EMQ

How can we work both with indigenous churches in other lands and (with) our own missionaries there, preserving the proper freedom and initiative of both? Thus a major mission board formulated a key question discussed at a convocation of missionaries.¹

A few years ago at a student missionary rally an earnest young American Christian rose to his feet to ask several very searching questions of the missionary speaker concerning some of the things he had seen on the field during a visit to Africa.

With the rapid growth of the student population in the great cities of Asia, churches and missionary societies are increasingly eager to find new ways of reaching the university campus with the Gospel. Four million Asian students are on the march; among them, a small minority of Christians.

The pendulum of missionary strategy with regard to mission-church relationships is swinging from one extreme toward another. There was a time when mission boards held control of churches that they had established for so long that they stifled and stunted initiative and growth in the churches.

Webster says religious syncretism is the "combination of or reconciliation of differing beliefs in religions." Scholars say syncretism shows a religion is weakening.

There's and a truism everybody would accept: missionary success and language skills go hand in hand. Why then the swelling tide of despair about the language problem?

The need for higher theological education overseas presses upon us. Can we train the future leaders of the younger churches beyond the Bible school level? They want seminaries on the graduate level.

The Jesuits had called them Zamucans; to the Bolivian farmers and villagers living on the edge of the jungle they were Barbaros or Yanaiguas. In great fear the Paraguayans spoke of them as the Moros. They called themselves Ayore, one of the nomadic hunting and gathering tribes of South America.

In an interview with a missionary candidate I asked, “Specifically, what do you expect to be doing when you get to the field, and how do you believe you will go about it?”

That many missionaries are heroic and do make sacrifices is undeniable, but it is not for Christian propagandists, surely, to make too much of this in the lifetime of those concerned.