Send the Best by Rev. Frederick B. Price

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 5, 1903

Send the Best

By Rev. Frederick B. Price

DAVID LIVINGSTONE, in his appeals to England from darkest Africa, reasoned somewhat as follows: When you have a critical case in surgery, you do not choose an amateur, but the most experienced and skillful physician available. Africa is in a critical state. Millions are perishing. Send your best-trained men and women to the rescue! So, too, the late Bishop William Taylor, whose apostolic zeal rivaled even that of Paul, himself urged the conviction that “in missionaries quality is of far greater importance than number.” And the son of Adoniram Judson, in his biography of that great missionary, declares that “Christianity will advance over the earth with long, swift strides when the churches are ready to send their best men, and the best men are ready to go.”

Often the impression exists among Christian people that the heathen of India, for example, are totally ignorant and depraved. On the contrary, many of them are trained in various useful arts, and, as servants, mechanics, merchants, and even professional men, they often astonish those who would evangelize them, by their business shrewdness and philosophic inquiries. To master but one of their languages, match their arguments, win their respect, inaugurate educational and religious enterprises for their betterment, and expose the fallacies of such venerable systems as Hinduism and Buddhism requires the utmost courage and versatility. Only the best-trained workers can hope to succeed, especially under the health limitations of a tropical climate. Yet how often missionary boards have been obliged to accept candidates who, though well-meaning, were ill-prepared for such responsibility! While many of these have wrought heroically, they have realized how much more could have been accomplished if they had been better equipped. Others have discovered their own unfitness, and have either engaged in secular employment or sadly withdrawn from the field. Meanwhile the work has suffered from lack of continuity and efficient leadership. True, “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” and many a luminous chapter could be written of gracious results attending the humblest instrumentality. But the rare endowment and training of Moses, Paul, and Wesley were no hindrance to spiritual conquest when subject to the divine will. All the facts of missionary enterprise that emphasize the importance of sending those who are best equipped, in mind and heart, for so important service.

But are the best willing to go? One would think so, in view of the missionary awakening of recent years, particularly that of the Student Volunteers among the colleges. Recruits already in the various foreign fields are demonstrating the wisdom of their choice, and many others are being stimulated by their example. Yet the emergency of the Christless nations far exceeds the response thus far elicited. Shallow excuses are frequently made by those who ought to heed the divine commission. Bishop Thoburn has observed a singular connection between so-called leadings of Providence and appointment to metropolitan pulpits, in the case of many whom he has sought to enlist as missionaries to India.

If the best equipped are willing to go, is the church willing to send them?— Yes, when fully convinced of her supreme privilege and calling. And she can well afford to do so. What with her splendid educational institutions and throngs of graduates, her steadily increasing wealth, the crowded state of many of the conferences, and the too often unreasonable demands of congregations, the offering of even a tithe of the best-equipped workers for such a cause would react most favorably upon both schools and churches, broaden their sympathies, enlarge the scope of their usefulness, develop much latent talent, and give to the mission fields an unprecedented spiritual quickening. If God gave his only Son for man's redemption, can the church refuse to send her best-beloved sons and daughters to the most spiritually destitute peoples for whom he died? — Rev. Frederick B. Price, of Rangoon, Burma, in The Christian Advocate.