Reflections on the Contemporary World Mission

Abstract

We come together today as a new Unit Committee of the Division of Overseas Ministries (DOM) at the beginning of the 1976–1978 triennium of the National Council of Churches. During this meeting, and in the months ahead, we will face important decisions which, given the magnitude of both the problems we confront and the resources we can tap, will be pressing and fateful. It would be foolish to exaggerate our role — there is very real sense in which our ecumenical vehicle is fragile and weak, far less influential on the world, national, ecclesiastical, scenes than we are prone to admit — but it would be folly as well to underrate the realistic and timely role we can assume in the exercise of the Christian stewardship expected of us in our day.

Allow me to commence with a very personal recollection — perhaps unduly personal. Exactly fifty years ago this year – in 1926 — my father and mother sailed out of New York harbor bound for Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was three years old at the time and they took me along. They were setting out on an overseas ministry in the year of our nation's sesquicentennial though I doubt that they gave that fact much importance. I now look back on this ministry from the year of our nation's bicentennial and wonder at the immense changes in the context of mission and ministry between 1926 and 1976. My father was quite clear about one purpose in 1926, a clarity he never lost however unclear he might have felt in other areas of his work — he was determined to do what he could to train young men and women for the fulltime