Carrying on together

The Presbyterian Historical Society continues its series contextualizing items of business before the 227th General Assembly. Here we turn to the overtures addressing the restructuring of the PC(USA)’s World Mission and calling for a new missiological statement.

Overtures 005 and 006, addressing the restructuring of the PC(USA)’s World Mission and calling for a new missiological statement, recall the efforts of Presbyterians both inside the United States and abroad to reshape their relationships during the middle 20th century. 

In the global political transformations following the Second World War, Presbyterian mission workers found themselves in between declining imperial powers — chiefly Great Britain and France—and the national churches of newly independent nations. As the people who they worked alongside, harvested crops with, taught, and were taught by demanded independence— in Cameroon, in Lebanon and Syria, in Iraq and Iran — mission workers and administrators found the centralization of authority in New York City and Atlanta to be incompatible with the new age. And so missions changed.

What happened in the decolonial period — taken here to cover 1945 to 1980— happened differently everywhere. John Coventry Smith, a missionary to Japan called to find a new name and new order for the Board of Foreign Missions, went to Korea to reckon with the twin shadows of Japanese and American imperialism. Jaime (Jim) Wright, descended from United States Presbyterians and born in Brazil, took up the mission banner there in order to work himself out of a job. After the integration of Mission and Church in Iran, Frances Mecca Gray gained the Shah’s support for a Presbyterian school for women. David and Elizabeth Gelzer served the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan as it struggled for freedom of worship and freedom of speech inside a repressive single-party state. 

Many stories of Presbyterians finding their way through an utterly changed political reality can be told. Here is one.

Carrying on together: John Coventry Smith in Asia

Newly installed as the PCUSA Board of Foreign Missions area secretary for Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, John Coventry Smith traveled to Asia in the summer of 1948, first landing in Korea. As described in his memoir, "From Colonialism to World Community" (1982), he immediately encountered the sensitivities of the post-colonial period. Smith had been a mission worker in Japan and spoke the language; some American Presbyterian Korea missionaries greeted him as if he was another imperial officer — “Don’t they know Korea is no longer a Japanese colony?” His dual role allowed him to speak directly with younger Korean pastors, who all had learned Japanese out of necessity. And he took care with his public speech, preaching not in Japanese but in English with a Korean translator: “It would have been embarrassing to preach in the former colonial language.”

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The $20-million postwar Restoration Fund of the PCUSA had had difficulty allocating money to Korea after its partition. Rather than identifying church buildings, schools, and hospitals to be rebuilt, the refugee Presbyterian population coming in from north of the 38th parallel was trying to transfer all their works “literally intact to the South” — at one point, according to Smith, six different presbyteries had headquarters in Seoul, there were two Presbyterian seminaries, and two denominations. Smith, amid this surfeit of order, found his best role was to “interpret their needs to the Restoration Fund people in the United States.” To be a bridge, not a director.

In Tokyo, Smith encountered a devastated landscape that he was unprepared for. American and Japanese Imperial military censors alike had suppressed reporting of the firebombing of Tokyo for divergent reasons, and now Smith saw it face to face. The business of funneling requests for reconstruction aid to New York was easier inside Japan’s united church, the Kyōdan, than it was in Korea. But human needs were more exigent than monetary ones — in Wakayama among the burakumin, a rural minority suppressed by caste, Smith reflected, “They needed many things but at the moment they needed a missionary friend.” He recruited Louis Greer, then studying in Kyoto, who would remain their missionary friend into the 1970s, accompanying the “unclean” people assigned to dig graves and tan leather.

American missionaries had by and large been evacuated from Asian countries in 1941. Back stateside, this was regarded as a colossal failure — on his itinerations, speaking to an American congregation about Japan, Smith routinely heard, “Too bad all your work was wasted.” For many American Presbyterians, Christian churches abroad were wholly a construct of missions; if the missionaries left, presumably so did Christendom. 

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Seeing national churches continue their own work — not just without American missionaries, but amid incredible hardship and monumental loss of lives and livelihoods — Smith found the Holy Spirit: “This ought to make us humble and teach us that we were working with a Force that is beyond our planning and our own strength.” The postwar period would be, for Smith and for the Presbyterian Church, a “period of growing up.” With maturity, the Church would begin to “structure our relationships so that change could occur.”

New ways of organizing global ecumenical cooperation were emerging across the world. The World Council of Churches and the United Nations both came into being in 1948. The National Council of Churches, uniting a number of separate ecumenical groups, would organize itself in 1950. The Église Presbytérienne Camerounaise would be fully independent in 1957. Egypt’s Synod of the Nile gained independence in 1958. The former UPCNA Synod of the Punjab became autonomous in 1961. 

New secular polities meant practical change for the American church. The presbyteries and synods in Cameroon, Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan all reported to the UPCNA and PCUSA General Assemblies, just like any other middle governing body. “Their judicial cases were ultimately referred to our higher courts. This pattern had become embarrassing.” More than just being awkward, a United States church couldn’t reasonably assert sovereignty over the churches of what were then called “new nations.” And so the presbyteries and synods abroad would no longer report to the General Assemblies. 

Smith was aware of some of the changes in mindset required for confraternity in mission, and that elsewhere he had more to learn. “We have begun to dig out the roots of centuries of colonial and racial prejudices, but it will take decades longer before we make substantial progress,” he wrote in 1982. 

At the same time, reflecting on his travels in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he writes, “Being a witness to Jesus Christ in Pakistan is like hitting your head against a brick wall. In Thailand it is similar except that the stone wall is a feather bed.” He goes on to stereotype Thais as “courteous,” their language “musical,” and their way of life “leisurely.” 

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Smith was also not a strict anti-imperialist. He fondly recounts meeting John Foster Dulles on a flight to Korea in 1950, then worshiping and feasting with him at Young Nak Church in Seoul. (Foster Dulles and his brother Allen would in 1953 direct CIA and State Department resources to topple the social democrat Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, as American power took over from British power in the Middle East.) The coming changes in the mission endeavor would require changes in hearts and minds, even of people as attuned to the world as John Coventry Smith.

And some of the coming change was rhetorical: the Board of Foreign Missions had to be renamed. “Postwar years were to be filled with various plans for carrying on together” — mission partnership, A New Day In Mission, ecumenical mission — new names abounded. In Smith’s telling, the new term “fraternal worker” to replace “missionary” largely did not take, except in Europe. The simplest change for the Board of Foreign Missions —deemphasizing the hub-and-spoke, mission-and-station mode — was to drop the plural, since “there is only one mission of the church.” 

Transformed attitudes were evident in the Asian churches, and Smith witnessed some of them over the course of several pan-Christian conferences from 1954 through 1957. In a mission conference in Hong Kong in 1954, churches which had been accustomed to seeking support from the United States, as in 1948, found support in each other. The Church of Christ in Thailand appealed for a nurse; the United Church of Christ in the Philippines had a nurse, but needed her travel costs covered; one Chinese Christian in Hong Kong paid her way. Networks of mutual support could take over from centralized, New York-directed sources.

“Do you mean that I could be a missionary? I thought that was an American monopoly.”

Frustratingly for Smith, this new openness was in places identified as an imported ideology, a new kind of Euroamerican intervention. At the next Hong Kong gathering in 1955, the Asia Council on Ecumenical Missions was criticized by representatives of the International Missionary Council, identifying the gathering as “an idea from abroad.” At the next gathering in Bangkok in 1956, some representatives of Asian national churches expressed skepticism toward the World Council of Churches, rejecting the specter of control from Geneva. Gradually, fear and doubt were overcome, and the assembly moved to plan their next conference in Prapat, Indonesia, in 1957. By then, Smith reported a burgeoning sense of the Asian churches’ self-sufficiency. Preparing to return to his Methodist congregation in Singapore, one Chinese minister teasingly asked Smith, “Do you mean that I could be a missionary? I thought that was an American monopoly.” 

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Gatherings stateside — at the newly-established Ecumenical Training Center at Stony Point; at the Lake Mohonk conference in 1956 — aimed to shore up what all of the churches meant when they used the phrase “ecumenical mission.” For Smith, it meant “New York was no longer the center with outposts around the world. We each were centers in our own right and part of the whole body of Christ.” At Lake Mohonk, Jose Burgos dos Santos defined ecumenical mission: “It is like sugar. Taste it and you know it is sugar. What is ecumenical? I cannot tell you even now, but I have tasted it. I know it. It means that when I pray I will see you all.”

More than 40 years earlier, at the high water mark of the 19th century missions and of European imperialism, the Indian Anglican priest Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah struck one discordant note among the 1,200-some delegates gathered in triumph at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. The missionary endeavor had not, he said, created a universal family. “You promise us thrones in heaven, but will not offer us chairs in your drawing room.” Acknowledging the sacrifices of missionaries in the world, Azariah continued, “You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us friends.” In the middle-1950s, after war and reconstruction, after national independence, through moments of distrust, Presbyterians would turn toward the world, seeking ways to carry on together as friends.  

Learn more:

John Coventry Smith (1982). "From Colonialism to World Community: the Church's Pilgrimage."

William Henry Temple Gairdner (1910). "Echoes from Edinburgh, 1910; an account and interpretation of the World missionary" conference

Ogbu U. Kalu, ed. (1910). Mission After Christendom

RG 547, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations Records, 1820-1987.