THE TRAINING NECESSARY FOR MISSIONARY CANDIDATES

Present Demand for More Thorough Training of Missionaries

Importance of Being Thoroughly Prepared in Doctrine and Established in Character Before Going to the Mission Field

Advantages to a Woman Missionary Candidate of Taking a Course of Special Study in a Residential School

Social Service as a Necessary Preparation of Missionaries Bible-Study Essential in Missionary Preparation

PRESENT DEMAND FOR MORE THOROUGH TRAINING

OF MISSIONARIES

PROFESSOR EDWARD W. CAPEN, HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT

WITHIN the last fifteen years there has been practically a revolution in the whole conception of the training required for missionary service. It was only about fifteen years ago that the secretary of one of the leading mission boards of the country was asked by persons interested in missionary training what special preparation was needed in those days by the missionary that had had theoretical training. He replied: "Nothing but the theological education; that is the best possible preparation." That gentleman's successor as the secretary of that large mission board has said publicly that he believes the time will soon come when leading mission boards will require of the ordained man not only the ordinary theological course but also a year of speecial or specific preparation, and will require of the woman missionary not only a full college course but also an additional year of special preparation. I give you these contrasting views of two officials occupying the same position fifteen years apart simply to show the revolution that has come about in the conception of the training needed by missionaries.

This demand for more thorough preparation first found expression at the Edinburgh Conference. So great was the need felt to be that the mission boards, both in North America and in Great Britain, have created boards of missionary preparation to consider this whole question of preparation and make such recommendations to candidates, boards, and educational institutions as may be demanded. The reasons for this new emphasis on preparation grow out of the new conditions that have come into the missionary situation. These include the new factors that have come into the environment of the missionary and the modifications in his task produced thereby.

Let us think of the new factors, the changing movements on the foreign field which call for better missionary preparation. The first of these is the development of education. As you are all aware, Japan has created a great system of secular education. India has done the same. China and Turkey are moving in this direction. This educational advance on the mission field has had two results: In the first place, the Christian or mission school maintained by the

missionaries is no longer the only school on the field, but is in competition with these other schools, most of which are better equipped. Many of them have more well-trained teachers than the mission schools. Again, in the old days the missionary went out with his Western education, his training in the United States, in Canada or Great Britain, and was the only person on the field trained in Western methods. No longer is this true. With the spread of education, the missionary is now laboring more and more among people who have been educated in ways similar to those in which he himself has been educated. Not only this, but the missionary has ceased, simply because of his training in this country, to stand intellectually head and shoulders above the leaders of the people. One of the most highly trained missionaries in Japan says that with a few exceptions the missionaries of Japan are not superior or even equal in education to the leaders of the Japanese Church. This is the first new factor that comes into the missionary's surroundings.

The second factor is similar, that is, the introduction of Western thought and Western intellectual problems. The growing familiarity with the English language, and to a less extent with the German and French languages, and the closer relations between the East and the West, are introducing into the Orient these problems, religious and scientific, with which we are familiar. We have in Hartford this year a missionary from China who wishes to take certain courses in the school. He says: "Every problem concerning the Bible and the relations of science and religion which is before the Church here, if it is not already rife in China, will be so within a few years, and I want to fit myself to help solve these problems for these people." The East also is being flooded with pseudoscientific attacks upon Christianity, so that the missionary is constantly facing the problems relating to miracles, prayer, evolution, and Bible criticism. The educated and student classes of these people are taking the agnostic position in increasing numbers, and the question is: How shall the missionary be prepared to meet these questions?

Dr. Paul told me, two years ago, when I had a talk with him about this matter, that he knew missionaries who had had to come home from China in order to study these problems or else confess themselves unable to solve the difficulties which the Chinese were bringing to them.

The third new element is that of industrial development. We all know that the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Great Britain, followed by that in the United States, is at the root of some of the most difficult and delicate problems facing the Church of Christ to-day. Dr. Henderson dwelt on that in his address yesterday morning. These problems which we are facing were brought home to the Church in the United States by the "Men and Religion" campaign, in which the social work of