EMQ

The mistake is easy enough to make. The hotel is comfortable, familiar. Outside, floods of new cars, smog, some skyscrapers, good restaurants, all overwhelming, occasional glimpses of the palace moat, or the curving roof of a shrine. How Westernized the Japanese are! How similar to us! And yet…

A unit of the World Council of Churches sponsored a symposium which has fiercely attacked missionary work among Indians in South America.

To understand the Barbados Declaration we certainly need another document to interpret the document. The symposium of secular anthropologists, who composed the statement, met as part of the World Council of Churches “Program to Combat Racism”, and operated within the frame of reference of the doctrine of liberation.

The Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) of the World Council of Churches (WCC) has chosen “Salvation Today” as the umbrella topic for its next assembly to be held in Bangkok late in 1972.

On the night of March 25, 1971, negotiations in shambles, President Yahya Khan of Pakistan gave the order to his troops to smash East Pakistan, beginning with the capitol city, Dacca. That first night Sheikh Mujib, head of the Awami League, was captured, the Dacca radio station commandeered, and many, many people killed.

Whether you are making shoes or planting churches you face the constant problem of how much to emphasize quality and how much to emphasize quantity. And people may disagree about where to strike the balance.

Henry Venn’s famous formula coined in 1861 as a definition of the autonomous church— self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating (extension)— has been so misused that massive education is necessary to review the thinking of both the donor and the recipient in mission-church giving.

In April, 1906, speaking in tongues broke out in the Azusa Street Methodist Mission, Los Angeles. The experiences in Azusa Street blended with similar events in other areas to give birth to the modern Pentecostal movement. Whether or not it is accurate to speak of a “Pentecostal Revival” in 1906 is a debatable point (Orr 1965:240).

The need to plant vigorous evangelical churches in Europe is acute. It is illustrated by the statement of a State Church pastor in Germany who declared, “We are all Christians here without having the least suspicion as to what Christianity is.” Four hundred years after the Reformation there are still 250,000 towns, villages and cities without a Protestant church.

Belgium is still a mission field. If missionary work as traditionally understood is needed anywhere in the world, it is needed in Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Greece. A Congo missionary told me that the Belgian churches— the free evangelical ones— are way behind the Congo churches.