The Crusade

“We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye have glory, but we have dishonor.”

— 1 Corinthians 4:10, ASV

A New Name

In 1919 the Heart of Africa Mission took a new name. It became the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade, usually shortened to WEC. The change was made at home in England, where Priscilla Studd ran the mission from Highland Road, with the help of Gilbert Barclay, a clergyman who had married the Studds’ daughter Dorothy and who became the mission’s Home Overseer that year. The Congo work kept its old name as the first field of the new body, and later fields took titles of their own in the same pattern.

The name said what Studd had believed since his voyage to the Sudan in 1910: that his task was not one corner of Africa but the whole unevangelised world. The word “Crusade,” which would later be dropped because of what it meant to Muslims and to many others, was chosen in the spirit of The Chocolate Soldier. Studd thought of the mission as an army at war, and he wanted its members to think of themselves as soldiers under orders. In later decades, recognising how the word was heard by others, the mission changed its name again, to Worldwide Evangelisation for Christ, and it is now known as WEC International.

New Fields

In the early 1920s the mission began to send workers beyond the Congo. The first new field was in the Amazon basin of Brazil, entered in the early 1920s under the name of the Heart of Amazonia Mission; by the time of Studd’s death it had about sixteen missionaries, working among three different peoples. Over the next few years, according to the mission’s own history, workers were also sent to Arabia and India. These ventures were small and often struggled, but they were the beginning of what would become one of the larger interdenominational missions of the twentieth century.

Studd took a fierce interest in all of it from Ibambi. He wrote long letters, appeals and articles, which Priscilla and the home staff printed and circulated. He prayed for each new field and pressed for more recruits. He believed that if Christians would only obey Christ’s command, the world could be evangelised within a generation, and he had little patience with anyone who thought that unrealistic.

The Language of War

Studd’s writing in these years grew steadily more vehement. He had always liked to put things in the most startling way he could. Now he used the language of the battlefield, of the sports field and sometimes of the barrack room to shake complacent Christians. He wrote of heroism, of sacrifice, of soldiers who would die at their posts rather than retreat. He mocked comfortable churchgoers and cautious committees. He was capable of real humour and tenderness, but in print he was usually at full volume.

For many young people his words were a trumpet call. They read his tracts and letters and offered themselves to the mission, often for the hardest and loneliest posts. Some of them did great things. For others, the call to heroism became a weight they could not carry. The history of the mission in these years is full of departures, and it is not hard to see why some who went out expecting to live as Studd lived found that they could not.

What the Crusade Got Right

Before turning to the darker side of these years, it is fair to say what Studd’s vision achieved, because it was a great deal.

He insisted, at a time when most missionary societies were consolidating the work they already had, that the first priority was the people who had never heard. That conviction, which he took from Paul, was not original to him, but he lived it so vividly that it shaped a generation. Many later missionary movements that speak of “unreached peoples” stand, whether they know it or not, in his tradition.

He refused to let money, education or social class decide who could serve. His mission accepted people whom other societies turned away, and many of them served with great distinction. It gave a large place to women, as the China Inland Mission had done, and some of the most effective workers in its history were women.

He insisted that the churches founded by the mission should support and send out their own evangelists, rather than depending on foreign money. That principle, harsh as it sometimes was in practice, helped the Congolese church to stand on its own feet long before independence.

And he kept before Christians, in an age of growing comfort, the uncomfortable truth that following Christ costs something. “Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33, ASV). Studd believed that promise and acted on it. Whatever his faults, he made it impossible for those who knew him to pretend that Jesus had said something easier.

D.C.D.

The most notorious of Studd’s writings appeared in 1928. It was a booklet with a title made of three initials, D.C.D., which, as later reprints spell out on their covers, stood for “Don’t Care a Damn.” Studd said that he had taken the phrase from a retired military man who used it to describe the spirit of complete devotion to king and country, careless of every personal risk and comfort. Studd wanted Christians to have the same spirit: not to care a damn for anything except the glory of Jesus, obedience to God and the evangelisation of the world. He tied it to Paul’s words in the letter to the Philippians, about counting everything loss for Christ and pressing on to the prize (Philippians 3:7-14).

The idea was not new. It was the same conviction that had driven him all his life. But the phrase caused a scandal. Many Christians in Britain in the 1920s regarded the word “damn” as profanity, not to be used by any Christian, still less printed on the cover of a missionary tract. Some of the mission’s supporters were deeply offended. Members of the committee in London, who had to answer for the mission’s reputation, were alarmed. One modern writer says that the mission tried to bury the booklet as quickly as it could; that cannot be confirmed, but it is clear that it did the mission no good with its more cautious friends. In Norman Grubb’s recorded reminiscences, made many years later, the D.C.D. is linked with the decision of the committee at home to try to remove Studd from the leadership of his own mission.

Studd seems to have been genuinely surprised by the reaction, and then defiant. To him, the shock was the point. If Christians were more offended by a strong word than by the millions who had never heard of Christ, that only proved how badly they needed to be shocked. There is some force in that argument. Jesus, too, used strong and startling language, and the prophets used stronger. But the argument also allowed Studd to dismiss every criticism of his manner as a sign of the critic’s worldliness. It made him almost impossible to correct.

Studd himself would probably have said that the end justified the language, and that if a strong word made one more person think seriously about the millions without Christ, it was worth the offence. That is an argument that every generation of preachers has to weigh. The answer of the New Testament seems to be that the gospel itself is offensive enough, and that its messengers should take care not to add offences of their own. “Let your speech be always with grace,” Paul wrote, and he was not a timid man.

It is also worth noticing who had to live with the consequences of the language. Studd wrote his tracts and letters at Ibambi, far from the people who read them. It was Priscilla, the home staff and the committee in London who faced the offended supporters, answered the letters of complaint, and tried to keep the mission’s friends. Words written in the forest landed in drawing rooms and church halls in England, and others had to deal with what they caused. A leader who speaks without counting that cost asks others to pay it for him.

Fools for Christ’s Sake

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ.” He was being ironic. The Corinthians thought themselves wise, strong and honoured; Paul and his fellow apostles looked like fools, weak and despised. Paul accepted that. He did not mind looking foolish to the world, if that was the price of faithfulness.

Studd could have recognised himself in that verse, and he lived it. He did not mind looking foolish. He had given away a fortune, gone to Africa as an invalid, and lived in poverty for decades, and he did not care what anyone thought of him. That freedom from the opinion of others was one of the finest things about him.

But being a fool for Christ’s sake is not the same as being careless of how one’s words affect others. Paul, who called himself a fool for Christ, also wrote, “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer each one” (Colossians 4:6, ASV), and “Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for edifying as the need may be, that it may give grace to them that hear” (Ephesians 4:29, ASV). The same apostle who could be fierce with the Galatians could be as gentle as a nursing mother with the Thessalonians. He knew which was needed when.

Studd did not always know. In his last years he often seemed to have only one register, and it was a shout. Many who loved him found it hard to bear. Some who heard only the shout never heard the love behind it, and that was a loss to them and to him. The next chapters tell what it cost.