Ch 5: Phase 3 - Initiation into Missionary Work
Becoming a missionary was not a process with a clearly defined end point. Once the missionaries arrived in West China, the work of enculturation – learning how to be a missionary, not merely in honing one’s medical or educational skills or preaching ability, but by acquiring the habits, preferences and behaviors that characterized the missionary microculture – went on for years or decades.
Missionaries learned, and taught each other, to aspire to a lively curiosity about China, symbolized and enacted through commitment to learning the language. Indeed, constant education and self-improvement of all kinds was reinforced through a stream of informative talks, discussions, lectures and articles in the main mission periodical for Protestant missions in West China.
Missionaries also learned that they ought to value gregariousness and hospitality over introversion and isolation, manifested in a calendar of social events that was perceived as alternately delightful and overwhelming by the missionary wives who were tasked with most of the organizing. Perhaps not surprisingly, missionaries also learned to display their faith, although what that display looked like could vary within the group of missionaries at any given time, and even more between generational cohorts of missionaries.
Within this diverse mix of activities, three areas stand out for their power to shape missionary culture:
1. Language study and missionary-training courses in Chengtu and surrounding towns and temples.
2. Shepherding new missionaries into the field and shadowing experienced missionaries in the field.
3. Household management, which included supervising servants and the sometimes-endless rounds of social engagements and leisure-time networking internal to the missionary community, facilitated largely by missionary wives.