China Missions

Doubting Pauls have been unable to comprehend that Re-Thinking Missions, published last winter by the Rockefeller-sponsored Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, gave a true picture of Christianity's status in the Orient. To confirm that picture, the Inquiry last week supplied them with Volume V of its source books--a combined volume of facts on Baptist, Congregational, Dutch Reformed, Episcopalian, Methodist and Presbyterian missions in China.*

The China report supports the general contentions of Re-Thinking Missions. The Laymen's Inquiry noted that Christian endeavor is out of line with current Oriental trends and advocated that Christianity concern itself directly with social service and only obliquely with conversion. The sociological work should be carefully coordinated by a super-missionary body representing all important Protestant denominations.

Oblique evangelism is an attitude which many a devout Christian cannot stomach. He cannot picture Paul sidling into a school, hospital or household. Dr. James De Wolf Perry, presiding bishop of the Episcopalians, went to Japan and China at his own expense to see personally if his missionaries there were carrying on like that. Three weeks ago he returned, convinced that they still put their religious teachings above social welfare.

Nonetheless Dr. Harlan Paul Douglass who directed the China survey for the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry last week stuck to his conclusions--that after a century of evangelism China, with perhaps 400,000,000 population, has no more than 400,000 members of Protestant churches, perhaps another 400,000 Christians who belong to no congregation and 2,489,000 Roman Catholics; that Protestant Church membership has fallen off 50,000 to 75,000 in recent years. Declared Dr. Douglass: "Christians who combine the spiritual and the social are needed [in China], especially to plan and demonstrate and set up norms for religious education. It is of the utmost importance that these two things be not separated . . . that spirituality shall prove itself not sterile or callous to social suffering and injustice."

*CHINA (LAYMEN'S FOREIGN MISSIONS INQUIRY FACT-FINDERS' RKPORTS)--Harpers ($1.50).

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