A GREAT CRISIS IN THE WORK OF MISSIONS by Arthur T. Pierson

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, Cal., Kansas City, and New York · Nov 29, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, Nos. 48, 49.

A GREAT CRISIS IN THE WORK OF MISSIONS

By Arthur T. Pierson

THE FACT, THE CAUSES, AND THE REMEDY

By Rev. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D., Editor of the "Missionary Review of the World."

No such emergency in missions has been known since Carey went to India and Judson to Burma, as now. God has thrown open the doors of five continents, given every facility for rapid travel and transportation, and supplied translations of the Scriptures by the hundreds, and provided for their swift multiplication and wide scattering over the globe. Fifty million communicants are in Protestant churches, with untold millions of money at their disposal. We are at the threshold of a new century, with a hundred years of heroic missionary lives behind us, and with astonishing fruits of their seed-growing already apparent in many lands. Yet, at this very time, missions have come to such a critical state that, as in the days of Nehemiah, the trumpet calls all the Lord's workers to the one place in the wall where for the time the assault of the enemy is concentrated.

What is the trouble? To find out the disease is the first step toward its cure. What has brought on this crisis? While the same causes work, in vain we seek to prevent the results. There seems to be abundant activity, with good organization, and no serious lack of general information. Workers offer for the field in unprecedented numbers, and there is greater financial ability in the church than ever. Missionary societies have greatly multiplied, and the working machinery of missions is more perfect than before. And yet the cry goes forth on all sides, "RETRENCH!" and we can not send new laborers, or even support those now in the field; and there is a general apprehension, on the part of intelligent friends of missions, that matters are growing worse instead of better.

Of the causes of such apathy about missions, first of all we mention:—

1. The Scientific Spirit of Our Day.

Never has there been such an epoch of scientific discovery and revolution, moving by gigantic strides and leaps. Ten years of this last half century have outrun a thousand of the years before Christ; scarce a month, a week, a day, without some new surprise. One hundred and fifty years after Franklin, electricity is the absorbing theme of thought, the one force, driving all else out of the world's market. It has become our motor, messenger, illuminator; it has given us the eye that penetrates to the invisible, and it is every day entering some new realm hitherto thought to be beyond our knowledge. This is but one illustration of the strides of modern science. As a natural consequence, attention is diverted from spiritual things. The eyes are dazzled as in a glare of light, or a display of fireworks; the ears are full of the noise of human activity, and the blare of trumpets that announce new wonders and prophesy greater things to come. The engrossing, bewildering attractions and fascinations of material progress drink up vitality and energy, and divert the mind from eternal realities.

Moreover, there is a destructive tendency in modern scientific thought. Men make a god of science, become idolaters, and practically say, "There is no God." Faith in nature displaces faith in the Creator.

Darwin was the most conspicuous advocate of evolution in our day. He gave all his powers of mind and stores of learning to establish the theory of man's descent from the brute, and the tendency of his system has naturally been to subject man more or less to the rule of the brute instinct. In his "Descent of Man," referring to the struggle of the weak against the strong and the survival of the fittest as tending to eliminate the feeble, diseased, and helpless from the animal creation—he suggests that the civilized races of the world, by protecting the weak, and providing asylums for the diseased and crippled, constantly promote the survival of the unfittest and the perpetuation of the abnormal forms of life. The inference is that our philanthropy and missionary policy are unwise; that we ought to let nature take its course, and drive out the feeble and imperfect, and so bring on the reign of a complete normal human development. If so, foreign missions are misdirected benevolence, perpetuating a degenerate stock that should be left to the process of elimination and extermination! This is utterly at variance, we need not say, with the Master's teaching and example.

2. The Liberal Spirit of the Day

is scarcely less fatal to missionary enterprise. Christianity admits but one God, one Saviour, and one way of salvation. To admit other religions to an equality or even to a competition with the faith of Christ, is to dispute its unique claim to supremacy.

Never has the church shown more disposition to fraternize with false systems, and even to deny their falsity. Sometimes more readiness has been manifested to reach out a hand of recognition to faiths that deny Christ's claim altogether, than to welcome to fellowship sincere disciples in other communions. From intolerance we swing to the other extreme of liberality toward Buddhists and Brahmanists, Confucianists, and Parsees! Parliaments of religion welcome representatives of every conceivable creed to a fraternal embrace. Let us remember that to give sanction to error lowers the authority of truth. Charity ceases to be an angel of God, and becomes a messenger of Satan, whenever she extends to error the recognition that truth alone can claim.

3. There Is the Secular Spirit in Our Church Life.

Man is a trinity of spirit, soul, and body, the soul intermediate between the other two. If the soul turns toward the body, absorbed in its appetites, lusts, and material surroundings, the man becomes carnal; if toward the spirit, engrossed in the higher, unseen life and its verities, the man becomes spiritual. These two contrary conditions can not coexist; the mirror reflects that toward which it habitually turns; and the carnal mind is as dull, blind, and dead to spiritual truths and facts, as the spiritual mind is quick to apprehend and appreciate them.

The church in our day is secularized, absorbed in the temporal. Eating and drinking, dressing and amusing one's self, and enjoying life generally, practically absorb our energies. There is lavish expenditure on self-indulgence, and a close hoarding for the sake of having and of holding. Foreign missions belong to an exalted realm, and can be seen and felt in all their magnitude, both of obligation and opportunity, only from the spiritual side and by the spiritual mind. And, as a consequence, to those who are engrossed in the fashion of this world—the 'stage scenery'—which passes away to be displaced by some other show of paint and pasteboard, it is not strange if the claims and charms of missions make no practical appeal. A secular church never was a missionary church. Labors for lost souls belong to a realm of thought and conviction, of passion and devotion, lifted far above what is of the earth, earthy and earthly. Zeal for a world's evangelization finds in the Word of God its meat, and in the atmosphere of the secret place with God, its breath. Therefore, only Bible-loving and prayer-loving disciples feel the passion for human salvation that impels them to live and give for the spread of the good tidings.

The prevalence of the secular spirit always therefore brings the decay of the spirit of missions. The church, like the individual, has its body and spirit, its links with time and with eternity, and when the temporal is unduly magnified, the eternal is correspondingly belittled. Man not only reflects that toward which he is habitually turned, but he retains the image. The carnal mind is the sensitive mirror which, turned downward, has taken on the image of the earthly; the spiritual mind is the mirror which, turned upward, has received and retained the impression of the heavenly.

Is not our church life essentially secular? Devout souls can give but one melancholy answer. Wealth, fashion, fame, formalism, culture, caste, polite society, worldly opinion, intellectuality, have crowded out simple worship, self-denial, passion for souls, devoutness of spirit, spirituality, and whole-souled devotion to God. Dependence on the material and temporal, devotion to the esthetic in art and architecture, music and dress, are far more regnant than the Spirit of God in the practical administration of church life.

In a worldly church, if the work of missions survives, the spirit of missions is quenched; the body of organization lacks the soul, which only the Holy Ghost can inspire, and the work is carried on in the energy of the flesh.

4. The Selfish Spirit

is akin to the secular, and exhibits itself mainly in indulgence of self and indifference to others.

The present extravagance in church life is amazing. Think of a woman's dress made of thousand-dollar bank-notes, with still costlier certificates of stock wrought into its sleeves; of a funeral where the casket alone cost thirty thousand dollars; of wealth, hoarded and held by professing disciples, which, piled up in silver dollars, would reach hundreds of miles high; of a silver service that might build one thousand chapels in inland China; of a single clock that would have supplied ten missionaries for a year to Uganda; of a porter's lodge that would have set up five hundred Christian presses in India!

Such self-indulgence breeds indifference to spiritual claims and needs. One can not study his own pleasure and at the same time be consumed with zeal for the salvation of souls. Temporal enrichment to ourselves means to others spiritual impoverishment. He who saves his life, loses it, as he who saves the seed loses the crop.

5. The Holy Spirit Is Grieved.

Is there any evidence of a virtual withdrawal of the Holy Spirit from the church as a whole?

Let us stop carefully to consider this. The Holy Spirit's office is one of administration. In the body of Christ, every member is to be under His control as the members of the body are under the sway of the will. And whenever, in the church, the members cease to respond to the Spirit and to yield to His motions, there is a spiritual paralysis. Any disease is possible to the body when the spirit of life no longer controls; and so it is with the body of Christ.

If this be the clue to the present situation, a great mystery is solved. For more than a quarter century, there has gone on a rapid undermining of popular faith in the inspired and infallible Word of God. Under the polite names of literary and historical criticism, the professed scholarship of the world has been repudiating the historical character of many of the books of the Bible. Dr. Harper says the earlier chapters of Genesis contain not a true history but an "ideal history;" and Wellhausen defines an ideal history as a falsified record fraudulently marked under the guise of a true record. The revelation of the one true God is represented as the invention of a later age; and the "Jehovah" of Hebrew history as originally a local divinity of paganism. Abraham and his fellow-patriarchs thus become mythical personages; and the sublime mission of Moses, and the Mosaic code, the driftwood of tradition. Pure monotheism is no longer a faith held by Adam, but the product of evolution. The Pentateuch was fabricated by some unknown editor about the "age of Jeremiah." When Jesus Christ gave His sanction to the Mosaic origin of the so-called books of Moses, and the Davidic origin of certain psalms, such as the hundred and tenth, He either conformed to current notions which He did not care to contradict, or else He knew no better.

Of such Biblical criticism the late Prof. F. D. Maurice has well said, that if Moses himself had constructed his own writings in such manner, and then pretended he had a divine mission, "he would have framed the most incongruous scheme of falsehood ever palmed off on the world, and his name ought to be held accursed as that of the wickedest of all liars and blasphemers."

The prevalence of such a scientific, liberal, secular, selfish, and irreverent spirit, is virtually a repudiation

of the Holy Spirit as the Divine Administrator in the church! Paul warns individual disciples not to grieve nor quench the Spirit. Is there no similar risk on the part of the church? The Holy Spirit will not perhaps altogether abandon the church; but may not the Holy Dove, grieved by this insulting indifference and practical antagonism, withdraw and retire, as into His own secret place, away from the strife of tongues and the confusion of contending and hostile spirits, thus ceasing practically to occupy His proper seat of authority and administration?

Satan is the hinderer of good—the Spirit of God is the Hinderer of evil. The two are exactly in opposition. The Mystery of Iniquity has been at work in the world always, and nothing has prevented its full development but this divinely-restraining power of God. Hence it follows that whatever in the church grieves the Spirit and repels or restricts His holy influences, tends to withdraw His restraints altogether, and give evil its monstrous and final growth in the personal antichrist—the man of sin—and promote the triumph of anarchy.

The Remedy for This Crisis.

What is the remedy for the present exigency in the work of missions, both at home and abroad? The one cure for all spiritual ills is a closer identification with God. This will be manifested in several ways:—

1. Submission to divine authority. Our marching orders are plain: “Go—go into all the world—go, preach the Gospel to every nation and every creature.” Missions depend, first of all, on a divine command. He, therefore, who disputes the duty of preaching the Gospel throughout the world, joins issue with God.

2. Sympathy with His plan and love. He has graciously called us to His help in working out a scheme for human redemption. To obedient souls, witnessing to Christ everywhere, there come the charm and compensation of the threefold presence: first, that of Christ, “Lo, I am with you alway;” secondly, of the Spirit, whom God has specially “given to them that obey Him;” thirdly, of the Father, who comes to, and loves to abide with, the obedient.

The uttermost parts are promised as the inheritance and possession of the Son, and the witness of disciples in the uttermost parts is the way in which the promise is to be fulfilled. Christ never will possess the uttermost parts until the church bears her witness everywhere.

3. A thoroughly Biblical hope as the basis of our work. To many the purpose of missions is the conversion of the world in this dispensation. For that expectation there is not the slightest Biblical basis. This is the age of outgathering from the world, but the world is to maintain to the end of the age its antagonism to the Gospel, even under the form of godliness denying the power thereof—and in the church itself there is to be a falling away. To aim and expect the conversion of the world in this age, is to meet only disappointment, because such aims rest on no Biblical basis, and we have no promise to justify such a hope.

To those who work on a thoroughly scriptural foundation, there can be no discouragement. They see everything to be as our Lord said: Tares and wheat growing together and practically indistinguishable. The church has never yet compared numerically with the world, and never will in this age. But he who goes on bearing his witness to the Lord, will see more and more glorious results wrought in the mission fields, and will help to fulfil the conditions that prepare for the Lord’s return, such as bearing a world-wide witness.

4. Supreme dependence on God and on the means He has instituted. These means are four: Going if you can go; sending if you can not go; giving, as stewards of God; and praying, as God’s intercessors. There is all God’s philosophy of missions. And when to all this is added the inspiration of history, what other motive is needed? God has always blessed the church just so far as the work of evangelization has been earnestly taken up, and the story of missions for the past one hundred years is pregnant with holy inspiration to heroism and faith, and reads like the chapters in the Acts of the Apostles which are aflame with miracles of divine presence and power.

Would to God there could be such a combined movement all along the line as would speedily carry the Gospel message to every living soul!

Arthur T. Pierson