Jesus was not content merely to open wide the door to all who were seeking fellowship and inspiration to fuller living. From the first he began to train his disciples that they might go forth on a mission of healing, preaching, and teaching. His social plan included an aggressive, organized missionary propaganda. He not only himself sought the lost, but also trained and taught his followers to do the same. This fact explains not only the tremendous drawing, but also the kinetic power of early Christianity.
To-day every individual is consciously or unconsciously longing for a fraternal community in which he can find sympathy, good-will, and an opportunity to serve his fellow-men. Capital and industry are groping for a common basis of justice and co-operation, where they can forget their present destructive feuds and hatreds and join in conserving their mutual interests and in discharging their obligations to society. All the nations of the earth are eager to perfect an agreement which will eliminate the horrible wastage of hate and war and enable them to dwell together as one great family. The Christian Church is also seeking a way in which it may adequately meet the crying needs of the individual and of society.
Is it not possible that Jesus' social plan is the true and only way so to adjust the individual to his environment that he will find that which he is seeking? Is it not possible that Jesus' plan provides the only practical way to eliminate the disastrous hatreds and wastage of modern industry, and to bring capital and labor into effective co-operation? Is it not possible that his idea of the fraternal community is the only satisfactory solution of our international problems? Is it not true that his simple social plan represents the historic commission of the Christian Church, and that the Church's present divisions and most of its complex machinery are only impedimenta? Is it not possible that a whole-hearted effort to carry through his social plan in this plastic twentieth century might unite not only his nominal followers, but also the many who are not now reckoned as members of his fold? Upon the answers that the leaders of this generation make to these fundamental questions depends the future of our civilization. To the leaders in our Christian institutions of learning we look to-day for affirmative answers.