What the Church Means to Me

I have always loved to think of Jesus Christ and to commend him as Master because he accepted all who came -- whether for comfort, for help, or for service. When a man sets to work on the road that leads to heaven here, he will be tasting the sweetness of the believing that involves everlasting life. In our Labrador work we form no church. Our fellow-workers pray and worship in every denomination as the bias of their mind and temperament leads them to find peace and comfort and strength best. Yet we are a definite body associated together for certain purposes. These we believe are translations into action of our interpretation of our debt to God and to our neighbor. In that sense are we not a true ecclesia?

Will it horrify my readers if I confess I have accepted doctors for our hospitals, nurses for our districts, and workers of every type, and yet have never known which way they prefer to worship? Nor have I ever played the censor on their right to help us by defining what they ought to believe before I allowed them to set to work. Before a member joins the permanent staff we must know he is in absolute sympathy with our aim to glorify God and serve our brother, and that he or she is willing to give their best for that object. But that is all. I am fearless to confess that I would enroll for a colleague in the clinics, which hold in their hands the lives of my friends, a man who is "facile princeps" in the art of surgery rather than a second-rate surgeon who can subscribe to the very same intellectual tenets as I do myself.