THE DEMAND ON STUDENTS FOR LEADERSHIP IN THE MISSIONARY ORGANIZATIONS

OF THE CHURCH AT HOME

The Call on Students for Leadership in the Church at Home The Demand for Leadership in the Missionary Organizations of the Church at Home

The Importance of Leadership in the Home Church

THE CALL ON STUDENTS FOR LEADERSHIP IN THE CHURCH AT HOME

MISS BERTHA CONDÉ, NEW YORK

THIS absorbing missionary enterprise depends upon the Church of Jesus Christ for its administration and execution. Each Church nationally organized has a missionary board which is responsible for the administration of a large portion of the missionary work of the world. Each one of us as a Christian belongs to some one regiment of the Church of Jesus Christ; and if we are to have any large part in this world-enterprise, we must be loyal to that regiment to which we belong.

The Church needs us, not only for work here at home, but in other lands, if any of us have caught that vision of service. If we go abroad to do that, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred we shall go under some missionary board of one of the Churches.

Now, although each one of us belongs to some regiment of the Church, there are many influences at work during our student days which tend to weaken our allegiance to our Church-and our sense of obligation to it. There is that stage-shall I say of religious adolescence?-in which, just as in our "'teens" we felt that we did not need the wisdom and guidance of our parents as much as we used to, we begin in college to think out our own religious problems, and the hold of the Church is likely to be loosened upon our lives. We sometimes have to fight in order to keep our allegiance to it.

Then, too, in many of our large universities, there is being developed a Sunday service, where men from all over the country, and indeed all over the world, come and pour out the riches of religious experience for our benefit. Inspiring as these services. are, they do leave all of us rather unprepared when we leave our university life to go back into the normal experience of the ordinary local congregation with which we shall probably have to be connected the rest of our lives.

Now, we need the Church as individuals for the sake of our union with the corporate body of the believers in Jesus Christ. We must depend upon the Church for our growth in spiritual life. We must depend upon it for that renewal of our life through the sacrament of the Holy Communion. We must depend upon it for the

sense of the communion of saints that we get through the corporate worship of the Church. There are countless other ways in which the Church is essential to us in our life; and we need to remind ourselves to-day that if any of us are to have the high privilege of representing the Church in foreign lands, we shall not be able to represent it adequately unless we are able to feel here at home the need, the keen need, that each of us has for the ministration of the Church during our student days.

The Church, on the other hand, needs primarily our loyalty. It needs our loyalty during our university life. It needs our loyalty as we, during our study, hear from Sunday to Sunday the continual call to the common worship of God in the local Church. And then, as we leave our institutions and go back into the local Church, the Church needs our leadership. It needs our leadership, not that we should go into the Church to displace some of the faithful workers that are already teaching in the Sunday-schools and leading the various organizations of that local Church, but that we should go there to extend the possibilities of that local Church into fields that have not already been conquered for our Lord. We can take up some of the missionary extension work of the Church which is not organized. With your leadership and your splendid executive ability, which you have developed through your Christian Associations, you ought to be able to bring to the Churches some service of special value.

There are many rural communities, from which some of us have come, waiting for the missionary spirit of some one student who has gone away from that community and may be returning home. We need to see the vast possibilities when that rural Church is transformed into a live, active, missionary Church in that community.

There are also many of us who have ample opportunity for developing new Sunday-school classes, new missionary organizations among people who are naturally interested in the Church with which we are connected, and yet have not yet been drawn into its activities.

We need also to come into this exalted service with a spirit of humility; for we may well be humble when we realize that we are in the service of a Church that existed many centuries before we came into it, and will exist many years after we have left it. In our leadership, and in our enthusiasm, we need to be most careful that we are not in any way guilty of that pride which will make our service useless to our local Church community.

We need to come to it with a spirit of giving rather than with a spirit of getting. I talk with many students all over the country who go back home after college days, and who say: "The year after I left the university was the most difficult year of my life, because somehow I could not get adjusted to the work of my own Church that I used to be so closely connected with before I went away to college." Now, that is very largely our own fault. It is

going to take some effort for us to adapt ourselves and adjust ourselves to the normal community life; but we need to do that, and to realize our responsibility for giving all that has come into our experience. We must guard lest we join that too great multitude of people who are in the Church already, and who sit there ready to have everything come to them, with no sense of responsibility for others outside of the Church.

May I say a word about the connection that we may have with the missionary enterprise of our own Church during our student days? We can connect ourselves with it by giving directly to our own missionary boards for the progress of the work entrusted to our Church. We can also familiarize ourselves with the missionary problems that our Church is grappling with by taking the regular missionary magazine that belongs to our Church, and keeping in touch with the progress of the work in our denomination.

We can also keep ourselves informed about the work that our own denomination is doing in order that we may be prepared to take up that largest leadership that God has given us, the privilege of sharing in the work of the Church of Jesus Christ in all parts of the world.

THE DEMAND FOR LEADERSHIP IN THE MISSIONARY ORGANIZATIONS OF THE CHURCH AT HOME

MISS HELEN B. CALDER, BOSTON

WE HAVE been confronted these past days with the needs of the great unoccupied fields of the world. Through platform messages, and through the silent appeal of the dark sections of the map before us in Convention Hall, we have been stirred to a deeper concern for the evangelization of the world. I wish it were possible to hang before you another map showing unoccupied places of leadership in our Churches at home. Such a map would be different for every one of you. It would show your Church and the group of Churches in the district in which you live, and on it would be marked the places where young women are needed as leaders in missionary organizations of various kinds. We cannot adequately occupy the great fields abroad until workers are supplied for these places for leadership that shall train up men and women for the world's harvest field, if that could be realized.

The Church that is fully organized for missions can report a Church missionary committee, a missionary committee in the Sunday-school, a women's missionary society, a young women's circle, missionary committees in young people's or junior societies, a children's mission band, and a missionary cradle-roll. In addition to