Only One Life

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.”

— John 12:24, ASV

After the Funeral

When Studd died in July 1931, the mission he had founded seemed close to collapse. It had been split. Its home organisation had largely walked away. It had perhaps thirty-five missionaries and almost no money. Its founder’s reputation had been damaged by quarrels, by his language and by the controversy over his morphine. Many observers in the evangelical world expected it to fade away.

It did not. Norman Grubb took over the leadership and, in a style very different from his father-in-law’s, rebuilt it. He was a gifted writer and teacher, and he gave the mission a theology of faith and fellowship that drew a new generation of recruits. By the time he retired in 1965, according to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, WEC had grown from that faltering band of about thirty to some eight hundred missionaries in twenty countries. It has continued to grow. Today WEC International works in many countries around the world, with workers drawn from many nations, including, increasingly, from the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America that missions like it helped to found.

The Forest Church

In the Congo, the work went on. In 1934 a missionary named Jack Harrison, known to the Congolese as Bwana Harri, began a Bible school at Ibambi to train Congolese pastors and evangelists. In the 1930s a revival broke out among the Budu at the village of Imbai, which the mission’s own accounts connect with the prayers of two missionary sisters, Lily and Ivy Roberts. In the early 1950s a fresh movement of the Spirit came to Ibambi and the surrounding stations. Norman Grubb, writing at the time, said that it came there, as at Wamba and Opienge, through the visit of an evangelist and his wife from Lubutu. In the mission writing of the time an “evangelist” almost always meant an African Christian worker, and there is every reason to think that this couple were Congolese. The revival that renewed the church Studd had founded was carried to it by Africans, as so much of the church’s growth had been from the beginning.

In the early 1950s the missionary doctor Helen Roseveare built a hospital and training centre in the area, and trained Congolese nurses and medical workers who carried health care into the villages. In 1964 the Simba rebellion swept through the region, and missionaries and Congolese Christians suffered imprisonment, violence and death. The church survived it. Today, as the Communauté Évangélique du Christ au Cœur d’Afrique, it is a large, self-governing Congolese church, with its centre at Isiro, its own pastors and leaders, and members counted in the hundreds of thousands. Studd lies buried at Ibambi among them.

His Words Today

Studd’s writings are still in print, nearly a century after his death. The Chocolate Soldier is reprinted by Christian publishers and read aloud in sermons. The rhyme about a rescue shop within a yard of hell, always credited to him, appears on posters, mugs and the walls of youth centres. The couplet beginning “Only one life,” which he loved but did not write, is one of the most quoted lines in evangelical Christianity, and the saying traditionally attributed to him, “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him,” is quoted more often still.

That popularity is a sign of how much his life still speaks. It is also a reason for care. Some of those words cannot be traced to anything he published, and one of them he almost certainly did not write. Studd himself would not have minded. He cared nothing for his own reputation as a writer, and he would gladly have had his name taken off anything, so long as the message got through. But a life that has been reduced to a handful of quotations is easy to admire and hard to understand. The quotations show the fire. They do not show the cost, either to him or to those around him, and they do not show the people, in China, India and the Congo, whose own faith and courage were the real fruit of his life.

How to Remember Him

There are two easy ways to remember C. T. Studd, and both are wrong.

The first is to remember only the hero: the cricketer who gave up the Ashes for China, the young man who gave away a fortune, the old man who went to Africa to die. That Studd is real, and he deserves to be remembered. But on his own he becomes a kind of reproach, impossible to imitate and therefore easy to admire and forget. And he hides the people who paid for his heroism, among them his wife, his daughters, his colleagues, and many Congolese Christians who bore his severity.

The second is to remember only the problem: the domineering founder, the morphine, the quarrels, the dismissed son-in-law, the split mission. That Studd is real too, and his failures should be studied. But on his own he becomes a cautionary tale, and the caution is too easily turned into an excuse. It is very comfortable to decide that, because Studd went too far, it is wise not to go anywhere at all.

The truth is harder and more useful. Studd was a man who took the words of Jesus with complete seriousness, and gave everything he had in obedience to them. That is the heart of his life, and it is why he is still remembered. He was also a man whose zeal was not always governed by love, and who could not bear to be told he was wrong. That is the warning of his life. Both are true at once. The second does not cancel the first, and the first does not excuse the second.

The Grain of Wheat

Jesus spoke of a grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies. If it does not die, it abides alone. If it dies, it bears much fruit. He was speaking first of his own death, and of the life that would come from it. He went on to apply it to his followers: “He that loveth his life loseth it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (John 12:25, ASV).

Studd’s life was a grain of wheat in that sense. He let go of his fortune, his fame, his health, his comfort, and in the end his life, in the conviction that only what was done for Christ would last. The fruit is real. It can be counted in the students who went overseas after hearing the Cambridge Seven, in the thousands of missionaries who have served with WEC, and above all in the Congolese church that grew in the forest where he is buried.

But the image of the grain of wheat also says something else. The fruit does not come from the grain. It comes from the life of God working in the soil after the grain has gone into it. Studd planted. Others watered: Priscilla, Buxton, Grubb, Harrison, Roseveare, and, above all, countless Congolese pastors, evangelists and believers whose names are known to God if not to us. God gave the increase. Studd would have been the first to say so. “I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6-7, ASV).

Above all, his life asks a question that every reader must answer for himself or herself. It is not whether one should give everything to Christ; the New Testament settles that. It is how to give everything to Christ in a way that also honours the people around us: the spouse, the children, the colleagues, the people among whom we live and work. Studd answered the first question magnificently. He answered the second less well. Those who take his life seriously will want to learn from both.

And it asks one more thing of the Church that tells his story. It asks that the story be told whole, with the Congolese and Chinese believers, the wife, the daughters and the colleagues kept in view alongside the hero. A life is never lived alone, and the fruit of a life is never the work of one person. If Studd’s story is told in that way, it becomes not a monument to one man’s sacrifice but a picture of the body of Christ at work, with all its gifts and all its wounds. That is a picture worth keeping.

Only One Life

The lines he is recorded as sending his grandchildren in his last year, borrowed rather than his own, are the best summary of what he believed: “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.” They are a challenge to every reader, as they were to him. Each of us has one life. It will soon be past. The question is what we will do with it.

Studd’s answer was everything. He gave it gladly, and he did not count the cost. His life suggests that the answer is right, and also that it must be given in love, with patience, and with humility enough to hear the counsel of others. A life given to Christ with all its strength but without love is, as Paul says, nothing. A life given to Christ with all its strength and love besides is the best thing a human being can do with the one life he has. Studd reached for that, and often grasped it, and sometimes missed it. He would want his readers to reach further, and to do it with more love than he did.