 Although Mathews set up his own printing business after graduating, he abandoned it to join the CIM in 1906, receiving eighteen months' training in Adelaide where he ministered to the city's outcast poor.Mathews left for China on 4 October 1908, stopping at the CIM headquarters in Shanghai for a short period before being despatched to Henan.In 1915 he was transferred to Huizhou (now a district of Huangshan), Anhui, where he is said to have found, as in Henan, "a peculiar lack of response to the Gospel message."