SENTIMENTALISM IN FOREIGN WORK by William Ambrose Spicer

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 25, 1900

SENTIMENTALISM IN FOREIGN WORK

By William Ambrose Spicer

ANYTHING that tends to make distinctions between home and foreign service is against the foreign work. Through the backwardness of the churches to recognize the duty of evangelizing the world, there has come in a sort of romance of missions, a habit of appealing to the sentimental side of religious feeling. But sentimentalism in the work of the Lord is bad. Work is work, that is all, wherever it is done; and the battle against sin abroad is just the same as the battle against it at home. There is no special inspiration, peculiar to foreign work, provided to keep the worker abroad going. There is much of an effort to popularize foreign missions, to work up an enthusiasm of a special kind, in order to get the workers and their support. I noticed a little time ago that Dr. A. T. Pierson, who has always been a home worker for foreign missions, said that he was “a little afraid of what is called missionary enthusiasm.” He said, further:—

It feeds on excitement; it seeks incitements; it likes imaginative pictures drawn in highly colored tints; but it fades and faints before discouragement and difficulty. We want something nobler even than such enthusiasm; namely, simple, calm, steady obedience, implicit compliance with an explicit command; not a calculating, hesitating policy, but simple, uniform, steadfast, immediate obedience.

In the idolatrous fields it is the need of the people rather than their own expression, or even knowledge of their need, that appeals for help. Speaking recently in England, Mrs. Bishop, who has traveled through all Asia, said she was constrained to utter one word of warning concerning a fallacy that has been helped on by the romantic school of foreign mission writers. “Some would have them suppose,” she said, “that these people were thirsting for God. It was not so. There was no such manifest desire on their part—their thirst was rather for gold and the good things of this life.” That is, they are like men the world over; and to help them means a steady, plodding effort that does not live on mere sentiment.

There is such a thing as a burden for a special field. No one having an interest in the work of the Lord would think of ignoring such special leadings. But the burden that precedes this is a burden to see souls saved, and the work of God advanced in the hearts of men. In a foreign field, I believe most of us would prefer to see somebody coming who, possibly, had had no special burden for our particular field, but who had proved, by experience in the work, that wherever he was placed he had a burden to work, rather than to see some one coming who had a tremendous burden to get abroad, but who had demonstrated no particular ability to make a success of the work at home, in the steady, plodding way. No amount of traveling can make a missionary. The best burden of all, the one that is least likely to mislead any, is the burden to bear burdens just where we are. And then the moment the Lord may show us and the brethren that there is greater need somewhere else, we are ready to get a burden to go anywhere under the sun. And any with a genuine burden to go abroad ought, generally, to prove their fitness and find their place in the work in practical service at home. This will save time and money.

That the sentimental idea in foreign mission work often sends men into trying fields who ought to have been tried and tested and developed at home, is perfectly evident in the work of every society. It is really irritating to find somebody who is prepared to find strange peoples “interesting.” They are not specimens to be looked at. They are living souls to be saved; and their personal peculiarities and picturesque appearance is a secondary and trifling matter. We are as strange to them as they are to us. What of it? Sin in them is just as sinful as in ourselves, and the gospel is just as powerful to save them from it.

I wonder if there are any who still think it would be pleasant to work in the South Seas, and see the wavelets roll in upon the coral beach. Bishop Patterson, of the Melanesian Islands Mission, had a horror of this class of missionaries. He said:—

A man who takes the sentimental view of coral islands and cocoanuts, of course, is worse than useless; a man possessed with an idea that he is making a sacrifice will never do; and a man who thinks any kind of work beneath a gentleman will simply be in the way.

It is possible for a man to be a Seventh-day Adventist in good and regular standing, and yet have his usefulness crippled by getting some one or all of these notions into his head. Romanticism in mission work is responsible for much. There is too much hero worship in the world, too much glorification of men, especially if the life-work may have had a strange and far-away setting. We do not need any of the devices that popular religion makes use of, with the best of motives, no doubt, to urge on foreign mission work. As Seventh-day Adventists, we know that the Lord is coming when the witness of this gospel of the kingdom is given to all nations. To give this witness is the regular, ordinary, and only work we have. Let us go at it, every man in the place where God puts him. It is the same work wherever we may be. Of course far more workers will yet be sent abroad, proportionately; for the work will not be done till the cry is sounded abroad. If home demands are allowed to monopolize more than a fair share of labor, the home work will simply have to drag on slowly, waiting for the work abroad to be done. The sooner the whole world is warned, the sooner will the home work be finished.

W. A. SPICER.