THE KING’ S BUSINESS 1063 tors upon evangelists seems to be growing, and it is' time that some one called a ‘halt. Ought pastors with an especial evangelistic gift to leave the pastorate and take up the work of an evangelist ? We receive many letters from men in the pastorate whom God has especially used along evangelistic lines, expressing a more or less definite conviction that they should leave the pastorate and take up general evangelistic work. That some pastors should do this, there can be little doubt, for there is great need of men in evangelistic work who have had experience in the pastorate, and who can therefore better appreciate the pas tor s problems than the men who. are utterly lacking in such experience, and who, therefore, know nothing of the pastor’s problems, though oftentimes they fancy they know all about them better than the man who has been there. But, on the other hand, there is the greatest need of men in the pastorate who have the evangelistic gift. Furthermore the supply of evangelists at the present time seems to be greatly in excess o f the demand. In some parts of the country, evangelists are tumbling over one another in their ravenous desire to get the best fields. Some of them employ advance agents like a theatrical company. The chiefi business of this advance agent seems to be to book the evangelist who employs him in as many fat fields as possible. It really is becoming a scandal. One prominent evangelist thinks of other evangelists as competitors, and speaks of them as “my rivals.” Some evangelists, or their advance agents, have gone so far as to try to get into a field that is already negotiating with another 'evan gelist, by offering especial inducements in their “ financial plan”’ or something else. We heard this summer, and heard very directly, of one evangelist who asked another evangelist what his future engagements were, and having found out, wrote to all those places offering his own services. We read last winter an evangelistic advertisement, sent to us by the evangelist Himself, with no apparent sense of shame, in which he plainly said that his company had never visited a place where any other evangelist had been before him, where his results did not exceed those of any one who had gone before. We happen to know that this statement was a falsehood. We were not surprised to learn later of two cities where this evangelistic troupe began a campaign, where they were requested to close and leave before the intended time of their stay had expired. With this surplus of evangelists and dearth of evangelistic pastors, any man should think long before leaving the pastorite for evanegelistic work. Furthermore, many evangelists who are doing good work in the field to which God has. called them could never succeed at all as pastors. . They have a large enough supply of sermons;: to keep them going, and keep them going well, for three or four, or even six weeks, but then they are all in. As pastors they would be utter failures, as evangelists they are undoubted successes. A pastor should certainly hesitate about giving up a work which he can do and do well, when there are so many doing well the work which he is contemplating, but who could not do his work at all. It takes far greater and more varied gifts to be a successful pastor than to be a successful evangelist.
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