Religion: Mott on Missions

• Share

Greatest U. S. Protestant layman is Dr. John Raleigh Mott. For more than 50 years Dr. Mott, a serene-faced man of disciplined energy, has traveled the world for the Y. M. C. A. and the International Missionary Council. The I. M. C., coordinator of Protestant foreign missions, re-elected Dr. Mott its chairman at its meeting in Madras last winter. Dr. Mott, now 74, requested that his term be limited to three years. Last week he addressed the Foreign Missions Conference of North America at Swarthmore College.

The Madras conference—whose findings the Swarthmore meeting met to ponder—reported that at no time during the past century had the Christian Church faced such opposition as it does today. Of 735.000,000 people in Europe and America, nearly one-third disclaim connection with Christian churches. Many more millions are being evangelized by the anti-Christian religions of Communism and Fascism. In the whole world, the spread of Christianity in the last decade has lagged behind the increase in heathen and pagan populations: Christians number only 737,000,000 of the world's 2,200,000,000 people.

Declaring that only 30% of U. S. and Canadian Protestants give money to foreign missions, Dr. Mott said that the whole missionary system is "overworked and undermanned." A 15% increase in staff, he declared, would bring a 100% increase in results. But if missionary zeal is dull at home, Dr. Mott thought that it was keen in the field. Said he: "If Christianity should die out in Europe and America, it exists in such vitality and propagating power in the younger churches of India, China, Japan and Africa, that sooner or later it would spread from those bases and re-establish itself among us."