Every mission seeks, as its ever-present ambition, to attain unto independence from all outside financial aid and a thorough self-support of its own institutions. We await the day, and believe in its no distant coming, when a large number of mission churches will entirely support their own institutions. Indeed there are now many churches, on mission ground, that have grown into self-dependence and that maintain, at their own expense, all those normal forms of work that are connected with Christian activity.
The question is frequently asked,—how far shall missions place before them, as the supreme and immediate aim, the self-support of their separate churches? Among missions and missionaries there are two tendencies in this matter. One class, represented by the Church Missionary Society Mission in Tinnevelly, place all moneys received from their mission churches into one fund, and from this fund they pay the salaries of the pastors and catechists, so far as possible. Bishop Sargent told me that he did not think any church should be allowed to directly support its own pastor lest they consider that thereby they had a right to exercise authority over him! That mission, therefore, and for other reasons also, has relegated the direct question of the self-support of each church into the limbo of the undesirable. In the American Madura Mission, on the other hand, the responsibility is urged upon every individual church to support its own spiritual instructor; and all rules and methods are directed towards emphasizing and enforcing this. Self-support thus becomes, in that mission, its ever-present cry and the growing ambition of its every church and congregation. And the progress of the Church and of the mission is largely measured by this standard.
The self-support of a mission, as such, is a question which is not looked upon with the same urgency, or with the same idea of importance by all missions, or by all missionaries. One party, for instance, would make self-support the supreme end; everything else must be subordinated to it. Nothing should be undertaken, they say, which is not within the means and the desire of the people to support. For instance, they maintain that the salary of all mission agents and the support of mission institutions must be pecuniarily within the means of the Orient and within the limits of its ambitions. I ought to say that no mission, to my knowledge, carries out this principle in its integrity, although there are some missionaries who urge it and proclaim it at all times.