Religion: Drama of Missions

As compared with such an unfashionable church as the Seventh Day Adventist, which spent $50,000,000 on foreign missionary work in six recent years (TIME, June 8, 1936), the fashionable Protestant Episcopal Church is comparatively cool about carrying the Word afar. It budgets about $5,000,000 a year for missions, chiefly in U. S. rural districts, Alaska, South America, India, and in recent years the Episcopal faithful have periodically allowed missionary deficits to accumulate.

As compared with the Baptist and the Methodist churches, the Episcopal Church does not go in much for the sort of homely activity represented by religious plays or pageants. The typical Episcopal vestryman, often a banker or substantial businessman, would feel queer in the false beard and cheesecloth garment which a small-town Presbyterian may wear with pleasure. Doubly notable, therefore, was an Episcopal pageant put on last week in Philadelphia’s big Convention Hall—biggest show ever performed by U. S. Episcopalians, and designed to quicken Episcopal interest in missions. It was called The Drama of Missions to Spread Throughout the World the Glory of the Light That All Nations May See and Know Him. It had its genesis a year ago when Pennsylvania’s Bishop Francis Marion Taitt, ordinarily a scholarly, retiring churchman, marched down Broad Street, with austere little Bishop William Thomas Manning of New York, other dignitaries and Episcopal laity, singing Onward Christian Soldiers. The Episcopal missionary budget was short once more—$250,000 worth—and Bishop Taitt was doing his part by holding a mission mass meeting in the Academy of Music. Soon, his access of zeal continuing, Bishop Taitt organized a Diocese Missionary Research Committee to devise ways of dramatizing missions. Result was the pageant, for which plans were laid last spring.

For the 1,300 actors in the Drama of Missions, Philadelphia churchwomen sewed 1,300-odd costumes which were sent to Virginia to be dyed by students in a mountain mission school. From missionary outposts of the Church, some 40 Episcopal converts and workers went to Philadelphia to appear in the pageant. A professional director of civic and patriotic shows, Percy Jewett Burrell of Boston, wrote the Drama of Missions.

Prologue of the Drama of Missions deals with the greatest missionary of all time, St. Paul, to play whom two Philadelphia laymen alternated in donning false beards—Robert C. Belleville III of Yardley, and Investment Broker Samuel C. Evans Jr. of Drexel Hill. Of the four main scenes of the pageant, the longest, called “Conflict for Christ,” shows Episcopal missionaries at work at home and abroad. In an Alaskan episode the chief actor is Dr. Grafton Burke, longtime director of Hudson Stuck Memorial Hospital at Fort Yukon, who plays “Old Alaska John,” a character upon whose eyes Dr. Burke actually operated when John was 100, restoring his sight. An Amerindian scene shows how South Dakota was missionized and presents an Indian convert who plays herself, speaking no lines—Mrs. Nancy American Horse, 70. Daughter-in-law of one of the first Sioux chiefs who fraternized with U. S. troops, Mrs. American Horse is president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Pine Ridge Reservation, holds religious meetings in 21 log and frame chapels from 20 to 40 miles apart, among which she circulates by horse & wagon. When President Coolidge was in the Black Hills, Mrs. American Horse was one of three squaws who greeted him; he said “a little something” to her but what it was she never found out. Speaking no English, a widow, she made her way East alone for the Philadelphia pageant, with only a letter in English to show people if she got in trouble. Mrs. American Horse had no difficulty until she arrived in the wrong station in Philadelphia, waited five hours until she was met.

Grandest part of the Drama of Missions is the epilogue entitled “Coronation Through Christ,” in which members of the cast occupy ten stages at 41 different levels, the topmost figure being “The Church,” played by Florence Newbold, a social worker of Germantown. The front stage slowly rises, disclosing a Table of the Covenant, a Bible and a Pact of Missions. Toward it move clergy, acolytes, incense-bearers, actors representing the peoples of the world. When “The Church” asks them if they will ratify the Pact of Missions, they join in a tremendous shout: “We will!”

Next week the costumes, lighting towers, drops and properties of the Drama of Missions will be taken to Cincinnati, where local Episcopalians have been rehearsing to perform the pageant during the forthcoming triennial Episcopal General Convention. Charles Phelps Taft II, good Episcopalian, will play one of the important roles, “The Teacher.”