Our Mission Fields and the Foreign Mission Seminary
By J. L. SHAW
THE selecting and training of suitable workers for the mission fields is one of the great and necessary problems continually before us in our foreign mission program. The growth and present development of the work demand a larger and more efficient force of workers to meet the pressing calls coming to us. Up to the present our workers have entered every continent and many of the islands of the sea. Organized conferences and mission fields are embracing the darkest corners of the earth. We are now printing literature in more than sixty languages. Schools, sanitariums, and printing-houses are springing up in various places. All these enterprises call for more men and women fitted to undertake various kinds of work in the cause. If this movement shall advance the next few years as it has in the past, a large company of young people must be selected and trained for work both in the home land and in the mission field. Our great need in the finishing of the work is a strong, trained, spirit-filled corps of missionaries. In the past, in selecting recruits for mission lands, the lists of workers in State and local conferences have been carefully studied, and missionaries selected. We have drawn until local trained forces have become very much reduced. Many of our most devoted and gifted laborers have been chosen and sent abroad to start work in other lands. From some conferences so many workers have been taken that it seems unwise and unjust to the interests at stake to ask for another worker at the present time. And yet the calls from the regions beyond are steadily increasing. In the great heathen lands of the East we have scarcely begun. What is our small band of fifty workers in India among the three hundred millions?—Only a drop in the bucket. At the last General Conference forty families were voted for China, yet only twelve have been sent forward. Of the twenty-five families voted for India only six have gone to the field. How shall we answer these definite calls? where shall we find suitable recruits to fill these orders? Seeing the position we were coming to in answering the growing calls for mission workers, the General Conference Committee, three years ago, while in council at Gland, Switzerland, conceived the idea of changing the Washington Training College to the Washington Foreign Mission Seminary, with the purpose in view of providing at headquarters a place of training for foreign missionaries. This was an advance step in our missionary undertaking, but a very needful and important one. The aim of the Foreign Mission Seminary is to give the necessary training for the mission field. Missionaries who have spent a number of years in mission fields have very definite convictions regarding the preparation required by those who go to the regions beyond. They urge that volunteers for missions should obtain a good knowledge of the geography of the country to which they are going; should be familiar with the history of the people, and their customs and habits; and should have a knowledge of the history of Christian missions, and the many problems which must be met and surmounted. Still more important is it that they should have a knowledge of the religions to be met, the specious, subtle errors they contain, and the wise and effective manner of displacing these by the Word of God. These alone, if no other reasons were presented, make necessary a place of special training for foreign missionaries. Other missionary societies have felt this need, and provided schools for this purpose. From a pamphlet giving an account of the recent World’s Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, we quote: “A number of experienced and distinguished missionaries have impressed upon the commission their conviction that one of the most urgent requirements of the missionary situation at the present day is that missionaries should be given a more thorough training in the language, customs, history, and religion of the people to whom they go. It also seems necessary for their efficient equipment that they should have some knowledge of missionary effort,16the main practical problems which they will have to face, and views regarding the solution of these problems which have commended themselves to the most experienced missionaries in different lands.” Residence in an Oriental country makes the missionary feel the need of special training for work in those fields. Life from many aspects in these lands is so entirely different than at home that a previous acquaintance with conditions which obtain, a knowledge of the people, their history, and religion, gives the prospective missionary great advantage. A commission on Oriental studies appointed by the British government has recently issued a report pointing out that Great Britain, in spite of its pre-eminence as a colonial power, is far behind Germany and France in its provision for the study of Oriental subjects, and recommending the establishment in London of a school of Oriental studies at an estimated cost of £12,000 a year for the training of civil servants, officers, merchants, and missionaries in these subjects. The Foreign Mission Seminary is not to do the same work that our academies and colleges undertake. The Seminary receives young men and women for the most part of some maturity, and gives them a fitting for the gospel ministry, general missionary work, and other lines of effort to which they have dedicated their lives, and it seeks to adapt the instruction in these subjects to the special needs of the foreign field. We may call the Foreign Mission Seminary a gate to the mission field. Here it is that workers going abroad receive their final fitting up for service in their respective fields. Here the General Conference Committee, who have the responsibility of appointing workers to foreign fields, may have the opportunity of becoming acquainted with those who are sent abroad. It is wise that they should avail themselves of every possible opportunity of knowing personally the men and women they choose to be representatives of this truth in mission lands. Many thousands of dollars are spent yearly in the transportation of missionaries to far-distant fields. If the worker is unsuited to the work and climate to which he is sent, not only is money spent to no purpose, but the individual who goes, and finds, or thinks he finds, himself a misfit, returns disheartened and discouraged. It may take years for him to get back the bright Christian experience of previous days, and in some instances the truth is given up, and a life of discouraging worldliness follows. In justice to the mission funds and to prospective foreign mission candidates, a place of final fitting up, under the immediate observation of the Mission Board, is not only desirable, but very necessary. The Foreign Mission Seminary should have one hundred strong, consecrated young men and women in attendance this coming year. Urgent calls for evangelists, teachers, and medical missionaries come from many lands. To answer these repeated calls our mature, strong, promising young people should be gathered in for final training and acquaintance preparatory to service at the front. The writer would be pleased to correspond with such as have a foreign field in view. Full information as to work, experience, age, health, previous training, etc., is also desired. There never was a time in the history of our work when greater openings presented themselves in the mission fields. Those whom God is calling should not delay in answering the call. In conclusion we quote the following words of earnest advice from a foreign missionary: “While vast continents are shrouded in almost utter darkness, and hundreds of millions suffer the horrors of heathenism, the burden of proof rests on you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by God to keep you from foreign fields.” President Foreign Mission Seminary.