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Show - 27 - Iu close connection -with this is the importance of more definite work in the training of children of the church- With nearly a thousand children enrolled in the schools of the station, and with a still larger additional number in some measure connected with the church, a field is presented for Christian teaching and training, the results of which work it will be hard indeed to foresee. A special Chinese Secretary for Children's Work is a hope in the immediate future. In connection with the effort to increase the efficiency of the outstation Churches moie attention must be given to the Sunday School work. Heretofore much of our country Sunday Bible School work has been marked by the twin defects, lack of purposeful organization, and of a designed curriculum. Here, too, it is proposed that another year should see a trained Sunday School specialist as travelling supervisor of the Sunday Schools of the field. All this, too, points to a larger use of laymen in the church than ever before. This must be encouraged wherever there are latent in the community, gifts that can be used in the service of the Church. The quiet work of the world in all ages and in every land has been done by the masses of common men, and if China, certainly if our own field, is ever to be evangelized, it must be thru this same means. It is necessary that we foreigners should have not only sympathy and faith to work with imperfect instruments, but sufficient knowledge of men to enable us to te'ect the right agents and assign them to the work for which they are fitted. Honor to Whom Honor is Due. In closing the year's report we must give honor to whom honor is due, our fellow-laborers in the Chinese Church. At home their names may mean but little, but out here they stand for men and women who have borne the burden and heat of the day, earnest, zealous, efficient, faithful, and successful in the highest sense of the word. They are the ones and not us foreigners who must bear the brunt of the battle thru the year in the midst of depressing heathenism, and with little outside succor or inspiration. Pastors at home may have many books to read, the encouragement, sympathy, and comfort of intercourse -with rich minds and richer hearts, and derive much of inspiration from other sources. All this is wanting for this body of men to whom most of all credit must be given for whatever is accomplished in our station's life and activity. Representing as they do our ablest preachers and teachers and the humblest country evangelist and colporteur; laboring in places varying from the busy central station with its unending demands, to the lonely frontier outpost where they stand alone against a seething mass of heathenism; and ranging in age from the youth barely out of his teens to grey-haired veterans, remnants of the first line of converts, they deserve our heartiest confidence, sympathy, and praise. For them and their spiritual uplift we should plan better things in the years to come, to bring them to an even broader vision, and to an ever deepening devotion and consecration to the cause of bringing this district, in all phases of its life and activity under the rule of that Kingdom whose insignia are Righteousness and Truth and Love. |
