Religion: Flying Missionary

When Bill Jackson was not up in his C-47 last week, he was busy 1) watching bulldozers break ground for Tokyo’s first English-speaking Baptist church, and 2) organizing an all-out evangelical campaign, “the biggest single effort in the history of Baptist foreign missions.” Texas-born William Henry Jackson Jr., missionary and active reserve officer in the U.S. Air Force, is planning his $200,000 church with all the U.S. trimmings—kitchens, dining hall, classrooms. As rotating pastors, he hopes to get “big Baptist churchmen” from the U.S. As for his choir, he needs “at least 500 voices. We’ve got to liven things up, hit them hard.” Barrage on Asahigawa. Hard-hitting Missionary-Pilot Jackson is no novice at church-building. His first big Japanese assignment (in 1953) was to set up a Baptist church in Asahigawa (pop. 171,835) on Hokkaido. Usual procedure in a new territory is to start a Bible class, gradually work for a church. Instead, impatient Captain Jackson and his pretty wife began with a long advertising barrage, organized Japanese pastors to line up officials and businessmen. After a week-long series of revival meetings, the church was launched. The average Baptist missionary church in Japan takes five years to stand on its own feet, but it was only a year before the Asahigawa church was selfsupporting, with 167 members and a fulltime Japanese pastor.

Church Builder Jackson was a pilot before he was a preacher, and one flying incident over New Guinea during World War II had a lot to do with his entering the ministry. One engine in his P-38 quit and he had to try for a forced landing on a tiny strip between foothills and ocean. His plan: to hit the strip so hard that the nose wheel would break and thus stop the plane quickly. The nose wheel “refused to snap for some reason or other,” but Jackson managed to stop the plane anyway. “I got out and then my heart almost stopped. Under my wings were two big bombs: I had forgotten all about them. If that nose wheel had snapped, the bombs would have gone off. That was when I thought that the good Lord was watching over me.”

The Best of Everything. Pilot Jackson got his divinity degree at Fort Worth’s Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1951, was assigned to Japan, spent two years learning the language. Last fall a group of U.S. military people, calling themselves the Southern Baptist Military Fellowship, asked Jackson to help them organize an English-speaking Baptist church in Tokyo. The Jacksonian result: a whirlwind of preaching, fund-raising and organizing, topped by ground-breaking ceremonies with a brass band from the U.S.A.F.’s 41st Air Division. For the full-scale Tokyo revival Jackson is organizing along with the new church, he plans to spend $200,000 in advertising and to round up big-name speakers, including Billy Graham. “We want the best of everything on this program,” says Missionary Jackson. “After all, it’s the biggest city in the world, and the Lord deserves the best.”