eft, se 10D CAL ee ort raat t 2 ag ps fetes é Wack teae 1, RS pee ey oh Sip tan mn fn OE NY rape 2 Gh Ly iu . BRSHOA re “its eel > feria: LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. PURCHASED BY THE HAMILL MISSIONARY FUND. Division. La....-.... Section...wt bed... 6 5 BV 2060 .F64 192 Fleming, Daniel Johnson, 1877-1969. Whither bound in missions = en a 9 etise he ge as ss ’ Ve « \ ; : f a he } (ieee a Al Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/whitherboundinmi00flem WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS BY THE SAME AUTHOR Marks oF A Wortp CuristT1an ButLpinG wirH Ixpia ScHOoOOLs witH A MeEssaGe In INpDIA Contacts witH Non-CuristTiAn CuLtrures DrEvoLuTION IN Mission ADMINISTRATION ONE Na EEE, “ MAY 13 1926 | WHITHER B IN MISSIONS BY 4 cles DANIEL JOHNSON FLEMING, Pu.D. COUNCIL OF CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS Student Department, Y.W.C.A., 600 Lexington Avenue Student Department, Y.M.C.A., 347 Madison Avenue New York City Distributed by ASSOCIATION PRESS New York: 347 Mapison AVENUE 1925 COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS To “COUSIN JENNIE” AND Tue Rev. Sm JAMES C. R. EWING D.D., LL.D.» D.LITT., K.C.LE. in whose home in India the author caught his first enthusiasm for the Christian enterprise overseas WO af a a: Se eee AOLbeI Mitead Deiat fl) hy pu sit srg 4 ner slotting ral baki eur Jog aan yea tim MGUABS OTE: Onis gaMt or edna A Oi Hoar bots] din \ilueanlh ‘Dat eee ae teal, weuti laativague [setae Me ata a! Pitts Lei ey Tanke deere ihe GD 4 5 ; a ike A fi,~ F ; }. Pointe scar A aN” fee Os Bie OM A h} ies af) a nDan a biGibare i ’ iy. . 3 ax i a OR a ay ee i kaee | y ihe ay PER BORE EE) ae AUG PE a at miahe ot 7 t ‘ " Sng > aK pt AY ae q 7 ‘te <4 “ . A @ i MPN LOOM A LEP as peu Ged) ade: roy eft i bautiaat , | eine ey j pha Paty psa 9 eRe veg EES hI as, ri ae vy ; oi ti ea ae het’ Pie eS eS ‘ : by 4 AO are OT SM si ch iat eo < Che ELE thi a ih Vids JOE {SUT Gate a pened ware Oe agar Bey ah yh Meat tba Ve cn Hf blpniater orenit dihival tigen ails ! AGLEMSY tantieo ae rhe virile bar iy chet} oe } : bagi ts et AL isk ah onirhind, ads scam ieney salt ti va Bis Oe Pay hat Mh ee fs oo > Aeoa ote SH bene datas eben Uw a ae hb. ‘9 Hh OF at) i 720 ue nt his pale a aaa sink “ibaa fai | eas ieee ay | ieee deasrieeiyyg ms Ab re ier “ay ra bebe PREFACE Ir is part of the glory of the modern missionary movement that it has not waited for criticism from outside. We doubt whether any profession has voluntarily and planfully subjected itself to more searching survey and appraisal than missions since 1910. The fundamental positions have remained unchanged. More clearly now than at any previ- ous time is it realized that the world’s welfare de- mands that Jesus Christ and His way be made known to every people. In the last fifteen years, however, advances in method and attitude have come so rapidly that there is danger that the constituency back of mis- sions will not keep up with the changes which are bound to shape the movement in the future. The giving constituency should know about these changes and share in the consideration of the prob- lems for the future which are raised. No one should want a gap to grow between the missionary enterprise as it will actually exist and the concep- tion of that enterprise held by those who so heartily support it. We are authoritatively informed that the whole missionary movement needs rethinking and re- stating.’ For one thing, while in some parts change *Report of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1923, p. 109. vii Vili PREFACE has been coming very slowly, in some major areas for overseas effort the cultural scene has changed more profoundly in the last ten years than in whole cycles of time previously. Discerning missionary statesmen feel that their most significant problem is not the getting of more men and more money for old work, but the catching of God’s leading in new ways. Furthermore, many of these changes in attitude and method are a part, as is quite natural, of the prevailing thought. movements of our age. We believe that there are many, not now interested in missions, who would find their sympathy and en- thusiasm for this work developing if they only knew how modern it really is. We want, then, to think ahead with this move- ment, see some of the tendencies that are working in it, and be ready for that flexibility which must characterize an agency through which God can continue adequately to work today. The effort has been to suggest possible and more immediate changes in attitude and method rather than to attempt any ultimate or philosophical answer to the question raised by the title. It will be recog- nized that where the number of societies engaged in this work runs up into the hundreds with mani- fold activities among most varied peoples at dif- ferent stages of economic, national, and religious development, sweeping general statements are either out of place, or must be taken as an estimate of the general trend. A special effort has been made to give the opinion of nationals on the various issues raised. PREFACE ix For we are their partners in the world task, and increasingly we find our common interest is helped by giving full consideration to their judgments. This volume could scarcely have been written were it not for the author’s contact from year to year with a stream of alert and ofttimes brilliant missionaries on furlough, who, with deepened con-~ victions as to the world’s need of Christ, are eager to study through their problems and go back for better service. Furthermore, it is a pleasure grate- fully to acknowledge obligation to many frank and sincere friends, and especially to my wife, who have read the manuscript in whole or in part and whose invaluable suggestions have corrected or enriched its message. DANIEL JOHNSON FLEMING. New York City, January, 1925. Wie va Seat ene ne ae hae had > t Liki 9 ae ke 43 anti ae ‘ oy ela? | yet re a , cate au - A al ie othe VOR One CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I: ERADICATING A SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 1 The reflection of prevalent attitudes of supe- riority in missions—Growing resentment over the western dominating type—Modern judgment with reference to relative racial capacity—Re- sulting observations for missions—The call for . a fitting racial humility. CHAPTER II: MUTUALITY IN GIVING AND RECEIVING . 23 The rise of mutuality—Some of its characteris- tics—Contributions to a common cultural evo- lution—The special possibilities of interchange within the world’s Christian fellowship—vVa- rious adjustments suggested by the ideal of mutuality. Cuaprer III: THe West as PArt OF THE Non- CHRISTIAN WORLD Hie ume tae. | Evidence of the fact—The West as cers see us—Sensitiveness among American students— Three resulting corollaries. CHAPTER IV: Fruit—THE Most EFFECTIVE APOLO- ETIO CON fee he oe is re Pura hota jal cee tem on ei OBE The missionary and his message no longer an isolated apologetic—Proofs passing from origins to consequences—The resulting enhanced obli- gation on western Christians—And on those who go abroad in other capacities than pro- fessional missionaries—Our most convincingly Christian opportunity. xi Xil CONTENTS CHAPTER V: Gon’s HAND IN OTHER FAITHS An earlier, harsher attitude—God not working exclusively through Christianity — Readjust- ments in vocabulary—Thankfulness for reforms in non-Christian faiths—The need for Chris- tianity at its best—Recognition of grave ethical and philosophical -disparities. CHAPTER VI: THE COMBINATION OF CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS LER Te LEE Mache ws) vee The missionary as advocate—However, there are novel situations demanding fresh judgment —Persons qualified for this wanted by discern- ing leaders—Three reasons for this type of mind—Serious dangers. CHAPTER VII: THE OCCUPATION OF NEw CONTINENTS Geographical expansion and Christian permea- tion—-Today, also, calls with great pioneering tasks-—-Signs of a reinterpretation of the mis- sionary movement—Present missionary organi- zations are reaching out toward larger service— Some precautions—Retaining the challenge to great adventure. Cuapter VIII: Facina THE HANDICAP OF A DIVIDED CA URGH 3 p08 | a ihcdiO oer PO eae en Care ee Divided strategy and competitive equipment— Evidence of dissatisfaction and danger-——As na- tionals see our sectarianism—Rising above denominationalism—An unmistakable demand , on western Christians. CHAPTER IX: Givina Way To NATIONALS .. . The significance of growing acclimated ° Churches—-Illustrations of their growing in- fluence—Evidences of a certain lag in recogniz- ing the new order—-Five adjustments caused by the centrality of the rising Churches abroad. PAGE 78 94 119 142 154 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER X: ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY AND TYPE OF UY CYR cerca co ets uate leak Mee SMa a EL i ye eS Incontrovertible evidence that missionaries are still needed—However, the time has passed for recruiting in terms of quantity—Called, located, and retained at the call of the Church—Adjust- ments in organization, policy, and education— Five stages in mission work. CHAPTER XI: DEVELOPING CHRISTIAN WORLD-MIND- PEER e nes ete RRO ik ot ot ality oatnha Seearen sled SEL OG Priorities in Christian fundamentals—The de- velopment of an international mind—Develop- ments in acquainting people with the missionary enterprise—Criteria for addresses and literature. CHAPTER XII: THe INEXHAUSTIBLE REALITY BACK OF IMPSRTONS Chi A sive ical cilia (cath a0 5h) RAN (NON eRe nay PRD The purpose and character of God—Making pos- sible a spiritual fellowship—Characterized by an urge to service—And full of promise for the future. 2; LH SHAR 2) Pe sd A ASEOF «7 *é 45 ay se t| ery " Le CHAR wary O ‘ ce WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS CHAPTER I ERADICATING A SENSE OF SUPERIORITY I A HUNDRED years ago European civilization naively assumed that the Caucasian had been made by God to rule the world, and took it for granted that there was only one culture worthy of the name. The existing political and economic pre- dominance of western peoples engendered a feel- ing of superiority. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, western civilization extended what helpful influences it possessed from above downward, rather than straight across from brother man to brother man. Our Anglo-Saxon temperament encouraged this assumption of su- periority. A tendency to master and direct made it seem natural for us to impose our wills on a more yielding and passive people. Even Christianity, as popularly understood, made it possible for one to nourish a sense of superiority. Christianity began with a great em- 1 2 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS phasis on love. But in time that love came to be considered typically Christian where nothing was given in return and where there was an essential inequality between the parties. Christian brother- hood was defined by the Church solely in terms of benevolence. Hence the popular conception of “charity” is tinged with condescension. In fact, to most people charity seems most Christian when there is no mutual exchange. Similarly, the altru- ism of early Protestantism took the form of sharing with others, but not of receiving from them. The modern emphasis on democracy, however, is mak- ing us see how un-Christian it is to think of others as beneath us, and how love, to be Chris- tian, must recognize the essential equality of the two parties concerned. . As long as the characteristic element in Christian love was merely giving without return, it did not offend our Christian sense to have a strong nation dominate a weaker one providing its rule was supposed to be for the weaker nation’s good, or to have missionaries patronize another people as long as the motives were quite unselfish. But we now see that Christian love includes democratic respect and justice as well as benevolence. To mere kind- liness is added a genuine solicitude that other people may be free and equipped to share in the duties and responsibilities of the new world order. Under this fuller conception of Christian love indi- viduals and nations will not be less called to serve; but consciousness of call will not be accompanied by a belittling of the recipients of this goodwill. For it will be seen that democracy is inconsistent SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 3 with a monopoly of call by any one group—that to be Christian is to assert that, in their several ways, each nation and race is called to serve.' It was in this earlier atmosphere of the assump- tion of racial and cultural superiority that modern missions took their rise. It would be surprising, therefore, if the feeling of superiority, so general in the West, had not been reflected in certain mis- sionary attitudes. Here and there it crept into the literature of early missions, taking it for granted that just as the West had the only worthy culture, so their religion also was the only faith embodying any truth. This spirit of condescension has not yet become extinct for many are still able to sing with complacency Can we, whose souls are lighted With wisdom from on high, Can we, to men benighted The lamp of light deny? Until very recent years the average call to work abroad more or less unconsciously assumed west- ern superiority. It was a romantic leadership which was held out to any young student who would go to the Orient. He was to stamp his in- fluence on other peoples, share in making a new world, shape the destinies of backward but changing countries, and lay out the lines upon which future development was to take place. Many of the interpretations of Africa and the East were tinged with a patronizing note. To such an extent *On the thought of the last two paragraphs see an ad- dress by Pres. A. C. McGiffert, in Religious Education, vol. 16, pp. 131-6. 4 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS has this point of view been absorbed that the head of one of our largest language schools for young missionaries has declared that one of his chief > responsibilities is to endeavor to eradicate from their minds false ideas of their future task. A missionary now in his second term in India thus reviews his earlier years of service: I say that I was ignorant and conceited. I knew next to nothing of Indian history, Indian lan- guage, Indian thought; above all I was profoundly ignorant of Indian character and psychology. Nevertheless, what I had read and heard from: missionary sources had made me regard myself as commissioned to enlighten and uplift a needy and degraded people, who were crying aloud for my help. The altruistic element in this was, no doubt, excellent; but it was inevitably accompanied by a self-sufficiency and an egotism, which, I fear, may in practice have frequently overlaid the altru- ism. It is hard for a young man, whose thought about his missionary vocation has been framed in the atmosphere of crisis and urgent need, to achieve that modesty of attitude in dealing with Indians which is characteristic of all really suc- cessful missionaries and administrators of an older generation. Yet without such an attitude it is im- possible for either missionary or administrator to gain the confidence and esteem of the people. Moreover, when a young missionary finally reaches the field a host of insidious influences may support and develop a nascent sense of su- periority. His salary, though meager enough according to western standards, in some areas per- mits him to run an establishment with a retinue of servants far more elaborate than most of the SENSE OF SUPERIORITY D5 people with whom he associates have. Health rea- sons usually demand that he should have a better house, or travel higher class. Sometimes he is put in charge of work over gray-haired and ex- perienced nationals. An artificial power surrounds him because of his control of a western purse, enabling him to engage and to pay workers. Inferior economic surroundings unconsciously suggest inferior peoples. The material and insti- tutional means of helping folks up to higher eco- nomic and educational levels tend to develop a sense of generosity, altruism and self-satisfaction. Often many of the little devices in the missionary’s house, equipment, or ways of doing things are copied, and imitation is an insidious form of flat- tery. A courtesy-loving Orient by instinct defers | to one who comes to them in the capacity of a” teacher. There is something about administration in most foreign fields that gradually makes a man unwilling to be talked back to unless he is very much on guard against the tendency. Among some groups where the spirit of nationalism has not developed there may still be a definite inferiority complex toward white people. The very fact that we possess special skill in administering our own type of institutions inclines us to rate ourselves above those to whom these institutions are still novel. With such suggestions, is it any wonder that some yield? One of the abiest missionarics now in India, looking back upon his experience of over forty- three years in that land said that he regretted, 6 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS among other errors, one serious mistake which he had made. He had not sufficiently estimated the potential capacity of the people. Therefore he had not expected as much from them as he should; and in consequence he feels that they had not developed and done as much as they might have done. Blessed is the one who is forewarned against unconscious influences which encourage the sense of superiority. Not all of the responsibility of possessing a right racial attitude, however, rests on the person who goes abroad. Before they reach the field they share attitudes of mind current in the West— often attitudes not helpful to the young missionary. One whose professional work brings him into touch with a large proportion of the junior missionarics coming to China complains that many of them come out “with the attitude that any condition they discover among the Chinese which is not in accordance with western traditions and ideals is inferior.” ? The highest codrdinating missionary body in North America has shown its sensitive- ness to this danger by giving a whole session to a discussion of whether or not even the churches of the West do not instill points of view which limit the usefulness of their missionaries, and display attitudes, such as a sense of superiority due to our wealth and prestige, a pride of racc due to the present position of the white peoples, and an assertive quality naturally found in the pote Report of the Foreign Missions Conference, 1922, p. 126. @? SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 7 propagandist, which as a matter of fact hinder the work abroad. Many missions have gladly acknowledged that nationals of good judgment, of whom there are very many, have most valuable points of view growing out of their intimate knowledge of local conditions. By such missions joint councils have been arranged to make their wisdom effective. But where this has not yet been done, a serious sense of inequality is the unfortunate but unavoid- able implication in the minds of these nationals. II Increasingly this attitude of cultural superiority on the part of the West is being resented. Asia and Africa have awakened to a new sense of race respect and corporate personality. The aggressive or domineering type of missionary is not wanted. The field secretary of one of our largest so- cieties, out of his long experience in China, tells us in a personal letter that: Young China will accept no service given in the spirit of condescending superiority. The man who , feels called to China to lord it over God’s heritage, a superman of Divine grace, would better change his mind now and save the board the expense of transportation later. But the man who in all hu- mility and love would go to China for the service of God and the people cannot go too quickly. It is a great help occasionally to see ourselves as others see us. “We welcome men and women,” *Tbid., 1923, pp. 154-170. 8 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS recently said an outstanding Chinese leader, “who come to China definitely to help rather than to dominate, to learn as well as to teach, to be friends rather than to be leaders, to be sympathetic and not dogmatic. Such men and women are more needed in China today than ever before.” A Chi- nese at one time general secretary of the Y. M. C. A. for China, and later the government’s secre- tary of foreign affairs, says that . .. the most serious mistake in the mission- ary propaganda in China is that, in the early and even in the later decades of the nineteenth century, the missionaries had a wrong conception of the moral and intellectual strength of the Chinese. They took for granted that the Chinese were an uncivilized race whom they must instruct and take into tutelage, and in consequence regarded them as incapable of being placed in responsible positions. Their policy was to develop and train their Chinese workers up to a certain point which would only fit them to be their assistants.* At a recent denominational conference a Chinese delegate set forth the Chinese point of view as follows: Intelligent Chinese do not care to work with the type of missionary who pretends to treat the Chinese as equals, placing them in positions of nominal leadership or inviting them to meetings of trustees or committees where they sit as silent listeners or as speakers whose words carry no weight. I would ask the missionary two things: first, give the Chinese every chance to do things for themselves; second, treat the Chinese workers as equals. “International Review of Missions, vol. 5, p. 85. SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 9 All the nationals who have been quoted are too big natured to speak in other than a sweetly reasonable way. Gently, yet firmly, they are saying that there are lingering even if unconscious racial predilections on the part of western mission- aries, and that we have been too slow in sensing the conception of nationals as to what is involved in proper treatment. There are thoughtful ob- servers who feel that the United States as a nation is complacently walking right toward the worst sort of conflict—racial war. Whether or not this is so, the missionary enterprise should un- mistakably glow throughout with Christian brotherhood. On the basis of a questionnaire to eighty-two leading Japanese workers, Prof. U. Kawaguchi, Ph.D., concludes an exceptionally significant paper on the missionary’s task from the standpoint of the Japanese Church as follows: The sooner the missionary delegates his paternal instinct, his desire to possess and to control, his endeavor to direct and to lead, to his Japanese co-laborer, the sooner will his ideal of an in- dependent, autonomous, native Church see its realization; and the more lasting will be the period of his usefulness in the accomplishment of the Christian program of the Church.® Tilak, one of India’s noblest singers, put the same thought into song: *“The Christian Movement in Japan, Korea and For- mosa,” 1923, p. 111. 10 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS baat: upon self you have come to us to bring us Christ; For us you have given life and all things, so that to our debt there is no end. Yet will tou heed one small request which I have still to proffer? You are father and mother, we helpless infants: enough of this relationship now! You have driven God afar by making yourselves gods: when will you cast off this sin? You have set up for yourselves a kingdom of slaves: do not call it a kingdom of God. We dance as puppets, whilst you hold the strings: how long shall this buffoonery endure? How long will you keep us dead? Hath not God eyes to see? Let us swim, let us sink or die; give us leastways the chance of swimming. Pack Be all your doctrines, and let us first find hrist. Be not angry with me; I am but a poor messenger, who speaks what he is bidden. Come, be to us brothers and sisters! all else we can settle then. iit Modern judgment with reference to relative racial capacity has a bearing upon this question. In catching this judgment certain graphic figures are useful. We have learned that the group capac- ity of a people is best represented, not by a dot or line, but by an area. Suppose all the individuals of a group have been examined and their capac- ities determined. If a curve of the results were plotted, with the vertical coordinates representing the numbers concerned, and the horizontal co- SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 11 ordinates the various capacities, we would secure a characteristic area (Fig. 1). For example, it would be found that comparatively few individ- uals (AB) have a very high capacity (OB). Also comparatively few individuals (CD) will be marked by a very low capacity (OD). In other words, there would be relatively few individuals of genius, and relatively few imbeciles. The greatest number (EF) would have a central ca- pacity (OF). Momb ers { \capad- 8 tres I "Gg ,. The relative capacities of two groups could be compared by the shape and position of two areas. Conceivably the results might be as in Fig. 2. Here the capacity of each individual in group A is greater than that of any individual in group B. Many a slaveholder used to think of his slaves as constituting a group wholly beneath his own in human faculties. Such a diagram could picture the way a Brahman has been accustomed to think of the pariah. There are still many who think of their race as so markedly superior to another that this diagram could fitly represent their thought. The overwhelming expert opinion, however, is 12 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS that there is a very considerable amount of over- lapping between the races in the matter of ability (Fig. 3). Group A has a few individuals superior to any in B. Group B has a few individuals in- ferior to any in A. But the amount of overlapping in the shaded portion is proportionate to the amount of common-ability. For every individual of group A within the shaded portion, an indi- Numbers Fig. a2. vidual in group B can be found with exactly equal capacity. Lastly, there is general unanimity that great differences exist between the various races and peoples in regard to actual experience and attain- ment. But this does not settle the question of native ability. It has been customary for many to assign these differences in attainments to orig- inal differences in nature. But thus far it has been practically impossible to separate the effects. of original nature from the effects due to social environment and training. Any exact measure- ments of the differences between two groups have SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 13 to be interpreted in the light both of original na- ture and of training. We have to acknowledge that at present we do not possess the technique by which we can determine differences in relative racial capacity, and that, therefore, it has not yet been proved that one race is inferior to another. But neither has the opposite been proved—that all races have equal native ability. In fact, there is a very strong probability that the various peoples do differ somewhat in natural endowment al- though, as we have said, the fact of such differ- ences as well as their amount and nature have yet to be determined with scientific accuracy. Graphi- cally, this probability for the various peoples can be represented by a group of distribution curves with different average capacities (A, B, C, D in Fig. 4). It should be noted that all the seeming differences between the various races and peoples appear very small compared with the vast _ difference which separates man from the nearest 14 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS animal (see Fig. 4). Furthermore even the alleged differences between the various peoples seem smal: compared with the wide range of variation within any one race or people (again see Fig. 4). With these last two statements in mind, we can under- stand what is meant by the assertion of the funda- mental unity of human nature. AG Dp Races of ej; Animals Fr. af IV Several important observations for missions come from a consideration of this question. One is that we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. There should be a certain wholesome humility. This is a lesson that the Anglo-Saxon, especially, ought to take to heart. It is very easy for the white race to as- sume its superiority as a matter of course, and to do unconsciously a multitude of little things which rankle harmfully in the hearts of another people. Consecration on the part of the missionary does not necessarily protect him from this. Let it sink into his consciousness that there are many ways of accounting for superior achievements without - SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 15 assuming superior capacity. The rapid develop- ment of self-consciousness in Asia, and in parts of Africa, has so heightened sensitiveness to atti- tudes of superiority, that western peoples must shake themselves out of objectionable ways that have become unconsciously habitual. Just as we have given up the idea of the divine right of kings, and are giving up the age-long conception of male superiority, we will very likely have to give up the flattering delusion of decided racial superior- ity. It is interesting that one board has taken the precaution of placing, for a time, each new recruit to Japan under a Japanese minister, in order to develop from the first a proper attitude. We can see, also, the right of each person to be treated as an individual and not classed in a group. The human mind has a distinct tendency toward classification. We tend to select the domi- nant traits of another race; associate these traits with certain external racial marks such as slant eye, dark skin, black, straight hair; and then assign the traits to every individual who has the given external marks. We tend to set up a set of mental pigeon-holes, each the abstract average of a group, and then we dump individuals into these pigeon-holes on the basis of some external sign. We forget that when we talk about the characteristics of a race as a whole, we are dealing with an abstraction that has no existence in nature. In this way peoples have made such generaliza- tions as that: all Hindus are untruthful; all west- erners are materialistic; all Japanese are tricky; all Chinese are honest, etc. Many do not realize 16 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS that there is a distribution curve for any race with respect to any quality (such as in Fig. 1). The particular individual before you may be in the line AB or the line CD, te. he may stand extraordinarily high or extraordinarily low in capacity, or honesty, or dependability, or what- ever quality is being considered. It is a mark of psychological immaturity to think of members of another race as though they had a common con- science, a fixed sense of honor, a unified financial interest, a single head, or heart, or life. Mission- aries are among the first to learn not to hang labels on a complex people, and then ever after interpret them by the label instead of by the indi- vidual reality. The rest of us must be on our guard against this insidious habit of men’s thinking. Another significant conviction for missionaries comes from a study of the extensive overlapping © in ability between any two races (Fig. 3). This overlapping is so decided, even when we allow for the more extreme judgments of inter-racial differ- ences, that we can repudiate the idea that one race is ordained permanently to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for another. One race, sup- posedly inferior, will not permanently need a dif- ferent type of cducation from that of a race, supposedly superior. Each will need a type of education suited, to its present needs, but we should not think that education for Negroes must always and of necessity be industrial, while that of the whites may be more literary. There is too much overlapping between the races for this. SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 17 There is a need of various types of education, in- volving more or less head or hand work, but from Fig. 3 it will be seen that for any given type suit- able numbers of each race should be selected. Again, if we were wishing to select a hundred people who are to be quite superior to another hundred, one of the most foolish ways would be to choose them by race. Selecting one hundred persons at random from one race, supposedly su- perior, would by no means give you a group uni- formly superior to another hundred chosen at random from a supposedly inferior race. Mis- sionaries have found that moderatorships and chairmanships and secretaryships do not need to go to whites as whites. The modern missionary does not assume that he is a natural leader just because he belongs to the white race, or that any white university graduate in a mission college can teach any subject to any member of a darker race. The selection of leadership by means of race alone would be a very inefficient method of procedure. If missionaries want to select youths for training in India, they will not reject every mess movement convert as such, and accept every individual who has sprung from a higher caste as such. They know that it will be vastly more efficient to apply some of the methods of selecting superior individ- uals regardless of race or caste. This discussion may make us more ready fo see the good in another people. If the facts as to the difference in racial capacity could be correctly represented by Fig. 2 instead of Fig. 3 we might justifiably be blind to the attainments of another 18 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS people. But a realization of the extensive over- lapping may strengthen in us “the will to believe” with reference to aptitude in another people. We rejoice, therefore, that widespread among mission- ary candidates is an attitude or frame of mind which is expectant with reference to the capacity — and attainments of other peoples. The present stage of knowledge concerning rela- tive racial capacity should give us great confidence that, given the right sort of training, we can find in any group the leadership it needs at any given time. We associate a sort of elaborate technique with those who lead here in the West; that is, we think of them as using typewriters, amanuenses, card- filing systems, and a great deal of machinery of various kinds. Furthermore, we expect our leaders to have a broad view of world movements and of ecclesiastical systems. While in many mis- sion lands we may not be able to get the equivalent of an experienced western superintendent or bishop, it may not be necessary to utilize such ad- vanced efficiency. It may not be that they need all the western paraphernalia and all the western vision that we bring in when we go to them as superintendents. The point to remember is, we very likely will find in any community ability for the kind of leadership that that community needs at the time. All tests point toward a “probability curve” sim- ilar to Fig. 1. Each group will have its AB men and women. And these AB individuals will be much superior to the average person belonging to another group whose average capacity may be SENSE OF SUPERIORITY Ag greater than their group. The Christians from among the outcastes of India, for example, must not be thought of as uniformly inferior. With scientific certainty we can expect to find among them men of superior gifts, men of marked abil- ity, the raw materia! for leadership. The existence of AB men in every group should give us a sure basis for stimulating the faith and courage of Asiatic and African peoples in their struggle with the vast social and ethical problems which they face. Instead of doing everything for people in mission lands, or taking everything to them, we shall hope to draw forth all that is latently present within. The conviction that God-given leadership can be found in any people is an additional assur- ance of the reasonableness of the missionary enter- prise. It encourages us to aim at a program that is big, and worthy of the persons with whom we are working. Eradication of the feeling of superiority is bring- ing about a change in missionary nomenclature. There are good words which have picked up an unfortunate or un-Christian connotation. Unde- sirable associations have grown up about them. All unconsciously the user is affected by the de- rogatory implications of the word. Hence some words need to be purged, rescued, or abandoned. Expressions betokening possession of the Church abroad on the part of the West are being given up. The reports of missionary societies used to be full of the first person possessive—‘“our gospel,” “our Christians,” “our converts,” “our African mission field,’ “our high school pupils,’ “our native 20 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS churches.” They informed their supporters that “our Indian Christians are learning to give to God,” or spoke of “representatives of our Chinese ministers.” A little imagination, when once our attention is called to it, enables us to see how we would not want to be possessed in this way by Christians of another land, however benevolent. The terms “mission assistants” and “missionary helpers” are already being dropped in the best usage. Where these older expressions are still used it shows that the center of gravity in thought is still in the temporary foreign missions and not in the permanent indigenous church. In the modern emphasis, it is the westerners who are the helpers. : “Native” is another word that has acquired un- fortunate associations. Some have used it ina derogatory, reproachful sense. The condemnable thing here is not the word, but the wrong attitude which has degraded the word. In some circles the word “nationals” is being substituted for “natives” and it may be best in some places where feelings have been hurt to make a new start. But as long as wrong attitudes and assumptions of white superiority continue, any new word will be _ dragged down in like manner. We must learn not to look down on another race or people. In the meantime we know that many Orientals are sensitive about this word. That is reason enough for avoiding it, or for using it with care and dis- crimination. When speaking of a_ particular country there is little need of it, since one can speak of Indians, Chinese, or Japanese, as the case — SENSE OF SUPERIORITY 21 may be; or of the Indian Church, Chinese hymnol- ogy or Japanese workers. ¥ It must-be plain that the sense of superiority which prevailed a century ago when modern mis- sions were young would now be ruinous. An attitude of mind could be successful then that could not be successful now. It would be folly for any modern missionary to neglect to adjust himself to the rapid development of racial and national consciousness which has been an out- standing characteristic of the past two decades. To be patronized by a foreigner is the last thing they will tolerate. It is recognized, therefore, that henceforth race pride is a disqualification for work abroad. Even a white skin may be more of a liability than an asset. It is not necessary to defend at ail costs our Occidental civilization. A fitting racial humility must mark those who go forth, and the warmth of their brotherhood must be so great as to weld races and to transcend national interests. Therefore those who select recruits for mis- sionary work want young men and women who recognize the fundamental value of each race, deplore the assumption of racial superior- ity on the part of whites, and realize that consciousness of superiority unfits for service to other peoples. Care, as never before, is being taken to send abroad only those men and women who can live among the people as brothers and _ sisters on the basis of simple unaffected friend- 22 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS ship, and who do not come as benevolent superiors from above. Though one speak with the tongues of men and of angels in behalf of his living gospel and yet does not feel brother to those of different color and culture, his relationship will be tinged with patronage and his words will be heard as sounding brass and a clanging cymbal. CHAPTER II MUTUALITY IN GIVING AND RECEIVING I Our minds are able to go back in imagination to those days beyond the frontiers of human history when migrations from the original group began to separate and differentiate the people of the earth.. Humanity that started as one became geographically separated by deserts and mountain ranges and vast seas. The long, steady influence of climate and of geographic conditions picked out and accentuated variations in temperament and ability. Various social situations called forth different customs, different estimates of value, different philosophies of life. Variations in virility, geographic environment and historic cir- cumstance allowed some groups to forge ahead, and contributed to the backwardness of others. The most romantic days of history have at last brought these distant cousins into vital communi- cation. Thousands of years of separation under the most diverse conditions enable each people today to bring its special gift to the common store—the best of each for the good of all. Books, people, and the products of industry—like myriad flying shuttles—are busy weaving the web of a 23 24 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS re-unified humanity. In the interpenetration of the East and the West we see one of the most significant facts of modern days. We catch a glimpse of a fellowship richer and more fruitful than anything the world has yet seen, in which every function will be spiritualized because of the recognition that it‘is for the whole. Thus four kinds of relationships may be dis- tinguished in our contact with other countries: the blind ignorance of isolation and prejudice; the dawning recognition of values; a time of suspicion, fear and rivalry; and a final confidence in the certainty of helpful interchange. We are entering the fourth relationship where we acknowledge that we can learn from other people as well as they from us; that the ideal is mutual stimulation and cross-fertilization of culture, and that the better world will be achieved only when all work together for common goals in the light of common experience. It is a stage characterized by the recognition of interdependence and mutual obligation, when no member of the world team will trip the other up, but will pass to him the ball. II Under a system of mutuality the stronger and more self-sufficient a race or nation or church may be, the greater is its obligation to place its resources and experience at the others’ service. On the other hand, the stronger group must realize that it can probably learn much from a less conspicious or less developed unit. History shows that gifts do not always come from the most GIVING AND RECEIVING 25 powerful nations, as is evident when we recall the significance of Palestine, Greece, Holland, or Switzerland. What we are approaching in as- piration is a living communion of one world group with another, where each is acting and reacting upon the other, consciously and unconsciously, with broadening, enriching, and most quickening results. Each nation will strive to stimulate the best life in others. But to do so it will see that it must correct its own life. For to attempt to do the best for others brings home the need of bettering one’s self. | Mutuality need not lead one to ignore the dif- ferences which actually exist In our human world. In fact, when we take into consideration the variety in mankind, it is necessary to revise some gen- eralizations, such as the Golden Rule. To do unto others as you would have others do to you is a very good guide as long as people are more or less alike. But when there are differences it may not be a sufficient guide for conduct simply to know what we would like most. The activity and organization congenial to us who have been brought up in a temperate climate may not at all be what is needed or desired by those of the torrid zone. We of the West might think that every one should be given tooth brushes because our civili- zation considers them of value. But in India they abhor these articles made of bristles, used time after time, and left to hang exposed. They much prefer their twig-made brushes, freshly plucked each morning. The intelligent application of the Golden Rule might lead us to install bathtubs for - 26 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS another people. Yet this would not be kindness to individuals whose racial habit is to pour water over the body, but never to use this same water a second time as is inevitable in a tub. _ These crude illustrations suggest how mutuality on a world-wide scale involves the consideration of unlikeness. Not*what we would most like to be done to us, but what will call forth the richest personality in the other becomes the guide when action is on an inter-racial scale. With peoples of other cultures and other training we will try so to discharge our spiritual energy as to evoke the finest spiritual energy in them. This in turn will come back to our own enrichment—an eternal reciprocity among those who differ. We are working toward a world harmony in which barriers are repudiated while distinctions are affirmed. Many in the Orient are hungry to enter into this relationship of reciprocity. Rabindranath Tagore valued his Nobel Prize as a recognition of in- dividual merit, and still more, so he says, as an acknowledgement that the East is a collaborator with the West in contributing its riches to the common stock of civilization. To him it was symbolic of a joining of hands in comradeship of the two great hemispheres of the human world.! He pleads with the West in another place “to tell us [India| that the world has need of us; not where we are petty but where we can help with the force of our life to rouse the world in wisdom, *The Modern Review, September, 1921. GIVING AND RECEIVING 27 love and work, in the expansion of insight, knowl- edge and mutuality.” ” This illustrates the truth that where you love another human being you need him. You are not merely eager (laudibly perhaps and _ disinter- estedly) to give him certain good things; but you need him as much as he needs you. An Indian Christian saint of great spiritual penetration, speaking to a friend about his relation with Euro- pean Christians, said, “You know, you make us feel that you want tc do good to us, but you don’t make us feel that you need us.” The conviction that mutuality in giving should be our normal expectation receives strong con- firmation in all the best friendships with foreign students in the West. Many colleges are learning the unique value of these nationals to their own student bodies, and are welcoming them for what they can give in forum, in cabinet, or discussion group. Their frankness in calling attention to the inconsistency and un-Christian practices and at- titudes on the part of Christians in the West has arrested the attention of many students and is influencing them to do all in their power to make real our Christian profession. Many who. began their relationship with these friends from across the seas as more or less condescending hosts have rapidly changed their attitude as they realized they were receiving, from those of other tempera- ments, upbringing, and culture, as much as they gave. *“Greater India,” p. 85. 28 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS iit We get glimpses here and there of possible con- tributions to a common, cultural evolution. It is arresting to have one of Bertrand Russell’s in- telligence and insight say that it may easily be that there are things done in China better than in the West, and that, in the great interchange which will take place in the community of peoples, we will learn at various points from them. I re- member how Professor Sargent of Chicago University used to tell his pupils that out of five specified elements of art, China surpassed the West in four. The perusal of “Chinese Painters” by Raphael Petrucci, or of the Chinese poems translated by Mr. Waley will convince any one that we have much more to learn from them than mah jong. In their guild system, employer and employees were found in the same democratic group, and cooperation between these two groups had displaced competition, at the stage of de- velopment industry had then reached. In the Chinese passion for “saving face,” there is an element of respect for personality. At their best, her literati have a noticeable quietness, a poise, a peace. China has had its wars, but unlike the West, it can be said that down through the centuries the “best people” did not approve of them, the soldier being the lowest member of their social hierarchy. We are all indebted to Japan for manifold creations from her sense of beauty, and for high individual and national embodiments of politeness. GIVING AND RECEIVING 29 In India we find patience, gentleness, and an age- long quest for oneness with reality; in Africa forbearance and cheerfulness; in Latin America quickness of perception, acuteness of analysis, and high flights of imagination. All over the Orient we see how people are devotedly fond of children, how all are wonderfully hospitable to strangers and guests; and how all (unless they have come too much in contact with the West) are beautifully courteous. Each land has certain ad- mirable qualities worthy of the unfeigned respect of the world. It is a realization of this that makes certain references to them as “those great mission- ary countries” sound a little provincial, as though being our parish abroad was their raison d’étre. Difference in gifts appeared explicitly in a con- versation two western professors of religion were having with a Buddhist monk. They had been questioning him long in their search for facts. Finally the monk asked them what work they had done in Buddhism. They said they had made a few translations. “No, I mean what work—what meditations have you done?” They had to ac- knowledge that they had done almost none. “Well, I advise you on getting up, before you get dressed, to take time to think back before you were born. Identify yourself with the Buddha which you are.” In our common search, surely the disciplined meditation of the East will helpfully supplement our scientific spirit. Surely India, whose rishis and sages have searched so faithfully for the ultimate gift of religion—the immediate knowl- edge of the imminent God—can contribute a 30 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS capacity for prolonged aspiration which we will value. If we look beneath the surface we shall catch from one of China’s sages the ideal of “production without possession, activity without self-assertion, development without domination.” We will hear a Buddhist singer chant: Unto us hath our father given these two spiritual gifts. Of these the first is the virtue whereby we attain unto his kingdom, and_ the second is the virtue whereby having so attained we return into this world for the salvation of men. . And this, the second virtue, is called the Gift of Returning. Amid a labyrinth of seemingly futile imaginings we will trace three noble truths for which India has stood down through the centuries: That man’s soul is akin to, indeed, is part of, God; that the world is, in the last analysis, spiritual, not material; and that the universe is just. To be valued contributions, such truths do not need to be absolutely new. To find old truths embodied in another society or in leaders or saints of another race often rekindles appreciation of elements of our own religious heritage which we had almost overlooked. Each striking embodi- ment of beauty, truth, or love comes from the one Source and is needed by us all. In all this interchange of cultural and site experience the Christian who knows and lives his faith has a contribution for non-Christian lands far greater than any gift he can bring back from them. From almost every region consciously or GIVING AND RECEIVING 31 unconsciously goes up the Old Testament cry, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!” The Christian has seen and experienced the pearl of great price. No missionary to other lands, no scholar of living faiths, has found a gem com- parable to this. It is because Jesus Christ is a uniquely precious and essential factor for the high- est, richest growth of every people that urgency surrounds the witness that Christians can give, in a way that urgency does not surround the sharing of any other gift of West or East. Each individual, each society, each nation, each race should have the opportunity of evolving in His presence. In communication with His creative Spirit individuals and whole peoples find a new future ever possible. We never were more sure than now that His is the greatest and the best influence that can be brought to bear upon the individual and corporate lives of men. Since this is so, mutuality’s inescapable demand on us is to make Him known. IV If there can be mutual profit from interchange between peoples of different faiths, still more specific should be the mutual gains when com- munities throughout the world that are Christian consciously stand shoulder to shoulder to form one body, With us to do and dare, With us the shame to share, With us the cross to bear For Christ our King. 32 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS We are already beginning with them a common aspiration for life—abundant, resourceful, pur- pose-forming, end-attaining, world-transforming life. The young and struggling churches of Africa, South America and the East stand today in special need of certain kinds of help which we can give them. But these same churches will be helping us if we are willing to be receptive. For one thing our Christian heritage of truth and life ideals is being challenged and re-studied from differing racial points of view so that, unless we are wedded to a static faith, the younger communions abroad should help us to pick out what is gold, tried and purified. We should be thankful that the fresher and less conditioned viewpoint of these young churches may help us to sweep away whatever of chaff has clung to our western church. We face certain problems of theological science: What is it that differentiates Christianity from all other religions; what gives it its convicting and converting power over the men whom it draws under its spell? Surely, those who have known vital religions in other forms and have seen Christianity meeting faiths of great antiquity will be able to throw light on such problems. It may easily be that the storm center of Christian con- troversy will pass from the West to Oriental sem- inaries where will be wrought out the adjustment of Christian thought to the ancient heritage of non-Christian cultures. In giving due weight to their sense of valucs in such controversies we ought to come to a better perspective in our own thought and see fundamentals in a truer light. We GIVING AND RECEIVING 33 can rejoice over the challenge they will in- creasingly bring to the Church of the West regard- ing aspects of thought and institutional life that from their angle of vision seem clearly divisive, unwholesome or purely’ sectional. Mother Churches may well listen, at least, to the fresh experience of daughters across the seas. Already we are getting rich foretastes of in- ternational Christian fellowship. For example, in 1923, at Oxford, men and women came together for the International Missionary Council from India and China, from Western and Northern Europe, and from North and South America. Here was a body, representing a wide range of nations and races, including many types of experience, and manifesting great variety in outlook; and yet knit together because of fellowship in a great objective. For ten days they met together in dis- cussion and prayer over questions so inescapable, so challenging, so vast, as to demand nothing less than corporate faith and action. During periods of discussion, devotion and social relaxation many felt exhilarated in experiencing the rich and varied contributions made by a group so constituted. Not less was this true in the World’s Christian Student Federation at its eleventh conference in Peking in 1922. Here were Koreans, Japanese, Czecho-Slovakians, Dutch, and Scandinavians, Italians, Greeks, Negroes, Indians, British, and Americans. Chinese had the largest hand in the organization. Indians came with a new vision of Christ gained from the vindication of spiritual force as seen in their national leader, Mahatma 34 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Gandhi. Their faith in God stood out, for when the conference was in the depths of argument and discussion—overburdened by their responsibility for reconstructing the world—it was the Indians who gently but firmly reminded the delegates that God’s hand was at the helm. Some Orientals thought that they might be able to take certain practical things better from the Chinese than from the Westerners; some Chinese thought that they might get the mystical elements in religion better from Christian India than from Britain or America. More than one delegate caught the con- sciousness that his nation had something that is characteristic, and is good, and which other peoples need. As it became plain that no widespread advance could be made until Christians in all lands joined in the common fight against wrong, all saw that the non-Christian elements in the West need the Christian East no less than the non- Christian elements in the East need the Christian West. Only together will the Kingdom of God be built. In the great codperative struggle for a better world, that will characterize the Christian fellow- ship of the future, we may find the various national Churches memorializing one another on specific points where action is deemed advisable. For example, when the petitions requesting the American and the British authorities to prevent foreign liquor interests from pressing their activi- ties on China were being circulated, it was sug- gested that it would be a splendid thing if the Chinese Church could appeal direct to the Church GIVING AND RECEIVING 30 in America in order that its constituency might bring pressure to bear on the authorities in this matter of combating liquor and vice in China. At the instance of a group of Chinese Christians, the National Christian Council of China wrote to the Federal Council of Churches in the United States concerning the playing of the Chinese game of mah jong in the West. ‘They said that the introduction of this game into the social life of England and America was having a weakening effect upon the moral stamina of Chinese Christians, since mah jong and gambling are always associated in China. Still another example is found in the action of the executive committee of the National Christian Council of Japan in connection with the United States Immigration Act of 1924. Feeling that in- ternational amenities had not been duly con- sidered, that adequate opportunity for united conference had been denied, and that the act as passed was not in accord with the spirit of Chris- tianity, this Council expressed to the Federal Council of Churches in America its desire “to cooperate with the Christians in the United States with a view to solving satisfactorily this difficult racial question in the spirit essential to Christian- ity.” Evidently we are just at the beginning of a period of such interchange of judgments on an international scale. We see the possibility of mutual contribution in still another form, in the visit to England of Theophilus Subrahmanyam. ‘The story of his leaving family and college to find God strangely 36 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS moved many hearts. “You can never understand how much my soul thirsted for God, in those days,” he told them. So, after the custom of his people, he left all and journeyed to the far-distant hills, lived as a hermit, meditated, fasted, journeyed to Benares and then to the Himalayas, in the hope of finding God. At last he found Him; not in the faith of his fathers, but unexpectedly, in Christ Jesus. Following Christ cost him dear. It meant yet another act of renunciation and self-sacrifice —hbreaking caste, counting ioss the things that aforetime had been gain to him, breaking away from his family and his beloved mother. Only those who know India can understand what all this means to a Brahman. It involves bitter re- proaches and hatred, and even scrious personal violence. As the people of England listened to Subrahmanyam’s story, Christ's words about taking up the Cross came to them with new mean- ing. Subrahmanyam’s visit became a blessing to thousands. This is but a single instance. Those, however, who care to listen may hear story after story of Christians in other lands, triumphing gloriously over depressing circumstances and wrong conditions, over sin and opposition, over pessimism and despair. Seeing them, will we not be spurred on to catch their secret—the secret of Christ within as the power for daily life? When the missionary enterprise has evolved into something different from just what we now understand it to be, and when Japan and China and all other lands are predominantly Christian,. there will undoubtedly be an interchange of great GIVING AND RECEIVING 37 spiritual messengers. Already Japan has given for a winter to India her Dr. Harada and Dr. Motoda for a notable series of addresses. Already China has given up one of its leaders, to become the first Oriental secretary of the Worlds Chris- tian Student Federation, who is able to say things to eastern countries which no western leader could fitly voice, and who, with his fluent English, gracious manner, and keen religious life, shares with the West those riches of God in Christ Jesus which have been revealed to the men and women of the East. Already many Christians of the West are prepared to welcome a time of receiving as well as of giving. On the other hand, just as we call a Jowett or a Kelman to America, so in the future Japan may invite some _ outstanding American to one of her pulpits, not as a mission- ary but as a preacher. One of the ablest and most outspoken Christian Indians* says that the time will never come when India can do without the western Christian. He has a personality, as has his wife, and their Christian home has an influence which India cannot spare. The mutual help and exchange already begun is sure to grow. Each land may produce its Paul, its Origen, its Augustine, who will give to his own people a con- vincing apologetic of the Gospel, and to the Church universal another great chapter of Christian in- terpretation. Just as now many of our seminaries rejoice in the national as well as the personal con- tribution made by British scholars on their staffs, * Report of the Deputation io India, London Missionary Society, 1922-3, p. 166. 38 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS so in the future seminaries may well have on their faculties an Indian or a Japanese—if we judge our students need to know other cultures and the way Christianity is interpreted by their best spirits. Western universities and theological schools will have courses on the history of Christianity in other lands, with special emphasis upon the contribution each has made to the fuller understanding of Christianity. Pulpits and seminaries in each land will increasingly draw upon an _ international supply. We do not see, nor wish to see, a time, however far through the distant future, when there will not be an international fellowship of interchange. Any group anywhere which feels it has discovered a new solution, a fresh interpretation, a satisfying way of life which others do not have, should send forth witnesses. Every one recognizes that new devices, inventions and discoveries may be ad- vertised on a world scale, and agents are “sent forth’—that is, commercial missionaries are sent forth to introduce them. .Surely a sharing of one’s best on the higher cultural and spiritual levels without the acquisitive motive is not less proper. There need be nothing that is patronizing in send- ing nor humiliating in receiving on an international scale any more than on a personal scale at Christmas. It is presence of mutuality that re- moves the sting. In this sense of international exchange let us hope there will never be an end to “missions.” The difference will be that China and Africa will be sending and calling as well as merely receiving; and we of the West will be GIVING AND RECEIVING 39 calling and receiving as well as merely sending. It will be a triple activity. The larger and older churches of the West would be shirking their duty if they did not contribute largely to the cost of the cultural and spiritual interchange anticipated here. For many decades the peoples of the Orient and of Africa may not be able to finance their spiritual representatives to us. Just this situation exists between England and America today in connection with the inter- change of pastors which is being encouraged. American preachers on larger salaries can live in comfort in England; but English clergy cannot afford to accept exchange pulpits and meet higher costs in America. Just as America can without condescension overcome this financial inequality, so fer years the West will have to take a large share in the financing of the world’s spiritual interchange. As a matter of fact, it is very hard to rise above the isolations caused by race and oceans, and feel that we are parts of one world family. Almost inevitably, in our thinking about the missionary enterprise, we have the consciousness of doing for another—a foreign—people. For a time in this enterprise we take up China’s or Africa’s load— but the task really belongs to them, we say. We set up an artificial limit—the establishment of a self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating Church—beyond which we do not think of our- selves as giving. The fecling of “otherness” is prominent in all this work. We look forward to the “euthanasia of the mission” with a sense of 40 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS relief, for, with the start we shall have given them, mission lands can then shift for themselves. But is not all this way of thinking a sign that we are still immature in world citizenship? Does it not mean that oceans and race still loom so large as to keep us from feeling the larger unity? Our relation through Christ to all mankind has not become the dominating relationship. We do not talk that way about a portion of our own country. We do not set a Kmit of time beyond which money shall not go from parts wealthier to the colleges and institutions of poorer sections. When at last we humans come to feel that we form one world family, will we not whole-heartedly adopt the principle that wherever need is, there resources in life and money should be released? For generations to come the white races may have economic power. Dare they hold their resources within the boundaries of their own national lives, as though our “we feeling” had not begun—falter- ingly, we acknowledge—to include all on our earth? The spirit of mutuality in a rapidly shrink- ing world sees no time when we can withdraw to enjoy by ourselves our material surplus. As long as is necessary we must cooperate in bringing the spirit and principles of Christ to bear upon all human life. Hence, until needs cease and as long as in- dividuals and peoples develop characteristic gifts, the spirit of missions will have a place. Hence on the economic side also, as long as needs exist, missions will not cease. GIVING AND RECEIVING Al Vv The adoption of this ideal of mutuality is affect- ing mission practice. Increasingly, missionaries are alert to see what they can bring back as well as what they can take. Both overseas and on furlough many a missionary thinks of his task as being that of an interpreter. In the past he has been an interpreter of the West; more and more he is becoming an interpreter to the West. Alert students in our colleges are asking missionaries what the distinctive contributions of Occident to Orient are, and what, on the other hand, are the distinctive contributions of East to West. They are expecting their representatives abroad to make contacts with the spiritually minded of other faiths. There is always the danger that zealous advocates may be so intent on molding another’s life and thought that they will be oblivious to ideas and institutions differing from their own. But in these days one can find many an earnest propagandist of Christianity who shows that he has been willing to learn. No one who has not made a start in cultural appreciation should think of going to the more advanced parts of the Orient. In particular, a candidate is expected to make a beginning in a special study of the contribution to culture and progress which his adopted country has made. Without losing his own peculiar cultural or national heritage while abroad, he looks forward to identifying. himself completely with another -people—than which there are few tasks more dif- 42 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS ficult, or more joyful. He is told that the only . gift he has to give or that they eventually are prepared to accept is that of reciprocal friend- ship on equal terms. He gladly recognizes, as one element in Christ-likeness, that spirit which sees the gifts and graces of others and is ready to learn from them. In like*manner forward-looking mis- sionary training centers more and more conceive their task, not simply as sending prepared men forth, but as mediating the world’s best to folks at home. What, then, from the standpoint of this chapter is the vision of the future, for the realization of which today’s youth are asked to give them- selves? We see peoples bringing their unique contribution to the common store. They are earnestly desiring the fuller understanding of the purpose and character of God that will come when each race has brought to the common treasury its interpretation as colored by its peculiar heritage and temperament. Into the city of God has come “the honor and the glory of the nations.” There is a full and generous appreciation on the part of each of what the others have apprehended of truth. Among them is found a positive and con- structive effort to share the springs of spiritual power. All are characterized by mutuality—that attitude of mind in which passionate affection for, and devotion to, the values associated with one’s own group are combined with a sympathetic re- ceptivity to values in each other group. Each is willing to say (adapting an old proverb) that every nation is our master in something. In this vision GIVING AND RECEIVING 43 the world has become a family, marked by mutual helpfulness and service in which differences make possible mutual enrichment—a_ fellowship in which not only the estranging differences of race are completely transcended, but in which the supplementing and fertilizing contributions of each are aggressively sought. Nay more—when western ideas threaten to overwhelm these con- tributions, the spirit of mutuality in the Christian movement will set itself with all firmness against such destruction. It seeks to help another people to achieve the full development of their worthful ideas and values. Each people, in fact, will have a fourfold struggle in love. First a discriminating effort to see and to appreciate the admirable qualities that should endure in other peoples (such as_ the Chinese spirit of tolerance, or their recognition of a moral order pervading the universe; the Japanese Buddhist’s genius for contemplation; or the permeation of life with the God-consciousness that marks India’s age-old quest for the divine). Second, a discriminating effort to detect for each other land those modes of thought and those elements in social and national life which have become hindrances io its progress and which therefore it should modify (such as the tendency to look only backward in reverence for the dead and not forward, also, in the interests of the living and yet unborn; the restriction of social interest and concern to the smaller units of family and clan; or the prevalence among a people of wide- 44 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS spread superstition). Third, an effort to detect any elements in one’s own culture that are worthy ' of transplanting (such as, for the West, the scientific spirit and method, the dynamic and technique of social betterment; the physical and moral values of play and wholesome recreation; the application of Christian principles to industrial and commercial life, and all the priceless heritages in life and influence that derive from Jesus Christ). Lastly, an unrelenting effort to detect those elements in one’s civiliza- tion that would harm another people (such as white racial arrogance; the militaristic spirit; sectarian ecclesiasticism; immodesty in dress; ex- travagance and luxury; or an industrial system based on ruthless competition). Discrimination of this fourfold character is needed as we enter the deeper fellowship of peoples. This is not a new ideal, for the conception of mutuality in giving and receiving finds its classic embodiment in I Corinthians, 12, where Paul uses the analogy of the human body which is one even though it has many members, and where all the members of the body form a single organism in spite of their number. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; it is not therefore not of the body. And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, [am not of the body; it is not therefore not of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing where were the smelling? But now hath God set the GIVING AND RECEIVING 45 members each one of them in the body, even as it pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now they are many members, but one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee: or again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much rather, those members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary: and those parts of the body, which we think to be less honor- able, upon these we bestow more abundant honor; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness; ... And whether one member suf- fereth, all the members suffer with it; or one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. This spiritual world fellowship—the Church that is to be—is an organism whose health and strength depend upon the drawing of vitality from the life of all the rest by each member, and whose weaker and less mature parts not only share the gains of the more virile and mature, but are grate- fully credited with functions without which the whole would be the poorer. In such a fellowship there is a plurality of cultures each contributing its distinctive flavor but a unity of family feeling through mutual appreciation and burden bearing. The world sorely needs to realize this organic conception of a world society, where independence gives way to interdependence, and where com- petition is superseded by cooperation. Fully to realize this co-relationship as members one of an- other constitutes a great part of growth in spirituality. Are there not possibilities of progressive mutual eran UY, WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS growth in this vision that can draw forth our utmost devotion? And is not the creation of this world-wide comradeship a worthy objective for every intelligent and religious being? CHAPTER II THE WEST AS PART OF THE NON-CHRISTIAN WORLD I Ir has long been the custom, when making mis- sionary maps, to paint the sending countries white and the receiving countries black. In recent years, however, we have been startled into the realization that the West is part of the non-Christian world, and that there is no sharp division into lands that are white and those that are black—unless, indeed, the West is of a deeper black because it has had access to Christ so long. We have to acknowledge that our western valu- ations are largely un-Christian. In current thought success is measured in terms of money, property, and material power. The commercial motive dominates the values in recreation and play, tend- ing to lower them to the level of passion and satiation of the senses. Scientific invention and discoveries are often used as a means of selfish gain. The bitterness of class struggles proves that the Spirit has not been permitted to yield the fruits of love, joy, peace. The glaring contrasts of luxury and squalor are quite incompatible with the teachings and spirit of the Carpenter of Nazareth. Western Christendom shows itself 47 48 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS most apostate in the sphere of international re- lations, where governments are managed to but- ~ tress selfish national privilege and the material power of a special few. After fifteen hundred years or so of Christianity one would have supposed that the nations of the West would at least be able to live in decent friendliness with one another. But we find even yet it is only a daring minority among Christians who are willing to out- law war as a thoroughly repudiated method of settling disputes between nations. The West must take its place as part of the non-Christian world even on the basis of ignorance of Christianity. The great majority of our popula- tion do not understand our faith. In Britain the Army and Religion Inquiry showed how little grasp of formal Christian teaching great masses of Great Britain’s population have. Similar re- sults came from a study of American troops. This condition is not confined to any one class. The house master of an English public school recently stated that a great number of boys came to the school even from so-called Christian homes with little or no knowledge of the Bible or of the Christian religion. The head of one of our fore- most missionary training centers laments the “rawness” with which candidates come up for preparation. In a national conference of church leaders in missions the statement went un- challenged that not 20 per cent of church members are intelligently interested in the world-wide King- dom, and a Bishop seriously suggested that not THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 49 even one member in five of the Church is a con- verted person. We find an experienced missionary lecturer ac- knowledging to his Indian audience that “except in individual lives here and there, the meaning of the incarnation of Christ has hardly been com- prehended in the West, much less lived up to.” The head of one of the great missions in India recently gave it as his judgment that America needs the gospel of Christ as much as does India; that our ideals are as much athwart the mind of Christ as are those of the simple villagers of Hindustan. Over and over again, when meeting the informed criticisms of non-Christian students abroad, I have had to acknowledge that America is not yet Christian; it is only trying to become Christian. Missionaries from the great port cities and from all parts of Africa say that it is just where there has been most contact with the West that success is least. The most striking results have come where work has been carried on apart from European and American traders and settlers. Such disconnected, yet arresting, judgments reveal how far we have yet to go before we are justified in coloring our western countries any- thing but a dark gray, and they help us to see the admonition in G. K. Chesterton’s lines: Lord, we that snatch the swords of flame: Lord, we that cry about thy car, We, too, are weak with pride and shame, We, too, are as our foeman are. o0 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Yea, we are mad as they are mad: Yea, we are blind as they are blind: Yea, we are very sick and sad Who bring good news to all mankind. Lord, when we cry Thee far and near And thunder through all lands unknown The gospel into every ear, Lord, let us not forget our own. IE A new factor in the situation is that, as a result of the great modern student migrations, intelligent representatives of other peoples are beholding at first hand our shame. The churches of the United States and Canada altogether send only about 17,000 representatives abroad. However, 7,494 students from other nations voluntarily come to us. China alone is sending 1,491 students to us. Japan sends 685; the Philippines, 649; Mexico, 232; India, 218. Authoritative investigations’ have shown that our people are falling far below their duty and privilege with reference to these guests who have taken the initiative in coming to us. Much adverse discrimination is endured by these students, not only in ordinary social relations, but in obtaining rooms, board. and public service. There is a vast amount of loneliness among them. Most of them do not have adequate contact with good friends and good homes. Too often they batile alone with the perils of social and spiritual solitude. From the stand- *By the Commission on Foreign Students in America, 1923-4. ae, THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 51 point of foreign missions the significant fact is that the presence, of these students among us results in a net loss to the Christian movement. We are told? that those who lose their effective Christian faith are in excess of converts to Chris- tianity. The average student is farther from the conscious acceptance and practice of the principles of Jesus when he leaves our shores than when he arrived. Most students coming from abroad do not relate themselves to Christian work in any active manner after their return; and not infre- quently this is true of those who came to America to prepare for Christian callings. Foreign students in our midst do not hesitate to jar us out of self- complacency by pointing cut our pride of race and national arrogance; our passion for money, for power, for pleasure; our materialism; our consciousness of color. No intelligent Oricntal will refuse to acknowledge that there are vices in his part of the world; but he will insist that they can generally be matched by those of the Occident in what is often a more strident and aggressive form. Many of them come to the West predisposed to find a Christian civilization here. They make no secret of their disappointment. Listen to these recent comments by forcign students in America. One who had been here seven months remarked: “Christianity no doubt is good, but it is not easy to find a Christian. Of what use is it to boast of one’s religion if religious ideals are not embodied in the lives of the majority _* By the Committee on Friendly Relations among For- eign Students. 52 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS of its followers?” Another who had been in a state college for fifteen months said: “I know only two or three men here whom I would call Chris- tians.” A Chinese student summed up our land as follows: “A Christian country full of pagans— out-and-out heathen.” A Hindu, three years resi- dent in America, said that “here and there is an occasional flicker of the true Christian spirit, but America’s young people are mostly un-Christian.” “It is a grave mistake,” rather bluntly warned another, “to disguise from yourselves the fact that the educated class of India sees that Christianity is made to cover a multitude of sins. We think that Christianity of to-day has only produced con- querors and enslavers of mankind. Unless the spirit of Christendom shall change from greed to service, unless the hearts and hands of Christian empires are clean, mission work of any kind is going to be a philanthropy wasted, because forced on a resentful people.” “Asia and Africa have found,” says another, “that you have used the Bible as it suited your convenience.” Still another foreigner pierces right home when he says: “If you wre at all like the Sermon on the Mount, or even like the prophetic ideals of Israel, Asia would fall down before your God.” A student from China urges that American Christians should make their country more Christian in its racial and industrial life, so that it shall be impossible for the fourteen hundred Chinese students who are studying in America every year to avoid catching the spirit of Jesus Christ. If such a transformation could take place, THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 53 so that there could be a stream of Christian stu- dents going back to China, what an effective con- tribution it would be! A keen Liberian graduate from one of our Universities had inquired why so few of American students are Christians. “Not Christian? What do you mean?” he was asked. “Over 85 per cent of the students of this college are members of Christian churches.” “But I mean real Christians. After four years among them—-and they are the finest fellows ever—I find so many who do not wholly earn their credits; so many who have the wrong attitude toward girls, so many who have no spirit of love or of service in their hearts, that I am forced to believe that there are not many actual Christians.” “How many would you say?” “That's difficult, of course; but I should say not much over 5 per cent are truly Christians!” Five per cent! And 85 per cent church members! In check- ing up with other students and with members of the faculty it was found that some accepted the figure given. None placed it over 12 per cent. Word of these conditions is not confined to America; Bishop Tucker says that Japanese say to him over and over again: | We read in our newspapers that in your colleges and universities in America, more than 50 per cent. of your professors are not Christian. We read the reports which come to us with regard to your Christian life, and, somehow, they do not convince us that Christianity is the dominating moral force in the lives of the people who call themselves Christians. o4. WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS In his book the “Scourge of Christianity,” Paul Richards tells how the West practices Christianity - in Asia. His words have been eagerly heard and quoted by Asiatics, who find in the theme the very essence of their own feeling for the mockery of white religions. Some passages, said to be most quoted in Indian papers, seem to be saying to us “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you”: Christians worship one son of Asia ...ata great cost to the others. Europe finds it natural to take one man of Asia as Master, and all his brothers as slaves. Christians think that since one Asiatic alone is the Son of God, the rest can fairly be treated as sons of the Devil. The Christianity of Christ died when Asia ceased to teach it. When Christ comes again He will have to give up being an Asiatic and a carpenter if He wishes to be admitted into the Christian countries of America and Australia. The Christ, if He comes, will not be of the white race; the colored peoples could not put their faith in Him. If Christ has not changed His ideas, Christians will have, when He returns, te change their habits. The reactions of foreign students in our midst, as indicated in this section, constitute a severe condemnation of Christianity in America, but they also show that we have failed to lay hold of a fresh and new way of touching other lands. The standardized Christian approach has been through our missionary societies. Special organizations, such as the Committee on Friendly Relations with THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 55 Foreign Students, the International House, and various Cosmopolitan clubs, have nobly tried to meet this problem. But in general we have had too much inertia and too little imagination to per- mit us to adjust ourselves quickly to this new opportunity in our own land of bringing the impact of Christian teaching and life to bear upon this great body of potential leaders. One big element in the reconstruction of our thought with reference to missions will be to catch the right perspective with reference to this opportunity. Ii Our own students are beginning to realize the implications of this inclusion of the West in the non-Christian world. Even candidates for foreign service ask whether it is not pharisaic for so-called Christian nations to send forth missionaries. They are confused about the sanctions under which we carry on missions, in view of the failures of western civilization. Such questions as the following are handed in: Does a church, that is willing to tolerate a state of things in which it can be authoritatively stated that 10 per cent of the workers of the United States have been out of work all the time, possess the moral passion that can evangelize the world? How can we justify ourselves in bringing Christ to the needy of the foreign field and then stand around with “hands down” when western in- dustries come along and upset all Christ’s principles in their business relations with these peoples? 36 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS © Very likely most of the money for missions comes from those who are doing their utmost to improve industrial conditions, but a young socially-minded missionary on furlough is sure to be restless if he finds out from social workers that the person who gave $800 toward his traveling expenses is tolerating unwholesome working conditions in connection with his factory. There was a time when at missionary confer- ences the contrast of the bright side of Christianity with the seamy side of the non-Christian religions would have gone unchallenged. “In Darkest Africa” was a book title typical of the nineteenth century. It is significant, however, that at the last Quadrennial Student Volunteer Convention there was more outspoken criticism of western civiliza- tion and its economic and political shortcomings than of Africa and the Orient. Implicit or explicit in almost every utterance was the realization that the world is a unity in respect to the need for spiritual uplift, moral guidance, and Christian fellowship. There, at least, Asiatic students could mingle with Americans and feel that no holier- than-thou attitude was present, for the heathen- dom of America and Europe was more emphasized than that of Asia and Africa. Unquestionably, there are Christian elements in western civilization. Workmen’s compensa- tion laws, safety zones, a long list of social solu- tions betoken an increasingly Christian valuation placed on human life. Manifold public and private philanthropic institutions have embodied some- thing of the spirit of Christian service. Many a THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 57 social and political struggle shows that some at least acknowledge the supremacy of moral values. We acknowledge that “non-Christian” is a pretty severe adjective, and we do not in this chapter wish to encourage any morbid self-condemnation belittling either the sincerity or the solid achieve- ments of Christian initiative in the West. We are simply pointing out that these unquestionably Christian elements are inextricably entangled with manifold pagan elements. Indelibly has this sad fact been printed on the minds of the younger generation—those who have faced the fateful, tragic years since 1914 and even 1919. Their con- ception, also, of what it means to be a Christian is being vastly deepened and enriched so that in comparison with the ideal they feel one with an un-Christian world. They can but strike their breasts and acknowledge that we too are sinful men. Hence in the minds of many, “the evangelization of the world” no longer has exclusive reference to other peoples. They sadly acknowledge that the West is only relatively Christian inasmuch as large areas of its life and of its international rela- tions are not yet fundamentally affected by the principles of Christ. All classification that self- complacently puts the anti-Christian entirely out- side so-called Christendom must be given up. IV Several results follow at once from the realiza- tion that the West is part of the non-Christian world. It has made necessary a sharp distinction 58 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS between western civilization and Christianity. There have been missionaries who have en- ‘couraged the spread of western imperialism on the ground that the control of non-Christian lands by so-called Christian governments would facili- tate the introduction of the West’s supposedly superior moral and spiritual standards. It is ac- knowledged that both before and since the war missions have been used to advance commercial and political interests* In the past hosts of westerners have assumed that their own civiliza- tion was good, and have taken it for granted that it should be passed on to others. Many have found it as natural to introduce democracy and rocking chairs, the American type of college and sewing machines, collars, and railways, as to lead people to be friends with Jesus Christ. Thus in the minds of many there has been a loose identi- fication of Christianity and the civilization of so- called Christendom. Christianity was presented as the source and basis of Occidental civilization, so that whenever the tide of occidentalization swept over a country (as over Japan in the eighties, or over China and Korea during the second decade of this century) the spread of Christianity went forward with leaps and bounds. This was an effective method of propaganda among uncritical peoples as long as they were welcoming things western, but a boomerang as soon as the prestige of western civilization has passed away. As long as Christianity is confused with western civiliza- tion and Americanism, enthusiastic nationals will * International Review of Missions, vol. 11, p. 149. THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 59 inevitably fear missions, for the combination does imperil much that they prize in their civiliza- tions. One of India’s greatest statesmen once said, “Your Jesus is hopelessly handicapped by His connection with the West.” Every modern missionary, therefore, is doing his best to let Christianity stand out by itself with- out the immense handicap of association with western civilization. To any one who urges that a case can be made out with certainty for the moral and spiritual superiority of western life, we would say, let us not set up East against West, let us frankly acknowledge our failure to put in practice the principles of Jesus so that we cannot yet be called a Christian nation. Rather let us emphasize the truth that wherever (in China, in India, or in the West) Christ’s way has been tried transformations in human nature and in the structure of society have followed which make it stand out as the hope of the human race. It is because we profoundly believe this truth and not because of the superiority of western civilization that missions command our loyalty. In fact a still more incisive distinction has to be made, and that is between Christ and Christianity. The term Christian has been associated with so much that repels the Near East, Africa, and the Orient, that in many places the influence of Jesus seems handicapped by being linked up with “Christianity.” In the bitterest of non-Christian centers, if you say your object in being there is to help men live like Jesus did, they will heartily approve. If you say you are there as part of an 60 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS effort “to make the world Christian,” they will resent it to the core. “Christian” to the Muham- -madans brings up the Crusades; to the Jews, bitter persecutions; to the Chinese, opium, western aggression, and the attempted partitioning of their country. To many an Indian “making the world Christian” is equivalent to British imperial- ism. To most Hindus every white man is a Chris- tian—the moral element is not prominent. In the minds of many non-Christians to Christianize a land is more to Anglo-Saxonize or Americanize it than to make the way of Jesus prevalent there. In many places it would not be wise to advocate “the Christian way of life,” for this brings up to mind the imperfect practice of the West rather than the following of Christ himself. Christianity, as they see the system, is not combating capitalism and militarism. The financial support of Christian organizations and of many missionaries is closely connected with an exploitive system and tolera- tion of the spirit of western militant nationalism. In many areas the coming of Christianity has been mixed up in their minds with the coming of the trader and encroachments of an alien government. — Individual missionaries have at times denounced some particular act, but few missionary societies have defined their position with reference to ex- ploitive capitalistic industry and imperialistic aggressive governments. The usual policy is one of benevolent neutrality. A secretary of the World’s Student Christian Federation found the following concepts associated with Christianity in the minds of non-Christian THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 61 students: being against the Jews; the system by which the rich oppress the poor; going to church on Sunday and doing what one pleases for the rest of the week; a fabric of worn-out dogmas which have nothing to do with daily life. Jesus unquestionably is associated with the Sermon on the Mount, but Christianity as practiced does not exemplify to the non-Christian such injunctions as: Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth; a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; therefore I say unto you take no thought for your life what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body; resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on one cheek, turn to him the other; and if thy eye offend thee pluck it out. In fact, we have to face the fact that our Chris- tianity is not Christian. Perhaps, if Jesus were here, he would hesitate to have His name used in connection with some of the things now called “Christian.” More and more, effective missionaries have to discriminate between the principles and life of Jesus Christ, and the trappings and con- notations of western Christianity; have to sub- stitute the religion of Jesus for Christianity, and call men to join Christ if they cannot join the Church. Just at the time when Christianity is at a very low ebb in the estimate of non-Christians, how- ever, there is a marked drawing to the person of Christ. People are beginning to see that they can have one without the other. There are today many thousands of people in the Orient who are capti- 62 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS vated with the ethics, ideal, and personality of Jesus and who are trying to follow Him, but who ‘do not want to be labeled as “Christians” or to identify themselves with western organizations. Experienced observers tell us that it is impossible to gauge India’s attitude to Christ by its attitude to the Church. Many a heart is converted to Christ without being converted to Christianity. Hundreds in India are drawn to Jesus as a great teacher and as an example of self-less living. They will quote His words and cite His example. Ten men derive inspiration from His life and message for one who joins the Christian Church. The recent experience of a noted evangelist in India is significant. In city after city he has been able to draw large audiences for six nights in succession on the single topic “Christ.” A leading Hindu daily published outlines of the lectures; another orthodox paper published the lecture, “Jesus Christ and the Problems of the Day,” in full. Students of a Hindu college put off a cricket match to hear a lecture on Christ. In summing up, one presiding officer said: “I suppose the epitome of what the speaker has said is this: That the solutions of the problems of the day de- pend upon the application of the spirit and the thought of Jesus to these problems. I am not a Christian, and you may be surprised to hear me say that I entirely agree with these conclusions.” A Chief Judge in one of the native states said to the audience over which he was presiding, “If to be like Jesus Christ is what it means to be a Christian, I hope we will all be Christians in our THE WEST AS PART OF THE WORLD 63 lives.” A Hindu professor in one of India’s strong- est religious centers said to the audience of students: “Young men, no other such personality as Jesus Christ has ever appeared in the world. We can begin this spring festival in no better way than in hearing more about Him.” Mahatma Gandhi had two pictures on his walls in South Africa: one of Christ washing the dis- ciples’ feet; the other, the crucifixion—service and sacrifice. He openly says that he caught his emphasis from the Sermon on the Mount. He declares that the principles of Jesus should be regulative, not only for the individual, but for nations. One of the most influential and re- spected missionaries in India recently said: “Gandhi has done more to hold up Christ than all the missionaries of the past hundred years.” And yet there is no indication that Gandhi expects to accept Christianity in any western sense of the term. One of the keenest minds in China, a professor in Peking University, recently wrote an article mercilessly attacking the Christian religion. The Bible was torn apart, missionaries were grilled, rice Christians were berated, and Christianity’s internal dissensions scorned. But the striking fact is that when he came to consider the character of Christ himself he had nothing but good to say. “The spirit of Jesus must get into the blood of every one of the four hundred million people of China before we can hope to come out into light, out of death into life, out of the pit in which we now are.” 64 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS It is because of the necessity abroad of drawing this distinction between Christianity, as popularly ‘understood, and Christ that the Barrows Lecturer to India and the Far East in 1924, after many at- tempted subjects, settled on the one word “Jesus” as giving him the best approach for Christianity unencumbered with misconceptions. Unquestion- ably the personality of Jesus is the central and characteristic possession of Christianity in distinc- tion from the institutions, doctrines, and practices which have taken shape about Him. May we present Him, without hindering requirements, and urge men to follow where He leads? In the third place, we recognize that conditions in the West demand an indubitable and pervasive humility on the part of Christians, and that a deep sense of national and racial repentance should accompany any further missionary work that we do. We have been too self-righteous. We have hardly realized how deficient our own civilization has been. But we now humbly recognize that our democracy has not gone very far, our political rectitude has not risen very high, and that even the Church has failed to manifest the spirit and the power of Christ. The war and social mal- adjustments have revealed appalling depths of selfishness and corruption in so-called Christian countries. It behooves us to walk humbly with our God and our brother peoples. Since our own nation is not truly Christian, let us approach other peoples in no condescending attitude, but in the spirit of sincere penitence. Jesus is still say- ing, “Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” CHAPTER IV FRUIT—THE MOST EFFECTIVE APOLOGETIC I THERE was a time when the missionary and his message were their own main apologetic. World communications were so ill-developed when Prot- estant missions began that the missionary stood before his hearers almost detached from his civi- lization. “It was as though, in some great dark- ened theater, a clear, white back-drop had been let down, a spotlight focused upon it, and, into the center of that circle of light, there had stepped the figure of a single man. There was nothing behind him, nothing beside him, by which to scale him up or down.” The message had a chance to make its own appeal. It was backed up by author- ity, and the missionary’s own life of peace and goodwill was an exhibit of the new religion’s power. But in a startlingly rapid way that whole back- ground has been filled in by commercial dealings and national aggression, by travelers and wireless, by movies and the press, and by the whole disin- tegrating and corrupting influence of western civilization. From the standpoint of apologetics, the significant thing today is that the missionary | 65 66 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS is almost lost against this background. Today other voices than that of the missionary inevitably interpret what the general movement known as Christianity means in practice. For example, in- telligent Orientals now know that the business men who go to their lands in large numbers represent the mass of the so-called Christian peoples much more truly than do the missionaries. They are the normal fruit of our Christian civilization. If in two thousand years Christianity has done so little to clean up the West, they feel it is of little use to investigate its claims. Corruption in Wash- ington, New York, or Philadelphia weakens the appeal in China to give up “squeeze.” When fac- tories in a Christian land are not run right, the argument for the adoption of Christian principles in Tokyo and Shanghai thereby loses force. Ori- entals see that western material civilization is beginning to dominate their lands; they would like to see Christianity able to dominate western ma- terial civilization. From this standpoint the con- version of ourselves to Christianity would be the greatest service we could render to the East. Similarly, the inability of Christians to dominate the policy of their nations toward the Orient and the un-Christian acts of western peoples in their treatment of Orientals are raising serious ques- tions among the peoples of the Orient as to the potency or meaning of Christianity. After America’s unfortunate action in regard to Ori- ental immigration, one of the foremost literary men of Japan addressed a public letter to the mis- sionaries, asking: “Why do you stay here when THE MOST EFFECTIVE APOLOGETIC 67 your home gardens are rank with weeds?” The prestige which Christianity for a time enjoyed from its association with the glamour of western civilization is shattered, for that civilization is no longer an effective argument for the excellence of Christianity. In a small world it is soberingly true that By all ye will or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Will judge your God and you. I In other words, the most effective popular apolo- getic on the mission field has passed from origins to consequences, from roots to fruits. Mere proc- lamation is not enough. More and more the people of the world are applying Christ’s test to Chris- tianity—“By their fruits ye shall know them.” It is to this test of life that Christianity is increasingly being brought. In so far as we regard the function of Christianity to be the transformation of life upon the earth into a kingdom of righteousness and not merely a means for saving a small rem- nant of humanity into a state of future bliss, people | will view Christianity objectively and subject it to a pragmatic test. If it helps men to a richer and a fuller life it will be accepted; in so far as it is narrow and impoverishing it will be condemned. Not only the ethnic faiths, but Christianity itself, must stand or fall by their power to enlarge and enrich life. It is because all organized religions 68 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS are being brought to this bar of judgment that men are saying that that religion will conquer the ‘world which deserves to conquer. In particular, the people of India, China, and Japan are not going to accept the Bible because of some statement as to its inspired origin. They will take over this- book as their own when they see that it can meet the modern problems of their lands. Similarly, Jesus Christ is not going to be accepted by the Orient because of positions taken with reference to His preéxistence, or His birth. Jesus Christ will become their Master when India and China and Japan see that He can help with their personal and national problems. More and more on the mission field the power of Christian- ity is to be proved by asking, not whether it can be authoritatively established, but what it accom- plishes in the lives of men. A direct and funda- mental proof will be the worth and practicability of its ethical principle of mutual love and sympa- thy and service. Hl This shift in the apologetic for Christianity from origins and authority to the actual working of the religion puts a greatly enhanced obligation on western Chrislians to live out—to incarnate—the Gospel. It is obvious, also, that nations as well as Churches have missionary responsibilities. A great corps of men and women are abroad endeav- oring to convert people—to convert them, however, to ways we profess, rather than to ways in which we actually walk. Here is one of the greatest THE MOST EFFECTIVE APOLOGETIC 69 weaknesses in the Christian enterprise today. Each person who labors to bring our home practice up to our theory is tremendously undergirding the Christian enterprise abroad. If forward-looking people in the Orient do not see the Bible and Jesus Christ enabling us to solve the problems which face us in the West, they are not hkely to try Chris- tianity for their own problems. Intelligent non- Christians are usually ready to admit the high ethical level of the Christian position, but when they see the so-called Christian West flout these principles in practice, they naturally hesitate to change. One is tempted to say that they know too much about western life and the extent to which its ideals and practices fail to embody the spirit of Christ. They have religions of their own whose ideals surpass practice. Any effective apologetic for Christianity must include a demonstration of dynamic among those who profess it. In a most real way this links up every Christian at home with the success of the Christian adven- ture overseas. One no longer has to live abroad in order to make his life tell in other lands. As soon as the peoples of the earth see the power and spirit of the living Christ enabling us of the West successfully to meet political injustice, economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and material standards of success they will begin seriously to consider Christianity for their own lives. One of the greatest contributions that could be made to the cause of missions would be the apologetic value arising from a thorough reconstruction of our social order after the mind of Christ. To this 70 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS vital and direct proof of the value of Christianity each individual of the West is making his con- - tribution for or against. Thus far we have called ourselves Christian nations, and yet by our failure to let Christ dem- onstrate His saving power in us, we have failed to draw men to Him. By an utterly unworthy representation of Him in the West, we have almost hidden His true face. The reduced world in which we live with numberless contacts between the ends of the earth compels us to face more penetrat- ingly now than ever before the sobering fact that the efficacy of the Christian witness abroad is con- ditioned by the degree to which the principles of Christianity are being embodied in our national and social life. We must purge our own life from untruth and wrong so that our contacts of every kind with other peoples will be Christian. For the West is immensely handicapped in attempting to give what it does not have. Missionary apologists recognize that on the great highways of the earth Christianity will spread more by contagion than by talk, and that even for the corners of the earth only a Christian society can effectively conduct a Christian mission. In a day when the excellency of Christianity needs to be shown by tangible evi- dence in western life, responsibility for Chris- tianity’s progress abroad rests on each man, woman, and child at home. IV There is another important group that can tre- mendously assist in producing the apologetic most THE MOST EFFECTIVE APOLOGETIC 71 needed today. Modern conditions not only make those who work for a Christian social order at home the very effective colleagues of missionaries, but they also make those who go abroad in other capacities than that of professional missionaries great factors in commending Christianity to an- other people. As we have seen, communication between the West and the East was at a minimum during all the first decades of mission work. This meant that mission activities constituted a dominating propor- tion in international contacts. In those days of comparative international segregation, when con- tacts were few, slow, and irregular, Christianity could not get beyond our borders unless we con- sciously took it. This gave a valid importance, urgency, and significance to the foreign missionary enterprise. But in these days when international communications have become far more rapid, multiform, and inescapable we are called upon to see the importance, urgency, and significance of those other outreachings of the West. We have not yet adjusted our thoughts and methods to this great change in the ratio of mission contacts to other international contacts. In the interests of a world-wide Christianity it is as important to per- meate this increasingly pervasive outreach of the West with the spirit of Christ, as it is to continue our missionary societies. One change demanded by the new conditions is that we should give far more consideration to agencies that are not professionally missionary. A great modern stream of life goes forth from the 72 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS West to other lands. There are traders, diplo- mats, consuls, travelers, educators, social workers, civil servants, film promoters, representatives of banks or of oil, etc. The relative importance of this group may be judged from the fact that Ni- geria has 2,800 westerners, of whom 1,200 are gov- ernment officials, 1,250 are in commercial concerns and mining, and 350 are missionaries; the Gold Coast has 3,182 westerners, of whom 2,463 are in mercantile operations and mining, 653 in govern- ment service,; and 66 are missionaries; Sierra Leone has about a thousand westerners, of whom 80 are missionaries.1. Over three thousand Ameri- cans are said to have permanent residence in Shanghai. These agencies which are not profes- sidnally missionary could—if only our own religion were vital enough to us—effectively witness to Christianity’s power. On the other hand, they can do much to negate the witness of the formal agencies of the Church if their note is uncertain or antagonistic. We dare not, therefore, confine our attention to propagandist agencies alone when a host of other voices may make our preaching seem like sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. The whole world now is very nearly approaching the degree of inter-communication realized in the first three centuries in the Roman Empire in a much smaller area. Just as at that time Chris- tianity spread very largely through the witness of enthusiastic laymen—Aquila’s and Priscilla’s—so now with contacts so varied and close it should naturally expand in unorganized ways. Hence our *Jones, Thomas Jesse, “Education in Africa,” p. 81. THE MOST EFFECTIVE APOLOGETIC 73 prayer should not alone be for missionaries, but also for all men and women of goodwill; for administrators, settlers, traders; for social reform- ers; for educated men and women who share the Christian ideals but are not Christian in name; for Christian rulers in mandated territories that they may keep in remembrance their trusteeship for native peoples; and for all who have to do with the perplexing questions of land and labor, taxa- tion and trade. Without the direct missionary witness the Chris- tian influence of all these other agencies would lack much of direction and effect; for while con- cern for laborers, patience with the unskilled, abhorrence of injustice, and all the acts of a lay- man’s life speak powerfully, there is also need of the explicit witness which missionaries are free and trained to give. The fact is, these are sup- pleménting expressions of the Christian life. Just now, however, we are emphasizing the fact that modern conditions increasingly handicap mission- ary work unless commerce and governments, finance and the press play their part in the great team. In other words we are recognizing as never before that being a missionary is but one of many ways of helping to bring in the Kingdom of God abroad. At the last quadrennial convention of the Student Volunteer Movement definite, planned consideration was given to possibilities for Chris- tian service both within and without organized Christian agencies. The British Christian Student Movement has placed before students the impor- 74 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS tance of such Christian service in non-Christian lands as can be rendered in Government employ- ‘ment and in other ways and is hoping to be able to form some bond of union between missionaries, civil servants, and others who shared common ideals in their university days. With the con- viction that discipleship has a place in all walks of life, that the engineer and the civil servant have their part in God’s purpose for the world as well as the missionary, we believe that being a mis- sionary should demand no more of Christlikeness than any other form of Christian work. Mission- ary work is thus not something quite separate and apart from all other service to humanity. This does not mean a lowering of our standard for missionaries, but it does mean that all, in what- ever walk of life, should have that absolute consecration and readiness for sacrifice that have characterized missions at their best. Shall we continue to give an exclusive consid- eration to the great formal outreach of the Church, or shall we seriously attempt to surround other agencies of interchange with some kind of a religious obligation, blessing, and sanction as well? Shall we not count it a normal thing for God to commission such? Surely the Church can work out a plan or ceremony by which such emissaries to other lands could on departing have their sense of mission strengthened and -enlist the spiritual backing of the local communities which know them best. It will be seen from the last two sections, that the missionary enterprise, far from being an iso- THE MOST EFFECTIVE APOLOGETIC 75 lated affair of boards and churches, links itself in vital ways with nations, with our whole social order, with the various agents from the West who go abroad, and with every man, woman, and child at home. All are helping or hindering the effec- tiveness with which Jesus Christ is being made known as an essential constructive factor in the world’s individual, social, and national life. V The need for an apologetic arising from a more vitally Christian West constitutes the most crucial problem in connection with carrying the Gospel to other peoples today. Our generation could do no more convincingly Christian thing than with God’s help to reconstruct a profit-seeking indus- trial and social order, with its imperialistic coun- terpart in government, into an industrial and political order which at heart would be based on the service, rather than the acquisitive, motive. We need an indisputable miracle of redeemed and transformed corporate life in Christianity’s west- ern home. Hence, some hold that, so far as the future of Christianity as a world religion is con- cerned, it is vastly more urgent to see that the contacts and the outreach of western life are permeated with the spirit of the religion we pro- fess than it is to carry that religion as a separate entity to the ends of the earth. This is a perfectly natural and honest reaction. Some years ago one of the strongest missionaries to Japan decided that the best way he could help Japan was to work in America. As one of the 76 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS secretaries of the Federal Council of Churches in America he says, “I am a missionary to Japan in America.” One of the ablest missionary execu- tives in India has accepted an influential post of leadership in America, saying that he and others “feel ham-strung until America straightens out.” Similarly I know several strong missionaries home recently on furlough who feel the deterrent ef- fects of home conditions upon the work abroad so strongly that they say that the words stick in their throats when they attempt to say that Chris- tianity will solve China’s problems and bring peace to Chinese when it seems to have done so little for the lands which most profess it. These mission- aries even seriously considered whether they should not throw in their lives at this end. Their national humility was good; their conclusion not so good. For the obligation on us to share Jesus Christ with the world can be made clearer and stronger than ever before. It was really a situa- tion where “these ye ought to have done and not to have left the other undone.” These men even- tually saw this. But the very fact that men from the field had to face such an issue should startle us at home into realizing that the Christianization of the West has a vital connection with the evan- gelization of the East. Not the number of missionaries nor the annual expenditure of societies but the character of the Christianity that is actually lived by those who profess it will determine the success or failure of foreign missions. Even believers in other faiths tell us this. A prominent Christian worker in THE MOST EFFECTIVE APOLOGETIC 77 Jerusalem met a small group of Muhammadan leaders in conference outside the city. He asked them how Christianity could be made more ap- pealing to the people. One man leaned over, touched him on the shoulder, and said, “Be Chris- tians.” A similar question was asked Mahatma Gandhi in India. His first three of four points were “practice your religion without adulterating it or watering it down, practice it in its rugged simplicity, and emphasize love, as love is the cen- tral thing in Christianity.” Four times within a single address a Muhammadan, speaking in Amer- ica, came back to the thought “You have stained hands; clean them first.” It seems clear that the selfish and exploitive aspects of industrialism in the Orient must be attacked at the roots, if missions are to appear Christian. In so far as the missionary enterprise, as such, takes an obvious stand against specific cases of political injustice, economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and material standards of success its note will be more and more convincing abroad. Are our churches able to reach the youth in our home towns and villages with an interpreta- tion of Christianity that relates it to all of life, before they go out to the frontiers of civilization or lose themselves in its mid stream? CHAPTER V GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS I INEVITABLY, on a little globe only 8,000 miles in diameter, with the means of communication rap- idly increasing, contacts between the adherents of the various living faiths will grow in number and complexity. Cultures will be enriched by other heritages developed through long centuries. Cus- toms and institutions and standards will receive mutual criticism and comparison, and differences in religion are certain to claim a share of interest. Over a billion human folk about this planet are facing life and destiny in groupings outside Chris- tianity. It behooves us, therefore, to inquire what our attitude to other forms of belief is going to be. A right attitude is important as well as a right method. Seventy-five years ago the opinion was general among Christians that non-Christian religions were more or less the works of the devil, or that scheming priests had invented these faiths in order to deceive the people and enslave them to priestly influence. Down to the time of ration- alism, the Christian Church sponsored a view of the world to the effect that original perfection was followed by imperfection. According to this 78 GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 79 view, only the people who adhered to the original revelation continued aright. The others all went astray and thus gave rise to the ethnic faiths. Any fragments of good to be found in these faiths were either bait cunningly devised by Satan to mislead the soul, or imitations or borrowings from the revelation completed in Christianity. It is not strange that the attitude of many of the early missionaries to any non-Christian belief was one of outspoken opposition or of uncompromising denunciation. These religions were often spoken of as systems of unredeemed darkness and error. That unsympathetic attitude is not yet wholly extinct. I remember an instance of the inflexible mind, exhibited in the discussion held by a group of newly appointed missionaries during a journey across the Pacific. Among them was a lady who, no matter what topic was suggested, wandered off into a tirade, condemning alli religions except her particular branch of the Christian faith. It was not surprising that a year later she was recalled by the board that had appointed her; for one who saw no good in other people could be of little help to them. Most of us have not been so outspoken as she was; but she showed in sharp relief a tendency to an intolerant, non-sympathetic, undiscriminating attitude all too common. In truth we have been far more ready to condemn than to commend. We have been negligent about seriously studying the content and meaning of the customs, institutions, and findings of other faiths. We have been less ready to receive than to give. 80 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS A harmful effect of this earlier and harsher atti- tude is seen in the mistaken judgments often made by those who come into touch with non-Christian faiths for the first time. Even a limited knowledge of these religions shows that they contain some truth. Those who have been taught to’ believe that no truth is to befound in any religion other than Christianity are, in reaction, very likely to adopt the opposite conclusion that all religions are of: much the same value, all containing more or less of truth and all pointing to the same goal. The corrective for this is a more thorough grasp both of Christianity and of non-Christian religions. Il As a result of comparative studies in religion during the last three-fourths of a century a marked change in attitude to the ethnic faiths has come about. Every religion in its essence is seen to be a prolonged prayer for life from the unseen world. Actual friendship with those who worship in a way different from our own often deepens rather than lessens our respect for them. No student of Chinese history is disposed to minimize the great service rendered by Confucianism in the moral discipline of the Chi- nese people. More than one missionary carries the Analects of Confucius with him on his itin- erary and finds in this ancient law many a fruitful text for a Christian sermon. Many Chinese Chris- tians could use, Paul’s metaphor and say that Confucianism was their schoolmaster to lead them to Christ. GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 81 A certain missionary to Japan made it a rule of his village preaching always to preach the first day from the Buddhist scriptures in order to show the people that they had not yet lived up to their own best. A missionary of great influence in India — held that it was a bounden duty of every worker among Hindus to read through every year the Bhagavad Gita, the “Lord’s Song,” the supreme poetic utterance of Hinduism. The sacred scrip- tures of Taoism contain this fine passage: | To those who are good to me, | am good; and to those who are not good to me, I am also good, and thus all get to be good. To those who are sincere to me, I am sincere; and to those who are not sincere to me, I am also sincere, and thus all get to be sincere. One of the most devout and scholarly mission- aries in India tells us that in the Rigvedic pantheon with its chaos of deities imperfectly personalized is one, Varuna, the august witness of the deeds of men. In him we meet with a series of truly ethical ideas—contemporaneous with pre-exilic Hebrew literature when Yahweh stood in the midst of a multitude of other gods—the conception of the holy will of Varuna and of sin as a transgression of his law; the conception of morality as of the inmost nature of things; the sense of sin gained through the pressure of disease and affliction, and the consciousness that fellowship with Varuna can be broken; confession of sin to Varuna and prayer for deliverance; and the experience of Varuna’s mercy and grace as followed by slave-like devo- _*“Tas-Teh-King,” 49: 2. 82 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS tion on the part of the sinner. Conceptions and aspirations such as these have had no adequate fulfilment in Hinduism but, as Dr. Griswold points out, have obvious points of contact with Biblical religion.” Often some of the best things are found, not in the classic literature, but in the outreachings after God by the more modern poet-saints. Listen to this bit of imagery by Tukaram, the seventeenth-cen- tury Marathi poet and saint: It is needless to lay a child in the mother’s arms; she draweth it towards her by her own instinct. Wherefore should I take thought? He that hath the charge will bear the burden. Un- asked, the mother keepeth sweetmeats for the child; in eating them herself she hath no pleasure. When it is busied in play, she seeketh and bringeth it in; she sitteth pressing it tightly to her breast. When it is sick, she is restless as parched corn on the fire. Tuka saith: “Take no thought for thy body; the Mother will not suffer the child to be harmed.” Growing willingness to see good in other faiths and peoples is evidenced in the selection of quota- tions from the literature of the world’s principal religions used in the International House, New York—that magnificently conceived home for for- eign students, both men and women, of all races and creeds. The following are the passages: Con- fucian, “What you do not like when done unto yourself, do not unto others”; Buddhist, “Eschew all evil, cherish good, cleanse your inmost * Griswold, H. D., “The Religion of the Rig Veda,” esp. pp. 351-375. GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 83 thought”; Hindu, “Lead me from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immor- tality”; Taoist, “To know the Eternal is enlighten- ment”; Zoroastrian, “The best and most beautiful of all religions—good thoughts, good words, good deeds”; Jewish, “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you”; Islamic, “God created man and is closer to him than his jugular vein”; Christian, “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself.” Sympathetic missionaries are willing to see good in Islam. They tell us that there is a certain at- tainment of democracy among Muhammadans. At least in early times no distinctions were made because of color, poverty, or social status. In a mosque—if not outside—a peasant may stand be- side a prince, and a beggar may perform his prayer close to a man of wealth. Many are ready to acknowledge that Islam stands firmly against idol- atry and polytheism; secures zealous devotion to the will of God as they interpret it; inculcates the habit of prayer; and has visioned a world-wide sway for Allah. One cannot consider this more liberal attitude to the non-Christian religion without realizing that it raises some very hard problems. What does it involve with reference to the conception of God and his relation to the world? How does it affect one’s theory of revelation, of inspiration, or of the authority of the Scripture? In the light of this new emphasis what shall we think of retribution and salvation? Would the enterprise of foreign 84 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS missions have a greater chance for success if it faced an unrelieved “heathenism”’? Or is the coming of the Kingdom easier because other faiths have tried to meet the needs of seeking souls? If we acknowledge that non-Christian religions have been pedagogues for some people leading them to Christ, will that affect the scriptural canon? Will we be ready to let the Chinese find in the Analects that which is fulfilled in Christ? Should we be willing for the Hindu to think of the Bhagavad Gita as being part of his Old Testament? Or will the best portions of the non-Christian scriptures be used as occasional supplementary reading, just as in certain of our Churches regular yearly readings are taken from the Apocrypha? One helpful factor in the approach to such ques- tions is the increasing emphasis placed on the belief that the Spirit of God is a living, actual reality in the life of every people. We are more ready to believe that “there was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man coming into the world,” and that God has “suffered all nations to walk in their own way, and yet He left not Himself without witness.” We are therefore not surprised to find a certain reality and rich variety of experience in non-Christian religious leaders, and positive values in certain elements of the thought, literature, and practice of other re- ligions which challenge respect and most careful constructive appraisal. God spoke to the Hebrews through their prophets “in divers portions and in divers manners.” In like manner He has spoken to the munis and saints of the East, though they GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 85 have been able to hear Him less: clearly. Each people has caught some intimations of His nature and will, each broken insight being prophetic of the perfect revelation that was to come. As a result of our conviction that God’s Spirit has ever been brooding over man, we realize that our task must be a continuation of the work God has already begun. We do not have to begin de novo. Hence we find the British Christian Stu- dent Movement explaining in “The Nature of the Missionary Enterprise” that “there is much about God and man and life in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Confucianism, in Islam, and even in Animism that is profoundly true.” In one of their great missionary conventions we find the topic, “God in the world’s religions.” The greater the effort to understand and the more purposeful the determination to discover what. values have emerged in the age-long quest of older lands for the Divine, the more positive becomes the assurance that the coming of Christ to these peoples, while supplanting many things, will, on the other hand, enrich and fulfill many others. It is dawning on the Christian constitu- ency, both at home and abroad, that a continuance of the old appreach to non-Christian peoples would mean failure to modern missions. More fundamental, however, than motivation from fear of the failure of missions, is the realiza- tion that a blind, unapprcciative approach is not in the spirit of our Master. Just as a chosen people of old, following the very climax of their great prophetic leadership, were led to see Israel as 86 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS third, with Egypt and Assyria first and second as blessings in the midst of the earth (Isa. 19:24), so we Christians have had to learn that God has not been working exclusively through Christianity. No part of mankind has a monopoly of His gifts. Off in India, in touch with those of other faiths who were lovers of truth and goodness, this conception came to me as a great relief—as a new and inspir- ing truth that helped me to see my Father work- ing, and in a very real way deepened my sense of kinship and fellowship with the best among whom I lived. The Christian who believes that God is at work in all His world joyously recognizes and welcomes every evidence of His footsteps. Each and every insight is from Him and deserves our love and service. Ii In the readjustment incidental to this more sym- pathetic point of view, the vocabulary used by mis- sions has been undergoing a gradual change. Many have been trying to eradicate from their vocabulary various military expressions associ- ated with evangelism. For each religion has its pilgrims, and Christians who meet searchers after truth off in a quiet village or at the great cross- roads of the earth, cannot think of them in the terms of battle. Such expressions as “great battle fields of Christianity,” “warfare against Islam,” “conquest for Christ,” “victory for Christianity,” “enemies of Christ,” “battle line on the foreign field,’ “trenches in heathen lands,” no longer sound appropriate. In days when the best Chris- GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 87 tian sentiment is striving for the outlawry of war, we recoil even from metaphors which seem to make the presentation of the Christian message appear as an aggressive and military attack. Such analogies are offensive to those among whom we go, and do not embody the spirit of our Master. How much more richly beautiful is His vocabu- lary—seed, light, leaven, life! In the effort to get rid of sentimentalism and base the Church’s international outreach on firm ground, many of our missionary hymns are being quietly laid aside. Many persons are reacting against that smug complacency which tends to group all non-Christians together as “men be- nighted,” “sin-sick souls,” “savage breasts,’ and “sheep straying in the dark.” Many an earnest missionary comes back to be shocked at the un- Christian aspects of our western life; and shrinks from the implication that only off in the Orient are those who are “unfit to see His face.” It is not so much that expressions such as “heathen darkness,” “shades of death,” and “prison house of sin,’ are not literally true, but that their use with reference solely to our brothers overseas leads to a false pride and sentimental pity in ourselves. “Heathen” is a word which has so degenerated that most people resolutely lay it aside. Orig- inally it denoted those who do not acknowledge the God of the Bible and therefore applied tech- nically to those who are not Christians, Jews, or Muhammadans. But dictionaries tell us that the word now means “any irreligious, rude, barbarous, or unthinking person or class.” It is therefore in- 88 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS creasingly resented by intelligent members of those races to which it has been applied. No one who heard it could soon forget the earnest appeal of a Holyoke student, a Chinese, who rose in a confer- ence and besought the audience not to use the word again. Japanese Buddhists, when sending in their contribution to the Near East Relief, said, “We send herewith to adopt one thousand orphans— but don’t call us ‘heathen’ any more.” Devout adherents to the higher, non-Christian faiths are not inclined toward Christ by hearing that mis- sionaries are sent out “to save men from heathen- ism.” The usefulness of the word and that of its derivatives is over and they should be laid aside. They are no longer brotherly words. We may well pray that the words of our mouths may not un- necessarily wound, and that they may be accept- able in His sight. IV One of the outstanding results of the contact of Christianity with other faiths has been to stimu- late a progressive sloughing off of what is crude and false. For example, in the time of Alexander Duff, the great pioneer educational missionary to India, the choice had to be between Hindu- ism and Christianity. Now there are forty reform sects in Hinduism alone, in each of which more or less of the crude in Hinduism has been repudiated. Bengal has a great festival called Durga-puja. “Durga” represents the fiercer, more destructive side of the Indian conception of divinity. The commonest picture represents her in riot of blood GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 89 and carnage. Skulls and severed heads hang from her neck; and her tongue, thirsting for more blood, protrudes from her mouth. Countless goats and buffaloes have been sacrificed to her. Concerning this festival a recent writer? says: “The puja seems to be growing yearly gentler in spirit. The goddess keeps her ten arms and weapons of men- ace, but the latter are hidden with tinsel and lotuses; the face is benign, and the whole figure is made beautiful. Fewer goats are sacrificed, fewer houses have their own images, the puja becoming less of a worship, and much more just a national holiday of great happiness.” One of the popular seasonal festivals in India is Holi, held in honor of Kama, the Hindu Cupid. Among the practices characteristic of the festival is the singing of songs celebrating Krishna’s love episodes with the herdswomen; the shouting of obscene words to passers-by, especially to women; and the throwing of colored liquid and powder (the popular significance of which is impure) over one another and passers-by. Although the last cus- tom is kept up by families in their own courtyards, indiscriminate throwing is rapidly being sup- pressed. An experienced missionary in India writes: “I remember when I first went to India we gave up work for a week during the Holi festi- val. But of late even in villages I have never had to stop even for a day.” It is now possible for a respectable woman to go about during the carnival rites of Holi week without being insulted and mo- antec: E. J., “Bengali Religious Lyrics, Sakta,” Dds tae 90 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS lested by the votaries of an unholy god, as it was not even fifteen years ago. Observers in Japan report that one of the most significant things to be seen there is the markedly increased activity of the Buddhist Church and its adoption wholesale of many Christian methods, such as preaching; parish work, Sunday-schools, day-schools, education for the priesthood, multi- plication of magazines and free distribution of literature. The Nanking Buddhist Seminary de- clares its aim to be, not training scholars to bene- fit themselves, but training men to benefit the world. Here, as in many other Buddhist schools, the monkish life of social uselessness has become a thing of the past. | What is the right attitude toward these evidences of growth or purification in ethnic faiths? Shall we feel regretful, as did a great leader in mission- ary effort, who, after describing various reform movements in non-Christian religions, added, “These efforts are, unfortunately, succeeding to a great degree, and many are thus being kept away from Christianity who were open to receive it”? Or shall we be thankful when Christian attitudes and purposes are developed in adherents to non- Christian religions, and when the finer spirits among them struggle to cleanse and spiritualize their faiths? While recognizing that all such de- velopments do very likely make it harder to win converts, ought we not to be thankful for every step toward purity, holiness, and the Kingdom made under whatever label? GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 91 Vv As we saw in Chapter III, a distinction can be made between Christianity as we practice it and Christ. It is not primarily our religious system in the sense of our practice in worship and our body of doctrines that we can confidently hold high as the preéminent standard for all men. It is not success for our “faith” that we most want. Rather is it that men shall increasingly learn to live in the spirit, with. the purposes, and by the methods of Jesus Christ. But the two are linked together and hence it should be our deep concern to see that our system throws off what is untrue to Christ. Only Chris- tianity at its best will be able to make progress in the face of reformation in other faiths. Only a Christianity that has freed itself from invalid ac- cretions, conflicting dogmas, and a mind that wars against science can compete with the best in the purified ethnic faiths. Before the best of these, Christianity is on its mettle. In many respects Buddhism’s standard is so high that the Chris- tianify which shall win the adherence of the fol- lowers of the Buddha must be of a thoroughly loving and sacrificial type. To go forth to the great non-Christian faiths with an interpretation of Christianity which is unscientific or unethical or merely provincial is not only to court failure, but to prejudice all later approach. The very success of Christianity in helping to purge the great religions of the world demands of us an ever-improving understanding of our faith in order that we may 92 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS be worthy witnesses of the preéminent One at its very center. Before one of the religions, however, it is not Christianity’s success, but its failure, that should spur us on. For thirteen centuries Islam and Christianity have been bitter rivals. In this con- flict we have to confess that far more converts have been made by Islam from among Christians than have been made by Christianity from among Muhammadans. Lands which were the home of the early Church—North Africa, Asia Minor, and Syria—are now overwhelmingly Muhammadan. Nowhere has Christianity won a marked and widespread success. But worst of all, these cen- turies of religious and political antagonism have instilled in our hearts a deep-seated prejudice, a hatred, an unreasoning antipathy that warps our judgment and attitude on every Moslem question. As one looks over some of the books on Muham- “madanism of the past, one scarcely wonders that Moslem lands should have been closed to Christian missionaries. During the late Greco-Turkish War venomed wishes regarding a Moslem state were unblushingly voiced even by acknowledged fol- lowers of the Christ. The demand from this situation has been un- mistakable, Missionaries to Moslems have seen it and are striving for the necessary adjustments. They know that the exterminating passion of the Crusades will not do. They see that the ruthless political and economic pressure of Christian na- tions must give way. They acknowledge that any bald, unsympathetic proselytization would be dis- GOD’S HAND IN OTHER FAITHS 93 astrous. If, through us, Moslems are to understand Jesus Christ and be drawn to Him, the Christian approach, not only individual and missionary but national also, must be in the spirit of service, in humility, in patience, and in love. We are finding ways to see and to meet the human needs which the Moslems feel. Disinterested, practical, minis- trant goodwill with very sincere humility for the failures of the West, and with a very genuine appreciation of the values in Moslem character and civilization is characteristic of the best present-day approach to Moslems. Missionaries are making it unmistakably clear that they come as friends. Does not this attitude need to become more pervasive in the West? The purpose of this chapter has been to encour- age a sympathetic appreciation of good wherever found. Unquestionably there are dangers in this attitude. Let us consider these in the following chapter. CHAPTER VI THE COMBINATION OF CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS * In the peaceful and progressive integration of the races and civilizations of the East and West, which is one of the greatest problems confronting human intelligence today, it is exceedingly desir- able that all should approach the whole range of differences—social, artistic, political and religious —both with convictions and with a humble teach- able spirit. To do otherwise would prove one to be unjustifiably immature or narrowly provincial. I A missionary is an advocate. He is an advocate because he has convictions. He is one who has done conclusive thinking, who glows from what he has experienced. There is no -place for the habitual neutrality of vascillating sieve-minded- ness. For the world’s thirst will not be satisfied by such. It is waiting for those who can say, “I *No one word has proved satisfactory for the attitude suggested in this chapter. Words are very unsatisfactory media of communication when once they pass away from the concrete. The same word may carry commendable connotations for one person and bristle with objectionable ones for another. Perhaps the reader can make a better selection than those I have ventured to use. At least we can (if it seems desirable) strive for the attitude ‘even though it be hard to name. 94 CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 95 have found the Christ”; who can testify about “things which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of Life.” There are things that can be known, things that are certain, things that can be experienced. And so when a person is sent from one civilization to another positive con- victions are in order. The missionary enterprise is an effort to share indubitable values in Jesus Christ. In the comparative study of religion and in dis- cussions with those of other faiths, we tend to set off one religion reduced to concepis over against another religion reduced to concepts. This ab- stracting process leaves out the warmth of feeling and reality which is such a large part of experience. It is the contention of this chapter that there is a place for such conscious and impartial weighing of the good wherever found, but at the very be- ginning let it be said that one should not remain continuously in this mood. After coming from the arena of fair and open discussion, one should cen- ter his values and let convictions glow. Certain depths of reality are not experienced except as an enthusiastic participant. If I am all the time weighing, and treating people and re- ligions as specimens, I will not get the deepest values. I must have life apart from the onlooker mood, or lose the ability to judge with insight. Even in discussion it is right to share these en- thusiasms, to become the advocate, to speak with all the ardent conviction and warmth of inside feeling—providing it is plain to all that in this one 96 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS is not attempting to play the réle of referee. While, as we Shall see, it is part of the professional quali- fications for missionaries that they should be ready to weigh evidence of truth or value in ex- perience which we do not associate with Chris- tianity and evidence of deficiencies in our own conceptions, yet every missionary should primarily be an advocate with convictions for which i would be willing to die, if need be. Il But there is also a need for fair-minded teach- ableness in a missionary. Let me state some of the problems that arise when Christianity in its spread touches new peoples and cultures. They may illustrate the need of possessing a mind at once open to new possibilities and yet alerily dis- criminating. Suppose a Chinese Christian scholar suggests that loyalty is the central Christian virtue. “I preach about the loyalty of Jesus,” he says. Should we have a closed mind to this man’s vision, and refuse to consider his point of view because it seems to us long since settled that love holds this central place? Or will we listen to this Christian, representing a different upbringing, different tra- ditions, different race, different culture, and see what his understanding of the Spirit is? Suppose that the Indian Church should feel that owing to the emphasis on baptism the word “Chris- tian” has come to signify merely those who have undergone this rite and the children of such, that very largely the word is losing for India its moral significance, and that Christians are looked upon CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 97 too often simply as another caste and not as people with a distinctly superior kind of life because in touch in a unique way with a unique Power; and suppose that in order to correct this impression they wanted publicly to announce that baptism is not necessary to become a Christian or a member of the Christian Church. Would you want your missionaries to consider this question absolutely on its merits? Should they listen with an open mind to see whether we have missed something when they hear Gandhi say that the West has misinterpreted the Christ? Or let us consider two pointed questions actually put to a group of responsible secretaries of mis- sionary societies by a distinguished Chinese Chris- tian in 1923: How far are you ready to go with the Chinese Church in the revaluation of matters touching faith and order as they are known in the West? Secondly, how far are you ready to go with the Chinese Church in accepting with discrimination the contributions that China may make to Chris- tianity for its enrichment or even reconstruction? Would you hope that these board secretaries answered that they would give sympathetic con- sideration to any proposal from the Chinese Church even though it might mean change? Or would you like them to discourage all such in- itiative in thinking, and insist that the Church standards were worked out hundreds of years ago and they do not expect them to change; and that 98 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Christianity as they know it needs no enrichment or reconstruction at the hands of China? We are told? that when the Bantu in Africa have awakened from their mental slumber and have done their own thinking for a while, they will write their own creeds in phrases that appear ade- quate to their minds and in metaphors that appeal to their imagination, and will frame their own Church polity, as European nations did, on the model of their secular institutions. The open yet discriminating mind is needed in connection with various experiments which earn- est missionaries try in order to make Jesus known in more winsome and effective ways. There is a Christian monastery near Nanking, China, where a Norwegian missionary, with the support and approval of many of the recognized leaders of the Christian movement in China, has recently begun a new approach. The buildings are very simple and as much like those of a Buddhist monastery as possible. Those who come in search of re- ligious truth find a lotus pond, a temple bell, a guest room, Buddhist and Christian symbols and incense burning on an altar behind which is the picture of Christ in Gethsemane. The object is to provide a place where, amid familiar surround- ings, Buddhists may learn of Christ, and to dis- cover and to use the truth in Buddhism with the conviction that such truth will not be out of har- mony with the Christian spirit. At worship the song may be a Christian hymn, a Jewish psalm SA PH Teun W. C., “Race Problems in the New Africa,” p. : CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 99 or a passage from a Buddhist psalter. One of the most spiritual, trusted and experienced of mis- sionaries reports, after visiting this center, that when he sees how one after another is drawn from near or far to hear this strange new teaching that does not discard the beautiful and true in the old faith, but builds with some of these old stones on the Christian foundation, and when he feels the earnest, helpful.atmosphere of the place, he hopes that here may be a promise of the future. Would you be ready with discriminating sympathy to ap- praise this experiment on its merits? Difficult questions come up involving standards of morality, forms of worship and methods of gov- ernment. The Commission of the London Mis- sionary Society to India, in 1922, was several times asked what would be the action of their society (which is Congregational in polity) if an Epis- copal system were adopted by the churches it had been nurturing. Still other possible changes due to indigenous thought are suggested by an Indian Christian who, thinking over the reorganization of his church along lines of his national heritage, writes: “The future unity of the Indian Church will not be the product of any massive organization. In- dividual churches must be as simple and complete as the Indian village. A Christian spiritual habi- tation should be as simple as an Indian hut. The vision of the united church that rises before my mind is not that of a grand, imposing cathedral, within whose ample roof the children of India will 100 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS gather to worship their Lord, but that of numer- ous small islets in a sea, cut off from each other ‘on the surface, but united together by the waters of the sea and by the all-embracing atmosphere. The village and town churches will be linked to- gether by a band of wandering sadhus, who would act as the circulatory system of the churches, and bring to the individual churches a sense of the greatness, largeness, and catholicity of God’s spiritual universe, thus saving them from stag- nation and isolation.” ° A group of churches in China has three creeds— the Apostles’ Creed of the second century, one made in Kansas City, and one drafted in 1920 by a Chinese Christian. A pastor is at liberty to use whichever creed he most prefers. Both in China and in India church members are asking how they may observe in a Christian way some of their popular feast days. Others are work- ing on forms of Christian ceremony which will ex- press in an indigenous way true ideas of marriage. In connection with services of religious worship, many are pondering over how customs and ideas close to the soil may be observed and adapted to express Christian truths. Here and there is a Bible teacher working out with her pupils, many of whom come from an absolutely non-Christian background, forms of worship which shall have in them some of the color and rhythm characteristic of most primitive religions and elements of which mark the more developed religions, but from which *Young Men of India, vol. XXIX, p. 541. CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 101 Protestant Christianity has fought shy for so long. The Chinese Church is reopening the question of ancestor worship on which all early mission- aries took such a decided stand; they are asking whether their old observances may not be so puri- fied and adapted as to become a truly Christian form of commemoration of their dead. They may easily settle on an expression for this deeply in- grained feeling which will not be congenial to those of another culture. One Chinese scholar urges the doing away with the Old Testament, be- cause he thinks that it—especially the imprecatory Psalms—has had a large place in making the West warlike. We may as well adjust ourselves to the fact that the decisions of thoroughly independent and in- digenous Churches may prove to be times of test- ing for us. It is already perfectly evident that the rising Churches abroad will have many a sug- gestion to make as to form, polity and doctrine. At least one of their leaders sees that it “will call for unshaken faith in God as Chinese Christians under- take to formulate for themselves what Christ means to them, and to determine the forms of their institutions.” * Will the respect we want to have for their initiative and judgment enable us to con- tinue to work with them and to give to their need, even though their decisions may seem strange to us? Will we be flexible enough to consider these suggestions on their merits? ‘Report of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1923, p. 209. 102 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Tih This need for an open and receptive yet thor- oughly discriminating mind, arising out of the practical situations caused by Christianity’s touch with other cultures, has been clearly seen by dis- cerning missionary leaders. One of the questions discussed by the Foreign Missions Conference of North America in 1923 was whether our western interpretations of the teachings of Jesus and His apostles growing out of centuries of Christian history and study tend to limit the usefulness of our missionaries as they seek to help the young Churches abroad.’ During the discussion a secre- tary of the National Christian Council for China very pertinently asked the commissioning Churches of the West, as they sent missionaries forth, “Are you instructing them to let the Chinese take the lead in determining the character of the Churches which you are trying to establish?’ *® In closing the discussion the chairman called attention to the fact that the Christians of other lands “are com- plaining that we are teaching them and claiming the right to speak authoritatively, because we are western”; and he ended by saying: Iam urging with all my heart that we seek most earnestly to cultivate a sympathetic and teachable spirit. I would not insist, before entering upon a friendly discussion of the most difficult things in religion, that each of my hearers should repeat the Nicene, Athanasian, or even the Apostles’ Creed. *Report of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1923, p. 154ff ° Ibid., p. 168. CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 103 No, no, no! Christianity was well established be- fore we had any such formulas as these, and if it had not been, it wouldn’t have survived them.’ In another session of this same conference an outstanding Chinese Christian, while giving un- hesitating testimony to China’s need for more mis- sionaries, specified certain desirable qualifications among which was the statement, “We need those who are willing to learn as well as to teach.” § In a bulletin intended for recruits, Bishop Fred B. Fisher, of Calcutta, makes a plea for freedom from religious conceit in those who go abroad. I do not use “conceit” in any bad sense. I mean sureness. It is sometimes called “cocksureness.” That is to say, we must be unprejudiced regarding another man’s belief, and we must not be foo sure of our own traditions. We are living in a growing world. Larger social and religious contacts may readjust some of our thinking and interpretation. That may seem im- possible to us, Just after we have been filled to the brim by the wisdom that is to be found in our colleges, but think about it a minute. In college a man has a more or less limited contact with faculty and student body. He comes to college from a home where his contacts are limited. All his life he moves in a limited realm. Now we ask him to cross the ocean and come into contact with people who have been thinking for three thousand years. Might it not be well for him to go not being too sure of his position? Let him have his mind open to adjustment. Every college pro- fessor who puts that attitude of mind in a Sader *[bid., pp. 169-70. *Ibid., p. 209. 104. WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS is doing far better than the man who attempts simply to implant a rigid defense of a static faith.® IV What are some of the reasons why teachable- ness is highly desifable when one undertakes to share values on an international scale? In the first place it is a very practical matter, at least for all who attempt to approach the alert informed and critical educated classes in other lands. Pro- fessor John Dewey, after his two years in China, said that he met many Chinese who were resentful at our attitude of having all the truth. It is pointed out that the intolerant attitude of many of the Christian propagandists is a barrier to the spread of truth and open-mindedness.” The presumption of the white man everywhere increasingly arouses indignation. The dominant spirit of nationalism leads each people to glorify their ancient heritage and to fear as a calamity the loss of their culture and religion under the influence of the West. Under these circumstances suppose you were an intelligent, university trained Hindu, Muham- madan, or Buddhist, and that two missionaries approached you about religion. Let us suppose that one did not try to appreciate the value in your religion; studied it, but only to find weak spots and material for refutation; was oblivious of the contribution your race might make to the develop- ment of Christian ideals; constantly assumed and ° News-Bulletin of Personnel, M.E.C., August, 1924, p. 1. ; aD eS pamphlet of the forthcoming Pan-Pacific nstitute. CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 105 acted on his own theological rightness, and offered Christianity on the basis of authority. Suppose that the other was as manifestly enthusiastic over the religious values he possessed, was as thor- oughly convinced of their truth and efficacy, and yet frankly and sincerely asked you to share your highest vision of truth and reality, showing a readiness to discover the value these truths had to you. Which of these men would commend him- self most to you? Would it be the closed-minded witness, or would it be the one so loyal to truth as he sees it that he manifestly would be willing to learn and who unostentatiously interprets the fundamental ethical and spiritual contributions for life that Christianity is prepared to make? In the long run we can trust the love for truth in man. Where men feel that in an unbaised way one is appealing to their sense of truth, and where in the appeal a passion for truth is displayed, rather than for one’s own position, one may trust that appeal finally to win, no matter what the obstacles in the way. Some evidently think a different standard than this is advisable for the less mature. A pamphlet on discussion groups issued by one of our mission- ary societies urges leaders not to ask such a ques- tion as “Why should Muhammadanism not remain the religion of Africa?” For then “one’s thoughts are focused on the good qualities of Muhammadan- ism. It is quite possible that a member of a class not quite firmly convinced will arrive at the con- clusion that Muhammadanism is quite good enough for Africa.” Rather, so the author says, 106 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS should one ask, “What elements in the Christian religion make it valuable for Africa?” for then “one’s thoughts are focused on the value of Christianity.” Perhaps some may wish to make out a case for relieving the immature from the high adventure of the open mind. ~ Similarly, some might think it right to relieve Christians in America and Britain, snugly surrounded by like-minded religionists, from this difficult attainment. Possibly some would say there is a place for earnest missionaries who have closed minds but who are effective advocates. But there must be in each field strong missionaries who cannot be so relieved. It is part of their pro- fessional qualification. What risk there is must be unhesitatingly faced. Missionaries go forth to a billion members of ten other faiths and ask them to see truths and take on allegiances that they have never had before. They outnumber us two to one, and include in their number those as high in cul- ture, as keen in intellect, as advanced in training as ourselves. In aggressively approaching them with good news which we earnestly want them to ac- cept, it is a pity to have one’s own mind fettered, or to be unable sympathetically to emancipate an- other’s life. The acceptable missionary to the educated classes, especially, makes it plain that he has been and still is a searcher for truth; that he believes in the truth as revealed in Jesus because he has found it to be the supreme truth, experi- mentally and practically; and that the Christianity he presents is itself scientific in the sense that it CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 107 welcomes the most careful and exact experiment or the test of any seemingly contrary truth. Vv Secondly, is the assumption that truth is pro- gressively revealed to man. If what we call Christianity is a completed system in a static uni- verse—something once for all delivered to the saints—so that it can be carried unchanged to the corners of the earth; if any modification of Chris- tian ideas or practices by reason of contact with other cultures and religions is of necessity de- generation; if what we have is a complete and finished gift, then there is little to be said for a mind being open to fresh truth. But if Christian- ity is a living, growing movement at the very center of which is the God revealed by the his- torical figure of Jesus; if revelation is progressive so that it did not end when the latest book of the New Testament was written; if Christianity is not a static set of doctrines but a dynamic experience; if God’s Spirit is indeed abroad among the hearts of men, then one must be ready to see good any- where, even outside Christianity and in those not formally professing Him nor consciously converted to Him. The world Christian of today, therefore, finds he must at the same time maintain both vitality of faith and expectancy for fresh incursions of truth from God. He stakes his life on fundamental revelations and acts in Jesus Christ, and yet realizes that his apprehension of the implications of these things may be supplemented by the 108 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS intelligent representatives of other cultures and faiths. The significance of Christ is greater ‘than any one race can exhaust. The world Chris- tian knows that he has experienced God in Jesus Christ, but with mankind so rich and varied, he does not set himself up as the exclusive interpreter of Christianity. His Christianity is a growing in- terpretation of life with all the possibility of re- ceiving fresh contributions from the experience of other peoples. His refusal to maintain a closed mind is both an acknowledgement that not all that is traditionally associated with historical Christian- ity will necessarily stand, and an assertion that life cannot be lazily ordered as thougy all truth had been discovered. In this conviction that truth is progressively re- vealed we are following the spirit of Jesus. He said, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he shall guide you into all truth.” He told the religious leaders of His day that “new wine must be put in fresh wine skins.” Possessed as He was with the power of the all- searching, transforming Spirit of God, He said and did things in revolutionarily constructive ways. He believed that Israel’s faith had come from God, but from His life and death came a new religion. Certain fundamental facts were complete in Jesus; but there are others which have “first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear’”—some things come in their own time through a gradual and an historical process. Perhaps one reason why no new significant theological interpretation has CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 109 come from the younger churches abroad is that we have emphasized the finality of what we take to them. There are heights and depths unfathomable in God’s plan for His children, and divine ways past tracing out. We can have a closed mind and miss the mind of Christ for ourselves and others. Still a third reason for the position of this chap- ter grows out of reverence for individuality. It is the conviction that each other person, although of different race and culture, may have experiences of value. Such experiences should be considered exactly on the same basis as are our own. Only when each of us gives his best in this spirit can richer experience and new truth be found. We recognize that this is the process by which the common mind grows. Only as the various mem- bers of the world family humbly, yet earnestly and sincerely, share the best that has come to them, will the truer, fuller solution be found. The world Christian, therefore, does not present his religion dogmatically on authority, but as a matter of life experience capable of test. Mary Parker Follett, in “The New State,” says: I do not go to a meeting merely to give my own ideas. If that were all, 1 might write my fellow- members a letter. But neither do I go to learn other people’s ideas. If that were all, I might ask each to write a letter. I go to a committee meet- ing in order that all together we may create a group idea, an idea which will be better than any one of our ideas alone, moreover, which will be better than all of our ideas added together. For this group idea will not be produced by any process _ of addition, but by the interpenetration of us all. 110 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Similarly, at the International Missionary Coun- cil of 1923, the Bishop of Bombay read a notable ‘statement with reference to the practicability of missionary cooperation in the face of doctrinal differences. In it he said: A man must come to the Council more desirous to learn than to teach, unwilling to believe that he brings with him the sole and complete solution of any problem, but convinced that what he brings will have its effect on the common mind and that the council as a whole will be able to put together, by the help of God’s spirit, a solution that is truer and completer than that which any member could have attained outside the Council.“ The question we are raising here is as to how far these same principles would hold good between missionaries and the people among whom they go. Shall our missionaries use the same method of tolerant expectation with the young Churches and with non-Christians that we are here told we should use with fellow Christians who differ from us? Something in Christianity itself impels us not only to hear but to seek the sincere testimony of those who differ from us. We are used to this principle in the social realm, for Jesus associated with publicans and sinners. He saw worthfulness in those whom others considered wholly unlovely. Similarly, I believe some aspect of truth is to be found in every sincere and honest man. Just asa Christian, because of his reverence for personality, should be able to see what is worthy in the par- “International Review of Missions, vol. 12, p. 507. CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 111 ticularly unpromising, so, also, a Christian ought to be able to expect and to see some measure of truth in those who seem most to disagree. Many present-day college students will be pre- pared to manifest this attitude of fair-mindedness. In a marked way they are getting a new conscience —a reluctance to come to a decision unless in the discussion the opposing point of view is repre- sented; a feeling that it is not right to adopt some- thing as a conviction without having opened our- selves up to possibly conflicting evidence. With the growth of the scientific habit of mind they are becoming sensitive to the fault of a one-sided search for reasons to uphold something one wants to believe. Their studies show them how in primi- tive times social standards and customs were rigidly fixed and how in relatively recent times there developed the conception of progress—prog- ress that could be accelerated by fostering change as a result of the thinking process. Such attitudes are bound to produce young mis- sionaries who will introduce the spirit of demo- cratic conference rather than of dogmatic assertion into their intercourse with thoughtful and rev- erent Christians abroad and with members of other faiths. Their training deepens not only the sense of responsibility which these students feel for earnestly contributing their experience and point of view, but also leads them to listen to the differing experience and point of view of others and prepares them for a possible modification and growth in their own convictions as the process of discussion goes on. It is just possible that only 112. WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS through such training does one learn to live with buoyant vigor of conviction and yet to seek those who differ, hearing fully and sympathetically their positions. It is difficult to have profound con- victions and yet to maintain a fair mind. One is not apt to cultivate this type of mind if one’s main business is instilling dogma without an earnest desire to teach the reasonableness of new belief. Just because the missionary has strong convictions and wants to share them, he must be especially on guard lest this cause him to over- look the possibilities for fresh insights. He may become too bent on converting others to his faith to take an attitude of generous consideration toward ideas and institutions that differ radically from his own. Every time a convert is baptized a missionary has to run the risk that he may think. Vi Some will say that the position taken in this chapter is an exceedingly dangerous one. And so it is. For it is possible for appreciativeness to degenerate into a weak and flabby eclecticism, wherein Christianity is only one of a number of rival faiths, and where the best of each is pooled to form the world’s ultimate religion. There is undoubtedly danger here. We have only to look back upon the history of Christianity in the first five centuries to see how serious the danger is. During that period, in an effort to maintain purity of docirine and discipline, Christianity took a most exclusive attitude to the other religions of the day. In spite of this, certain pagan attitudes and cle- CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 113 ments entered, particularly in the field of worship, in order to make the services attractive to the new converts. If this syncretism in doctrine and worship took place when Christianity was intensely antagonistic to other faiths, it stands to reason there is more danger if one approaches other re- ligions in a sympathetic appreciative attitude. Possibly we can avoid some of the mistakes of the first centuries if we consciously recognize the peril. Some feel that it is disloyalty to the religion we have known from childhood to carry this spirit of teachableness over to another land where Christianity has been less long established and people have been nurtured in a different faith. Actually to maintain an open mind as to the completeness of everything in Christianity as we now understand it, in the face of those who differ, gives to many the impression of weakness. But there is nothing incompatible between the most ardent allegiance to one’s own faith and the cul- tivation of that confidence in others and respect for them which should characterize each member of a group who have met to share the most serious problems and deepest convictions of their lives. On the other hand may it not be lack of confidence in Christ when we do not undergo the discipline of attempting to take all the facts into considera- tion, or when we hesitate to follow where truth seems to lead? Is not a lurking fear sometimes back of our unwillingness to open certain religious questions to freest and most unhampered discus- sion? Conviction with teachableness seems to me to be a higher type of loyalty to Christ than that 114 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS which counts it sacrilege to re-think in open sin- cerity the most vital issues of our faith. Still another danger in encouraging sympathetic appreciation of good wherever found is that we may allow our powers of discrimination to be blunted. We dare not be so uncritical in our ob- servation of facts as to close our eyes to the deficiencies, defects, and unsocial results of sys- tems, whether our own or others. A proper balance between the two attitudes is needed. An increasing number of earnest Christians to- day love to say with the blind preacher of Scot- land, George Matheson, in his prayer: Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all, Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold, Rend each man’s temple-veil, and bid it fall, That we may know that Thou hast been of old; Gather us in. Gather us in: we worship only Thee; In varied names we stretch a common hand; In diverse forms a common soul we see; In many ships we seek one spirit land; Gather us in. Each sees one color of Thy rainbow light, Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven; Thou art the fullness of our partial sight; We are not perfect until we find the seven; Gather us in. Thine is the mystic life great India craves, Thine is the Parsee’s sin-destroying beam, Thine is the Buddhist’s rest from tossing waves, Thine is the empire of vast China’s dream; Gather us in. CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 115 Some seek a Father in the heavens above, Some ask a human image to adore, Some crave a spirit vast as life and love; Within Thy mansions we have all and more; Gather us in. Such an expansive, inclusive attitude enlarges our sympathies, but it would be muddling thought to forget that different world views do make a difference. All roads do not lead to Rome. All religions do not have the same ethics and the same metaphysics. There are great ethical and philo- sophical disparities not only between the various faitus, but also within the faiths, our own included. In the ethical realm, the hope of forward-look- ing men and women is that, as a result of fearless criticism of each and of every moral standard and the constructive work of experimental and educational psychology, we shall obtain a body of scientific knowledge directly bearing on social problems. We believe that Jesus Christ gave us the ethical norm for social living and Christians have the confidence that science will show that He was right. We believe that many of the ethical ideals of other faiths are inadequate, and that eventually systematized, scientific study will show that they cannot stand the test of social results. One reason why I am committed to missions is that I believe that through Jesus Christ the world has been given principles as to the best way of liv- ing, that His scale of values is not only incom- parably ahead of present practice but is the truest revelation of life’s significance, and that other re- ligions do not equally meet this practical test. 116 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS But ethics is not all. No detailed knowledge of life in particular makes up for an explanation of -life as a whole. Each of us needs a view of the whole of life. Through Christ we have caught a philosophy of life, a general view of God, of man, of their relations, of their purposes and goals, and life lived on this basis is abundant, socially desirable, and progressive; such as satisfies the deepest needs of the spirit for power to live up to the ideals recognized as supreme; and such as con- forms to the strict discipline of scientifically ob- servable facts and meets all the tests of clear, con- sistent, logical thinking. I do not believe that the general viewpoint or philosophy of other faiths will equally stand these tests. Since general view- points do make a difference, this is another reason why I believe in missions. Young students have a right to know where the attitude advocated here will lead one. Let me give my own testimony. Twenty-six years ago I went out as a short-term teacher to one of the col- leges of India with no thought of missions as a life work. Asa factor in making up my own mind as to the urgency of missions, I began to study the Bhagavad Gita, that most esteemed of Hindu sacred scriptures. In order to see it through the warm enthusiasm of one who loved it, I read with a Sanskrit Pandit who knew English. Neither then nor since have I been able to take all the facts into consideration; life decisions can never be made on such an inclusive basis; but, on the basis of my own study and experience, fairly open- minded, and on the ground, there came clear con- CONVICTION AND TEACHABLENESS 117 viction that the most worthwhile investment of my life and effort would be to help India to discover Jesus Christ. It was plain that India—and the whole world—needed not only a better ethic, not only a better philosophy of life, but to know the old story of what God did for men through Jesus Christ, to hear of a life that was lived, of a death that He died, of something that was done. Never, however, in the later days did I regret having sympathetically tried to listen to India’s best. As opportunity offered, I still tried as the years went on to see the highest glimpses that India had caught of God in the Gurukula at Hardwar, at Shantiniketan with Tagore, at a Buddhist mon- astery in Colombo, and with many a devout and earnest seeker after God whom I still can call by name. The uniqueness of Jesus and the incom- parable riches found in Him stood out with ever greater clearness. Quietly the conviction gathered overwhelming strength that Jesus Christ is the interpreter of the final fact of the universe, the One through whom the sacredness and value of human life is shown, the Lord of life, and in actual fact man’s Savior from sin. It became clear that man’s greatest wisdom is to give Him the full opportunity with every human being and every aspect of organized society. Intelligent, zealous, effective cooperation with the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in bringing heme His world stood out as life’s highest aim. With Him incomparably supreme what else but strengthened loyalty could be the result of such study? The teachable mind comes as a result of a 118 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS genuine respect for human life and of confidence in the indwelling Spirit of God. With the utmost loyalty to the lordship of Jesus Christ, the teach- able mind lets us be receptive to God’s disclosure of Himself in human life under any sky. It is ever ready to detect better ways of living the Christ-like life. Itshows that we accept Hindus and Muhammadans and Confucianists as God’s children even when they are not aware of the fact. It is a humble acknowledgement that we of the West have not yet learned how to meet all the problems of a modern world, and that we eagerly seek with our comrades overseas how to find and do His will. CHAPTER VII THE OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS eee The Older Geographical Expansion task missionary was interpreted as a circular one be- ginning at Jerusa- lem and extending unto the uttermost parts of the earth. Now, however, we are interpreting our task in perpen- dicular terms, as well. It involves Emphasis— 119 Untit the middle of the nineteenth century missionary effort was occupied with the geo- graphical expansion of Christianity. China, Japan, Africa were closed and largely un- known continents. Our Additiona$ Emphasis— Christsan ‘120 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS not merely geographical expansion, but the Chris- tian permeation of all phascs of life. Once the call was to unoccupied continents. Now the missionary call includes also great areas of life and thought which are as yet “unoccupied” by the spirit of ‘Christ. The modern missionary ideal is that His spirit shall permeate the whole of life—individual and social, national and international. The task is immensely greater than when we thought of it merely as the proclamation of good news to all the world. The “unfinished task” can no longer be given merely in terms of Afghanistan and Tibet, but also in terms of un-Christianized habits, attitudes, and inward urges everywhere. In the past we have been in the habit of divid- ing humanity into certain compartments. Along geographic lines we have used such compartments as Africa, South America or the Near East. But some aspects of the task of making life on this earth Christian cannot be shut up in these com- partments. In fact, that which most militates against the Kingdom is not only off in China, or Japan, or India, but also in America. Again, under the heading of religion we group people as Hindus, Confucianists, Buddhists, etc. Missions meant taking the good news to these dis- tant compartments. In fact, many still think of the anti-Christ as being off in some mission land, or in some non-Christian religion. It is a part of this point of view to say that the Muhammadan religion is the most dangerous surviving opponent of Christianity. As before, however, that which most keeps back the Kingdom is not only in OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 121 Muhammadanism, or Hinduism, or Buddhism, but also in so-called Christianity. As we try to pic- ture Christianity’s most significant struggle we do not primarily think of Christ on one side with Buddha, Zoroaster, and Confucius on the other. Rather do we see arrayed against the Christ stu- pendous social forces which are turning the world’s life upside down, and which unless confronted by the united forces of Christ will ere long make the opposition of Confucius and Buddha seem in- significant indeed. In fact, in this greater struggle Christianity generally finds itself the ally and the fulfiller of other faiths, rather than their enemy. Missionary study texts have largely taught us to think of certain localized evils. As a result of this teaching the mention of India brings up at once the thought of caste and child widows; China, the thought of foot-binding and squeeze; Africa, the thought of polygamy and superstition. But there are other and greater evils cutting right across all peoples, great horizontal strata of life and thought which gird the earth. In these do we find the char- acteristic struggle of our day. There is, for example, the whole subject of in- dustrialism. It is sweeping over the world. Evils held in check by social legislation in the West are often enormously aggravated in countries where capitalistic industry is a recent introduction. If the Church does not make a systematic effort to think out the application of Christianity to this problem, countries in the first stages of industrial transformation will to that extent discount _ Christianity. As one thinks of the extension to the 122. WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS millions in India, China and Africa of western _industrialism in its selfish acquisitive form, one be- gins to see what a menace to humanity lies in the purely materialistic development of resources. Here then is a continent that should be entered. Just as Judson and Livingstone and Morrison pressed into geographical areas to make Jesus known, so we should send men and women into the area of social maladjustment to bring His way to bear upon the problem. There are other great continents where He is hardly known—competitive nationalism, race pre]j- udice and pride, the ready resort to war, ignorance, :overty. In each of these the whole world lives, so that the modern call is not primarily in terms of a Christian West going to the help of the non- Christian continents of the East. Rather is the call for the forces of Christian idealism wherever they are found to join issue with the forces of selfish- ness and cruelty and sin throughout the world. The modern Christian enterprise asks us to be- hold, runr 1g transversely right across the human race, those elements of selfishness and material- ism which keep the Kingdom from manifestation. The mighty human attitudes and habits which can block the realization of a better world cannot help but be a concern of missions. Only a religion that sets itself to solve these problems can win the reverence of mankind. II One hundred and fifty years ago Africa and Japan and China were almost unknown lands to OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 123 us. Their peoples and their problems and the ways in which we could help could not be pic- tured with exactness. And yet our forefathers began one of the most amazing and effective move- ments in human history. Carey, the cobbler, stirred his generation with “Expect great things from God —attempt great things for God.” Henry Martyn, in the employ of a trading company, reached India and exclaimed, “Now let me burn out for God.” Vision, sacrifice, faith, love characterized the noble succession of men and women who made the mis- sionary movement during its predominantly geographic period. Can we not do for our day and generation what those venturesome God-filled spirits did for theirs? Are the continents which we should enter in order to release the spirit of Jesus more ill- defined and therefore harder to vision? Are gov- ernments today any more opposed to Christians being dead in earnest for justice and goodwill between the nations than in 1706 was a _ political officer opposed to the delicate Ziegenbalg’s landing at Tranquebar? Are the exploitive capitalistic corporations of today stronger or more opposed to reformation than was the East Indian Company opposed to Carey’s landing at Calcutta? Are any of us likely to face harder racial situations than did the first Protestant missionary to China? There are great pioneering tasks in the applica- tion of Christianity to the economic, social, political and international aspects of life which call to us today. 124 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS If missionary zeal for occupying areas of mod- ern thought and activity for Christ could possess our hearts and wills comparable to the mighty impulse which fifty years ago sent man after man to give his life in Africa this would be a different world. There would be a spiritual awakening, also, for only as Christianity grapples with con- temporary tasks will its vitality, truth, and power convince. The one great way to a new faith in God and man is to give up the familiar but too long accepted geographical boundaries of our task and attempt with corporate faith and in Christ’s spirit of adventure the humanly impossible for our day. There are resources that become available only to great outreachings of faith. Possibly we need new terminology, for the spirit of missions is far larger than societies which take that name. We do not want the absence of a familiar label to blind us to those great streams which, apart from ecclesiastical institutionalism and organizational regularity, are helping on the Kingdom. The essential characteristic of missions does not reside in the society under which it is carried on, nor in certain commissioning cere- monies of the Church, nor in any particular activity that is taken up, but in spirit and in pur- pose. The essence of the missionary spirit is the desire to do good to all men as we have the opportunity, so that every form or type of service which ministers to man’s well-being can on principle be included in the missionary move- ment. OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 125 Iil There are many signs that a reinterpretation of the missionary movement is at hand. Perhaps it is not too much to say that it must come if the present student generation is to be won to what has been so great an enterprise. The oncoming generation is almost on tip-toe to give itself with abandon to heroic service. We have the option of attempting to gear this groping optimism and idealism up to our familiar missionary program, or of expanding the program to enlist fresh tides of the Christ-life surging into the lives of men. One gets the impression that students vaguely sense the inevitableness of this transition, and are grasping with increasing clearness the new insight —that if the Christian witness is to be borne effec- tively, it must express itself in relation to the great moral issues affecting the social and national life of our day. Both in Britain and America they are uniting their study of missionary problems with home social problems and international prob- lems as they did not do even two years ago. No missionary program will enlist their interest which centers on the “occupation” of far-off continents and leaves out of consideration the major con- cerns affecting our whole generation. Let us chal- lenge the oncoming youth with the immensely difficult and (to some) apparently impossible task that confronts this generation. Symptomic of this change was the widened scope of the program of the last Student Volunteer Quadrennial Convention where matters concern- 126 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS ing “the evangelization of the world in this gen- eration” shared attention with such themes as racial relations, industrial democracy, social re- construction, and those international problems which lead to war. It cannot be said that there is general approval among the leaders that such present-day basic human problems should be in- cluded as an integral part of the program of a foreign missionary convention. But.there is un- doubtedly a strong body of eager thinkers who whole-heartedly desire that the concept of the word “missionary” should include an intimate re- lationship to the great moral and Christian issues which now confront all peoples regardless of national lines. There are certainly student centers where those missionary leaders who wish to hold the interest of students must prove to them that they know world problems and can speak the language of international discussion. With this constituency missions will suffer if one man pre- sents “world problems” and another presents “missions.” The tendency, among students, to give up think- ing of the world as made up of geographic com- partments, is still further seen in a restlessness over the distinction between home and foreign missions. Unity of the work throughout the world seems to many a more significant thing than any geographically differentiating aspects of the mis- sionary vocation. Hence, many prefer that calls to service should be in terms of the greatest need for the whole world, for God’s plan for the indi- vidual in relation to His whole Kingdom, rather OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 127 than for foreign missions as a geographically dif- ferentiated area. Wireless, the long distance tele- phone, and the aeroplane will soon make com- munication with the more distant field as quick as now with the nearest home-mission station. What need then, they say, for an administrative distinction? The whole world is the mission field; and if a person serves at all he serves in the mis- sion field. The significant difference is that the opportunities in some places are more strategic than at others, or the needs are greater, or the Christian communities are younger and less ex- perienced or equipped. The separate appeal for a separate destination is in danger of making the decision as to type and place of vocation seem fundamental rather than whether the Christian ideal shall absolutely guide at every stage. Doubt- less from an administrative standpoint most Churches will continue to make a distinction be- tween home and foreign missions, for this is an age of specialization.. But in the reorientation of our missionary policy this restlessness at a distinction in thought between mission lands and non-mission lands must be taken into consideration. Significant of this new conception of missions is the fact that within a twelvemonth four books? on race have appeared from distinctly mission sources—one as part of the preparation for the recent Student Volunteer Quadrennial at Indian- *“Racial Relations and the Christian Ideal”; Basil Mat- thews, “The Clash of Color’; Oldham, J. H., “Christianity and the Race Problem”; Speer, R. E., “Race and Race Relations.” 128 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS apolis, a second from one of the most versatile and facile interpreters of modern missions, and a major volume from each of the two foremost mis- sionary leaders of Great Britain and America. The new conditions of a modern shrunken world have made racial antipathies a major issue. It seems plain that those who are most possessed by the missionary spirit do not propose abandoning this dark continent in human relationships to be in- terpreted by Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant. IV Missionary organizations now in existence are unquestionably feeling out toward the larger serv- ice. Something that might become a transition to an oncoming stage of missions is already under way. In this more specifically missionary realm, a most significant fact is the increasing develop- ment since 1910 of strong national and _ inter- national organizations, enabling the far flung enterprise of missions to speak authoritatively with a single voice, and making possible new and powerful means for embodying international goodwill. Probably few supporters of missions are aware of the international services being rendered by the top coordinating missionary body in the United States—the Foreign Missions Conference of North America—through its subcommittee on Missions and Governments. Through its action Dr. James L. Barton was sent to attend the Premiers’ Confer- / OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 129 ence in London in order to bring to the attention of the representatives of the governments con- cerned the best interests of the Near East. The same Board Secretary was sent to the Lausanne Conference, again in behalf of the Near East, as an “observer” technically so-called. Missionary organizations are large enough and influential enough to obtain a hearing, directly or indirectly, at many an international conference. When proposals looking toward the reintroduc- tion of opium into China were made, this sub- committee Joined with other bodies in bringing these plans to the attention of the various Govern- ments in the West and of the missionaries on the field, in order that the utmost possible endeavor might be made to combat the restoration of the ' opium traffic. In 1922 the secretary of the Foreign Missions Conference participated in an important conference in London at which the international aspects of the opium traffic were considered. Ac- tion was taken also when, as a result of prohibition legislation in the United States, it was proposed to transfer breweries to lands in which missions work. Because narcotic drugs are so often produced in mission areas, and because people in China, India, and other lands suffer so greatly from the misuse of these drugs, missionary societies are deeply interested in limiting their production and use to medicinal and scientific purposes. Their in- fluence has been brought to bear upon the Con- gress of the United States to stimulate action which will make possible the continued participation of 130 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS © American delegates in international conferences dealing with these evils. .. The Foreign Missions Conference nominated two of a committee of five appointed to administer a fund of approximately a million dollars to be ex- pended in China for the prevention of future famines. : It is the custom of the Committee on Missions and Governments to take advantage of opportuni- ties to bring officials and other representatives of foreign governments into contact with officers and members of mission boards. Such social confer- ences have been arranged, for example, with the representatives of the Educational Commission, sent from the Province of Kiangsu, China, to the United States, with Minister Schurman before he sailed for China, and with a delegation of busi- ness men from Japan. A -deputation, representing foreign mission boards, was sent to confer with the Secretary of State at Washington in order to urge the appoint- ment of representative citizens of character and ability to consular and diplomatic positions. The similar coérdinating missionary body in Britain led a quiet but very effective movement to safeguard labor conditions in Africa. Govern- ment regulations which seriously endangered the independence of the laborer had been issued. As a result of this action a statement was issued mak- ing clear and unambiguous the disinterested and impartial position of officers of government in re- gard to both employees of labor and native laborers. OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 131 As a result of a carefully prepared memorandum sent to the Colonial Office by the British mis- sionary societies, a conference attended by five governors was held on education in Africa. The result was that, while heretofore Government has done little toward the education of Africa, it did appoint: an Advisory Committee on Native Education in British Tropical African Dependen- cies, which has initiated new and constructive measures. Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones, who has been chairman of two educational commissions to Africa, speaks of this step as probably the most significant movement for education in Africa in many years. The Advisory Committee hopes “to explore the experience of the world as to what is the best and most helpful form and type of educa- tion that we can give to the Africans for the pur- pose of giving light to New Africa.” Mr. J. H. Oldham, Secretary of the International Missionary Council, was asked to serve on this committee. His close touch with missionary agencies in America, Great Britain, and the European continent, and his study of British colonial activities, especially those concerned with race, education and the welfare of the people, have prepared him to render im- portant service on this committee. Together the missionary societies of Great Bri- tain and America have sent educational commis- sions to India, to China and to Africa, with the primary purpose of discovering how the Christian forces of the West can best contribute to the solu- tion of the educational problems of these lands. 132. WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS They worked together, also, in connection with the drafting of the mandates of the League of Nations which undoubtedly expressed a new spirit on the part of nations and their governments in relation to colonies that may come under their control. The clauses in the mandates of the League which guarantee religious liberty and as- sure missionary freedom were written into those mandates in the first place through the coopera- tive efforts of the missionary societies of Great Britain and America working through the Inter- national Missionary Council. At the meeting of the Council of the League of Nations in 1922 Lord Balfour explained that the final wording in the clauses in the “A” and “B” mandates was a word- ing written by the Department of State at Wash- ington into its treaty with Japan in regard to the island of Yap, an action taken by the Department of State in response to recommendations made by a committee of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America.’ The International Missionary Council stands for the protection of the great common rights of humanity. One of its secretaries took a most active part in the victorious struggle to prevent the establishment of forced labor in British East Africa, referred to above. We are told that they are facing more serious situations in Portuguese Africa, and that the time is rapidly approaching when mission forces will have to make a united ?Warnshuis, Dr. A. L., Report of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1923, p. 75. OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 133 and determined protest against the conditions maintained there.® The same type of action is being encouraged on the part of proper bodies on the field. The mis- sionary forces in China, in Japan, and in India have joined with the Churches in forming what are called National Christian Councils. One minor object in equipping these Councils with a staff of full-time secretaries is that they may be able to collect the facts and consider the principles on the basis of which in the name of the whole Christian movement may be given the Christian view con- concerning great public questions in which right and wrong are at issue. The National Christian Council of India, meet- ing in 1920, at a time when men’s minds were deeply moved and passions were excited to a dangerous degree, placed on record their convic- tion that any Christian view of the situation in the world at large at that time, and in India in particular, must take account of certain principles, eight of which they proceeded to formulate.* This Council has long been at work on a new draft for a new Indian Christian Marriage Act, and on a Legal Hand Book. The National Christian Council of China has as one of its definite objects the “progressive study of the mind and will of God in relation to the ful- filling cf His purpose in China.” The National Christian Conference in Shanghai, 1922, pledged * Ibid., 1924, p. 71. *Proceedings of the National Missionary Council, Cal- cutta, Nov. 11-16, 1920, p. 30. 134 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS the Christian Church to direct responsibility for better labor standards in Chinese industry. The Council’s Committee on the Church and Industrial and Economic Problems was asked to carry out the intent of this pledge. Problems of child labor, industrial hygiene, living wage, and social legisla- tion are being taken up. The Council has had, also, a committee on the Social Application of Christianity, later called Social and Moral Wel- fare Committee. Two of the four subjects chosen ' for study during 1923-1924 by China’s National Christian Council were the Christian approach to the industrialization of China and China’s inter- national expression. We will make no attempt here to review the more familiar social work carried on by the regular mission societies—colleges of agriculture and forestry, schools of industry and engineering, seri-culture and institutional churches, cooperative credit socicties, and the study of erosion and floods along the Yellow River. Nothing pertaining to human welfare and achievable with available resources has been considered outside the scope of missionary effort. Of the 353 international organizations now in existence not one can compare with the missionary movement for long-continued, persistent world service. There has been a constant tendency to enlarge the purpose of the missionary enterprise. Conspicuous and convincing expressions of the spirit of friendly helpfulness and of the ability to render worth- while service have been given in all parts of the world. OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 135 The illustrations given in this section will help us to see how our present missionary organizations, although still dominated by the attitudes and patterns of the earlier geographic period, recog- nize that the larger needs must be met. In fact, if they were blind to the new continents that have been here suggested, people would question their qualifications for entering the old for Christ. Vv In the reinterpretation of missions that is going on certain things will be kept in mind. There is certainly urgency in the need for Christians to enter with greater power the great transverse areas of human activity today. But it would be a tremendous step backwards if we lost the sharp edge of the present emphasis on making Jesus Christ known to all mankind. The problem of individual redemption still stands as one of the basic problems in the recovery of the world. There are, thank God, men and women whose hearts will never be at rest as long as there are people who have not heard of Him. It is as vital as ever, therefore, to take Christ’s love to everybody every- where. We are simply more consciously and aggressively yearning to permeate with His spirit every relationship in every aspect of life. The gospel is to be taken not only to the whole world but also to the whole of life. But do we possess the spiritual vitality to do both these things? Is there not a very great danger lest modern missions sub- stitute social ministrations for personal redemp- 136 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS tion, instead of letting them supplement one another? Even from the older standpoint, however, it is an ~ arresting fact that there are psychological obstacles to reaching another people that may be as balking as geographical obstacles were in the days of Morrison or Livingstone. Such things as_ the Amritsar Tragedy, or the way in which the United States Senate went about changing the conditions for Japanese immigration may close mental doors as effectually as ever ports were closed. It is short sighted for us to send missionaries for the geo- graphical occupation of continents, and to leave great areas of human thought and _ activity un- evangelized. Secondly, we have learned that it is only through steady, close, continuous, constructive study that Christian solutions can be worked out for the kinds of problems we are facing. Loyal to the scientific © spirit of our age, the facts would have first to be assembled and then made known. This must be done on a scale rarely attempted by missionary societies of the present denominational type. This has been recognized in the establishment of the Institute of Social and Religious Research with a large annual budget. We see the same careful processes of exhaustive surveys, thorough expert consideration, follow-through, and checking up in the Rockefeller Boards, such as the Chinese Medical Board, or the Health Board. Something no less thorough will be needed when Christians take up in earnest the task of studying, locating, OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 137 and eradicating the social, national and inter- national sins of our day. One of the essential conditions of success in problems so difficult and complex (aside from the prayerful appropriation of the limitless resources of God) would be the careful organization of research on the basis of which the Christian way of life might be determined in any given situation. For the application of Christian principles to complex conditions is difficult, and only harm is done where the authority of the Christian name is applied to ill-considered and _ unscientific solutions. In the realm of international relations proposals, such as the Permanent Court of Inter- national Justice, the League of Nations, or an international treaty to outlaw war, not only have to be originated but they have to be studied, appraised and acted upon. World Christians are called to study relentlessly the implications of Christian principles for each problem. Students, therefore, must be raised up of such character and knowledge that they will be able to grapple with the problems which must be solved if we are to get a better world. Another condition of success will be the Systematic development of a Christian public opinion. On the basis of data impartially gathered by research, people can be helped to formulate their Christian ethic on vital social, economic, and political issues: All can help to create an at- mosphere which will go far toward making possible decisions that are wise and right. 138 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Still another condition of success will be the training of Christian leaders for those professions or those services, whether public or private, which most materially affect the evolution of the nation’s social, industrial and political life, and which exert the greatest influence on public opinion.® We may well remember that it is not only in Britain and America that men should be able to consecrate their brains to a Christian world order. There must be groups of such thinkers in every land. Here Christian missions have a great oppor- tunity, since they have so large a place in the education of the youth of these peoples. The very fact that this education is Christian ought to help them to concentrate on the primary conflict—not East versus West, not Christianity versus some non-Christian religion, but right versus wrong in the concrete relations of industry, race and politics. Christian missions may well incorporate in their aim that there shall be in each nation a group yearning to discover and to make articulate the Christian Gospel for national and international life. They may well undertake to raise up a constituency in each land who will be convinced that the peace which all the world so woefully needs is the fruit not of balanced self-interest but of mutual respect, love, and passion for service. Into the whole developing fabric of the Church on the field should be woven principles of Christian internationalism and interracialism. *“Christian Education in China,” p. 220. OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 139 VI Is it wise for denominationally organized mis- sionary societies to attempt a radical readjustment of their missionary policies so as to give as much attention to occupying for Christ great areas of human thought and aetivity, as to seeking in- dividual converts in other hemispheres? Or shall they concentrate on the specific task of making Jesus known in the more usual evangelistic sense? Shall they attempt to “send” people into whatever area of thought or world that seems most needy, or shall they acknowledge that they can cover but a sector of the missionary outreach in the larger sense, and hence share with other agencies of the Church, or with extra-Church organizations, the glory and privilege of what in the truest sense can be called missionary service? Are the $44,000,000 annually given for missions in the United States and Canada most wisely spent through 236 separate societies? Or will nothing less than an interdenominational and international agency have the outlook for the larger work? No one knows the answer to these questions, nor can anticipate all the adjustments that would be involved in connecting the thought of missions with a greatly broadened scope. We are living in a time when earnest people are doing a great deal of rethinking and restating. A remarkable series of national and international conferences is evidence of a widespread search for a new way. C.0.P.E.C. has just been held. The Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work will be 140 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS held in Stockholm in 1925; The World Conference on Faith and Order, in Europe or Jerusalem, in 1927; The National Conference on the Christian Way of Life, in America, possibly in 1926. Among a score of Christian international organizations Jet us just recall a few—The Church Peace Union, The World Alliance for International Friendship throughout the Churches, The International Fed- eration of Christian Women, The International Congress of Religious Liberals, the Commission on International Justice and Goodwill. Manifestly the courageous assumption of the newer and larger obligations of making Jesus known in a modern world is no small task. Conscious of our weakness we turn to God who promised, “Behold, I will do a new thing.” Manifestly there are forces outside the Church through which God is working. If our denomi- national societies remain unchanged, they will undoubtedly continue to be important factors in the missionary enterprise; but the enterprise it- self will be far larger than the societies. Chris- tians in many walks of life will become aware that as the Father sent Christ into the world, even so has He sent them. And when they stop working for themselves and devote themselves to God’s purpose for the world they are missionaries and should be recognized as such. In the meantime all who are loyal to the mission- ary enterprise will take care not to be so busy getting more men and more money for the work which is being done now, that they will not have time to catch God’s leading in new ways. They OCCUPATION OF NEW CONTINENTS 141 will sympathetically recognize that the extent of the work that can be done by our present boards cannot be determined on any a priori basis, since account must be taken of available resources, both human and financial. Furthermore our present coordinating national-and international societies have no independent incomes of their own, and hence must not act so fast as to lose the confidence of any large portion of their constituency. Re- sponsible board officers dare not lightly experi- ment with their organizations, for they must raise millions of dollars each year or else cripple num- berless institutions in all parts of the world and fail thousands of men and women who have gone forth trusting to them for support. We do not have to answer all the questions raised in this chapter now. But we are living in a rapidly changing world; new forces are at work; and world-wide efforts at readjustment are being made. This chapter may help to give that back- ground against which we can attempt the readjust- ments that most concern us as each concrete decision comes before us. Along this road the missionary enterprise will retain that challenge to great adventure which characterized the geo- graphic period. CHAPTER VIII FACING THE HANDICAP OF A DIVIDED CHURCH WE have been considering a natural extension of the missionary enterprise—the vast unoccupied areas of thought and activity into which men and women should be sent to make Christ known. Plainly such problems are too vast for any one denomination. I But even in the task to which the Church has already set itself—the older form of the missionary enterprise—we have to face a mighty handicap in a divided Church. The need for adjustment becomes glaring when once we see ourselves propagating division abroad with divided strategy and com- petitive equipment. Even where there is little overlapping territorially, it is inevitable that work should develop out of balance under this system. _ No unified administration of common resources in men and money would have sanctioned the pres- ent distribution of schools and colleges, or the present relative neglect of Christian literature, or inefficiency at a dozen other places. We are pour- ing annually a series of parallel streams of man- and money-power into the mission fields. ‘rhe high intent is acknowledged. But no unpreju- 142 FACING A DIVIDED CHURCH 143 diced person can fail to see that if the streams were combined on reaching a given country and were redistributed under unified control the Christian movement would be immensely more ef- fective. As long as policies are planned separately by scores of independent societies defects in administration are inevitable. Long-continued familiarity with this situation has dulled our sense of fitness. Otherwise we would be shocked at the sight of hundreds of separate agencies going forth to evangelize the world. ; To take one specific situation, we may note that there are sixteen Christian colleges in China. They were built up when, on the one hand, com- munication was difficult and there was some ex- cuse for multiplying local institutions of higher grade. But on the other hand, one contributing cause was that they were founded in a period when there was great emphasis on denominations, and when the foreign mission rather than the Chi- nese Church was centric. The recent Commission on Education in China stands four-square against a continuation of this enlarged and competitive system. i Institutions, missions, and denominations seem to find it hard to manifest as organizations the quality of self-sacrifice even unto death that has marked the individual missionary from the be- ginning. Consecration on an institutional scale is needed, for wherever Christianity becomes vocal abroad the leaders say they do not want our de- 144 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS nominationalism. A discussion in the National Christian Council of India, in 1923, brought to ‘light a wide-spread impatiencé, almost a resent- ment, at the sectarian divisions which Christian missions have transplanted from the West into the Indian Church. As far as India is concerned, her leaders say that these distinctions are mean- ingless, a burden grievous to be borne. Commission II of China’s National Christian Conference, 1922, says that “difficulty will be found in the defense of foreign denominationalism which, in some measure, however slight, diverts the atten- tion of the Chinese Church from the essential ele- ments of Christianity,’ and Commission V says that it would “urge the importance of all Chris- tians getting beyond those denominational predi- lections which have been introduced to China along with Christianity.” The significance of these statements lies in the fact that they represent the highest authoritative Christian bodies in two great mission fields. In the nineteenth century the Gospel reached China, India, and Japan from Palestine via England and America, so that our denominationalism traveled with it. National leaders are insisting that the twentieth century shall see that Gospel acclimated without some of our western conceptions of it. They are calling upon us to make the reality of our oneness in Christ as obvious as at present is our scct-mindedness. It is plain that missions of the future simply must find a way of co6dperative approach that will not offend the awakened consciousness of intelli- FACING A DIVIDED CHURCH 145 gent citizens of other lands. For they cannot see that any denominational line in Protestantism co- incides with a live issue in their lives. When talk- ing frankly Christian national leaders abroad tell us that the impression often given is that a mis- sionary’s denomination has sent him out to work for its extension rather than for the development of Christianity itself. Instead of unquestionably serving the needs of China or India or South America, we ofttimes seem to be serving the ends of sectarian ecclesiasticism, and to be perpetuating divisions created for reasons which long ago ceased to be in force. There is danger in postponing action. For we may so indoctrinate the young Churches abroad with the spirit of denominationalism that they will not want to give it up. An American society re- cently sent a deputation to Japan to suggest the union of Japanese Christians connected with this society and Christians of another denomination. The boards concerned were ready, the missionaries were ready, but the Japanese did not want to take the step. In fact, in Japan, unlike China, western denominationalism seems to have become accli- mated. In Mexico, also, we have for fifty years been in the business of making denominational- ists, so that when the time seemed ripe for making - a national Church it was not the missionaries who opposed the measures, but the Mexican Protestant Christians. Similarly it is said that in South India (in spite of the existence of the South India United Church) many Indian Christians are more anxious to preserve the distinctive existence of their de- 146 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS nominations than are the missionaries. Perhaps the reason may be that in the South the Christian communities have been longer organized and developed, and hence there has been more oppor- tunity for our western divisions to become stereo- typed, and for the spirit of disunion to become naturalized and endemic. iil Let us look at this question from the standpoint of nationals. The Chinese, for instance, behold a recently made map of the missionary occupation of their land, in which it is shown with graphic exactness that 74 per cent of China’s territory has been partitioned into 200 spheres of denomina- tional influence. Different churches and missions have staked out areas in which they may propa- gate their own type of institutions. Like their political counterparts these spheres of influence were not primarily made for China’s good, but to make it unnecessary for outsiders to fight over conflicting interests. A patriotic Chinese asks why a family in a given city must be Methodist or Pres- byterian because the policy of foreign groups has recognized this area as the exclusive preserve of a particular denomination or society. China will no more submit to a partitioning of her Church among western denominations than a partition- ment of her territory among western nations. If we pause, we can catch in imagination the sense almost of despair that comes to the Chinese as they seek to erect on the foundations we have laid FACING A DIVIDED CHURCH 147 a Church that shall be truly Chinese as well as truly Christian. In 1915 the missionaries of Mexico, unable to continue their labors in that’ country for a time, met in conference in Cincinnati with representa- tives of the boards concerned, and a very states- manlike re-division of Mexico was made. Real denominational sacrifice was manifested. Terri- tory that had long been Methodist or Baptist or Presbyterian was given up, and the equipment and converts were turned over to another society, in order that the work of each might be more uni- fied. Fine as this was from the standpoint of foreign bodies sitting at Cincinnati, how does it appear to Mexicans? Can you put yourself in their place, and imagine how we would like our whole Church connections to be changed by a set of independent societies meeting in Paris or Peking? It is from this angle that our divisions and rivalries seem not only unfortunate, but crim- inal, when arbitrarily imposed on other people. This is an age which is manifesting a deep longing for a union of the Christian forces. A little imagination will enable us to see that denominationalism presents a very different prob- lem to the receiving country than to the sending country. Conscious of their own generous impulses and confident of the value of their distinctive message the sending sects do not feel the need to give much consideration to their rivals. Not so with the receiving lands. If threescore forms of Christianity come to them, of necessity the problem 148 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS is forced on them to consider which is best. Each denomination has its peculiar temperament, special policy, or emphasis in teaching. This, so one of the foremost Chinese Christian leaders tells us, has confused the minds of the simple believers of the Orient. Ethically we may well consider whether it is right for us to go ahead unconcern- edly with a divided, competitive approach which forces on them our problem of disunion. Ought not the sending societies, also, to concern them- selves more seriously at their source with this problem in some definite and aggressive way, and not leave it all to the immature native Churches? We are supposed to have the more mature Chris- tian experience. But are the sending Christians of the West aggressively grappling with this problem? The demand from abroad, however, cuts deeper than denominationalism. In 1923, a conference on theological education was held in China. All shades of western theological thought were repre- sented. A friend writing about this conference said: “The net amount of constructive plans and resolutions was not great, but it may be regarded as a very real accomplishment to have assembled that group representing such divergent views, and to have their representatives look into each other’s faces, hear each other’s voices, and to eat, sing, and pray together.” What a consummation this, on the part of ambassadors sent forth by western Churches to make Jesus Christ known to China— the triumph of having eaten, sung, and prayed FACING A DIVIDED CHURCH 149 together! The Chinese delegates, a majority, were impressed as never before with the way in which theological controversy blocks the progress of the Christian enterprise. Is it any wonder that one of them publicly confessed his conviction that if the atmosphere must be one of such suspicion the time had come when continued control by mis- sionaries is simply delaying the greater progress of the Kingdom of God in China? Let us not mistake the point in this illustration. It is not meant as a condemnation of these mis- sionaries in China, but of a western Church which brought them up in an atmosphere that made an over-emphasis on doctrines seem normal. Would that western Christians could catch the perspective that comes from actual contact with other relig- ions—from seeing human folk of many lands as they face life’s present and life’s future with the religion they now have. Here are the Vedantists of India who repudiate all personality in God, and who confidently claim that you can make no single affirmation of their Absolute, except that it is not this or that. Here are the Muhammadans, with whom we have much in common, but whose God is a far-off transcendent potentate before whom Moslem foreheads touch the dust five times a day. There are Buddhists, Confucianists, and Zoroastrians. Faced with such differences, it would be supposed that all those who find, in Jesus, God manifest in the flesh, would be able to lay aside minor differences for the sake of most effectively sharing our good news. 150 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS IV Most missionaries would repudiate the idea that they go forth to reproduce and perpetuate in lands afar the ecclestiastical and doctrinal differences that have been the cause of so much strife in our home churches. They realize that distinctions which have meant much to us in the past may have no meaning to Oriental and African Christians. Very few people at home realize the extent to which active codperation abroad is now carried. Ten out of the thirteen schools classified as “theo- logical seminaries” in the China Survey are union schools—a situation without parallel in any other part of the world. Almost every year sees the inauguration of some new scheme for a “union” institution. There are seventy union educational institutions in China alone. Churches belonging to the same denominational family have in many areas come together. Fur- thermore, Churches of closely allied systems of government have in a few cases come together. The outstanding example is the “South India United Church” which is made up of the Presby- terian and Congregational churches founded by the United Free Church of Scotland, the Reformed Church in America, the London Missionary Society, and the American Board of Commission- *For example the churches that have resulted from the missionary work of five Presbyterian and Reformed Churches are united in the “Church of Christ” in Japan. The Methodist Church in Japan is a union of the churches established by the Methodists of the United States, North and South, and of Canada as well. Similar movements are found in Korea, China, India, Brazil, and Mexico. FACING A DIVIDED CHURCH 151 ers for Foreign Missions. A still more difficult kind of union is being attempted in several areas where Churches that differ not only in forms of government but also in their doctrines relating to the sacraments and the Christian ministry are planning to unite.’ A striking instance of triumphing over denom- inationalism is found in the work at Santo Domingo where four boards pool their resources for the whole area instead of agreeing to comity ona geographical basis. They thus make a unified approach so that converts are admitted into the evangelical church and hear nothing of the sec- tarian divisions back of the work. A similar development exists in Iraq where five denomina- tions work through a unified board. Twenty-eight missionary societies are represented on the Com- mittee of Cooperation in Latin America. In Leyden, Holland, four large societies have combined their secretarial staffs in a common Missionary Bureau. Larger evidences of the desire to overcome the handicap of sectarianism in mission activities are seen in the national coor- dinating organizations found not only in various western lands but in China, Japan, India, and in Western Asia and Northern Africa. Especially since 1910 have such organizations developed with budgets and staffs of whole-time officers. *Viz., the South India United Church and the Anglican Church, and in Kenya Colony in East Africa the Kikuya Alliance of Missionary Societies which includes mission- aries of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), the Church Missionary Society (Anglican), the African In- land Mission (undenominational) and others. 152. WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS As a matter of fact, more has been achieved in Asia and in Latin America in reuniting the Churches than in North America or Europe. The members of these new Churches, surrounded by vast non-Christian populations, feel their essen- tial unity much more than we do. Here in Amer- ica, confronted as we are with the task of bringing the Christ-attitude into the problems of race and industry, we should feel a similar necessity to put first things first. We western Christians firmly believe that Christ is the hope of the race, and that this has been demonstrated by the transformations wrought in individual life and in the structure of society wherever He has been accepted and His principles have been courageously acted upon. And yet we allow our sectarian differences to endanger the sharing of our Savior. Should we not let the words of a brilliant Chinese, as spoken for the Church in China, affect our poli- cies: “We agree to differ, we resolve to love, we unite to serve”? But we have not done enough. It is evident that an unmistakable demand from abroad comes to western Christians. They are asked to get beyond denominational rivalry and disunion, or at least to cease to set up sectarian division on the field. If thirty Presbyterian Chinese move into a Luth- eran area, are western Lutherans to encourage the Church of that area to insist that the newcomers submit to Lutheran discipline? If certain Baptist Chinese move into a Disciple area (as occurred recently) are we going to encourage the Chinese Church of that area to recognize that their new FACING A DIVIDED CHURCH 153 friends have the essentials, or shall we threaten cessation of financial support if they do not make the newcomers conform in what most would call unessentials. Will the supporters of missions con- tinue to support Christian work even if it is not called by their sectarian name? Will denomina- tions and institutions manifest the degree of self- sacrifice that has characterized individual mission- aries in the past? The way in which such questions are answered and the extent to which we recognize the profound necessity of inter-mission and inter-denominational policy will do much to make or mar the work of foreign missions during the next generation. Some say that church members need no educa- tion in this element of reconstruction in modern missions—that the trouble comes from further up. Certain it is, however, that there is evidence that an ever-growing number of young minds are becoming increasingly impatient with divisive forces in western Christianity and are looking for a federation in action which will make possible the freest possible assistance in building up in each land a Church with such organization and practice as shall be consonant with the genius of that nation. - CHAPTER IX yeniees WAY TO NATIONALS I Most missionaries would assent to the proposi- tion that the vigor, spontaneity, and living power of the Church in any land are matters of abso- lutely incalculable importance in the work of establishing the Christian way of life in any land. Already Christianity’s most effective witness is passing out of the hands of missionaries. The time is at hand when India, and China, and Japan are going to be influenced to accept the Christ way of life primarily by the witness of their own peoples. Friends from the West will still be most urgently needed to help, to counsel, to train, to educate, to share experience and aspiration. But the Church of the land will be centric—all foreign agents will be helpers. Already in the more ad- vanced areas we go over—unlike Carey, Morrison, and Verbeck—not to establish a Church, but to cooperate with a Church already established and srowing. We now see clearly that the Church that shall be able through Christ to redeem and enrich a given land must be indigenous, acclimated, nat- uralized to that particular land, striking its roots 154 j GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 155 deep into the soil of the national life. It is not enough that the Church be Christian; it should be Indian, or Japanese, or African. Otherwise the Church would be an exotic, transplanted move- ment lacking real depth and distinctive character. It must be suited to the mentality, genius and spirit of its people. A Brahman once said to a Christian leader, “As long as the ax-head of Chris- tianity has a handle of foreign wood, we have nothing to fear. But when the handle is made of domestic wood, danger is near.” We may lead men to the well of life, but we do not need to prescribe with what vesseis they shall draw from that well. The westerner may want a clean trans- parent glass; the Indian may want his fire-cleansed and polished brass lota. An analogy for the relation of the outer indi- genous dress to the inner Christian core of religion has been found by a recent traveler in China.t_ The Lin Ying Temple near Hangchow had been destroyed by fire. The governor of the prov- ince sent for Captain Robert Dollar, and said, “I want you to go to the United States and bring back sixteen of the biggest trees that grow there for use in the rebuilding of this temple.” This was done. When the traveler visited the temple, the bark of the Oregon pinc trees, now stately temple pillars, had been removed, and the pillars had been covered with red, Chinese lacquer. He saw no trademark of an American lumber com- pany on them, but on the other hand did see aS te Missions Conference of North America, 1922, pp. “0. 156 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS inscriptions in Chinese characters. As he gazed, he exclaimed, “I would to God that the Christian religion were so practiced in America that the Chinese would send over for it, just as they have sent to find the best trees in all the world.” The pillars caused the added reflection, “Here they have taken American pine trees, they have re- moved the bark, they have covered the smooth surfaces with Chinese lacquer, and they have dec- orated them with Chinese inscriptions. There is nothing to suggest an American origin; but these pillars constitute noi only the glory but the strength of the great temple.” Surely we may have such confidence in the Christ that we will be willing to release Him among men everywhere, to be the strength of their lives, even though they do not retain the bark of our western ecclesiasticism, and although they may adopt superscriptions differing from our own, which will best express their adoration and devo- tion. Increasingly we may expect to see rapid strides made in the adaptation of prayers and rites, festivals and sacraments, architecture and all ecclesiastical symbols to the habits of thought, forms, and customs of the people, i. e., in what some call the Indianization or Chinification of the Church. II In actual fact the Churches abroad are rapidly becoming the most efficient factors in the Chris- tian propaganda. In such lands as China, Japan, and India indigenous Christian movements have GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 157 developed with ever-expanding staffs of able leaders. Among the nationals of many lands are to be found Christian workers who in spirit and capacity are fully the equals of the missionaries sent to them. Christian leaders, while few nu- merically, are often of great influence and are becoming powerful factors in re-shaping national life, not only through their personal faith and char- acter, but also through their social life and ideals. Let us look at the Church in China, for example. The number of Christians in China has quadrupled since 1900, and what is more important than numbers, their leaders are earnestly working that it should be an indigenous Church, true to the genius of China, without any slavish copying of the West. It raises annually about $1,500,000— about one-tenth as much as is sent to China by the various boards. No cause is more heartily received by the Chinese than their inclusive, inter- denominational Home Missionary Society with its twenty-odd missionaries in Yunnan. In May, 1922, there was held in Shanghai a National Christian Conference that marks the be- ginning of a new era in all Christian enterprise in China. Twelve hundred delegates were present, more than half of whom were Chinese—the very flower of the Chinese Church, distinctly and whole- heartedly Chinese-centric. Some of these Chinese delegates were men who represent the highest branches of scholarship—men with degrees in divinity or literature, philosophy or medicine, from such Universities as Harvard, Yale, Colum- bia, or Edinburgh. There were Chinese delegates 158 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS who: could speak English better than the mission- aries present could speak Chinese; and they stood up to take part in the debate with an ease, self- possession, and command of language that filled many European and American delegates with wonder. There were Chinese members on each of the five Commissions, and the one which brought in the most vital report—the message of the Chinese Church—was composed entirely of Chinese. Apart from the leaders, the contribu- tions of the Chinese to the general discussions were, on the whole, more relevant and competent than those of foreigners. Never before has the Chinese Church entered upon such a conference on an equal footing with the representatives of the missionary societies. The Shanghai Conference of 1890 was entirely composed of missionaries. The great Centenary Conference of 1907 was still a conference of mis- sionaries with a small number of Chinese Chris- tians. Since then things have moved rapidly, and the Chinese Church has grown beyond all expecta- | tion. This assembly was of an entirely different character from the previous ones, being, as its name implies, a National Christian Conference. The Chinese who were present were there, not as employees of the mission boards (although a large number are still supported by western funds), but as colleagues and coworkers with the missionaries —nay, rather as the accredited representatives of the Chinese Church which is steadily keeping before it the ideals of self-support and _ self- government. | GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 159 At this Conference the Christian Church of China adopted a labor standard for China, asking for no child labor under twelve years of age, for one day’s rest in seven, and for provision for the health and safety of workers. Save in the British colony of Hongkong, there is not a law in China of any consequence for the restriction of modern indus- try, which is pouring into the country with the most up-to-date machinery but with almost total disregard of the value of the human life which is to be chained to the machinery. Never before has the Christian Church assumed direct responsibil- ity at so early a stage in the industrialization of a country. That this was done, will be a noble part of the history of the Chinese Church when the records are written. This is only one instance of many that could be given showing that Christians in China are beginning to take great forward steps in applying the spirit and principles of Jesus to the largest social problems of their nation. The National Committee of the Y. M. C. A. in China is made up of seventy-five members, all Chinese. In 1907, Peking had two foreign and one Chinese secretary; in 1923, there were twelve foreign and sixty-four Chinese secretaries. In the Shanghai Association there are thirty-six secre- taries of whom thirty-two are Chinese, and only four are American. The number of American secretaries has not been increased in the past ten years, and they do not expect to increase the num- ber in the future. In 1899 one-half the 102 dele- gates to the student conference were foreigners; in 1911 they numbered only one-sixth; at 1924 160 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS (the twenty-fifth anniversary) the conference was made up largely of Chinese delegates. - Evidence of the realization of the existence and importance of the Churches abroad has already received official embodiment in India, China, and Japan. In 1912-1913 “National Misstonary Coun- cils” were organized in each of these lands. In 1922 the names were changed to “National Christian Councils” in recognition of the large place taken in the evangelization of these lands by their own Christians. It is noteworthy that the recent China Educational Commission sent out by the mission- ary societics of America and Great Britain entitled their report “Christian Education in China.” Missionary education would have implied the presence of the foreigner and at least partial for- eign support, but they were distinctly looking forward to the time when the foreigner will with- draw and leave all the Christian schools to be directed and supported by the Chinese Christian community. Still further indicative of the growing impor- tance of the work of the Churches abroad is the fact that in the World Missionary Atlas just pub- lished the statistical tables completely separate facts concerning “The Church in the Field” from those concerning “Foreign Staff,” even though such a volume still implies the long-standing home-base- and-mission-field conception of propagating Chris- tianity. Yet many of the facts needed for such a volume can now be obtained only from indige- nous socicties and Churches. We are coming to a time where we shall need a World Christian Year GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 161 Book. Such a name would indicate that we feel that Christians in the more advanced areas have graduated from the missionary stage. May not these developing Churches of the East be as sig- nificant in the future as those of France or Britain now are? Certainly no one should generalize about the progress of Christianity in these days and forget that Christendom dces not stop with the boundaries of western nations. lil This change in point of view which makes the indigenous Church centric has not yet completely permeated actual practice. A senior missionary, secretary for his mission, writing a personal let- ter in 1923 was, unfortunately, able to say Not all the missions by any means are inclined to respect the local church authorities, nor to foster the growth of an organized native Church. Quite a number of our men insist on playing the bishop and ignoring the local leaders altogether, ordering native ministers about like subordinates. In many instances where missionaries and mis- sions have really sought the assistance of nationals on questions touching their Church, this sharing of responsibility has depended ultimately on the will and temperament of individual missionaries, and has not been made a matter of right by legis- lation. In the midst of routine work it is easy to overlook the fact that circumstances change, that things are not today as they were thirty years ago or even five years ago. 162 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS The growth of national and racial self-con- sciousness and pride is a striking new factor in present-day missions. Our relations are to an increasingly sensitive national leadership. One is, therefore, regretful but not wholly surprised to have Dr. Cheng Ching Yi, the responsible and trusted leader of Chinese Christians, frankly state to the assembled leaders of American missionary societies in 1923: May we say with all kindness that the missions have been altogether too fearful of surrendering their control....The time has come for a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the whole situa- tion, and for readjustments that will enable the church to move forward along constructive lines. Failure to make these adjustments will mean dis- aster both to the church and the mission.? This same leader in his presidential address at the National Christian Conference at Shanghai ' the year before said: For many years missionaries have been com- mitted to the position that it is right that the Christian Church should become naturalized in every country in which it is found. What is needed today is not so much a statement, or a restatement of the ideal just mentioned, but rather the realizing of that ideal. The difficulty is that while there has been agreement in theory too little has been done to put it into operation. That is the real trouble. ... We would solemnly declare it is our mature Judgment that the success of the work of every mission should be judged in the final analysis by the degree in which it has suc- ceeded in putting that ideal into actual practice. ? Report of the Foreign Missionary Conference of North America, 1923, p. 203, 4 GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 163 In India, too, we find the same feeling. At the National Missionary Council in Calcutta in 1913 the following resolution was passed: While the Conference believes that the Indian Church should continue to receive and absorb every good influence which the Church of the past may impart to it, it also believes that, in respect of forms and organization the Indian Church should have entire freedom to develop on such lines as will conduce to the most national expres- sion of the spiritual instincts of Indian Christians.° Ten years later (1923) at the meeting of the new National Christian Council, there was on all hands an almost passionate desire for a Christianity which should address itself to Indian hearts in Indian ways. Together with a frank acknowledg- ment of the need for continued help and counsel from the western Church, there went a new long- ing that the Church in India should be free, under the guidance of the Spirit, to work out its ‘own ideals under Indian leadership. We have slowly come to realize that the people of India can play on their own home instruments chords of religious music that touch and move their own hearts. They love their melodies. We now see that we have come with our foreign in- struments; and, though the music has been that of the great Master, our inability to appreciate their instruments and our rough handling of them has left much to be desired. Certain it is that in most fields we have not waited for the outer forms of * The Harvest Field, April, 1913, pp. 156-160. “Young Men of India, VOU545 Dbl aei 164 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS religious expression to arise as the natural growth of the religious consciousness of the indigenous group. We have gone into lands which have known only individual worship, and have intro- duced congregational worship after a western pat- tern with synods and presbyteries and confer- ences, with paid pastors, with deacons and elders, with standing committees and the like—systems wholly unlike what the native religious conscious- ness would have created if left to itself. In the past fifteen years, however, the devolution of initiative and powers and responsibilities from the foreign missions to the young Churches has received an immense amount of attention, and many missions have taken radical steps in the way of transfer of authority and leadership. For the most part it is a consciously accepted principle of missionary work that Churches should be de- veloped among different peoples according to their genius and culture rather than presented ready- made by westerners. IV The centralization of the rising Churches abroad makes necessary a whole series of readjustments. 1. For one thing it is leading us to alter our vocabulary. The rise of Christian churches abroad of necessity expands the content of the word “Christendom.” There are those who still speak of Christianity as though there was nothing likely to happen outside the limits of western civiliza- lions. In judging whether Christianity is advanc- ing, they think of Europe and America, but forget GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 165 Africa and Asia. It cannot be too strongly stated, however, that any review of Christianity must now include the Churches of other than western lands. In fact, there are those who fecl that just as Christianity in the past has found successive cen- ters in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constan- tinople, Rome, so its center may even now be passing from an unworthy West to a receptive East. It seems perfectly natural to remind Chris- tians abroad that they are members, not simply of an Indian Church or a Chinese Church, respon- sible for the evangelization of their own countries, but that they are members of a world-wide Church. Let us not forget that we, too, are members of a world-wide Church and should not be determining our policies simply as western groups. Certain other words or phrases should be changed for the simple reason that conditions have altered since these expressions entered our mis- sionary diction. To retain these phrases would be to increase that mental inertia which is all too apt to hold us to the conditions of yesterday. For example, we often use the expression “missionary movement” or “missionary enterprise” when we really mean the whole, present development of Christianity abroad. In earlier days when converts were few and unorganized, there was some justifi- cation for speaking of all Christian work abroad as “missionary.” But in these days to assume all the progress of the Kingdom abroad under the heading “missionary” is to overlook the extraor- dinarily significant fact that each country now has Christians of its own. Unless we are inten- 166 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS tionally distinguishing the work merely of those technically called “missionaries” would it not be a great deal better to speak of “the Christian move- ment abroad,” thus recognizing the share in the work taken by the Christian people of those lands? Even where we could correctly speak of “our society’s missionary work in India,” meaning by this the work of the foreign organization, may it not be better to talk of “our share in the Christian work in India”? Suppose we want to speak about ~ “men and women returning from our foremost mission fields.” That scems harmless enough. But there are two distinct gains in a slight change - to “men and women returning from the most ad- vanced Christian work abroad.” We cannot too carefully school ourselves to realize that the idea of Christendom must be broadened to include the growing Churches abroad. We sometimes speak about “the missionary pro- gram in a given land.” If used without discrim- ination, this overlooks the way in which programs are more and more actually being developed: i.e., by the codperative thought of both national and foreigner. In that case, precise usage would speak of “the Christian program.” It is supremely im- portant that we western Christians should not be oblivious of Christian coworkers in other lands, and the very care used in habituating ourselves to discriminating phrascology may help us to keep the right perspective. We have “prayers for missions”; we ask for “the protection of missionarics”; we commend to God’s fatherly care “all whom God has called to take GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 167 part in the missionary work of the Church”; and we ask God to “hear the prayers of the Church for those who go forth to preach the Gospel to every creature.” Such phrases are right and proper if one is intentionally limiting one’s prayer to mis- sionaries. It is unfortunate, however, if these expressions limit our intercession so that definite prayer for the welfare, growth, and forth-going service of the people themselves never becomes quite explicit in our minds. Usually when we pray for missions, our real interest is in the general advancement of the Christian cause in other lands, and we have no conscious desire to shut out of consideration the work by Christians other than missionaries. In such cases we might pray “for the Church now found in every land,” “for all Christians,” or “for pastors and ministers of our own and other lands.” By such expressions we will help ourselves and others to think in terms of a universal and Catholic Church. 2. Making the development of indigenous churches central in our thought is beginning to show itself in our promotion literature at home. Many of the older reports of foreign missions which went out from our boards to their constitu- encies dealt almost wholly with what we call “mission work.” The mission stations and the mis- sionaries were most prominent, so that almost inevitably in the minds of our constituencies, 156 Fifth Avenue, or 150 Fifth Avenue, or 14 Beacon Street, or Philadelphia, or Dayton, rose to people’s minds when they thought of foreign missions, instead of the Churches on the mission field. In 168 ©§WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS some reports one almost had to hunt to find any- thing which represented in any very definite way _ the progress of the Churches. Why should we not definitely dignify the small events connected with the Churches we go to found? Even if it is a little contribution that they give, even if it is only a little home missionary effort that they make, why should that be ignored? It should seem natural to us to sce a report come out with the very first page devoted to this central fact in our missionary program, the establishment, the development, the progress of these Churches on the mission field. 3. It is recognized that Christian literature pro- duced on the field must smack of the soil. While remaining absolutely loyal to Christ in every way, it must be made truly Indian, or Japanese, or Chi- nese. Not only the language, but the literary forms, the illustrations, the ways in which things are put, indeed the whole literature must appeal to the people as theirs. It is beginning to be recog- nized that few foreigners can meet this demand, and that much of our foreign-made Christian lit- erature of the past has been almost a failure. Reorganization is taking place in certain centers giving overwhelming priority to native judgment and authorship. For a century the attempt has been made in China to provide acceptable Chris- — tian literature through missionaries with Chinese amanuenses. Slowly leaders have come to real- ize that money and control must be given to the Chinese so that they may choose what is wanted, shape it, and set the style with chosen foreigners only as advisors. GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 169 4. The principle involves yielding places of leadership to nationals as soon as this can be wisely done. We are undoubtedly in a transitional period when the directing control of Christian work is passing from the hands of missionaries to nationals. Already in China, Japan, and India certain nationals of these lands have become rank- ing executives above missionaries, not for senti- mental artificial reasons, but because they are fitted for it. Several mission colleges in India have appointed Indian presidents. A Chinese has been made dean of the theological school of Peking University. In both the Anglican and the Methodist Churches in Japan, Japanese bishops have been consecrated; in India an Indian bishop is in full charge of a diocese in the Anglican Church; and in China in the same church there is a Chinese assistant bishop. An able Indian missionary was considering remaining home after furlough be- cause he feared his presence would hinder an Indian from taking over the educational work as soon as he otherwise might. The foreign heads of several schools have resigned and accepted the vice-principalships. British missionaries are working under Indian Councils. In some areas decisions by missions may be reviewed by the Church of the land. At the recent Y. M. C. A. convention at Tokyo, the foreign secretary did not know anything more about the program than any other speaker. At another Y. M. C. A. convention at Tientsin, China, it was plain that foreigners were working under Chinese secretaries, and that the Chinese were 170 ‘WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS freely recognized as their superiors in position. The foreigners were thoroughly respected, but the Chinese did not hesitate to take the leadership. One visitor resented the situation and did not like the way things were going. Evidently there was no foreign imperialism anywhere in the conven- tion. He and others from the West were not looked up to as essential, nor was their advice sought on > every occasion simply because of holy orders, or of race, or of standing. A missionary from China recently predicted that “within ten years there will not be a single important administrative position held by a mis- sionary.”’ Another rather selfishly laments that “the Chinese are now taking all the places of leadership in the Church so that there is no place or opportunity for a Westerner.” These are un- doubtedly extreme statements, but they show the present tendency and indicate the re-orientation through which missionarics and missionary organi- zations must pass during the next few decades. That much remains to be done in the matter of transfer of powers and authority, even in a rela- tively advanced area like China, is indicated by the judgment of the recent Educational Commis- sion when they called attention to the strikingly small proportion of Chinese in executive or responsible teaching positions as a damaging weakness Icading the Chinese to look upon mission schools with indifference or dislike as a foreign element in their national life.6 And at the National Christian Conference in Peking, in 1922, Commis- *“Christian Education in China,” p. 114. GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 171 sion II asserted that the time has come for the subordination of the activities of the missions to the advice and direction of the Chinese ecclesias-- tical authorities, since two-thirds of church control still resides in the missionary. Missionaries of the future may not have as much glory and certainly will not have so much consti- tutional power as some of their predecessors had. In many situations and kinds of work an individ- ual missionary will be expected to plan his work so as to provide for his own speedy elimination as the men and women around him grow capable of taking his place. A very able missionary once said to me, “When I came out here, I made up my mind that I would train a young Japanese who could take my place if I were eliminated, and I did it.” In fact, it is said that a man is not consid- ered an efficient Y. M. C. A. secretary in China unless he succeeds in working himself out of a job and putting a Chinese in his place. Thus the missionary of the future must be willing to serve under the nationals to whom he goes. At present it is common practice for nationals to serve under us; we rarely serve under them. In the few cases where a foreign missionary serves under a national, it is usually found that the controlling body is foreign. In the brotherly, democratic, and Christian relationship we wish to establish with our co-workers abroad, reciprocity is essential. When circumstances justify it, we must make it plain that we are ready to serve under them. I can think now of one who comes definitely to mind. He lives a most self-effacing life. His 172 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Indian associate has the first place and comes first in the public eye. It is quite right that this national . Should appear as the leader for he is worthy. Yet I am sure that he never could be what he is, were it not for the faithful, laborious backing that | he receives from this missionary, who is sinking his life there, unseen and unheralded. We cannot overestimate the importance of such a spirit in the recruits of the future. It will tre-_ mendously help in making the Church indigenous when Chinese or Japanese or Indians are ranking executives over their helpers from the West. No missionary of the future should be sent out who is not willing for his associates to be on a par with him, or, it may easily be, above him. Already at least one mission is putting its young recruiis — under the direction of a wise national leader from the start. We can see, therefore, that in some — ways a distinctive type of missionary is going to be required. 5. The position just taken places tremendous emphasis on the training of leadership. The pre- vious section was equivalent to saying that a missionary’s business is to make himself dispen- sable as soon as possible. When this principle becomes operative in affecting policy, it at once becomes plain that a greater place has to be given to the training of indigenous leadership. If the work is to be done by them, they manifestly should be as well trained as the missionaries have been. This has meant adopting additional methods of developing leadership. GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 173 One effective way has been through associating colleagues from the people with missionaries. The direction of the Y. M. C. A. in China, in India, and in Japan, has now passed over to a national of each country, respectively. In more than one instance the transfer was preceded by a stage when foreigners and nationals were co-secretaries. American Y. M. C. A. workers in China are some- times general secretaries but never in the same sense as they would be in America; they are always associates to the Chinese and, if general secretaries, their position is recognized as_ temporary. Similarly there are missionaries who definitely associate with themselves those whom they expect eventually to take over the matters concerned, in- asmuch as in this way they will be able to transfer responsibilities with more certainty to the churches. The new policy means, furthermore, giving these men and women, when once trained, opportunities for the genuine expression of their own aspirations and discipleship. A few missions have set aside whole areas where new experiments are being made under the control and with the methods of the people even though subsidized with foreign money. Heretofore the training of this leadership has been almost wholly within the leader’s own country—China, Japan, India. In very few cases have missionary societies, as such, brought workers from abroad to America for graduate work. Three boards, however, have been experi- 174 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS menting somewhat’ extensively in_ bringing selected nationals to the United States for training. One of these spends from ten to fifteen thousand dollars a year for this purpose. Every alert mis- sionary realizes how much he gains by stopping off to see the best work in other fields when traveling back and forth on furlough. If we come from India, we stop off in Korea and China, or in Japan and the Philippines. Or, when on furlough, our boards send us down to Tuskegee or Hampton, or make provision for our study in various places where study will profit us. Undoubtedly, as we take up more seriously this turning of things over to the people, more help will be given selected leaders, who have had experience, to enable them to get the training and broadening experiences that missionaries receive, and thus qualify them to take over positions missionaries occupy. The securing of funds for this training will mean in many cases drastic action on the part of societies. Some missions already are withholding sending out their usual quota of recruits, in order to have money for the training of indigenous workers. The official secretary of one of the large missions in China wrote to his Board in 1923: What we shall ask of the Board and of Christians in America is to build up strong schools and to enable Christian students to attend them. Chinese workers will take the place of missionaries from America. They will be far more effective mis- sionaries, if they are given a training somewhat comparable to that of a missiOnary, and put in responsible positions with genuine freedom of action. GIVING WAY TO NATIONALS 175 If the positions of the last two sections are correct, more and more of the work will be under the management and control of nationals and less and less under that of missionaries. Manifestly this transition to the support of work under in- digenous leadership will require a re-adjustment in the minds of the giving constituency, and of the policy of our boards. This is indicated by the statement made by the Educational Commission to China that it is always easier to get a new appointee from the home board, than funds for paying high-salaried Chinese." Administrators are asking whether they can maintain the interest of the home Churches on the newer plan. The giving constituency has been used to thinking of missions in terms of the missionary. They have been glad to send forth ambassadors to maintain interest and make the enterprise objective to their minds. At present $2,000,000 out of a total! $3,000,000 in one of America’s societies goes to the salaries and travel of missionaries. Could they raise their budget, if the amount spent on missionaries was largely devoted to the support of work in the hands of local churches? When one of our great boards was asked by its mission to send more money as well as more missionaries, but if they could not send both, to send the money for work by Chinese, the board sent missionaries without the money, because they feared the effect on the home Church of lessening the number of missionaries. The situation shows that there is need for very definite education of the home constituency on this point if the transition is to be made safely. *“Christian Education in China,” p. 113. CHAPTER X \ ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY AND TYPE OF WORK I THESE considerations inevitably raise the ques- tion as to the numbers of missionaries to be sent. * Hearing of the progressive devolution of powers | and responsibilities to the Churches abroad, many a young and thoughtful student is saying to him- self: 7 I have before me real opportunities for service in America and have no desire to go to the foreign - field simply for the sake of “being a missionary.” I am interested, however, in meeting a need. Is there an actual need for more missionaries, or would additional men be accepted simply with good-natured tolerance? | On this question the testimony is clear. The following resolution was unanimously adopted by foreign and Chinese members of Commission II on the Future Task of the Church and presented to the National Christian Conference, Shanghai, May, 1922: That to answer the challenge of the unoccupied areas and to make possible an effectual entry by the church into these open doors, the preparation of Chinese Icaders be stressed during the next few years, and the foreign missionary force be main- tained at least at its present strength. 176 ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 177 At the recent Student Volunteer Convention, Dr. Cheng Ching Yi, who was chairman of the National Christian Conference to which reference has just been made, gave the following as his judgment: It is true that 74 per cent of the entire Chinese territory has been claimed by one or more foreign missions. It is true that the Chinese Christians are coming forward to shoulder their responsi- bility and to get themselves under the burden. Yet you will entirely misunderstand the situation if you think that there will be no need any more for missionaries. You will misjudge the situation if you think your missionary effort has almost come to an end. Why, the work is just at its very beginning. We are needing missionaries today perhaps more than ever before. At this same Convention, speaking for Japan, where more than in any other mission country the Church is at its highest development and efficiency, Rev. H. Hatanka said: We ask you to come to Japan to help us remove the evils, revealing Christ in their lives. We ask you to come and participate in a task that is larger than strengthening a denomination or building a church or even saving many souls. It is the great task of uniting nations, races, and classes by the common spirit of Christ, upon the principle of the brotherhood of Jesus. We do not ask you to come because our people are born militarists and bad, but we ask you to come because we believe the spirit of Christ lives in our people, although some- times it is hidden and disguised. Prof. U. Kawaguchi, Ph.D., in 1923 asked eighty-two of the leading Japanese Christian -178 WHITHER BOUND. IN MISSIONS workers whether they thought missionaries are still needed by the Japanese Church. His report states that a large majority affirm this need on > various grounds such as the vastness of the non- Christian population, the unevangelized condition of the country, the scarcity and the difficulty of securing Japanese workers, and the fact that the missionary is specially qualified to do some kinds of work which the Japanese worker is unable to undertake. Prof. Yohan Masih, of India, speaking of the work among outcastes, said: Thousands and thousands had to be refused bap- tism. Thousands had to be refused to be admitted, because there was no arrangement to be made for. their training. To Bishop Azariah—a recognized leader of the Indian Church—the following question was put: “When the foreign missionary work now under the missionary societies is obviously and perman- ently related to the Church in India, what will still be required from the Church of the west?” His answer was: This does not mean that these fields will not require men and money any longer. The Church will still require all the sympathy and help that ‘he older Churches of the West can give it for a long time to come. Even if the Church in some of the districts should become entirely self-support- ing tomorrow, yet, for the training of the workers and of the clergy, for manning the educational institutions for its youth, for conducting its col- 4“The Christian Movement in Japan, Korea and For- mosa,” 1923, pp. 87-93. ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 179 leges and hostels for non-Christians, and for de- veloping in its workers a strong spiritual life and a spirit of self-sacrificing service, it will need for some long time to come the best men that the Church and the universities of the West can pro- duce. Financial support, also, will still be required for the training of the clergy and other leaders of the Church, until Indian Christians themselves can equip and endow their own _ theological colleges. It such statements can be made by trusted rep- resentatives of the three most advanced mission areas, all the more could strong appeals be made in behalf of Africa, Central Asia, large areas in Western Asia, the pure Indians and the tropical portions of South America, and other less vigorous Christian communities. It is estimated that if missionary work throughout the world were not increased the number of new recruits needed each year to replace those who have died, or have had to return to their own countries because of health or other reasons, is approximately 1,200 from the Protestants of the United States and Canada. In some areas a church is practically non-existent. One minor consideration in determining the pro- portion of available funds that should be invested in western missionaries is the relative cost of west- ern and eastern workers. It would be foolish to attempt to measure the gift of personality in terms of money cost, but no board can afford to ignore such an argumeni altogether. The China Chris- tian Educational Commission? says that for what *“Christian Education in China,” p. 405. 180 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS it costs to maintain one high-grade foreign edu- cator, five able Chinese educators could be sup- ported. This at once raises the question whether the average missionary will contribute as much as four or five Christian Chinese. On the other hand the London Missionary Society’s Deputation to India in 1922-reported: ° ... that in point of salary the Indian man of any qualifications is every year more nearly ap- roximating to the European, while the educated ndian Christian woman can actually command a higher rate of pay, whether in education or medi- cine, than we give to the woman missionary of equal qualifications. There are so many oppor- tunitics for Indian women of education that their salaries run very high... . If it be economy of which we are thinking, the grounds for replace- ment are not very convincing. There is no unanimity of judgment as to the relative cost of equally qualified workers— national and missionary. We must guard against the inference that any immediate reduction in the missionary force is contemplated. It would be a serious mistake to infer that the meager membership of the young Churches abroad can shoulder without help the responsibility of carrying the Gospel to the un- evangelized of their people. The magnitude of the task involved in enabling the peoples of the earth to know and have fellowship with Jesus Christ will demand a large number of missionaries for an indefinite time to come. Furthermore, these young P1658. ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 181 Churches still need the touch with older and larger Christian experience that is secured through mis- sionaries. II While culture groups in other lands will un- questionably call during a generation or more for a transfer of personnel from older Christian lands, yet there is an unmistakable feeling on the part of Christian nationals that there should be an adjust- ment, if not in numbers, at least in quality and type of work. The time has passed for thinking of recruiting in terms merely of quantity—more missionaries. Conditions may only be aggravated by advocating missions in mathematical terms— sO many missionaries for every million of in- habitants of mission lands. Such a_ procedure would run athwart the best in the national con- sciousness of several peoples. Various additional present-day factors have to be taken into con- sideration in considering the question of number. The desire on the part of nationals for more west- ern Christians in their midst is conditional. For one thing, the probable effect on the Churches to which they go is becoming a consideration in de- termining the ideal number and type of mission- arics. Some hold that when a Church becomes self-conscious, when the national spirit gets to a certain point, too many missionarics may retard the work. From this standpoint some would say that the number of missionaries has reached the saturation point in China. A bishop in Japan de- finitely proposes that the ratio of foreign mis- 182 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS sionaries to Japanese Church workers should not exceed a certain figure. In other places only a portion of the missionary staff is associated with the indigenous Church lest the young shoot be smothered; the rest work independently of it. It is a significant fact that at the Christian Con- ference in Shanghai in May, 1922, very little em- phasis was placed during the sessions on the need of more recruits from outside China. Very great emphasis, however, was placed on securing the right kind of Christian leaders. When some of the younger Chinese Christians at the Conference were asked whether this meant that no mission- aries would be needed in China in the future, they replied: “No, but hereafter only those will be wanted who can coéperate to the fullest extent with the Chinese, keeping themselves, meanwhile, in the background, and putting the Chinese for- ward into positions of leadership.” As soon as the Chinese and Japanese and Indian Christians be- lieve that we really acknowledge that they are masters in their own house, as soon as entire or almost entire administrative responsibility is placed on the more developed churches, when missionaries frankly accept the position of ad- visors, help is eagerly desired and numbers wel- comed. It has to be acknowledged that the conditions of an ideal spiritual partnership are still being worked out. In addition to qualifications demanded of earlier missionaries such as physical health, adequate intellectual training and sterling Christian characters, modern missionaries ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 183 to established Churches are called to lose them- selves with men and women of other races in a common service to the Kingdom of Christ; they will be those whose ambition is not to become directors and superintendents, but friends and fellow workers; they will expect ,to work with or under leaders of the land as loyalty to the greatest good may require; they will have the“insight to see that the most lasting and fruitful service may be the most hidden and unannounced. Commission IV of the National Christian Con- ference in Shanghai, 1922, has the following to say to home societies with regard to missionary workers: Only those with large vision and trained in the best that the West can give, can hope to meet _ successfully the multitude of problems that press upon the Chinese Church in these days of change. Hence, we record here our appeal to the various Boards of Missions, that they will hereafter send to China men and women of the best quality, and with large vision, of broad mind, large heart, and, if possible, of large experience and high attain- ments. The mission work has grown larger and needs larger men. With the rapidly growing number of native leaders who have received the best training that the universities of the East and the West have to offer, one may well inquire whether anything less than the best the West has Gat dons be wisely offered for this important work. Recruiting agencies have been emphasizing “quality” through the years. Traveling secretaries, missionaries on furlough, board officials—all who 184 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS have really caught the vision of the Christ and the world in need—have stressed the need for quality in workers. We admit that to define just what one means by qualify is exceedingly difficult for it docs not always go with a Phi Beta Kappa key or a Ph.D. degree.. Every recruit of the present day would shrink from any suggestion that he or she 1s expected to tower in quality above the giants of earlier days. Nevertheless there is something behind this very common emphasis on the need for quality rather than quantity. Sometimes people who urge this emphasis want men and women who can give to the Christian movement abroad in our day and with its problems the same gifts of personality, organiza- tion, and leadership that the men of old gave in their day. Sometimes they mean that now there are nationals in China and India, in Japan and in South America who are good, who are able, and through whom the Spirit of God is working, and hence, in their opinion, missionaries must be all these things and more. They must be so equipped and so trained that in some one line at least they may be able to make a distinct con- tribution to the group. Still others point out with reference to work—cspecially educational work— the conflict between a possible policy that will make for quality even at the cost of larger appro- priations or a drastic reduction in the number of schools, and the all too prevalent policy of expan- sion, of penetration, of evangelization, where value is placed on quantily of contacts. By quality some mean a man—a gentleman—with powers of growth ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 185 and with a grasp of Christianity. Some undoubt- edly would like to see sent to India or China, a small group of specially picked men, men big enough in personality to merit the friendship of the leaders of these nations, possessed of unques- tioned professional experience so that their judg- ment would be sought, men who could help to analyze a people’s problems, who could command through travel and correspondence the advice of the best minds of the West, so that through a new and larger way they could befriend a_ people. Hard as it is to define, back of this almost universal emphasis on quality, is the truth that mere num- bers are not enough. it Apart from the question of numbers we must more and more recognize that missionaries will be asked for, located, and retained at the call of the Church on the mission field. Already in several missions joint committees of missionaries and nationals are determining the number of new mis- sionaries for which their area should ask, and are settling their disposition after arrival. Already in several advanced missions in several countries, the number of new missionaries called for must re- ceive the approval of the Church to which they go, the location of those who do come is left to the Church, and the Church decides whether a given missionary shall be asked to return after furlough or not. The suggestion has been seriously made on the floor of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America that suitable nationals sit on the 186 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS candidate committees of our missionary societies in this country in order to secure missionaries who will suit the national temperament. In other words, the initiative in determining the number and type of missionary recruits is passing from the mission_boards to the indigenous Chris- tian Churches. Several missionaries are now back permanently because of decisions made by native vote. At least one board has sent to experienced Indian Christians for their judgment as to the wisdom of the permanent appointment of a young man who had been out on short term. These leaders were surprised, and thought there must be some mistake, for never before had they or their friends been asked to give letters of reference for a missionary. In other words, the first term of missionaries is becoming somewhat probational from the stand- point of their acceptability, not simply to the boards, but to the people of the land to which they go. The nineteenth century brought missionaries to the test as to whether they could use nationals. The twentieth will test the nationals as to whether they can use missionaries. Of course, this will make mission service less inviting to certain types of people. A recent conference which had met to consider a nation-wide missionary program felt it worth while to discuss the question: “Will students respond to the missionary appeal today more because they believe that Churches at home ‘There are signs that the counterpart of this will also be recognized—that a junior missionary may honorably resign, if he feels it wise to do so, without any reflection on his loyalty to the cause. ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 187 want men and women to go, or because they are convinced that the best student minds in non- Christian lands want them to come?” Some may hesitate to go abroad, if they feel that their con- tinuance in the land and even their location while there will be determined by the people among whom they go. Hence candidates for work abroad are facing three significant words in thinking about the position of the missionary of the future. The mis- sionary enterprise is femporary—the Church and not the mission is the more permanent organiza- tion. The missionary is secondary. He has come to assist and not to boss. It is the missionary, not the national, who is the proverbial “helper.” And in the third place the missionary’s function is ad- visory. It is acknowledged by the best opinion of Christians abroad that the missionary’s presence is still needed and his advice necessary. But it is as clear as day in the more advanced mission fields that it is only in such advisory capacity that he can render to the Church his greatest, most lasting, and most appreciated service. Temporary, secondary, advisory—these are adjectives which are not supposed to appeal to the ambitions of strong men. Fortunately we can expect that special condi- tions will find their special ministers. This genera- tion, also, has those who acknowledge the lordship of One who said: “He that would be greatest among you, shall be the servant of all.” Oppor- tunities for maximum service, for largest unselfish- ness, and for unwearying, unceasing absorption in 188 | WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS the greatest work of the world—the building up of God’s Kingdom—will draw men today as of old. I firmly believe that among the students of the oncoming generation will be those who will not be one whit less well prepared, not one whit less committed to the Gospel, and not one whit less outstanding in other ways, in comparison with those who have gone before, who will gladly take the second place, who will go out understanding that they are to decrease, and recognizing that they _ have the mind of Christ only when they are willing to be servants and helpers, not rulers. To the present-day student volunteer the mis- sionary task presents itself as a sharing of the work of world evangelization with such young Christians from other lands as he meets at con- ferences of the World’s Student Federation or in his local University. At such recent conventions as the World’s Student Christian Conference at Pek- ing (1922) and the Quadrennial Student Volunteer Conference at Indianapolis (1924) emphasis was put on getting the point of view of the people of Asia and Africa. At the former conference the resolutions on the qualifications necessary in candidates for foreign service were drawn up by a committee consisting of an American Negro Professor, a Red Indian student, a Syrian Christian from South India, national student leaders from Japan and China, an American, a South African and an Englishman. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this procedure. It instils a new confidence in many Orientals, and starts a new strain of thought in the minds of all concerning ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 189 the place and function of missionary work. At the Indianapolis Convention students realized that the exhibit emphasized codperation with the indigen- ous agencies rather than dictating and forcing western standards and ideas. Some frankly said that they were glad to see Japanese and African jeaders pictured side by side with the missionaries. Missionary recruiting is coming to be regarded not as the securing of superior leaders but of fellow- workers, colleagues and friends of the Church leaders abroad. Candidates are going out ready from the very beginning to conform their stand- ards of efficiency and methods of work to the best expression of the genius of their adopted land. IV There must be further practical adjustments. It is of the greatest importance that the Church in each land should develop with increasing strength and rapidity as an indigenous organiza- tion. But it is not always easy to see how it can be free to determine its own plans and to build in such a way as to express its own life and yet at the same time to receive that aid which the older, stronger western Churches are ready to give. Moreover, nationals are beginning to realize that the new rights of control carry with them burdens heavy to bear. Seeing how great are the resporsi- bilities which missionaries have been carrying, and with what meager resources they have worked, some draw back from accepting offered control. Not infrequently where missionaries are most ready to turn things over, they find nationals un- 190 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS ready to receive. In fact, this is because they have not been educated for independence. As _ self- consciousness on a nation-wide scale increases along with a corresponding assumption of respon- sibility, fresh realignments of work and the estab- lishment of new relationships are inevitable. Hence, adjustments in the organization of com- mittees, joint sessions, and church councils will continue to occupy some of the best minds of the ablest workers, both foreign and national. Increasingly foreign boards are recognizing that their policies abroad will be determined by the Christian people living in these countries. Not only on the field, but here in America also the leader- ship and contribution of the various nationals are being sought. For several years distinguished na- tionals have been asked to address the Foreign Missions Conference of North America. A secre- tary of one of our larger boards recently expressed his strong desire to have a distinguished Chinese who has acted as their assistant secretary in China invited to sit during his visit to America in the formal meeting of his board. That the secretary should have to manifest much hesitation as to whether he could bring this about, shows how far behind the trend of the times he judges that even board members are. Very likely the time will come when boards and candidate committees will seek to enlist the active, constructive judgment of qualified nationals from other lands in their ses- sions. There may not be many here at any one time, but when trusted leaders are here we shall surely want them in councils at this end. ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 191 In particular we are more and more recognizing that we do not need to look to missionaries alone as the agents through whom our money may be spent abroad. One great board is turning over its budget for Japan to a committee predominantly Japanese. Certainly there is no reason for con- tinuing to consider as axiomatic the proposition that foreign support means foreign control. We see that there is no difficulty in principle, at least, in having the people of the land advising on a financial committee or in having them in a majority on such a committee; or, in fact, in turn- ing over our money to a committee made up wholly of the people of a given land, if that seems best. Many western givers have accepted the principle that their money need not be controlled by those personally known to or racially kin with themselves, but is given to be most fruitfully used for the Kingdom of God. Making the growth of a virile independent church central is necessitating a scrutiny of the aims, methods, and outcomes of the elementary education carried on by missions. The mistakes made by our schools abroad as pointed out by the three educational commissions sent out by the mis- sionary societies of Great Britain and America are for the most part the mistakes of current western education. As a matter of fact, however, we now see that these schools simply have not sufficiently developed such attitudes as independence, self- reliance, ability to make choices and such skills as those needed in self-government and coopera- tion. Too often pupils have been trained in docil- 192 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS ity, rather than in self-reliance. Uniformity and autocratic control have tended to the repression of personality. Teaching has been conceived as indoctrination. The development of thinking power in pupils has not been made a major ob- jective. Curricula have ignored the native heri- tage. The segregation of Christian children in residential schools has resulted in their alicnation from other groups of the nation. Religious educa- tion has often placed more emphasis on the trans- fer of ready-made religious ideas and beliefs than on growth. Western forms of worship have been encouraged. Insufficient foundation has been laid in religious matters for habits of thought which tend toward independent interpretation and ap- plication of religious truth. In other words, we now realize that we must begin far down the educational ladder if we want to get self-reliance, iniliative, and independence in the Church. These qualities can not be put on as capstones if no foundations for them have been laid. The next decade will see much conscious planning for con- tinuous reconstruction of curricula and methods from this standpoint. Vv All this indicates that in certain advanced areas we have entered on what may be called a fourth stage in mission work. The pioneer stage comes first when Christians are few or none at all. Next as a matter of history came the paternal stage when the churches were weak and their leader- ship dependent largely on the mission or the in- ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 193 dividual missionary for help in various ways. The dangers are those inherent in benevolent patronage. The third stage may be styled that of the elder brother, where the Church still needs in marked degree the experience, background and financial assistance of the older Christian Churches of the West. In practically two thirds of China the leadership of the Church is still largely in the hands of the soreign missionary who alone receives converts into Church membership and administers the sacraments.> In the elder-brother stage it is generally true that missionaries come from com- munities of decided economic surplus to com- munities of decided economic deficit. Manifestly this is a stage that will continue at least for a half century in many areas. The fraternal stage comes fourth. Here the church is able to stand on its own feet. The dif- ference between it and a Church in the West is that there is a greater disproportion between its strength and its task of evangelizing the nation than is the case with the western Church. For this reason help is continued. But the old relations of child to parent are no longer possible. The term “mother Church” must give way to sister Church or brother Church. Mission funds spent in evangelistic work are no longer administered by the mission alone, but by a joint committee com- posed of missionaries and representatives of the indigenous Church. There seems to be no doubt that we must con- *“The Christian Occupation of China,” p. 296. 194 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS sider an oncoming stage of missions—not here yet, but certain in the future—when each country will be sending, each receiving, and each calling in a spirit of mutuality. The fact of international exchange will continue, but on a different basis from the present. Foreign missionaries in great numbers will not be effective nor desired. Though relatively few in number, they will be highly gifted people, preéminently qualified to share one or more specific things. The anticipation of this fifth stage of missions should summon us to our most earnest, prayerful effort in these days when the opportunity is widespread. For leaders, return- ing from the most advanced Christian work abroad, urge us to take stock of our capacities and our objectives, lest our distinctive task abroad re- main undone when the accepted time of the present type of opportunity has passed away. If we seriously face this truth, that our time in China and Japan and India on the present scale and basis is limited, that the years of control, leadership or even large codperation are numbered, and that this end is being talked of even now, we cannot but pause to inquire whether we are actually making in the various earlier stages the contributions God intended us to make. In considering this last paragraph it should be carefully noted that in most areas this stage is not even in sight. Not only are different countries on the average at different stages, but different areas in the same country are at different periods of chronological development. It would be fatal *See page 31 ff. ADJUSTMENTS IN QUALITY 195 to forget that there are great sections of non- Christian lands where most of the characteristics of pioneer work still prevail. We shall never rightfully understand the task abroad, much less interpret missions as we ought, if we lose sight of this fact that all areas are not at the same stage. Emphasis has been placed upon the more ad- vanced areas and stages since we are endeavoring to see where missions are tending. CHAPTER XI DEVELOPING CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS RECONSTRUCTION in missionary education in- volves broadening and deepening the content of the term as popularly conceived. This may well take place in at least four ways. I The universal brotherhood of children of God is one of the great Christian convictions—so common as to seem trite, and yet so rich in im- plication that if it were once taken seriously by professing Christians on this planet it would trans- form their world. Entrance upon this larger fellowship of the family of God makes bigger, broader, nobler men and women. To see with clearness the preciousness of our national heritage, and yet to realize one’s membership in something indescribably higher and greater and nobler; to be lifted up in Spirit and made part of the great world company, is an experience that thrills one through and through and that ushers in life on a new plane. On its international and interracial side this great formula means that all men are children of God, and hence have a common divine heritage. 196 CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS — 197 It means that others presumably have the same right to their opinion as we have to ours, and that one must not forcibly overrule another’s habit of thought, principle of living, or ways of doing things. The larger view will make it impossible to judge every question from the view of the smaller group alone as when some lamely say that they must run their business in an un-Christian way because of their families; their nation in an un-Christian way because of their business; and in like manner the world in an un-Christian way because of the interests of their nations. As brothers in the family of God we are to accept individuality, and not to suppress it. We are to rejoice in var-ety of personality rather than to limit and destroy it. Universal brotherhood assumes universal and mutual goodwill prompting men anywhere to help others everywhere where there is need, just as Americans gave to the Japanese earthquake sufferers, and Japanese gave to the Near East Relief. Brotherhood is the antithesis of international and interracial jealousy, hostility, and distrust. Helping people to accept and to act upon this Christian conviction of divine sonship is a part of missionary education. A second cardinal Christian belief is the primal importance of world-wide coéperation in common constructive tasks. We believe that God intends us to share in His great purpose of developing a world-wide society of Christ-like personalities, set in an environment such as beings with unlimited possibilities should have. Sometimes it seems we are just at one of the great points in history, 198 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS when we are beginning to glimpse what the great Painter means to portray. We do not always see it clearly. It comes and then fades. Even our leaders cannot always hold it. But we are sure that He wants us to see and share in the making. Helping people to grasp this interpretation of life and assisting them to develop capacity for taking an intelligent and effective part in the task is a part of missionary education. Some favored few gain through travel and intimate personal contact a feeling of respect, sympathy, and appreciation for other peoples. But for the vast majority of human beings the ex- perience of world fellowship can come only through increasing participation in the pursuit of world objectives. As such ends are grasped and made our own, world-wide fellowship deepens even with peoples we do not see. We grow to spiritual maturity as we participate in this process with other humans and with God. Generation by generation, aS we grow in the capacity to vision and to adopt cooperative ends, our capacity for fellowship with God and man will deepen. Such suggestions as the League of Nations and the World Court are not merely possible ways of escape from war; they may be thought of, also, as providing contacts in the pursuit of common ends that will mean greater richness of life. The discovery of world-purposes such as those em- bodied in the twenty-third article of the League of Nations, and the encouragement of people every- where to put first cooperative constructive effort for a new and better world is missionary education. CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS _ 199 It is also, in part at least, what Jesus meant by telling us to seek first the Kingdom of God. With the supreme and inestimable significance of the fact of Christ and these two principles which He did so much to establish, humanity possesses what will make possible the achieve- ment of a world-wide society of suitably environed Christ-like personalities. The times require that such principles should be put in the very forefront of Christian teaching, and that Christians honestly and fearlessly face their practical corollaries and consequences. The Church has seen to it that Christianity stands for personal purity, for honesty, and for love of strangers, the uncongenial, and those in need. With a persistence and an emphasis never used before, Christians in these days should make men see that Christianity involves the universal brother- hood of children of God and purposeful, con- structive endeavor for world ends. The or- ganization of humanity for codperative associa- tion with mutual respect and service necessitates a persistent and world-wide educational prepara- tion of mind and spirit. The world’s public opinion must be so penetrated and saturated with facts and convictions as to make possible an intelligent commitment to a harmonious, a progressive, a Christian world order. The next quarter of a century presents no more claimant duty to the Church than the proper selection of and emphasis on those Christian fundamentals which constitute the priorities of our day.' : *Cf. article on “The Church and World Fellowship,” by A. GC. McGiffert, Religious Education, vol. 16, pp. 131-136. 200 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS II Implied in what has gone before, and yet suf- ficiently urgent to be worthy of separate mention, is the common acquirement of an international mind. An immediately pressing task for this generation is the development in all lands of Christian personalities who have wide thoughts, a genuine feeling with the rest of the world and outlooks which include other races. Prominent in the thought both of leaders and of followers in all nations should be world consciousness, world outlook, world background, world fellowship, and world objective. This means a persistent struggle against the great age-long barriers raised by oceans and continents, language and race, tradition and custom, provincialism and inertia, and by man’s meagerness of imagination and vision. Developing and maintaining this world consciousness has not usually been a definite factor in what has been understood as missionary education. The international mind has been defined as “that fixed habit of thought and action which looks upon the several nations of the civilized world as cooperating equals in promoting the progress of civilization, in developing commerce and industry, and in diffusing science and educa- tion throughout the world.” This aspect of mis- sionary education definitely contemplates the development of a world consciousness and an interest in international and interracial problems expressing itself in a spirit of Christmindedness and with His dynamic of love. Whatever enables CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS — 201 a person or a group to push back their individual horizons; to get an intelligent and sympathetic insight into other cultures; to be aware of the many interlinkings of people with people; to think about impending international and interracial problems; to see what solutions are offered .by organized religion and especially by the Christian way of life—whatever does these things ministers to this aspect of missionary education. The inclusion of these wider objectives in the term should not disturb any one, for the perusal of almost any one of the modern texts officially issued by missionary societies for study shows that an immense amount of space is given to instructing a provincial public in matters of geography, customs, economics, and politics. To such an ex- tent do mission texts and school books in Britain approximate each other that half the books issued by the United Council for Missionary Education are officially listed by the educational authorities as authorized supplementary reading in geography and general knowledge. Sweden, with a State Church, has missionary education as a compulsory subject in schools. Now when information such as is given in these missionary texts is given in school geography, secular magazine, and public lecture, why not think of this also as missionary education? We must enlarge our conception of this term to include the dissemination of world knowledge through every agency. We cannot begin this broadening process too soon, for American college students have shown a distinct resentment at “missionary education” 202 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS being interpreted as the presentation of a restricted range of interest connected with the particular enterprise known as “missions.” With them, especially, mission study has shown a marked tendency to broaden and to include the considera- tion of international affairs of all kinds. Any question of international or interracial bearing which becomes a big issue is seized by the alert as an opportunity for education. Fortunately, also, the whole horizon of the man in the street has been indefinitely expanded as a result of the war. The geographical horizon of interest for many has at last become—to use President Wil- son’s word—“ultimate.” This means that we will recognize the part that can be played in missionary education by the common, general agencies of information. Among those the press stands out preéminent. The brotherhood of man is in no small way dependent on reliable and impartial information with regard to the farthest corners of the earth. There is a terrible drag on growth in international and inter- racial comity as long as opinions are formed concerning sister nations from papers that incul- cate racial and national animosities, and as long as the dailies of a great city can disseminate a vicious propaganda of misrepresentation against those who strive to teach and forward Christian principles of national codperation. Newspapers all too often carry from country to country the story of the crime and the disorder of the nations. Few are the writers who have learned the art of making the goodness of the world interesting to newspaper CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS = 203 readers. Hence the spiritual development of the great news agencies is a matter of prime im- portance. The Church may not be able to develop great right-spirited dailics of its own, but it can raise up men of character and of knowledge who wil be able to create an atmosphere in our nations which will encourage a news service more helpful internationally. In the future we will pay more attention to the foreign news columns of our daily papers, or insist that there be such columns if there be none. Just as now one of our outstanding Christian weeklies ? has regularly a page from a British correspondent, so our wecklies of the future will doubtless have regular Indian, Japanese, and Chinese surveys of the affairs, the needs, and the accomplishments of their respective areas. More use, also, undoubtedly will be made of papers originating in other lands. Already the New York Public Library receives eighty-nine current periodicals from India, fifty-nine from Japan, and forty from China. As the demand for international knowledge becomes greater, smaller librarics throughout the land will undoubtedly supply something of this kind of service. We should expect the cinema, also, to render its service to the international mind. Even the most ignorant can catch through this agency of wide popular appeal an idea of the humaneness of life in other countries than his own. But if the Mexican always has a sinister, side-wise slant of the eye, and if the Chinese is always used to * The Christian Century. 204 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS commit some sly crime, if the Hindu is always sensual, or if films of American family life as shown abroad represent it as characteristically immoral, seeds of international distrust are im- planted in impressionable people. It would help to create goodwill if we did more to represent the people of another country or race as likable. Some readjustment in the choice of books, also, is necessary. The Christian internationalist will not confine himself merely to what has been known as “missionary publications.” Samples, at least, of the best general literature on other lands will be read in order further to develop a genuine and intelligent conception of other countries and peoples. That noble Rumanian statesman, M. Take Jonescu, one of the finest international leaders in Europe, once told a friend that he considered it a piece of absolutely necessary intellectual hygiene to leave his country once or twice a year and see something of other nations. Not all of us can do this in fact. But under the guidance of expert authors we can be swiftly taken to the very heart of another nation’s life so that we may feel its problems and possibilities and intense aspirations. Similarly we will expect our colleges to develop more than they do now the international mind. Both institutions and students will be tested by the extent to which curriculum courses are provided which overcome provincialism and contribute to a Christian world outlook. A few colleges already give courses on contemporary civilization, but these generally confine themselves to Europe, ignoring the whole world of the Orient. But the CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS — 205 desired end will not be accomplished merely by adding courses, nor by putting the burden upon the specialized Biblical subjects or missions. The old standard courses in sociology, economics, politics, literature, history, and philosophy must do their part by showing what they have contributed and can contribute to the true progress of the whole world. Dean Woodbridge, of Columbia University, strongly believes that language chairs in our schools and colleges should be the means not merely of teaching language and literature but of gaining an insight into other civilizations. Too often the study of foreign languages has been mainly a linguistic and literary accomplishment rather than a study of man and his ideas. The result has been that in spite of the funds spent upon departments of language study, they have produced almost exclusively merely teachers of language and literature. They have rarely pro- moted real knowledge of the world of foreigners. They have still more rarely produced men of affairs capable of dealing with foreign relations. Dean Woodbridge urges that this divorce of lan- guage and literature from the land and affairs of a people cease, so that the study of foreign lan- guages may involve real knowledge of what the foreign world is like. Columbia University’s Department of Chinese has been reéstablished with this new conception. This Department is asked not only to teach the Chinese language and literature but to consider such a question as what we need to kuow about 206 | WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS China in order to make our future dealings with the Chinese intelligent. The interests and opinions of the Federal Government, the Chinese legation, the Chinese students among us, returned mission- aries and travelers, and the great corporations which do business in China are taken into con- Sideration in planning the work. Similarly, other universify chairs should be expected to make very real contributions to the study of the world of human affairs. Already they contribute to the world of philosophy, or of politics, or of economics. But their contribution should also be to the world of different peoples, who, on account of their differing philosophical, political and economical interests, create the problem of world coéperation.® It is humiliating to have a Hindu, three years resident in America, speak of the “astounding ignorance of the people regarding foreign countries and peoples in whom they are not in- terested.” It is also humiliating to have the head of one of the two large missionary language schools in China publicly testify that practically all the students he gets are provincial in their outlook.‘ The same judgment is voiced by Fletcher Brock- man—that veteran servant of the educated classes of both East and West—-when he assures us that at present Chinese students ask questions con- cerning a far wider range of interest in industry, social conditions, education, government, and *Cf. Annual Report of the Dean of the Graduate Facul- ties, Columbia University, 1918. “Report of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1922, p. 126. CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS = 207 religion than he had heard in America. Nor do they limit themselves to Chinese and far-Eastern questions, but are interested in modern questions everywhere. An appreciation of the international aspect of missionary education will cause us to value our opportunities for contact with ten thousand potential leaders of eighty nations resident in our colleges. We should seek much more touch with these young men and women, not simply in order to please them, but because they can change us and can help us to a more sympathetic and tolerant outlook upon the world. Some of these students are making invaluable contributions as members of study groups and forums. Many more of us should be entering into the thought life of other peoples; and in many of our communities it is the foreign students who afford the best opportunity for acquiring skill in an understand- ing touch with those of a different temperament, upbringing, race, and religion on a basis of mutual respect and reciprocal sharing. Our children get some of their most effective lessons in inter- nationalism when friends from across the seas join in the wholesome fellowship of the family circle. For our ideal for a world society is mean- ingless unless we can demonstrate its essential character through friendly intercourse where this is possible. “International Evenings” enable members of a particular country to interpret to others what they feel to be the truest and the best side of their national life. Actual face-to-face contact with 208 © WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS these representatives does not permit us to think of their lands as primarily “poor and benighted” but as countries full of great brother peoples, ready to contribute their rich variety of gifts and temperaments to the common store, and to work out with us the divine purpose. International conferences arc another means of bridging the gulf between nation and nation. No one can estimate the value of a convention where delegates from small towns and rural dis- tricts come into actual contact with choice men and women of other peoples. Another bridge builder is international visita- tion. Many hundreds of really poor students in the high exchange countries have in the years since the war had the chance of making pil- grimages of friendship throughout Central Europe. Two hundred out of the two thousand students in one of our colleges were abroad last summer. A few students have gotten as far as India and the Far East in their visitations. One college has started the plan of sending junior students to a college in the Orient that they may come back, still as undergraduates, to help broadew the rest of the student body. A pilgrimage group of fifteen students from the Pacific Coast States visited Japan in the summer of 1924. The fact that the six weeks of their stay were during the most uncomfortable time of the year, a time of heat, humidity and mosquitoes, convinced the Japanese that these young men were ow for more than a lark. In a score of meetings and conferences CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS 209 Japanese students, teachers, and professional men talked with these American students over the vexed problems of international and interracial relation- ships. Another student pilgrimage of friendship to Japan is being planned, and it is hoped that Japan will send her pilgrims to this country. There has already begun an exchange of pro- fessors between the Orient and the West. One frequently hears of a professor of chemistry, or English, or Bible, or household arts spending a year or two years in some Christian college abroad. When this practice of the interchange of teachers between the nations is increased, students will naturally absorb much of the information and many of the points of view which must form the basis of all intelligent missionary education. The Student Friendship Fund, the Women’s Union Colleges of the Orient, and the sister and brother college movement under which a score of American colleges have established definite links with some Near East or Oriental college, the interchange of some six hundred drawings by the public school children of Japan and Iowa, are other ways by which young people are being led on to a larger inclusiveness in their thought life. We need not here give further illustrations of the manifold ways in which the international mind is being acquired. The immediate point is that the term “missionary education” must be enlarged to include all these processes, since international mindedness is one of the factors of the missionary mind. 210 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS Ii Acquainting people with what is commonly understood as the missionary enterprise is_ to many people the most obvious factor in missionary education. In fact, this has all too often been taken as its sole meaning. Even in this more restricted aspect of missionary education various kinds of reconstruction are needed. Various urgent reasons summon us to revise much of the terminology which we use. One demand comes from the desirability of interesting the man in the street who does not understand nor respond to our highly specialized vocabulary. We sometimes forget that it has been a relatively small, though intense group within evangelical Christianity, who have been interested in making Jesus Christ known to every human being. Within this circle a vernacular has grown up which is barely understood outside. For example, at a recent conference intended mainly for student volunteers and returned mis- sionaries, a stalwart man was asked, “And what field do you come from?” He hesitated as though he did not understand. “What field do you come from?” The meaning finally dawned upon the man, an intelligent army officer who has seen service in India and who had come with a friend. He simply was not used to the missionary ver- nacular. Such words as “adherents,” “home base,” “colporteur,” and the like are all good words and we need them. But they form a specialized vocabulary of the small circle and are CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS 211 uncongenial to the university student and business man. What is encouraging, however, is that the man of the street is becoming increasingly interested in the facts and the principles which that small circle has most at heart. Stated as “gleanings from the harvest field,” accounts of the results of missions will be rejected by most of the modern press. Stated, however, in terms of our own day and stripped of unnecessary professional ter- minology, news about the making of a better world is being gladly accepted by many an alert editor, club, or board of trade. The inner missionary group knows that momentous changes in life and environment are being caused by influences coming directly from Jesus Christ and that still greater ones are possible. But if the wider circle is to be interested, the smaller circle must learn to talk in the language of our day. The British societies have for several years past appointed a man to specialize in cultivating the editorial and writing personnel of journalism, leaving them to a noticeable extent with a kindlier feeling, and introducing paragraphs and long articles in the daily press in a style congenial to the constituency. Both in Britain and America missionary agencies have broadcasted missionary addresses stripped of professionalism. As already noted, missionary societies in Sweden have suc- ceeded in preparing text books that have been used in the compulsory missionary education of the State schools. Again, the increasing deference being given to 212 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS the opinion and point of view of nationals will cause home agencies to select as authors for their missionary study books Christians from the country dealt with. One such study text has been issued by the Student Christian Movement of Britain—“The Desire of India,” by S. K. Datta. For fourteen years it stood practically alone as a prophecy of this new use of authorship by nationals. The same, forward-looking movement has recently published “China Today—Through Chinese Eyes,” a series of essays by Chinese. The Missionary Education Movement in America, in 1923, limited its new dramatic sketches on Japan to those written by a Japanese, and brought out a play written by a Chinese in 1924 after it had been carefully reviewed by a group of Chinese students. The ideal mission study book for home churches may in the near future have to be the result of the collaboration of a home committee, an experienced missionary, and a Chinese, or Japanese, or Indian author. Each of these three would have a valuable point of view. But our interest here is to notice that we will soon be seeking on a larger scale to enlist the authorship of nationals for study texts in order to embody from the first and to recognize throughout their point of view. Similarly home churches will increasingly wish to hear nationals as well as missionaries tell about the progress of Christianity in their lands. To the Wesleyan Centenary in England, in 1913, twenty nationals were brought, and they remained for six months visiting the churches. One of the most experienced workers among British students CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS | 213 predicts that in ten years all speakers on missions in their colleges will be nationals. Some such have been extraordinarily successful in awakening interest. Students after hearing K. T. Paul, of India, speak, said “If that is the kind of leader India produces, I would like to go out and work with him.” As we saw in the previous chapter, missionaries in numbers greater than or equal to the present staff are still needed in every land. No one can say just how long this condition will last. Un- doubtedly changes in their type and relationships are right upon us now, but very likely for a generation the number will not be markedly decreased. Yet missionary education should begin now to prepare our minds for the fifth stage which will come at different times in different lands. This raises a serious problem in education, for missions in America have been inextricably as- sociated with the sending of men and women. Popular thought centers about their departures, letters, and return. But undoubtedly money will be needed for these lands of lower economic level long after it has ceased to be wise to transfer personnel from this to other lands in the present quantity. We send money to aid many a home mission community without necessarily sending with it our own personal representatives. Can we educate ourselves to do this same thing for equally deserving Christian communities abroad? Fifteen million dollars are spent annually by the various Boards in China. Far-seeing leaders are already asking whether that large sum of money is 214 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS being spent in the best way for China; in particular, whether so large a per cent should go to the support of foreign missionaries. One sometimes hears those at home responsible for raising the budgets answer, “We must send out new mission- aries, for new missionaries open new channels of .support. How can we give largely even to the cause of Christian literature in China when this does not awaken interest among our givers?” The same home-centric point of view lay back of a remark by a secretary of one of our large societies, “If I should send to China the kind of missionaries asked for by the national lead- ership of China, I would have to part company with my constituency.” There is no doubt that home churches must be educated to give, not for what will show the greatest immediate tab- ulatable results in mission statistics, not for what will lure more money from the giving constitu- ency, but for intangible results which cannot readily be labeled and yet which may, in the long run, most build up a Christian constituency. This will require a definite and persistent program of education. IV Fortunately, a certain limited type of missionary address is becoming almost extinct. We can all remember talks where the main emphasis was placed on the strange and grotesque in other lands, or where the backward and ugly aspects of a given people were overstressed. One young British leader believes that missionary exhibits, on the CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS 215 whole, are a bad thing, because they are so apt to emphasize the things which are odd, curious, different. Such addresses and exhibits are not untrue in actual detail, but in the proportion of portrayal. Their tendency is to instil an un- charitable and distorted view of countries known as mission lands. It is as the result of such early education that a graduate student in one of our seminaries was able to write: I wonder if all children in the United States grew up with the perverted view of other peoples and their faiths which formed my own early con- ceptions. Thus, I was taught that the people in - India and China and Japan and all non-Christian countries are “heathen.” I hardly supposed that they had real cities. It was a great surprise to me when I learned that the Indians could produce a poet like Rabindranath Tagore or the Chinese a patriot like Confucius. I had been taught that all of those heathen people would acknowledge all of us Christian Americans as unquestionably superior to them; and that they would, of course, seize every opportunity to make themselves like unto us. And to admit that any of those heathen religions might contain an atom of truth or any admirable feature—that would be utterly un- Christian and sacrilegious! ® It is among little children and “teen-age” boys and girls that misconceptions are being formed. We need more teachers who will give these ques- tions of international mindedness and world friendship their rightful place in religious educa- tion. In some schools instead of a mechanical pores by Hume, R. E., Christian Education, vol. VI, p. c 216 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS handling of missions as a side issue, boys and girls are brought into some kind of friendly and normal touch with the children of other lands. This can be done through the worldwide Church as through no other agency of education. | The tendency to give a distorted view of another land is one which is quickly detected and resented by many of the ten thousand foreign students in America. Discount them as you may, their state- ments on this question should stimulate us to scrutinize our missionary propaganda in order to see wherein we err. Of eighteen Indian students consulted by the recent Commission on Foreign Students in America, all but four found misrep- resentations of their country in the American press and by missionaries. One who is a _ professed Christian, and who is eager for the spread of Christianity, says: Time and again have I had the painful ex- perience of hearing India-returned missionaries not only distort and conceal the facts, but deliber- ately slander the fair name of Mother India, and this from the pulpit! If as a Christian I bow my head in shame at the conduct of these so-called ministers of Christ, as a true and loyal son of India I feel within me surge a wave of indigna- tion, gradually crystallizing into a resolution to avenge the slur. I know that this is an unchristian frame of mind, but at whose door does the blame lie? Deliberate misrepresentation and unscrupu- lous perversion of facts have underlain the report of almost every missionary that it has been my privilege to hear in this country during the last four years. CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS — 217 Another whose family was converted to Chris- tianity generations ago, says that: India welcomes missionaries from all over the world, but in return for her unbounded hospitality she expects just one thing—that the guests will not abuse the freedom granted to them while in India, and that they will be honest in the expres- sion given to their own people when they report on their return home. That single expectation of India has yet to be fulfilled. A Hindu, twenty months’ resident in the United States, declares that “. . . in case America should be represented in India in the same way as India is represented in this country very few Americans would recognize Uncle Sam.” Feeling this way, is it any wonder that a few go back and retaliate by telling of America as the jand where “every prospect pleases and only man is vile.” A thoughtful Christian Chinese student, now studying in an American institution, recently stated that he was afraid that many current presentations of missionary work were such as to transform the missionary movement from an agency of inter- national goodwill into one which engendered ill- will between the nations of the East and the West. A talented, but sensitive, Chinese student at a recent summer conference refused to participate in a Chincse play because the play took as its setting the old Manchu period. He felt that such a dramatization of the Chinese as they were in those days misrepresented his people. Other nations want us to picture them, not as they were, 218 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS but rather as they are; and to state concerning any defect we mention whether it is an ebbing ora flowing tide upon which we look. When a plant is identified with a thistle it is difficult to see figs upon it even when they are there. Statements and attitudes such as these may be exaggerations but they represent views held by many of the foreign students among us. It is a good rule, therefore, always to speak in a way such that you would be pleased to find one of your Korean or Japanese friends in the audience at the close of your address. In the preparation of a pageant recently published, nationals from various lands who themselves had been converted to Chris- tianity were asked to witness a trial presentation and to criticize the parts presenting their countries and old religions. The need for getting their point of view is imperative, so that such groups might more often be asked to pass upon our plays, our moving pictures, and our mission study texts. Most responsible missionary societies and writers today are alive to the necessity for fair- ness and justice in educating a great home con- stituency with reference to other lands but many fear that during the decade when this education is going on their budgets will suffer. On the other hand an experienced secretary of one of our oldest boards, on the basis of experience, declares that he would be willing to submit the question to the test of one year of real education as against what he calls “sob-stuff,” representing the rest of the world as longing for our help and eagerly awaiting to be shown the way of salvation. He has found CHRISTIAN WORLD-MINDEDNESS 219 that giving goes up fifty to a hundred per cent where a vital interest is created through frankness and reality of statements. But apart from its effect on giving, each new book, each new article and address should be able to win the approval of a fair-minded and Christian national, present in reality or imagination. Along with a careful scrutiny of their own literature, Christian internationalists might show their disapproval when the screen or stage, or general press hold another race up to reprobation or ridicule, and where other customs are cari- catured. The world is now too small for the effect of prejudice and misrepresentation to be other than harmful. From this standpoint missionary education is the fair presentation of all the facts. The criteria of success, therefore, in missionary addresses and literature will not be alone that the budget has been raised, or that backers for a board policy have been secured, nor yet that the required number of recruits of the right caliber have been obtained. There will be additional tests: Is the literature helping to build personalities with wider horizons, deeper sympathies, and more brotherly attitudes? Is it scrupulously scientific, balanced and fair, so that it can put the reader, as far as possible, in touch with the total situation with reference to the people and to the missionary enterprise both favorable and unfavorable? Does it enable the reader to face the situation in the light of all that is best in experience (including the non-Christian religions) and to see solution and duty in the light of all these considerations? CHAPTER XII THE INEXHAUSTIBLE REALITY BACK OF MISSIONS At the very heart of Christianity are certain his- torical facts—something that happened in Galilee. Through a Person God acted and revealed Him- self. Christianity is essentially this good news about our God. In Jesus Christ we begin to realize that the Heality which is the very center of the universe, other and greater than man, in whom we live and move and have our being, is best thought of as forth-streaming, father-like love. This conviction that a personal God cares enough for men to do something and has a far-reaching purpose for human folk has done more than anything else to make us conscious of the inestimable worth of each human being, however humble. | In the character of God who through Christ we have come to see is Himself constantly seeking man’s good, we find our greatest urge to unselfish service. Ministering rather than being ministered unto becomes a normal and essential part of the Christian life. Man is asked to join God in a great purposeful mission of redemption and of self- forgetting ministry. A fellowship of men of good- will thus begins. Individually and together they renew and refresh their life in the presence of a 220 THE REALITY BACK OF MISSIONS 221 God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, and whose purpose and character they therefore know. On the one hand, through worship this fellowship is ever drawing life and strength from the eternal order; on the other it is ever entering into human life and setting up the Kingdom of God in the world that now is. This fellowship is the ideal Church. Every living, Christian fellowship feels within itself an impelling urge to service—a divine send- ing, what we have called the missionary movement —as integral a part of the ideal Church as outgoing breath is a function of the body. Imperfect though they may still be, we begin to see that both fellowship and forth-going service are in their very nature essential to the realization of highest human values. Both Church and missionary movement, not necessarily as they are but as through our loyalty and devotion they can grow to be, are grounded in the very nature of God and man. When once the vision of this fellowship, eternal in its nature and yet here and now in time, takes possession of our being all differentiating and estranging differences between us human folk seem insignificantly small. The present reality of the Kingdom dawns on us as an inspiring revela- tion, and its coming in all fullness becomes our dominant and passionate desire. Thwarting conditions are seen as mountainous facts, but yet as mountains that can be removed because they stand across God’s purpose. Nowhere does a group seem so backward nor human nature so depraved but that the pursuant love of God, through Christ 222 WHITHER BOUND IN MISSIONS and through those who fellowship with Him, can bring about a transformation. The deepest long- ing of the fellowship is to enfranchise each human being from bondage to self and to the world, and have each enter the wondrous association of those who share God’s character and God’s purpose of overcoming evil and redeeming human life. In response to this characteristic urge of Chris- tianity, missioners have sought every corner of the planet with Christ’s winsome invitation to come unto Him, change the direction of life, be freed from the past, and join the world-wide society of those who are committed to His purpose. These men of God have faced human need right across this world of ours, and in spite of almost insuper- able obstacles have built up institutions as varied as that need, whether economic, social, educational, literary, philanthropic, or religious. No one can see this far flung work without recognizing that it is the result of Christian capacity, daring, and vision of the highest order. 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