Missionaries to Europe

In the front room of a sprawling, neo-Tudor house in the English village of Burgess Hill one night last week, a husky young man & woman from the Soviet zone of Germany, a coffee-skinned youth from India, a trim girl from Finland and a swarthy boy from France were hard at work studying the Bible. In the chapel at the rear of the house, a music class was in progress; a Berliner was at the piano, an English girl played the viola; a boy from Silesia whittled away at the violin. In a small side room a pink-cheeked Yugoslav and a chubby Hollander were boning up on the Epistles. The International Bible Training Institute was beginning its fourth year.

Young, Healthy & Devout. The institute's purpose is to train missionaries, but not missionaries to the outposts of civilization. Most of its graduates go back to their homes to reclaim backslid Christians and to evangelize those whom Naziism or Communism have deprived of the barest knowledge of Christianity.

"What Europe needs is a spiritual Marshall Plan," says the institute's founder and principal, Frederick H. Squire. Evangelist Squire, 46, began saving souls at the age of ten as a soprano cornetist in the Salvation Army. He spent twelve years in the Army, and in 1930, he set out to tour Britain as a free-lance evangelist. As a welfare worker on the Continent after World War II, Squire was shocked at the spiritual as well as physical deprivation the Nazis had left behind them; when he returned to England he set up a school especially to train European workers.

Candidates for the institute must be young, healthy and devout, with some musical ability (to back up hymn-singing). Those who are unable to pay the $400 all-inclusive fee for a two-year course are taken free of charge, with pocket money included. So far, only two of the institute's 60 alumni have strayed from the evangelistic fold.

What is Wrong. Principal Squire is making a special effort to get students from behind the Iron Curtain and train them to take the Gospel back to Communist areas. Three Soviet-zone Germans are currently enrolled. Said one of them last week: "You can still go to church under the Communist regime, but it's not the same . . . Many of us have begun to realize under Communism what is wrong with the church. It is this: the church retains its trappings of old, but it has lost much of what goes on beneath them . . . In these circumstances, Communism finds little real opposition."

Evangelist Squire, who has made 15 trips to the Continent in the past two years, will soon head for Berlin to find other young people for his institute. Says he: "We've only begun to fight for Christianity behind the Iron Curtain."

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