Religion: After Madras

U. S. Protestants have sent missionaries to Asia, Africa and the isles of the seas for more than a century. This missionary enterprise throughout the world, despite the late lean years, still spends $50,000,000 a year. Yet there has persisted a vague belief among average uninformed Christians that the main job of missions is to teach ABC's to, wipe the noses of, and put pants on little black, brown and yellow people whose conception of Christianity is about that of a Sunday-school squidget.

Actually, of course, for many years Christianity has been spread in the East not only by missionaries but by the native Easterners whom they converted to the task. Most important aspect of the International Missionary Council meeting in Madras, India last December (TIME, Dec. 26) was that there, for the first time, Orientals mingled in equal numbers and on equal footing with Westerners. To show in their own persons what missionary Christianity is really like, last week some black, brown and yellow delegates from Madras were telling churchgoers in the U. S. about the Council meeting.

In Charlotte, N.C., heading South, was a team composed of comely Miss Ila Sircar, associate general secretary of the Student Christian Movement in India; Dr. P. C. Hsu, University of Shanghai professor; Dr. Gonzalo Baez Camargo, Mexican Methodist leader. In Detroit, heading West, were Miss Minnie Soga, Bantu social worker in South Africa; Dr. Rajah Bhushinam Manikam, Lutheran secretary of India's National Christian Council; Dr. Hachiro Yuasa, "Christian Pacifist," onetime president of Japan's Doshisha University.