A Lutheran missionary who chose to remain in Red China for three and a half years after his release from a Communist prison in 1957, arrived in New York last month after a 35-day voyage from Hong Kong.
He is the Rev. Paul J. Mackensen, 35, believed to be the last American Protestant missionary to leave mainland China. His decision to stay in China after his release from prison—because, he said, he liked the Chinese people—contributed to reports he had been brainwashed.
The lanky, deeply-tanned bachelor clergyman was friendly toward reporters, but refused to discuss his 12 years in Communist China, five of which were spent in prison for alleged “acts threatening security.”
“I have no plans whatsoever, other than seeing my folks,” he said. “But I will probably stick around for awhile.”
Mackensen declined to say whether he would try to return to Communist China. Neither would he comment about conditions there.
He went to China in 1948 on a call from the Board of Foreign Missions of the United Lutheran Church in America, and began his ministry at Tsingtao after a year of study at the School of Oriental Languages and Culture in Peiping.
The year he started his work in Tsingtao, the Communists took over that area, but Mr. Mackensen decided to remain at his post. He did not ask for permission to leave China until 1950.
His request was refused, and there were indications he was under Communist surveillance. He was arrested shortly before midnight on March 7, 1952, charged with “acts threatening security” and sentenced to five years in prison for alleged espionage.
Late in 1955, Mackensen was transferred from Tsingtao to Shanghai. A year later, he and other prisoners were taken on a 24-day, 3,000-mile trip “to see the new China.”
On their return to the prison, gradual improvement in their living conditions was reported. After having served his prison term, the former missionary announced his intentions to remain in China.
In September, 1957, six months after his release from prison, Mackensen became a teacher of English at the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Languages.
Although his parents did not hear from him during the first few years after his arrest, they have corresponded regularly with him since then.
The parents received a cable October 14 telling of their son’s anticipated return. A letter with additional details arrived four days later.
Mackensen was met in New York by his brother-in-law and sister, the Rev. and Mrs. Leonard E. Good, who drove him to their home in Spinnerstown, Pennsylvania. He subsequently visited his parents at their home in Baltimore.
Others who met Mackensen at the dock in New York included two members of the ULCA’s Board of Foreign Missions, Dr. Earl S. Erb, executive secretary, and the Rev. Warren C. Johnson, who was secretary for Hong Kong, Malaya, and Japan when Mackensen accepted the ULCA call and went overseas.
Erb said he and Johnson were not present in any official capacity—Mackensen resigned his position with the ULCA missions board when he left prison and became a teacher.
“We came to greet him and offer any possible assistance,” Erb said.
On his first Sunday in the United States, Mackensen attended services at St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Baltimore, where his father is pastor-emeritus. He spoke to a Sunday School class and later made short remarks at a worship service, thanking the congregation for their prayers.
He appeared to be in excellent health and full of vigor.
Mackensen said his “chief reason” for returning now was to see his parents.
“My folks have been waiting a long time and begging me to return,” he said. “I was anxious to see them, too. A person has to come home some time.”
Mackensen’s father had been quoted as saying that his son “decided to stay in China because he felt, once out, he could not get back in. He had learned to love the Chinese people and wanted to serve them.”
Mackensen still holds ordination credentials from the American Lutheran Church. Ordinarily such credentials expire in two years if the holder has no specific pastoral appointment. Special action was taken in Mackensen’s case, however, for an extension. Upon his return, Mackensen said he had not yet decided what action he would take regarding his ministerial license.
Mackensen’s silence about conditions behind the Bamboo Curtain represents a disappointment for many U. S. church leaders, especially displaced missionaries, who have been hoping for news about the fate or fortune of Christianity on the China mainland. Relatively little is known of the extent to which the Communist Chinese regime permits religious assemblies and open Christian witness. In East Germany, where restrictions upon Christians have been regularly reported, the church is known to be isolated within its walls.
Profile Of Paul J. Mackensen
The Rev. Paul J. Mackensen, believed to be the last American Protestant missionary to leave mainland China, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 23, 1925.
He was graduated from St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, in 1945, and from Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, in 1947.
Mackensen holds ordination credentials from the American Lutheran Church, but his missionary appointment was made under the Board of Foreign Missions of the United Lutheran Church in America.
After a year studying Chinese at Yale University, Mackensen went to China in August, 1948. He spent another year of study at the School of Oriental Languages and Culture in Peiping before beginning a ministry in the city of Tsingtao in 1949.
He is the son of the Rev. and Mrs. Paul J. Mackensen, Sr., who live in Baltimore. The father is pastor-emeritus of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Baltimore.
In his application for service as a missionary, written in December of 1945, young Mackensen wrote: “A Christian message is much more than a systematized statement of convictions. It is a whole life of prayer and thought and action consecrated in Christ Jesus. That is my belief, and God willing, it will be my life.”
Protestant Panorama
• Conviction for contempt of court of Dr. Willard Uphaus, Methodist layman and religious pacifist, was upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court for the second time last month. In a brief 6 to 3 curiam (by the court) Uphaus was denied a new hearing. He has spent the past year in a New Hampshire prison for refusing to tell a state legislative committee about guests at his World Fellowship Center. The court’s order drew angry dissents from Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo L. Black which were endorsed by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
• The United Lutheran Church in America is launching a study of medical ethics through its Department of Social Action. The project will consider moral aspects of birth control, artificial insemination, sterilization, therapeutic abortion, and euthanasia.
• U. S. Methodists are embarking upon a four-year program aimed at relieving racial tensions. An initial orientation conference will be held in Louisville March 20–24, 1961. Sponsoring agencies will cooperate with the Commission on Inter-Jurisdictional Relations, established by the Methodist General Conference earlier this year and entrusted with “the continuing program of The Methodist Church to abolish the (all-Negro) Central Jurisdiction, promote interracial brotherhood through Christian love, and achieve a more inclusive Church.”
• Baptists will mark 100 years of organized missionary activity in Burma with a four-day celebration to be climaxed on New Year’s Dav.
• Five evangelical denominations are planning joint publication of a youth quarterly which will make its debut early in 1961. Cooperating in the venture are Wesleyan Methodist, Free Methodist, Pilgrim Holiness and Evangelical Friends churches and the Church of the Nazarene, at whose publishing house the 64-page digestsized magazine will be printed. The quarterly will be known as Aldersgate Teen Topics after Aldersgate Street in London, where John Wesley was converted.
• Ground was broken last month for the new $400,000 Pennsylvania United Church Center, located in the state capital of Harrisburg. The center is sponsored by the Pennsylvania Council of Churches.
• Dr. Albert Schweitzer, famed Protestant medical missionary in Africa, will be honored by American businessmen on his 86th birthday, January 14, with donations of supplies totalling 86 tons—a ton for each year in his life. Coordinating gifts is Religious Heritage of America.
• A Lutheran drama troupe is touring the East Coast this month with productions of an e. e. cummings short play, “Santa Claus,” and a longer adaptation of “Christmas in the Market Place,” by French playwright Eric Crozier.
• The Presbyterian Synod of Washington state plans to erect a $5,000,000 home for the aged on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle.
• Five U. S. Methodist seminaries are undertaking a 10-year project to publish the “first complete definitive edition” of John Wesley’s works. Cooperating in the effort, expected to result in some 35 volumes, are scholars from the theological schools of Southern Methodist University, Emory University, Boston University, Drew University and Duke University.
• More than 250 visiting United Presbyterians from 23 states attended ground-breaking ceremonies last month for the denomination’s first church in Hawaii. The $350,000 structure will serve a congregation organized last April which has been worshipping in the Honolulu YMCA. The Rev. William E. Phifer, Jr., is pastor.
• Historic Ebenezer Church in New Amsterdam, British Guiana, will be torn down to make way for a larger church of contemporary design. The present edifice is more than 200 years old.
• Newly-approved expansion program at American University, rapidly-growing Methodist school in Washington, D. C., will cost $36,000,000.
State Control
The government of Ceylon assumes control of all religious schools under a bill ratified by the Senate in Colombo last month.
Affected are Protestant schools with approximately 140,000 students and Roman Catholic schools with an enrollment of some 250,000 according to Religious News Service.
The bill nationalizing the schools was passed despite strong protests from some religious leaders. Catholic authorities say they will test the validity of the takeover legislation in court.
Ceylon is predominantly Buddhist.
Heresy or Hostility?
Strong measures are being taken by the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church to counteract what it calls the “heretical propaganda” of the Rev. Spiros Zodhiates of New York, general secretary of the American Mission to Greeks.
For the past two years, Mr. Zodhiates has been publishing an evangelistic message each week as a paid advertisement in some 100 Greek newspapers and magazines.
The Holy Synod is issuing an encyclical to the Greek people which says of Zodhiates: “he is a Protestant trying to make Protestants of the Greek.”
A second encyclical—to the bishops—will propose that the Orthodox Church offer the newspapers and magazines the same amount of money Mr. Zodhiates pays for his messages to induce the publications either to drop his ads or print sermons written by Orthodox bishops.
In New York, Mr. Zodhiates expressed regret at the “hostility” shown by the Orthodox Church over his wish to be of spiritual and material help to the Greeks.
He said the synod’s actions “stem from a spirit of insecurity and a misapprehension” that his purpose is to “make Protestants of the Greek Orthodox, when it is simply to preach Christ and the Gospel of personal salvation on a non-sectarian basis.”
Mr. Zodhiates noted that he writes his weekly messages on the very same Scripture passages read in all the Greek Orthodox churches each Sunday and that many of the Orthodox priests use his message as material for sermons. This, he said, shows that the Orthodox Church’s objection is not to the messages’ content, but simply to the fact that he is a Protestant.
He added it is “not proper” to deprive a person belonging to a religious minority of the freedom to serve spiritually the country’s entire population.
Sitting on the Wall
While not distinctly defined at certain touchpoints, the wall of U. S. Church-State separation nonetheless finds the vast majority of its citizens clearly on one side or the other. To be on the wall, or to straddle it, is to be conspicuous. And such is the case with the office of religious affairs adviser in the United States Information Agency.
When USIA was initially organized back in 1951, its architects felt the need of counsel on how American religion was to be represented abroad. The post of religious affairs adviser was created on a part-time basis, and still remains so, the office-holder’s presence being required in Washington “only a few days each month” (current rate of remuneration: $57 per day, plus travel expenses). Much attention has been focused upon the post, partly because of rapid turnover (four appointments in less than 10 years).
First to hold the post was Dr. Albert Joseph Macartney, then minister of National Presbyterian Church. He was succeeded in turn by Quaker scholar D. Elton Trueblood and Dr. Ronald Bridges.
Following Bridges’ death a year ago, there was speculation that USIA would try to do without a successor. Last month, however, the new adviser was named. He is Dr. Edgar H. S. Chandler, vice president of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago and former director of refugee and relief activities for the World Council of Churches.
Chandler assumed his new responsibilities immediately. He is a Congregational minister and former World War II Navy chaplain.
Senate Religious Census
The 87th Congress will have 87 Protestants, 11 Roman Catholics, and 2 Jewish members.
Three Roman Catholic Senators did not seek re-election, and were succeeded by Protestants. With only one new Roman Catholic elected, Roman Catholic Senate membership dropped from 13 to 11. The number would fall to 10 if a Protestant were named to the seat to be vacated by President-elect John F. Kennedy.
Methodists outnumber all others with a total of 19 members.
Religious affiliation of members of the new Senate is as follows:
Methodists (19): Bible (D.-Nev.); Butler (R.-Md.); Francis Case (R.-S.D.); Dworshak (R.-Ida.); Eastland (D.-Miss.); Engle (D.-Cal.); Hickenlooper (R.-Ia.); Hill (D.-Ala.); Holland (D.-Fla.); Jordan (D.-N.C.); Mundt (R.-S.D.); Russell (D.-Ga.); Schoeppel (R.-Kan.); Smathers (D.-Fla.); Mrs. Smith (R.-Me.); Sparkman (D.-Ala.); John Williams (R.-Del.); Boggs (R.-Del.); Metcalf (D.-Mont.).
Baptists (14): Robert Byrd (D.-W.Va.); Carlson (R.-Kan.); Cooper (R.-Ky.); Gore (D.-Tenn.); Johnston (D.-S.C.); Kefauver (D.-Tenn.); Kerr (D.-Okla.); McClellan (D.-Ark.); Robertson (D.-Va.); Talmadge (D.-Ga.); Russell Long (D.-La.); Thurmond (D.-S.C.); Yarborough (D.-Tex.); Edward Long (D.-Mo.).
Seventh Day Baptist (1): Randolph (D.-W.Va.).
Episcopal (14): Allott (R.-Colo.); Beall (R.-Md.); Bush (R.-Conn.); Harry Byrd (D.-Va.); Clark (D.-Pa.); Goldwater (R.-Ariz.); Hayden (D.-Ariz.); Kuchel (R.-Cal.); Monroney (D.-Okla.); Proxmire (D.-Wis.); Scott (R.-Pa.); Symington (D.-Mo.); Morton (R.-Ky.); Pell (D.R.I.).
Roman Catholic (11): Chavez (D.-N.M.); Dodd (D.-Conn.); Hart (D.-Mich); Kennedy (D.-Mass.); McNamara (D.-Mich.); Miller (R.-Ia.); Lausche (D.-O.); McCarthy (D.-Minn.); Mansfield (D.-Mont.); Muskie (D.-Me.); Pastore (D.R.I.).
Presbyterian (11): Anderson (D.-N.M.); Clifford Case (R.-N.J.); Church (D.-Ida.); Curtis (R.-Nebr.); Ellender (D.-La.); Ervin (D.-N.C.); Jackson (D.-Wash.); Keating (R.-N.Y.); McGee (D.-Wyo.); Stennis (D.-Miss.); Thomson (R.-Wyo.).
Congregational Christian (7): Bridges (R.-N.H.); Cotton (R.-N.H.); Humphrey (D.-Minn.); Morse (D.-Ore.); Prouty (R.-Vt.); Fong (R.-Hawaii); Burdick (D.-N.D.).
Lutheran (4): Capehart (R.-Ind.); Hartke (D.-Ind.); Magnuson (D.-Wash.); Wiley (R.-Wis.).
Unitarian (4): Hruska (R.-Nebr.); Mrs. Neuberger (D.-Ore.); Saltonstall (R.-Mass.); Harrison Williams (D.-N.J.).
Disciples of Christ (3): Johnson (D.-Tex); Fulbright (D.-Ark.); Oren Long (D.-Hawaii).
Latter-day Saints (Mormons) (3): Bennett (R.-Utah); Moss (D.-Utah); Cannon (D.-Nev.).
Latter Day Saints (Reorganized Church) (1): Milton Young (R.-N.D.).
Jewish (2): Javits (R.-N.Y.); Gruening (D.-Alaska).
Friends (1): Douglas (D.-Ill.).
Reformed Church in America (1): Dirksen (D.-Ill.).
“Protestant” (no denomination given) (4): Bartlett (D.-Alaska); Aiken (R.-Vt.); Carroll (D.-Colo.); Stephen Young (D.-O.).
Enter ABC
The American Broadcasting Company launched a new weekly religious television program last month. ABC had been the only one of the three major television networks without a religious series in its public affairs schedule.
The new program, to be aired each Sunday afternoon, will be known as “Directions ’61” and will be produced alternately by the National Council of Catholic Men, the National Council of Churches, and Jewish Theological Seminary of New York. The number of programs will be divided equally between the three groups, an innovation in religious telecasting. CBS and NBC hold to a 3–2–1 ratio for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish segments, respectively.
The ‘Real Approach’
Some pointed comments about Protestant-Roman Catholic unity appeared in Rome on the eve of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s scheduled call on Pope John XXIII. While aides to Archbishop Geoffrey Francis Fisher persistently denied that his meeting with the Pope would amount to a religious summit, many observers felt nonetheless sure that ecumenicity would be a key topic of discussion. Fisher, titular head of the world’s 40,000,000 Anglicans, was slated to visit the Pope early in December after visits to Orthodox patriarchs in Jerusalem, Lebanon, and Istanbul.
Only a matter of days before, in an article published in Rome, Jesuit Father Charles Boyer, president of Unitas, a movement seeking to promote Christian unity, said that non-Catholic churches “wishing for a real approach (to union) must adopt the Catholic doctrine they so far have refused.”
“One must admit,” said Boyer, “that the Catholic church does not need any change regarding its doctrine.”
Meanwhile, in a lecture at Unitas headquarters, a German Lutheran clergyman said that the time may be at hand for groups of Lutherans to join the Roman Catholic church.
The lecturer, the Rev. Max Lackmann, was suspended from his pastorate in Soest, Germany, last year after he declared in a book that “the church of Rome is a symbol set up by God himself for the truly catholic worldwide church.”
Lackmann’s acceptance of the papacy as the center of Christian unity has been censured by leaders of his own church. He is a leader of a small group of German Lutherans who seek reunion of Protestants and Catholics.
Christmas Tower
A memorial “Tower of Christmas Peace” will be erected at the grave of Franz Gruber, composer of the internationally beloved “Silent Night, Holy Night.” The grave is located at Hallein, Austria.
Dr. Friedrich Jacoby, director of the Franz Xavier Gruber Foundation, has been quoted as saying that “every Christmas Eve, ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ will resound from the tower, sending forth a message uniting all mankind in a Christian mission for redemption and peace.”
Honorary patrons of the tower project include Roman Catholic Archbishop Andreas Rohracher of Salzburg, and Dr. Joseph Kalus, governor of Salzburg. The memorial is expected to be completed by Christmas, 1963.
Gruber, a Catholic schoolmaster and organist, was born at Hochburg, Upper Austria, in 1787 and died in 1863.
The Adam Question
A report of its Theological Commission bearing on the historicity of Genesis, adopted last summer by the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America, is drawing fire from some Reformed churchmen.
Misgivings are elaborated in a pamphlet prepared by Dr. John H. Ludlum and Mr. John Richard De Witt and printed by the Consistory of the Sixth Reformed Church of Paterson, New Jersey. The signatories question whether a General Synod has the legal right “to adopt a statement as to the belief of the churches and give it official sanction, without any referral of it to the classes and churches, without any previous discussion of it in the classes and churches, and without a vote of approval of it by the classes for the churches.”
They assert that acceptance of the report opens a door for “any one who accepts the most destructive critical views of Scripture, who holds that all of its documents are unauthentic and spurious, who holds that all its contents are anonymous works of unknown and unknowable parties” to occupy the office of minister and teacher in the Reformed Church in America.
The report itself declares that the members of the Theological Commission were “unanimous in affirming the historical character of the Book of Genesis.” “However,” it adds, “we must be clear as to the nature of this history,” and “the Church must allow a certain latitude in the understanding of details,” Theological analysis and critique leads Dr. Ludlum to suspect that the report reflects a departure from old standards of his denomination. He takes issue with its conception of divine revelation as revelation through events, and complains that “no mention whatever is made of any kind of direct word or utterance straight out of the mouth of God, in a fixed form of words, to men.” A scholarly reader would interpret as “a total rejection of propositional revelation” the Commission’s protest “against all attempts to divorce faith from history, and to reduce the word which God would speak to us to abstract information about His nature,” says Ludlum.
He concludes “that the new statement allows anyone to remove one foundation (Moses and the prophets, Christ and the apostles) out from under Christianity, and to put a new foundation (unknown and unknowable literary men) beneath it in place of the old.” He cannot think “how anything could be more fatal, potentially, to the Reformed Church in America and what it is supposed to stand for than this statement.” At the same time he is “very careful not to say that the Commission’s statement, as a scholar would understand it, represents what the recent General Synod believes, or even what the Commission’s members believe.” “I have merely shown,” he says, “what a particular statement may be understood to mean, and, I think it does mean, whether the General Synod or the Commissioners knew it or not.”
A letter of inquiry sent to all members of the Theological Commission by Mr. De Witt has failed to clarify the issue. The responses were far from unanimous: some express a belief that the report affirms the historicity, plainly understood, of Genesis 1–3; others think that it does not, and regret it; others again think that it does not, and rejoice; and one is non-committal.
P.E.H.
Baptist Headquarters
Construction progress is well ahead of schedule on the gigantic national headquarters building now being erected for the American Baptist Convention at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
The circular edifice, located along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the eastern part of the state, will house denominational agencies which now have offices in New York and Philadelphia. A graphic arts plant for producing books and periodicals also will be located in the headquarters building.
Occupancy is scheduled for late in 1961 or early in 1962. The building when completed will represent a cost outlay of some $8,500,000.
Warning Mennonites
Some 6,000 delegates were on hand last month for the triennial General Conference of the Mennonite Brethren Church of North America in Reedley, California.
The Rev. J. A. Toews of Winnipeg called upon conferees to use their increasing contact with the world by spreading their beliefs and engaging in an active, personal evangelism.
He warned church members against accepting ways of the world that are “self-destructive.”
He urged them to check themselves to see whether the great changes wrought by society in the last 100 years have affected their basic faith in addition to changing their external habits and living patterns.
Toews asked for a re-examination of the denomination’s three basic concepts—personal salvation, separation of the church from the state and the world, and Scriptural authority.
While modern transportation and communication have opened “wonderful new areas of witnessing,” he continued, at the same time these have brought temptations to corrupt the faith through undue attention to materialism.
“Piety gives rise to prosperity, but prosperity often turns around and devours piety,” he added.
‘Speed up the Church’
A study of the Protestant Episcopal missionary program finds it weak and outmoded and in need of sweeping changes.
The 54-page dissertation which took two years to prepare was made public at a meeting of the Protestant Episcopal House of Bishops in Dallas last month. It will be formally presented to the church’s triennial general convention in Detroit next year.
“As things stand now,” the study declares, “the world is moving faster than the Episcopal Church. We cannot slow down the world, even if we would; but we can and must speed up the church.”
A committee of 16 prepared the report, headed by the Right Rev. Walter H. Gray, bishop of Connecticut.
A number of administrative changes are recommended. In addition, the study stresses that foreign missions can no longer be serious and effective until the church as a whole understands that all of its members “are in fact missionaries, whether at home or abroad, whether clergy or laity.”
Suggestions include proposals that laymen going overseas be formally commissioned, that briefing centers be established for travellers, and that special aids be provided local clergymen to prepare their parishioners for overseas visits.
Still another recommendation calls for establishment of a permanent advisory council of evaluation and strategy on the mission of the church.
The meeting of the House of Bishops resulted in the issuance of a 4,000-word pastoral letter which reaffirms the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds “as the symbols of the rock of our faith.”
Reminding Episcopalians of their roots in the historic Christian faith, the letter at the same time declared that the two ancient creeds must always be interpreted in the language of the times.
The bishops called the creeds a “proclamation of a faith, a gift whose kind and nature does not in itself change from generation to generation.”
“Christianity is primarily an affirmation of what God has done, is doing and will do,” the letter said, “and of our participation in these mighty acts of God by our penitent and thankful response.
“The doctrine of creation is not a description of how the universe was made, but a statement of the complete dependence of the universe in its total being upon God. The first article of the creeds is the context for the other articles.
“It affirms the totality of God’s actual power as creator and is the indispensable basis for all the other creedal affirmations.”
The 14-page pastoral letter was the first by the Episcopalians since 1958. Such letters are usually issued at the church’s conventions and must be read in all the denomination’s more than 7,000 churches within 30 days.
A statement of faith used only in the Western Church, the Apostles’ Creed dates from the First Century and appears to be based structurally on Matthew 28:19.
The Nicene Creed was formulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and affirmed in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. It is longer and more explicit than the Apostles’ Creed and is accepted by both the Western and Eastern Churches.
These creeds, the Episcopal bishops stated, “are the skeletons of the Bible and the Bible is the flesh and the blood of the creeds.”
“Contemporary interpreters are in danger of becoming heretics even as champions of orthodoxy are in danger of becoming unintelligible,” the bishops continued. They pointed out that the creeds are intended to be statements of faith and not scientific documents.
The New Sectarianism
A new meaning is being given to the word “sectarianism” by opponents of religious education in the public schools, according to the Rev. E. R. McLean, who sounded a warning last month in an address before a biennial meeting of the Canadian Council of Churches in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Prohibition against sectarian teaching was originally intended to mean denominational teaching of Christianity, said McLean, while today it is being used to mean that Christianity itself is a sect.
Presidency of the Canadian Council, which rotates among its 11 member denominations, went this year to the Rev. David Hay, a Presbyterian and professor at Knox College, University of Toronto. He succeeds the Very Rev. George Dorey, a former United Church of Canada moderator.
Hay is a member of the World Council of Churches Committee on Faith and Order and its theological study commission.
Delegates heard Dr. Wilfred Scopes declare that Christianity can be spread effectively overseas only if denominationalism is overcome and the missions are internationalized.
Scopes, who heads the International Missionary Council’s Standing Committee on the Ministry, said that denominational mission boards are outdated and not geared for the job in the face of the present world situation.
He conjured up a vision of one Protestant mission “in the countries of the growing churches.” In India alone, where he served 35 years, he said there were some 200 different Christian groups carrying on mission work.
Canadian Ecumenicity
Ecumenically-oriented conversations between representatives of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, broken off in 1945, were resumed last month in Toronto.
A cautiously-worded statement issued after the sessions said the conversations were of “an exploratory nature to establish communication and mutual understanding.”
Subjects discussed by the 10 Anglicans and 9 Presbyterians at the meeting included doctrine, order, polity and practical cooperation. Delegates agreed to meet again February 2 to study “the nature of the unity we have.”
Serving as chairman was Dr. Robert Lennox, principal of Presbyterian College, Montreal, and moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly. Archbishop Howard H. Clark of Edmonton, Primate of All Canada, served as head of the Anglican delegation.
Conversations between the two denominations were discontinued in 1945 as the result of a vagueness in terms of reference. Such talks were first initiated in 1944 by the Anglican Church.
Mission at Oxford
Oxford University undergraduates by the hundreds filed into a nearby church for eight nights last month. The attraction was a mission conducted by the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. Theme: “Encounter with Christ.”
Main services were reinforced by gatherings in the colleges and personal conversations with missioners. Speakers at breakfast and luncheon meetings included industrialist A. G. B. Owen.
The Rev. R. C. Lucas, chief missioner, is a Cambridge graduate who is candidates secretary of the (Anglican) Church Pastoral Aid Society.
The Oxford mission is a triennial event. A number of English Christian leaders trace their conversion to previous missions.
Defying the Enemy
Protestant missionary activity in Laos was being carried out last month in the face of armed Communist agitators.
Personnel of the Christian and Missionary Alliance reoccupied a mission station at Xieng Khouang, in the heart of the Red agitation, after having been caught in transit in the city of Vientiane when a coup occurred there.
The station later survived a counterrevolt in Xieng Khouang itself.
“In spite of the serious and unpredictable internal situation marked by armed Communist activity,” said the Rev. Louis L. King, foreign secretary of the Alliance, “the missionaries on all four of our mission stations are sticking by their posts witnessing and encouraging the believers.”
Reading and Running
Although young people of Taiwan apparently are among the most eager in the world to learn (America now has nearly 4,000 Chinese students, more than those from any other country except Canada), Christian educational advances in Nationalist China are hard to come by. Chief reasons: (1) To secure accreditation, schools must adopt government-formulated entrance requirements, which, in predominantly-Buddhist Formosa, result in a non-Christian student body; (2) lack of funds; and (3) the exodus of Chinese intellectuals needed for professorships.
Championing evangelical education against the Formosan odds is a heavily-built 61-year-old American missionary originally commissioned as an evangelist and Bible teacher by the Southern Presbyterian Board of World Missions, Dr. James R. Graham (no kin to the famous evangelist Graham, although James is Far Eastern representative of Billy’s evangelistic association). As late as seven years ago, missionary Graham did not feel that educational work was part of his calling. He was finally impressed, however, “that unless there was a college for the young people of the churches, there would be no educated ministry and many of the children of Christian homes would be lost to the churches.” Says Graham:
“The Lord had ‘written a vision and made it plain’ as he commanded the prophet Habakkuk ‘that he may run that readeth it.’ Though others seem to read the writing of the vision, [I] seemed to be the only one that would run to accomplish it.”
In 1954 Graham got a few dollars together and acquired a tract of land which included the skeleton of a building housing Nationalist troops. Windows, doors, and a roof were eventually installed and the troops vacated. Here was established the campus of the Taiwan Christian College of Science and Engineering, located near the township of Chung Li, 25 miles from the Formosan capital of Taipei. Fifteen hundred applications were received for admission to the first freshman class in the fall of 1955; 220 of these passed entrance examinations and were admitted.
Within a few months the Nationalist Chinese government had decreed that its Ministry of Education would thereafter conduct all college entrance examinations. Because of its curricular stress on science and engineering, to which the young Chinese readily gravitate, Taiwan Christian College immediately attracted hundreds of non-Christians. Curriculum Bible classes were retained as electives, however, and proved highly popular even among unbelievers. The result, says Graham, was that in the 1960 graduating class more than half had professed conversion experiences during their stay at the college.
Spearheading both spiritual and academic priorities at the college are President Hsieh Ming-San, a Chinese scholar who holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, and Dean Levi Lovegren, a Conservative Baptist of Swedish descent who spent four years and eight months in a Communist prison on the mainland.
Enrollment this fall topped 1,200, which outstrips Tunghai University, started the same year with far better physical resources. The only other Christian college registered with the Formosa government is Soochow University, transplanted from the mainland.
A year ago, still another Graham venture was realized with the opening of Christ’s College on a site overlooking the Formosa Straits at Kwan Doo, 11 miles northwest of Taipei. Graham chose not to seek accreditation for this second school, preferring “to persist to the accomplishment of our original vision of a college that is Christ-centered throughout.” The curriculum is programmed around “liberal arts and pure science with a central emphasis on Bible.”
U. S. Christians are often the most outspoken in favor of defending Formosa militarily. But not nearly so many are concerned with buttressing the Nationalist Chinese ideologically. Graham is challenging American apathy to the extent that he can round up enough funds for “the biggest evangelical Christian university in all of Asia.”
