Under the leadership of the Reverend Ira E. Gillet, educational and industrial missionary of the Methodist Church in Mozambique, Portuguese East Africa, a recently acquired farm of 2,000 acres is being developed as a farm-school for the training of young men. Twenty-acre plots are being assigned to young Christian Africans and their families. They will reside on them and farm according to modern methods taught by Mr. Gillet and his associates. Most of the graduates will move to farms of their own when trained.
This plan seems to fit into the native life pattern of the Africans. What they eat comes from the land, not the store. The African is naturally shiftless and yet when the missionary introduced classes in vocations and agriculture, the natives became enthusiastic. The agriculture classes are the most enthusiastic on the mission.
And how is it with our own missions? In a recent letter from Howard J. Welch, who for some years was dean of Madison College and is now in mission service in West Africa, he says:” Tell the students who look toward the mission field to get an all-round education. They will certainly need it. The educational system here has been entirely too theoretical and lacking in practicability. I have been holding studies with our staff on Christian education. As a result they are getting interested in agriculture and a work program for students.
"The school prospectus was ready for the press when I arrived. However, I managed to insert a paragraph about self-help for students who do not have fees, and also one specifying that all students must participate in the work program."
This letter brings to mind a message sent to Adventists some years ago by God's messenger:
"While attending school, the youth should have an opportunity for learning the use of tools. Under the guidance of experienced workmen, carpenters who are apt to teach, patient, and kind, the students themselves should erect buildings on the school grounds and make needed improvements, thus by practical lessons learning how to build economically. . . . Culture on all these points will make our youth useful in carrying the truth to foreign countries. . . . Missionaries will be much more influential among the people if they are able to teach the inexperienced how to labor according to the best methods."—Testimonies, vol. 6, p. 176.
"Study in agricultural lines should be the A, B, and C of the education given in our schools. This is the very first work that should be entered upon."—Ibid., p. 179.
"Every youth, on leaving school, should have acquired a knowledge of some trade or occupation by which, if need be, he may earn a livelihood."—Education, p. 218.
While traveling to the mission field some years ago, I read a book by a missionary who said that the first thing the missionary should do for the natives was to teach the church in the mission field to become self-sustaining. I gave considerable study to that question while there, and came to the conclusion that faithfully carrying out the instruction given us regarding our educational program would accomplish that very thing.
"Those who go forth from our schools to engage in mission work will have need of an experience in the cultivation of the soil and in other lines of manual labor. They should receive a training that will fit them to take hold of any line of work in the fields to which they shall be called. No work will be more effectual than that done by those who, having obtained an education in practical life, go forth prepared to instruct as they have been instructed."—Fundamentals of Christian Education, p. 512.
In Africa there is any amount of land available for the natives to cultivate. But because they need only enough to sustain life, which is usually not more than an acre, much of the land is not cultivated, and the natives have no means of sustaining a missionary program. When we began to teach better methods of agriculture and how to build better homes, they became very much interested. If the teachers who go from the mission stations to conduct schools and carry on Christian help work in the villages were to teach and encourage each family to plant five or ten acres of crops, what a blessing it would be to the natives! It would lift them to a higher plane of living, and at the same time provide them with funds to help sustain and expand the mission work. Prof. Ross J. Griffith, of Butler University, has said:
"Nine tenths of the population in mission lands live in rural areas. About two tenths of the persons who give their lives to the missionary enterprise work in rural fields. Of eighteen thousand missionaries on the field, not more than fifty have technical preparation for rural work."
If we had known what was coming in China and had carried on a practical training program before the present situation developed, what a blessing it would be now. The church there would be prepared to sustain itself when cut off from supplies from America, and the work could be continued on a firm basis.
In the Time magazine of November 15, 1948, there was an article giving a report of a foreign missions conference. In this article one man said: "A new type of missionary will have to be developed in China." "Those who know a trade will be at a great advantage." "It may be necessary for the Christian church in a given area to sever its ties with its mother churches in all lands and become strictly independent, . . . [preparing] church leadership to be, if necessary, on an entirely self-supporting basis."
Who knows when similar conditions may develop in other lands? If, during the last war, America had been forced to forbid mission funds' leaving the country, as was the case in so many of the European countries, what would our missionaries have done? And where would our mission work be?
"The time is soon coming when God's people, because of persecution, will be scattered in many countries. Those who have received an all-round education will have a great advantage wherever they are. The usefulness learned on the school farm is the very education that is most essential for those who go out as missionaries to many foreign fields."—An Appeal for the Madison School.
