TIMEs Magazine has an interesting collection of articles that pertain to Missions. This one was written all the way back in the 1930s where our Christian fathers were putting their heads together to figure out a way to make it a priority in the church.
“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.” -Dr. Hocking
Re-Thinking Missions
Monday, Nov. 28, 1932
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 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.
