Notes: Are the Christian Missions worth their Cost?

“Missions Overseas, in 1920, estimated that in 1919 the large sum of £2,5000,000 was contributed to foreign missions by only a portion of the public, since this did not include contributions to Roman Catholic missions, the Salvation Army, the Austra­lian and the American missions.

With regard to the latter alone, Dr E.C. Lobenstein, of the China Continuation Committee, calculated that in 1915 the missionary societies of the United States of America and Canada contributed $18,000,000 (gold) for foreign evangelisation, this not including grants to medical missions or educational colleges.

Last year the Church Missionary Society pleaded for an income of £700,000, which was afterwards reduced to £600,000 by drastic “cuts.” At the same time the Wesleyan Missionary Society was asking for £300,000, and it has been estimated that the total so contri­buted by Great Britain and Ireland is about £4,000,000 per annum.

The exact figures may be reduced by industrial depression in some years, or swollen by heavy legacies in others, but the total is so gigantic that it is time that some impartial authority dis­covered what it is producing.

No converts are being made, we are told, among Moslems [Muslims], and very few, if any, among Buddhists. With isolated exception, no converts are made among the educated classes of China, Japan, and India. In South Africa, after a hundred years of intense and extensive missionary work, there are only 1,500,000 of real — and nominal — Christians among the many millions of coloured people, and according to the last census, this million and a half is divided among nearly thirty sects. In Nigeria, again, after seventy-five years of missionary work, there, are only 4,000,000 nominal Christians out of a native population of 16,500,000.”