Forty Years in South China: The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.Fagg, John Gerardus
Religion
Forty Years in South China: The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.
Fagg, John Gerardus
Missions -- China; Talmage, John Van Nest, 1819-1892
With these preliminary statements we proceed to notice the suggestions made
and questions propounded. "To extend to the native churches on mission
ground the lines of separation which exist among Presbyterian bodies" in
home lands is acknowledged to be a great evil. To avoid this evil and to
"bring all the native Presbyterians," in the same locality, "into one
organization," two plans are suggested to us.
The first plan suggested (perhaps we should say mentioned for it is not
advocated), we take to be that the missionaries become not only members of
the ecclesiastical judicatories formed on mission ground, but also amenable
to those judicatories in the same way, and in every respect, as their
native members, their ecclesiastical relation to their home churches being
entirely severed. This plan ignores the actual relation of missionaries to
their home churches, as spoken of above. Surely the home churches cannot
afford this.
Perhaps we should notice another plan sometimes acted on, but not mentioned
in the letters we have now received. It is that the missionaries become
members of the Mission Church Judicatories as above; but that these
Judicatories be organized as parts of the home churches, so that the
missionaries will still be under the jurisdiction of the home churches
through the subjection of the Mission Judicatories to the higher at home.
This plan can only work during the infancy of the mission churches, while
the Mission Church Judicatories are still essentially foreign in their
constituents. Soon the jurisdiction will be very imperfect. This
imperfection will increase as fast as the mission churches increase.
Moreover this plan will extend to the native churches the evil deprecated
above.
The second plan suggested we take to be that the missionaries, while they
remain the agents of the home churches, should retain their relation
respectively to their home churches, and have only an advisory relation to
the Presbytery on mission ground. This is greatly to be preferred to the
first plan suggested. It corresponds to the relation of missionaries to
their respective home churches. It takes into consideration also, but does
not fully correspond to the relation of the missionaries to the churches on
mission ground, at least does not fully correspond to the relation of the
missionaries to the native churches at Amoy. Our actual relation to these
churches seems to us to demand that as yet we take part with the native
pastors in their government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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