Men On Christ’s Mission 11/14/43

Scripture: Psalm 27 (read)

A little more than two weeks ago, I was privileged to attend the 14th Mid-West Regional Meeting held in Columbus, Ohio. A year before that I attended a similar meeting held at Moline, Illinois.

These annual Mid-West meeting are arranged for the better understanding and promotion of the missionary work of the churches of our faith and order.

While at Columbus, I saw a very interesting service. Miss Harriet Mae Summerville was commissioned to go to Africa as a missionary of the American Board to teach in a mission school. She is well prepared and trained for the work she was about to enter. She appeared strong and healthy. I would guess that she is a person of very normal tastes and ambitions. What influences, exactly, led her to plan to give her life’s efforts in a place so far from her home in Ohio, I do not know. But I do know that her commissioning was a dignified and impressive service at a considerable gathering of people.

What is this “missions” of which people speak, anyway? Why do we hear, every so often about “missions” or some “missionary” or the need for more “missionary work?”

Well, every Christian ought to know that missions is something inherent in his religion! It is simply sharing the gospel you and I have received with someone else. It began long ago. When Jesus Christ walked the earth and taught, one of the men who heard about him, and became a follower, was a man named Andrew. The first thing Andrew did after that was to go and find his brother, Peter, and tell him about it, and bring him to Jesus. The next day a man named Philip heard and followed Jesus. And he immediately found Nathaniel and told him. This has continued throughout the history of Christianity.

In modern times, especially, Christians have been interested in taking the message of Christ to peoples of distant lands as well as to those closer at hand. And that, very simply, is what Christian missions are.

Modern missions are carried out, in the main, through four channels; first, through preaching the gospel in every native tongue, including printing, distribution, and reading of the Bible; second, through teaching. And teaching in a modern mission includes anything and everything from kindergarten through high school, college and graduate school; third, healing - in the work of doctors and nurses and the operation of hospitals; fourth, social service, including social settlement work, agricultural experiments and the like. All of the work in these four phases is done in the spirit of Christ. All of it is evangelistic in the most practical sense.

If the word “missions” has an unattractive sound to some folk it is due to a lack of sufficient understanding. It may be that some seemingly peculiar person has been caricatured as a “missionary.” It may be that it seems strange to many folk the any normal person should seek to live and work among other people who appear at first different from those we are used to meeting. Whatever it is, let me assure you that there is noting “queer” about Christian missions nor about most missionaries. They are among the healthiest realities there are, with capabilities far beyond the average.

Dr. Russell Stafford, president, just now, of the American Board of Commissioners for foreign Missions, remarked at Columbus that “missions” are simply Christian action at home and abroad. Our so called “foreign missions” are Christian action abroad in foreign countries. Our so-called “home missions” are Christian action at home in this country and in this state.

Missions are a man’s business. Let me say this emphatically. No church ought to leave the study or the support of the church’s missionary work to its women. The first foreign missionary society was a man’s organization. The first missionaries were men and their supporters and backers were men. And the modern missionary enterprise requires the strength of men. If you’ve had a chance to hear Congressman Judd (formerly a missionary doctor) you know that the missionary work hits men with a punch!

For the last thirteen years, our churches have been asked, if they will, to observe the Sunday preceding Thanksgiving Sunday as “Men and Missions Sunday.” Today is the thirteenth annual “Men and Missions Sunday.” The movement is a layman’s movement. And it was a laymen, Mr. Charles H. Vial of La Grange, Illinois, who wrote to me reminding me of the date and urging an observance of it in this church. I am complying at least to the extent of preaching in that field today.

People all over America are perhaps more aware now, than ever before, of the practical worth of Christian missions. Two or three years ago hosts of Americans, if they thought of the Soloman Islands at all, thought of a vague island area in the South Pacific where natives were likely to kill and cook a white man if they felt like it - or even to eat one another if they craved the taste of human flesh.

Today we know that idea is out of date, for we know of the Soloman Islands as an important strategic battleground where natives are friendly and helpful. Over in New Guinea, out of those 6,000 “fuzzy-headed” native people who were of such incalculable aid to the American defense of the Owen Stanley mountains, 4,000 are Christians converted and educated by our missionary effort!

The director of the General Commission on Army and Navy chaplains has an interesting comment to make of “Global minded Americans.” Says he: “The impact of the war news and the phenomenon of American men of the fighting forces writing home from unexpected corners of all the continents, have made the average Americans more or less global-minded, for the first time in their lives. The Christian Church has been global minded for a long time. That is why American fliers who have crashed in the Southwest Pacific have sometimes found fuzzy haired natives, who have fed and nursed them, and taken them to church on Sunday, instead of cooking and eating them as would have been the case fifty years before. That is why finely trained missionary doctors were on hand to take over care of wounded British and Americans in Burma. Wendell Wilkie discovered a reservoir of good will which existed for Americans in China and other areas; American soldiers discovered Thanksgiving dinners in the African Cameroons; and our engineers stumbled on a mission chapel in Syria.

“A new era of appreciation for Christian missions as the long term solution of the problems of a better world, seems to be in the making. American soldiers and sailors may come to various parts of the world not only as liberators, in the political and military sense, and benefactors in the economic sense, but thoughtful Christian contacts may make them missionaries too.”

President Walter T. Brown of Victoria University in Toronto, Canada, observes that “war did not kill the modern missionary enterprise. Rather the war destroyed the germs of indifference of many. The new missionary spirit is wider and deeper than the old. A generation ago there was held up to us the needs of the world - the needs of China, of Japan, of India and Africa, and church was challenged to meet those needs. Today,” he says that we “are beginning to realize that the United States and Canada need a great missionary movement in order to save their own national existence. Great nations, like great individuals, can never be developed on the basis of selfishness.”

Dr. E. K. Higdon calls attention to the remarkable contrast between the massacre in New Guinea in 1901 of missionaries and converts by cannibals; and the phenomenon, 40 years later, of American soldiers who write home about lives saved by the Christian men, women or children educated in the mission schools of that same vicinity. Indeed, the soldier sometimes has his picture taken beside some direct descendant of those cannibals of less than 50 years ago! And Dr. Higdon remarks that “Changes as profound as that knock the stuffings out of the ‘why not let them alone their own religion is good enough for them’ school of church members. A religion that isn’t good enough for everybody isn’t good enough for anybody.”

The work of our missionaries abroad is of tremendous value culturally, spiritually, physically. Through the years, the work, though it often seemed laboriously slow, has produced marvelous results in China. We should have had no such ally as we now have there had it not been for the patient influence that eventually made Christian the lives of an important proportion of China’s leaders - from the first man and the first lady of that land through the roll of leaders in many parts of the government. A very practical note appears in the work of Watts Pye who introduced peanut culture to China so effectively that this practical missionary effort is credited with saving millions of Chinese lives, literally, in a time of famine. Another food that marks the path of the missionary in many spots is the potato which so valuably supplements native diets.

My friends, there isn’t any cause that has greater long view importance than the cause of Christian mission, both abroad and at home. It needs to be a greater cause in the hearts of all Christian people. It has certain needs, certain liabilities and certain assets that we ought to understand.

First the needs. The needs of millions of people are desperately apparent. But the cause itself needs, in order to grow from strength to strength, (1) a clear sense of direction. In our day we must keep faith with the “younger churches” - the churches of China and South America and wherever else the doors are now open. Some of these new churches are ready to stand on their own feet. They have their own character which may possibly show us up! But they still need our counsel and experience and encouragement. They say so themselves.

(2) The missions cause needs an overpowering sense of mission. We all go forth in times like these not just on our own initiative but under a Divine mandate. Christ’s clear commandments cannot be repealed, for they are irrevocable.

(3) We all have a basic need for companionship - human and divine. We are members of one great Christian fellowship. Our “one world” of which Mr. Wilkie speaks is a compulsory unity. We have become neighbors with all other peoples whether we like it or not. But the Christian fellowship is a voluntary fellowship, a fellowship even sought. Hence it is basic. It will offer more hope for spiritual reconstruction after this holocaust than any other single factor at work in this world.

Now there are a few liabilities to the cause of Christian missions. This greatest constructive force in the world is supported by a woefully inadequate giving. It costs $50,000 to kill one soldier in this war. What does it cost per capita to make the greatest positive investment in the world, this investment in missions - in world wide good will? Well our Congregational average is less than $1.50 per year, per member, for both home and foreign missions! About 50 cents per year, per member is our contribution to foreign missions. Our own church’s average (in Wisconsin Rapids) is higher. But it ought to be, for obvious reasons. The only “cheap” thing about missions is the way the average Christian supports them!

On the assets side of the ledger is first of all an incorrigible optimism. The missionary forces are hard at work wherever the field permits - and the majority of fields do permit. Others are straining at the leash until they may return to fields now ravaged by war. And our Congregational Christian forces are now looking for at least 150 new missionaries - preachers, teachers, doctors, nurses, technical personnel - to prepare for a lifetime of devotion in mission service. “The night is dark” now but “the end is not yet. The night is far spent ---- the day is at hand.” It is the Lord who will bring the day in his own time. But paradoxically, he can not bring it in without us. “Christ has no hands but yours” is the appropriate appeal of our Congregational Committee for War Victims and Services (one of our mission- minded agencies.)

The greatest asset is called to our attention in the words of a man who is not a professing Christian, but an admirer of much that is Christian - Dr. Hu Shih, former Chinese Ambassador to the USA. Dr. Shih told Stanley Jones not long ago, “You do have an advantage in that your ideals are embodied in a person.”

For us the truth is in Christ. The way is in Christ. The very world to be is in Christ. The eternal quality of his living soul will live and grow forever.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, November 14, 1943