Mission: Bangladesh

From Dacca came a birth announcement written by International Christian Fellowship (ICF) missionary Phil Parshall:

“A nine-month gestation and fourteen days of agonizing labor culminated in the bloody cesarean birth of the world’s eighth largest nation.

“Name: Bangladesh.

“Size: 75 million population.

“Disposition: Jubilant.

“Prognosis: Democratic, socialistic.”

The new baby is a special challenge to Christian missionaries. In its prenatal state as East Pakistan it comprised only 15 per cent of Pakistan’s land area but was home for 55 per cent of the nation’s people. More than 1,300 persons were jammed into each of its 55,000 square miles, making it perhaps the most densely populated nation on earth. But less than one-third of the Protestant missionary force of 400 was based there. Only 200,000 residents professed Christianity (less than one-fourth of 1 per cent of the population), half of them Catholic. Muslims predominated; Hindus were a minority.

Those statistics remain virtually the same; only the name—and government—has been changed (Bangladesh means “Bengal State”).

Catholics began mission work in the area in the sixteenth century. Baptist pioneer William Carey arrived in 1795. The work he started is still carried on by thirty missionaries under the Baptist Missionary Society of Great Britain. Baptists from Australia and New Zealand work closely with them. (The majority of Protestants are Baptists.)

Medical missionary Viggo Olsen of the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) says the future looks bright for missionary work under the government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a Muslim who insists he will run a secular state free of Islamic strictures.

Parshall agrees, but ICF head William Pagett fears that Bangladesh may be influenced by India’s hostile attitude toward missionary work.

Meanwhile, missionaries on the field report growing interest in Christianity, especially among Hindus. Olsen says dozens of Hindus have professed Christ in the past few months. Several mission boards have enrolled thousands of Bengalis in Bible correspondence courses. Pagett’s ICF grades 3,000 lessons a month.

Most mission boards are currently engaged in extensive relief operations. Millions of refugees are returning from India, food is scarce, and the nation’s economy is in shambles. The Baptist World Alliance has asked its members to raise $100,000 for relief, and Norwegian Lutherans have donated two DC-6’s to fly food shuttles.

Most missionaries were evacuated during the recent turmoil, but many resettled at their posts before the new government got around to visa and travel regulations. Olsen stayed to man his Chittagong district hospital and was able to arrange immediate re-entry for many in the ABWE force of forty. Now on furlough, he says the Bangladesh ambassador has assured him missionaries will be welcome.

Other missions with work in Bangladesh include: Southern Baptists, Anglicans, Welsh Presbyterians, Seventh-day Adventists, Assemblies of God, Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), Churches of God in North America (Findlay, Ohio), and Christian Missions in Many Lands (Plymouth Brethren). Only the latter and ICF also have missionaries in West Pakistan.

An Editor Exits

Editor Alan Geyer will leave the Christian Century May 1 to become the first Dag Hammarskjöld Professor of Peace Studies at Colgate. He became editor of the influential, theologically liberal weekly in 1968.

With Geyer as editor, the Century has undergone a visual transformation. It had previously been characterized by a sedate, gray look that gained whatever eye appeal it had from good typography. Geyer introduced extensive use of photographs, line drawings, cartoons, and some color.

Theological content has not changed appreciably. The magazine usually meanders somewhere between neo-orthodoxy and modern radical theology.

The Century dates back to 1884. Although it has never had a large circulation, it enjoyed for many years the distinction of being the most respected religious journal in North America, if not the world. Many think it has now lost a substantial portion of the impact it once had.

Geyer, a Methodist, was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in sociology at Ohio Wesleyan, then earned an S.T.B. and a Ph.D. in Christian ethics at Boston University. He taught at Mary Baldwin College and had pastoral experience before going to the Century at age 37.

Religious News Service quoted Geyer as saying that the Century is basically “doing well,” but noted that like some other religious magazines, it is currently experiencing financial problems.

Nearly one-third of its 35,000 subscriptions go to libraries.

Pulpit Vacancy

One of the nation’s most prestigious pulpits will soon be vacant. Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, who reached his sixty-fifth birthday last December, is resigning as pastor of National Presbyterian Church. He plans subsequently to be a “preacher-at-large” and wants to devote more time to writing and to his position as chaplain of the U. S. Senate.

Elson has been pastor of the church since 1946. In 1970 the congregation moved into an elegant new building that has become a tourist attraction. A number of government dignitaries worship at the church. Its most prominent member was President Eisenhower, whose funeral Elson conducted on national television.

Elson is a native of Monongahela, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Asbury College. He holds honorary degrees from Wheaton and Occidental Colleges and has been a contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY since its inception.

The local presbytery is being asked to dissolve the pastoral relationship effective upon the election of Elson’s successor or by January 28, 1973.

Godly Ranks Reduced

Three much publicized tragedies last month brought Christians to violent deaths in widely separated areas. The incidents occurred in a Peruvian jungle, along a Gaza Strip highway, and outside a Pennsylvania motel.

A Christmas Eve crash of a Peruvian prop jet claimed the lives of ninety-one persons, including missionaries and Christian students bound for the Wycliffe Translators mission base at Pucallpa, 450 miles northeast of Lima. The plane was not found until early last month, after the sole survivor, a German teen-age girl, emerged from the jungle.

Among the victims: Harold Davis, a Wycliffe translator working with the Machiguenga Indians; Mr. and Mrs. Roger Hedges, short-term teachers at a Wycliffe jungle base; Nathan Lyon, 13-year-old son of missionaries; Donald Erickson, a Minnesota resident making a holiday visit to missionary relatives; and several Quechua Indian youths on their way to a Wycliffe school.

The Gaza Strip incident occurred at night near a refugee center. Guerrillas machine-gunned to death Southern Baptist nurse Mavis Pate, 47, of Ringgold, Louisiana. She was in a Baptist hospital van driven by fellow hospital mission worker Edward Nicholas, 47, of Austin, Texas. Nicholas and his 17-year-old daughter were wounded; two other children escaped unhurt. (He and the same daughter were wounded two years ago when their car hit a land mine.) Local military authorities say the guerrillas may have mistaken the van for a military vehicle.

The Pennsylvania violence involved Delaware state troopers David Yarrington, 24, of Wilmington, and Ronald Carey, 29, of Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania. They were fatally shot outside a motel just across the Pennsylvania state line where they had pursued a couple on a hold-up spree. Both officers were married, had young children, were active in their churches, and were known for their forthright Christian witness among fellow officers.

A police spokesman said Carey’s funeral was the largest police funeral in the nation’s history. More than 1,200 policemen from twenty-six states assembled at the Marcus Hook Baptist Church, where pastor Randy Carroll spoke of Carey’s faith in Christ.

At Yarrington’s funeral the next day in a suburban Wilmington Assembly of God church, pastor Asa Martin declared, “Their deaths have reduced the ranks of the godly by two too many.”

Religion In Transit

Time reported that on the basis of reader response its June cover story on the Jesus revolution snagged third place in popularity of 1971 cover features, just behind stories on the Calley trial and the Pentagon papers.

When Congress reconvened January 18 Christian students at Harvard and other schools were praying. The Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, lamenting national forgetfulness of “need for the counsels of God,” called for the day of prayer.

Best sellers at the Jesuits’ University of San Francisco bookstore, according to the National Catholic Reporter, are Toffler’s Future Shock and Reich’s Greening of America. Right behind, in third and fourth place, are Reuben’s Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex and The Sensuous Woman by “J.”

The 13-year-old Catholic publishing firm Herder and Herder, with estimated sales of $2 million last year, was sold to McGraw-Hill for an undisclosed sum. Among Herder and Herder’s top sellers: A New Catechism (400,000 copies since 1968) and The Sex Book (125,000 since publication in 1971).

The City Council of Evanston, Illinois—home city of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—voted 10–7 to permit the sale of liquor in clubs, restaurants, and hotels there. The campus community (near Northwestern) has been dry since its founding in 1851.

In a nod to ecumenism, Chicago’s Immanuel Lutheran Church placed a statue of Pope John XXIII on display alongside a statue of a deceased Swedish Lutheran leader. Immanuel’s pastor, C. J. Curtis, teaches at the Catholic DePaul University.

When Jesus Christ Superstar came to Constitution Hall in Washington, D. C., last month, Seventh-day Adventist youths handed out thousands of leaflets explaining the SDA answer to the rock opera’s question: Who is this man? The strategy did “far more to witness for Christ than protest could,” commented SDA youth executive John H. Hancock.

Pastor Jack Hyles of First Baptist Church, Hammond, Indiana, claims a new world Sunday-school attendance record was set in his church when 12,530 showed up on December 19. Many came aboard the church’s fleet of 108 buses. Thousands of free hamburgers were served after class. More than 500 conversions were registered. The church has an adult membership in excess of 15,000, and its average Sunday-school attendance last quarter was 6,295, according to sources.

Personalia

David Poling, who resigned from the helm of the ailing Christian Herald during a policy struggle last spring (see March 26, 1971, issue, page 34), has been named executive director of the United Presbyterian Synod of New Mexico.

Christian entertainers Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are currently appearing on “Country Crossroads,” a half-hour weekly television show produced by Southern Baptists and carried on more than 400 stations.

Mrs. Richard Nixon and the Reverend Billy Graham flew with a party of about forty persons to Monrovia, Africa, last month for inauguration activities for Liberia’s new president, William Tolbert. Graham gave the thanksgiving prayer during a special service in Providence Baptist Church.

Diane Kennedy Pike, widow of the late Episcopal bishop, has pulled up stakes in Santa Barbara, California, to establish a “free university of the spirit,” the Center for the Restoration of Knowing, in Littleton, a Denver suburb.

Deaths

CHARLES J. FEAVER, 76, president of the Shantymen’s Christian Association, which conducts an extensive outreach to mines, logging camps, and fishing centers of northern Canada; in Hamilton, Ontario, of a heart attack.

PATRIARCH MAXIMOS V, 77, former Orthodox ecumenical patriarch and spiritual leader of world Orthodoxy; in Istanbul.

H. G. RODINE, 79, first fulltime secretary of overseas missions of the Evangelical Free Church of America; in Glendora, California, of a heart attack.

CHARLES WESTPHAL, 83, longtime leader of France’s estimated 800,000 Protestants as president of the Protestant Federation of France; in Montpelier, France.

The Reverend Bernard Bodewes, 32, a white priest who has been a leader in the marathon civil-rights campaign in Cairo, Illinois, was excommunicated from the Catholic Church after he filed a civil damage suit against his bishop demanding $7,350 in back pay. Bishop Albert Zuroweste ordered the priest’s support cut off when Bodewes refused to give up his mission in Cairo; Bodewes had allowed St. Columba’s Mission to become headquarters for the militant United Front of Cairo.

United Church of Canada minister Donald Keating resigned from the ministry of his denomination in protest against what he regards as the “anti-Semitic” stance of United Church Observer editor A. C. Forrest, author of The Unholy Land, a critical dissection of Israeli Middle East policy. Keating claims the book virtually commits the church to a pro-Arab position in the public mind.

Andrew W. Tampling, an Alabama minister prominent in Southern Baptist circles, has become pastor of the First Baptist Church of Birmingham—more than sixteen months after the church was split over the refusal of a majority of the members to admit blacks to membership. Herbert J. Gilmore, then pastor of the church, and others quit in protest against the segregationist victory to found the nearby Baptist Church of the Covenant.

Nineteen-year-old Charles Whidden, a Baptist minister’s son who directs three choirs in his father’s church, spends Friday nights at a Miami synagogue—singing in a Jewish choir. He says he likes singing in Hebrew and enjoys the close-up learning about Judaism.

Salvation Army officer Paul J. Carlson moved from his post at the Army’s international headquarters in London to New York, where he assumed the rank of national commander, the Army’s top post in the United States. He succeeds Edward Carey, who has retired.

Gospel music continues to pack them in at Las Vegas clubs. Elvis Presley booked J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet to appear with him in a five-week stand at the International Hotel. The Presley-Stamps rendition of “How Great Thou Art” drew standing ovations. Meanwhile, Nashville’s Imperials Quartet recently returned from Europe, where they were the first gospel group to sing on the German TV network and the first to sing in East Berlin.

Charles Polcaster, 24, has succeeded in getting pastor Vernon C. Lyons of Chicago’s Ashburn Baptist Church on virtually every talk show in town. A self-styled “media guerrilla,” he serves on the Ashburn pastoral staff, and grooms other evangelicals for appearances on radio and TV in hopes of upgrading the evangelical image and getting fairer shakes from media people.

World Scene

A Vatican official said that during the last four years the Catholic Church has failed by more than $1.5 million to meet its financial obligations in joint Bible-translation work with Protestant organizations. Only $40,000 has been contributed, say sources, against estimated annual shares of $400,000 since 1968 for producing common Bibles in 117 languages.

A British government report recommends that the ban on entry of Scientologists into the country be abolished, but rejects complaints made by the cultists that they were being discriminated against on religious grounds rather than for reasons of alleged danger to the public welfare.

Canadians who object on religious grounds to participation in their country’s compulsory national pension plan have won exemption, a victory for communal groups such as Old Order Amish, Hutterites, and certain Mennonites.

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