Religion: Re-Thinking Missions

That they were squaring off at the biggest Protestant question of a century doubtless did not occur at once to the little group of Baptist laymen who met with John D. Rockefeller Jr. in Manhattan one night in January 1930. They knew that in Christ’s command. “Go ye therefore and teach all nations,” lay the largest task of Christianity. Good businessmen, they and Mr. Rockefeller knew that gifts to missions had now fallen off alarmingly. People no longer thought missionizing the best way, as they thought it 30 years ago, to spend their charity-money. Most people did not know or care much about conditions in foreign mission fields. Mr. Rockefeller had called his Baptist friends together to hear Dr. John R. Mott, who had just journeyed around the world to look at missions. Out of Dr. Mott’s talk grew a plan.

A Baptist committee of five was formed, headed by Engineer Albert Lyon Scott (Lockwood Greene Engineers Inc.). Because the subject seemed too big for five lone Baptists, an invitation was sent to the laymen of the Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal, Methodist, Dutch Reformed and United Presbyterian churches. After a preliminary fact-finding study, an Appraisal Commission headed by Engineer Scott and Philosophy Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard, set out to tour the Orient for nine months, returned to the U. S. last summer, began releasing its report to the public last month (TIME, Oct. 31).

Last week the complete report was made public, in a volume called Re-Thinking Missions,* November choice of the Religious Book Club. Excerpts published in the Press had already caused mutterings. But Re-Thinking Missions proved to be well-knit, sincere, lucid, the work of 15 able men and women whose diversities of creeds and interests seemed to preclude collective bias. Thoughtful Protestants had withheld comment until the appearance of the complete report. They now agreed—whether or not they agreed with all the Commission’s opinions —that it was a major milestone in the development of church doctrine, church organization both home and abroad. And slowly the realization grew that Re-Thinking Missions had as much significance for Protestantism at home as for Protestantism abroad. Must not a home-church as well as a mission preach a Way of Life rather than threaten hellfire? Should not churches unite against atheism and secularism? Is not economy and centralization as necessary at home as abroad?

Summarized thus are the Appraisal Commission’s views:

“The mission in some form is a matter not of choice but of obligation. . . . But the essential rightness of the mission idea will not save actual missions from decline or extinction unless in spirit and deed they worthily present that idea.

“The aim of Christian missions [is] to seek with people of other lands a true knowledge and love of God, expressing in life and word what we have learned through Jesus Christ, and endeavoring to give effect to his spirit in the life of the world.”

Missions, says the book, must cooperate with non-Christian systems of religion. When missionaries go into teaching, medicine, literature et al., their standards must be higher than those of secular groups. Missionary personnel must be of higher calibre, on the whole, than at present, “even at the risk of curtailing the number of missionaries sent out.” There must be concentration of workers in the Orient, with unity among the various Christian sects (which is no new recommendation—unity has long been sought, and achieved in such organizations as the 16-denominational Church of Christ in China). Abroad, responsibility must be transferred from missionaries to natives. At home, all Protestant missionary boards should in the Commission’s opinion be consolidated in a single administrative unit.

What U. S. Protestant churches would do about the Appraisal Commission’s report was not at once apparent. They were not obliged to do anything, for the Commission specifically disclaimed any intention of asking the various missionary boards to adopt or reject it. First U. S. Protestant body to repudiate it flatly was the American Lutheran Conference, a large Midwestern federation of synods formed in 1930. Last week the Midwestern Lutherans passed a resolution condemning the Commission’s statement that Christianity “has become less concerned in any land to save men from eternal punishment than from the danger of losing the supreme good.” The resolution announced that the American Lutheran Church would continue to “preach to all the world the gospel of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ alone.”

Of the seven churches concerned in the joint inquiry the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions last week led off with a pledge of greater co-operation with the Commission but warily added it did not necessarily “swallow the whole report.” It seemed likely that the Baptist and Congregationalist churches would favor the report. If the other four churches balked at the report it would be because of one fundamental difference of opinion. The whole theological problem both for home churches and for foreign missions is: A God-centred or a Christ-centred religion? The report emphasizes God and makes no mention whatever of “Preach Christ and Him Crucified” or “Preach the Blood.” This omission more than any other would infuriate fundamentalists.

The Appraisal Commission had its big evening last week, and no one heckled its members as they arose in the ballroom of Manhattan’s Hotel Roosevelt to explain Re-Thinking Missions. Necks were craned for a look at two outstanding visitors: John D Rockefeller Jr.. the man who started it all, and Mrs. Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (The Good Earth), whose intense, quietly emotional appreciation of Re-Thinking Missions, reprinted from this week’s Christian Century and handed to the guests, called it “a great monument, dividing the dying past from a glorious new movement in Christian life.”

There was no discussion of the report from the floor, but guests could write out questions for Commission members to answer. One question hit at a point which had disturbed many a U. S. churchman. Why had the Commission rushed into print with its findings before giving mission boards a chance to peruse the full report? It was replied that the excerpts were publicized (by Ivy Lee) in order to bang them home to the people who needed most to be told, the laymen.

The matters in hand seemed to grow most vivid through the personality of Dr. Hocking, the ruddy-faced, stubbly-mustached 59-year-old Harvard philosopher who chairmanned the Commission. No great orator, he spoke intensely, earnestly. A cool-minded stalker of religion in his books (best-known: The Meaning of God in Human Experience), Dr. Hocking wrote the first four chapters of Re-Thinking Missions, the groundwork of the whole discussion. Last week he got his laugh when he was asked to answer somebody’s question: “If it be accepted that a culture, as distinguished from a mood or a tendency, must be informed by one great unifying conception, can it be said, with any degree of realism, that in our modern world, in which are found fundamentally divergent viewpoints in regard to every basic conception, something exists on a world scale to which can be given the name of culture? If such a culture exists or is emerging, a culture of which, as the report suggests, Christianity should be made the spiritual buttress, what is the basic idea which inspires it?”

“Yes!” cried Dr. Hocking quickly.

He also said: “If there is anything about this report that suggests a jauntiness of criticism, I pray that God will forgive us. The criticisms which we have uttered, we have uttered with groanings of the spirit. . . .

“I think that what we have tried to do is this : we have tried to recognize that the work of God is the work of God, and that it is too holy to be touched and judged by our feeble intellects.”

*Harpers, $2.