Recruiting for missions: the Baylor volunteer foreign mission band, 1900-1906: the Protestant foreign mission movement in the United States began early in the nineteenth century, but as late as 1890, fewer than one thousand missionaries lived abroad

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr, 2008 by Bill Pitts

University Student Culture of the Band

The Baylor Band, like the SVM, was designed for university students. Neither was a missionary society or board with the responsibility of sending and sustaining missionaries. Instead, they both sought to recruit and nurture mission volunteers. As their denomination grew, Southern Baptists devised a variety of ways of informing members about missions. Pastors with missionary convictions supported the movement from the pulpit. The Woman's Missionary Union, the leading womens' organization in Baptist churches in the South, became an anchor for the movement. The key organizations for children--Girls in Action and Royal Ambassadors--heightened missionary consciousness of the young. Moreover, special offerings each year supported and promoted the missions cause.

University "student culture" is focused on a four-year period of early adulthood. Vocational questions are especially pressing during this stage of life. A certain level of educational achievement is expected and normally achieved. The band tapped into this student culture to recruit volunteers for the mission field. These students sustained the organization, an organization created by students and designed for students. Students elected officers and committees to give direction to their work. They raised money to meet their modest expenses. Above all, they met and talked with each other every week of the school year about their goals of mission service. They created a parallel curriculum to complement their required university work. They used the free time available to university students to help them prepare for their lifework. Their zeal and idealism were doubtless challenged by the high demands of the missionary calling.

The typical pattern for prospective Southern Baptist missionaries of this era would be for students to move directly from university to seminary studies and, following graduation, to marry and leave for their mission appointment within months of seminary graduation. Most of their missionary training occurred on the field. (63) The band helped prepare and sustain prospective missionaries for their work. The SVM volunteers functioned in a similar fashion. The two movements targeted members of the university culture. Had the Protestant missionary movement tried to recruit thirty-year-olds, the results would doubtless have been dramatically different. Nor would addressing twelve-year-olds have achieved the desired end. Introducing the claims of mission service to young adults at the right time was essential. Those claims must be presented neither too late nor too early in life, but during the critical months of their vocational decision. This style of recruiting was not appropriate to preceding generations of missionaries. Andrew Walls's research found that the earliest generations of missionaries were "plain men" with common sense who knew the Bible, but they were not typically drawn from university ranks. (64) The band and the SVM were designed for twenty-year-olds, women and men, who were in the process of enhancing their education and deciding their future careers. Both the Baylor Band and the SVM succeeded remarkably in their efforts to recruit university students for foreign missions.