Alongside the more obvious turmoil that now engulfs Viet Nam, there is a war being waged for souls. A dedicated coterie of American evangelical missionaries and Vietnamese Christians are pressing the claims of the Gospel in the face of numerous adverse circumstances such as Communist hostility, Roman Catholic influence, pagan culture, and sheer indifference. The spiritual conflict is graphically depicted in a new book published by Harper & Row, The Bamboo Cross, by Homer E. Dowdy.
“Viet Nam has its Christian stalwarts to match those of any place and time,” says Dowdy, former Flint, Michigan, newspaper reporter.
Dowdy’s account of guerrilla warfare is written from the behind-the-lines perspective of the Vietnamese mountain tribes-people, whose culture contrasts sharply with the more Oriental-type Vietnamese who have lived in the cities. The account revolves around Sau, a tribe leader, described as a man marked for torture and death if he is ever caught by the Communist Viet Cong.
Dowdy traveled throughout South Viet Nam to gather material. Cast in a novel-like narrative, his book suffers at points from overwriting. Recent political upheavals and Catholic-Buddhist riots serve, however, to focus timely interest on Dowdy’s volume.
“I got around by making myself as little known to the authorities as possible,” he says. “I was afraid if the Army knew I was there, they’d say I couldn’t go. As to front lines, there weren’t any. Small battles spring up all around you, and you never know when you will run into shooting.”
Dowdy recalls one trip with a missionary when they pulled the car up to a row of gunners in a ditch. The troops had cornered some Viet Cong guerrillas in a thicket and were trying to flush them out.
His only injury while in Viet Nam, however, was of a non-combative nature. He injured his right hand against a tree branch while riding an elephant in a tiger hunt. The injury pained him for three months.
Dowdy indicates that it was the acceptance of Christianity by the tribespeople that saved many of them from the Viet Cong. For centuries the mountain people had been reluctant to move down into the rich valley below because of fear of evil spirits. It is doubtful that they would have fled from the Viet Cong had not Sau introduced them to the Gospel.
Once they were in the valley, new problems came up. The tribespeople who were accustomed to the cold mountain air and familiar with the edible wild foods in their native forests found the new locale difficult. In the warmer climate they became ill and languid and quarrelsome, then hungry and angry as their first crops failed because of their inexperience. For a time they turned against Sau.
After they had become adjusted to their new homes, had harvested bountiful crops, and were enjoying more abundance than they had ever known, the Viet Cong again descended upon them. The guerrillas surrounded the valley on three sides and fenced in the people with deep rows of bamboo spikes. Once again they had to move.
The most dramatic episode in the book tells how Sau’s brother Kar led a mass exodus of his village down a river past the bloodthirsty Viet Cong.
The Evangelical Church of Viet Nam is the only Protestant national body in the country. It is the outgrowth of missionary work by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which started back in 1911, when Robert A. Jaffray crossed from China into what was then French Indo-China. The Alliance currently maintains more than 100 missionaries in Viet Nam.
Dowdy states:
“Not to set up mission schools and orphanages and hospitals, but through teaching of the Bible to establish the Church, believing that a well-taught Church will develop its own conscience tor the physical, social, economic, and educational needs of its people—this has been the guiding rule.”
Airborne Enterprise
A compact twin-engine aircraft designed especially for use in pioneer missionary work underwent initial flight tests this past summer. Carl A. Mortenson, manager of the Evangel-Air development project, said he is satisfied with the results of the tests. He predicts that the plane will be operating in foreign skies within a year.
“The first phase of our flight test program indicates that we have a good basic design which is worth the usual ‘de-bugging’ and refinements normally incorporated into production aircraft built thereafter,” said Mortenson. “We are moving forward with the program leading to final certification and field evaluation.”
The plane, tagged the “Evangel 4500,” had its maiden flight on July 27. On board were Mortenson and Lynn Washburn, former missionary pilot in Peru now with Ozark Airlines. They wore crash helmets, shoulder harnesses, and parachutes. Firefighting equipment was placed at points along the runway. A physician and a nurse stood by with medical supplies.
The flight, made in the area near Hampshire, Illinois, where the plane was built, came off without incident. Another aircraft with a representative of the Federal Aviation Agency aboard flew chase. Since then the “Evangel” has logged more than twenty-five hours in the air.
Mortenson said that in some ways the plane performs even better than had been hoped. One objective of the design was to enable short take-off runs, perhaps as little as 600 feet. Mortenson said the plane surprised them by becoming airborne after a run of only 450 feet.
A defect discovered in the plane’s instrument system will be corrected without much difficulty, he added.
The rationale of the “Evangel” was that a twin-engine aircraft would reduce appreciably the risks involved in missionary flying, particularly in remote areas where landing strips are scarce. Moreover, the plane’s designers came up with a fuselage that handles bulky cargo and readily converts to accommodate six to eight passengers. The design blends power, ruggedness, compactness, and easy maintenance.
A non-profit corporation was established to aid the project. All financing has come through individual contributions. (Sec CHRISTIANITY TODAY, May 10, 1963; February 28, 1964.)
Survival In The Jungle
A noted Southern Baptist clergyman and a missionary pilot survived the crash landing of their single-engine plane in the Peruvian jungle this month.
Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, largest in the Southern Baptist Convention, was on an annual missions tour. Neither he nor the pilot, Floyd Lyons of the Wycliffe Bible Translators’ air arm, was injured.
The pair were flying in a pontoon-equipped Helio Courier when, according to Criswell, “the plane almost exploded. We lost all power and began to sink immediately toward the jungle.”
Lyons spotted a small creek, and though it was filled with rocks and logs he figured it was their only chance. The plane skidded over the obstacles and came to a stop on a sandbank.
A Return To Mombasa
Evangelical Christianity came to the mainland of East Africa in 1844 when the Ludwig Krapf family landed at Mombasa. Four days after arrival Krapf buried his young wife and six days later their infant child. But he clung to Mombasa and to his missionary task and explored the Kenya hinterland as well as the coastal region of Tanganyika to the south. In the ensuing 120 years his missionary successors and their national fellow Christians have spread Christianity throughout Kenya and Tanganyika and have seen the establishment of at least a nominal Christianity in Uganda. Last month the city of Mombasa, still the principal East African port and still predominantly Muslim, hosted a visiting throng of six thousand Christians from these lands.
A revival movement that arose in western Uganda about thirty years ago has spread to many parts of East Africa and unites across denominational lines (without severing them) many who wish to testify to their experience of salvation through Jesus Christ. Locally such people meet weekly in groups for Bible study, prayer, and mutual exhortation and testimony to God’s dealings with them in forgiveness and empowerment since the previous occasion. Such groups are related to one another through movement of participants from one community to another, in some cases through inspiration and instruction by common leaders, and through regional meetings and conventions. Last month’s four-day gathering at Mombasa was such a convention on a grand scale.
A speaker’s platform was set up in the shade of a huge fig tree on a schoolground overlooking the Indian Ocean. Many in the audience sat under mango trees. In the evening, floodlights were turned on. The Anglican communion seemed to be best represented, but the crowd also included large numbers from the Africa Inland Church, planted by the Africa Inland Mission, plus Presbyterians, Methodists, and a sprinkling of Lutherans, Mennonites, and Moravians from Tanganyika. Some sixty missionaries were on hand. The only reported incident was the delay of a special train from Moshi that struck and killed a rhinoceros.
After breakfast each morning an enlarged “team” met in one comer of the grounds screened off with palm-leaf thatch and got set for the work of the day by turning to God and his Word and by exhortation and consultation. Morning and afternoon sessions of the convention lasted from two to three hours. All addresses and public statements were made either in Swahili or in English, with sentence-by-sentence translation into the other language. In the evenings the crowd spread out into sixteen different meeting places in the city. As they returned to their sleeping quarters each night the moonlit streets echoed with the strains of the revival movement’s theme song, “Tukutendereza” (the Lord be praised).
Literacy’s Champion
Friends of Dr. Frank C. Laubach helped him to celebrate his eightieth birthday this month by treating him to a round of banquets throughout the country.
The noted “apostle to the illiterates” was born September 2, 1884, in Benton, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary and went to the Philippines as a missionary. There he realized that the people’s greatest handicap was illiteracy, and since then he has probably done more to reduce illiteracy than any other man alive.
By conservative estimate, the “Each One Teach One” method Laubach developed nearly thirty-five years ago has brought the ability to read and write to some 60 million people in more than 100 countries.
“Do you think Christ is smiling at us Christians in America when all we can spare to save the world is one dollar out of twenty-two?” he asks. “If you could say to Christ, ‘Our church has $22,000; what should we do with it?’ would He say, ‘Put $21,000 in stained glass windows and a tower, and then send a thousand dollars abroad’?”
Laubach says that “compassion is our greatest strength. If Americans will mobilize their compassion, I have no doubt at all that we can stop the spread of Communism.”
The Discipling Function
A noted missionary leader suggests that better care of converts would considerably accelerate evangelization in non-Christian lands.
“Where comparisons are possible,” says Dr. Vernon Mortenson, “the number of baptisms is only 15 or 20 per cent of the professed conversions.”
Mortenson is general director of The Evangelical Alliance Mission and president of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association. His observations appear in the September–October issue of the IFMA News.
“If we discipled all professed converts to prepare them to take their proper places as functioning, reproducing members in local churches, we could greatly speed up world evangelization,” said Mortenson.
The lessons, he declared, are these:
“Not to evangelize less, but to disciple more so that the percentage of converts brought to maturity may be greatly increased.
“That every mission should recapture the New Testament emphasis and reshape its methods along New Testament lines to produce solid, steady growth in the churches leading, in turn, to ever higher levels of evangelistic activity and church establishment.
“That renewed emphasis be given to praying out men called to be missionary ‘apostles,’ whose specialization will be churches leading, in turn, to ever highering, counseling, warning, and establishing the believers as functioning members in local spiritual congregations.”
Free Transportation
New Air Force regulations spell out circumstances under which missionary groups and other religious organizations may fly goods abroad free of charge. Such cargo is sent via U. S. Air Force and Air National Guard training flights—which are necessary with or without cargo.
Religious groups may apply for cargo space on international flights through local Air Force transport units. Such units are stationed at Air Force bases throughout the country. Training flights are normally programmed three months in advance.
An Air Force spokesman in Washington said priority is given perishable goods and emergency supplies, particularly when disaster relief is involved. Transportation of individuals would be unusual, he said, but not altogether out of the question.
Training flights usually follow the standard global routes of the Military Air Transport Service, the spokesman added. Cargoes are accepted only if they do not change the flight destinations “appreciably,” he declared, and only when they do not compete with established commercial runs. He said, moreover, that military cargoes have priority and that approving authority for all cargo space applications rests with the Pentagon.
Congo Evacuation
Rebel activity in northeast Congo forced the evacuation of a number of American Protestant missionaries last month. Although a rebel leader vowed to wipe out all religious institutions in captured territories, there were no immediate reports of violence involving missionary personnel.
The Africa Inland Mission reported the evacuation of eighteen stations with some 120 missionaries. Conservative Baptists and the Evangelical Free Church said that dozens of their missionaries also were obliged to leave their posts in the northeast Congo region.
