Theology Today - Vol 35, No. 1 - April 1978 - ARTICLE

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Apostles To The People
By Hugh T. Kerr

"The message of these expansive evangelists was simple and direct. Christian faith, they all agreed, whatever its personal rewards in terms of religious assurance, also promised education, health, and social progress to all sorts of deprived and oppressed peoples. In our less romantic age, we may smile at this simplistic creed, sugar-coated with token benefits, thinly hiding a political and economic policy of western imperialism…. But it would be futile to impugn the motives of these apostles to the people. Their record of astonishing achievements is available for all to examine."

AN epic chapter in modern Christian history is waiting to be assembled from the biographies of a dozen extraordinary pioneers of fifty to seventy-five years ago. From the turn of the century, 1900, to about 1925 and a little later, a steady succession of unusual emissaries provided spectacular Christian witness to untold numbers of people in many parts of the world.

We are not talking about that enormous cloud of witnesses, men and women, young and old, of every country and denomination, who girdled the globe about the same time as representatives of the great foreign missionary movement sponsored by so many churches. Their names, and their faithfulness and endurance, are written in the book of life. That, too, is a chapter that needs re-writing for our day.

We are thinking, rather, of a special group of about a dozen who were distinguished not only for their mass evangelism but more especially for what might be called their benevolent philanthropy. Here is a partial roll-call:

James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey (1875-1927)
General Evangeline Booth (1865-1939)
G. Sherwood Eddy (1871-1963)
Sir Wilfred Grenfell (1865-1940)
Sam Higginbottom (1874-1958)

Hugh T. Kerr is Professor of Systematic Theology, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY, with which he has been associated for 35 years. In his own way, he has also been " an apostle to the people" through his voluminous writings in THEOLOGY TODAY, other periodicals, and numerous books, which include Readings in Christian Thought (Abingdon) and a forthcoming volume on Protestantism from Barron's Educational Series, Inc.

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Sheldon Jackson (1834-1909)
E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973)
Toyohiko Kagawa (1888-1960)
Frank Laubach (1884-1970)
John R. Mott (1865-1955)
Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889-1933)
Robert E. Speer (1867-1947).

The message of these expansive evangelists was simple and direct. Christian faith, they all agreed, whatever its personal rewards in terms of religious assurance, also promised education, health, and social progress to all sorts of deprived and oppressed peoples. In our less romantic age, we may smile at this simplistic creed, sugar-coated with token benefits, thinly hiding a political and economic policy of western imperialism. Well, that may be part of the story, and the debunking of the foreign missionary enterprise has gone on apace in recent years. But it would be futile to impugn the motives of these apostles to the people. Their record of astonishing achievements is available for all to examine.

Though active just the day-before-yesterday, these extraordinary humanitarians are almost forgotten in our day. Often self-appointed and fiercely independent, these ambassadors to the poor, the oppressed, and the derelicts of society were untiring in their life-long witness that Christian faith uplifts, enlightens, heals, and empowers all who accept the message of Good News. Well-known in their own times, they should not be forgotten in our time, for they still stand as models of excellence especially in an age such as ours that belittles selfless service, mass evangelism, and ambitious programs of social betterment for marginal people.

What distinguishes this particular group from other mass evangelists of yesterday or today was their social and humanitarian conviction that Christian faith could make a real difference for multitudes of people in their quality of life. So they organized schools and colleges, they taught the illiterate to read and write, they provided health and medical facilities, they fed the undernourished, they combatted epidemic disease, they introduced new farming and agricultural techniques, they gave outcasts a caring community, and-most of all-they held out hope to the hopeless.

In many instances they were the only ones devising such programs. No one else was doing it, not government, not university education, not the free-thinkers or agnostics, not the humanists or artists, not the scientists or political theorists. The humanitarian movement of 1900-1925 was inspired by specific Christian principles, naive and guileless perhaps, but conceived and carried out on a grand scale.

Today our mass evangelists, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Rev. Ike, Sun Myung Moon, are mostly interested in preaching their brand of the faith, soliciting decisions and contributions from the churched and

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the unchurched. They are primarily concerned with personal religious experience, not social or humanitarian programs for the poor and the indigent of society. Some are interested in education and faith healing, and all would doubtless say they offered their hearers a chance for a better life.

But the evangelists of the first quarter of the twentieth century, the ones we're talking about, seemed to reverse the expected sequence. They didn't usually ask people to accept Jesus Christ so they could receive promised educational or medical dividends. They appeared to be genuinely interested in helping people who needed help. It is true they also preached the gospel, made converts, and based their social programs squarely on their Christian faith. But unlike Billy Graham, for example, who says he is so busy winning souls for Christ that he has no time or inclination for social witness, these earlier mass missionaries were humanitarians first and evangelists second. Or, they probably would have preferred to say, their understanding of evangelism included social witness whether anyone was converted or not.

The dozen names we have listed were not especially distinguished as theologians, though they were often engaged in controversy. They began no new religions, sects, or denominations; they wrote no new creeds; they did write books, lots of them, that were read far and wide, but their ideas and their doctrines were all more or less familiar and conventional. They weren't interested in theological methodology or biblical hermeneutics; they thought the Christian faith was intellectually respectable, that the Bible was an obviously inspired piece of ancient literature, and that those who troubled to take Jesus and his teachings seriously were in for the thrill of their lives.

Perhaps we are straining to make something special of this select list. But in retrospect, they seem today more like visionaries than missionaries. They dreamed their dreams on a worldwide screen, they often overrode ecclesiastical and administrative bureaucracy, creating their own ways of doing things, working with great groups of people and even whole populations, and they were in their own times individualists, independents, and what we could call today "loners."

Some were striking in appearance (Booth, Mott, Singh) and gifted intellectually (Eddy, Laubach, Speer). But not all were so obviously endowed (Kagawa was half-blind; Grenfell was known to his intimates as "Non-Sequitur" because he could scarcely string two coherent sentences together; Speer's voice was harsh and rasping). But as a group, these heralds were charismatic exemplars of faith in and hope for humanity.

The special breed has not, of course, died out completely. In our own recent times, the successors of this turn of century humanitarian can be spotted immediately in Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Pope John XXIII, Mother Teresa, and perhaps a few others. These, too, are remembered as charismatic persons, highly in-

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dependent, unafraid of criticism and controversy, dreaming grandiose schemes for human betterment, sublimating what personal faith and religion they may have had to these wider programs of mass education, health, and welfare.

III

Assuming that many today scarcely know the names, much less the achievements, of those on our list, suppose we venture a few profiles in Christian humanitarianism. Maybe we can learn something.

Aggrey of Africa

A small, wiry African, born in Anamabu, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast), Aggrey attended a Methodist mission school and then went on to Livingstone (!) College, Salisbury, North Carolina, sponsored by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He received his A.B. degree (with honors) in 1902 and later began doctoral studies at Columbia University (he passed his comprehensive exams but never finished his dissertation). He was unusually well versed in the Greek and Latin classics, and he sprinkled his sermons and speeches with numerous tales from ancient times.

Aggrey spent his relatively short life (52 years) travelling back and forth between America and Africa. Twice he served on the Phelps-Stokes Commission to study education in Africa (1920, 1924), and he combined his talents for oratory, preaching, and teaching in what he regarded as his Christian service on behalf of better race relations between white and black. Africa in Aggrey's time was just beginning to dream of something better than white domination and exploitation, and he thought of himself as providentially poised to act as mediator.

There is a pathos about Aggrey's life and career that can only remind us today of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were keenly intellectual, both were deeply committed Christians, both believed in non-violence, both gave their lives to further better understanding and cooperation between races, both were dreamers, and both were cut down too soon. Eloquent spokesmen for their own peoples, they were also widely criticized by militant blacks and apprehensive whites.

Aggrey's death came just when he was appointed to the administrative staff of Achimota College (Accra) which he helped to establish, and just when he returned to Columbia to complete his thesis. Yet with all the frustrations of being misunderstood, Aggrey's name was widely revered throughout his native land, which he called "Africa-my Africa." His picture hung in thousands of schools, and his wit and humor endeared him to multitudes of village folk.

Three Aggrey epigrams to remember: "You can catch more flies with molasses than you can with vinegar." "You can play a tune of sorts on the white keys, and you can play a tune of sorts on the black keys, but for harmony you must use both the black and the white." "I am anxious that Africa should be civilized, not westernized, and that

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the civilization should be Christian . . . . Only the best is good enough for Africa."

"Little Eva"

In 1865, William Booth moved from Nottingham to London where, with Catherine his remarkable wife, he established the Salvation Army. In the same year, on Christmas day, Evangeline Booth was born, the "Little Eva" (the name was borrowed from Uncle Tom's Cabin) who became an Army "Commander" and then the "General." Also in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who with his father and his brother was one of the famous Shakespearean actors of the day. Apparently, if you find a Booth, you will be in touch with dramatic action. There were good and bad Booths, but for our purpose let us select Evangeline.

Nurtured within the Army family circle of her striking and dominant father, her gentle but determined mother, and a half-dozen brothers and sisters, Little Eva soon learned the ways of street-corner evangelism. With her guitar or concertina, she sang the gospel songs, handed out copies of the War Cry, was one of the first women to ride a bicycle to work, and, dressed in shoddy, she appealed to and identified with the down-and-outer.

But the most effective era of her career, from 1896 to 1934, took place in Canada, Alaska, and especially in New York. This is exactly the time span for others on our select list of extraordinary humanitarian Christians.

Evangeline Booth was both an evangelist and an administrator-two vocations not often successfully combined. She could counsel with individuals and speak to enormous crowds. Her father was conspicuous everywhere he went by his patriarchal and prophetic appearance, with his long, pointed beard. Evangeline's own dramatic presence was enhanced by her red hair, the way she wore the uniform, and her vibrant voice (coached, we learn, by the brilliant film star, Nazimova).

A treasure from her London days, which she transported all over the world on her evangelistic missions, was the original, crude wooden table at which William Booth had made his first Christian commitment. It bore a plate, reading: "God shall have all there is of William Booth." It always made a poignant and convincing altar call.

As an administrator, Evangeline Booth pulled the United States Salvation Army staff together and initiated extensive developments in all the traditional welfare programs. The New York office soon became the central headquarters for the Army throughout the world. Statistically, the Army record is almost incredible-established in more than 70 countries, working in 170 languages, with 17,000 evangelistic centers, and over 3,000 hospitals, schools, camps, and welfare institutions of all kinds. No other religious or social organization anywhere in the world can touch its consistent record of helping the helpless without concern for creed, class, color, recompense, or reward.

During World War I, Evangeline organized the Army's much ap-

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preciated presence among the allied troops, and toward the end of her long career she was instrumental in persuading France to abandon the infamous Devil's Island penal colony, and it was under Salvation Army auspices that the thousands of hapless inmates of the "dry guillotine" were repatriated.

During all this time, about twenty-five years, the Salvation Army was often ridiculed, vilified, and made fun of-even by church people and denominational leaders. For many, not familiar with the serious work of the Army, their only information was derived from Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls and George Bernard Shaw's acidic Major Barbara.

Near the end of her active leadership, Evangeline Booth insisted that the administration of the Army be democratized. In this she withstood her older brother in London, General Bramwell Booth, but she had the considerable assistance of Gladstone in London and Rockefeller in New York. Her views prevailed; Bramwell fell ill and died; Little Eva, in 1934, was appointed "General" by the newly established High Council. Five years later she was "promoted to Glory."

Evangeline Booth could draw a crowd wherever she spoke. Once in a packed Madison Square Garden, a Vice-President of the United States said that the greatest man of the day was a woman! When asked why she didn't write her autobiography, she replied, "I won't write about myself, and that decides it." As her father before her had said, "I do things-I'm too busy to write about them."

What we have tried to do for Aggrey and the Booths, thumb-nail sketches at best, could be extended to include the others on our list of a dozen Christian humanitarians. But we must be content here with only a few identifying marks.

Sherwood Eddy of the "Y" and the Student Volunteer Movement circled the globe more than once, reported on revolutions in Russia and the Far East, announced himself as an "absolute pacifist," and toward the end of his long and eventful life was convinced, through psychic research, of personal immortality, so his last of thirty-six books was entitled You Will Survive After Death (1950).

Grenfell of Labrador, medical missionary and explorer, worked for more than forty years to bring some measure of comfort, health, and social order to the Eskimo and Indian peoples of a bleak and desolate land. He established hospitals, schools, child welfare centers, seaman's institutes, hospital ships, nursing stations, clothing distribution centers, co-operative lumber mills, a supply schooner. Knighted in 1927, he was an immensely popular exemplar of Christian humanitarianism.

Sam Higginbottom was an agricultural missionary or, less grandly, a farmer. He introduced revolutionary techniques into a country, India,

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that desperately needed more productive methods. As originator and moving spirit of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, Sam (and his wife, Ethel Cody, who wrote appreciatively of Indian women) became legendary figures and paragons of practical Christianity.

Sheldon Jackson comes somewhat before our quarter-century, but he can stand for all the others as a pathfinder, for that is what he was. Variously dubbed as "the St. Paul of America," the wild horseman of the Rockies," "the missionary with the flying coattails," "the bishop of all beyond," Jackson travelled more than a million miles in the American northwest and in Alaska. He established more than a hundred frontier churches, schools, and health centers. Among other things, he introduced the reindeer into Alaska by importing them from Russia, Norway, and Lapland. Short of stature and frail in health, he infuriated his denominational superiors by doing things his way. All agreed that he was Christ's fool in Seward's folly.

E. Stanley Jones was a missionary entrepreneur. From Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, he adapted the Ashram formula for Christian purposes and created in several north India centers what we would call Christian communes. His Round Table Conference extended the format to include non-Christians, and his later interest in the "Federated" church plan was another attempt at innovative dialogue. Jones' book, The Christ of the Indian Road (1925), was especially popular among high-caste and educated Indians, to whom Jones' ministry was mostly directed. Suspicious of institutional and westernized forms of Christianity, he insisted that Jesus was the guru, not the missionary, and that Indian Christians should carry over their native culture into their new faith and life. Later, Jones expanded his outreach to include social programs for the poor, such as mobile dispensary trucks, and he argued that Christianity was the only "answer" to communism. Elected a Methodist bishop during a return trip to America, he quickly resigned so he could continue his evangelistic work in India and elsewhere. A pacifist and an advocate of home-rule for India, Jones was often criticized by British government officials and American missionaries, but his influence on behalf of a native and indigenous Indian Christianity was incalculable.

Toyohiko Kagawa became a Christian at the age of fifteen when he prayed: "O God, make me like Jesus." In the years that followed, his prayers were answered, as he went about doing good, preaching to the poor, living for ten years with the slum derelicts in Kobe, Japan, and later establishing labor co-operatives, farmer unions, nurseries, and social welfare centers of all kinds. When a newspaper ran a competition for the ten greatest names in Japanese history, Kagawa was at the top, and the only Christian mentioned. Yet in Japan, he was not always honored because he tended to by-pass the institutional churches. When in English he spoke of "denominations," his listeners thought he said

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"damnations." He replied: "They are very much the same thing." He was, he said, not a Christian because be was interested in society's problems; he was, rather, a convinced socialist because he was a Christian.

Frank Laubach began his remarkable missionary career in the Philippine Islands, but within his lifetime he visited practically every country in the world, including Afghanistan (off-limits for Christians). His ruling passion was to teach the illiterate to read and write. "Each one teach one" became his trademark, and over the years he prepared more than two hundred literacy primers in as many languages. Author of many books, some on specifically religious subjects, two early titles are indicative of his astonishing contribution-The Silent Billion Speak (1913) and Teaching the World to Read (1917).

John R. Mott was a perennial Christian optimist. His eloquent speeches, to very large audiences everywhere, always included the refrain that never before in history has there been greater opportunity for the Christian cause. An elegant, handsome person with bristling brows, he could sway whole masses of people, especially among the younger generation, to evangelize the world in this generation. A born leader, he chose to remain a layman, and his special appeal was directed toward the Student Volunteer Movement and the World Student Christian Federation. The recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, he was at the very center of the ecumenical movement and guided the variegated missionary forces into the first World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh 1910) that later issued, through the first Oxford Faith and Order Conference into the World Council of Churches, of which he was an honorary President.

Sadhu Sundar Singh was born of a well-to-do family in the Punjab and reared in the Sikh religion. He had, like Paul, a sudden conversion and became an ardent Christian. He studied at various missionary schools but did not take to institutional Christianity. He began on his own to preach the gospel throughout India, and later on he travelled to many countries. Those who were deeply influenced by his witness were C. F. Andrews, Canon B. H. Streeter, Nathan Söderblom, and F.Heiler. Singh was a strikingly handsome person. He was an ascetic, a mystic, a prophet to his people. In 1929, in poor health, he set forth to visit Tibet, alone and on foot. He was never heard of again. The Sadhu (holy man) experienced trances, lived outdoors in extremes of weather, enjoyed affinity with wild animals, and lived what today would be called a life of "radical discipline." Several of his books were translated into forty or more languages and sold in the hundreds of thousands throughout the world.

Robert E. Speer served for nearly fifty years as an ecclesiastical Secretary of State. He headed the Presbyterian Board of Foreign

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Missions, and through his writing, recruiting, public speaking, and administrative leadership he exalted the wider mission of the church throughout the world. He visited every continent and became familiar with both the missionary and native Christian churches. Against the wishes of many at home and abroad, he urged that native churches become autonomous and independent of foreign control. Increasingly, he saw the missionary possibilities of the ecumenical movement, and he constantly worked for greater cooperative programs. Drawn into the controversy over the uniqueness of Christianity and other religions, the Layman's Missionary Report of 1931 which suggested a more receptive attitude toward the "non-Christian" religions, he insisted on "the finality of Jesus Christ." A layman who was at home in the pulpit, Speer was a ramrod figure of a man who gave dignity, vision, and imagination to the office of church administrator.

To recall this fairly recent history is to stir nostalgic feelings and, perhaps, to engender remorse that things today in the worldwide mission of the church are so different, so unexciting, and so unimaginative.

The opportunities for mass evangelism at home or elsewhere are not what they once were, and we should of course live in our own time rather than in some supposedly golden age of the past. Yet some lessons can be learned, and some carry-over influences from our dozen Christian humanitarians could be as creative and effective for our day as for theirs. Such as?

Well, for one thing, a humane concern for the poor and needy-stemming from Christian faith but not tied too closely to conversions or decision cards. A global vision could raise our sights from current parochial and nationalist perspectives. Imaginative planning and action based on individual conviction and initiative would certainly be fitting for a generation of young people who talk so much about doing your own thing and being your own person.

Most of all, we can learn from this recent past that personal Christian experience, instead of being an end in itself, can become the motivation for daring commitment to human need. After all, we ought to know from one who spoke with authority that this is the essence of the matter-to love God and neighbor.