THE PRESENT MIS- SIONA~RY SITUATION AN ADDRESS to the CHURCH HUH 003 T HE Open Door Emergency- Movement was originated by ' JA ~ the Board of Bishops, who recommended the movement to the General Missionary Committee. This Committee in turn approved and referred the whole matter to the Board of Managers. The Board of Managers appointed a Commission and also elected Field Secretaries to work under the direc¬ tion of the Commissic n. All com¬ munications concerning the Open Door Emergency Movement should be addressed to the Executive Secretary, Mr. S. Earl Taylor, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York City Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from Columbia University Libraries https://archive.org/details/presentmissionarOOopen The Present Missionary Situation An Address to the Church by the Open Door Emergency Commission T HE Open Door Emergency Commission gratefully recognizes in the work of the past year the abundant blessing of Almighty God and the cordial co-op¬ eration of the Methodist Episcopal Church. With faith in God and with confidence in the Church, we face the opportunities and responsibilities of the hour. In order that these opportunities and responsibilities may be more clearly apprehended, we are constrained to review briefly the present missionary situation as it relates to our Church. THE OPEN DOOR IN THE HOME FIELD The foreign population and the cities so blend their dangers and their difficulties as almost to be one problem and to offer a single challenge to our profoundest efforts. Our six largest cities—Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis—contain with their environs a seventh of our population. But while our total foreign born are about ten millions, or thirteen per cent, of our whole population. New York is thirty-seven per cent, foreign born, Boston thirty-five per cent., Chicago thirty-four per cent. Our greatest need is in our cities. Here the emergency is acute, and must be met if Protestant Christianity is to continue its supremacy. Says Dr. F. M. North, “ The frontiers are now' streets, not acres. The reflex action of civic upon rural life was never what it is to-day. The Cities and the Frontier The Colored Population Meaning and Appeal of H eathenism The city is America’s central home mission field. Nor is the reflex action true only of the homeland. The testimony comes from Germany, from Scandinavia, from Italy, from China, from Japan, that the evangelization here of those whom we call foreigners means the radiation of a mighty influence throughout lands we shall never see.” The colored population numbers one-seventh of the republic. The revelation of the wonderful progress of this people since they were set free, made at their great Christian Congress at Atlanta, in August, 1902, may be counted as one of the most encouraging signs of the time. But the eight or ten thousand gathered there were the flower of all that Christianity and education have done for this race. They were leaders, and back of them were the churches and the schools sending them as representatives. Out beyond the circles of religious interest and mental culture there are still large masses of this portion of our body politic with souls unkindled and open to every temptation and vice. No one has seen more clearly and stated more wisely and forcefully than the colored men and women there assembled, the stu¬ pendous tasks yet to be wrought out before the race as a whole will be assuredly on the upward path to a safe future. In these tasks the Missionary Society of our Church must bear a worthy part. THE OPEN DOOR IN FOREIGN LANDS Marvelous transformations have been effected by Christian missions among heathen peoples, but great tracts of non-Christian life are as yet untouched, and heathenism itself continues to be a hideous empire of depravity, misery and shame. In addition to those evils which undermine the life of the individual in Christian lands, as well as the pronounced forms of eeotism, selfish- ness, pride, dishonesty and brutality—infirmities which characterize a fallen race—there are the outbreaking social evils, which not. infrequently are imbedded in the religious faiths of the people and are sanctioned by their most revered characters, as well as by immemorial custom. Heathenism is physical, mental, moral, spiritual, social and governmental perversion of right human life — Godless, decadent, hopeless—and must be awakened and reconstructed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We do not declare that heathenism as a whole has A World-Wide become sated with its own death in life, but we do Restlessness unhesitatingly affirm that there is a world-wide restless¬ ness such as has never been known before, and a conse¬ quent world-wide opportunity for the entrance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the only religion that adequately inspires and accomplishes individual and national regeneration. In China, following the Boxer insurrection of 1900, China has come an unprecedented readiness to listen to the Gospel message. Districts, and even whole provinces, hitherto turbulent at the approach of Christian workers, now welcome them. The country is open to evangelical work everywhere. Bishop Moore declares that the clamor for Christian schools is incessant, “ rolling like the thunder of the surf upon the coast.” All the empire, with its quarter of the population of the globe, is in a ferment. The blood of a martyr church calls us to a new consecration of money and forces for the evangel¬ ization of this great people. It was estimated a few months ago that fully ten Japan thousand Japanese are desiring immediate guidance in spiritual things. One Presiding Elder writes concerning his district, “A hundred places/which cannot be touched with our limited resources, are open and ready Korea The Philippine Islands India for the word of the Lord.” Applicants for entrance to onr schools are being turned away because of lack of equipment. Korea may justly be regarded at present as one of the great Pentecostal fields. Ten years ago we had in all the empire of Korea only ten preaching points ; now we have 155. Then we had 241 members and proba¬ tioners; now we have 6,000. Last year 7,000 patients called at one of our hospitals for treatment. Yet we are trying to harvest such a ripe field with the same number of workers that we had in 1893. To the Christian churches of the United States the Philippine Islands present one of the most impressive obligations for missionary aggressiveness ever laid upon any people. The oppressions and iniquities of the friars impel throngs of Catholic Filipinos to our Protestant services. The Methodist Episcopal Church alone con¬ ducts forty-five religious meetings in the city of Manila and suburbs each week, and has a total attendance upon these services of at least twelve thousand. Important cities in the provinces also show a marvelous readiness to receive the Gospel. In a single Presiding Elder’s district in India ten thousand people have applied for baptism. In his fare¬ well address in New York, in November, 1902, Bishop Thoburn declared that there would be at least one hundred thousand natives who would apply for Christian teaching along the route of his first episcopal tour after landing in India. At the Cleveland Convention he declared it to be his solemn conviction that if the Protestant churches of America would face the problem of the awakening multitudes of India, within ten years we might have, either within the pale of the Christian Cnurch or inquiring the way thither, ten millions in India who are now worshipping idols. In Africa, at all points our missionaries are sur¬ rounded by great multitudes of the native blacks, as yet unreached, who, in most cases, welcome the approach of the Christian worker. The six years of work by Bishop Hartzell has resulted in a thorough reorganization of the work, in the increase of property holdings, in the increase of workers, and has revealed to the Church a situation expressed only by opportunity writ large and many times multiplied. In Latin America the stirrings toward religious and civil liberty are almost everywhere manifest. Romanism has been tried and has been found wanting. It has met the need neither for social nor for individual regeneration. The numerous republics of South America and Mexico are throwing off the yoke of Rome to the extent that never since the beginning of the Roman Catholic ascend¬ ancy have there been such promising opportunities for evangelical occupation. THE EMERGENCY Our opportunity is our embarrassment. Our very successes create a sublime yet painful crisis. Even with the increase of |i 12,000, which was reported last November, we are utterly unable to keep an adequate force in the field to accomplish the work that now presses upon us as a result of recent marvelous successes. In every foreign field the average missionary is carrying the burden of two. The inevitable advance in age and the constant strain of overwork threaten speedily to deplete the already insufficient force. New men must be in training, learning the languages and knowing the fields, to take the place of the noble leaders who have nearly reached the bounds of possible service. An emergency may be created by progress and enlargement as well as by retrogression; but if not Afri ca Latin America The Embarrass¬ ment of Success Buildings and Equipment Needed New Missionaries Needed responded to, the failure to meet the claims of the new situation may itself produce retrogression. What news¬ paper, if given a hundred-fold larger circulation than it had thirty years ago, could maintain itself, if restricted to the presses and appliances of that long-past era ? Our missionary plant in buildings and equipment of a generation ago cannot possibly meet the demands of the vastly larger work to-day. For years but little money has been applied by the Board for buildings or repairs. Not less than a million dollars are absolutely required to place the material basis of our missionary work at home and abroad abreast of the needs of this hour. The Corresponding Secretaries of the Missionary Society have recently made this statement concerning the need of new missionaries: “On most of the fields the number should De at once doubled. This is true of Southern Asia, including the Philippine Islands; Eastern Asia, including China, Japan and Korea; and Africa, while the needs of South America, Mexico and Italy are scarcely less emergent.” A request came for twenty-five missionaries for the Philippine Islands, but the Missionary Committee, under the most generous impulses, could grant only fourteen thousand dollars for building, equipment, traveling expenses, salaries and the aggressive development of this most important field, where a nation waits to be born in a day. Bishop Moore reports that fifty additional mission¬ aries are urgently demanded in China to maintain what has already been undertaken; Bishop Hartzell pleads for the support of ten white men and women, and ten black men and women for Africa; Bishop Thoburn says that India needs at least forty-five more missionaries, in order to keep up with the work that is now attempted. “We are occupying,” he adds, “ a field to-day which, according to the ordinary expenditures of any modern missionary society, would require about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and we have never had the half of it—indeed, a tenth of it—for that field.” Bishop Warne states that practically all of the five hun¬ dred thousand seekers after a new religion in Godavery district could be brought into the Christian Church if there were sufficient workers; and yet, to adopt the figure given by Bishop Foss, the Methodist Episcopal Church, in the person of its missionaries, is lining up before this dusky multitude, who want to forsake idolatry and come for baptism, and saying, with batons raised like those of policemen ,—“ Stand back, stand back, we are not ready for you; we do not want you.” Our missionaries are virtually compelled to do this heart¬ breaking thing, because a laggard and reluctant Church commands it. The Church commanded a retreat in 1901, when the eight per cent, cut in appropriations made it necessary for one India Conference alone to drop twenty-three pastor-teachers, because the nine hundred and sixty dollars needed to keep them going for another year had been withheld by the home Church, while seven thousand boys had to be dismissed from our schools on account of decreased receipts. In the Bengal Confer¬ ence, comprising eighty-seven millions of people—greater than the entire population of the United States—one aged missionary had to retire from a district of twenty million people, and there was no money to support a missionary in his place. Such are the open doors and such is our evident inabil¬ ity to enter them, without a great increase of missionary gifts. Have all the centuries ever made such a call for workers ? Thousands of Seekers A Retreat Commanded 4 OUR ABILITY We have the Money Opportunity, Ability and Obligation A very reasonable estimate, based on Government statistics, places the wealth of the Methodist Episcopal Church at three billion three hundred million dollars. The average increase of this wealth annually, over and above all living expenses, including extravagances and luxuries, is estimated to be more than one hundred million dollars.” The wealth of the United States doubled from 1800 to 1850; doubled again in 1875; doubled again in 1890 ; doubled again by the year 1900. The addition to the wealth of the United States during the last decade is $25,000,000,000, a saving within the decade equal to the aggregate savings of our people from the discovery of America to the Civil War, and exceeding the savings of the world from the beginning of history to the Declaration of Independence; ” and of all this vast increase of wealth a fair proportion must be in the hands of the Christian Church to-day, and in the Methodist Episcopal branch of the Christian Church, yet we find that during the past thirty years our Church has not in¬ creased its gifts to the Missionary Society more than one cent per capita. OUR RESPONSIBILITY Our responsibility is commensurate with the great need of our own land and the appalling need of the heathen world. Our incomparable opportunity, together with our ability, intensifies our obligation, and the vastness of the emergency should arouse us to the utmost endeavor. The tokens of God’s presence are unmistakable. The still, small voice in multitudes of hearts throughout the heathen world encourages the Church to go forward. Men and women who offer their lives for service on the foreign fields are a constant challenge to us and are a witness to the powerful working of the Spirit of God. Israel was turned back to the desert and the wilderness and plagues and death because she hesitated to take the advice of two against ten. What if the Church of God con¬ tinues to falter when all is of good report ? The great Apostle, at the inception of the Christian Church, in its poverty and weakness, responded to the call of one man standing in his soul’s vision upon the shadowy shores of Europe. What will be the sentence upon the Church, in the time of her wealth and her power, if she refuses to answer her accredited representatives at the front, whose pleading is accentuated by the Macedonian calls of ten thousand times ten thousand, whose imminent readiness for the Gospel is supplemented by the infinite need of the millions who are still in the midst of the darkness of heathendom. t( The trumpet of God has sounded the advance in every part of the world.” Our faces are to the front; we dare not mark time longer; if we turn back we crucify afresh the Son of God. “ By all the anguish of God’s Son in yonder garden, by all His agony on the cross, by all the tides that sweep across the shoreless sea of God’s infinite love, and by the surging sorrows ot a perishing world. He calls to us, * Arise and follow where I lead you into these wide, open fields! ’ ” THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN The Plan of Campaign which is recommended by the Open Door Emergency Commission is simple, and yet if the Church responds to the call it will be effective. It is the plan recommended by the Cleveland Conven¬ tion, whereby every presiding elder’s district will endeavor to raise at least a dollar per member for missions ; each pastor will encourage each member of his church to give, at least, one dollar to missions ; every The Peril of Indecision Simple, yet Effective Epworth League or Sunday-school worker, every member of a missionary committee, and every individual, will take up the cry: “A dollar per member, the mini¬ mum ; ability to give, the maximum.” If this ideal be realized, three million dollars will flow annually into our missionary treasury, and the work which is before the Church can be vigorously prosecuted. The Commission would not be thought visionary, nor does it believe that the desired result can be obtained without well-organized effort. Machinery will be set in motion ; a corps of secretaries will be ready to render any service within their power ; printed matter will be published; but the ultimate aim, A dollar per member,” will not be lost sight of, nor will the fact that it is not by might or by an army, but by the Spirit of Jehovah of Hosts, that the work must be done. Signed : E. G. ANDREWS. C. H. FOWLER. A. B. LEONARD. H. K. CARROLL. HOMER EATON. JOHN F. GOUCHER. J. M. BUCKLEY. F. D. GAMEWELL. ANDERSON FOWLER. JOHN R. MOTT. S. EARL TAYLOR.