"Incorrigible Optimist"

"Length of life has very little real significance." Arthur Judson Brown once said. "What's really important is the quality." The life of Dr. Brown had lots of both. He was 106 on his birthday Dec. 3, six weeks before his death, and back of that lay a solid career as a prime mover of Christian missionary work, as a founder of the ecumenical movement, as a lifelong advocate of Christian peace on earth among men of good will.

Presbyterian Missionary Brown once jovially compared himself to Satan in the Book of Job, who spent considerable time "going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it." He was born in Holliston, Mass., and never lost his love for the hard old New England way of life, with its boiled dinners and God-fearing Sundays. He admired the iron and certainty of the traditional Calvinist theology, "stern and rockbound" like the coast of Maine.

Brown studied at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, spent twelve years as a pastor in Ripon, Wis., Oak Park, Ill., and Portland, Ore., before his election in 1895 as administrative secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. "A divided church cannot save the world," Brown said, and with that in mind he helped organize one of the landmark events of 20th century Christian history: the Ecumenical Missionary Conference of 1900, which took the first major step toward ending the wasteful competition of church missions.

Brown served 34 years as secretary of the Missions Board, "thankful to have a part in the movement for human betterment." He produced what is still the classic guide to the essential meaning of pastoral life abroad, The Foreign Missionary. At the behest of his friend Herbert Hoover, Brown helped establish a number of World War I relief committees-notably Near East Relief, which raised more than $116 million to assist 1,500,000 war-dispossessed refugees.

Spry and witty, Brown remained "an incorrigible optimist," whose concern for cold war crises never destroyed his belief that the power of righteousness is greater than the power of evil. "Despite our inner conflicts and tensions and our outerspace contests," he would say, "we're going to survive. We'll not only survive; we will prevail."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.