Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions - Roland Allen; Thomas Cochrane

This table leads us naturally to consider the educational work done in the station area from an evangelistic point of view. We must inquire then into the extent to which evangelistic missionaries assist in the schools, and educational missionaries assist in evangelistic work, and the evangelistic results so far as they can be traced of the work in schools.

We ask first the extent to which educationalists employ the services of evangelistic workers in their schools and institutions. As we pointed out in dealing with the relation between medical and evangelistic work, so here we would insist that this particular table is not by itself a good guide. There is a serious danger in an institution, whether medical or educational, of dividing the work in this way. We have already asserted our conviction that medical missionaries should be evangelistic, and educational missionaries evangelistic also. But when evangelistic workers distinctly so called are on the staff of hospitals or schools, there is a danger lest the medicals and the educationalists should consider themselves absolved from personal effort by the occasional presence of an evangelist. "Let him do the religious preaching, and let me do the secular teaching. Preaching is his job, teaching is mine." Thus a division is created which reacts seriously upon the work of both. The pupils learn to distinguish the one work from the other, as separate and distinct departments. They prefer the one, they are bored by the other. No man can serve two masters; and if the religious teaching is plainly in the hands of one teacher and the secular teaching plainly in the hands of the other, they will tend to think that they can hold to the one and despise the other. This we say is a danger, but it is not an unavoidable danger. Only we must not judge that an institution is doing good evangelistic work because evangelistic services are held in it. The table is as follows:—

Then there is a most important work which the educational evangelist does, or might do, outside the school. Perhaps we ought to explain this; for many supporters of missions are unfamiliar with the idea. They think of the work of educational missionaries as necessarily bound up with schools and institutions. A teacher without a school, or outside a school, seems to them rather like a gunner without a gun. If an educational missionary goes on an evangelistic tour it is, they think, as an evangelist that he goes, not as an educationalist. Yet, if we understood the work of an evangelistic educationalist, we should not think it strange to meet an educational missionary on tour, doing evangelistic educational work. Evangelistic work is educational to the core, and it leads to educational results. No evangelistic work amongst an illiterate, or a literate, people can be really complete, if it does not lead at once to the organisation of education amongst the converts and hearers. The illiterate must be taught to read the Gospels, and it demands an expert in the teaching of illiterates to direct their studies; the illiterate and the literate converts alike must be taught to transform that education which they all give daily to their children, whether in the home or in a school, into Christian education, and this too demands the attention of a skilled educationalist. This work is invaluable and most exciting and interesting work, and must produce results which, for the establishment of the Church, are almost incalculably important. As then for the medical missionaries, so for the educationalists we ask:—

When we turn to the immediate evangelistic results of the education given in the station district, we labour under difficulties even greater than those which we met when we tried to formulate tables to reveal the extent to which medical missions were effective as an evangelistic agency.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the educational missionaries who set before themselves as the aim of their work a far distant goal to be attained by the cumulative effect of Christian influence brought to bear upon generation after generation of children who do not themselves become Christians, naturally resent a table which seems to demand a present, immediate, result in the tabulation of baptisms, and we fear that the other tables will hardly reconcile them, because we are afraid that few educational missionaries have yet learned to understand what a vast and important and absorbingly interesting work the education of the converts outside the schools affords. Consequently we shiver when we think of the reception which these tables are likely to receive at the hands of some of our friends in foreign countries, and our ears tingle in anticipation.

Nevertheless, if we are to be told, and to act on the hearing, that Christian schools are founded because it is easier to convert the young than the old, and the twig can be bent while the tree resists till it breaks, we must inquire how far this saying is justified by experience. A survey which neglected the factors which throw light upon it would be a partial and unjust one.

Hence we ask first—