Farm-&-Convert Mission

George and Marjorie Button lived a soft and pleasant life in Los Angeles. They owned two Cadillacs, splashed in a heated swimming pool, entertained 1,500 guests a year in their $100,000 house. Five pages of pictures highlighted them as a "lucky" U.S. family in LIFE'S "Special Issue on the American Woman" (Dec. 24, 1956). They shot elephants in Africa, spent holidays in Hawaii, toured the Holy Land, knocked about Europe.

But to the Suttons, the soft and pleasant life turned out not to be the satisfying life. Last August George, Marjorie and three of their children chucked the pools and parties (and George's Ford agency) for spiritual values. Last week, 6,000 miles from home, they were battling the jungles of Brazil's Parana State as part of a new colony of Protestant missionaries who work the land to support their mission.

Farm-and-convert evangelism is the idea of Minnesota Lutheran Maurice Sand, 54, who first set up a self-sustaining mission in Medellin, Colombia. Returning to the U.S.. he started organizing an interdenominational mission of "Colaborers." He heard about jungled Parana State, visited it, decided it was a good site for a beginning. "I thought we could set up a little community of, say, ten American families with tractors and trucks to support the mission with coffee and crops." he said. Some 200 U.S. families heartily agreed, bought tracts at $30 an acre for uncleared land in Parana. Last August the first five Colaborer families, including the Presbyterian Suttons, got to work.

Since then, the Suttons, Sand and their Colaborers have drilled a 125-ft. well, installed a gasoline power generator, raised 63 sturdy cabins and a schoolhouse-church. They have built a bridge and spur road to short-cut the trip to the Parana River, are starting another school, a separate church, and several more frame houses for the Colaborer families soon to follow. They hold Sunday and evening services for hundreds of Brazilians, show film strips, pass out Portuguese-language Bibles and prayer books. George Sutton, 35, has trimmed off 35 lbs., put calluses on his hands lugging buckets of water. His wife, 34, misses lipstick ("but, after all, we don't want to look like painted women") and yearns for un-Brazilian slacks to ward off chiggers and biting flies.

When all the Colaborer lands are plowed and planted, George Sutton wants to start other enterprises and funnel their proceeds to other missions deeper into the backlands. "I'm liable to do some Bible-pounding myself,'' he says, "and boy, they sure could use encouragement. I saw a lad here trying to read a Portuguese Bible--upside down. It's a shame, when you think of folks at home who know how to read but never even open the Bible."

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