p. 6 | The Call for Preachers of the Word by W. A. Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 19, 1914

The Call for Preachers of the Word

By W. A. Spicer

A Note for Young Men in Our Schools

THE situation pressing upon us in all the mission fields of the world, as well as in the home fields, constitutes a constant call to young men finishing their work in our training schools to consider whether the Lord by his Spirit and his providences is not calling for the dedication of their lives to the work of the ministry. It is an unmistakable fact, which appears every week in our correspondence with the mission fields, that the opening of the gates of entrance and the establishing of a foothold in the various countries demand the coming of more preachers of the message for this time.

In every land it is the preaching of the word of the living God in the terms of the third angel's message that brings out Sabbath keepers and raises up churches, and builds the training schools, the printing houses, and other institutional helps in the new fields. They all spring up from the preaching of the word. And now with the beginnings made, and the barriers down, the insistent call is for more evangelists to sound the message far and near among the masses of the people. It is still by what inspiration, quoting the criticism of the worldly, calls "the foolishness of preaching," that souls are won from darkness to light, and the cause of God pressed forward into new regions.

To meet this demand, an ever-increasing number of consecrated young men from the training schools must surely be found dedicating their lives to the ministry of the word of God.

We were struck with the emphasis given to this matter of the need of more evangelistic work in the mission fields at a recent conference of officers of all the Protestant missionary societies in North America, held at Garden City, Long Island. The leaders of these missionary societies certainly struck the evangelical and evangelistic note constantly in discussion of the needs of the fields and of the problem of missionary preparation. We quote a few paragraphs from the report of the committee on preparation of ordained missionaries. The committee had been working for two years on its report, gathering data from all lands. Speaking of the call for the dedication of service to foreign missions in this generation, and of the special need of preaching evangelists, the report says:—

The greatest need of reenforcements is not now for the auxiliary methods of work, though wise use should be made of them, but for direct country evangelization, and combination should be made wherever possible in educational and other forms of work in order to release as many missionaries as possible for direct evangelistic work.

The general conviction in these large missionary societies is that the tendency has been away from evangelistic work among the masses to institutional effort. The call is to swing the forces out again into the old-style evangelistic service that laid the foundations and built up the auxiliary agencies. Again the report appeals directly to young men in the schools to consider seriously whether the Lord does not call them to give their lives to the mission fields and to the ministry:—

The time has evidently come, not only to say to young men who have definitely decided to give their lives to medical or educational work or other similar forms of service at home, that they should consider whether the foreign field does not at this time offer them the largest field of service, but also to urge earnestly upon all young men who are not yet irrevocably committed to such forms of service that the present greatest need abroad is for trained evangelistic leadership, and that the loudest call is for reenforcements of thoroughly prepared ordained men.

Here is another statement from the same report:—

When young men are making their choice of the forms of action they are to pursue, it is just to press upon them these considerations which our correspondents have advanced, and also to direct them to the example of the most powerful and successful missionary who ever gave his life to the propagation of Christianity in other lands. What method did Paul pursue? He directly assailed his problems. He took his living gospel and went with it confidently out upon human life. In city and town and country he preached Christ. . . . He was forever on the watch for likely young men whom he bound to Christ and to his own missionary ideals, and whom he carefully trained in the most powerful of all schools, the school of his own blazing personal companionship. His ambition was to push out the bounds of the church to the rim of the world, to reach the unreached. . . . The committee has set forth with deep sympathy and general agreement these arguments for a larger preponderance of ordained men engaged in the most direct, aggressive, and comprehensive evangelistic work.

And we would press these arguments with all our power upon the attention of our young men. At the same time, we recognize, as our correspondents have done, the large and increasing place for other workers, and desire to guard against any unnecessary comparisons which might discourage young men who are not intending to enter the ministry from considering the claim of the foreign field.

As we have said, the call from our own mission fields sounds more urgently than ever this same cry for evangelists to go with this message to every tongue and people in the lands now opening before us. The educational and medical missionary and publishing institutional centers will of course increase with the growing work; but in the first place, and ever as the chief agency, must be the ministry of the word. Our fields are calling for help. The home conferences are ever ready to give of their best in response to the call of need from the yet more destitute mission fields. Sometimes a home conference feels itself hardly pressed indeed as it yields up soul-winning evangelists whose labors might most profitably be retained at home. But there is never an unwillingness to let the help go when the far fields call. The Lord is surely calling by his providence and by his Spirit for consecrated, thoroughly equipped young people to dedicate their lives to the ministry, and to shape their school work to this end.