Drama of Missions

As compared with such an unfashionable church as the Seventh Day Adventist, which spent $50,000,000 on foreign missionary work in six recent years (TIME, June 8, 1936), the fashionable Protestant Episcopal Church is comparatively cool about carrying the Word afar. It budgets about $5,000,000 a year for missions, chiefly in U. S. rural districts, Alaska, South America, India, and in recent years the Episcopal faithful have periodically allowed missionary deficits to accumulate.

As compared with the Baptist and the Methodist churches, the Episcopal Church does not go in much for the sort of homely activity represented by religious plays or pageants. The typical Episcopal vestryman, often a banker or substantial businessman, would feel queer in the false beard and cheesecloth garment which a small-town Presbyterian may wear with pleasure. Doubly notable, therefore, was an Episcopal pageant put on last week in Philadelphia's big Convention Hall—biggest show ever performed by U. S. Episcopalians, and designed to quicken Episcopal interest in missions. It was called The Drama of Missions to Spread Throughout the World the Glory of the Light That All Nations May See and Know Him. It had its genesis a year ago when Pennsylvania's Bishop Francis Marion Taitt, ordinarily a scholarly, retiring churchman, marched down Broad Street, with austere little Bishop William Thomas Manning of New York, other dignitaries and Episcopal laity, singing Onward Christian Soldiers. The Episcopal missionary budget was short once more—$250,000 worth—and Bishop Taitt was doing his part by holding a mission mass meeting in the Academy of Music. Soon, his access of zeal continuing, Bishop Taitt organized a Diocese Missionary Research Committee to devise ways of dramatizing missions. Result was the pageant, for which plans were laid last spring.

For the 1,300 actors in the Drama of Missions, Philadelphia churchwomen sewed 1,300-odd costumes which were sent to Virginia to be dyed by students in a mountain mission school. From missionary outposts of the Church, some 40 Episcopal converts and workers went to Philadelphia to appear in the pageant. A professional director of civic and patriotic shows, Percy Jewett Burrell of Boston, wrote the Drama of Missions.