Mission Problems in Japan

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The Organization Of The Christian Church, The First Great Step In The Accomplishment Of Our Purpose. In our first chapter we saw that the grand object of missions is not merely to evangelize a country, but to organize within it a permanent agency for keeping the truth before the people, an...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The Organization Of The Christian Church, The First Great Step In The Accomplishment Of Our Purpose. In our first chapter we saw that the grand object of missions is not merely to evangelize a country, but to organize within it a permanent agency for keeping the truth before the people, an agency so well established that we can presently withdraw, in the confident expectation that future generations no less than the present will have the blessings of the gospel. There can be no doubt as to which form such a permanent agency should assume. The Christian church is the divinely ordained organization for the preservation and propagation of the gospel. To her are committed the oracles of God, to her is given the task of preaching the gospel of a risen Lord to the ends of the earth. She is the pillar and ground of the faith, for without the organization of the church that truth would be lost to the world in a single generation. The church, in her essential life, is one, as her task is one; but if we hold the conception of the church that has always prevailed among the Protestant, and especially among the Reformed believers, it is evident that churches established in two very distant countries or among two diverse races can do their work best when independent of one another, and that such independence is not in conflict with their essential one-ness.For this reason the Reformed Church in America felt it no offense to be distinct from the Reformed Church in the Netherlands, and even the Episcopal bodies in England and in the United States consider it undesirable to be one in outward form. There will be no question, then, that in lands like China and Japan the church ought, as soon as she has gained sufficient strength, to be organized on a basis of absolute i...