Concern with missions in our time often seems to be expressed in the search for new approaches and methods, sometimes accompanied with sharp criticism of our predecessors. While we need to take advantage of new opportunities and try to improve our methods, we must keep in the foreground that both our Christian message and method of proclamation were given by our Lord and are not subject to changing fashions. This article, written by the late Rev. Johannes G. Vos (whose career was reviewed in the November, 1983, Outlook) appeared in the October, 1938 Evangelical Student while he was a missionary in Manchuria.

No one should enter upon foreign missionary service for the romance of traveling in distant countries and studying a strange civilization. There is an element of romance in the foreign travel and residence of the missionary, but the person who becomes a missionary for such reasons is certain to be sadly disillusioned after the first glamour of a new country has worn off. The new missionary will find the almost unmitigated filth of many mission fields oppressive, and may soon find himself overwhelmed with homesickness for his native country. The places usually seen by tourists are very different from the scenes of the life and work of most missionaries. Continental Asia has innumerable villages of little one-story houses built of sun-dried mud bricks. Outside of a few large cites, sanitation is unknown. The lack of personal cleanliness of the people in some fields fills an American with disgust. Added to these physical conditions is the extremely disconcerting fact that no matter how many years a missionary works in an Oriental mission field, he will be misjudged by most of the natives to the end of his days. A missionary neither can nor ought to live and raise a family on the same income as that received by a native pastor in China, for example. Fifteen American dollars a month is an average salary for a Chinese pastor, and will support him and his family in comfort. For a missionary, this would mean extreme privation. The missionary’s native co-workers have never seen America and are entirely unable to form an adequate conception of American living conditions. The missionary’s salary is not a large one, judged by American standards, but being six or seven times as large as that of the native worker, it is regarded by the latter as princely wealth. The missionary has made sacrifices to serve Christ in a foreign country. Very likely he cannot afford to purchase some of the books which would keep him in touch with life in the home land. Careful budgeting and bookkeeping may be necessary to make the missionary salary sufficient for the needs of an American family and the ever recurring calls for charity and contributions. But in spite of all of this many natives will think the missionary is in the work for the money he gets out of it. Even consecrated Christian workers cannot understand why a missionary must live in a larger house and have a larger salary than a native worker. So the missionary is very likely to be in the position of making sacrifices for the cause, and instead of this being appreciated, it is likely to be entirely misunderstood. People will not only not believe that he is making any sacrifices, but will say that he is positively selftsh. When we realize that in China, for example, it is not uncommon for two families to share a single room as their sole living quarters, and that this is not regarded as a special hardship, but has been going on from time immemorial, it is apparent that the missionary cannot possibly even approach the natives of many mission fields in simplicity of standard of living. But the missionary who thinks he is going to convince his native constituency that he has made sacrifices for the cause of the Gospel, is certain to fail in most cases. He must simply make up his mind to have his mode of life misunderstood, and to face this perpetual misunderstanding and go on with his work through the years in spite of it. It is one of the differences between East and West for which there is no present remedy. If a missionary buys a pair of shoes, at a cost of six American dollars plus postage and duty, he is providing himself with a necessity and is not guilty of extravagance. But many Chinese Christians may ask how much those shoes cost, and on learning that they cost as much as a Chinese laborer would earn in six weeks, will conclude that the missionary is a man of unlimited resources and that America is a land where gold coin is used instead of copper. Chinese shoes are made of cloth and paper, and cost about thirty cents a pair.

The foregoing are merely examples of situations faced by foreign missionaries cited to “debunk” the notion that the missionary has an easy life or a particularly congenial task. They should not discourage anyone who is really in earnest about devoting his life to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ on the foreign field. Foreign mission work presents many truly golden opportunities for real Christian service today. Needless to say these opportunities are not to be found in pseudo-Christian, modernistic institutional or educational work. The primary work of Missions is and always will be evangelism. Along with evangelism there is need for medical and educational work of the right kind and on the right basis. The present article, however, deals principally with evangelism, or the religious part of mission work in the strict sense.

The Opportunity to Preach to Those Who Have Never Heard

The Apostle Paul tells us that he made it his aim to preach the Gospel, not where Christ was already named, that he might not build upon another man’s foundation (Rom. 15:20). Many a missionary today has the privilege of preaching Christ in a town or village where the Gospel has never been heard before. Of course not every missionary can do pioneer work; some must devote themselves to building up and instructing those who have already professed faith in Christ. Nearly every missionary who is engaged in evangelistic work, however, has the opportunity to proclaim Christ in places where there has never before been any Christian witness whatever. And every missionary in every foreign mission field, even though located in a station where Christianity has been established for many years, is sure to have the opportunity to proclaim the Gospel message to multitudes of lost souls who have never heard it before. Missionary work in the great mission fields has really scarcely been begun. There are in Asia, for example, many thousands of towns and villages, peopled with many millions of souls, which are still totally unreached. Even though it is quite true that America is a land of many churches and little Gospel, still the desperate need of the Gospel and inadequate supply of it in a country like China, is beyond all comparison with the situation in America. China alone has triple the population of America, and the vast majority of China’s millions know nothing of Christianity and are in the most intense spiritual darkness, enslaved by sin and by Satan, and without God and without hope in the world. The foreign missionary has practically unlimited opportunities to proclaim the Gospel to multitudes of lost souls, and deliver to them, in the name of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, a direct appeal and command to repent and believe the Gospel, to tum from idols to serve the living God and to wait for his Son from Heaven. The only serious limitations are lack of time and strength to meet the needs. The problem is not, as so often in America, to get an audience, but to be able to enter the doors that are open without overtaxing one’s strength. Of course the fact that multitudes are willing to listen to the Gospel does not mean that multitudes are ready to embrace it. When the real nature of Christianity, as the system of salvation by free and sovereign grace entirely apart from works of human merit, is made clear, many immediately lose interest and fall away.

But wherever the real Gospel is faithfully proclaimed there are always those who believe, and often in a surprisingly short time a Christian Church with thirty or forty earnest members is established in a place where two or three years before, all was pagan darkness and sin and despair.

The Opportunity to Establish New Churches

In some mission fields there exists a type of missionary who is interested only in evangelism and tends to minimize the importance of the Church; the aim of such is simply to preach the Gospel to as many souls as possible in order that as many persons as possible will be saved, with but little regard to the spiritual nurture of the converts and still less for a Scriptural form of Church organization and manner of worship. That this tendency is utterly unbiblical and wrong, will appear from even a casual reading of Paul’s Epistles. The tendency referred to is the result of the false assumption that the highest object of missions is the salvation of men. While it is of course true that the first concern of missions is the salvation of the lost, still the highest object of missions is not the salvation of men but the glory of God, and this demands that evangelism be followed by a Scriptural program of Church organization and activity. To be so exclusively concerned with the salvation of men, that we neglect those matters of Church organization and worship which God has appointed in His Word, is not only very unsatisfactory from the standpoint of permanent results, but is dishonoring to God and therefore sinful.

Scriptural practice demands, then, that evangelism be followed by the establishment of Churches, and this is another opportunity placed before the missionary. When an infant Church is established in any place, it means that Christianity has obtained a permanent foothold in what was before that a totally pagan environment. The public worship of God is conducted each Lord’s Day. A community of people has been gathered out of paganism, a community which is a part of the Body of Christ and which is bound together by spiritual bonds entirely unknown in heathenism. The Communion of Saints is a feature of Christianity which has no counterpart in any non-Christian religion. People go to heathen shrines and temples to perform acts of worship, and come away after these have been performed; they have no sense of fellowship with, or love for, their fellow-religionists. Very different is the situation in the little Christian Churches which spring up where the Gospel is preached in mission lands. Christians assemble not only to worship God, but for fellowship with one another. There may be no Church building at all, or it may be a simple structure of mud and cornstalks; it is not the building that counts, but the nature of the group that assembles. Such little Churches, imperfect as they are, are often like little samples of Heaven surrounded by all the sin and sordidness and sorrow of heathenism.

Many a missionary has the privilege, over and over again, of setting in order the organization of the Church and the worship of God in places where never, since the dawn of history, have people gathered together for the purpose of worshiping the God that made heaven and earth. The ftrst establishment of the Christian Church in a locality is undoubtedly the most important event that can ever take place in that locality; it means that a definite breach has been made in the ramparts of Satan, so that his dominion is openly disputed where it was unchallenged before, and that a new outpost of the kingdom of God has been carved from the empire of the prince of darkness.

Native converts on the mission fields are usually strong in faith but they may be very weak in knowledge. The fact that the convert to Christianity usually has to face persecution in some form, and often in a very severe form, means that those who reach the point of public profession and baptism are usually firm believers and not easily shaken from their allegiance to Christ. In point of knowledge, however, they are babes in Christ, for they have come directly out of paganism, and the sum total of their knowledge of the Bible and Christian doctrine is simply what they have acquired from hearing a few sermons, attending a few Bible classes, and reading some tracts and Scripture portions. The whole field of the Bible and of Christian doctrine lies before them. A new convert may ask a missionary whether Saul who persecuted David and Saul who persecuted the Church were the same individual, or whether Moses lived before or after Jesus Christ! Even the text of Scripture, with its many proper names transliterated from a strange language, is confusing to the new believer. Every convert must be patiently and carefully instructed in the Bible and in Christian truth; his questions must be answered and his difficulties explained as far as possible. While much of this work can be done by native evangelists and pastors better than by a missionary, there remains a tremendous amount of this kind of work that can be done only by the foreign missionary. The missionary’s knowledge of Church History enables him to help the new convert to avoid many an anciently refuted error and doctrinal pitfall. Heretical tendencies appear continually in new Churches on the mission fields, and the missionary is the one best able to help the native church recognize error when it appears and steer safely around it. Here it is in order to state that the oft-repeated assertion that Oriental Churches do not want Occidental creeds is modernistic to the core, utterly pernicious, and ought to be rejected by all real Christians. If the great creeds and confessions of the Christian Church are not true, they ought to be abandoned in the Occident as well as in the Orient. On the other hand, if they are true in the Occident, they are just as true in the Orient, and therefore are not really “western” creeds at all, but the property of the Christian Church apart from all distinctions of race or geography. To say that the great creeds of the Church are not suited to Oriental Christians involves us in a dilemma: either the creeds are not true, in which case the whole history of Christian doctrine has been a tremendous mistake, or else we must deny the unity of the human race and of truth itself and hold that a proposition can be true for an American and false for a Chinese, true in New York and false in Shanghai. The missionary who intends to propagate a form of non-doctrinal Christianity on the foreign field had better stay at home, or return home as soon as possible, for he is devoting his life to the propagation of a contradiction in terms. If his message is non-doctrinal, then it is not Christianity; and if it is Christianity, then it must be doctrinal.

Then, too, the missionary has access to a vast body of literature which has never been translated into the languages of the mission fields. Although great progress has been made in recent years, still sound Christian literature in such languages as Chinese remains pitifully inadequate. And it ought to be stated that unfortunately liberal missionaries have caused the translation and publication in Oriental languages of a great deal of modernistic literature, such as the writings of Harry Emerson Fosdick. There remains a great lack of conservative Christian literature. The missionary possesses commentaries, theological and other works in English, to which the native worker seldom has access. Through the foreign missionary much of this treasury of knowledge becomes available to the native Churches.

The Opportunity to Share the Reproach of Christ

The Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry severely criticized missionaries in the Far Eastern fields for not fraternizing more with the American and European business men found in large Oriental cities. Of course among these representatives of Occidental commerce who live in the Orient, there are to be found men of genuine Christian faith, and others who while not professing Christians, still realize that missionaries are normal human beings who are doing a good work under difficult conditions. But apart from these, Occidental commerce in the Orient includes not a few persons who regard missionaries as half-crazed fanatics, to be scorned or pitied but not ordinarily to be associated with. Foreign business men of this type are often men of low character, frequently immoral and dissipated, and nearly always have an attitude toward the natives of the country where they live that makes it impossible for the missionary to associate with them. Every true missionary of Christ will regard it as an honor to be reproached by foreign business men who spend their leisure time in saloons, dance halls and at the race tracks.

As conquering armies sweep onward across eastern Asia they are setting up a form of totalitarian government in their rear. This means that the missionary is called upon to bear the reproach of Christ in another form. The missionary must stand opposed to the blasphemous claim of civil and military powers to exercise control over the preaching of the Gospel and the government of the Church. In some places the claims of human power confront the missionary with a choice between loyalty to Christ and obedience to human authority. This is the case, for example, when attendance at heathen shrine worship is demanded of mission schools. A demand of this kind brings the conflict to an acute stage. Compromise is unthinkable. It is a clear choice between God and Caesar. To render the things of God to Caesar would be sin. The missionary must plainly tell the representatives of Caesar that he will obey God rather than men. This causes the missionary and his native constituency to face real persecution. They must bear the reproach of Christ. But the missionary of Christ is the ambassador of a King, not of a beggar, and must conduct himself accordingly. He must not deviate one iota from his instructions, and must be fully assured that the great Judge of the nations will hold human governments strictly accountable for their treatment of Christ’s Church. It is not an easy thing to bear witness for Christ before earthly rulers, but it is sometimes the missionary’s privilege, and when he is treated with scorn and contempt for his loyalty to Christ, he can rejoice in the reproach of Christ.

Sometimes reports of missionary work convey a false impression. People are led to think that the missionary enterprise is more successful than it really is. Sometimes reports list the converts but not the backsliders. Sometimes the words “crisis” and “challenge” ring out and people are led to think that now, of all history, is the decisive moment when the world is about to be won for Christ. All such over–emphasis is extremely unfortunate. Yet it is still true that there are golden opportunities in foreign missions. The life of the foreign missionary still has many difficulties and reproaches, but it has many rewards. The faithful proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is always honored by God and often honored far more than we would have any right to expect.