The Missionary Literature Drive

NEWS

Christianity in the World Today

“The Church on the Offensive in the War of Ideas” is the challenge of World Missionary Literature Sunday to be observed October 12 in churches across America. Sponsored by Evangelical Literature Overseas (ELO), cooperative missionary literature ministry, this first annual observance focuses attention on an urgent need for world-wide Christian missionary literature offensives.

“Today approximately half the world’s population can read,” according to Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse in a recent article in the ELO Bulletin. “Present estimates,” he reports, “indicate that one million people are learning to read every week. But what will they read? The answer is simple—whatever is available—everything, anything.”

Helping place the printed Gospel message in hungry hands has been the work of ELO since its founding six years ago. ELO, literature arm of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Missions Association, has encouraged the holding of intermission literature conferences to bring about closer cooperation of already existing missionary agencies on the field.

New African Magazine Published

Dramatic evidence of the success of such cooperation is the launching this month of Our Africa, eleventh mass-appeal Christian magazine originated in the last six years. Sponsored by the South Africa General Mission, Our Africa is directed to the 55 per cent of the South African population who can read English. In this day of emphasis on the indigenous church, it is significant that under missionary Don Smith, SAGM literature secretary, nationals are being trained to take over the responsibility of writing, producing, and distributing the magazine.

Pioneer of the mass-appeal Christian magazines is African Challenge, published in Nigeria under the Sudan Interior Mission. Printed in English, Challenge reaches thousands of newly literate Africans with simply written self-help material and the Gospel of Christ.

Before the end of the year two more new magazines will appear, both in the Belgian Congo. Sponsored by the Africa Literature Society, Oyebi will be published in the Lingala language; Sikama, in Kikongo.

Other evidences of evangelical cooperation are the score of literature fellowships now active in strategic areas. Pioneer is LEAL, the Latin American Fellowship. In the Belgian Congo alone six fellowships are now active in as many language areas. In India, ELFI (Evangelical Literature Fellowship of India) has been instrumental in the founding of Kiran, mass-appeal magazine in Telegu, sponsored by International Missions.

Recent progress was reported by the Rev. Harold B. Street, executive secretary of ELO, following a trip to the simmering Near East, North Africa, and Europe. In Beirut, heart of the Arabic-speaking world, 38 delegates from 27 mission boards and national churches, representing 11 countries, made plans to set up what will become the nineteenth cooperative literature organization.

A Unique Opportunity

The Beirut conference pinpointed the unique opportunity of developing Christian literature beamed to the 100 million Arabic-speaking people of the Near East and North Africa—almost 100 per cent Moslem. In meeting this regional need, a basic literature, suitable for adaptation in other languages, can be provided for the whole Moslem world of 500 million souls, largest single religious body in the world.

“Because more and more of the peoples of the world can read this life-giving message, of Christ’s coming to give men new life,” Barnhouse emphasizes, “we must tell it with the printed page. To meet the urgency of the hour there must be a literature program that will concentrate on communicating the love of Christ to a divided world, and that will identify itself with the people it seeks to serve.”

Antecedent to this task of communicating the love of God to man is the basic need of teaching the world’s illiterates to read.

A “breakthrough” on the literacy front has been scored these past two years in the literacy-by-TV program in Memphis, Tennessee. This pilot project of a community educational TV program, using the Laubach literacy system, has successfully taught over 2,000 adults to read. To share the Memphis plan, the local Chamber of Commerce recently invited representative national leaders to a two-day Conference on World Literacy by Television. Response was encouraging.

Veteran literacy expert Dr. Frank Laubach, in his keynote address, pointed out that America might lose the cold war to communism in Asia and Africa if we fall behind in the literacy race.

Laubach retired recently from the Committee on World Literacy and Christian Literature, but the committee—known as Lit-Lit—continues his work. A unit of the Division of Foreign Missions of the National Council of Churches of Christ, the committee works with NCC members and nonmembers alike in stepping up world-wide lit-lit programs.

“Nine people out of ten in South Asia and Africa are illiterate,” reported Dr. Laubach at the Memphis conference. “That area is the world’s question mark.… These people are destitute because they are illiterate. They want to come up out of their ignorance more than anything else in the whole world.”

“People fear,” said Laubach, “that if we teach illiterates to read, they will read Communist literature. But we must provide them with what they ought to read.… If we mobilize our writing talents to win friends and influence people in Asia and Africa, we would have nothing to fear from the Communists. Their writings are cheap, and they are as dull as a government bulletin.

“But teaching a billion illiterates to read is a gigantic and costly task.… We need a mass medium which will teach these billion to read as swiftly as the totalitarian methods of the Communists are doing in Russia and China.”

He listed television and motion pictures as two great potential teachers, then added, “This vast world enterprise would require a third program—training an army of specialists to install the equipment, to direct the teaching, and to organize villages into literacy campaigns.…

“Where is the money to be found?… Under Public Law 480 our government has sold about three billion dollars worth of our surpluses to 25 backward countries. Because they could not pay us in dollars, we allowed them to deposit that money in their own currency in their own banks. Congress has now passed an amendment to this bill permitting the use of that money for education and literacy. Moreover, many farsighted men and women in business and philanthropy are keenly aware that we cannot save Asia and Africa unless we lift their unbearable load of ignorance and poverty.”

North Vs. South

Officialdoms of Northern and Southern Presbyterianism split along a familiar front this month: race relations.

“Enforcing (the Supreme Court desegregation decision) with troops and tanks if necessary, is a lesser evil—however undesirable—than the alternative of buying temporary peace,” read a statement from the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Signers were Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, stated clerk, and Dr. Theophilus M. Taylor, moderator.

“I must heartily disagree,” countered Philip F. Howerton, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. “Force can accomplish nothing but chaos.”

A few days later, ministers of the Washburn Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. took a stand of their own which set them at odds with Arkansas Governor Orval E. Faubus. The Little Rock area clergymen in a resolution urged the governor to countermand his proclamation refusing to open the city’s four high schools.

In ill-tempered words, Faubus said “some Presbyterian ministers have been brainwashed” by “Communists and left-wingers.”

The ministers denied the charges and demanded an apology.

The race issue failed to slow a move by the Northern and Southern Presbyterian churches to operate Austin Theological Seminary jointly. The Texas synod of the Northern church voted to buy a half-interest in the seminary. Southern Presbyterians have already approved the plan. Northern Presbyterians will pass on the proposal at their General Assembly next year. The Texas seminary has been integrated for more than 10 years.

Divine Promotions

E. Arthur Bonney was a guided missile expert at the Johns Hopkins Applied Research Laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland. Several years ago he heard God’s call to the ministry. “Last year,” he recalls, “the calling grew so strong I couldn’t refuse.”

This month Bonney, 40, enrolled at Gordon Divinity School in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, for theological training. With him went his wife and three children. They were starting all over in obedience to the Great Commission and divine beckoning.

Robert T. Yonkman of Grand Rapids, Michigan, also knows what it means to pull up occupational stakes, middle-age notwithstanding. Married and the father of a seven-year-old girl, he gave up work as an electrical manufacturer’s agent to enroll at Bexley Hall Seminary of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. That was three years ago. This summer Yonkman was ordained and became rector of Christ Episcopal Church of Charlevoix, a small town in northern Michigan.

Theological Center

A Sealantic Fund grant of $1,500,000 will make possible immediate construction of buildings for the new Interdenominational Theological Center of Atlanta, Georgia.

The center will combine educational functions of Gammon Theological Seminary (Methodist), the graduate faculty of religion at Morris Brown College (African Methodist Episcopal), the graduate program in religion at Morehouse College (Baptist), and the Phillips School of Theology at Jackson, Tennessee (Christian Methodist Episcopal). Classes are expected to begin next fall.

Ministerial Problems

What bothers clergymen in the United States?

The Ministers Life and Casualty Union of Minneapolis sponsored a survey to find out. The poll revealed that ministers worry most about how to handle demands on their time, especially burdensome details of administration.

Clergymen also are troubled by church finances and by their own inadequate salaries as well as by church members’ lack of interest in spiritual things.

Some 44 per cent of the 1,405 ministers polled said they felt their salaries inadequate. About 52 per cent reported salaries (excluding parsonages) of between $3,000 and $5,000 a year. Another 28 per cent are paid reportedly from $5,000 to $7,000. Less than one-half of one per cent said they received more than $10,000. Ten per cent reported salaries under $3,000.

Nearly one-fourth of the responding clergymen said their churches expect too little of them in the way of counseling.

Most of the ministers (63 per cent) complained of not enough time for leisure activities, although most (65 per cent) were satisfied with their vacation time.

The Negro Baptists

For America’s two big Negro Baptist groups, the Supreme Court’s latest integration ruling could not have been timelier. Conventions of both were in session when the nation’s highest tribunal ordered Little Rock to proceed with integration. The two groups met simultaneously (September 9–14), the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., in Chicago; the National Baptist Convention of America in Detroit.

At Chicago Coliseum, some 10,000 delegates greeted the announcement with shouts of “Thank you, God” and “Yes, Lord.” The assembly sang “Rock of Ages.” Many delegates cried openly.

Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, who was unanimously reelected president of the incorporated body, had urged delegates to accept the court’s order in a “spirit of meekness and worship and not cheers.”

The announcement was made immediately following an address to the convention by Democratic Representative Brooks Hays of Arkansas, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Hays cited the need for Christian brotherhood.

In Detroit, 8,000 delegates met at King Solomon Baptist Church. Their reaction to the Supreme Court decision was equally subdued.

“There was no demonstration,” said the Rev. G. Goings Daniels, recording secretary. “We took the matter quietly as a matter of course.”

Keynote speaker for the unincorporated Baptists was the Rev. Martin Luther King of Montgomery, Alabama.

The National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., is America’s third largest Protestant denomination with more than 4½ million members. The National Baptist Convention of America is sixth largest with more than 2½ million members.

Church Effectiveness

Churches today “are not very effective either in changing society or even in making clear what it means to be a Christian,” according to Dr. Winthrop S. Hudson, professor of church history at Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

“The church is failing,” he told a Baptist student assembly, “because it is confused within itself on the nature of the Christian faith, the nature of the Christian church, and the Christian vocation.”

“A student’s first job is to draw together small groups for Bible study and theological discussions to clarify his thinking on the basic nature of his faith,” Hudson said. “The current spirit of easy tolerance which says that one religion is as good as another is a death-blow to evangelism.”

A student’s second task as a church member, he said, is to “rediscover the nature of the church as the household of God.” He warned against thinking of the church building as the church. “These buildings are little more than monuments to ourselves—the product of our own pride rather than of our devotion to God,” he said.

The professor’s remarks were addressed to 500 delegates attending the sixth annual Baptist Student Conference at Green Lake, Wisconsin.

Baptists In Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh Baptist Church is a new venture of Southern Baptists in western Pennsylvania. The work began some three months ago as a mission of the Evangel Baptist Church of nearby Weirton, West Virginia. Now the church has 26 members, all formerly from the South. A recent Sunday service drew 60 worshipers (some were Northern Baptists).

The congregation represents the first Southern Baptist work in the Pittsburgh area. Services are held at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in the Steel City’s civic center.

Said a Northern Baptist official: “We will be courteous and Christian in our attitude and will want to work with them in the same cooperative spirit that we share with other denominations.”

C.N.W.

The “Y” Program

Spiritual priorities were plainly on the margin at a meeting of YMCA general secretaries in Pasadena, California, last month. The “Y” administrators were largely preoccupied with extension of present programs.

Commenting on the plea of CHRISTIANITY TODAY for a larger spiritual thrust, Randolph E. Myers of Washington told the secretaries that the spiritual thrust is uppermost in the capital.

Chairman Harper Glezen of Minneapolis called the problem of expanding services into new suburbs one of the most pressing.

Recruitment and training of YMCA secretaries was an acknowledged problem. A national commission is at work on it. Currently the “Y” gets half its secretaries from George Williams College, Chicago, and Springfield College, Springfield, Massachusetts. Both are traditional training grounds. The next largest group comes from seminaries, church-related liberal arts colleges and schools which train social workers.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.