In 1976, Faith at Work, Inc. celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its incorporation. But few organizations have waited so long to legalize their identities. In fact, Faith at Work has had a series of births and rebirths stretching back to the beginnings of the century and even beyond. It is a child of diverse parentage, including the evangelism of D.L. Moody, the missions of Hudson Taylor, the student ministries of the Y.M.C.A., student volunteer activism, Frank Buchman's A First Century Christian Fellowship as well as baptized versions of a number of behavioral and relational disciplines.

Samuel Moor Shoemaker, who deserves to be called the father of Faith at Work, was born into a time in which the tracks were already being laid for the kind of ministry which he and his friends were to carry out both in America and abroad for nearly five decades. In 1900, when Sam Shoemaker was seven years old, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions was picking up momentum under the leadership of young people like John R. Mott, Robert E. Speer and Sherwood Eddy. It had begun at a conference of the student department of the Y.M.C.A. held under D.L. Moody's direction at Mt. Hermon, Massachusetts in the summer of 1886. At that conference one hundred young people, mostly men, dedicated themselves to foreign missions under a watchword, "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." The years that followed saw the formation of the World Student Christian Federation (1895) and the Layman's Missionary Movement (1906) and the emergence of leaders of the caliber of the men already alluded to. In her illuminating biography of her husband, Helen Smith Shoemaker, speaks of Sam's first contact with this leadership.

"His interest in this direction was further spurred by attendance at a series of summer conferences where he came in contact with some of the great spiritual leaders of the time. The first of these which he attended were held at Northfield, Massachusetts in 1911 and 1912. Sam wrote, 'In 1911, Dr. John R. Mott was there, Dr. Robert E. Speer and Dr. Sherwood Eddy came the following year. Mott and Speer were physical and spiritual giants; and Eddy, smaller of figure, was a great spiritual power.'

"It seemed to me that I had never heard men of such stature with such a message of the worldwide significance of Christianity. Dr. Mott with his influence on the student movement and the student volunteer movement for foreign missions, his prodigious labors toward the dawning ecumenical movement half a century ago, was justly called the greatest layman of his generation. On the platform he was immensely impressive. Dr. Speer, also a layman, Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions, was probably the most powerful devotional speaker some of us had ever heard or will hear. Later I came to know Sherwood Eddy well, to work and travel with him, to work and pray with him.
 

"These three men left an indelible impression on me. The Christian faith could never again be the small parochial denominational affair that it had once been. It had tasted a wider world, smelled its clearer air, traveled a little to its roomier spaces."

Inspired by the efforts of Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission (1866), and Dwight L. Moody, the internationally renowned evangelist, who were both lay persons, young men saw themselves as dedicated to a crusade of evangelization at home and abroad.

Sherwood Eddy tells of being converted while a student at Yale in the 1890's through the preaching of D. L. Moody. When some years later, he enrolled as a student at Union Theological Seminary, his aim, together with that of his good friends, Henry Luce and Horace Pitkin, was to carry the Gospel to China.

He writes, "At that moment my life was focused upon what seemed the greatest work in the world. I, too, felt I must be a crusader. I was jarred, broad awake: my studies meant more, and even athletics had a new meaning. When I would box every afternoon with Pitkin and when we would run our daily mile in the gym or the open air, we would say, 'This will carry us another mile in China.' "

The crusade of evangelization in which Mott, Eddy, Speer and later Frank Buchman and Sam Shoemaker participated was largely lay-oriented. The models of Hudson Taylor and D. L. Moody were no doubt important in this process but so was the new understanding of the evangelistic task. The latter was less and less tied to the organized denominations with their systems of clerical training and validation, and readier to move freely in a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices within the framework of classical Biblical faith.

Basic to this flexibility was a mood of urgency in the period of 1890 to 1914. This mood was a curious union of pessimism and optimism. It drew on the eschatology of Taylor who saw growing numbers of unbelievers swept to perdition unless the missionary task were carried out at once and on the broadest possible scale. At a student volunteer convention in Detroit in 1894, Taylor told his audience,
 
 

"The Gospel must be preached to these people in a very short time, for they are passing away. Every day, every day, oh, how they sweep over! There is a great Niagara of souls passing into the dark in China every day, every week, every month, they are passing away! A million a month in China they are dying without God."

There was considerable naivete in this view and it was unquestionably used to mask the naked power of some American political and economic interests, but in the minds of the young crusaders it was closely related to the substance of the Gospel. Formulated much too simply, this view said, "We need to make America more Christian and we need to make the world more like Christian America."

The orientation of the crusaders toward lay participation, non-denominationalism, the urgency of the evangelistic task probably accounts for the simplification of their theology and, related to this, their commitment to a psychology of effort and challenge.

The theology of Taylor and Moody, despite some variations, was the minimum characteristic of the Anglo-American revivalism of the preceding century: the one thing needful is salvation or conversion. Human beings are innately sinful; Christ suffered, died and rose again to provide salvation; people need only to accept that salvation in order to become changed, new creatures. When they have been changed they have one primary commitment: to win others for Christ.

This streamlined system of doctrine allowed the crusaders to devote almost all their energies to the recruiting task. In this situation they found ready at hand the psychology of William James with its emphasis on the almost limit-less capacity of the human will to will, and the muscular personal activism made popular by Theodore Roosevelt. It is significant that both James and Roosevelt came out of psychological and physical puniness to become dynamos of energy and creative willing.

Finally, the Crusaders seem to have embraced a charismatic notion of leadership. They were followers of charisma in others until they were free to exercise their own charisma. It was almost inevitable that with the years this should wear thin and lead to caprice, despotism, and fractured relationships. Even the amiable Napoleons do not realize that the price of energetic conquest may be the loss of the community they helped to shape. In any event, as our century began and moved toward its major and unexpected crisis in World War I, the ground was being prepared for a new strategy of evangelism which, while borrowing heavily from the past, drew on the present for much of its direction and motivation. In its development some years later, Faith at Work was to inherit and modify that strategy for the newer age.