it; and in the eyes of the young believers the Christian life
becomes simply a matter of doing what the missionary says.

That is not the way that Paul built churches. Great and dynamic
character that he was, he so taught and led his groups of young
Christians that when after a few months or a year or two he left them
they were able to carry on by themselves, and even to grow. He did not
put up church buildings for them, nor schools, nor give them "grants."
He brought them to the place where they could function as living
churches, in direct union with the Head, and not centered upon
himself. His efforts were directed to building up churches that would
be able to stand alone, because they stood in the strength of the One
who upheld Paul.

Why is it so easy for us missionaries to think that we know how to do
the work of the Lord better than any mission field convert, especially
if that one has been led to the Lord by us? Doing the Lord's work is
not fundamentally a matter of knowledge, training, or even experience.
It may be true that I have had years of Bible training, and the little
old woman with whom I am going out visiting has never been to any sort
of school a day in her life; that I have traveled around the world,
and she has never been thirty miles from the place where she was born;
that I have heard the Gospel and studied the Bible all my life, and
she has known it for only a few short years. I was born again
twenty-five or thirty years ago; she has been the Lord's own for three
or four years. Suppose we go to call on someone who is ill or in
trouble. I get out a poster, and carefully explain the Gospel. The
woman we are visiting listens to me with her mouth open; and after
twenty minutes of as clear and simple preaching as I am capable of,
when I am just getting to my climax, she lays her hand on my sleeve
and asks earnestly, "Did you make this dress yourself?"

My heart sinks to my boots. Is that what she has been thinking about
all this time? Is that why she fixed her eyes on me so intently?
What's the use anyway?

Then the old lady who is with me starts in. _She_ can't even tell
clearly the bare outlines of the life of our Saviour; but she turns to
the woman, one whose life and thoughts she knows (wasn't she just like
her before she was saved?), and says, "Look at me! I used to have
this trouble and that trouble and the other trouble, and then I came
to Jesus, and asked Him to forgive my sins. He did it a