Askov American. [volume] (Askov, Pine County, Minn.) 1914-current, 1940-11-14
Church and Home
BY REV. M. MIKKELSEN

Foreign missions face difficult prob
lens and many missionaries are in
grave peril. Support from the Home
Mission societies has ceased to arrive.
Other channels must be opened if
this good work is to continue. Some
missionaries have already been forced
TO return and many more may even
tually have to do so because of lack
of financial support.
Success or failure has very little
bearing in such cases where men
of many years of service on the mis-
sion field are recalled. There is of
course always the danger of becom-
ing too successful; and we are likely
to test the working ability of out
standing spiritual leaders in terms
of success rather than in failure. Some
of the greatest Christian missionaries
have been failures; Jesus was a fail
ure; Livingstone was, and m n y
others 1 sincerely hope that we may
all become failures like them for
whom service meant everything and
self nothing.
In honor of heroic missionary may
! be permitted to quote The Christian
Century;
lone hundred years ago next Sum-
day a young Scot left his humble
home in Blantyre bound for London
and South Africa. Behind him were
years at the weaver's loom, years
spent porting over college textbooks
at night, years during which by al
most superhuman toll he had won
entrance to the medical profession.
Ahead were to be years in missionary
service to hitherto untouched tribes
in Africa, years in exploration of
what had been in, alas, too many
ways the Ozark Continent" years in
exhausting struggle against the slave
trade, and at last grave in the CEN
ter aisle of Westminster Abbey-and
immortal fame. 1t is to be hoped that
all the churches will devote time,
and thought, to this centenary of
David Livingstone's departure for
Africa. And it might be well, if they
do, to consider both what made Liv-
y
made him bad missionary. For it
is well to recall that, from the view
point of the missionary societies of his
own time, Livingstone was bad
missionary. That there was some
thing out of the ordinary about him,
something which inspired the I'M
precedented acclaim that greeted him
on the infrequent occasions when he
returned to England, they well knew.
But they also knew that he was
opinionated, intractable, given to
making unsettling proposals, unwil-
ling to accommodate himself to meth
DDS and views which had the weight
of mission board tradition behind
them. The result, as is too often
forgotten today, was that while Liv-
ingstone went to Africa in 1910 as an
accredited representative of a great
Protestant missionary society," that
connection had been severed by 1857
and he worked from then until his
death in 1878 as an independent. Yet
that he was great missionary, per-
haps the greatest modern missionary,
no one today will dispute. And the
qualities which made him great-his
courage, his doggedness, his patience,
his Standardization with the people
of Africa, his utter devotion to the
eradication of the slave trade-are
there in the record for all to see. II
was a sound popular instinct which
acclaimed him even though the or
too Independent spirit to get along
with. Christianity's front line scouts
are usually irregulars."