which the whole
force works together towards one end.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE NATIVE CHURCH.

In the Introduction we pointed out that the end for which the work
surveyed is undertaken ought to govern the survey of the work. Now we
are constantly told that the end for which the station is founded is the
establishment of a Christian Church in the district so strongly that if
the station with its foreign staff disappeared, the Church would remain
and bring up each generation in the Christian Faith.

This proposal sets before us a real end for the mission station. It
suggests a point at which the station will have done its work; the
mission would then have no more place in those parts. The station has
thus an end, not only in the sense that it has an object at which it
aims, but a point at which it ceases. But this end is not simply a point
in the far distant future; it is a condition, or state of the Church in
the district, into which it must be growing. Then the growth of the
native Church is more important than the growth of the mission, and all
things should be directed primarily to that end, so that as the native
Church waxed the mission should wane, and thus the end should be reached
naturally and easily and not by a catastrophe. If that is the end, then
the survey of the station and its district cannot fail to take the form
of an inquiry how far progress in this direction has been made.

Since our ideas of missionary work are wrapped up with the establishment
of mission stations and consequently with the purchase of land and
buildings, since we rely almost wholly upon paid workers for the
prosecution of the work, since we employ most expensive methods of
propaganda, such as the establishment of great medical and educational
institutions, since our societies at home are almost wholly absorbed in
the effort to procure funds to pay for all these things, it is not
surprising that money takes a supremely important position in our
thought of all missionary work. Consequently, when we think of the
growth of the native Church in power to carry on the work which we have
begun we naturally think first of self-support.

Self-support is now one of the most common missionary catchwords. We
hear it on every platform at home; we hear it in the mouths of large
numbers of our converts abroad. There exist in the mission field large
numbers of what are called "self-supporting churches". Our missionaries
often set this self-suppor