Mission's End

In Manhattan's Madison Square Garden this week was to open a winter sports show, complete with a ski slide covered with snow-like ground ice. Two days before workmen began installing equipment for this commercial venture the Garden was the scene of a less publicized, less spectacular event. Paying nothing to get in, 18,000 New Yorkers settled themselves among its 20,000 seats. There was music by a Salvation Army band, a massed choir from city churches, a single speech. The speaker was that ever zealous Methodist Missionary, Rev. Dr. E. (for Eli) Stanley Jones. Cried he:

''Man's mind has been swept of superstitions, and garnished with conveniences, but has been left empty of a constructive way of living. . . . We must put God back into Life."

With this Manhattan mass meeting ended the nationwide tour begun last September by the Federal Council of Churches' National Preaching Mission to revivify the spiritual life of the U. S. (TIME, Sept. 28). This venture, first of its kind, enlisted the aid of 70 U. S., Canadian and British religionists who in groups of various sizes visited 25 U.S. localities. Conceived originally by one-time Moderator Hugh Thomson Kerr of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., the project cost $60,000 of which two-thirds was raised by local churches, the rest by private donations, John D. Rockefeller Jr. being put down for a modest contribution. With details of transportation handled by Secretary Jesse Moren Bader of the Federal Council's Department of Evangelism, the tour went off without mishap. Traveling simply by train and plane, members of Preaching Mission "teams" kept themselves physically fit by eschewing whatever social functions they might have been invited to, spiritually consecrated by dropping to their knees at 8 a.m. breakfasts in prayer with local ministerial committees formed to collaborate with them wherever they went.

In Manhattan last week Missionaries said that their messages had reached a total of 1,000,000 people. Biggest per capita turn-out for their meetings was in Billings, Mont. (pop. 20,000) where police daily counted 2,000 to 3,000 automobiles and some 8,000 people on the fair grounds where the Mission set up camp. The Mayor of Omaha proclaimed a minute of silence on two of the mornings the preaching team was present. In Seattle 8,000 people crowded the Civic Auditorium while 5,000 were turned away. In Chicago 30,000 attended a series of meetings in the Loop district; in Philadelphia the Mission lunched with Mayor S. Davis Wilson and city officials during a three-day visit attracting 20,000 listeners. In St. Louis the Globe-Democrat issued daily supplements detailing Mission activities and one young man declared that the team's appearance had dissuaded him from suicide. Everywhere Missionary Jones was the headline speaker, driving home repeatedly his message to the effect that: "Religion is at the judgment bar. America must make her choice among Fascism, Communism, or the Kingdom of God on earth."

Many a thoughtful U. S. religionist was left feeling last week that the Preaching Mission had attracted audiences of people who went to church anyway; that it left behind it no practicable means of consolidating whatever gains it had registered. Said the liberal, nondenominational Christian Century: "It must be frankly said that the technique and doctrinal presupposition of the old revivalism were too much in evidence. ... If the great messages of the missioners had been implemented by the disclosure of a fresh method of enlistment, their permanent contribution to the nation's spiritual health would have been incalculably greater. . .. . The pathos of the Preaching Mission was that it had no church at once holy and catholic to which its message was referable and in which its values could be conserved and carried on."

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