A Plane's-Eye View

Christianity's greatest missionary, St. Paul, had his hands full keeping in touch with a scattering of churches along the shores of the Mediterranean. When the president of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, Henry P. Van Dusen, took a few months off early this year for some churchly visitation he calmly set out to visit church groups on four continents and in 20 countries, a trip of some 40,000 miles.* Last week in a sermon at Wellesley College, Dr. Van Dusen reported what he had found on his "plane's-eye view of Christianity around the world."

Head-Hunters & Hospitals. Everywhere he went, said Dr. Van Dusen, the Christian church was "the one resourceful, untiring, dauntless ministrant to human need--human need of all kinds." The old-fashioned picture of the missionary as a "well-intentioned but rather commonplace preacher, a Bible in one hand and an umbrella in the other, standing under a palm tree exhorting half-naked savages to discard their heathen ways" is as out of date as the daguerreotype. The typical Christian mission today is a center of three or four buildings--a hospital, a school, a church--from which a team of co-workers ("minister, doctor, nurse, school superintendent and teacher, agriculturist, social worker") moves out into the community.

In Asia, says Dr. Van Dusen, this kind of service has done much to overcome tendencies toward anti-Americanism. Even among the headhunters in Formosa, "there is taking place today one of the most remarkable mass movements into the Christian church . . . Since the war, they have built with their own hands over 100 new churches."

In Africa, south of the Sahara and north of Natal, 85% of all school education is under missionary direction. When Dr. Van Dusen asked the director of education in the Gold Coast where he managed to get teachers to man his recently quadrupled educational program, he replied: "From the missionary training colleges. There is no other possible source."

In the Belgian Congo, 75 years after the first two (Baptist) missionaries landed here, 1,700 missionaries of 30 Protestant denominations are directing 12,000 schools with 400,000 pupils and nearly 200 hospitals and dispensaries. They are all united in one body--the Congo Protestant Council. "They baptize into one church, the Church of Christ in the Congo, one of the finest examples of Christian cooperation on earth. And they have 600,000 church members, plus 300,000 inquirers, out of a population of some 12 million."

Pregnancy Preferred. The problems that beset the missions, Dr. Van Dusen found, are both old & new. The old problem of teaching sexual morality is still bafflingly difficult--especially in Africa, with its tradition of multiple marriage and its placid view of premarital and extramarital sexual relations. "One of our finest missionary nurses told me," he wrote back to friends, "that her African student nurses welcome pregnancy since it makes them more readily marriageable . . . The Paris Mission has projected a large boarding school to take little girls between six and eight years of age and keep them without ever letting them go home, until they marry, in an attempt to prepare them to become intelligent and chaste Christian wives."

Three other major factors with which the Protestant African missions will have to deal, says Dr. Van Dusen, are: 1) "the whirlwind of social, economic and political dislocations which are sweeping from the west coast eastward and southward"; 2) the multiplying activities of governments in fields previously dominated by the missions; 3) the expansion of Roman Catholicism, "especially in French, Belgian, Portuguese and Spanish territories."

Letter to Diognetus. But Van Dusen is confident of the outcome. "As one hops quickly from continent to continent and country to country, almost everything changes--climate, clothes, color of skin, customs, language, outlook. There is only one thing . . . which is everywhere the same: Christians and the Christian church . . .

"In the 2nd century, an unknown Christian wrote to his friend, Diognetus: 'What the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world . . . Christians hold the world together . . .' It may be that history's most important verdict upon these troubled times . . . will be: 'Christianity held the world together.' "

* His itinerary: Japan, Formosa, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Siam, India (where he spent two weeks at the Lucknow meetings of he World Council of Churches), Egypt, then down the east coast of Africa (Uganda, Kenya and Rhodesia) to Johannesburg and up the west coast (the Belgian and French Congos, the Cameroons, Nigeria, the Gold Coast).

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