A Cruel Necessity by William Ambrose Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Nov 10, 1904

A Cruel Necessity

By William Ambrose Spicer

We have sent word to all the mission fields to defer any expenditures that can be deferred, and to husband every slender resource. The mission funds are depleted, and the annual offering is still a long way off, measuring the time by the needs.

We are telling laborers who expected to go to the fields this autumn that we can not send them. A few will go, as special help comes from conferences sending laborers, or from other sources. Others must wait, and the fields must wait, apparently. Calcutta greatly needed three nurses for the busy winter season in our sanitarium there, and three earnest missionary nurses were under appointment months ago. We have had to cancel the appointment for this year.

Brother J. N. Anderson has been pressing us to get Dr. Law Keem to China by January 1. Dr. Keem, after years of preparation in this country, and with plans to become self-supporting very quickly after his arrival, is in California, ready to go, and the Mission Board had expected to send him. We have written him that we shall have to wait. When the little in the mission fund is needed to sustain workers already in the field, it becomes necessary to resolutely refuse to go ahead.

We are saying “No” to many an urgent call, while waiting for the annual offering, and shall have to continue, unless the regular flow of gifts shall be found to greatly increase. Surely many who might help are forgetting the fields that are so far off that they can not quickly tell us of their immediate needs. Month by month those needs must be supplied, or there is perplexity and possible distress.

No one believes we are doing too much for missions. In the best year we have ever had for mission gifts—the year 1902—the total given in all the year, including some special appeals, averaged four cents a week per church-member. Is that too much for a people charged with quickly carrying the third angel’s message to a perishing world? It is less than the price of one loaf of bread a week. Will not all especially pray now that the Lord will send forth laborers into his harvest? That means money with which to send them. It is a cruel necessity we are under just now in holding back workers and saying “No” to appeals for help. The most rapid progress we have ever seen in the mission fields is reported to-day. That very progress—God’s signal of advance—adds to the hardness of the situation as we counsel every our retrenchment and delay in all the fields. Must it be so?

W. A. SPICER, Secretary Mission Board.