It is easy to say that one man was right and the other was wrong. But how many of us would not have followed in the footsteps of Mr. Beaver if we had not been warned? And how many of us missionaries today, even though warned, are not still in danger of making ourselves the little center around which the mission station revolves?
"It's all very well to say that the Christians should take the responsibility from the very beginning," we think; "but _here_ it is impossible. These people are too poor! And they are too ignorant! No, they certainly would do everything wrong if I let them take the lead!" And so we go on telling everyone what he ought to do, and seeing that he does 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?"