4 Yona > xo oy Jerusalem’s Answer to Present Day Inquiries WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORK OF THE STUDENT VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT JEssE R. WILSON STUDENT VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT 419 FourTH AVENUE New York, N. Y. xo es FOREWORD The Jerusalem meeting of the International Missionary Council brought together on the Mount of Olives at the Easter season of 1928 two hundred and forty delegates representing fifty nations. They “came by roads that lead up from the ends of the earth to the Holy City to face frankly and together the final challenging issue in the world today—the question of the adequacy of the Christian Message to transform and save man in face of his sin-tormented life everywhere, and especially in face of the world-conquering tides of material civiliza- tion and the resultant maelstrom of industrial and rural revolution and inter-racial conflict.” Among those present at Jerusalem were many deeply interested in the student life of North America with reference to the work of the church around the world. Several of these are closely connected with the Student Volunteer Movement of the United States and Canada; namely, Dr. Robert E. Speer, Honorary Chairman of the Movement’s General Council, Mr. Milton Stauffer and Mr. E. Fay Campbell, Chairman and Vice-Chairman re- spectively of the Administrative Committee, and Jesse R. Wilson, General Secretary. It is little wonder, therefore, that “Jerusalem” which seemed to gather up the very best missionary thinking of the past decade and place it right at the heart of the missionary life of the church in well-conceived plans and policies for the future should find a large place on the program of the annual meeting of the General Council of the Movement at Kalamazoo, Mich., August 31 to September 6, 1928. Many believe that “Jerusalem” gave adequate answers to serious inquiries concerning missions which arise in student circles today. The following statement, there- fore, was presented to the General Council of the Move- ment with the thought that it might lead to a further study of the Jerusalem findings and to a clearer under- standing of the Movement’s responsibility in the light of them. It is in accordance with a vote of the Kalamazoo Council that this statement reappears in pamphlet form. J.R.W. JERUSALEM’S ANSWER EVERAL general observations about the Jerusalem meeting of the International Missionary Council have interested me greatly. One is that Jerusalem in its findings seems to have embodied the results of the very best missionary thinking of recent years. No important field of missionary thought was left untouched. No serious criticism of recent pro- grams, policies, or tendencies was overlooked. No problem or perplexing situation in world affairs affecting missions was left without con- sideration. And most surprising of all, no cour- ageous position had to be abandoned through the failure of the whole Council to stand in support of it. In positive and convincing state- ment of the Christian missionary cause, in logi- cal conclusions as to what is right and what is wrong in past and present missionary endeavor, and in constructive recommendations for the future, the men and women at Jerusalem, with rare insight and fearlessness, seemed to gather up from all quarters the very best and most progressive suggestions which have emerged out of the ten-year period of intense post-war mis- sionary thinking. Another thing of interest is that the findings and conclusions of Jerusalem were set forth with no pretense toward external authority. Jerusalem wasa representative, deliberative coun- cil, and in no sense a representative, legislative assembly. The representative character of its 3 membership merits consideration. There were present men and women from fifty different nations representing twenty-six national or in- ternational Christian Councils and practically the whole of Protestantism in its foreign mis- sionary relationships. For the most part, these delegates could and did speak with the authority of scholarship and experience, but even so they modestly send forth their findings to stand or fall in accordance with whether or not they commend themselves to others by their own in- trinsic worth. A further observation is that whatever else Jerusalem may have been, it was not a mere academic gathering. There was no attempt to robe itself in theories and think that by so do- ing it had done its work. It had no place for mere value-judgments; it sought values only in facts and realities. Its conclusions are not the sum total of different hypotheses nor the results of mere rationalization. The Jerusalem delegates were men and women in close grips with life situations. They had always before them visions of their fellows, toiling, suffering, struggling, despairing, beaten down by poverty, ignorance, disease, superstition, or else fairly well satisfied now but doomed to ultimate dis- appointment because of trust only in the pomp and show of transient things. They wanted to help these people everywhere—help them vitally and in ways that count for eternity. They knew their lack of power to help apart from God, and therefore they sought not only by corporate thinking but also by corporate wor- 4 ship ways of spiritual ministry and practical helpfulness. This leads me to record another general obser- vation. Jerusalem was a Christian Council. We met as convinced Christians in the name and in the spirit of Jesus Christ. We knew out of past experiences and by divine intuition that the truth and light we sought lay in Christ and a fuller understanding of Him. We studied non-Christian religions with an abandon and a degree of willingness to find in them elements of good that perhaps have never before char- acterized a missionary gathering. But our chief interest was not in these systems of religious thought so much as in the condition of men and women and little children whose lives are influenced either for good or for ill by them. Our study was with the desire that we might be the better able to present Him whom we steadfastly believe came to bring fullness of light and life to all men. As we studied, He stood forth more clearly than we had ever seen Him before as unique, supreme, and necessary to the life of individuals and of the world. Our conclusions, therefore, came not so much in the form of arguments designed to convince as in the form of testimonies designed to induce others to try to discover in Christ all and more than we had found. Therefore, if some would accuse us of a Christian bias, we frankly admit it. It was a bias consciously formed, and we are willing to let time and the judgment of men and God determine whether or not we de- part from truth in following Christ. 5 In trying to present Jerusalem’s answer to present-day inquiries, it seems only fair to do it from the background of this characterization. Our task, then, is really to discover what this kind of a Council had to say to the persistent questions directed at the heart of the mission- ary enterprise. As actually asked by seriously inquiring minds, these questions are legion. But ignoring for the most part many variations of the ques- tions and putting all from the point of view of the man who really wants to know, this legion can be greatly reduced. Six are listed below. No one would maintain that these six are all-inclusive but we may be- lieve that in answering them many of the most important inquiries can be met. They are as follows: [ 1 ] What Is the Christian Message? [ 2 ] What Is the Motive that Prompts to Its Proclamation? [ 3 ] What Is the Spirit of Christian Mis- sionary Endeavor? [ 4] What Is the Christian Attitude Toward Non-Christian Faiths? [5] What Are Some of the Outstanding Weaknesses in the Present Situation? [ 6 ] What Is Proposed for the Future? Interestingly enough, all of these are dealt with pointedly in the Statement of the Christian Message. The other documents of the Council are important and their arguments and conclu- 6 sions will help to form the background of all that is said here, but because the best of all the other findings is summed up in the Message Statement, reference will be made most fre- quently to it. Wuat Is THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE? A great deal of confusion in recent years has centered around this question. Many Christians have been bewildered in the presence of it. Many, with varying degrees of success so far as the general acceptability of their statements is concerned, have tried to answer it. Some have tried to put into their answer as little as possi- ble; others have tried to put in as much as possible; and still others have tried to distin- guish between “what” and “whom.” Jerusalem did not try to see how little or how much it could say. Rather out of its two weeks of corporate study and prayer, out of the varied experiences of its whole membership, and in the light of its knowledge of the world, it tried to say what is sufficient and adequate. Moreover, while recognizing the superior value of the “whom” of belief, it did not overlook the es- sential importance of the “what.” Further, Jerusalem was wise enough to state many things in new, crisp phrases and at the same time cour- ageous enough to use old expressions where the new either were not forthcoming, or were in- adequate because inaccurate, or simply did not have the strength of some of the old terms which a passing fancy would try to render obsolete. Just how acceptable the Jerusalem Statement is going to be, it is too soon to judge, but those of us who first heard it read, and were ready without one dissenting vote to adopt it as our own, felt we were in the presence of an ac- complished miracle. And certainly the recep- tion which has so far been given this statement is one of the most encouraging events of the year, and may prove to be one of the most sig- nificant of the decade. It would be necessary to quote at length from all sections of the Statement to give in full Jerusalem’s answer to the specific question, “What is the Christian Message?” But this is not necessary since the statement itself is avail- able to all. Briefly, and only by way of sug- gestion, the answer is as follows: “Our message is Jesus Christ. He is the revelation of what God is and of what men through Him may become. In Him we come face to face with the ultimate reality of the universe; He makes known to us God as our Father, perfect and infinite in love and in righteousness; for in Him we find God incarnate, the final, yet ever- unfolding, revelation of the God in whom we live and move and have our being. . . . Jesus Christ, in His life and through His death and resurrection, has disclosed to us the Father, the Supreme Reality, as almighty Love, reconciling the world to Himself by the Cross, suffer- ing with men in their struggle against sin and evil, bear- ing with them and for them the burden of sin, forgiving them as they, with forgiveness in their own hearts, turn to Him in repentance and faith, and creating humanity anew for an ever-growing, ever-enlarging, ever-lasting life.” And again in the words of the Lausanne Conference quoted in the Jerusalem Message we have the following very clear statement: 8 “Jesus Christ, as the crucified and the living One, as Saviour and Lord, is also the center of the world-wide Gospel of the Apostles and the Church. Because He Him- self is the Gospel, the Gospel is the Message of the Church to the World. It is more than a philosophical theory; more than a theological system; more than a pro- gram for material betterment. The Gospel is rather the gift of a new world from God to this old world of sin and death; still more, it is the victory over sin and death, the revelation of eternal life in Him who has knit to- gether the whole family in heaven and on earth in the communion of saints, united in the fellowship of service, of prayer, and of praise.” That this is the Christian Message with im- plications both individual and social, extending out to the whole world, everyone at Jerusalem was ready to affirm. The Student Volunteer Movement finds it a satisfactory statement of its Own missionary attitude. We go out with the desire and avowed intention of helping to recruit men and women who will go to all the world to deliver by life and by word this mes- sage as the only way of light and life for all men. Wuat Is THE CuHriIsTIAN MIssIoNARY MOTIVE? When Jerusalem deals with the motive that prompts men and women to go forth in the proclamation of this message, it is no less speci- fic and positive. Believing this good news to be “the answer to the world’s greatest need” and resting not on our discovery or achievements, but ‘“‘on what we recognize as an act of God,” we are constrained by the love of Christ to share it with all the world. Many ulterior and inferior motives have been charged up against 9 missionaries. These the Jerusalem Council re- pudiates as being unworthy of Christians: “We cannot tolerate any desire, conscious or uncon- scious, to use this movement for purposes of fastening a bondage, economic, political or social, on any people. Going deeper, on our part we would repudiate any symp- toms of a religious imperialism that would desire to impose beliefs and practices on others in order to man- age their souls in their supposed interests. We obey a God who respects our wills and we desire to respect those of others. Nor have we the desire to bind up our Gos- pel with fixed ecclesiastical forms which derive their meaning from the experience of the Western Church.... We ardently desire that the younger churches should express the Gospel through their own genius and through forms suitable to their racial heritage. There must be no desire to lord it over the personal or collective faith of others.” “Herein lies the Christian- motive; it is simple. We cannot live without Christ and we cannot bear to think of men living without Him. We cannot be content to live in a world that is un-Christlike. We cannot be idle while the yearning of His heart for His brethren is un- satisfied. Since Christ is the motive, the end of Christian missions fits in with that motive. Its end is nothing less than the production of Christlike character in individuals and societies and nations through faith in and fellowship with Christ the living Saviour, and through corporate sharing of life in a divine society. Christ is our motive and Christ is our end. We must give nothing less and we can give nothing more.” This motive must be kept at the very heart of the Student Volunteer Movement’s recruit- ing program. Nothing short of this personal constraint of Christ is a sufficient reason for one’s becoming a missionary. Nothing short of this will be sufficient to keep one a missionary or enable him as a missionary to do work that is 10 deep, vital, transforming and abiding. “If any man is in Christ Jesus, there is a new creation.” The world’s greatest need is for new creations. Only those who go out as missionaries because of the indwelling Christ can bring people into that vital touch with Christ which literally makes men over again. Men need life; the source of life is God; God has chosen to mediate that life to men through Christ; therefore men need Christ. It is the business of missionaries to proclaim Him. He is our motive and our end. ‘““We must give nothing less and we can give nothing more.” Wuat Is THE SPIRIT OF THE CHRISTIAN MiIsst1ONARY ENDEAVOR? The spirit of our endeavor, Jerusalem character- izes with three words: Humility, Penitence, and Love. These three words in this connection answer a very pointed present day question concerning missions; for many ask, “Is there not of necessity in missions a reprehensible spirit of condescending patronage to a supposedly in- ferior people?” Jerusalem says that this spirit may manifest itself, but it is utterly wrong, and is in no way inherent in or necessarily en- volved in Christian missionary work. A real missionary is one sent of God speaking the words of God. It is not himself nor his own message he proclaims but God’s. He passes on that which he himself has received; and his pos- session of it is a trusteeship and a cause for thanksgiving but not for boasting at all. And 11 further, “if in our delivery of it self-assertion finds any place, we shall spoil that message and hinder its acceptance.” And similarly, we cannot go out today as missionaries without the spirit of genuine peni- tence. We and our fathers before us have been blind to many of the implications of our faith. We have been sluggish in the discharge of our responsibility. Facing these things, as face them we ought and must, we can go out only in a spirit of deep regret that we who have received so much have given so little. But humility and penitence are no substitutes for love. In fact, in this connection at least, they are spurious unless they generate love; and so the real missionary goes to his task with a humble, penitent, and loving spirit to deliver his message of the love of God and make its power known to as many as possible. And here again we may wonder whether a lack of this three-fold spirit in the present stu- dent generation may not account at least in part for the great falling off in the number of volunteers. Often those who have been loudest in their condemnation of a sense of superiority in missionaries have in the pride of their own opinion given a good example of the thing which they were condemning. If they were as penitent and as loving as they think missionaries ought to be, nothing in the world would keep many of them from becoming missionaries themselves. 12 Wuat Is THE CHRISTIAN ATTITUDE TOWARD Non-CHRISTIAN FaITHs? At no point did Jerusalem do better or more conclusive thinking or find more felicitous phrasing for the statement of its conclusions than in response to the question as to what our attitude toward non-Christian systems of life and thought ought to be. A most helpful dis- tinction was kept in mind all along; namely, the difference between the systems themselves and the people affected by the systems. Jeru- salem’s primary interest was in the people and, so far as I could discern, it had no desire at all merely to bolster up or to tear down any re- ligious faith. In fact, it recognized that the non-Christian religions are finding it increas- ingly difficult to maintain themselves not be- cause of the advances of Christianity but in the face of a rising tide of education, democ- racy, and scientific development. These very things, indicating a materialistic trend in life, often present real problems to Christianity itself, and certainly their effect on non-Christian faiths thrusts upon Christians a new responsibility and a new element of urg- ency for carrying the Gospel to the whole world. For as men are torn loose from old moorings, which at their best have been “able to effect some real deliverance from many of the evils which afflict the world,” there is all the more need for helping them “to find the fullness of light and power in Christ.” I have already intimated that perhaps no Christian missionary gathering ever went far- ther in a deliberate attempt to discover and 13 appreciate the best in non-Christian religions. There was no reluctance to admit the existence of good wherever it manifests itself. Rather in the words of the Council: “We rejoice to think that just because in Jesus Christ the light that lighteneth every man shone forth in its full splendor, we find rays of that same light where He is unknown or even is rejected. We welcome every noble quality in non-Christian persons or systems as further proof that the Father, who sent His Son into the world, has nowhere left Himself without witness.” But, nevertheless, there was the clearest call to followers of non-Christian religions “‘to dis- cern that all the good of which men have con- ceived is fulfilled and secured in Christ.” At this point one of the finest statements of the Council emerged. “Christianity is not a Western religion, nor is it yet effectively accepted by the Western world as a whole. Christ belongs to the peoples of Africa and Asia as much as to the European or American. We call all men to equal fellowship in Him. But to come to Him is always self-surrender. We must not come in the pride of na- tional heritage or religious tradition; he who would enter the Kingdom of God must become as a little child, though in that Kingdom are all the treasures of man’s aspirations, consecrated and harmonized. Just because Christ is the self-disclosure of the One God, all human aspirations are towards Him, and yet of no human tradi- tion is He merely the continuation. He is the desire of all nations; but He is always more, and other, than they had desired before they learnt of Him. But we would insist that when the Gospel of the Love of God comes home with power to the human heart, it speaks to each man, not as Moslem or as Buddhist, or as an adherent of any system, but just as man. And while we rightly study other religions in order to approach men wisely, yet at the last we speak as men to men, inviting them to share with us the pardon and the life that we have found in Christ.” 14 This latter idea of the solidarity of the human race making for a common and universal need for Christ was further developed in a way to express our own spirit of humility as follows: “We do not go to the nations called non-Christian be- cause they are the worst of the world and they alone are in need—we go because they are a part of the world and share with us in the same human need—the need of re- -demption from ourselves and from sin, the need to have life complete and abundant and to be remade after this pattern of Christlikeness. We desire a world in which Christ will not be crucified but where His Spirit shall reign.” To my mind this position is thoroughly Christian; and I cannot conceive of any other, substantially either more or less, which would be. Anyone who does not rejoice in truth wherever found can hardly be a follower of Him who said, “I am the truth’; but, on the other hand, he who cannot see that men every- where apart from Jesus Christ are groping in darkness, cannot well be a follower of Him who said, “I am the light of the world: he that fol- loweth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” At this point also the Student Volunteer Movement should make its stand unequivocal. Men either do or do not need Jesus Christ. If they do not need Him there is not much justi- fication for a Christian missionary movement. If they do need Him, they need Him desper- ately, and we should be restless until all have a chance of knowing Him in something of the fullness of His light and power. Let us have done with fear lest we offend men by preaching 15 Christ unto them. Some may be offended, for today, also, Christ crucified may be “unto Jews a stumbling block and unto Greeks foolishness.” The Gospel has always been a savor of life unto life to some and of death unto death to others. It all depends on the individual response. But we must not prejudge, and regardless of how some may respond, others, both Jews and Greeks, will find Christ to be “the power of God and the wisdom of God,” and these will be eternally grateful for the message. Wuat ARE SOME OF THE OUTSTANDING WEAKNESSES OF THE PRESENT MIssIONARY SITUATION? Jerusalem recognized three different kinds of weaknesses in the present missionary situation: enemies in the rear, vulnerable points in our so- called Christian civilization, and gaps in our strategy of advance. ‘These exist and trouble us partly through a failure “to mitigate the evils which advancing industrialism has brought in its train.” This, Jerusalem believes, ‘has been a positive hindrance—perhaps the greatest of such hindrances—to the power and extension of the missionary enterprise.” Then there is the further fact that while secular civilization has unquestionably helped to serve the cause of Christ by “dispersing the darkness of ignorance, superstition, and vulgarity,” it has in many cases outgrown our spiritual and moral control. Progress in things spiritual and moral has not kept pace with progress in material civilization. Non-Christian peoples now, as never before, are quick to point this out. Jerusalem peni- 16 tently confessed our failure “to bring the ordering of men’s lives into conformity to the spirit of Christ. The Church has not firmly and ef- fectively set its face against race-hatred, race-envy, race- contempt, or against social envy and contempt and class- bitterness, or against racial, national, and social pride, or against the lust for wealth and exploitation of the poor or weak. We believe that the Gospel ‘proclaims the only way by which humanity can escape from class and race- hatred.’ But we are forced to recognize that such a claim requires to be made good and that the record of Christen- dom hitherto is not sufficient to sustain it.” And in an equally vital even though a less personal realm, it is recognized that it must be “4 serious obstacle to missionary effort if a non- Christian country feels that the relation of the so-called Christian countries to itself is morally unsound or is alien to the principles of Christ.” The fact that non-Christian nations do feel this way toward the Western and so-called Christian nations is obvious to all. We cannot hope to win the world to Christ until we do more to deliver the name of Christ and Christianity from complicity in any evil or injustice; and, in order to do this, we must first deliver Christians themselves from complacency in the presence of such things. In the strategy of our advance, many weak- nesses were hinted at but two areas of neglect were repeatedly pointed out. One is in the realm of education where there are “certain bewilderments and fears, natural enough in themselves, but, if allowed to remain, fatal to the progress which we believe that God wills us to make.” Specifically under this, two things were pointed out: i? [ 1] “Uncertainty as to the place of education in the Christian adventure, and a tendency to contrast the work of the teacher, training his pupils step by step for fullness of life with that of the evangelist whose primary object is regarded by many as securing immediate conversions.” [ 2 ] “Consequent distrust both in Christian and non- Christian lands of the worth of educational methods, and reluctance to meet their demands for a large provision of workers and equipment.” In answer to this situation, Jerusalem set forth the fact that in Jesus “tthe contrast be- tween teaching and preaching, education and evangelism, simply does not exist”; and second, that inasmuch as our goal is the conversion of the world, “‘we can interpret that conversion in terms of the ever-present energy of God, sub- duing by love our wills to Himself”; or we can interpret it as a “training up of humanity for fullness of life in Him. In either case we have our share and our responsibility, whether as teachers or evangelists, parents or pastors. The whole effort of the Church is towards this one result. Its members may differ in method but their function and aim are the same: all are educators, servants of Him whom Clement of Alexandria truly called ‘the Educator.’ ” The other great area of neglect has to do with the whole Christian program in rural dis- tricts. One of Jerusalem’s strongest appeals is at this point. “Specific attention to rural needs by missions and churches is necessary, in part because of the numbers of people involved—nearly a thousand million of them— and the great issues of Christian civilization at stake; but also because the rural people live apart from the centers of wealth and population, their occupations differ in 18 many respects from those of industrial and urban places, and many aspects of their institutional and group life have no counterpart in the city. Moreover, this great branch of mission service, in all its implications for Kingdom-building, is not now sufficiently covered, either as to policies and programs or as to specially trained leadership and adequate financial support.” “In this immense rural work the missionary enterprise faces a great opportunity. Much work is under way, but much of it does not adequately affect the life and work of the people. To be fully successful, it must redeem whole communities and bring them into a new and abid- ing social vitality, a truly Christian method of living together. . . . We appeal to all boards, officials, mission- aries, churches, to all other lovers of their fellow men, to assist in this work so vital to the world’s welfare. The rural fields are indeed ‘white unto the harvest.’ ” In recent years, we have been afraid to put the note of realism in our missionary appeals. It has not been good form to tell of thousands of hungry people, thousands more who live in the depths of degradation and disease with none to deliver, whole provinces without the light of this life much less the light of life eternal. We have been afraid we might cause some one to cry, and that simply must not be done, be- cause forsooth it is an emotional appeal. Would to God our emotions could get stirred again! Maybe our other faculties would be released and we would see clearly and will nobly for the setting right of many wrong things. We seem to forget that Jesus wept over Jerusalem be- cause He faced reality and knew how awful it was. We need once more to see the restless millions desperately in need of “that light whose dawning maketh all things new.” 19 Wuat Is PROPOSED FOR THE FUTURE? No one who has followed thus far can have failed to suspect that in the judgment of Jeru- salem the day of missions is far from being over. The impression made on those of us who were there is that the world mission and expansion of Christianity is just getting under way. To use Dr. Speer’s phrase, there are tasks not only unaccomplished but as yet unattempted. The International Missionary Council girded itself for both kinds of tasks and, interestingly enough, while retaining the word ‘missionary’ in its title, its membership in the future will include the national Christian Councils, or sim- ilar organizations, of mission lands, such as China, Japan, India, Africa, and South America as well as those of the western nations. Every commission report brought in recom- mendations for an enlarged missionary program, and to insure the carrying out of this program, so far as the International Missionary Council is concerned, the Council called to its full time leadership Dr. John R. Mott, who has already presented his resignation to the Y. M. C. A. in order to devote his best energies to this ever- enlarging work. Two major proposals were made for the fu- ture: one calls for a strengthening of the in- digenous churches, increasing the national leadership, and placing an ever-enlarging respon- sibility on the local churches to carry on an adequate program of evangelization. 20 The other proposal calls for an increase in personnel and funds from the west. So careful was everyone in the Council not to over-state this call that some of us at the end of the two weeks felt that very little had been said. The missionaries showed a becoming reluctance to point out specifically the needs which they rec- ognize. The Christian nationals, on their part, were a bit unprepared to speak for their coun- tries as a whole. But two lines of thought and statement re- veal clearly a much greater call to the West for help in terms of both men and money than we at Jerusalem at first suspected. One is that the clearest and most unmistakable implication of the needs recognized, of the plans made, and of the forces released is that the unaccomplished and unattempted tasks must be undertaken by the combined and enlarged forces of both the younger and the older churches. And while it was more clearly recognized than ever before that the younger churches must be “more deeply rooted in the soil” and that they hold a primary responsibility for their own people, the task is still too great for them alone. In the various findings are no less than a dozen specific calls for missionaries and mission funds for carrying on and enlarging existing work. Some of these calls are unmistakably clear. The report on “Christianity and Industrial Problems” sets forth one of the functions of the International Missionary Council in the fol- lowing terms: “To bring to the notice of Christian bodies and mission boards the urgent a necessity of securing an adequate supply of competent workers for the mission field equip- ped with the necessary economic and social training.” In the Message Statement we have these words: ““As together, Christians of all lands, we have surveyed the world and the needs of men we are convinced of the urgent necessity for a great increase in the Christian forces in all countries and for a still further measure of cooperation between the churches of all nations in more speedily laying the claim of Christ upon all the unoccu- pied areas of the world and of human life.” Mr. K. T. Paul of India, one of the outstand- ing spirits of the Council, drove this home with great force. He said, “I want to say in the very clearest possible terms that the Church in India does want missionaries, as many as you can send... . It is the missionary, the human being who lives and loves in the ordinary everyday life of Christ that is always welcome. We want missionaries, Christlike missionaries who will come and live among us and identify them- selves with us, who will share with us all our joys and sorrows in the spirit of Christ.” Since this is the supreme question with the Student Volunteer Movement we may conclude the case by giving a few figures. At the present time there are about 30,000 foreign missionaries under Protestant sending societies. It is esti- mated that the average term of service of a mis- sionary, by reason of the many forces which oppose long term service, is not over fifteen years. In order not to overstate the situation, let us assume that this life-service expectancy 22 is twenty years. This means that we ought to have at least 1,500 new missionaries going out from North America and Europe every year to maintain the present numerical status of the missionary force. The United States and Canada in the past have furnished a full four-sevenths of the total number of missionaries. This would mean that our yearly output ought to be not less than eight hundred and fifty. For the period 1906- 1925 we almost maintained this average; for that twenty-year period the average number going out from the United States and Canada was 826. But in recent years there has been a steady decline so that in 1926 only 778, and in 1927 only 558 missionaries went out from all North American sending societies. This de- crease has been due not only to the financial condition of many boards but also to a real lack of fully qualified candidates; and this lat- ter aspect of the situation bids fair to be even more serious in the future due to a great de- crease in the number of student volunteers. Therefore, leaving wholly out of considera- tion Jerusalem’s proposals for an enlarged work and an increase in personnel, in the years out ahead we must do much better than we have been doing in order to prevent a continued decrease in the missionary forces of the world. The responsibility of the Student Volunteer Movement is clear, and our spirit and purpose ought with God’s help to be made equal to it. 23