The Christian Minority in the World of Tomorrow

DR. PHIMISTER: In the midst of world tensions, where the efforts of emerging peoples to identify themselves with a new national status is commonplace, there seems to be emerging a counter-movement among religious groups, which traditionally have been separate and idstinct, to come together in the cause of religious unity in order that the religious ideals may find fuller expression and, in a unified form, exert more influence for the survival of men's ideals in troubled times.

The evidence of the attempts of the religious groups to make their influence felt in world affairs comes from the three meetings of the World Council of Churches held first in Amsterdam in 1948, six years later in the United States in Evanston and in 19961 at New Delhi. Our Speaker today, The Reverend Ernest M. Howse, has attended all three of these World Councils either as a representative of the United Church or as a Special Correspondent for the Canadian newspapers.

Dr. Howse has held pastorates in Beverly Hills, California, in Winnipeg and in Bloor Street United Church, Toronto. He is an author of some five books and many articles in magazines, periodicals and newspapers. His work for the Christian Church has brought him in touch with the leaders of the Muslim world and, in 1955, he was elected in Cairo, Egypt, Christian Co-President of Continuing Committee on Muslim-Christian Co-operation.

In the United Nations Assembly there are 102 nations, the minority of whom are white. So now with the enlarging of the World Council of Churches to include many religious groups, Christians are aware of the minority role which they play in the world. Hence of interest to all of us today is the topic which The Reverend Mr. Howse has chosen to speak upon-a topic which gives us pause for thought, "The Christian Minority in The World of Tomorrow".

REV. HOWSE: An erudite Professor in Oxford was nonplussed last summer when a bright young thing from across the ocean asked him if he could give her, in a few sentences, the general hang of English History. I cannot give you in a few sentences, even the "general hang" of that world movement of which the Assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi was the visible expression. I cannot begin even to state the significant issues which, in the course of seventeen days deliberation, were raised and wrestled with by first-class minds of many countries, by scholars, and men of responsible position, black and white, brown and yellow. I cannot make this a neat and rounded statement where everything is properly included, and nothing external intrudes.

Rather I shall select a few representative experiences and impressions chosen not as the material for a Report to a Church Court, but as the recollection of an innocent (relatively innocent) Canadian abroad in a large and rather frightening world, of which the significance to us is not limited to an Assembly of Churches nor to Christianity itself.

First of all the Assembly was at Delhi-the historic capital and ancient centre of power of a substantial portion of the human race. And there can be few ways more calculated to shock the Westerner into an awareness of the dimensions of the human problems which are going to bind us all together in a bundle of life-or of death-than to drop him down in India. The first impact upon the newcomer is apt to be discouraging, for he is apt to be overwhelmned by the magnitude of poverty, misery and degradation, and not be aware of the magnitude of the effort which India today is making to meet her problems.

Just to drive in the twenty miles or so from Santa Cruz to Bombay is to confront a festering mass of degrading humanity, for which despite his reading the imagination of the Westerner has not really prepared him. And Calcutta, I am told, is more terrible still. Estimates of the number of human beings who live in the streets, or the by-ways with no more homes than the cattle or goats that roam the streets, range from 500,000 to a million. But despite the swarming multitudes of the great cities, India is still a land of villages. Over 350,000,000 people live in India's 3,000,000 villages. And multitudes of the villages are almost as primitive now as they were centuries ago.

I took a day off and went out to a jungle village. The huts, built in a huddle one against the other, were of mud, with grass roof, which in the monsoon would be dripping through on the mud floor. They had no doors or windows; and there was not a man in the village who could make a wooden house, or a wooden door, or a frame to set it in. A Doctor in Ratlam estimated to me that the villagers would be 100% infected with guinea worm. The Indian Government has vast and imaginative schemes to teach primitive communities how to be more self-sufficient. But the task is stupendous, and all the schemes together cannot catch up with the need. Perhaps literally within sight of fast automobiles that rush along asphalt highways, and jet aeroplanes that swoop through the skies overhead, millions of primitive villagers still live as modern India's "contemporary ancestors."

This aspect of Indian life a newcomer cannot escape. The most casual tourist, of course, will also see other aspects. He will see magnificent architecture of which the imposing beauty tells of great peaks in civilization. He may see the Tai Mahal, certainly one of the most marvellously beautiful of all the creations of man. He may see the city of New Delhi, created by the British and greatly expanded by the Indians since Independence. The whole city is a panorama of spacious distances and splendid views of stately buildings. The former Viceroy's house (now the President's), called the Rashtrapti Bhavan, "the house of the father of the nation," has 347 rooms, and gardens reminiscent of Versailles. The city is clean and busy and prosperous. You can drink the water from the taps. And there are no animals roaming in the streets. Even the sacred cow is not permitted in New Delhi. Far away on the outskirts are vast areas of jungle reclamation where immense new factories of light industry are being built.

A few tourists may even go to Chandigahar the new capital of the Punjab, that incredible city which, in the last five years, like the more noted Brazilia, the capital of Brazil, has been built from scratch in a wilderness. The public buildings there are of a size and impressiveness which have few, if any, equals in the world. The huge straight boulevards, lined with bougainvillaea, the masses of beautiful and airy apartment buildings, the splendid private houses, and the stupendous complex of buildings in the new University-all an island in a jungle, created in half a dozen years, now comprising a city of 200,000 with not a single ugly lane or unbeautiful house-constitute one of the most remarkable achievements of modern man.

All this is but an indication of the ferment of life in modern India. One could pile up instances, but let me state just one fact. Since the granting of Confederation the Government of India has opened an average of ten new Post Offices a day, every day for 14 years.

Yet behind this there is one dark factor that threatens every effort: the increase of population. With Dr. Forrest, of the United Church Observer, I spent a morning with the Director of Information for the Indian Government. We learned that in the census of 1961, India though it had feared the rapid growth of population, learned that the total increase in the ten year period was ten million more than the highest estimate. That is, the population increased not to 428,000,000, as had been predicted, but to 438,000,000.

In those ten years India had made massive efforts to increase agricultural production. Taking the year 1950 as an Index 100, agricultural production by 1960 had risen to 124. The production per capita had risen only to 104. But even this is now diminished by a population greater than had been calculated. Ten years of large scale agricultural effort had brought substantial increases in the amount of food; but there were so many more mouths to feed that the increase in production was cancelled out by the increase in population. The problem which Canada has of more employed by more unemployed, India meets on a vastly greater scale with more fed but more hungry. In 1953 India had to import 2,000,000 tons of food-stuffs. In 1959, despite the increase in agricultural production, India had to import 4,000,000 tons of food-stuffs. In one more decade she will need to import a third as much as she is producing now. There is no way in which this can be done. There is no chance of bridging the gap between food and large scale famine, except by slowing down the rate of population increase. For at present the net increase in population which India has to face amounts in round figures to 25,000 every day.

This, of course, is only part of the problem that confronts the whole world. It is a fact as simple and as inexorable as that 2 and 2 make 4 that the present rate of population increase in the world cannot be indefinitely continued. Dr. Harrison Brown of Cal Tech has shown by simple mathematics that, at the present rate of population increase, the total number of human beings in one thousand years would constitute a standing mass of humanity covering every square foot of land above sea level. India, facing her own problem, has begun promoting a massive programme of family planning. Frowning on abortion, it approves sterilization after four children have been born to a family. But it is putting more hope in research for a cheap oral contraceptive.

One other item I should like to mention concerns the involvement in India, our host country, of our Christian Missionaries. India significantly is the one country in Asia which has an indigenous Christian Church, going back to the time of the Apostles. The Bar Thoma Church in South India claims that it was established by the Apostle Thomas, and has been in existence ever since. Mission Churches have been known in India since the arrival of Roman Catholic Missionaries in the great days of Portuguese expansion. In the last couple of centuries both Roman Catholic and Protestan Missionaries have done an amazing amount of useful work in many fields. The impact of Christians upon India has been many times in excess of their numbers. For example while Christians form only about 3 % of the total population in India, Dr. McClure estimated a few years ago that 85% of all the women nurses in India had been trained in Christian institutions.

I wish, however, to make mention, especially of a Toronto Doctor Robert McClure, a Missionary of the United Church in Ratlam, India. When Dr. McClure was on furlough, a couple of Toronto friends gave him money to purchase radium for cancer patients in his hospital, the only centre of such treatment for something like 30,000,000 people. The Banting Institute in Toronto also gave Dr. McClure some 30,000 doses of anti-polio vaccine. And while I was with Dr. McClure, he was just starting an immensely successful out-door clinic for polio vaccination. Dr. McClure had also taken back with him a volunteer dentist from Hamilton, who was the first western trained dentist in that area. Other Canadians whom I should like to mention are Dr. and Mrs. John McKim of the Medical College at Ludhiana. Dr. and Mrs. McKim, both Medical Doctors, left their practices in the city of London and offered five years of service in India. How much such a gift really means is difficult to calculate.

Only one other matter I must hastily mention. New Delhi is at present the centre of a huge industrial fair, almost on the scale of a World Fair. Eighty-six acres on the outskirts of New Delhi are given over to a great group of spectacular buildings in which the industrial countries of the world, great and small, have been busily parading their wares, and selling them to an enormous market not only in India but throughout that whole section of the world. Almost every country one can think of without any pretentions to industrial capacity is there with impressive exhibits: Poland and Finland, Belgium and Germany and dozens of other countries. And, of course, Soviet Russia is there with an exhibit of a tremendous size and an unlimited amount of free literature. I was happy to observe, however, that taken all together the exhibit of the United States seemed to me clearly to outclass the Russian. But one thing was distressing and shocking. Canada had no place in that Fair! In all that assembly of manufacturing ability and aggressive salesmanship, there is nothing to suggest that Canada exists. How on earth can Canadian manufacturers compete with manufacturers of other countries if they do not bother to display their wares or try to sell them?

My time is running by, and I must come at once to the Assembly of the World Council. India not only provided the setting for the Assembly, but to some extent accentuated the significance. For the first time in 2,000 years an Eucumenical Christian Assembly was held in Asia. And an assembly of Christians against the back-drop of Asia is more sharply silhouetted than one at Amsterdam or Evenston or Rome. In India, Christians are a minority. But India is a reminder that in the whole world Christians are a minority, indeed of late years a steadily diminishing minority. Christian missionaries, Roman Catholics and Protestant (Orthodox and Coptic Churches have no missionaries) have made Christianity the first religion which may be called a World Religion. And-though we must be careful of statistics which are usually inflated-Christians are, in point of numbers, the largest company among the great religions of the world.

But altogether they are still a minority. India is not a Christian land. There is no indication that there is going to be a Christian land. There is no indication that the world, in which we or our children live, is going to be a Christian world. After generations of missionary work, Christians are 3 % of India. Before the Revolution they were only 1 % of China, and they are still only 1/a of 1 % of Japan. The fact is that Christians live in a world that must be one world, and that will not be a Christian world. So Christians must learn to live with others. And a Christian Council in India made this effectively clear. The New Delhi Assembly, it is true, brought to the East a reminder that Christianity, which did not begin in the West, was no longer just a religion of the West, with a few Overseas transplants, which until the 19th Century Christianity largely was. Probably never in a history of mankind was there gathered in one place a group of human beings with such a variety of customs and robes, colour and nationality. The United Nations in its great Assemblies would undoubtedly have a larger total of countries represented, but it would have nothing approaching the dazzling variety of raiment, the vivid testimony of such diverse traditions.

The Assembly procession, representing the Mar Thoma Church, the one ancient root of Christianity in Asia, the ancient Coptic Church of Egypt and Ethiopia-which claims to be the original stem from which all the rest of us haev come-the Orthodox Churches and all branches of Protestantism were in colour, nation, race and tradition the most diverse group of Christians ever assembled in one place, anywhere any time, under any auspices. Since Christ walked in Galilee there never has been a gathering in His name of people so widely representative of mankind. Any Hindu who looked at that procession would be under no illusion that Christianity was the religion of the white man. As a matter of fact, although the Russians received the most publicity, eleven of the twenty-three Churches received into the Assembly at New Delhi were from the continent of Africa and two others from the South Pacific.

This new pattern has important consequences. The Ecumenical Movement began in the mission fields. The lineage of the World Council Assemblies goes back to the pivotal meeting in Edinburgh in 1910, when Missionary leaders, such as the Canadian-born Bishop Brent of the Philippines, the Indian-born clergyman Samuel Azariah, later to be the first Indian Anglican Bishop, and one of the founders of the Church of South India, proclaimed, in a way which Christian Churches had not before heard, that the isolation in which the individual Christian Churches hug themselves, each representing their own slogans which made each the one true Church, was a sin and a scandal in non-Christian lands. But although the Movement began in mission fields, the leading figures in the Movement have been largely Western. In Amsterdam the prominent leaders, the speeches and the programmes were from the West. In Evanston there was a change. The members of the Coptic Church, for example, were more vocal. At New Delhi, the Assembly in a way the others never approached was simply as a World Church.

Indeed the admission of the Orthodox Churches radically and permanently altered the structure and character of the World Council. To begin with, it made the pattern complete. Now, with negligible exceptions, all Christians of the world are represented, as Roman Catholics by the Vatican, or as Ecumenical Christians by the World Council. The complete picture is quite different from the partial. Before the admission of the Orthdox Churches, the largest single Church in the World Council was the American Methodist with 10,000,000 members. The Russian Orthodox Church brought in by its own estimate 50,000,000 members from a population of 250,000,000. One other Orthodox Church, the Roumanian, brought in a total of 13,000,000. On the Central Committee of 100, which in future will direct the policies of the World Council, the Eastern Orthodox Churches now have seventeen members compared with a total of twenty-one members form all the Churches of North America. In addition, Africans will have nine members and Asia thirteen. The World Council of Churches, like Christianity itself, is no longer a white Western community.

What difference this will make to the pattern, structure and aims of the World Council, nobody now knows. What difference it will make to the Russian Orthodox Church, to have direct and continuous contact with a World Organization and to share in its work, nobody knows. One thing is clear: despite nearly a half century of Communist Government in Russia, much of it marked by active persecution of the Christian Church, you can't write off the Orthodox Church in Russia, just as you can't write off the Catholic Church in Poland.

One Sunday afternoon at New Delhi I went to the Russian Embassy where the Russian Delegation had arranged to have a showing of motion pictures covering the special services in the Cathedrals at Moscow when Visser 't Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council, went to Russia to invite the Orthodox Church to the World Council. The showing included a long series of movies of other special Services in the cathedrals of Moscow, Kiev and other Russian cities-mainly the special Services at Christmas and Easter through the recent years. As we were watching the pictures, one of the Russian delegates said quietly in English, "Look at the faces." It seemed to me, as I heard, that I knew exactly what he meant. I looked at the faces, and from then to the end I looked at the faces in these vast throngs of worshippers. They were not by any means all old faces. Significantly, Nikodim, the leader of the Russian delegation, is himself only thirty-two years of age. Russian Christians of this generation have been born and brought up in an atmosphere hostile to Christianity, yet they are still militantly Christian. It is true that they live under pressures and under limitations that the Christian Church does not know in free countries. It is true that their conception of the task of the Church in social affairs is quite different from our conception. But the Church in Russia is still to be reckoned with in its own country. Supplemented by other Orthodox Churches, outside Russia, it is still to be reckoned with when it becomes part of a World Organization such as the World Council.

To receive the Russian Orthodox Church created risks and problems. But at least there is now one segment of Russian society that has an opening through the Iron Curtain. The reception of the Russian Orthodox Church into the World Council was a calculated risk, gladly taken.

So far I have said little about the Assembly itself. This is for two reasons. First, because while you men here have religious affiliations, you are here not as a Church audience. And second, in any case what can be said must necessarily be a matter of selection. I could, for example, easily spend the entire time on the mechanics of the Assembly. To conduct such a Council with the complexities of committee work required, and the variety of languages involved, demands a setting almost as elaborate as that of the United Nations. Not only the Assembly itself but the Press Conferences and the Committees required elaborate systems of translation and reproductions, so that as a man began speaking in Russian the English listener could grab an ear-phone, turn to a certain number and hear in his own tongue. Fortunately the Vigyan Bhavan, the new building erected by the Indian Government for UNESCO meetings, was almost ideally equipped for Council Assemblies. So far as I know, it is unsurpassed in the world, and incidentally it is air-conditioned.

I could spend time also describing the colourful details, and making notes on the distinguished personalities, and commenting on the speeches which made the press despatches. In general I would judge that, though some of these issues debated were important, few if any of the speeches were significant. In effect upon the audience there was no speech to match that of Charles Malik at Evanston, or of Bishop Stephen Neill or Reinhold Niebuhr at Amsterdam. I think also that the Assembly reports on the sections Unity, Witness and Service choked in their own wordiness.

I have read criticisms from Roman Catholic sources that the last Papal encyclical, while it said a lot of good things, it said nothing distinctive or outstanding that would make it memorable. I feel the same, only much more so, with the Assembly pronouncements. There was too much a tendency to use several pages of typescript to approve the Ten Commandments-in principle. I recall the story of the Back Bencher in one of the Committee rooms who, after a frustrating morning, rose to say, "Mr. Chairman, those of us who have kept silent are not the only ones who have said nothing." And the Message, which in some ways corresponds to an Encyclical, was, I think, almost unChristian in its Christian exclusiveness.

When I think of Lord Halifax, the austere Anglican High Churchman going with Gandhi, the Hindu, to spend an hour in prayer with him before they discussed important international issues; and when I think of such a man as Martin Buber in Israel, I feel sure that no Christian individually would go into the presence of such men and say, "I am a Christian, I have access to God. You are not a Christian, you have no real access to God." Yet, while individually Christians would be appalled at so speaking, collectively they say just that.

I think that there should be some way that Christians, whether Roman Catholic or Ecumenical, can express their own faith in God, and accord their own experience that they have found Jesus Christ to be the Light of the World without limiting converse with God to themselves alone. This exclusiveness comes out of an unenlightened literalism in Scripture interpretation of which all of us, Protestants, Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Jews have been guilty in times past, but which for the most part we have happily discarded; and which we could still further discard to become not less Christ-like but more Christ-like in so doing.

I could also profitably point out how limited a part of the World Council activities had to do with the Assembly meeting. The World Council of Churches has one resemblance to the United Nations. It is not only an Assembly where delegates make speeches, it is an organization reaching out into the world in a multitude of ways never seen by visiting the Assembly Hall. Assemblies come and go, but the United Nations carries on work of incalculable value through continuous agencies such as UNESCO, WHO, FAO and the others. The Assemblies are intermittent events. The continuing service goes on constantly all around the world. So it is with the World Council. In its service to refugees, for example, the Council has 500 staff members continually at work throughout the world in 45 different countries. It has agricultural and special project teams in "areas of acute need."

Wherever earthquake, flood disaster or sudden need arises, the World Council of Churches organization is one of the chief voluntary agencies on which the United Nations Commissioner can rely. Co-ordinating the work in Christian congregations during the last five years, it has given 50,000 tons of clothes and, altogether, including the surplus stocks of the United States, fed hungry people with a million tons of food. It has homes for medical rest and care, in which over the past five years more than 1,100 Christian workers have received extended treatment. It has provided upwards of 2,000 scholarships, mainly for post-graduate work. It has operated over 250 Ecumenical Work Camps in five continents.

So I could go on. I wish only to show that the World Council of Churches, like the U.N. has activities far beyond its publicized Assemblies. It is already an effective world wide agency for Christian compassion. And in such service it has achieved a measure of unity and harmony which it has not approached in Assembly debates. But I must conclude. I have been asked what is the good of the Ecumenical Movement. I am reminded of Ben Franklin when he was asked "what is the good of electricity?" He replied, "What is the good of a new-born baby?" You don't know, because you don't know what it will grow into.

So I don't know what will be the good of the Ecumenical Movement, but I suggest that it should have three areas of growth: First, in itself it must grow to a much closer unity. It must become more of a working fellowship of Christians with, indeed, vast differences which will remain, but with increasingly common purposes and concerted goals in the field of humanitarian service, the kind of humanitarian service that comes only from the springs of religious devotion. Second, we must develop some lasting link-if at first it is only a bridge of free communication-between the two great groups, those represented by the Roman Catholics hierarchy and those represented by the Ecumenical Movement. And happily of this we have many hopeful signs.

Today, January 25, is the last day of the Church Unity Octave conducted by Roman Catholic Churches throughout the world. During this Octave, Roman Catholics repeat a prayer which every other Christian with the necessary change in names might well repeat:

For controversies marked by irony, superstition and exaggeration, for lack of understanding, for unfeeling judgment concerning our non-Catholic brethren, Forgive us O Lord.

For the acts of violence and the injustices we have tolerated in the course of history against our Protestant brethren, Forgive us O Lord.

For proud complacent attitudes shown in times past towards our Orthodox brethren, for our present indifference to them. Forgive us O Lord.

When Roman Catholics so pray, and when the Vatican can describe the Ecumenical Movement as "the fruit of the inspiration of Grace," we may well say that we are in a new atmosphere of hope. We have still far to go, but we are coming to recognize that people of different theological ideas can co-operate fruitfully in practical issues, giving to others the freedom they cherish for themselves. For altogether they are a minority, and if they don't tolerate each other they have small complaint if others don't tolerate them. Let us hope that the Ecumenical Council, called by His Holiness the present Pope, will make an important step in some avenues of communication and co-operation that the centuries have not known.

One further step I think Christians must make. They must learn to look with wider sympathy upon men of other religions in this non-Christian world. In the Press Room in New Delhi, while we were discussing Observers from the Roman Catholic Church, one Jewish correspondent asked, "Why no Observers from the Mother of all Churches?"

In a university near New Delhi, a man with an important position in the Indian Government, a Director of Rural Education in India, a Doctor of Science with a son and daughter both living permanently in the United States, said to me somewhat wistfully, "Now that all these Christian leaders from all over the world are here in our midst, isn't there some way we could talk with them? We shall never have them here again. We would like to be able to talk with them about the ressource of religion in the life of man today." Probably, regrettable though it is, a great many of the delegates to the World Council of Churches would have been scared to death of sitting down to talk with representatives of any non-Christian religion. They would be afraid of the critics of the World Council. They would be afraid that they would be accused of selling out their own religion. They went, of course, to the tomb of Gandhi to pay their respects. But Gandhi is now dead! He won't ask any embarrassing questions. They would have been much more cautious about going to talk with him if he were still alive.

Christians must come to recognize the hard fact that, in the world of today, they are in a minority and, in the world of tomorrow, they will still be a minority. And Christians must recognize that many of the leaders, and many of the rank and file of other religions, are just as concerned as we are about the survival of the spirit of man in the world which we are fashioning.

It is a curious lack of faith that suggests that, if Christians sit down seriously with people of other faiths to discuss the ultimate concerns of man's spiritual life, it is Christianity which will suffer. If we had more true humility we might confess that all our knowledge of God is a fragmentary grasping after immeasureable truth. And we might all benefit by sympathetic appreciation of each other's faith. It is not enough to pray that Christians may all be one. We should pray that Christians might seek new ways of being at one with all other men of like mind and heart, seeking in their own way truth and beauty, goodness and God.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. T. A. King.