¢ ¥ fk Bs, a i 5 id oe ey, Sek ae , x aa he 2 = . von \ ig > . _ PAUL W. HARRISON y x se PREPARATION for as _ MISSIONARY SERVICE ad Preparation for Foreign Missionary Service An Address to Student Volunteers By PAUL W. HARRISON, D.Sc., M.D., F.A.C.S. StuDENT VOLUNTEER MoveMENT FOR Foreicn Missions 25 Madison Avenue - - New York City ’ ' ts } , : C aged y 4 K J ' , : As en Aer ae ie F . ‘ : Lal ‘ os \ ¥ 1 ‘as ae . a Se ‘Wart i ‘ * r: j = : “ i ¢ ; - Price, 10 cents each, one dollar per dozen. PREPARATION FOR FOREIGN MISSIONARY SERVICE By Paut W. Harrison It is our purpose, if God permit, to become foreign missionaries. What is more, we want to be good ones. We want to accomplish all the work that God Himself has in mind for us. How can we prepare ourselves best? Health First of all because a missionary needs a rugged and resistant physique, we should be willing to devote time and attention to securing it. In its pursuit the first word is a word of caution. Avoid too much attention to health. A missionary will be a far more effective worker with a weak body than with a neurasthenic mind. How- ard Walter of Lahore was an outstanding missionary. Few have done more than he to point the men of India to Christ, and he worked under the handicap of frail health and limited activity. We have all known men whose concern about their body has cut down their use- fulness to a pitiful fraction of their possibilities, Neurasthenia has wrecked more missionary careers than weak bodies. Cultivate a healthy contempt for the minor ills to which all flesh is heir. Refuse to think about yourself, either your body or your soul. 3 Nevertheless it still remains true that a rugged physique is an asset beyond price. Howard Walter and the glorious company of missionaries like him could have accomplished twice as much had they been better en- dowed physically. Health of body requires a certain amount of play, even for the man of eighty. It requires a reasonable amount of sleep. It requires regularity of the bowels. It requires hard steady application to the object of life. It requires little else. The volunteer who neglects these things because of his work, makes a mistake. The man who wastes his endowment on late fudge parties and talk-fests is a traitor to the Kingdom. Technical Preparation _ In the second place the Volunteer needs the best sort of technical preparation. The man who is willing to be a slovenly and careless doctor in India, and hopes to excuse that slovenliness by engaging in evangelistic work, is a dishonest hypocrite. This is not to say that none are wanted in the mission field except geniuses, but it is to say that none are wanted except faithful, hard-work- ing, honest workmen, who plan to do the very best they are capable of, in whatever activity they elect to en- gage. It makes comparatively little difference whether the Volunteer takes up medical work abroad, educational work, evangelistic work, or indeed, one of the more un- usual lines of missionary endeavor. What does matter 4 a great deal is the honesty, diligence and faithfulness with which he performs his duties. We are out there to introduce men to Christ. The first requisite is funda- mental honesty in our own character, which is only another way of saying that our day’s work must be of the sort that Christ Himself can congratulate us over. This seems a platitude but apparently it needs con- tinual re-emphasis. It was in one of the best univer- sities in the country that a student said to me: “I do not expect ever to be a really good doctor, so I plan to go out as a medical missionary.” Equally to be repudiated is that haste which cannot pause for an adequate prepa- ration, but desires to enter the field at once. Christ spent thirty years in preparation for a ministry of only a little more than that many months. Let us be willing to follow His example. The Spirit of Cooperation If remarks on health and on technical preparation seem trite, there are certain aspects of the preparation of the spirit, of whose discussion the same cannot be said. In the first place, we must train ourselves to work com- fortably with uncomfortable people. Missionaries form a splendid company of Christians. They are not sur- passed in consecration and ability by any body of men and women anywhere. But the crippled missionary and the crippled mission station whose usefulness has been 5 cut down to a mere fraction of what it ought to be is not uncommon, and the commonest cause is a lack of brotherly cooperation in the missionary body. It is safe to say that nothing so cuts down the effectiveness of the missionary enterprise today as this. Sometimes it is a matter of sensitive feelings. Personal slights, usually imaginary, sometimes real, cause us great distress. We are sure that the interests of the Kingdom of God are jeopardized by the unchristian attitude and actions of our colleagues. If we will haul out that soul pain and examine it in the cold light of day, it is never our zeal for the Kingdom of God that is found to be suffering. That variety of pain does not come from such a source. It is our own personal pride that aches that way. Few things are more needed by the prospective missionary than a thorough vulcanization of the epidermis of his personal feelings. Not many things we can pray for and work toward are more important than this, as we prepare to be Christ’s messengers to the uttermost parts of the earth. Sometimes it is a question of tolerance. You do not smoke, and your colleague smokes as if he thought it a means of grace. Doubtless you show better judgment than he on that point. But the important question is how you are going to react to this situation. He is not coming to ask your advice on the matter. No, unques- tionably he will continue to smoke. And are you who 6 do not smoke to divide yourself from him on that account, to sever all diplomatic relations, so to speak, and destroy the spiritual unity of the station? It was not an idle prayer when Christ prayed for us “That they may all be one, that the world may believe that Thou didst send me.” The mission station thus divided with its spiritual unity gone is in God’s sight a pitiful, crippled agency, a futile useless thing; not because someone smoked, but because someone so far failed to catch the spirit of Christ as to learn the first lessons of tolerance and forbearance and brotherhood. We must learn to work comfortably with uncomfortable people, to preserve and rejoice in unbroken Christian fellowship with people whose table manners offend us, whose political convictions irritate us, whose personality is disagreeable to us, whose theological outlook differs from our own. If our vision of Christ and our par- ticipation in His Spirit is not sufficient to enable us to rejoice in deep and lovely Christian fellowship and affection for our colleagues; if we cannot as disciples of Christ triumph over the trifles that separate us from one another, we would do well to come to Him for a deeper vision and greater grace before we apply to any Board to be sent out to the field. We can train ourselves in this. We not only can, but we must. Hardly any training that could be mentioned is more important. Race Relations in the Concrete As we train our spirits for the work that we trust lies before us, we must, in the second place, free our- selves from race pride, and all feeling of race superiority. Missionaries in the past have made some grave mistakes here, and the matter is far more important now than it was with them. All over the world aggressive na- tionalism is rising in a great tide, until it promises to become the outstanding phenomenon of the mission field. The Arab will endure many things, but being patronized by a foreigner he resents with a fierceness that is start- ling. The same is true of the Indian and the Chinese. On the other hand, the most fanatical and bigoted Arab melts under the approach of simple unaffected demo- cratic friendliness. The Arabs are perhaps as fanatical a race as can be found in the world today, but I have yet to meet one of them who could resist such an ap- proach. I have eaten with the Shiah river boatmen of the Tigris, whose religious teaching makes eating with a Christian a filthy and repulsive thing. It took only a week of common friendship to do it. A member of the fanatical desert brotherhood of Inland Arabia not long ago volunteered to act as my guide and advance agent in his own country, an offer that meant for him great per- sonal unpopularity, not to say danger, and this after an acquaintance of two weeks. It requires nothing except simple brotherly democratic association with every ele- 8 ment of race pride eliminated. This means, of course, that as far as possible the missionary joins with his new friends in their activities. It means that he seizes every opportunity to accept and offer hospitality. At the end of the long day’s caravan ride, the caravan cook turns his sheepskin saddle wrong side up on the sand. The hair side is down, and the clean side up, or at least if not clean it is hairless. This sheepskin he pounds in the middle with his fist, making a sort of dish out of it, and into this dish he pours a certain number of cups of flour and water, the whole being kneaded into dough, and shaped into a great flat pancake as big around as a dinner plate, and an inch or more thick; just as nice and light as a paving stone. This is baked in hot ashes for twenty minutes, and it makes a good, solid, substantial meal. Now the mis- sionary can sit off by himself and eat a sardine out of a tin can, if he desires, but the road into men’s hearts does not lie in that direction. When roasted locusts are served he eats roasted locusts, just as John the Baptist did long before. Such a missionary prays at times for a zinc-lined and copper-riveted stomach. It goes with- out saying that not everyone can go the limit on this program, but it should be a matter of prayer and effort to go just as far as possible in practice, and always the whole length in spirit. Our missionary success is going to depend on it. Gray Dust or Rose Tints? And let us train ourselves to be enthusiastic in our outlook on life and on our work. There are too many missionaries to whom life’s outlook resembles nothing so much as one of the roads of India in the Summer, before the rains have come. Everything is covered with a thick gray dust, and there is not one sparkle or dash of color in the whole landscape. Those men look for- ward to long years of plodding devotion to their duty, and devotion to duty is a magnificent thing. But Christ has something better than that for us, if we enter at all adequately into His spirit. The task to which He calls us is one of high lights and lovely rose tints. When we see it covered with gray dust, and lacking every attractive feature, it is simply because we have ceased to see it with the eyes of our Master, and have come to look on it with the eyes of the world. There is one thing perhaps more than any other that will help us keep the splendid colors and magnificent outlines of our calling clear, and that is an adequate comprehension of our task, and a fearless undertaking of the largest and hardest piece of work that our situa- tion offers. Every mission field has in it tasks difficult and magnificent. The educational missionary looks forward to bringing education of the right sort, and with it a knowledge of Christ, to every boy and girl in the province. The evangelistic missionary plans to bring the 10 Gospel message into every home in his entire district. He dreams of a united indigeneous church that shall be an example for the whole universal Church of Christ. The medical missionary dreams of setting up the King- dom of God in the forbidden cities where explorers scarcely penetrate, and where fanaticism reigns supreme. That is to say, these are the visions that ought to be ruling our lives. Too often we acquiesce in the common opinion that such achievements are far beyond us, are for our successors, and the gray dust of mediocre ambition and poorer accomplishment settles down on our souls like a pall. Let us pray for a vision of the impossible job; let us strive to see our field with God’s eyes, and take that splendid and impossible project as our own life mission. We are too much afraid of the big things in the Kingdom of God. It is the man with an impossible task whose enthusiasm never flags, who never loses the splendid rose-colored vision Christ gave him. Great ambitions generate great enthusiasms. Perennial Enthusiasm It is thus, too, that we shall gain a perseverance with- out which great things cannot be done on the mission field. Few men are more of a thorn in the flesh than the missionary who generates a magnificent new idea every week, forgetting in the meantime his idea of a week ago, and making all his enthusiasm a mockery. Such a man 11 may stir the whole station with a new plan for the occupation of territory or the better development of the work. His colleagues turn the matter over in their minds and are convinced that the plan has great merit. But on further conference it is discovered that already at the expiration of a week the plan has completely disap- peared from its author’s mind, and a successor reigns in its stead. That sort of missionary thinking helps nobody. What is needed is a calm and prayerful survey of the field, and an enthusiastic grappling with the largest prob- lems that it affords, and then a perseverance that finds the missionary at the expiration of twenty years still carrying forward the campaign with a vision and an en- thusiasm which has not cooled but rather increased in intensity and determination, with the passage of the years. Such a man will have his lines laid out for work years in advance. His vision will cover whole provinces as yet unreached, but which he is praying and planning for. That man is sharing Christ’s spirit, and is seeing his work through Christ’s own eyes. The Friendship of Christ There is one line of preparation, however, that is more important than all of these. Indeed, on it all of these depend. We go out to introduce men to Christ, and our most important preparation for that task is the cultivation of Christ’s friendship for ourselves. It is not 12 common for missionaries to give more time to this on the field than they did at home before coming out. I think I have known one man who found more time for personal devotional Bible study and prayer as a mis- sionary than he had found as a student. Are our present habits of prayer and Bible study an adequate foundation for the missionary career that we look forward to? If they are not adequate, surely nothing compares in importance with making them so. We forget that in essence misionary work is a very simple thing. The souls of two men come into contact. One of the two is the missionary, and the other is his friend in India or China or Arabia. In that experience of friendship, the man of China meets with Christ. We do well to see that no racial pride and conceit keep our soul from real con- tact with the soul of the man we wish to reach, but it is more important still that our own contact with Christ be kept so genuine and intimate that through us He touches men and draws them to Himself. If men are to come into contact with Christ when they come into con- tact with us, we must keep our contact with Him un- broken, and for most of us thirty minutes a day devoted to this purpose is none too much. Spiritual Reinforcements And while we are in this country, let us raise up a constituency which will back us up. I am not speaking 13 now of the men and women whose sacrifice pays our salaries, and makes the various enterprises of the mis- sion fields possible. That is necessary, of course, but there is a far more important thing. We want back of us men and women and children who know us and love us, and have confidence in us, who will put back of us and of the work that has been given us to do all the power of their spiritual lives; who will pray for us, and think about us and carry us on their hearts. The Apostle Paul needed this sort of help and so will we. Every one of us will face desperate and apparently hopeless situations. Men and women we love will be struggling for a footing in the Kingdom of God. The prayers and the spiritual help of twenty earnest children of God are stronger than the prayers and the spiritual help of any one of us. So let us get the twenty behind us. And finally let us remember that through all the diffi- culties and the perplexities of the days of preparation, as we follow, Christ promises to lead us. We will find ourselves in hard situations because He led us there. We may meet with temptations and trouble and humiliation and apparent failure. All our experiences He selects for us, one after the other for our development. He who knows all about the world and its need and all about us and our possibilities, is the one who prepares us and makes us sufficient for all the tasks He has in store for us. In that knowledge we can face the future with per- fect confidence. 14