Letters

Copy of all General and Individual Instructions to all Fuh Kien Missionaries[?]

Church Missionary Society.

Instructions of the Committee to Missionaries proceeding to various Missions in the Autumn of 1901

In taking leave of their brethren and sisters who are soon to sail for the Mission-field, the Committee would always keep prominent in their Instructions the injunction very definitely to “preach the Gospel.” Their chief desire is for the diligent and faithful setting forth of a clear and simple Gospel of Salvation, whose attraction is to be found most of all in its gracious Revelation of the Love of GOD, whose moral power is to be found in the tremendous realities of the Redemption wrought by our Saviour Jesus Christ, and whose access to the hearts of men is to be gained by the mighty influence of the Holy Spirit.

This direction is to be taken as applicable to all alike without exception. It is spoken to the brother or sister engaged in medical, in educational, in linguistic, industrial, or business work, not exclusively to the evangelistic and pastoral missionary. The peculiar functions, the special privileges of some of these may modify the meaning of the word “preach,” but they must not be allowed to modify the principle of the commission. All that is done must be so done as to tend to the setting forth of the Gospel of our Saviour, in its fulness, to ever new circles of hearers; and to the building up of Christians in their holy faith, so that they too may pass on the good news with clearness and with power. There will indeed be limits for some missionaries, limits of necessity, to the measure in which they are able to employ personal pleading, witnessing by word of mouth, and teaching. But the Committee are anxious that nothing short of necessary limitation should prevent any missionaries from accounting direct evangelization their duty, their delight, and their honour. There will remain abundance of opportunity for the influence of character, for “diversities of operations,” and for richness of all-round Christian instruction.

After this general direction the Committee would ask your attention to certain of the characteristics which should mark a missionary’s service.

I. It should be thorough. None of it should be marred by any degree of carelessness, of insincerity, or of lapse below the highest level you can reach. Perhaps in some circumstances the purpose to be thorough compensating advantages if your lot is cast where a small work is carried on against many difficulties, and with slow progress. thoroughness there may be a comparatively easy matter. But if you are engaged in a work of considerable magnitude, where there is a flowing ride of success, where events rapidly follow one another with ever increasing interest, it is not so simple a matter to secure thoroughness. It will require attention, patience, and a strong principle to make each day’s work, each duty undertaken, a matter of prayerful responsibility to God, and of diligent faithfulness in missionary service. Difficult as it may prove, it is, however, of first-rate importance. For your own soul’s peace and satisfaction, you cannot afford to be in any degree careless. For the sake of the Society with which you serve, you are bound to do your work well. For the sake of the Christian Church, whose present and future you must affect, you are called upon to give of your very best, and to let it be seen that you count no pains, no perseverance, no patience too high a price to pay for well-grounded and established results. “Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God,” is a searching standard for service, and one which holds good to-day for every worker in every place.

To those of you who are fresh to the foreign field there is one matter in which you will early find this spirit of thoroughness put to the test. That is in language study. It is a heavy, exacting, often weary task to learn a strange tongue, and to be patient during all the time that its study postpones your activities as an evangelist. Yet the Committee do not hesitate to lay this burden upon you as one of their strongest claims, and in particular as the special business of the first period of your missionary life. You can be no exception unless in your field of service not aanything about yourself or your functions, but the capacity of those around you to thoroughly understand English makes work in English the best. Otherwise you are in duty bound to learn to speak, to think, and in almost every case to read well in the tongue of those to who you are sent. You hae no right to be content with acquiring a smattering of the vernacular, nor even with mastering a Mission dialect, known perhaps throughout the congregations and the stations, but not “understanded of the people” further afield. Thorough knowledge of their way of speaking and thinking is your necessary ideal as missionaries–such thorough knowledge that you can really bring home to their minds God’s truth with which you are entrusted. “So run that ye may obtain.”

II. Another point the Committee count worthy of your attention is that of fellowship in work. Not only is there in every station a call for faithful fellowship within its Mission community. This, while always needed, is especially so when new recruits arrive. They may gain so much by finding themselves from the first lovingly welcomed and helped by their seniors, and they may do much by showing a spirit of kindness, and of readiness to learn from others, and to ease the burdens of their seniors. But, further, as the roll of missionaries enlarges, and the scope for service expands across a wider field, there must come increasing occasion for changes in the duties assigned to any one missionary. From the senior of all to the junior of all, you must be prepared from time to time to find that you are moved from one station to another, from one duty here to a different one there. Consequently you must seek to think less of my station, my class, my work; more and more of the unity and fellowship of the whole. If what you do one year is over-strongly marked by your own peculiar tastes and methods, and at the end of the year you pass on to some one else’s work which has been carried on upon equally marked, but different, characteristic lines, it may be no easy matter to adjust things properly. Is it not sometimes true that a very “square” missionary makes a very “square hole” into which the “round” missionary who follows finds it difficult to fit? This can only be avoided by a loving steady purpose to “look not every man on his own thins, but every man also on the things of others.” There is very real occasion to make your own part of the work helpful to that of others; to feel that even in the things definitely entrusted to your own hands you are no irresponsible autocrat, but are a member of a body–a body having many members, meant to gain help from others, and to give them help in their turn; thinking of them and for them; shaping and limiting the individuality of your service, so that it may tend to the advance of the whole. It is an unselfish, generous, self-effacing character that a missionary must bear if he is to be worthy of his high calling.

Such fellowship may with advantage, too, be extended from Mission to Mission. One field may do much for other Missions. it may, if it be richly honoured of God, quicken everywhere interest and prayer for missionary work. It may cheer the heart of many a burdened worker in other fields by its forcible witness to the owner o the Gospel and to the presence of the Holy Spirit. And in its turn it may receive much in the earnest intelligent prayers of godly people, nowhere perhaps more real and steady that in other foreign countries where the C.M.S. is at work. Each Mission may also learn not a few lessons from other fields. As its problems come fresh to the front they may prove to have been familiar problems, elsewhere, and perhaps have found their solution in other Missions. A hundred years of experience should make the Society strong in this matter of the mutual helpfulness of Missions.

What the missionaries from the field have been able to do at the Conferences held from time to time at home, in exchanging information and views upon difficult matters with their fellows from other lands, shows the kind of benefit that may be reaped from an intelligent recognition of the solidarity and fellowship of Mission work in many lands, especially of those where the C.M.S. is the common bond of help and affection. Mutual study of one another’s needs and dangers, weaknesses and strength, triumphs and sorrows, not with an ill-instructed readiness to criticize what differs, perhaps necessarily differs, as if it must be inferior, but with a loving desire to learn, to help, and to encourage, will bring blessing to all concerned.

III. Yet one other most important feature of the work the Committee would dwell upon, and this is the need of working with an eye to the future.

In many fields the problem has already arisen, or is beginning to arise, of the organization of the Christians into a self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extending Church. In some cases, at least, the matter is already a pressing one. To all concerned it should be one of deep interest, and prayerful consideration.

One element in the consideration must be the proper relations between a voluntary missionary society like the C.M.S., not possessed of any offical Church status, and an infant Church, which, though in some cases small in itself even in comparison with the work of the C.M.S. as a whole, is on its way, God willing, to become a younger sister in the family of Churches in which are included such august bodies as the Churches of England, Ireland, several of the Colonies, and the United States. Though an infant, the sister must, even from its birth, be able to take the place this destiny involves. A mere Mission of a Church Society, organized as such, is of course quite another thing.

Where other Societies are concerned, as in Japan, or where other large communities of Christians not connected with the Mission have to be included in the Church, as in New Zealand, it is more readily seen how widely Mission Organization and Church Organization must differ in their nature. it requires thought–thought which is a responsible duty for all missionaries engaged in such fields, to see that there must be the parallel wide difference even where, as in Uganda, the whole Christian community with very little exception has developed from–it might truly be said is–a single C.M.S. Mission. If in either case the whole is to be organized as a Church it cannot relaly be organized in the usual sense as a Mission. A Mission may be organized within a Church, as in Japan and New Zealand, where the Church is large, the particular Mission comparatively small. A Church may be separately organized near to, but not on quite the same ground with, a strong and separately organized Mission, as in West Africa. But where the Church must practically be the Mission in a new phase of its existence, the dual organization, complete in both parts, is not practicable. Church Organization, naturally, waits while the Mission carries out its preliminary functions. But at some time or other it must be for the “Mission” to stand more or less aside, and for the “Church” to occupy the field. When will the time come for that in your field, and how shall preparation be made for it? To most of you that question will in the future be of very real importance; and no careless indifference, no ready-made prejudice, should be allowed to prevent your giving it prayerful and studious attention, so that your attitude in the matter may be an intelligent one, and when any decision is reached your whole weight should be thrown into loyal support of the plan which prevails.

IV. The present instructions are clearly not the place for a discussion of such matters in detail. Having bespoken your candid and prayerful consideration of the matter as it arises, the Committee will content themselves with remarking upon one practical course of preparation for the future, which is not likely to be unsuited for any result that may issue. Keep in mind in all your work the responsibilities of the Native Christians, their clergy, their councils, their synods or whatsoever may be arranged. Remember that it is likely to be very difficult to hand over to some newly-constituted organization duties and responsibilities which its leading members have not previously been in some measure trained to fulfil. Example is doubtless an excellent factor in training. But when a missionary is placed where he can choose between saying in effect to a Native brother by his side, either “see how I do this,” or “come and do this with my sympathy and help;” if he follows a steady course of “example,” and gives no room for his brother to follow in practice the example that he sees, he is in all likelihood storing up for the future a deadweight of responsibility shirked, and of indifference accumulated, which will prove a grievious hinderance to the Church’s life in the future. It may seem so much easier for to-day to do, and do well, oneself the thing that needs doing. But it may be so much better for the future that some one else hsould be led to do it now, though he does it not nearly so well, because he will be bound to share in such work some day in the fiture, and then may lack the guidance he can get to-day. This principle is far reaching, and the Committee earnestly hope to see it well applied, by men and women alike, to all the work they have in hand; for the responsibilities of the missionary to-day are the responsibilities of the Native Christians at what may prove a no very distant to-morrow.

In closing, the Committee add one word, in these instructions, besides what is verbally addressed to you in their name, by way of exhortation as to the nature of your work in its relation to the great Lord of all. They are assured that you, with the Committee, will here to-day seek to renew your heartfelt expression of thanksgiving to God that He has given you this ministry. That you will also, with themselves, look up afresh to the Master that calleth out His disciples, and seek of Him for your ministry all the gifts and graces that are needed to make you able ministers of His new covenant. That you will, by the Holy Spirit’s help, renew your consecration of yourselves to the work, making it, so far as you are able, and impelled “by the mercies of God,” an absolutely wholehearted “presenting of your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God.” And they would earnestly commend you to the faithful keeping of the Chief Shepherd, whose missionary command was the happy occasion of His blessed assurance, “Lo, I am with you always.”

By order of the Committee, H. E. Fox, B. Baring-Gould, F. Baylis, G. B. Durrant, Secretaries, C.M.S.

Church Missionary House, Salisbury Square, London, E.C. September, 1901

General Instructions, delivered on Sept. 25. 1901 to all Fuh Kien Missionaries

Pathetic has been the sight which China has recently presented to the world. Its Capital in ruins; held by foreign soldiery; its Emperor fled; famine threatening; and worst of all, its teeming millions ‘having no hope and without God in the world’. And yet what important lessons has God been thereby teaching. You, dear brothers and sisters, who are returning to work there, or about to go forth for the first time, have seen in the wonderful story of the relief of the British Legation the confirmation of your confidence in God’s over-rulling Providence. You have been taught also to place a higher estimate on the stability of many of your Chinese brethren and sisters, as you have heard of hundreds who have, when in imminent peril of a violent death, with heroic steadfastness clung to their Christian faith. The public too have heard of not a few who without thought of reward have been willing to risk their lives on behalf of the foreigner in Pekin, acting so as to evoke the grateful recognition of representative s among the European Power. The Committee trust that this may lead to much more prayer and effort on behalf of the evangelization of China. But you have, the Committee believe, been taught another lesson by the events of the last twelve months, namely - that at any time, under God’s Providence, your personal service in China may suddenly be brought to a termination. Hence the importance of seizing the present opportunity for training the Native Christians, in dependence on the Holy Ghost, to stand alone. The Committee, therefore, dear brothers and sisters, would urge you to lay yourself out even more than heretofore in developing the Native Agency, in training Catechists, Schoolmasters and Biblewomen. it may be that it will prove more important for you to spend time and prayer and thought on this branch of the work rather than in the direct evangelization of the heathen.

You who are returning to the Field will probably find, the Committee would remind you, your position considerably changed especially in the Districts. Native Christians, under the abnormal condition of things, will have developed into Leaders nd, it may be, previously trusted Leaders will have deteriorated in spiritual force. Be ready to recognise and welcome co-operation on the part of those who during your absence have won the confidence of their fellow Christians. Be not surprised, and certainly not grieved, if your plans and opinions are not always received with the same docility as heretofore. Rather rejoice if a healthy but humble independence of spirit is evinced. Welcome any indication that the Native Pastor or Cathehist desires to initiate work. Give him all the sympathetic encouragement in your power.

Not a few of you, dear sisters, who are returning to Fuh Kien and Mid China have been compelled to leave your mission before your furlough was fully due, and now many of you are cheerfully consenting to return to your districts after a period in England less than you might justly have claimed under ordinary circumstances. But the Committee trust that you have been refreshed and strengthened in mind and body, and quickened in spiritual vigour by intercourse with Christian friends at home. Assuredly you may count upon China occupying an abnormal position in the prayers of many of God’s people throughout the world at this time. The Committee are thankful to know that in consequence of residence in their Medical Mission at Bermondsay many of you go forth on the present occasion still better equipped for service in China.

With respect to you, dear Miss Barber, the Committee are asking the Conference to consider what is the most pressing and suitable line of service for you to undertake, and they will recommend to the Committee your exact location. They regret that in your case health considerations have specially to be kept in view.

To you, dear sisters, the Committee will only add one word to emphasise the extreme urgency of your labour amongst the Bible-women. They regard it as of the utmost importance that you should make every effort to train your Native sisters for active service among their fellow-countrymen, even if it involves the sacrifice of some time which has hitherto been devoted to direct evangelistic work among the heathen. You may rest assured the committee will do their utmost cordially to support you in connexion with your Women’s Schools and similar organizations. May the Lord graciously grant you many souls for your hire, and may you ever realise to the full the ‘the joy of the Lord is your strength.’

By Order of the Committee, (Sgd.) B. Baring-Gould (Sgd.) G. B. Durrant Secs. C.M.S.