By Good Works

A group of Pittsburgh's leading citizens gathered last week to hear a unique kind of promotion talk. The speaker marshaled his facts with the assurance of a man describing an appealing new bond issue, but he was, in fact, a Christian minister: the Rev. Roy A. Burkhart, pastor of Columbus, Ohio's First Community Church. The organization that Preacher Burkhart was selling is called World Neighbors, Inc. It is a bold attempt to fight Communism in the world's underdeveloped areas with a mixture of technical enterprise and Christianity by example. To the men gathered to hear about it in Pittsburgh (including U.S. Steel's President Clifford Hood, Baseball Magnate Branch Rickey, Westinghouse Vice President Andrew Phelps), it sounded both novel and good.

World Neighbors, Inc. began last September at a conference of U.S. business and religious leaders in Columbus. Among its sponsors: Missionary-Educator Frank Laubach, who has taught millions of Asians and Africans to read through his international literacy program (TIME, June 28, 1943); International Business Machines' Chairman Thomas ("Think") Watson; Manhattan's Rev. Norman Vincent Peale; Minnesota's Congressman Walter H. Judd, who was once a physician-missionary himself. Pastor Burkhart, who has made a name for himself in Columbus as a socially conscious clergyman (TIME, Aug. n, 1947). was elected president. The purpose of the organization, as he sees it: to recruit enough money and personnel in the U.S. for an intensive five-year program of practical aid, on a "village level," in areas that suffer from material want.

Agronomists in the Villages. A similar but smaller group, World Assistance, Inc., founded by the Rev. John Peters, an ex-Army chaplain from Oklahoma City (TIME, Oct. 8, 1951), was absorbed by World Neighbors. Its two pilot projects in India became models for what Dr. Burkhart plans to set up elsewhere: a system of small but highly trained technical teams, e.g., an agronomist and a nutrition specialist, who will settle down in selected districts, advising villagers and farmers in their immediate localities.

A private organization, President Burkhart reasons, can do this sort of job more efficiently than any government. And, if its workers are dedicated Christians as well as good technicians, they will be able to transmit to Indians, Africans and Burmese their faith in a Christian and democratic way of life more effectively than most orthodox missionaries.

To emphasize its Christian character, Neighbors' field workers will have plenty of Christian literature on hand for their libraries and literacy programs. But though they will cooperate with local mission agencies, they will not do any preaching on their own. Says Burkhart: "Missionaries try to talk about Jesus in words. We're going over trying to find the secret of improving living conditions." A Dynamic Faith. At present, World Neighbors, Inc. has 120 specific pilot projects marked out in 16 different countries. To run all of them for five years, World Neighbors will need some 600 technical specialists and almost $20 million. At the moment, World Neighbors has only $150,000 definitely budgeted for 1953, but Burkhart, busy collecting pledges, is sure that more is on the way.

Already, he has founded World Neighbors, Inc. chapters in 21 cities. Many more chapters are now being formed, and Burkhart spends most of his time on the road these days, talking to groups like the one in Pittsburgh.

"World Neighbors," says he, "is an avenue through which the American people can now express their interest in a world ministry. In five years we will have developed a new spirit within American Christianity. We will have helped the mission agencies to a new expression, where people will not only be helped to help themselves, but where they will find a dynamic faith to live by."

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