Religion: Sunday School International

Greeting the Protestant delegates at a monster rally in Tokyo’s vast Sports Arena, Japan’s Buddhist Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi said politely: “Japan is not a Christian country, but Japanese Christians wield a powerful moral influence out of all proportion to their numbers.” Assembled in Tokyo, just 99 years after the first Protestant mission was organized in Japan, were 3,000 Japanese delegates and 1,200 delegates from 62 other nations. The occasion: the 14th World Convention on Christian Education, sponsored by the World Council of Christian Education and Sunday School Association. Theme of the convention was “Christian Education in a Changing World,” but Western delegates found that it might more appropriately have been: “The Challenge of Race and Nationalism.”

Said one Westerner: “We were made aware that in large parts of Asia and Africa, Western missionary work is now regarded, even by many Asian and African Christians, as mere propaganda for ‘imperialism’ and ‘capitalism.’ ” Many Asians complained that only three of the 33 members of the world council’s board were Asians, and were only partly mollified by the election to the council’s presidency of India’s Methodist Bishop Shot K. Mondol (succeeding England’s Viscount Mackintosh of Halifax). Western delegates, proud of the amount of free discussion in the convention, were disconcerted to discover that even some of the Japanese clergy strongly suspected that, as one of them said: “This emphasis on discussion groups is just an attempt to make propaganda for your American ideas about democracy and has no direct connection with church work.”

In Africa black nationalism is here to stay, said the Rev. Dunstan K. Nsubuga of Uganda, and since the Christians cannot beat it, they had better join it. “Nationalism will spread all over Africa,” he said. “In Kenya the Mau Mau movement is still strong. The church should not stay away from the nationalists but try to civilize them—keep them with the West.” Mindful of such advice, the convention decided that African Protestants will work out a unified text for Sunday school books, to be printed in 74 African languages. Asians will “stop copying Sunday school textbooks from the West” and develop their own.

Many Asian delegates looked to Japan for leadership. Said the Philippines’ Bishop Proculo A. Rodriguez (United Church of Christ): “Why send potential leaders to the West for training when it can be done more quickly and cheaply in Japan?”