SURVEY OF DISTRICTS WHERE TWO OR MORE SOCIETIES ARE AT WORK AND SURVEY
OF MISSIONS WITH NO DEFINED DISTRICTS.
I. Districts in which Two or more Societies are at Work.
Hitherto we have taken for granted that only one missionary society is
at work in the district and that the survey is therefore simple; but in
many mission station districts some other society is also at work.
Occasionally the district of one station overlaps part of the district
of a station of another society. In many districts Roman Catholics are
at work, and certain forms of their work cannot be ignored, and no form
of their work ought to be ignored in surveying the district.
If two missions sent by different societies are at work in the _same_
district then, it would be an immense advantage if the survey of the
district could be made a joint production. Union for study is often
possible, when union in work is impossible, and the common understanding
of the situation is most useful.
But if that is impossible, then each society must survey the whole
district, and, what an immense amount of labour would be wasted in the
preliminary survey, the physical toil of travelling over the country to
see the villages and towns, which must be seen to be known, and must be
known to reveal the secret of the task which the mission is founded to
fulfil, that labour is known only to one who has undertaken such a task,
and will soon be known to anyone who starts out conscientiously to
survey any district. But it is helpful and illuminating labour, and it
would be far better that the heads of two missions should survey the
whole of the same district separately than that neither should survey
any of it. If both feel that in any real sense that is "_their
district_," then they ought both to survey it all; for to call a
district _mine_ which I have not even surveyed and do not know even by
sight is absurd; but it would lighten their labour and help their mutual
understanding if they surveyed it together.
If a part of the district overlaps part of another mission district,
that part should be surveyed together if possible, or if that is not
possible, by each separately.
In this survey the work of no Christian society, however remote
ecclesiastically or theologically from the surveyor's point of view,
should be omitted. Ignorance of the work done by others is the worst
possible form of separation. There is a sense in which it is true that
the more remote the ecclesiastical position of another is from our own,
the more near we are to definite opposition, the more important it is
that we should know what his work is. We may find in it so much to
admire that our annoyance at what seem to us his ecclesiastical
absurdities may be softened. If we survey the district together we shall
perhaps find there is room for both, even if we each start with the
persuasion that there is no room for the other anywhere in the world.
On no account must we fail to consider another's work. In educational or
medical work we must recognise that a school or a hospital which exists,
by whomsoever created, in the district makes a difference to the
situation. To deal with the district as if that school or hospital did
not exist is to deal with an imaginary district, not with the real one;
and no one supposes that there is any advantage in dealing with things
that are what they are as if they were something else.
We have observed a certain tendency to recognise this truth in the
matter of education and medicine, and to introduce into survey proposals
a note, when the educational and medical tables were reached, to remind
the surveyor that the educational and medical work of some society of
which he is afraid, or from which he thinks himself widely separated, as
extreme Protestants from Roman Catholics, must not be ignored; but in
the evangelistic and Church tables no such note is inserted. This is, we
suppose, a tacit acceptance of the idea that the opposite party's
evangelical and church building work can be ignored with trifling
loss--that to ignore it does not much matter. But if a man is surveying
what he calls habitually "his" district, he is surveying it presumably
to get at the facts, and one of the most important facts which he needs
to know is how far the preaching of Christ has extended and where
Christian churches have been established. Unless then he is prepared to
deny the name of Christ to the opposite party (and that is a very
serious thing to do), he cannot ignore their churches. The people claim
to be Christians and declare that they believe in Christ. If the
surveyor without further inquiry rejects them because they belong to a
society which he does not like, that may be an exhibition of
ecclesiastical zeal, but it is not the science of surveying.
Whatever he may think of them, as a surveyor he has no right to ignore
them. He is surveying "his district". There are in it so many persons of
various religious belief, amongst them his own converts and these
Christians of the opposite party. He perhaps refuses to recognise the
latter as Christians; but they are undoubtedly neither Moslems nor
Confucianists, nor Buddhists, nor Hindoos, nor do they belong to any of
the non-Christian religions. He cannot ignore them. He must take count
of them. Therefore if in a district the Protestant and the Roman
Catholic cannot survey together, the Protestant who does survey must
carefully consider the facts before his face, and endeavour to find out
what the facts really are as well as he possibly can. The facts are that
Roman Catholics are working in what he calls "his district"; the facts
are that there are churches here, and here, and here, and people who
call themselves Christians so many, and that the heathen population is
by so many less. And there are so many mission priests, and they win
converts, and the converts won by them cease to be heathen, for they are
sometimes persecuted by their heathen neighbours, even as his own
converts are persecuted.
Happily all leading surveyors are realising these obvious facts and are
now taking these things into serious account; but it is still necessary
to insist on their importance.
In these tables, when other missions are at work in the district, all
that is necessary is to add one column of the work of the other missions
so far as it is known, or can be ascertained. We are well aware that
that easy phrase covers in many cases great practical difficulty. Here
is one of the places where estimates may be inevitable. If they are
inevitable, they should be estimates, not guesses, and a note should be
made of the process by which they were reached. The difference between
an estimate and a guess is that an estimate is the result of a definite
train of reasoned calculation and a guess is not. For an estimate
reasons can be given, for a guess none other than--it occurred to me.
II. The Mission which has no Defined District.
We believe that the vast majority of missions accept a territorial
district; but there are missions where the station district has not and
cannot be defined.
The idea of the mission is not territorial. The object proposed is not
to cover any area with mission stations, nor to establish in every town
and village a church or chapel, but to create at a centre a Church of
living sons trained and educated by many years, perhaps generations, of
care to become the centre of a movement which may cover the whole
country; or it may be to influence movements which arise in the
religious, political, or social life of the people, and to direct these
into Christian channels. In such cases a territorial foundation is
impossible. The mission exists in the midst of a people and influences
the people; it makes converts, it establishes them in the faith, it
cares for them in mind and body, it prepares them to set the moral and
religious standard for any Church of the future. It is not concerned
directly with the widest possible preaching of the Gospel. When the
native Christians whom it is painfully and slowly educating and training
come to maturity they will spread the Gospel throughout the length and
breadth of the land. It is not, we are told, the business of the Foreign
Mission to preach the Gospel in every village of a defined area nor to
make itself responsible for such preaching directly: it should give to
converts in every country the highest and best and fullest teaching of
Christian civilisation, in order that by so doing it may show to all the
people of the country an example, by which they may be attracted and
influenced. If we take the widest expression of such mission activity we
find that to estimate the true value of such work we should be compelled
to survey not only the mission and its activities but the social, moral,
material, and spiritual state of the people among whom the mission was
planted, and seek for signs of a change which we could trace with some
certainty to the influence of the mission. That would be a stupendous
and most intricate undertaking. Where innumerable forces are at work
such as are implied in the impact of western civilisation upon the
peoples of the East, or of Africa, it would be extremely difficult to
state the exact impression made by the mission, even if we could survey
the whole state of the people at regular and definite periods. We do
not for a moment doubt that all Christian missions do exercise an
influence of this wide and far-reaching character, and from time to time
we can see results which clearly spring from it, but we cannot think it
wise to set out this vague influence as the primary purpose of a
mission. We believe that the Christian missions which aim directly and
primarily at the conversion of men and the establishment of a living
native Church produce this fruit by the way.
If, however, we take the narrower expressions in the statement of aim
which we have set out above, we find in it the purpose of establishing a
Church, but the establishment is viewed as the result of a long and
elaborate training and cultivation of a comparatively small body of
Christians, rather than as the immediate result of widespread work. In
such a case we ought to be able to trace progress and to place these
missions in a common scheme.
The early tables of work to be done and of the force in relation to that
work on a territorial basis certainly fail. The leaders of the mission
have not the information and do not want it, but they could almost
certainly provide the facts concerning the force at work contained in
the tables without the proportions for the district, and they would
perhaps be able to fill up most of the other tables omitting proportions
to area and population.
Now if they did that we should be able to see the force at work and the
type of work in which the mission was strongest and weakest, and the
relation of the different types of work to each other, though it is
probable that the tables dealing with the native Church as distinct from
the Mission would not be filled up. With that information we could
almost certainly define more or less exactly the place of the mission in
a large area such as the province, or the country; for in dealing with
the province or the country we must necessarily mass figures, and we
have there a known, or estimated, area and population, to use as a basis
for calculation of proportions and comparison, and we are aiming at
placing each mission in a larger whole and trying to see what part each
takes in the performance of a great work which is world wide in its
scope. If the missions then which decline a territorial basis for their
work would fill up those tables which reveal the nature of their work
and the force engaged in it we should be able to advance to the next
stage. This is what we meant when at an earlier stage we remarked that
we had drawn our tables to serve a definite purpose, but that we had not
ignored the case of the man whose idea of the purpose of a mission
differed from our own.