8. The Relation of the Missionary to the People Among Whom He Lives.
Having entered upon his work and settled among the people of his choice, he must seek to realize the best possible relation to them. This relationship will be a varied one.
He must be a leader of the Christian community. In India, today, there is special need for missionaries who are born leaders. The people of that land are defective in the power of initiative; but they are most tractable and docile. They love to follow a bold and a wise leader of men. And the missionary, from the very necessity of his position, should be able to direct and guide the Christian community into ways of holiness and of Christian activity. He is to be a leader of leaders. He should marshal the mission agents connected with him in such a way as to lead the native Church into highest usefulness and most earnest endeavour for the salvation of souls.
He should be strong as an organizer and administrator. In missions the word organization is becoming the keyword of the situation. There is no danger of over-organization, so long as the organization is endowed with life and does not degenerate into machinery. The best organized activities of today are the most powerful and the most useful. And the missionary will find his highest powers for organization taxed to the utmost in his missionary work. And as an administrator there will be made many claims upon him daily. I know of few qualifications that are more essential to the highest success on the mission field than conspicuous ability to organize and wisdom to administer the affairs of a mission. Missionaries frequently fail at this point and need therefore to strengthen themselves in this particular.
A missionary should be as much the conserver of the good as a destroyer of the evil which he finds among the people. Much of that which he will see in India, for instance, will at first, and perhaps for a long time, seem strange and outlandish to him; but let him not decide that it is therefore evil. The life of the Orient is built on different lines from that of the Occident. Many things in common life, in domestic economy and in social customs will, and must, be different there from what they are here. Their civilization, though different from ours, has a consistency as a whole; and we cannot easily eliminate certain parts and substitute for them those of our own civilization without dislocating the whole. Therefore, it is often safer and better to conserve what seems to us the lesser good of their civilization than to introduce what seems the greater good of our own.