Missionary school

“ With our eye fixed steadily on our missionary work, enough who cannot attain to the Christian ministry will become teachers, and they, catching the spirit of the institution, will become missionary teachers. It is surprising to see how this spirit has taken possession of our pupils. There is scarcely one who goes into the country to teach who does not organize his Sabbath-school as promptly as his day-school, and pursue it with even more interest. ”

“ This fact is a trumpet call to us to press the work of the Association in its schools and colleges and churches with renewed vigor and devotion.
And we would especially emphasize the necessity of preserving the unity of the educational and religious work of the Association to this end. Every teacher must be a missionary as truly as every preacher. And this unity of purpose and effort must be felt. Church and school, as in the past, must continue to stand together in the minds and labors of the people that there may be no exaltation of education at the expense of religion. ”

“ It is obvious that as missionary societies lay weight on one or the other of these objects, they will support a different kind of school. If their object is the first, they will seek to educate the orphan and the waif, and the school and the orphanage will be, as they are in the Roman Catholic body, intimately joined together. If the object is to edify the Christian body and to provide it with a suitable pastor, the missionary body will erect primary schools for Christian children and theological and normal schools to complete their school system. ”

“ A limited theological class of Indian young men may be trained in the vernacular at any purely missionary school, supported exclusively by missionary societies, the object being to prepare them for the ministry, whose subsequent work shall be confined to preaching unless they are employed as teachers in remote settlements, where English schools are inaccessible. ”

“ Every colored Sunday-school in the neighborhood has a large number of its teachers from the Normal school. We consider this missionary work of the students most important in keeping up their interest in their own people, and in developing the Christ-like spirit of work for others.
Our school for Bible study, though cramped for room, is exerting an important influence on this community. Almost all the colored pastors of the place have received instruction in its classes. All the white pastors of the place, with one exception, take part in the instruction of their colored brethren. ”

“ I love more and more the freedom and fraternity I find, and I believe in the church, which makes so much of schools, and has educated so many of my people.”
Said another: “The church must go with the school, because education alone only sharpens the mind for greater mischief. In the very nature of things, every school teacher ought to be a true Christian, to exert a Christ-like influence in the school, to encourage pupils to attend church and Sunday-school. The teacher’s power is greater over scholars here than in the North.” ”

“ Great is the opportunity of the rich and enlightened churches. The helpfulness of our schools to my people and to the country, is beyond calculation. Our missionary schools are like so many lighthouses along this dark belt of the Union. Their light is being reflected by thousands of colored youth who without these schools would have grown up in gross ignorance. ”

“ Give them schools and pure and enlightened churches and they will awake into new life as fast as any people ever did. They will show in years what missionary work can usually show only in decades. In Williamsburg Academy, Ky., nearly every boy in the higher classes is expecting to prepare for the ministry, and that school is only a little over half a dozen years old and is the first one opened in our mountain work. ”

“ Missionaries were appointed to preach, and to teach day-schools, and assistants, both male and female, were sent out; from 3,000 to 5,000 pupils were taught yearly, until about 1872, when the secular or day-school system was given up, and efforts concentrated on permanent or higher institutions, some of which had been planted in 1865. ”

“ None of our great benevolent enterprises will suffer in their hands.
While there was great seriousness, there was also evident hopefulness, and an unshaken confidence in the power of the gospel to remove all the difficulties in the race problem, the Indian and the Chinese questions, and in the treatment of the Mountain Whites. While a unit in sentiment as to the importance of the school, the convention seemed to be equally a unit as to the importance of making it a missionary school, and of keeping it in closest union with the church. ”

“ The Missionary must be supported by Christian owners; they must labour to improve the servants at home; having regular schools for the children and meetings for the instruction of adults. They should encourage their people to attend public worship, especially should they send the children to Sabbath school; otherwise such schools, let the missionary or teacher do what he may, will decline in all ordinary cases. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Look in upon a single mission station. A group of three buildings attracts our attention as a bit of New England transplanted, a church, a good-sized school-house, and between the two a neat white painted cottage. The missionaries number four, of whom three are ladies from the North. Over 200 children and youth come daily to the school, where these missionary teachers instruct in branches usual in primary to grammar grades, and also in Christian morals and manners, with the Bible for [18] a text-book, seeking earnestly to develop heart, mind and body to honor and righteousness. ”

“ Besides these, we have in the South thirty-seven which we class as [pg 308] common schools. Eight of these are graded, with two or three teachers each. Nearly all are parochial schools. The teachers are in both the day schools and the Sunday-schools, and are not only school teachers, but church missionaries. They train the young of our congregations for greater usefulness, encourage many of the most promising to go to higher institutions, teach the parents better ideas of home life, and lead all ages to a more intelligent and spiritual worship. ”

“ Such a school as that in Andersonville, Ga., is the initiative of a church mission. School education is of little advantage unless it is linked with moral training; and there is no moral training comparable with that of a pure and true Christian church. Our mission school teachers call for and need the re-enforcement of gospel preaching on the Lord's day, and the faithful work of a pastor during the week. A great deal of hard work in the school would be frittered away and lost without the distinctive church work which must supplement, and confirm it. ”

“ We opened a school tentatively in one of these places, as we had one missionary there already, and I visited the other place. This is what I found: A teacher independent of any society, [12] and consequently knowing only a small part of the South, had opened a school. She had labored very faithfully, but very unwisely, putting money and years of hard work into a field which, from its very conditions, could not be largely successful. She had a poor building for teachers' home, a rough school-house with no desks, a narrow strip of land, and an enrollment of about eighty pupils. ”

“ The bell for school rings at 2 o’clock, and the teachers go round to the houses where they fear the children do not care to come, and bring [214] them to the school. Before bringing them in to the Sunday-school, a shirt is given to each scholar, as many of them wear no garments at home. This is made of English cloth and supplied by the missionaries; when they return from school, it is laid aside to be worn the next time the school assembles. The instruction is mostly oral—the teacher asking the pupils questions and then requiring them to repeat the answer until they are able to say it. ”

“ The compulsory attendance of all the children from 6 to 18 years of age in school, mostly in boarding-schools, has closed the mission day-school, and the native worker has become preacher and pastor and no longer a school teacher. Ten years ago the work of our native workers could be closely planned by the white missionary, but to-day he must plan his own work largely to fit ever changing conditions, and learn to make each day count most for Christ. ”

“ It is from country places like these that we wish to bring scholars into the school. The truth is that the young people in these communities are too ignorant to have any desire for anything different from what they now have. Here is an almost limitless home missionary field, to be worked by the graduates of our schools. ”

“ From the University between 100 and 150 students, most of whom are members of the church, go out to teach school during vacation. These teachers organize Sunday-schools and temperance societies. Five of the students have already gone as missionaries to Africa; others are preparing to go, having consecrated themselves to the work of African missions. Many of the students, members of the church, are now engaged in the work of preaching the Gospel in the churches of the South; others are preparing to preach. ”

“ We have no such opportunity for reaching those under our educational care as is offered by a boarding-school. The parents of most of our pupils are connected with some church, and the children themselves with Sunday-schools. The kind of instruction they receive is one of the necessities of our continuance. The growing intelligence of the colored preachers, and the attractiveness of the large congregations which gather about them, make our beginning less attractive to the young, who otherwise might prefer our place of worship. ”

“ Never before have we known our pupils so susceptible to all good influences and so ready to receive instruction and guidance from their teachers.
During the year past, the school has experienced a most precious revival, over forty of our young people professing conversion. In our closing prayer meeting for the year, it was found that there were but about a dozen students of the Normal department who had not accepted the Saviour. ”

“ It is no ordinary education which is sought, but a special and peculiar training for a high and holy missionary work.
The demand for teachers from this school is continually greater than the supply. In the last catalogue were the names of 214 pupils, and of these, more than 150 are known to have engaged in teaching during the year. In the previous year, out of 240, more than 175 were at work in the same way. And this number includes nearly every person in school whose age and attainments gave him even the smallest fitness for the work. ”

“ Lesson 9 The Sunday-school and Missions
96. "It is the whole business of the church, and it is the business of the whole church, to carry the whole Gospel to the whole world as speedily as possible." Missionary work is not one of the features of church activity; it is the one all-important work of every church, every Sunday-school, every Christian. Without intelligent missionary interest there can be little spiritual power. Every Sunday-school should be, in fact, a missionary organization, and set itself to definite, far-reaching missionary tasks. ”

“ The long experience of this Association through this half century of specialized work does fit it, as the report has said, to give an almost commanding opinion in regard to the method of the work to be pursued among these very distinct classes. From the field as well as from the office, and from the experience of those longest at work, we learn that the school finds its ultimate aim only in the church; that, as a Christian agency, we are to work with the school only as a means to the end of building up that body of Christ on the face of the earth which is known by the name of his church. ”

“ Their desire to push forward their mission work will only be increased by the rude log churches, benches that tip uneasily, shuttered holes in the walls, and dearth of Sunday-school papers, books and Bibles. The needs of their people are becoming more and more plain to them as they observe the methods and efforts used for themselves at this school, and the example set causes them to use some efforts for the benefit of others. They draw their pupils with them on their return here. The pestilence of last summer kept from us an overflow of students whom our next term will see filling our rooms. ”

“ They think of the work of educational missionaries as necessarily bound up with schools and institutions. A teacher without a school, or outside a school, seems to them rather like a gunner without a gun. ”

“ Over thirty schools have been supplied with acceptable teachers from our schools.” We have here an illustration of what is taking place more or less in connection with all our schools. We are supplying teachers for the public schools of the South. Reports that tell only of what our missionaries are doing among those whom they personally reach, fall far short of that larger work, which, through their scholars, they are doing all over the South. Think of the difference between a school taught by a Christian teacher and one under the care of a godless teacher. ”

“ In starting a school in a Mussulman country the object of the missionary must always be to get the establishment regarded as a settled fact, consequently certain things which would otherwise be unimportant become matters of extreme moment. For instance, if anything should happen to the teaching staff, the school must be kept running, even if the pupils cannot under the circumstances make great progress. At one time I had to keep the school going when I was myself laid up in a sick room, and had no assistant capable of teaching much more than the primers. ”