How Hudson Taylor Got Recruits for China

by Daniel Bacon

It’s easy to get sentimental when writing about great missionaries of the past. Although Hudson Taylor was a product of Victorian perspectives, his life and ministry speak to a wide number of our concerns.

It’s easy to get sentimental when writing about great missionaries of the past. Although Hudson Taylor was a product of Victorian perspectives, his life and ministry speak to a wide number of our concerns.

One of the major lessons coming from Taylor’s ministry has to do with motivating and mobilizing people for missions. Over the centuries our biggest problem has been not so much getting people to listen to the gospel as mobilizing believers to proclaim it. Yet Hudson Taylor was able to recruit, directly or indirectly, some 800 missionaries for the China Inland Mission, and as many others for other societies. The question naturally arises: What were the human factors that made him so successful? This is an analysis of some of those factors, together with suggestions for our age.

At an early stage in the CIM., Hudson Taylor learned a crucial principle about recruitment. As he records in his autobiography, A Retrospect: "In the study of that Divine Word I learned that to obtain successful laborers, not elaborate appeals for help, but first earnest prayer to God to thrust forth laborers, and second, the deepening of the spiritual life of the church, so that men should be unable to stay at home were what was needed."

During Taylor’s leadership, the CIM made appeals for new workers. But each appeal grew out of a strong burden and a confidence that God would provide the laborers. The appeals were not so much a cry for missionaries as a plea for prayer that God would raise them up. Hudson Taylor recognized that unless new workers are God-sent they hinder rather than help. He saw that prayer must precede plans, programs, and promotion. As Taylor put it, "Let us go to the right quarter for our missionaries. Not to the plough or to the anvil, not to the university or the forum, but to the great Head of the Church." Hudson Taylor trusted God to select and to send the right men and women.

The call for one hundred in 1887 is a good example of Taylor’s priority of prayer. He testified later how God led and worked:

It is not lost time to wait upon God. May I refer to a small gathering of about a dozen men (the first China Council of the CIM) in which I was permitted to take part some years ago, in November, 1886. We in the China Inland Mission were feeling greatly the need of Divine guidance in the matter of organization in the field and in the matter of reinforcement, and we came together before our Conference to spend eight days in united waiting upon God-four alternate days being days of fasting as well as prayer. This was November 1886 when we gathered together; we were led to pray for one hundred missionaries to be sent out by our English board in the year 1887 …. What was the result? God sent us offers of service from over 600 men and women . . . and it proved at the end of the year that exactly one hundred had gone.

The amazing response of volunteers stemmed primarily from the fact that Taylor and his colleagues prayed first and recruited second. This is a vital lesson we need to learn afresh.

Hudson Taylor prayed for workers, but he also presented the needs and opportunities of China in an intelligent, compelling way. He knew that facts were just as important as prayer in motivating people.

For us to see how Taylor depicted China is extremely useful. "China’s Millions," along with special recruitment publications like "China’s Spiritual Need and Claims," demonstrate his creative skills. Given the virtual ignorance of China among Westerners, Taylor had to draw constant parallels with Europe. He used bar graphs, diagrams, and statistical charts. Taylor gave vivid accounts of missionary work, and graphic sayings, such as, "One million per month die without Christ in China." Special articles for children and poetry were included in the mission’s magazine.

Marshall Broomhall recalls how Taylor communicated creatively:

He never wearied of arraying facts before the Christian public, and of getting to close quarters with his hearers or readers in their application. He knew how to appeal to the imagination, how to speak to the conscience, and how to move the heart also. He himself was so dominated by creative convictions that he could make them contagious.

Hudson Taylor was convinced that "missionary intelligence is essential to missionary effort, and the more definite the information the better." He seldom spoke without visual aids such as maps or charts. He crammed his biblical sermons with anecdotes and stories.

Today we have a vast array of things to use in recruitment. We must guarantee not only that they are used creatively, but also accurately and honestly. Facts alone, however, are not enough. Facts must be coupled with biblical principles and related in dependence upon God.

Another important lesson we can learn from Hudson Taylor’s success in recruitment is that his major focus was on the task, not on the mission. Taylor himself said, "We do not need to say much about the CIM. Let people see God working, let God be glorified, let believers be made holier, happier, brought nearer to Him, and they will not need to be asked to help."

For Taylor the critical issue was not the survival or reputation of the mission agency, but rather the needs and opportunities in China. He constantly stressed the missionary task. He exerted every effort to portray a million people dying each month in China without Christ.

He turned the attention of the Christian public to China itself and secondarily to the CIM. Tayor knew that job one was reaching China, regardless of who did it.

We need this perspective, because competition is dangerous. We must remind ourselves, that if the task is of God, then it is his responsibility to provide the workers and the resources to do it. As we maintain a servant spirit and see the agency as a means to an end, not an end in itself, then God will sustain our cause without our resorting to gimmicks and manipulation.

Hudson Taylor spoke eloquently, but his appeal was due to more than his skill with words. It was in large measure due to his self-disclosure and honesty, which enabled people to indentify with him. Broomhall described this quality the following way.

But a large measure of his power and appeal lay, not in the facts alone, but in his own impressive personality. He had a way, not given to every man, of baring his own heart. He could speak with freedom of the most intimate experiences, of his trials and sorrows, his bereavements and anxieties, his times of want and times of deliverance, of his spiritual failures and spiritual triumphs in Christ. He took his hearers by the heart, he admitted his readers into his most sacred confidences, and men were drawn to him, and knit to him in the deepest things. This is apparent on almost every page of A Retrospect, and on many a page of "China’s Millions" when he was editor.

When Hudson Taylor spoke with students and potential candidates for missionary service, he not only challenged them with needs and opportunities, he also helped them to see the enablement God could provide. Taylor spoke often about his own growth, failure, and development. This lent credibility to his message and motivated others to step out in faith.

Taylor’s candid revelations of his inner spiritual struggles also made him extremely approachable. His authenticity in itself was an attraction for new workers. As another speaker at a missions convention put it, referring to Taylor, "We know how we were all touched this morning by words of Dr. Taylor of the China Inland Mission. Why? Simply because he quickened our spiritual lives."

A grand vision had captured Hudson Taylor, and his passion to see the vision become reality was evident in all he wrote and spoke. This passion generated tremendous energy and vitality and attracted thousands. His own excitement excited others and brought them to commitment.

His earnestness was contagious. A strong sense of responsibility drove him to obey God and recruit others. See this in the following excerpt from a message Taylor gave in Detroit at the Second Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement in 1894:

And the Gospel must be preached to these people in a very short time, for they are passing away. Every day, every day; oh, how they sweep over! Your great cataract Niagara seems to me to teach us a lesson and to afford us an example. How the water pours over and over ceaselessly by day and by night, over the great cataract! There is a great Niagara of souls passing into the dark in China. Every day, every week, every month they are passing away-a million a month in China are dying without God. And what a wonderful difference there is in dying with God, dying with God as Saviour, and dying without God.

The implications for missionary recruitment are obvious. Facts about need are not enough to motivate people. Even facts spoken with enthusiasm are insufficient. Rather, effective recruitment must come from one’s own deep, genuine commitment to the biblical task, which in turn produces urgency and passion to enlist others.

Hudson Taylor never saw the missionary "call" as either mystical or complicated. He communicated the call of God to missions in moving yet practical ways. This accounted, in part, for his success as a recruiter.

Taylor never diminished what it costs to be a missionary. He emphasized the responsibility of every believer to seriously consider the call to foreign service. He felt that many more could go than were actually going. Because the commands of the Great Commission were obvious, the real question for each believer to weigh was whether or not his general circumstances, health, and abilities would allow him to serve in missions. Taylor minimized the need for extensive academic preparation, so many more applicants responded to the CIM than to most other mission societies of the day. Taylor challenged any believer of reasonable health and qualifications to justify why he or she should not go, in light of Scripture and the unmet needs in the world.

Taylor saw no problem with using one’s mind bathed in prayer to find out the if and where of a missionary call. The place of greatest need probably should be the place of service. At the same time, he did not demean the need for inner assurance from God and adequate preparation. For Taylor, the overwhelming need demanded a response from Christ’s people, and no one was exempt from that responsibility.

In emphasizing the need to go into all the world regardless of obstacles, Taylor tended to downplay the role of the local church to select and send missionaries. He placed a strong emphasis on the personal call and the mission agencies; responsibility to screen candidates, without giving adequate regard to the sending church. Perhaps in light of his earlier experience with indifference to China’s claims, his stress on an individual call is understandable.

In view of Taylor’s success in recruitment, his practical approach to the missionary call has lessons for us. He never reduced God’s call to a pet formula, nor did he persuade on the basis of need alone. The commands of Scripture, the needs of the world, and the general circumstances of the believer were all significant factors to be prayerfully considered.

Taylor’s burning convictions and his cry for the lost are the greatest challenge to the recruiter today:

Oh, think not so much of China’s needs and claims as of Christ’s needs and claims. When on earth His voice was heard. That voice is silent. He wants your voice to go. When on earth His eyes wept over the perishing. Those eyes weep no more; He wants your eyes to weep over the perishing. Christ has need of you, dear brothers, Christ has need of you, dear sisters. To many of you here it may be His call, His claim, His duty will require you to work at home, and it is very blessed to work at home if He wants you to. But there are many others, I am quite sure, who, if they are abiding in Christ, will not abide in the United States. The Lord has need of lights in the darkness. And Oh, how great the darkness is!

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