Asia's Protestants

"First there were the years of carrying handkerchief-twisted pennies to Sunday school 'for the missionaries.' Then there were the years in young people's groups and in the congregation listening to furloughed missionaries tell their long stories

. . . At seminary there were classes in missions, with emphasis on the length and breadth of this globe-girdling enterprise." Thus the Rev. Theodore A. Gill. 37. managing editor of the Christian Century, describes his personal background for a four-month trip around the world last year to see at first hand what the Protestant missionary enterprise is really like. In the current Christian Century, Presbyterian Gill concludes an eight-part report on the countries of Southeast Asia--the area chosen by the National Council of Churches' Board of Foreign Missions for special study during 1957. Gist of his report:

HONG KONG (140,000 Christians, 45,000 Protestants). This is the last citadel of British colonialism, and "for those who would understand what is behind the rest of Asia's anticolonial frenzy. Hong Kong is the place to get a bellyful of the original offense." But the British have turned generously to help the 667,000 refugees from Communist China. So have the Christian missions from the U.S.. "healing, counseling, running schools, staffing nurseries, opening clinics, building family centers." The most valuable mission activity in terms of the future, says Gill, is being done on university campuses supported by various denominations.

PHILIPPINES (19 million Christians). Chief troubles besetting the estimated 2,000,000 Protestants are about 17 million Roman Catholics, whose priests, says Gill, oppress the people and oppose the growth of Protestantism with intimidation and physical violence: and the "freehand, fly-by-night missionaries sent out by pentecostal churches, by fundamentalist societies, by their own perfervid wills." Gill also casts a skeptical eye on the nondenominational. evangelical Philippines Crusade, which sprang up in the wake of Billy Graham's 1956 tour through Southeast Asia. The evangelists, he says, are a ticking time bomb. "The doctrinal havoc, the personal tensions, the communal wreckage will come later as Stateside purse strings become puppet strings even upon the pleasant, well-meaning young men directing the crusade . . . How brief the independence of churches which, having pulled away from mission-board paternalism, flung themselves down before fundamentalist imperialism."

INDONESIA (4,200,000 Christians, 3,300,000 of them Protestants). In this new nation struggling to be born, nationalism is stripped to raw nerve ends. "See it in all its hypersensitivity there, and you will understand it better in its gentler manifestations all over the globe." But "suddenly, in the place where American missions had least to do with the development of Christianity, you come upon Protestantism with the structure and stature which most Americans. I am sure, assume for it everywhere." What they need most from the U.S. is teachers to train a new generation of self-governors.

THAILAND (100,000 Christians, an estimated 20,000 of them Protestants"). "Lovely, smiling, shapely people in their fascinating, glittering, flowery land." who bend gently before the harsh winds from outside and so seem impervious to them. This lotusland temperament is the chief obstacle to the Gospel. "Couldn't you almost say that Christianity has its hardest time with people who are nicest? . . . The Christian news has a hard time coming as good news to people who are not themselves torn by the rifts in the world, who are not deeply agitated about what may be wrong with them."

Reporter Gill's prescription for Protestantism: "Mission must be rescued from its relegation to one special vocation and reinhabited as the basic description of all Christian life. And meanwhile, the comfortable 'missionary' illusions too many of us have been relaxing in must be ruthlessly exposed . . . We have much to be proud of, and it is a good thing we do; anything less, and there would be nothing to talk about at all."

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