Everyman's Burden

Once, spreading the Gospel was the white man's spiritual burden; now all the world's Christians share it. Says the Rev. Willem Visser 't Hooft, general secretary of the World Council of Churches: " 'Mission' no longer is traffic from West to East, but traffic from everywhere to everywhere."

In Mexico City last week, the new international flavor of mission work was aptly personalized at a meeting of the council's Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. More than 200 churchmen from 62 church bodies and 48 countries showed up to discuss the problems facing the spread of Christianity. Anglican Bishop John Sadiq summed up one of them: "Old non-Christian faiths have become renascent." M. M. Thomas of India pointed out another: a "secular ecumenism" that finds its focus not in Christ but in the brotherhood of man.

The churches seem to be finding solutions. Within the World Council, there is widespread debate about the need to forsake the traditional parish in favor of new forms of urban churchas--such as the "guild churches" of London, each of which ministers to a particular fragment of the city's population, or the Japanese cell churches that serve textile workers in Osaka and are run by ministers who also work as secretaries in the textile unions.

For Africans and Asians, a major problem is eliminating the prejudice against Christianity as an unwanted "cultural import." The young churches of the East are nationalizing their hierarchies and structures as fast as means allow and are developing mission forces of their own. More than 200 missionaries have been sent from one Asian land to another to preach the faith in unmistakably non-Western accents.

One augury of the churches' future is the presence of nonwhite missionaries in Western countries. This year, for example, the United Church of North India and Pakistan sent the Rev. Emmanuel Johnson to Glasgow, where he works in a mission parish that serves both emigrants from Pakistan and Scots. In time, more missionaries from the East will be called upon to preach the Gospel in Christian countries that are in need of re-evangelizing--including the U.S. Next spring, the National Council of Churches plans to send teams of ministers and laymen who are experts on racial conflict to Mississippi. The teams will include foreigners, probably from Africa and the melting-pot slums of industrial England.

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