The STUDENT YOUNG MEN’S 
 CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 The 
 
 Comprehensiveness 
 of the 
 
 Evangelistic Aim 
 
 J. H. OLDHAM 
 
The 
 
 Comprehensiveness 
 of the 
 
 Evangelistic Aim 
 
 J. H. OLDHAM 
 
 ASSOCIATION PRESS 
 New York: 347 Madison Avenue 
 1918 
 
I 
 
 Copyright, 1918, by 
 The International Committee of 
 Young Men’s Christian Associations 
 
The Comprehensiveness of the 
 Evangelistic Aim 
 
 The promise of Jesus to the first dis¬ 
 ciples was that He would make them 
 “fishers of men.” What a world of 
 thrilling interest and inexhaustible fasci¬ 
 nation that promise opens up! He 
 offered to lead them out from their 
 narrow, contracted, parochial life, in 
 which the all-engrossing interest was 
 fish, into the great, wide, endless, moving 
 world of humanity with all its incalculable 
 hopes and fears, its stirring aspirations 
 and achievements and heroisms. 
 
 To bring men to Christ—let us consider 
 for a moment what is involved in such an 
 aim. Are there any conceptions richer 
 and profounder than those we have just 
 expressed — men and Christ? Think of 
 the inexhaustible variety and depth of 
 human life — the. sheer delight in living. 
 
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the love of adventure, of daring and doing, 
 the deep-rooted affections of the home, 
 the incidents of daily life and toil, the joy 
 in the world of nature, the passion for 
 the beautiful, the curiosity regarding the 
 innumerable objects of human research, 
 the deep desire to know the cause and ex¬ 
 planation of things. Consider the extraor¬ 
 dinary and perplexing differences in the 
 temperaments and characters of men in 
 their tastes, their pleasures, their inter¬ 
 ests, their ambitions, their ways of doing 
 things, their ways of being affected by 
 things, their desires and hopes and beliefs. 
 And then think of Christ, the universal 
 Son of Man, in whom every race of man¬ 
 kind and every variety of human tempera¬ 
 ment finds its ideal, Christ in all the un¬ 
 searchable glory of His perfection. Is 
 there in the whole world a larger or a 
 grander task than to try to bring men to 
 Christ? Is there a greater privilege than 
 to become the conscious and intelligent 
 instrument through which Christ accom¬ 
 plishes His mysterious and gracious deal¬ 
 ings with a human soul? 
 
 Let us seek, therefore, to lay down cer- 
 
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tain principles that ought to guide us in 
 seeking to carry out a work so great, so 
 glorious, and so difficult as this. 
 
 We must certainly entertain a profound 
 respect for the individuality of the men 
 we desire to reach. Every life has a pecul¬ 
 iar and sacred mystery of its own. We 
 must approach it with the utmost rev- 
 reence. It has possibilities of its own 
 which are found in no other life. Let us 
 beware of trying to impose our own per¬ 
 sonal, limited, rudimentary apprehension 
 of Christ upon another man. Our prayer 
 must be that he may learn to see Christ 
 with his own eyes, and come to know 
 Christ in his own way. Let us never for¬ 
 get that our part is to supplement the 
 wonderful, slow, and silent processes by 
 which God is patiently seeking to bring 
 that soul to an immediate and first-hand 
 knowledge of Himself. We shall never 
 do the work of evangelism as it ought to 
 be done until we have felt the awe and 
 sacredness of it. 
 
 We must learn to speak the language of 
 those whom we seek to influence. There 
 is a language of thought as well as of 
 
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words. And just as you cannot preach 
 the Gospel to the people of China because 
 you have never learned to use their speech, 
 so all around you there are men whom you 
 cannot reach because you are not able to 
 speak in a language that they can under¬ 
 stand. You have never penetrated with 
 sufficient sympathy into the world in 
 which they live and move. You are un¬ 
 familiar with the thoughts which habit¬ 
 ually occupy their minds. You have 
 never felt the burdens that continually 
 weigh upon their spirits. You have never 
 been conscious of needs which they feel to 
 be implanted deep within their nature, and 
 which they know that God meant to 
 be satisfied. They are instinctively aware 
 of this, and so their minds are closed 
 against your appeal. You are as effec¬ 
 tually separated from them by this in¬ 
 compatibility of thought as you are from 
 foreign peoples by the barrier of speech. 
 You can never influence them until you 
 have learned to take an interest in the 
 things in which they are interested, and 
 to look out upon life in some degree with 
 their eyes. Our evangelistic aim de- 
 
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mands that we should take an interest in 
 everything that interests men. 
 
 We must bear in mind that conversion 
 goes to the very roots of a man’s life. It 
 is not a merely emotional change, nor a 
 change of mere outward habits. It is not 
 the adoption of a new phraseology, the 
 picking up of new catch-words, or begin¬ 
 ning to associate with a new set of people, 
 although it may include all these things. 
 We have all known of examples which 
 show how easily these outward forms may 
 be substituted for the reality. True con¬ 
 version is something that radically alters 
 the whole of a man’s attitude to life. It 
 is described in the New Testament as 
 becoming a new creature, or as being 
 transformed by the renewing of the mind. 
 It means learning to look out upon life 
 with the eyes of Christ. That is some¬ 
 thing which is beyond human power to 
 produce. When we see a man’s life in 
 its guiding principles and ambitions led 
 captive to the will of Christ, we stand 
 back amazed and exclaim, “This is the 
 work of God!’’ Our evangelistic aim is 
 something so great that it can be accom- 
 
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plished only through the supernatural 
 working of God’s Spirit. 
 
 And hence we must not be afraid to in¬ 
 sist upon the loftiness and moral severity 
 of Christ’s demands. Christ Himself is 
 our great example in this. He never 
 lowered His demands to suit men’s weak¬ 
 ness. He brought them face to face with 
 a clear-cut, searching, tremendous issue. 
 “Whosoever he be of you that renounceth 
 not all that he hath, he cannot be my dis¬ 
 ciple.’’ Christ’s appeal was always di¬ 
 rected to the heroic in men, to the love of 
 the adventurous, the exalted, and the 
 noble. In words that stagger us by the 
 immensity of their demands He declared, 
 “Be ye perfect as your Father which is in 
 heaven is perfect.” Let us follow this 
 great example. Do not let us try to hide 
 the cost and hardness of being a Christian. 
 Let us not be afraid to make it plain that 
 surrender to Christ is something that cuts 
 deep into life, imposing arduous duties 
 and profoundly influencing daily conduct. 
 We do not need to try to make Christ’s 
 demands seem easier than they are. Let 
 us rather set forth their loftiness and diffi- 
 
 s 
 
culty as one of the great attractions of the 
 Christian life. Let us point out as one of 
 its glories that it opens out before us an 
 infinite ideal, that it summons us to the 
 highest of which we are capable, that it 
 appeals to the deepest and truest instincts 
 of our manhood, to courage, devotion, and 
 loyalty. If we seek the highest success in 
 our evangelistic efforts let us lay aside all 
 apology, hesitation, and timidity, let us 
 issue our challenge directly to the heroic 
 and noble side of men’s characters, and 
 let us boldly confess that Christ would not 
 be worth following unless He asked from 
 a man all that he has. 
 
 We must boldly assert the right of 
 Christ to dominate every department and 
 interest of human life. That is one of the 
 severest and highest tests of our faith. It 
 is so much easier to narrow the circle of 
 our interests, to withdraw from the world 
 into the society of the like-minded with 
 ourselves, and so to live a restricted, 
 maimed, and timid life that is inconsistent 
 with the august majesty and sublime 
 authority of Christ. Or else we are 
 tempted to break up our life into depart- 
 
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ments and be a Christian and a student, a 
 Christian and an athlete, a Christian and 
 a member of the college societies. But 
 Christ claims to control the whole of our 
 lives; to be the Master of every depart¬ 
 ment of human life. He asks us to be 
 Christian students, Christian athletes, 
 Christian citizens, Christian men. And 
 it is only when we have the courage to 
 answer to that demand that the highest 
 success in our evangelistic efforts will come 
 to us. Are there not whole tracts of col¬ 
 lege life which we have been too cowardly 
 and unbelieving to claim for Christ? 
 Have we dared to assert His right to be 
 acknowledged in the college clubs and 
 societies? Have we ever had the faith to 
 declare that art and literature and politics 
 must acknowledge the dominion of Christ? 
 Our faith must rise to that if we are going 
 to take this evangelistic policy seriously. 
 Let us have the courage to proclaim fear¬ 
 lessly the universal authority of Christ, 
 and God will see that our testimony is 
 not put to shame. 
 
 Our evangelistic efforts must be domi¬ 
 nated by the missionary outlook. There 
 
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can be no doubt that the question of 
 personal salvation is for every man the 
 central one of life. And yet it may be 
 that the importance and urgency of this 
 tremendous issue led some of the teachers 
 of a past generation to be too exclusively 
 occupied with it, or at least with one side 
 of it. And as a protest some more modern 
 teachers have found it necessary to lay 
 emphasis on another fundamental truth, 
 that “salvation is character.’’ I think 
 that we might safely go further, and as the 
 figure of the Son of Man rises before our 
 eyes, the form of the suffering servant of 
 Jehovah, we might assert that salvation 
 is service. The salvation which we offer 
 to men must be something that looks be¬ 
 yond itself. Let us make plain to them 
 that the only salvation worth having is 
 that which leads us to become like Jesus 
 Christ in His life of ministering. Let us 
 never dissociate salvation from that out¬ 
 look upon the whole world with which it 
 was always bound up in the mind of Jesus. 
 And to-day, when our eyes are being 
 opened to the fact that in all our large 
 cities our fellow human beings are living 
 
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under conditions which make a healthy, a 
 happy, and even a good life well-nigh im¬ 
 possible, and when there are entering into 
 the common life of the world the vast pop¬ 
 ulations of Asia and Africa as yet practi¬ 
 cally untouched by the Gospel of Christ, 
 let us find a new constraint, a new glory, a 
 new thrill in all our evangelistic efforts in 
 the thought that the men and women 
 whom we are trying to win are those who 
 may bear their share in the fulfilling of the 
 great tasks to which Christ is calling His 
 Church. 
 
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