Roland Allen

“ It is vain to attack statistics to-day. Every society publishes statistical sheets. Every society by publishing them shows that it recognises the value of statistics. The difficulty to-day is not that the societies do not publish statistics, but that the statistics which they publish are not related to any aim or purpose, and do not include factors or standards which enable us to measure progress. ”

“ Every little piece of mission work ought to be directed on principles capable of bearing the weight of the whole. We ought to be able to say, "The whole world can be converted by these means and on these principles which we are here employing in this little village". If the methods and the principles are so narrow that we can build no great world-wide structure on them, we can take little more interest in them than we do in the petty politics of some little parish at home. ”

“ Where we must act it is our duty to know all that we can know, and if, because we cannot collect all the information that we should wish to possess, we refuse to collect that information which we can obtain, because we realise that it will be incomplete, we commit a serious moral and intellectual crime. If we can know only one factor out of one hundred, we offend if we refuse to know that one. We must act. We have no right to shut our eyes to knowledge which ought to guide our action because we are aware that action taken on that one factor will be insufficiently guided. ”

“ If we survey the district together we shall perhaps find there is room for both, even if we each start with the persuasion that there is no room for the other anywhere in the world.
On no account must we fail to consider another's work. In educational or medical work we must recognise that a school or a hospital which exists, by whomsoever created, in the district makes a difference to the situation. To deal with the district as if that school or hospital did not exist is to deal with an imaginary district, not with the real one ”

“ An evangelistic missionary is perhaps a doctor by training or experience, and heals the sick as eagerly as his colleague who is called a medical missionary. Each is unwilling to be catalogued in one column only. He feels, and feels rightly, that that single figure belies the facts. The evangelistic missionary may be the only doctor in the whole area who really understands the use of western drugs and implements, the doctor may be the only evangelist in the whole area who really knows how to preach the Gospel in language which the people can understand. ”

“ Now when our missions are presented to us and we are asked to support them on all sorts of grounds, as though a society with its slight funds could really successfully practise every kind of philanthropic work, we begin to doubt whether it can really be wisely guided. Each mission station, each institution, seems to be an isolated fragment. The missionary in charge often appeals to us as an exceedingly good and able man, and we support him, and we support the society which sends him and others like him. ”

“ We begin to feel that if only the Christians awoke to their duty they could influence the whole population profoundly. That is precisely the effect produced upon the Christians by a missionary survey undertaken with them, and understood by them; they begin to see the immensity of the work to be done, they begin to see that it can be done. ”

“ They have become, like many little Christian communities at home, so entangled in the effort to maintain their own dignity, their own services, their own progress in outward prosperity, that they have forgotten the real purpose of their existence, and, instead of becoming centres of light and attraction and active zeal for the spread of the gospel, have degenerated into self-contained units indulging a self-satisfied pride in the glorious position to which they have attained as self-supporting churches. ”

“ Very often the establishment of a medical mission turns upon no more thorough examination of the facts of the situation than the conviction of a capable missionary that there is need for medical work in his district, and that he must supply it if he can, and that he must persevere in appeals till he can supply it. When a man asks: "On the basis of what facts ought this or that to be done in the mission field?" he has got a long way into the complexity of the problem, and the need for survey, if a society is to act with wisdom, is already apparent to him. ”

“ If there is any doubt as to the dominant aim and purpose of a school, the fact that it receives Government aid reveals at once that in the eyes of the Government it stands for the general enlightenment of the population rather than for any direct evangelisation. The dominant aim of the Government is general enlightenment, and the Government gives no grant without some sort of control. ”

“ We can no longer afford to ignore the work of others and to plan our missions as though other missions did not exist. As we try to point out from time to time no society can act rightly in ignorance of another's work. ”

“ Carefully defined, missionary survey is not the unwieldy, amorphous thing which people often imagine. There is indeed a dangerous type of survey which starting with a hypothesis proceeds to prove it by collecting any facts which seem to support it to the neglect of all other facts which might disprove it. The procedure advocated here is the adoption of a definite and acknowledged purpose for which the survey is to be made and the collection of all the facts which bear upon the subject in hand. ”

“ Would not the rigid definition of the aim of our foreign missions, by excluding a great many legitimate aims and methods, weaken and beggar our missions, which are strong in proportion as they admit all sorts of different aims and methods? There are men who speak and act as if they thought so, and in consequence welcome as a proper part of the missionary programme all Christian, social, and political activities. ”

“ It is true that a great many missionaries would refuse to admit that the recognition of other stations in the planting of our own is an acknowledgment of the unity of our work; but whether they acknowledge it, or whether they do not, it is so, and we for our part recognise it with thankfulness and look forward to a day when missions will not only recognise others by avoiding them, but by planning missions deliberately to assist each other. ”

“ We may well acknowledge that the aim which above all others has appealed to us is the aim of the establishment in the world of a Christian Church, native, indigenous, living, self-supporting, self-governing, self-extending, independent of foreign aid. That has no doubt coloured our work and will perhaps render it less acceptable to some; for the facts which must be included in a survey which accepts that aim are precisely the facts which societies do not now tabulate and are often estimated with some difficulty. ”

“ The man who provides the information should be the first to profit by it and to be interested in it. The first man to criticise these tables should be the missionary who fills them up on the spot; and his most valuable criticism might be a demonstration that the last column in a table was futile; that the table led him to no conclusions and suggested no remarks. That column of conclusions and remarks we hold to be the most precious of them all. We would have no man supply meaningless information. ”

“ So long as foreign missions are presented to us in that way, so long as any mission may serve any purpose, we cannot possibly take any intelligent share in foreign missions as a whole. We are lost. We cannot co-ordinate in thought the activities of the missions, as we see plainly that they are not co-ordinated in action in the field itself. ”

“ When world need is so vast it is time to challenge a reasoned contradiction of this assertion. If each Society did what in justice to its constituency it ought to do, a survey of an area such as a province or a country would be an easy task, and a survey of the world would be neither difficult nor expensive, and after all, until we know the whole, we cannot intelligently administer the part. ”

“ And it is practically impossible for us to imagine that the missions are directed on any thought-out policy, because a policy seems to involve necessarily the sub-ordination of the aim deemed to be less important to another which is deemed to be more important, and the less or the more must depend, not upon personal predilections, but upon closeness of relation to some one dominant idea; and, therefore, the definition of the dominant idea is the first necessity for the establishment of a reasonable missionary policy. ”

“ We need then a table of the foreign missionary force. In its form it will be a mere statement of proportions. The proportions are essential in order to make comparison between one area and another possible; and comparison is the sweet savour of survey. We cannot compare the work of three men labouring among an unstated population with the work of two other men working in an unstated population; the moment that the proportions are worked out the cases can be compared. But some men detest this purely quantitative comparison. ”

“ But though this thought has inevitably governed our conception of survey and we have made no attempt to conceal it, we have nevertheless tried to avoid the danger of selecting for survey only those facts which might serve to support a theory of the method by which that aim is to be attained; and we have kept in our minds constantly the needs of men whose idea of the aim of foreign missions differs from our own. ”

“ Our evangelistic missionaries are busy about everything, from itinerant preaching to the establishment of banks and asylums. Can we afford it? What purpose is dominant, what aim really governs the policy of those who send out evangelistic missionaries? What decides the form of their work and the method by which they pursue it? It is hard to guess, it is hard to discover, it is hard to understand. ”

“ There is in hospitals an opportunity of extraordinary importance, a field of great fruitfulness which is largely neglected. If the hospital is a missionary hospital, founded to heal the souls as well as the bodies of men, ought not the patients in them to be taught as well as medically treated? ”

“ We should conduct all our work, and plan all our work, at home and abroad, with our eyes fixed on the final goal, which is for us, so long as we are on this earth, coterminous only with the limits of the habitable globe. We cannot be content to approach even the largest areas as though our action was limited by them. All our policy in every part should be part of a policy designed for the whole. ”

“ We look at the parts, and the smallest parts, because our minds instinctively seek a unity, and only in the parts do we find a unity, nor there often, unless we concentrate our attention on one aspect of the work. But by thinking of foreign missions in this small way and speaking of them in this small way, we alienate men who are accustomed to think in large terms of large undertakings designed on large policies.
What we need to-day is to understand foreign missions as a whole. We want to take an intelligent part in them viewed as a unity. ”

“ We are dealing with a missionary survey, a survey concerned with the propagation of the Gospel. The mere strength of the Church, unrelated to any work in which the strength is to be employed, is a very different matter. We might take pleasure in the sight of it. We might congratulate ourselves and the missionaries on the beauty of the strength revealed, but not until it is related to work to be done does strength appear in its true glory. We find in nearly all missionary statistics the number of communicants and converts set forth, and we often wonder what for. ”

“ It may also cause surprise that we ask for estimates in some cases where exact information is not immediately accessible. It may be said that statistics are misleading, but estimates are hopelessly misleading: let us have correct figures or none. That attitude is easily understood, but under the circumstances it is vain. "Correct figures," that is, meticulously exact figures, are unattainable. An estimate is in nearly all matters of daily life and business the basis, and rightly the basis, of our action. ”

“ Unless the objective is understood men cannot estimate the value of their work. They cannot trace progress unless they can see clearly the end to be attained; they cannot zealously support action unless they are persuaded that the action is truly designed to attain the defined end. There may indeed be many subordinate objects, and men may be asked to work for the attainment of any one of these, but there ought to be one final end and purpose which governs all, and intelligent co-operation involves the appreciation of the relation between the subordinate and the final end. ”

“ We cannot sacrifice the proportions, because the life is in them. Comparison of conditions in different areas can only be made on proportions. The mere statement of the figures with the suggestion that anyone can work out the proportions would reveal a singular ignorance of human nature.
For the native force all that we need for the present purpose is a table that will show us the Christian constituency, communicants, and workers in the whole province in proportion to one another. ”

“ Two hospitals in a single area are probably not in the same place and imply more widespread influence; but if each has twenty beds, in proportion to population it is of no importance whether the forty beds are in one place or two: forty in-patients fill the beds.
But in medical work, when we are considering the need of the district, another factor of importance often enters. The medicals of the mission are often not the only men meeting that need. There are often others, Government officials, or private practitioners, who, from the point of view of medical practice, are doing the same work. ”

“ With that information we could almost certainly define more or less exactly the place of the mission in a large area such as the province, or the country; for in dealing with the province or the country we must necessarily mass figures, and we have there a known, or estimated, area and population, to use as a basis for calculation of proportions and comparison, and we are aiming at placing each mission in a larger whole and trying to see what part each takes in the performance of a great work which is world wide in its scope. ”

“ If we desire to know the influence of our medical and educational work upon the native Church we ought certainly to have a table which, for the schools at least, would show us what proportion of the pupils who passed through the schools became valuable members of the Church. But every one who has had any scholastic experience, and has tried to follow the after-history of his pupils, knows that that is not easy, even in external and material affairs, and when the inquiry is concerned with internal convictions and religious influence that difficulty is insuperable. ”

“ Since our ideas of missionary work are wrapped up with the establishment of mission stations and consequently with the purchase of land and buildings, since we rely almost wholly upon paid workers for the prosecution of the work, since we employ most expensive methods of propaganda, such as the establishment of great medical and educational institutions, since our societies at home are almost wholly absorbed in the effort to procure funds to pay for all these things, it is not surprising that money takes a supremely important position in our thought of all missionary work. ”

“ If we take the last table and, instead of considering the proportion of the communicants to the non-Christian population, consider the proportion of communicants to the Christian constituency, we gain a very different view. We gain then an idea of the character of the Christians. Instead of an idea of the size of the force at work we receive an impression of the quality of the force. ”

“ But if that is impossible, then each society must survey the whole district, and, what an immense amount of labour would be wasted in the preliminary survey, the physical toil of travelling over the country to see the villages and towns, which must be seen to be known, and must be known to reveal the secret of the task which the mission is founded to fulfil, that labour is known only to one who has undertaken such a task, and will soon be known to anyone who starts out conscientiously to survey any district. ”

“ The tables in this book are arranged apparently for the worker on the spot as well as for the intelligent supporter and director at home; why multiply tables and trouble the missionary with the sums of proportion? Why not ask the man there simply to give the necessary facts and then let the man at home work out for special purposes the various relations? The answer is simple: we ourselves have been asked to fill up long schedules of unrelated facts; and we know that the labour is intolerable. The supply of unrelated, meaningless facts dulls and wearies the brain. ”

“ In many areas two or more societies are at work and their conception of the qualifications for the name of Christian differ. In a survey each society is tempted to ignore the members of the other, and to reckon as Christians only those who fulfil the conditions which are applied by the one society. So certain Protestant societies ignore all Roman Catholics; but that for the reasons already stated is most misleading, for when persecution arises Protestants and Roman Catholics alike suffer for the Name of Christ. Whatever the members of another society may be, they are certainly not heathen ”

“ If a school is judged by a few exceptionally good scholars, it should also be judged by a few exceptionally bad ones. It is indeed of serious importance that the missionary value of some of our medical and educational, especially the educational, institutions should be carefully examined and tested by an appeal to indisputable facts. It is generally supposed that education in mission schools must necessarily produce a strong, enlightened, and zealous Christian community. ”