right here seems as good a place as any to look at the Jaffray philosophy of Christian missions. It was a simple philosophy based on New Testament principles and shot through with salty common sense. From it he evolved a pattern for his work, a pattern whose lines show through everything he did from his earliest South China days to the end of his life.
Whether Robert Jaffray ever sat down and reasoned out a policy is very doubtful. His mind did not work that way. He scooped his ideas on the move as a swallow at evening takes its supper on the wing. The Bible and a sound instinct guided him, and hard experience soon corrected any flaws in his theories. His views were never complex nor difficult to comprehend. The work of missions was fairly simple after all. It consisted chiefly of four things to do: contact, evangelize, organize and instruct. That was all. But in the doing of these essentials a man might toil a lifetime, and his toil would be fruitful, for these were the things Christ had sent His servants to do.
Contact was first. Nothing could be done until communication had been established. The missionary must go to the lost tribes. This was the basal tenet in his missionary creed, and to him it was the voice of command. It created within his mind an eager restlessness that never left him for one day nor one hour while life remained in him. The sight of a map or the sound of a strange heathen name stirred him as the sound of an alarm bell stirred the old fire horse of other days. So Jaffray was a pioneer, an explorer, an adventurer obsessed with the urge to discover new peoples and hidden tribes.
It is this aspect of missionary work that captures the imagination of the public. We are all children enough to love the thrill of missionary adventure enjoyed by proxy, and Jaffray knew this. As a good showman he was willing to give the people at home what they wanted. His newsletters and magazine articles often read like real tales of the wild, but they were never told for their own sake nor for mere amusement. Jaffray was altogether too serious for any such child's play. If he could win attention with honest reports of exotic customs and curious ways of strange peoples, he was not adverse to doing it, but always his motives were in full view. He wanted help. He wanted money, lots of it, but more than all, he wanted young men to hurry over and help him with the job. And they came, these young men, and they came winged with prayer and backed with the consecrated wealth of the people at home.
After contact came evangelization. Christ had told His disciples to go into all the world and make disciples. To Jaffray that could mean only one thing: win lost men to Christ now, bring them to trust Him as their personal Saviour at once, without waiting for civilizing influences or long courses of instruction to condition them. They had but to hear the Gospel and they could be saved, as certainly as any white man could.
That was Jaffray's theory, and its soundness was confirmed in man-to-man practice. It worked, that was the glory of it. Lives were actually changed overnight, transformed by this simple technique. Men could and did jump from raw savagery into the kingdom of God at one
bound, and for the most part, those who made the great transition lived to prove that the change was real and permanent.
The next step was to organize these new Christians into a church. It would need to be a simple thing at first, little more than a loose, common-consent kind of organization with certain men among them picked to act as leaders and give some direction to the group. Later it could go on to a more perfect form of organization with a pastor, deacons and elders; but that could wait, for the missionary would act as the real leader until the new converts had been better instructed. Ecclesiastical-minded persons may smile at this, but it worked, and it still works, and that fact cannot be smiled away.
Then, this new church must be taught the great truths of the Christian faith, must be instructed, indoctrinated, and to accomplish this two means were required: the school and the printing press. These came after organization, and where Jaffray could have his way, not long after.
The printing press was to Jaffray what hand-written epistles were to Paul, a means of keeping in touch with his converts as they increased in number, and distances made personal contact impossible. Then too, the press made available to these new Christians the best in spiritual literature. Usually Jaffray's presses turned out matter written by himself and addressed to particular needs, but they produced also books, tracts, magazines, Bible courses, and expositions of one after another of the books of the Bible as he could prepare them and as he felt the people were ready to receive them.
Along with the printing press stood the Bible School as an effective instrument for the dissemination of the truth. Jaffray believed in the Bible School with a positiveness amounting to sheer dogmatism. He knew its power and promoted it with unremitting zeal. Foreign missionaries would never be the last word in the evangelization of any country. The best and swiftest work would always be done by Christian nationals operating among their own people. But these must first be taught the truth and trained for the most effective service. The Bible School could do this; there was no other agent that could. So every field must have a school; at least one, and more if the need demanded. That was Jaffray's view, and again its soundness was confirmed in practical outwork.
The speed with which the Christian faith spread among the hitherto unreached peoples testifies to the fact that Jaffray's vision was divinely given. He would never allow his workers to huddle together; they were expected to spread out, always spread out and stay on the move. He was so insistent upon this that some of his workers were at times led to question his wisdom, and a few dared to oppose him outright. Usually subsequent developments justified him, however, and the doubters were forced to acknowledge that he had been right.
"Of course," said one official before whom he appeared to request permission to preach the Gospel within his territory, "of course you will concentrate your forces?"
"Certainly," agreed Jaffray quickly. Then stepping to the wall where hung a huge map of the country, he touched with his finger one after another spot on the map.
"We'll concentrate here, and here, and here, and here." "Why, how many missionaries have you?" asked the astonished official. "Six," replied Jaffray, unsmiling. It was this strategy of "concentrating" all over the map that gave such thrust to his missionary drives.
In spite, however, of this blitz-like speed of advance he never fell into the error current today in some quarters—he never believed he had done the Lord's work merely by announcing
the Gospel and moving on. He would not leave the new Christians to fall back into heathenism. Wherever a few converts were made, there a church must be formed; gains must be consolidated. Then the messenger could go on, but not till then. This was wisdom and it was New Testament procedure. It might well serve as a pattern for all missionary societies everywhere.
The notion that we have only to announce the Gospel once to each tribe and then pass on to the next without regard to results is as old as it is false. Though it is the philosophy back of much present-day missionary enterprise, it is nevertheless a plain heresy of method based upon a misreading of orders. It is interesting to know that Wesley and his Methodists had this to face in their early missionary activities, and it is instructive to learn how they handled it.
In one section of the old Methodist Discipline published in 1848 and bearing (I would guess) from an earlier day the marks of Wesley's own mind, under the head, "Rules by which we should Continue, or Desist from, Preaching at any Place," the question is asked, "Is it advisable for us to preach in as many places as we can without forming any societies?" The answer is emphatic. "By no means. We have made the trail in various places; and that for considerable time. But all the seed has fallen by the wayside. There is scarcely any fruit remaining."
Jaffray was of Presbyterian stock, and it is doubtful whether he ever gave much attention to the ways of the early Methodists, but in the hot fires of experience he learned the same lessons they had learned before him and he arrived at the same conclusions. This may not be the last word that can be spoken on the subject, but the wise missionary will listen respectfully to these masters. They bring to the support of their philosophy the unanswerable argument of overwhelming success.