Missionaries to Communism?

Is there any future for Christian missions in China? Yes--but not for the institutionalized missions of the recent past. To make any headway in a China overrun by Communism, missionaries will have to go back to Christian beginnings. So says Journalist Robert Root of the Des Moines Register & Tribune, just back from a tour of the Orient.

Reporter Root outlined his views in somber detail in the Christian Century. Though he wrote even before the fall of Mukden, Root did not find it hard to believe the Communist boast of complete control of China within three or four years. If that should happen, what would be the prospects for Christianity?

Journalist Root thinks there will still be room for a new (or a very old) kind of mission and missionary. There will no longer be "elaborately housed institutions." "The primitive 'rough it' work of the 1st Century disciples comes to mind. The Friends' Ambulance Unit, though it has no evangelization work, is active in Communist China and suggests a pattern. It would be a labor of tents and poor food and maybe overalls . . .

"But for the devoted there would be compensations. Talk about 'building bridges of understanding'! The Iron Curtain cuts off Russia and central Europe, but it has not yet been demonstrated that there is an Oriental Iron Curtain. Perhaps China is the one place on the globe where an imaginative church, with great experience of the land, could be a leaven able to penetrate the brittle hardtack of Communism."

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