Missionary Journal.

Births, Marriages & Deaths. Ar Wei Hien, Shantung April 8th,

WHAT OUGHT TO BE THE POLICY OF MISSIONARIES IN REGARD TO
ORDINATION OF NATIVE PASTORS.

V.

THE

BY REV. H. D. PORTER, M.D.
(Concluded from page 186.)

-THE NATIVE PASTORATE AS DETERMINED BY THESE PRINCIPLES.

HAVING been thus explicit in discovering what principles may

guide us in the search for a wise policy, we are ready to ask how is the question of a native pastorate affected by them, either singly, or in combination.

Our first principle calls upon us, then, to institute a native pastorate. The highest and best condition of any Church can be none other than a fully organized one. The natural condition, by which we now mean the condition best suited to realize the aim of any Church organization, is only secured when it has an independent and acknowledged leader and guide. It is only when the native membership is small, and separated, that it is legitimate for the missionary to assume the pastorate. He is not and he can not be the pastor desired or needed. He may not have discovered his inadequacy. Whether he know it or not, that inadequacy is inherent in the nature of his relation to the people he would evangelize. It is an essential element in the ministry that the leader in spiritual matters should have a primary conviction of responsibility to God. The missionary from his training and experience, from his glad purpose to unfold God's love to men, may have this conviction deep and profound. But it is a no less necessary element of the pastorate, that the teacher and leader should have a sense of allegiance, and responsibility to his Church. Without such a sense he can not be in any natural way a pastor. The missionary can never have any other sense of such responsibility than that coming from his sense of indebtedness to proclaim the truth to men. Personal interest there may be, and should be. Such responsibility

as fills the ideal pastorate must be sought in another form. A divided responsibility, the larger part of which is assumed, perhaps necessarily, by the missionary, cannot tend toward healthful activity in the Church. We know so well, by the happy experiences of hundreds of flourishing, and effective Churches in the home lands, the charm and the influence attending the pastorate. We may accept it as an axiom that that influence, is due to the sense of personal leadership untrammelled by external interference, and enhanced by the thought of the mutual responsibility of pastor and people. We may accept it as equally evident that like conditions in the mission fields will produce like results. Unless this principle of an ideal to be early attained, assist in determining a policy, a great danger must attend missionary effort. It is the danger of attaching undue importance to the difficulties in the way. Those difficulties are indeed great. They may very easily increase, they may become all but insuperable. They must therefore be met at the outset. We can best meet them by trusting to the general rule that the ideal condition of a Church must be sought, despite the hindrances. These difficulties may present themselves in this way:-Want of adaptation to the pastoral office; lack of experience; imperfect conceptions of the Christian life; lack of traditional ideas of the importance of veracity and morality; lack of systematic study of the gospel themes; lack of natural gifts of leadership, especially spiritual leadership. It would be easy to accumulate hindrances, and to magnify each into undue prominence. In the face of all these real, or apprehensible difficulties we must turn toward the principle laid down. What is the ideal? What is the normal condition of Church life? What in reality tends to realize in its highest forms, a vigorous and expansive Christian development? Against the hindrances on the side of the native pastor, we may set, the separation of the missionary from the people; the necessary imperfection of his modes of approach to them; the lack of that deepest and personal sympathy which comes from similar tastes, habits of thought and manner of life; the danger of keeping in subjection a body of native preachers and the constant peril of holding up before the helpers, an imperfect ideal of Church expenditure, or Church life. It is at the turning point of this dilemma that we plant our principle of ideal Church development. "Have faith" said Francis Wayland "in general principles." The principle of the ideal condition of Christian life and growth, demands the native pastorate, it demands it at the earliest possible period. "The pastorate," says Dr. Anderson," apprehended in its relations to the person and work of the Redeemer is far more

desirable and influential than that of reader,' 'catechist' or mere licentiate.'

The conditions of normal, vigorous, continuous and expansive growth are to be found in the native pastorate, and in that alone.

If such be the demand of the first law of determinate growth, we shall find that demand supplemented and enforced by the second principle of normal growth. This demand is not merely enforced, it is securely guarded against mistake from an unnecessary haste toward securing the result desired. If it be indeed true that the "one controlling principle is the establishment of self-supporting self-governing and self-propagating institutions of the gospel," it is no less true that there must be some method of securing such a result with ease and success. I submit that such a result can be best secured by a native pastorate, nay more, that it can only be secured by a native pastor. We may maintain the principle without any leaning toward the idea of a priestly office, that a pastor is a divinely commissioned officer of the Church. The elements that combine to select and determine who may be called to be a pastor, while they may be common and successive human events, are nevertheless under the guidance of Him, in whom we live and move and have our mental and moral, no less than our physical, being. The pastor then, is the divinely appointed leader of any local community. We read, "As is the priest so is the people." The pastor is in reality the Church. The Church depends upon him for its thoughts, for its stimulus, for its activities. It may not be wholly the case in Christian lands where every individual Christian by his instincts and training is ready for a certain leadership. But it must be so in every place where Christian social life is built from the bottom. In a very interesting lecture on education in the Southern States, entitled "Building for the Children," the Rev. A. D. Mays lays down a great truth regarding education. "But one thing is absolutely necessary to a good school. That one absolute essential is a good teacher." Gen. Garfield once said, "If I were forced to select between a university without Dr. Hopkins, and Dr. Hopkins with only a shingle and a piece of chalk, under an apple tree, he on the end of an oak log and I on the other, I would say: 'My university shall be Dr. Hopkins, president and college in one.' I paraphrase this principle and affirm, "One thing is absolutely necessary to a good Church. That one absolute essential is a good pastor." On heathen ground nothing can be more true. I paraphrase again and affirm that a good pastor carries his Church in himself. It is just at this point that our second principle guards and conserves the first. The first step towards the pastorate, if

there be one fitted to assume that office, is self-support. We can not secure an ideal Church life in any of its forms until this first step is taken. Self-support is the key note of the more recent missionary advances. Without this as a cardinal principle, a pauperized and lifeless body of uncertain believers, or half-hearted believers must be begotten. Without it only a new form of a "hireling ministry" can be developed. It is seeds of the Kingdom that we are to plant, not roots. The seed will grow of itself. The roots watered however so carefully, may sprout, but they will live a perishing life and finally must be plucked up to make room for seed that shall live and grow in normal ways of development.

We may take it as an axiom, that until a people are either able, or willing to attempt self-support, they are still infants, or children. They must remain under the tutelage of the missionary whose first hope and continuous aim, should be to awaken and urge to full development the idea of self-dependent self-support, first in the pastorate, second in Church building, and finally in schools and education. Thus guarded and saved from its first, perhaps its only peril, we may urge on the pastorate to its full development.

The native pastorate is demanded in order to complete the accomplishment of self-support. But the process of self-government demands more rigorously the native pastorate. "The responsibility of self-government," says Dr. Anderson,* "must be devolved upon the native Church as soon as it have a pastor." The Church in many cases has begun to learn that lesson before its organization is completed. Its mistakes, perplexities, anxieties, all will serve it well in the process of a healthful development. In order to carry on the work of self-government to its full conclusion the Church must have its own pastor, who accepts the leadership conscious of his responsibilities and full of purpose to secure for those who support him, all that building up in mental, moral, and spiritual life possible to a wise and sympathetic leadership.

In like manner, a Church can not awake to its responsibility of proclaiming the gospel, except under the incentives of a personal leader. The native Church, with all the outlying darkness around it must be taught its duty of evangelizing men. It must be selfpropagating from the very first. Without such a motive and purpose it will be a useless branch in the vineyard. "There comes also," says Prof Ladd,† "to the local Church, as a Church, a command of Christ. This command is historic...It emphasizes the final purpose of the Church. It teaches the doctrine that the local Church is in

* Foreign Missions, p. 112.

† Sect. XI. Prin. Church Polity, p. 385.