The Relation of Street Preaching to the Perennial Revival
There are two great commissions in the New Testament. One of these is recorded in Matthew 28: 19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The other is Luke 14: 21: “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.” The first looks to the evangelization of the world — the object for which Christ died; the second, to the winning of the city — the storm -center of civilization, and the stronghold of Satan.
One cannot properly understand the Great Commission of Matthew 28: 19, nor truly interpret Luke 14: 21, without being impressed with the fact that the evangelization of the city and bearing witness to the world involve open-air work. The Salvation Army has set the churches a needed example. A few years ago their outdoor work was considered an innovation, and, by not a few, an insult to the conservative methods of the more conservative churches. How strange that men so often forget to confront the religious novelty with the question, “What did Jesus do?” and by this comparison reach a conclusion. Sometimes our Saviour spake in the synagogue; more often in the field; but most often in the street. The perennial revival must in some measure depend upon a return to the Master’s methods. Have we ever stopped to analyze the philosophy of Christ’s conduct when he chooses the street for pulpit and auditors? The study of the parable in Luke 14: 15-24 reveals at once the wisdom and the grace of street work.
The Misery of the Streets
Taking up its suggestions in order, we are at once and deeply impressed with the misery of the streets. “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.”
The poor are in the streets of the city. We may not understand it, but it is a fact that the poorest of the poor prefer city life. It is probable that that indigence which precludes the success of many people is often associated with an abnormal sociability. Dr. P. S. Henson used to tell the story of an Irish woman in Chicago who had been in the slums for years and was always a pestiferous dependent. By and by some of the people, to whom she had made herself a nuisance, gave her some money and shipped her several miles into the country. A few weeks later she was found in her old haunts, and when asked why she was willing to quit the open country with its beautiful landscape, its invigorating air, its comparative plenty, and go back to her place of squalor, foul air, and starvation, she answered: “Sure, and I got tired of seeing only stumps; I’d rather look at people.” That this social nature accounts for the fact that great sections of cities become poverty centers we do not affirm; but that they are such centers no one questions.
You may travel the war-cursed South, and stop with the colored people and the poor whites, and see many evidences of poverty that are painful, but for sheer suffering we know nothing that equals the squalor of city life. In a Northern city, famed for its wealth and culture, not twelve blocks from the City Hall, and not one block from splendid residences, we found a man utterly deserted, lying on a pallet of straw in the corner of an otherwise empty house, dying of starvation and disease, without sympathy or assistance. That day the truth of this text was burned into our heart, “The poor are in the streets of the city.” A man, therefore, who takes a dry-goods box and converts it into a pulpit and speaks to the passing crowds gets a portion, at least, of the class of people to whom Christ devoted so much of his ministry.
The maimed are in the streets of the city. This term comprehends individuals of every social station and class. The maimed man may be rich or poor, ignorant or highly educated, stooped with the weight of age, or buoyant with the blood of youth. But the great majority of the maimed are in the streets of the city, and this statement remains true whether you speak of the physical or moral man. The car-wheel that mercilessly grinds beneath its weight a little child and lames him for life is no respecter of station or of people; and the great enemy of men’s bodies, minds, and souls is equally indifferent to the same. He would drag a Solomon from his position of purity and his place of prominence to evil conduct and disgraceful end as willingly as he would deceive and destroy a plain, unlettered, and poor Judas Iscariot. He would maim forever the life of the sweetest sister with just as much relish as he would lead into iniquity the most vicious and criminally inclined man.
Ballington Booth, who is an authority on such subjects, declares that the Salvation Army finds in the slums women who once moved in refined circles and exhibited unusual natural gifts. In one’s study of sociology he is often saddened to learn that not a few of the wrecks of men found among the submerged were born and bred in homes of opulence and refinement. The university often makes its contributions to the crowd who sleep on mission floors, and sometimes royalty is found in the common pile of human wreckage. When they were exhuming Pompeii they dug up a slab, and cleaning the dirt from the face discovered what seemed to be the features of a man. Carefully they cleared away every accretion from the stone, and lo, the face of one of the old kings appeared. But it was sadly marred, for when the cold slab was in plastic state a dog had walked across it, and every footstep had either mangled or obliterated some part of the noble face. One of the sad sights of the street is that of the marred men and women — women and men who have upon them the marks of the beast, marks that have defaced their kingliness and obliterated the features of royalty. When, therefore, one finds in the open-air a gospel forum he finds the multitude which includes the men and women of direst need.
The halt and the blind are also in the streets. We do not speak so much of those who have lost a limb, nor yet of those who must be led about by the hands of others; these are only a few of the halt and the blind. The men who were once successful in professions, who in business were once swifter than their competitors, whose accomplishments seemed only an earnest of coming honor, but who have met with adversity, and through money losses, or moral losses, or both, have come to limp and to lag behind in the race of life — the disheartened man, the defeated man — these make up the halt; and the streets are full of them.
It is no wonder that Christ wept over Jerusalem. The anguish that escaped his lips as he looked on Jerusalem is felt by every Christian who deeply studies his own city. Our acquaintance may not be so large, we may not have entered so fully into the secret of suffering hearts, our sympathies may be regarded as comparatively shallow; yet who is not afraid to sit down and think of his acquaintances? Think of the men who have failed in business and lost their wealth; the men who have failed in their professions and taken forty-second rank when they had hoped to hold first; of the men who dream great projects but are never able to bring them to pass; think of the men who have been thrown out of employment, or else are compelled to accept positions which do not bring a competence. Aye these are the things that make us afraid. Just as a few years since, we dreaded to read about the famine in India; just as we preferred not to look upon the pictures of the suffering, starving natives of that country; and as now we shudder at the reports of war-stricken lands; so the average man shuts his eyes to the scenes of the city in which he lives.
There are too many of our fellow creatures who, like Jacob, when the sun rose upon him at Peniel, are halting upon the thigh. Yes, and there are many who, like Bartimaeus, are among the blind. They have lost their way, they are groping in the dark, they have found no hand to lead them out of danger; or worse still, they have felt no fear of the sin which they commit, nor of the Adversary whom they serve. Such is the street of the city. The Christian church has too long covered its eyes from the vision. If we continue we may impose upon ourselves irremediable blindness. They tell that in the days of Rome a man who had been condemned by the law escaped. In order to disguise himself he put a patch over one eye and kept it there for twelve years. Thinking then that the danger of recognition had passed, he removed the patch. The sight of the eye was gone! Under this enforced shielding it had died. God forbid that the church which wears the name of Jesus Christ should shut her vision from painful scenes until her spiritual sight is destroyed!
It means something when our Christ utters the command, “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city.” The commission is just as incumbent as that of evangelizing the world. It is a question indeed whether we shall go on gospelizing the public or continue to speak only to the small fraction that we can coax within the walls of the church house. We find this statement in the Journal of the grand John Wesley: “I preached near the hospital to twice the people we should have had at the house. What a marvel that the devil does not like the field preaching! Neither do I! I like a commodious room, a soft cushion, a handsome pulpit. But where is my zeal if I do not trample all these under foot in order to, save one more soul?”
The Mission to the Streets
The very misery of the streets explains Christ’s command, and our commission. The Lord of this parable is none other than Jesus himself; and the servants are none other than those of us who have named his name. Through us, if ever at all, he must mitigate the misery of the streets.
The first invitations to this feast are to equals and intimates. That is at once natural and right. No true foreign missionary spirit exists in a man who is not concerned for the salvation of his nation; no real disposition to save America is to be found with him who forgets his own State; there is no evangelist true to the State who forgets his own city. The city missionary who neglects the unsaved members of his own house is a hypocrite. The public takes no stock in the woman who presides with grace at a foreign missionary circle, but whose home influence does not help her husband heavenward, or favorably affect her unregenerate children. God forbid that we should speak aught to decrease the interest in the heathen world; its very smallness is one of the sins of the church. God forbid that we should utter a word to detract from the motto “America for Christ “; our contributions for home missions ought to be increased many fold. But God forbid that we should forget that the Christian’s first duty is to the man next to him. Andrew was a sample saint! “He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias; and he brought him to Jesus.” Philip did not forget his fast friend Nathanael. Too much of our religion consists in what we call going to “divine service,” but what is as a matter of fact “going to human rest.” We go to easy pews, and listen to a comfortable sermon. Wilbur Crafts reports a man in Maine who complained, “It is this working between meals that is killing me “; but if our churches die it will be for the opposite reason. Their very lives depend upon their working between meals, and the work is at hand.
The first mission of every man of us is to his own — the members of his own house — or of his circle of social friends. When Jesus healed the Gadarene he said, “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.” We must be rid of the notion that one has to enter the sanctuary and ascend a pulpit before he can preach the gospel. The private ministry of the gospel is the sine qua non of the perennial revival.
This mission is not to stop with one’s own, it must extend to the needy. In the parable the first invitation was to friends, but the second invitation was to the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind — in a word, to the needy.
It is useless to define “the needy.” Living in a brownstone front is no sign that a man’s heart is not hungry. If a man is a foreigner, and poor, tinctured with anarchistic tendencies, that is no proof that he is without an abiding sense of lack in his life. One of the great problems of the present time — a pressing problem, a problem that must be rightly solved, or the nations suffer — is this Christian social problem of meeting, not the wants of men, but their needs — needs of body, needs of mind, needs of soul. The keenest, clearest thinkers of our age, such men as combine at once successful business ability with a sympathetic heart, are not satisfied with the present attitude or past accomplishments of the churches of Jesus Christ. One of these wrote to a minister of the gospel: “ I have no quarrel with the church, but I have no relish for the praise or worship which ends with itself. It seems to me that the function of Christianity is to make the earthly conditions better.” Louis Albert Banks says: “We discuss with vigorous eloquence ‘How to Reach the Masses ’ and kindred topics, but that divine hungering and thirsting after souls; that sublime passion for souls which mastered Philip and sent him climbing into the chariot of the eunuch; that drove Peter from the housetop of Simon the tanner to the house of Cornelius; which made Paul and Silas and Barnabas flames of living fire, so that before the days of steam their own enthusiasm burned their way through nearly all the known world, has died out of these respectable and conservative garrisons of righteousness.” The average reader can determine for himself whether Banks is right or not. Some of us have reached the point where every charge against present-day profession pushes us back to personal examination of motive and of method in reaching our fellow men; and we have come to feel that a confession of evident weakness, and an attempt to right them, is far better than countercharges, or recrimination.
The needy should move us just as the halt and the blind move us, and whenever and wherever we see a man in need, in bodily need, in mental need, in spiritual need, suffering from debasement of the flesh, from false philosophies, from heart hunger, then Christ’s commission should so far command us, and so far include our needy brother as to cause us to attempt to give him “the gospel of the Son of God.” In that gospel men see their bodies to be the temples of the Holy Ghost, their minds to be the instruments of the Spirit, and their souls to be the subject of infinite love and eternal growth. Let us go into the streets and seek them, and speak to them saving truth.
This commission is still more far-reaching; it includes the neglected. When the servant came back from the streets and lanes with as many of the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind as would come he reported, “And yet there is room.” “The Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in.” The expression, “the highways and hedges,” is significant. There are the people that live off to one side of better society. They are the social outcasts. Have you not noticed that the commission to these was the most urgent one? There was a kind invitation given to the social equals, a more pressing one to the people in need, but the most insistent invitation was reserved for the neglected. The reason for this is not far to seek. Jesus Christ was the great sociologist of the ages. If it be true that “never man spake like this man,” it is still more true that never man thought as he thought. He went as deeply into all sociological questions as Deity itself could go, and his prescriptions for them will prove, at last, the all-wise and adequate ones. It is right to legislate on questions of labor and capital; it is right to talk arbitration; it is right to effect compulsory education, but let the Christian never forget that the solution of the difficulties arising out of ignorance, out of prejudices, and out of oppression, is not SO much with congresses as in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Just so long as New York City goes on with a population larger than Detroit, in which there are practically no Protestant churches; just so long as the Thirteenth Ward of Boston, with its thousands of souls, has scarce a Protestant church, while the wealthier Back Bay Ward witnesses their multiplication; just so long as upper Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, is crowded with sacred cathedrals, and the sanctuaries are moving away from the ever-increasing center; just so long as the city of Chicago retains a “black hole” of three hundred thousand in which only weaker missions work, the churches of Jesus Christ must be regarded as neglecting their Master’s commission. These centers permeate the atmosphere with the skepticism which they breed. They produce anarchists who take as much pleasure in destruction of the church as they could find in the overthrow of the State.
When, some years ago, three of the most prominent churches of Chicago, located on the very edge of its deserted, neglected section, were burned within three weeks, the very suspicion of incendiarism emphasized the fact that they might be reaping a destruction for which more guilty sister churches had sown. No army ever beat a more shameful retreat than that which has characterized the so-called Army of the Cross, as presented in the Protestant churches of America, who have moved from glutted centers into sparsely settled sections where was the wake of wealth. We maintain that a properly equipped building, a vigorous preaching of the gospel will call a crowd to the very section of the city where theaters flourish seven nights in the week and saloons hold great companies twenty out of every twenty-four hours. But if there be some vacant pews inside the sanctuary, then carry your pulpit outside, and almost any kind of preaching, with the aid of organ and singers, can collect an audience many times larger than that which commonly rustles its silks in the suburban church.
The Message to the Streets
Every follower of the Nazarene is favored in the message which has been put into his mouth. It is his high privilege to call men to a feast. There are few more attractive terms than “feast.” Go to a Southern barbecue, and watch the people when the master of ceremonies announces, “Dinner is ready.” There is a rushing response. In cultivated Boston we saw the representatives of one of the most honored denominations, on their way to dine, so crowd Mechanics’ Hall as to endanger the more feeble people who were attempting to press their way to a plate. But no feast of body is comparable to this which Christ has spread. The man who goes out to proclaim it will always find in the streets some who are hungry for it, and who are also sensible of their starving condition. It is a mistake to suppose that the crowds are rejecting the gospel. On the contrary, the churches are neglecing the crowds. There are not many men who hear the gospel with any regularity and reject it. There are thousands and tens of thousands in every city who never hear it. We have erected our commodious building, employed an eloquent preacher, and hired a competent or incompetent sexton and suppose that with this our whole duty is discharged. When the house is not filled we blame the folks outside, and defend our speech by calling attention to the preparation we have made for them. But what has that to do with the Great Commission? The words of Jesus were never directed to the unconverted, calling them to the sanctuary; they were addressed to disciples, sending them into the streets and into the world. It was a blessed epoch for the church when the members at Jerusalem were scattered abroad and went everywhere preaching the word. It will be a more blessed epoch if ever the professed followers of the Nazarene scatter themselves on the same mission.
What churches could accomplish if their members were consecrated is evident in what has already come to pass. There is no other institution which compares with the church in calling together crowds who come not for social pastime, nor because compelled, but of their own will. In the gospel God is giving his best, and many so understand it. It is, therefore, all the more incumbent on the churches to spread that proclamation. How often the coming of some famous man calls unchurched people to the sanctuary; and how often also some of these same people are caught by the gospel and their lives yielded to God. The popularity of the speaker may account for their hearing the gospel, but the power of the gospel alone accounts for their salvation. Why should the less famous disciple leave the unregenerate populace to such a precarious event as the possible coming of some popular preacher? Why should he not make more sure for these the word of witness, by watching, even while he walks the streets, for an opportunity to tell the good news of redemption? Some millenniums ago Moses uttered a wish which finds repetition in the heart of every man who has been put into the ministry by God’s Spirit: “Would God that the Lord’s people were prophets, every one.”
Do we shrink from the sacrifice of street preaching? Is our pride opposed to such procedure? Then how much we need to sit again at the feet of the great Master, until he has taught us to follow him in his daily walks, until he has shown us how to work, and in our hours of rest to recline upon his bosom until his very spirit has permeated us and made sacrifice a privilege!
If, for any reason, we feel utterly incompetent to undertake this commission to the streets, what about the means with which God has blessed us, and the offerings by which we could send to that same surging crowd a substitute? After the battle of Petersburg, a church in Philadelphia received word that two or three thousand men were wounded and bleeding and were without sufficient attention. Doctor Talmage, addressing the people, said:” I will not make any appeal. There are two or three thousand men bleeding to death at Petersburg. Pass the plate! “ That day women stripped the rings from their fingers and the jewels from their necks, and cast them in, that the wounded might have attendants and the dying be nursed back to life again.
The Christian man who studies the streets will rightly interpret the spirit of Jesus, who, when he looked upon the multitude, was filled with compassion for them. With his Saviour he will see that the poor are there, the maimed, the halt, the blind; yea, there are the wounded, the bleeding, the dying. The cushioned pew may be a fit place to pray for a perennial revival, but the man who prays in the sanctuary and declines, or fails, to seek the souls in his home, in his office, in the shop, and in the streets has prayed in vain.