The Missionary Motive
By Joseph Houldsworth and William Paton Oldham
- Subject
- Missions / General
- ISBN
- 9781116942385
About this book
The study of foreign missions has been greatly extended during the last seven. Years since the wide-spread adoption of the small-circle method, and there has grown up a considerable literature intended primarily for the use of study-circles. It is now possible for a group of people who wish to study any of the great mission-fields, to find a text-book written specially for their purpose and giving in small space an admirable account of the nature and history of the country and the progress of Christianity within it. With the progress of missionary study, however, there has become evident a tendency to con centrate attention upon the externals of mission ary work, and the immediate setting of the missionary need, with the result that the essential spiritual forces which have always animated missions and missionaries have slipped some what into the background.
This tendency is only a special case of a wide spread danger which represents the defect of the qualities of modern missionary organization. We live in a day when missionary conferences and committees, missionary literature and campaigns cover the ground, and an immense amount of single-hearted labour is being put into the double task of assisting the work ofmissionaries on the field, and awakening and sustaining the missionary passion in the Church at home. Yet there is in all this a peril lest amid our activities we forget God; lest in our insistence on the crisis and opportunity of the present time we shift the ground of missions from the eternal love and mercy of God to the temporary exigencies of a single race or generation.
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