Missionary messages

Front matter

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1 ! ! 31

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Preface

As indicated by the title, this book is, for the most part, composed of missionary messages which have been delivered by the author on various occasions. They are issued in the present form for the single purpose that they were at first delivered orally, namely, to quicken interest in Foreign Missions. In the main they have to do with Foreign Missions as a common Christian enterprise, but at points they deal specifically with the Baptist foreign mission program. There was in the delivery and there is here no disposition to evade the distinctive views and policies which characterize Southern Baptists and control their foreign mission work. An effort has been made to state the denominational viewpoint as inoffensively as frankly, and to use this to strengthen the foreign mission motive. No man ought to hold a religious opinion or alliance of which he is ashamed. Neither should one state his personal or denominational views in irreligious spirit or manner. Thoughtful men will agree that the only certain course to better understanding, mutual respect and concord among the Christian forces which are engaged in this commanding world enterprise of Foreign Missions is for each group to state with proper Christian decorum those views and principles which it holds and would have obtain in the conduct of the work and thus allow others to examine these on their merit. Respect of one Christian denomination for another will be promoted and that Christian unity, about which so much is said in foreign mission circles, will be the more certainly realized by clear and frank confession rather than by sentimental slurring of the comparatively few points of difference between the evangelical forces of Christendom. The agitation for Christian union gathers so distinctly about viii PREFACE

Foreign Missions, and sentiment hostile to denominationalism is so strong in foreign mission circles, that one can scarcely write or speak on certain phases of Foreign Missions without coming upon matters at issue. While there is here no side-stepping of these issues, the author's desire and hope is that these messages shall be read in the light of the missionary purpose which produced them and controls their publication, and that the cause for which they plead shall be strengthened in the consciences of the home constituency and on the mission fields.

James F. Love.

Richmond, Va.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Value of the Missionary Ideal . . 13

II The Home Base 25

Chapter I The Value Of The Missionary Ideal

THE Christian calling is, in brief but comprehensive statement, the execution of the Great Commission. Our life-task is to perform the duties which that Commission prescribes and to tie up the consciences of men with the authority which it claims. The Commission describes the sphere of Christian activity, designates Christian duty and presents ample opportunity for the exercise of the highest powers and the fulfillment of the largest legitimate ambition a Christian can have. It requisitions our time, our talent, our training, our wealth, and promises profitable investment for them all.

The modern word which most completely embraces the duties set forth in the Commission is the word "missions. " This word marks, as no other word does, the central thought and whole round of duties prescribed. Like every great idea, missions has great value for those who aspire to eminent lives and eminent usefulness. We will do well to fix for this word a large place in our lives.

Growing perhaps out of the Roman Catholic use of the word "missions" to distinguish ecclesiastical sub-stations in different countries, we commonly use the word as a plural noun. This use, I think, shunts our thinking from the essential nature of missions as an integral part of Christianity itself. Mission stations are incidents in the missionary life of Christianity. Missions designates the genius, the controlling spirit of Christian discipleship, and belongs to the elemental Christian moralities. Missions is that to which the churches have been commissioned, the Christian calling and occupation. For this reason J prefer to use the word as a singular noun. I am here talking about the active translation and fulfillment of the Commission, the very spirit and behavior of obedient discipleship. A man can no more be a disciple of Christ and not be missionary than he can be a Christian and not be truthful or honest.

Missions is God's plan and Jesus' program for the salvation of the world. It characterizes the spirit and voluntary act of the Saviour himself, explains the purpose for which the Holy Spirit was sent, and describes the scheme by which the Kingdom of God is promoted among men. It names the vocation of Christian men and women, the business of the churches for which the Spirit is given and the conditions on which the presence of Christ is promised. Into this word and enterprise to which it is applied, flows like a crystal river the redemptive purpose of God for a lost world. He has conditioned the salvation of the world upon the obedience of his disciples to the Commission. Missions is vital to New Testament Christianity.

I am aware that ignorant and stupid men sometimes use words of which they do not know the meaning, and we excuse them, but the fact is there is no rational ground on which a man can stand and claim to be a Christian and disclaim missionary obligation and duty. Men may be better than their parrot creeds, but Christ's word is, "He that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad." No man ever got Christ for a personal Saviour on an anti-mission importunity. He who says, "Lord, I want you for myself, but I will not share you with another," goes down to his house unjustified. The Lord does not start into our lives if He is forbidden to go through them to others.

Again, "missions" is more than is indicated by any adjective which we may use to designate mission work. "City missions," "state missions," "home missions," and even "foreign missions," while indicating important aspects of our task, instance the failure of the adjective to do comprehensive service. The noun is the important and significant word in each case. Foreign mission work in China, for instance, will be "missions" when the missionary volunteer gets to it, although it will not longer be "foreign missions" for him.

Moreover, missions does not designate a certain class of Christian service as distinct and separate from all other Christian activities. Considered from the viewpoint of the primary and paramount task, we may think of missions as saving lost folks. Whoever leads a sinner to Christ is a missionary, whether it be done by one who goes under the Commission to Asia, or Africa, or a mother who in tender love and by beautiful life turns the feet of her own child into the way of salvation. Any one who saves a soul is a missionary.

But the Commission does not limit missions to the saving of souls. Conversion of the sinner is the cataclysmic, but it is not the climacteric work in the missionary process. Set this work to the front and magnify it, for without it all else that we do comes to naught, but do not accept a definition of missions which casts a shadow on other parts of the task by' which we translate, expound, and execute the Commission. One of the hopeful things attending this missionary era is that, like everything which has in it the vitalities of our Christianity, missions is, in practice, a growing and expanding Christian service. With our growing fidelity to Christ in missionary operations we are expanding our definition of missions. Attempting to do what He commanded, we are learning to do what He did and all that He commanded. Jesus not only saved men, He healed, comforted, instructed and encouraged men and women. All these things were a part of His mission. He saved the soul and then sought to make the body a fit dwelling place for it. He saved men and women, and then set them to making the world a suitable and congenial place for saved men and women. All this fell within the scope of his ministry and falls within ours. The salvation of a man, his soul, his life, his talents, his powers, his possessions, and the bringing of all these under the benediction and proprietorship of Christ is contemplated in missions.

The grasp of the Commission thus comprehensively is one of the signs of growth accompanying the missionary movement. A conscience for social service and Christian stewardship is itself a product and expression of the growing missionary spirit. We have begotten a conscience for these things by the practice of obedience to Christ. As we have tried to make more Christians, we have been learning how to make better Christians. Committing ourselves to the task of saving men's souls, we are learning how to save their bodies and their substance from the service and dominion of Satan. Says Prof. Harnack, "The gospel aims at founding a community among men as wide as human life itself and as deep as human need." Social work is not a gospel but a service and should be observed as a duty and subordinated to the eternal issue of saving the lost.

There is, therefore, a mission to the saved as well as a mission of the saved. "When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren" is an ancient missionary admonition. "Confirming the churches" was an important part of Paul's missionary labors. We are not only to increase the number of believers, but the value and efficiency of those who have been converted and set them about their main business. To make Christians missionary is as necessary to the fulfillment of the Commission as making converts. All of us, therefore, — teachers, preachers, Sunday School workers, all, — can participate in this world-wide enterprise, and be loyal missionaries.

Having set these definitions before you, I shall now discuss the value of the missionary ideal.

I will, then, first discuss the value of the missionary ideal to the ministry,

1. The missionary ideal will enrich the minister's sentimental and enlarge his mental life. In the study of missions he will find opening to him world conditions and a challenge of world problems and world needs which broaden his thinking and deepen his feeling. The mind of a preacher with a missionary ideal expands in the effort to grasp a vast and manifold enterprise. His sympathies are enlarged as he discovers human need. He will find his powers stretching in response to the world call. Even mediocre men have, under the spell of this ideal, become world masters. Carey was a married man and still a shoemaker at his bench when this ideal began to charm and master him. The Missionary ideal found him when he was poor, ignorant, obscure. When he first talked of the missionary enterprise, he was rebuked, snubbed, and ridiculed where he was not ignored, but, after he had been transformed by it, he was "wined and dined" by lords and ladies. Under the spell of this ideal Mathew T. Yates, a Wake County North Carolina clodhopper, climbed over the walls of severe limitation and led the hearts of Southern Baptists captive across the Pacific Ocean, and in the midst of his labors and under the inspiration of this ideal, he actually grew tw^o inches in physical stature after he was twenty-eight years of age. Foreign Missions has immortalized hundreds of men and women as it has vitalized the churches of Christ wherever and whenever they have practiced it.

2. The missionary ideal gives practical value to the minister's reading. Preachers learn to love study. How much of your reading helps you to fulfill the Commission ? Something you must read. The minister will either read and grow, or he will stunt and go. The people will not long frequent a dry well. He who reads will either select his reading with discrimination and definite purpose, or he will dissipate mental energy and waste precious time. The wise minister will give large place in his reading to that which bears upon the main business of his calling. The missionary ideal will create an interest in missionary literature. What inspiration there is in the lives of missionary heroes, their heroic deeds, sacrifices and achievements! These, illuminated in the best Christian biography, will provide illustrative material for sermons and addresses which will, for very abundance, embarrass you, and such illustrations will bear practically upon your task. Incidents in the lives of missionaries and of their converts will thrill the preacher's soul and set his ministry on fire. There is much literature prepared for preachers that is fruitless and profitless. I have a volume by an Andover professor, which contains scholarship that it would take three score and ten years to acquire, but which has not in it enough Christian truth or sermon suggestion to comp'ose or inspire a twenty minutes* prayer meeting talk. That book was written for preachers !

3. The missionary ideal will, as well as anything, determine the spirit and the virility of the preacher's ministry. It will keep him out of the deep ruts which homiletic habits have made, and out of which many times the preacher has climbed on dusty platitudes while the people have groaned. The world's complaint of dry orthodoxy has not been p'rovoked by orthodoxy, mind you, but by dry orthodoxy. The essential gospel of evangelical Christianity is the juiciest, the freshest, the most appetizing, and the most refreshing doctrine in the world. Theology is made fascinating by the missionary spirit in the preacher and its missionary application in the sermon. The preacher with the missionary ideal both recites and demonstrates that the gospel is the power of God. The missionary preacher deals in living truth and his vital message vitalizes. Missionary incident tingles with human interest.

4. The preacher with the missionary ideal will select themes which have missionary value, and will find modern duty in old texts. This will increase his power. Those who accept the responsibility of going into all the world under the Commission are likely to find themselves under necessity of carrying a gospel which will do the deed. The missionary ideal will do more to eliminate trivial themes from the pulpit than anything I know. A British war correspondent says that one effect of the war was that it has "spoilt the people for little themes and for dilettante preachmerits." Face to face with spiritual need and desperate human situations, preachers would not discuss "the modern novel," nor "evolution," nor "Casey at the bat," but would be driven to the minister's essential message, Christ crucified, the hope and immediate help of the man who wants him. In like manner the man who gets a lost world on his heart — gets heathenism with its ignorance, superstition and depravity, the papal fields with ignorance and degradation — will find himself harking back to the gospel of the cross which alone can regenerate, transform and reinvigorate depleted moral manhood. Thousands of sinners at home have been saved by the preaching of a gospel which was inspired by the foreign mission ideal.

5. This ideal will put p'assion into your ministry. The world does not like cold hash served at eleven o'clock on Sunday. The minister who is not at white heat in his quest for souls will not lure them to the mercy seat. The preacher without passion is the preacher without power. But you will not give your life unsparingly to proclaim a half gospel nor to a small Christian enterprise. Only little men have redhot convictions about small subjects. It takes great matters to stir as it takes great matters to make great souls. Burning convictions of the truth and a great task, even the needs of the race, beget boiling enthusiasm.

11 The Value of the Missionary Ideal to a Church

The missionary ideal has great value for a church.

1. In the first place it justifies the large expenditure which modern churches make for their comfort, convenience and work. We hear much about great "plants" for our churches. Well, certainly a great plant is not needed if a church is not going into a big business for the Lord. Some churches have great plants which seem to have been dedicated to the God of Comfort, and some are just places provided to hold audiences for preachers to preach before.

Shortly before Reginald Campbell left the City Temple for the fold of the Established Church, I saw a report of the foreign mission offering of that great church for a twelve months. It was $50 ! A certain Baptist church in America with a plant costing more than $500,000 gave in a whole twelve-months $250 to foreign missions, and enrolled one hundred in its Sunday School! A church does not need a great plant for such small business. The missionary ideal is what that church needs.

2. The missionary ideal sacredly cherished will increase the attendance upon the ministry of any man. I am much among the churches, and I have not found in all the rounds of my travel a missionary pastor and a missionary church which are mourning for congregations. Men are seeking opportunities to go into big business. There is fascination in it. The preachers and churches which draw the masses are missionary. Billy Sunday said that the non-churchgoing members belong to non-giving churches.

3. The missionary ideal will insure a spiritual church membership. Men and women dare not undertake so large a task as world conquest for Christ without much crying to God in prayer. Human inequality to the great task begets a craving for divine help. Companionship and power begotten by the magnitude of this task steeps the soul of pastor and people in spirituality and awakens it in others. When Andrew Fuller was broken-hearted over the dearth of conversions in his church, he preached three successive Sundays on "The duty of giving the gospel to the heathen," and a great revival broke out and multitudes turned to the Saviour. Men and women cannot cultivate worldliness when they are bent upon bringing the world to Christ. Worldliness and waywardness will wither in the presence of sanctified devotion to this great ideal, selfishness and covetousness will be broken up and the idle will become religiously industrious.

4. The missionary ideal is a cure for many petty ills that afflict the churches and many ministers. Some time ago a company of ministers in conference were hearing first from one, then another, of the difficulties they encountered in their work. A dolorous meeting it was in which ministerial confidences were exchanged concerning pesky deacons, tattling women, burdensome debts, the frivolity of the young, poor congregations, and the like. An old minister, who had worn his life out in missionary effort, arose finally, and in a trembling but thrilling voice said, "Brethren, raise a larger issuer !" and sat down. Missions is that larger issue, and it will cure many ills which afflict the churches and discourage the preacher.

5. The missionary ideal is not only a vitalizing principle in a church but it insures scope and permanency for the preacher's work. We have had much talk about the reflex influence of foreign missions. Let me give you an example : The ministry of Dr. A. J. Gordon of Boston, and of T. DeWitt Talmadge of Brooklyn, just about paralleled each other, and covered approximately a quarter of a century. Dr. Talmadge with his extraordinary popular gifts set himself to the task of building up a congregation and ministering to a local community. He would build up a people's church. He possessed almost incomparable gifts for such achievement. Devoting himself to his aim, he had little to do with the missionary enterprises of his denomination. Dr. Gordon, on the other hand, set for himself the task of building a church through which to give the gospel of Christ to the nations of the world. He was a great foreign mission spirit. The end of their respective periods of service came in the destruction by fire of Dr. Talmadge's great meetinghouse, and in the death of Dr. Gordon. The great congregation which Dr. Talmadge had built about himself, and through which he had devoted his powers almost exclusively to a local ministry, did not have vitality enough to build another place of worship for itself and the community. Dr. Talmadge spent the remainder of his ministry in a pulpit in Washington City supplanting the old pastor who had by enlisting his people in the Foreign Mission enterprise, built a great church. Dr. Gordon's church, with the pastor in his grave, maintained itself for continued and great local service, while keeping up foreign mission contributions at the rate of $20,000 a year. These two pastorates illustrate a great truth and one which churches and ministers ought not to miss. The great churches of the South and their pastors illustrate the value of the missionary ideal for both the church and the pastor. Count them over and the truth of this will be obvious.

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The Value of the Missionary Ideal to the Denomination

There are benefits which the denomination shares when the missionary ideal is cultivated, as there are penalties which it must inevitably suffer if it is neglected.

1. In the first place the missionary ideal will insure the principles of the denomination. There is no way to guarantee the propagation and preservation of denominational principles except by planting them. So far as Baptists are concerned they have not hedged their principles about with ecclesiastical protection. These principles cannot be protected by defensive tactics. If we would save ourselves as a denomination, we must save others. If we would save our principles, we must sow them. The heart which the gospel regenerates is the only safe keeping place for the gospel. Those who know its power to save, believe it too precious to be lost. You cannot keep the truth pure apart from the missionary use of it. Personally, I have never believed that musty sermon illustration which recites how a grain of wheat had been found in an Egyptian tomb, where wrapped with a corpse it had lain for two thousand years, and unwrapped and planted, it sprouted and grew a harvest. That is both unnatural history and unethical illustration. There never was a grain of wheat which could be thus preserved. But suppose you could preserve a grain of wheat by sealing it up with a mummy, is that the best use you can make of wheat? A grain of wheat planted in good soil two thousand years ago and its natural product planted through the successive seasons, would by this time give every man, woman, and child in the world a barrel of flour. That is better than preserving one grain of wheat. It is true of the gospel. It was given not to be hoarded but to be heralded. Truth is prolific when missionary use is made of it.

"Good more communicated, more abundant grows, The giver not impoverished but enriched the more."

2. The missionary ideal gives to the denomination inspirational history. It has been said that the negro race is handicapped by the fact that it has no great history, and that the Indians are handicapped in that they have no future to inspire them. Certainly Baptists have a history. Along the course of the centuries stand out great granite characters who are the inspiration of all who read. Who can tell how much the denomination has been enriched by such missionary characters as Carey, the Judsons, by Yates, Graves and others? But we are not living in the past. I heard an Oklahoman say that "Oklahomans are not trying to live up to the prestige of their grandfathers, but that they are trying to make prestige for their grandchildren." It is our business to make inspiring and heroic characters for the future. By the cultivation of che missionary ideal, the denomination will make heroes who shall inspire our people to-morrow. Theodore Parker, the critic and heretic that he was, said that if the missionary enterprise had never done anything but make Judson, all that had been put into it would be justified.

3. Of course, there is no other way for us to increase our numbers than by the cultivation of the missionary ideal. It is by this means that the denomination is to become a real world power. We doom ourselves to provincialism and ultimate obscurity if we fail to extend our lines to the nations and make converts to our faith everywhere. We grow only as we go. But in multiplying our numbers, we shall multiply our wealth, our strength and our influence.

Each year of missionary progress marks increased momentum for the enterprise.

There is a place in the world for a people of our faith. The world needs what the Baptists have to give. Whole nations are to-day struggling toward the light and seeking to grasp principles which Baptists have enunciated more clearly and held more consistently than any other people. The nations want and need these principles, and their want and need add urgency and create responsibility for Baptists in the execution of the Commission and the cultivation of the missionary ideal.

The preacher, the church and the denomination will find a value in a missionary ideal which cannot be found elsewhere. Without this ideal and the benefits which it confers, the preacher dooms himself to mediocrity, the church to a famished and feeble life, and the denomination to an inglorious future.

Chapter II

THE home base of foreign missions is constituted of the individual Christians, the churches, the Christian organizations, the material resources and the spiritual assets of our home Christianity which can be depended on for the projection of the missionary enterprise to the uttermost parts of the earth. The base is strong or weak in proportion to the dependability of these elements in the Christianity of the home land for the purposes of this enterprise. The home task of the foreign mission agencies is to strengthen the home base by increasing the reliability of these elements. It is the necessary expenditure of effort and money upon this part of the foreign mission task that constitutes much the larger part of the expense of foreign mission administration. The actual expenses of the purely foreign mission administration is a comparatively small part of the foreign board's expenditure of money. The larger cost of administration is that which is necessary in order to create and keep up a reliable home base. Considering the circumstances, this is money well spent, but, if giving to foreign missions were more voluntary, there could be a great saving in expense. If evangelical Christianity's present resources were wholly and immediately available, we could probably, under present world conditions, and in the face of the opportunity now presented in the mission fields, in one generation, duplicate on the foreign field the total church membership of the home churches without increasing the cost of administration. We would thus have constituted a double base from which the advancing lines of missionary conquest could converge on the diminishing heathenism and soon take our positions for the final siege.

Christianity's holdings here ought to represent the strength of its foreign mission base. But, alas ! such is not the case. Many of our churches give nothing even of material support to this enterprise; many of the members of those churches which report contributions give nothing; and probably one-half of those members who give do not give half as much as they ought to give for a cause so commanding as foreign missions. The Home Base Commission of the Edinburgh Conference, after canvassing a mass of data, records this conclusion: "It is probably well within the truth to say that nine-tenths of the funds raised in the United States for foreign missions are contributed by one-tenth of the members of the Protestant bodies, the remaining nine-tenths of the members giving the other tenth. This statement is accepted as true by several of the leading denominations." The case is not now as bad as that among Baptists, but there are still many delinquent churches and church members.

With such defects in the home base threatening the success of the whole enterprise, there is no higher order of missionary service or campaign strategy than this of more thoroughly constituting this base. This work has its difficulties no less formidable than those which confront us on the foreign field, and to overcome them, labor, money, courage, and patience will be required. Who among us has realized the vast areas of our American Christianity which are yet uncultivated and fruitless? Millions are to-day starving for the Bread of Life, while vast and productive sections of the home field yield not a loaf to stay their consuming hunger. Many strong churches and more capable individuals stretch forth no hand of relief. Our churches represent potential missionary resources which are undeveloped while missionary triumphs are shortened for the lack of adequate supplies. To render this fertile field fruitful of foreign mission resources there is demand for an order of work which is hard and expensive. It is of the

THE HOME BASE 2J

nature of digging the stumps and ditches and of long and faithful cultivation of the soil before the harvest can be realized. Many roots of prejudice must be cast out, some natures must be plowed deep, the mellowing, softening showers of grace must be invoked and the fertilizing methods of New Testament teaching and missionary instruction must be used. What a task! And yet how abundantly worth while! It is as important to the foreign mission enterprise to make a reliable home base as it is to press the campaign itself. It would be a waste and cause hurtful reaction to put all the effort in the campaign abroad and neglect the matter of strengthening sentiment, enlisting support and assembling resources at home. Undeveloped and stingy church members more than the alleged extravagance of mission boards are the cause of unnecessary administrative expense.