Onward, Christian Soldiers                                                  9/23/45

 

Scripture:  Isaiah 61.

 

Text:  Isaiah 61: 1,2;  “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;

            To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; ....”

 

I confess that there have been times in my experience when I have winced at the use of the hymn: “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”  It seemed to me then to suggest a sanction of, and glorification of, warfare - whereas anyone can see that war is terrible, grim, devastating.

 

But I’ve changed my mind somewhat.  The composition and singing of “Onward Christian Soldiers” never was meant to bless bayonets and bombs.  It was meant to inspire people of Christ-like spirit toward action in their faith.  It is a stirring hymn, with a place of its own in our church life.  The fact that it has lived for 80 years indicates that it has permanent spiritual value.

 

There never was an age that did not call upon Christians to act upon their faith.  The call of our own age is urgent.  Man-made destruction and devastation has walked the earth with an intensity never seen before.  Millions are in want of the necessities for physical life - shelter, food, clothing.  Without these hundred of thousands will die.  Among them there is a desperate lack of jobs that will enable them, unaided, to save themselves and their families; lack of hope, lack of the ability to believe in a good life in a friendly world.

 

In the face of such staggering need, surely it is a time for Christians to be, spiritually, on the march; not just practicing Christian virtue as individuals, but undertaking great tasks together.

 

I intend, this morning, to be quite practical in sketching before you some needs, and a program put forward by our denomination for meeting those needs.  For the past three or four years, we have done much thinking in terms of war emergency.  Now we come to the time for thought and action of the post-war emergency which is even more urgent.

 

Every Christian denomination is making plans to meet, so far as it can, the needs of this time.  Our own has taken time for careful study before advancing its program.  A series of post-war aims was adopted more than a year ago at the General Council meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Since then a program has been carefully studied and built by groups in which pastors and laymen, superintendents, executives and secretaries were always represented.

 

The Executive Committee of our General Council has voted the program in its final form as a valid and reasonable program for the post-war years.  It includes at least eleven vital areas.

 

(1)  First on the list is increased relief to War Victims.  We have all seen the pictures, and read about, the homelessness, want, woe and fear that go with the war’s destruction.  In the Philippines, a gallant national people are impoverished, ill, ragged - many, many of them victims of deprivation and starvation.  In China, hundreds of thousands, literally, have fled before an oncoming enemy - some too feeble, too old, or too young to go on, dropping from exhaustion and starvation along the roadside.  The way back is just as hard, and often to homes and shops and farms now destroyed.

 

In England, thousands of homes are destroyed; Congregational churches were blitzed along with the rest.  In France are the refugees trudging forward somewhere; and emaciated, homeless children begging morsels of food.

 

Many of these sufferers in war-torn lands can now start the long, slow way back to freedom and health and happiness.  Many others can scarcely even start back without assistance - our assistance.

 

In five years, from 1940 to 1945, our Congregational churches, through the Committee for War Victims and Services (now the Committee for War Victims and Reconstruction) have contributed approximately $1,400,000 for the work of feeding children in war-ravaged lands; for civilian relief in the Philippines, Greece, India and China; for emergency mission work in foreign fields; for aid to our more-than-400 chaplains in service; for relief in England through Congregational churches there; for refugees and those in resettlement and relocation areas.  It has been a flexible program of quick relief as needs became acute.  Now the work becomes steadier and the needs mount.  Mr. Herbert Hoover says, “It is now 11:59 o’clock on the starvation clock.”

 

Six American youth workers, called by British Congregational churches, are providing church-centered social service; three are in France; our Medical Nutritional Unit is in Italy finding ways and means to restore the undernourished to full health.

 

Who has the imagination to see and care?  Our denominational committees, on the basis of their study, believe that not less than $1,350,000 is needed in the next three years for this work of relief.

 

(2)  What of the rehabilitation of uprooted people?  The needs of our fellow-Congregational people in England - bombed out of their churches and homes, are unbelievably elemental.  It is little enough to prove to them that nothing can separate them from our concern!  Think of Greece where our colleges are considered essential by the government to national recovery.  How shall the faculties be held together and housed after the seizing and looting of our college properties there during German occupation?  We have Congregational churches in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Spain.  Shall they have some word and some hand of encouragement?  What about the youth of their parishes who have lived in a real world of murder, deceit and treason?  Help is needed there in youth guidance.

 

Here within our own national borders are the Japanese-descended families of American soldiers whose loyal blood soaks the battlefields of Italy and France.  All such loyal families are being released from relocation centers.  Many of them will have to start all over from scratch in new communities.  Others will go back to the west coast to find their homes filled with war workers and service families.  The former Los Angeles “little Tokyo” is now “little Harlem.”  Where are these people to go and what are they to do?  The problem is one for the whole nation, but those families that are Christian deserve some real evidence of concern and help from us who belong to the same families of the Christian church.

 

For all of the most necessary work in rehabilitation among the uprooted peoples of the world, not less then $180,000 is needed in the next 3 year period from us Congregationalists.

 

(3)  And then there is a ministry to be rendered to returning service men beyond their return to normal home and church life.  Thousands of them will enroll in schools and colleges.  We must establish at least temporary service for them through our Student Life Department.  At certain strategic campuses we must place the most adequately trained men we can find for counseling and leadership.  Many competent chaplains have expressed an interest in such work.  For work with returning service men, not less than $165,000 is needed in the next 3 years.

 

(4)  A fourth field of need challenges our consideration.  Enemy attack and our own bombings have ruined an appalling number of our own mission-built and owned churches, hospitals, schools and residences on foreign mission fields.

 

At the beginning of this war, our Congregational properties, used as tools for foreign mission work, included 687 organized church buildings, 1,113 primary and elementary schools, 57 social centers, and a great number of missionary residences.  Much of that has been destroyed.  In one of China’s major cities, the enemy deliberately destroyed the influential Christian college as a part of its program to drive out western influences.  The students and faculty salvaged what books and equipment they could out of the debris and walked inland hundreds of miles out of range of the enemy.  After those weary weeks of moving, they continued, as best they could, their educational work.  But they are a college without a house - if we can imagine such a thing!

 

The Congregationalists have a particular interest in  missions on some of the Pacific isles.  We have been the only Protestant group to send workers to the Marshalls or to Kusaie.  Truk, Jaluit, Kwagelein were our fields before Japanese occupation.  In the spring of 1944 the American flag was being raised over the first atoll of the Carolines so to be occupied.  The first utterance after the simple flag raising ceremony was the question of the old native chief: “May we pray now?”  To fulfill our obligation on those islands we must help in rebuilding the simple churches destroyed in war’s conflict.

 

Greek officials, during enemy occupation, secretly renewed our yearly permits for college operation and held Greek faculty members together so that no technical difficulties would stand in the way of reopening after the war.  But the buildings have been robbed by retreating Germans of furniture, equipment, and even plumbing.  They must be re-equipped.  For the replacement of our mission housing and equipment not less than $1,294,520 is needed during the next three years.

 

(5)  In the fifth place - it would be short-sighted and silly to think of Christian action without thinking of the spirit that prompts it.  How is the teaching, preaching and study of our Christian life to keep pace with present day movement and needs?  26,000,000 civilians of the US - war workers and service families - have moved away from their established homes since Pearl Harbor.  219,000 are Congregational Christians.  This is over one-fifth of our total membership!

 

It is further estimated that not more than half of the 12,000,000 men and women in military service have been under any church influence, while 60,000,000 people in our country as a whole have no connection at all with any church.  Is the USA a Christian nation?

 

Our Commission on Evangelism and Devotional Life is preparing for personal leadership in meeting with fellow-pastors and lay member throughout the country to offer guidance and encouragement in ministering to uprooted peoples, in holding high ethical standards required in the post-war world.  For this, no less than $102,000 is needed.

 

(6)  Sixthly, at least $300,000 is needed for repairs to facilities and equipment of our churches at home - churches that have opened their plants for furloughed servicemen, for day nurseries for children of war working mothers, and other emergency service.  Under this heading also comes the need for making permanent the church facilities in those mushroom, war-created communities which are becoming permanent.  All of this is a program for which there are no accumulated funds.  $300,000 is needed.

 

(7)  Seventh.  $65,000 is needed for the development of churchmanship - expansion of the Laymen’s Fellowship, weekend conferences, enlisting “all the men of the church at all the work of the church.”

 

(8)  Eighth.  The Negro Colleges of our American Missionary Association are going to be taxed in ability to handle their work.  Approximately 100,000 of the 700,000 Negroes in Armed Services want further education. The Negro colleges will have to have help in taking care of so many.  No less than $220,000 is needed for this during the next three years.

 

(9)  Now a ninth area.  We have come to speak of the “younger churches” - meaning those churches in old countries like India, China and certain other areas, that are beginning to “stand on their own feet.”  In many cases they have a spiritual vitality we might envy.  But they still need the advice and counsel of our missionaries in the ministry, in education, health, social service, certain areas of agriculture, and so on.  This heading the, is “Aid to, and Fellowship with, the younger churches.”

 

Dr. Frank Laubach has done a perfectly marvelous work in simplifying reading in several languages so that native illiterates could learn to read in a relatively short time.  He is a Congregational missionary with years of service in the toughest assignments in the Philippines.  His work will be continued through his leadership in literacy among the younger churches of the Pacific Isles, Asia, Latin American and Africa.  But what good is reading without worthwhile literature?  The ability to read may be very good, or very bad, depending on what one reads!  These younger churches must be helped then with creative, constructive, Christian, reading matter.

 

Their consecrated young folk must have counsel and training for the ministry, in evangelism, religious education, rural sociology and reconstruction.

 

You wouldn’t think it, while hearing the propaganda line, “leave Catholic South America to the Catholics,” but the fact is that there is a large indigenous Protestant movement in Brazil and it has been going for years.  It ought to have the fellowship that we can give it.  For this effective contact with the “younger churches,” at least $166,000 is needed in the next three years.

 

(10)  Many of our Foreign missionary properties, in areas where they have not been destroyed, are nonetheless in need of long-delayed repairs, if the work is to go on.  I need not elaborate on this, in a land where we are straining to get at repairs delayed by war.  For repairs to our missionary properties, no less than $131,850 will be needed.

 

(11)  The most crucial need of our time is the careful building of understanding and good will!  Discrimination among races; strife among managers and laborers in industry; differences in ideals and purposes among nations; even interdenominational jealousies between churches - can be resolved only through understanding and good will.  Unless we make this our earnest business, we are due for a lot more trouble, strife, bloodshed and warfare.

 

There are definite things that can be done - conduct of traveling seminars to Europe for our churchmen, international embassies of Christian leaders from other lands coming here, training schools for pastors in industrial areas (I attended such an experimental session at the University of Wisconsin last July - sent by our Home Board and State Conference).  For a share in building understanding and good will, not less than $200,000 is needed.

 

In these eleven carefully studied areas, after sifting and paring down earlier estimates, our sober committees have estimated that we must raise in the next three years a total of $4,500,000, or one and one-half million dollars a year - over and beyond our regular local expenses and benevolence giving.

 

Suggested quotas are being worked out for the churches in each Congregational State conference. 

 

I told you I was going to speak in a practical vein this morning, didn’t I? 

 

But, do you know that our Congregational churches are only a modest, though important, part of a great American Christian movement?

 

In total membership, we rank about 12th among 19 church denominations with a grand total of 26,000,000 members who are seeking to raise a total of more than $100,000,000.  This is extra giving, to underwrite an emergency post-war program of relief, reconstruction, and advance in evangelism, Christian nurture, and Christian World action.  This is the Church’s contribution to world peace and good will.  Locally, we will hear more of it before the every-member canvass at the end of November.

 

The churches of Europe, of Asia, and of Africa are likewise engaged, according to their abilities in the same sort of venture.

 

There’s work for the Christian churches to do!  “Onward, Christian soldiers!”

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            Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 23, 1945.