Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER VIII.

CHINA INLAND MISSION -PREPARATION AND DEPARTURE.

"Since service is the highest lot,

And all are in one body bound,

In all the world the place is not

Which may not with this bliss be crowned.

"Since service is the highest lot,

And angels know no higher bliss,
Then with what good her cup is fraught
Who was created but for this!"

Early in the fall of 1895, we find Miss Leffingwell at the Training Home of the China Inland Mission at Toronto, Canada. This missionary organization is too well known to require any extended descrip tion here. It is strictly an interdenominational mis sion, and has a very remarkable history. It was. founded and organized by Rev. J. Hudson Taylor, who first went to China as regular missionary, and after he had returned to England on account of poor health, became satisfied that he had a call of God to organize a mission on different lines from any. thing then existing.

He immediately began the work, and started the new movement. It met with great success, and has now the most extensive mission work in China. It was organized in 1865, and in 1906 reports 850

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][subsumed][subsumed]

missionaries, 863 native workers, 205 stations and 632 outstations, and 14,521 communicants. Their income for 1906 was reported at $268,817.01. They have their own methods of raising money, distribut ing it and of doing their work. While these are well known, it may not be out of place here to mention a few of them:

1. The mission is supported entirely by the freewill offerings of the Lord's people. The needs of the work are laid before God in prayer, no personal solicitations or collections being authorized. They hold public meetings and present the needs of the work, and leave it on the hearts and consciences of their hearers to give as the Lord shall direct.

2. They have no church membership as such, neither among the missionaries nor among the native converts. The missionaries remain members of their respective churches. A missionary in charge of the station is at liberty to adopt that form of church government which he believes to be most scriptural. If missionaries from any denomination come to them in sufficient numbers to man a station or a district, they are given it; and all missionaries of that same denomination who may come to them later are sent to that station or district. Each denomination may conduct the worship of its station according to its respective forms, and the converts of each station are received into the church relationship of the denomination that occupies that station. When missionaries are received from a denomination that has no station or field, they are sent to a station where the missionaries are the most congenial to the new comers.

3. They work inland, away from the seaport cities and towns. They say there are plenty of missionaries who will work in these favored places, and that they are called to the interior, where, at the time they began their work, eleven of the eighteen provinces were without a Protestant missionary and where but few missionaries cared or dared to go.

4. Their work is largely evangelistic. They make the salvation of the souls of the natives superior to educational work. Many other missions are given up almost wholly to educational work, but the China Island Mission, while they carry on extensive educational work, make a specialty of itinerating among the people, selling or giving away tracts, scriptures and other literature, and of evangelizing the people in their villages.

5. Their missionaries receive no stated amount as a salary. Their officers only receive and pay out whatever comes in; and every missionary agrees to this method before being accepted. As a matter of fact, however, their missionaries receive quite regu larly a certain amount for living expenses. varies each year somewhat, but not very largely.

It

6. All missionaries must wear native dress. These points have been mentioned because Miss Leffingwell spent seven years with this mission. She always spoke of its members and methods in the highest terms, and some of these principles mentioned as characteristic of the China Inland Mission were very acceptable to her and much in harmony with her ideas of faith and labor.

She was, however, a loyal Free Methodist,

and she was always free and frank to confess her love for that church and her devotion to it. For seven years, more or less, while her call to foreign work was forming and crystallizing in her nature, she had all along supposed that she would go out as a missionary under the "Missionary Board" of that church; and even after she had found in the will of God that her special field of labor must be China, she still expected to be sent out by that board, even though she knew that at that time they had no mission work in China.

In a letter to the Rev. Benjamin Winget, the missionary secretary of the Free Methodist church, written after she was at Yun-nan Fu, she says: "For twelve years I have been a Free Methodist; earn. est and loyal in every way. Not for an instant did I doubt, nor have I ever since doubted that I was in the divine order all the way along those years. The Lord called me to foreign mission work seven years before I actually went out as a missionary, and He had repeatedly reminded me that the time was drawing near for me to go. I did not question how the way was to be opened, but supposed of course that He would move the board of the Free Methodist church to call for missionaries for China when the time came for me to go-not that He had ever told me this. I had never asked Him about it, only I had never thought of any other way."

As soon, however, as she found that the Free Methodist church could not then establish a mission in China and that she must go out under some other organization, she immediately turned to the China Inland Mission and made her application

« PreviousContinue »