The Crisis

Christianity's foreign missions today face the "greatest crisis of [their] history," according to Dean Listen, Pope of Yale Divinity School in the current Christianity and Crisis. The main trouble is neither lack of funds nor manpower, but the "political, economic and racial revolutions in many parts of the world."

"It is clear," writes Dean Pope, "that mission activities will continue in China only at the tolerance of the Communist authorities." Under such conditions, "the missions will almost certainly collapse, in one way or another.

"India has become politically independent, and there are great waves of unrest and portents of early struggles for independence in many parts of Africa. A missionary movement which is basically controlled by personnel from despised European powers (and belonging to the white race) is viewed with growing suspicion..."

As the only possible solution, Dean Pope recommends more stress on the training of natives in political leadership as well as Christianity, and the obliteration of "every trace of racism . . . Those of us who stay home have the same imperatives; the news of what we are travels faster than the missionaries we send out."

The Unfit & Defective

The Rt. Rev. Ernest William Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, England, seems to believe that Anglican sensibilities should be shaken well at regular intervals. Last week, speaking before the Birmingham Rotary Club, he set off another of his Episcopal cannon crackers. Sterilization of "the unfit" and the killing of "defective" babies, he said, would be a fine thing for Britain.

"We look like being permanently the paupers of the English-speaking world," the bishop declared. "We need to restrict our population . . . We must preserve the better stocks in the population, and hinder the increase of the worse . . . We need to preserve the good-living, honest, hard-working classes in our people, whether they be rich or poor ... A time is quickly coming when sterilization of the unfit will have to be essential in our social organization . . .

"Many are beginning to think that medically controlled euthanasia for defective infants should be an element in the social policy. I have met mothers of such children who have been thankful when death brought release.

"What should be the Christian attitude to these questions? . . . Are populations to increase everywhere till an explosion comes? . . . Think on these things."

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