Our Debt To Missions

Walking With God by Costen J. Harrell

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tiding!" Isaiah 52: 7.

A Christian layman, and a man of considerable ability, was the speaker, and the writer was a listener. "I do not believe in foreign missions," he said with manifest emphasis. "Every nation has its own religion, suited to its particular disposition and traditions, it is folly to try and convert foreigners to our faith. Confucianism is the religion of China, sprung out of Chinese soil and suited to the Chinese people. Christianity is the religion of the Anglo-Saxon and agreeable to our type of mind. Let us keep our religion and let other people keep theirs." Many another person who has not been so outspoken has persuaded himself that the Christian faith is our peculiar possession and that we are under no obligation to give it to the rest of the world.
But really, is Christianity an Anglo-Saxon religion? It did not begin with us, for Christ was neither an American nor an Englishman nor a European. He was born on the other side of the world, the son of a woman of alien blood. He lived amid scenes that are foreign to us and spoke a language that is unintelligible to us. He died for our sins on a hill many thousands of miles from American shores. Christianity is not an Anglo-Saxon religion: speaking after the manner of the flesh, it is an Asiatic religion. Our fathers were foreigners to Christ and his disciples, and they would never have heard the gospel of the Nazarene had not the missionaries of the Church crossed mountains and sea and brought to them the glad tidings of salvation.
When Christ lived in Galilee the Angles and Saxons and Britons-our fathers-were veriest heathen and among the most backward people on the earth. The first volume of Hume's history of England should prove an effective antidote to our racial pride. He says, "No idolatrous worship ever attained such ascendence over mankind as that practiced by the Gauls and Britons." Our Fathers worshiped Woden, the god of victory, and Thor the god of thunder. All the days of the week are named for heathen gods whom our fathers worshiped and should be a daily reminder of our heathen ancestry. With all our mania for family trees, no intelligent person finds any satisfaction in running his family tree back of the time when Christian missionaries came to our fathers with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Portraits of those half-naked, painted savages would be no adornment to our handsomely appointed living rooms and no matter of pride to us their children.
Things have been different with the Anglo-Saxon since the advent of missionaries. In the sixth century Augustine came to England, a foreign missionary to our fathers. He started a mission at Canterbury, which was the beginning of the Canterbury Cathedral. After a life of sacrificing toil, he was buried there, and over his tomb in the cathedral one may read to this day his epitaph, "Here lies the Lord Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury, who reduced this nation from the worship of idols to the faith of Christ." Boniface went to Germany, Columbia to Scotland, and Patrick to Ireland. The light of the gospel shone in the darkness of Britain and Germany, and we emerged. We have been out of heathenism for about forty generations only, and "a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it passed and as a watch in the night."


"From depths of night to plains of light, O praise His name, he lifted us."

In so far as we are saved people, we are sinners and barbarians saved by grace. The greatest apologetic for Christian missions on earth is the Anglo-Saxon people. What Christ has done for us he can do for all men. It was a long and weary way from Jerusalem to Canterbury, and the foreign missionary was the connecting link between our ancestral home and the cross outside Jerusalem's gate. Not only for love of man and in response to our Lord's commission should we be a missionary people, but out of sheer gratitude and in recognition of our dept to missions.