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

But here we ought to remember the difficulty which we set forth earlier in discussing the missionary influence of our various activities, medical and educational, from a Church building point of view. A great many boys are educated and trained at mission expense to be evangelists, medicals, and teachers in mission employ, who serve indeed for a period according to their contract and then disappear into Government service or private practice. It is a serious question whether missionaries can be raised up successfully in this way. "I will give you training if you will promise to serve the mission," is not a very certain way of securing ready, wholehearted, zealous service of Christ. We have found out its uncertainty in many cases at home; we have found it out in still more frequent cases in the mission field. Unless we keep a very careful record of the after-life of those whom we train, and a very honest one, we are apt to ignore the failure, a failure which we cannot properly afford, and consequently we cannot know what we are really doing by our training. We ought to know the truth in this matter, both for our encouragement and our admonition. Happily here, we think, we can find an easy and a valuable test. If we ask what proportion of those whom we train continue in their missionary work after the end of their first term of service, we shall certainly have some enlightenment; for it is true of medicals and educationalists, and of evangelists, though in a much less degree, that if any man continues in missionary work after he has fulfilled the letter of his contract, it will generally be because he has his heart in the work; for missionary work seldom, if ever, offers the emoluments of Government service, or of private practice. We ask then—

SURVEY OF WORK IN A PROVINCE

If the institutions in which the training is actually carried on lie within the province, then we ought to have tables such as we have for the schools in the station area for these institutions. We need no elaborate statistics in this place, because the work of these institutions should be specially treated in departmental surveys. Here, all that we need is to relate the work of the schools or hospitals which were omitted in the station district survey, because they served a larger area than the station area, to the work done in the province or country. The educational returns from each station area must be added together and the returns of these larger institutions added to the total educational statistics; that will give us the work done in the larger area in proportion to population.

But in the province it is important to consider the relation in which the different grade schools stand to one another; because if the aim of the missionary educational system is the education of the Christian community, and the higher schools are designed primarily for Christian pupils from the lower schools, this relation is of importance. It is possible to build an organisation too narrow at the base and too heavy at the top, and then to fill the higher schools with non-Christian pupils without any definite understanding of the way in which that practice is to serve the main purpose of the mission. Then these schools stand on a distinct and separate basis from the rest of the mission activities, and the work of Christian missions in the country is split, part aiming directly at the establishment of a native Christian Church, and part "aiming at the general improvement of morals, and social, religious, and political enlightenment. Thus we arrive at that chaotic state in which the mission as a whole is not subordinate to any dominant idea of the purpose for which it exists, which alone can unify the work of all its members. But if the colleges and schools are designed for mutual support, and if the higher have any relation to the lower grades, then there must be some proportion between the base and the superstructure, and that proportion must be known and expressed in any survey worthy of the name. We include, therefore, the following table:—

In the province also we must know the educational facilities afforded by non-missionary agencies, if we are to have any true conception of the work of the educational missions. We must therefore add a table for these schools.

Here it is not necessary for us to find the proportion between the higher and lower grade schools, because we are not surveying the non-missionary educational work, and their scheme of proportions is not our business.

A comparatively slight addition to the tables for medical work in the various station districts will suffice to give an adequate impression of the medical work done in the whole area. We need not go into details, for the medical work should be, and generally is, reviewed by Medical Boards in their reports. For us now, all that is needed is the addition of tables, similar to those which we used for hospitals in the station area, for hospitals excluded from any station survey.