Pilgrim Soldier

This morning I dipped into the archives of the Journal of Aggressive Christianity and read through William Booth’s The Mission to the Future address of 1889. In it he outlines the things that will be needed in the future for the mission to continue and grow.

In his 7th of 10 points he says the following:

VII The Mission of the Future while retaining all that is essential to godliness, will strive to adapt itself to the peculiar habits, conditions and circumstances for the different races it seeks to conquer for Christ.

Strange that this common-sense method should ever have been neglected or need defending. No wonder there have been such miserable and mortifying and soul-ruining failures, seeing that it has been so openly and boastfully set at naught. This is a principle that is acted upon every hour of our existence, in almost every transaction of every-day life. We continually become all things to all men, yielding to the eccentricities, ignorance and infirmities of those about us, in order to prevent any unnecessary hurtfulness to their feelings, or to accomplish something that we many consider of importance. This priniciple will be carried out in the Mission of the future. We shall learn to stoop in the non-essential matters in order to conquer in the greater things that concern and lead to salvation.

You go to lead and guide your less favoured brethren to the Christ who has bought them with His Blood. Then go as a brother, and do not go at all unless you do. I say to my Officer who is going to Holland, “Can you be a Dutchman?” To the man who is going to Zululand, “Can you be a Zulu?” To the one going to India, “Can you be an Indian? If you cannot, you must not go at all.” This principle has only to be acted out to prove an enormous success. The Missionary Societies have only to go forward, and, with the opposite, setting it at naught, as in the past, in order to perpetuate the wretched failures over which so many thoughtful and sensible Christians are mourning to-day.

Now obviously at this time Booth was talking about overseas missionaries, but today there are those in the church who are perpetuating a system of doing things that is exactly the same as it was in Booth’s day. We accept that overseas work must evolve to meet the needs of the people we are trying to reach, yet ignore the changes that have taken place in our own society when trying to reach people with the Gospel.