Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions | Page 8

is so manifold and variegated that it includes every kind of
activity, every sort of social and economic reform. Our evangelistic
missionaries are busy about everything, from itinerant preaching to the
establishment of banks and asylums. Can we afford it? What purpose is
dominant, what aim really governs the policy of those who send out
evangelistic missionaries? What decides the form of their work and the
method by which they pursue it? It is hard to guess, it is hard to
discover, it is hard to understand.
Now when our missions are presented to us and we are asked to support
them on all sorts of grounds, as though a society with its slight funds
could really successfully practise every kind of philanthropic work, we
begin to doubt whether it can really be wisely guided. Each mission
station, each institution, seems to be an isolated fragment. The
missionary in charge often appeals to us as an exceedingly good and
able man, and we support him, and we support the society which sends
him and others like him. And we call this the support of foreign
missions; but foreign missions as a unity we do not support because we
can see no unity. The directors of foreign missions appear not to have

hitched their wagon to a star, but rather to all the visible stars, and we
cannot tell whither they are going. So we fall back on the individual
missionary, or the isolated mission which at any rate for the moment
seems to have an intelligible objective.
Hence the common conception of missionary work as small. We look
at the parts, and the smallest parts, because our minds instinctively seek
a unity, and only in the parts do we find a unity, nor there often, unless
we concentrate our attention on one aspect of the work. But by thinking
of foreign missions in this small way and speaking of them in this small
way, we alienate men who are accustomed to think in large terms of
large undertakings designed on large policies.
What we need to-day is to understand foreign missions as a whole. We
want to take an intelligent part in them viewed as a unity. We want to
know what is the grand objective and how the parts are related to that
end. We do not want merely to support this mission because this
missionary appeals to us; we want to know what dominant purpose
governs the activities of the different societies, directs, and controls
them, deciding what work good and excellent in itself the mission
cannot afford to undertake, what it can and must do with the means at
its disposal in order to attain an end which it has deliberately adopted.
We need more, we need to know on what principles the missionaries
are sent here or there. We need to know what facts must be taken into
consideration before any mission, evangelistic, educational, or medical,
is planted in any place, what facts decide the question whether work is
begun, or reinforcements sent, to this place rather than to that. It is not
enough to be assured that there is a need. There is need everywhere.
We cannot supply all need; but we can have some settled and clear
judgment what facts ought to weigh with us, what information we must
possess before we can decide properly whether the claim of this place
is more urgent than the claim of that. We ought to have same basis of
comparison. The mere appeal of an earnest and devoted man, the mere
clamour of a body of men, the mere insistence of a persevering man, is
not sufficient to guide us aright. The mere offer of some supporter to
provide a building ought not to suffice. Acceptance of the offer may

alter the whole balance and character of the mission. We ought to know
what facts must be considered and how.
We need therefore a reasoned statement of the work of our foreign
missions expressed as a unity, which sets forth the work actually done
in different departments showing their relation one to another and the
relation of all to a dominant object. In other words, what we need is a
survey of the missionary situation in the world in terms of these
relationships.
It may be said that such a claim is outrageous and impossible; but we
are persuaded that with our present enlightenment, with the means of
knowledge which we now possess, we could, if we thought it worth
while, lay our hands on the necessary information. Our firm conviction
is that, if we did that, and set out the results of our examination in a
form intelligible to thoughtful laymen, we should obtain the support of
a great number of men to whom foreign missions at present