Missionaries: Christ for a Changing World

In a village outside Tokyo, a German Jesuit priest builds a Zen monastery --with the blessing of the Vatican. Two Canadian Protestants arrive in the Black African enclave of Swaziland to set up a 100,000-watt radio transmitter. Farther north in Tanzania, Maryknoll priests and nuns work side by side in the fields with peasants, then help train native leaders for the new communal villages of President Julius Nyerere's socialist state. Wycliffe Bible Translators in South Viet Nam, who lived in Montagnard villages well before American G.I.s came, produce nine new written languages from the native dialects, with more to come.

Following Jesus' command in the Gospel of Mark to spread the "good news" and in Matthew to "make disciples of all nations," Christian missionaries have scattered across the earth since the first Pentecost in Jerusalem. Now, despite the closing of Communist China and Third World resentment of so-called "cultural imperialism," Christian missions in many parts of the world are livelier than ever before.

Fruitful Fields. Some of the new mission activity, especially among Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists in Latin America, has been the result, ironically enough, of the Second Vatican Council. The council's decree on religious liberty was quickly felt in Roman Catholic countries, where hitherto severe restrictions on Protestant evangelizing all but disappeared. At the end of World War II, there were only 1,900,000 Protestants in Latin America; today there are ten times that many.

Other fields, too, have proved fruitful. Over half the people of the Pacific islands of Oceania are now Christian. Virtually all U.N. delegates from the new Black African nations were educated in mission schools. In Korea, medical missions have trained over 3,000 physicians since World War II. On the Indonesian island of Flores, first visited by Divine Word missionaries in 1912, there are now 615,500 Catholics, 90% of the population.

The effort to establish indigenous clergy in mission areas--and thus "work themselves out of a job," as some missionaries put it--has been remarkably successful in some countries. India now has 100 mission boards of its own to send evangelists into the field. One of the most successful Protestant projects, backed by Latin America Mission, is "Evangelism-in-Depth," which depends almost solely on local lay evangelists. One current effort in Mexico has some 5,000 Mexican congregations at work evangelizing their own areas. Though outsiders frequently come equipped with better technical skills, only rarely can they do a better job of evangelizing. One recent exception occurred in Ghana, where there are at least 50 distinct languages. Black evangelists from Ghanaian towns could not talk to the rural, up-country Chokosis without noticeable hauteur. But a white United Church of Christ missionary, Alfred Krass, learned Chokosis and converted hundreds.

Radical Posture. Mostly it is a shortage of native clergy and technical help that persuades most Third World leaders to accept missionaries from Europe and North America, though some leaders attach special provisos to their invitations. Under the bootstrap socialism of Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere, a Roman Catholic, has required the missionaries to pitch in to rebuild the society. On a quiet visit to the U.S. recently, Nyerere slipped up to Maryknoll headquarters near New York City to lecture nuns on the role of missions in developing countries. One of Nyerere's suggestions, already adopted by missionaries in some areas, is that educational and medical services should be performed by priests, nuns and brothers working in community or state-controlled institutions. "By separating the provision of service from its evangelical activities," Nyerere argued, "the church will make clear that it desires men's conversion to Christianity to come from conviction, not from gratitude or from the compulsion of indebtedness."

Some young Roman Catholic missionaries are adopting an even more radical posture, arguing that their proper place in unjust societies is at the forefront of economic and social revolution. Some of them, like militant young priests from Spain exiled to work in the missions, take their anger with them. Some find it in the field: while Maryknoll missionaries in Guatemala, Thomas and Marjorie Melville (a priest and nun who later married) actively aided Castroite guerrillas because they felt the Guatemalan Indians were exploited; they were expelled from the country.

Lit-Lit. Others adopt a more pragmatic political approach. In Peru, some 100 Catholic missionaries are working with Peruvian priests in a new organization called the National Office of Social Information (ONIS), an unabashedly leftist lobbying effort. Recently ONIS criticized the new Peruvian land-reform program as being too capitalistic because it preserved the property principle in providing for peasant shares; by reverse psychology, their extreme position slyly helped make the government's program more acceptable to conservatives.

Among Protestant evangelicals, of course, communicating the Gospel is still the core of the missionary effort. They take the injunction to preach literally. Dozens of high-powered transmitters operated by various evangelical groups now permit Protestant radio to cover the world with round-the-clock broadcasts, including areas where missionaries are forbidden. California-based Wycliffe Bible Translators carry the command to imaginative lengths. They train in a test "village" of primitive huts in the jungles of Mexico, then are sent to live unaided in the Latin American bush for six weeks. In order to get the Bible to many primitive peoples, they actually create a written language out of dialects that are only oral, first developing an alphabet, then a dictionary. In areas where the problem is simple illiteracy, an ecumenical Protestant effort nicknamed Lit-Lit (for World Literacy and Christian Literature) aims at teaching the predominant national or local language.

Soft Sell. Despite their emphasis on the Gospel message, Protestant evangelicals, like their Catholic counterparts, are showing a deeper awareness that missions are inseparable from social and political action. Says Black Evangelist Tom Skinner of Brooklyn, "Any Gospel that does not speak to the issue of enslavement, that does not want to set the oppressed free in the name of Jesus Christ, is not the Gospel." Peruvian Baptist Samuel Escobar insists that "Marx and Marcuse have detected the depths of injustice with far more realism than the average preacher."

Even those conservative, evangelical Protestants who desire social change, however, cling stubbornly to a conviction that sets them apart from liberal Protestants and most Catholics: the belief that salvation is either impossible or extremely difficult without faith in Jesus Christ. But their numbers grow while liberal Christians report a decline in missionary recruits as well as membership. On last New Year's Eve some 12,000 evangelicals, most of them college age, met at the University of Illinois for the triennial Inter-Varsity Missionary Convention. It was the largest gathering of its kind in American history.

One reason for attrition in the ranks of liberal Protestant missionaries may be that some extreme ecumenicists have questioned whether Christians have any right to proselytize others at all. Such views have naturally bred a powerful reaction. The Rev. Dr. David Stowe, new chief missions executive of the United Church of Christ, wants to see a re-emphasis on the uniqueness of the Gospel among liberal Protestants, albeit in a low-key, soft-sell approach. "I am terribly anxious for the Hindu to respond to the Christian experience," says Stowe. "Whether he becomes a Christian or a different kind of Hindu is not my primary concern." The late Trappist contemplative, Thomas Merton, felt that Buddhism and Christianity could mutually reinforce one another. Jesuit Ugo

Lassalle, who offers the Zen way of contemplation at his Japanese monastery, is convinced that Zen can produce a state of "profound prayer and spiritual union."

Fire-Hose Approach. Official Catholic willingness to accept a Merton or a Lassalle indicates the depth of recent change in Catholic mission theology. To an extent, even the documents of Vatican II, which acknowledge the "true and holy" aspects of other religions, still emphasize the importance of the "sacramental signs" of the faith--not only baptism, but other sacraments, such as penance and the Holy Eucharist. But the attitude is still markedly more tolerant than what one irreverent Jesuit calls the "fire-hose approach," which was the rule until recently.

Perhaps the most engaging statement of the new Catholic view is in a littlenoticed, remarkably subtle document issued by the U.S. Maryknoll missionaries after a general chapter meeting in 1966. Citing a "new optimism" in theology, the document declares that "the saving invitation and power of God reach out to all men" even if they do not attain "explicit faith in Christ and his Church." The role of the Christian is not to convert everybody but to be an example: "A sign before nations . . . a sign to confront them with the challenge of God's love, to tell them of their own deepest selves, to purify and illumine their own deepest values . . ."

That is an attractive vision, generous in its view of humanity and human destiny, but also severely demanding of the Christians who take it seriously. It reveals the hard existential truth in Christ's command; that one who truly believes his faith must live it as well as tell it, that the crucial soul he is commanded to save is his own.

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