The Good News Movement – A Job Well Done (Part IV)

This is the second half of the commentary on the Good News movement’s positive influence in United Methodist missions, drawing upon personal experience.

Raised in a family engaged in the mission field, my mother’s family was Mennonite and attended the Berne, Indiana, Mennonite Church. In the mid-1900s, it was the largest Mennonite church in the world with an attendance of 1,300 in a town of fewer than 2,000 persons.

I recall a directory in that church with about 150 names of persons who had gone into full-time Christian service from the congregation. Included were aunts, uncles and cousins. They were the core of General Conference Mennonite work in India, where one uncle died.

In my Methodist home, my mother’s bulletin board had missionary prayer cards. A teenager stayed with us a year because her missionary parents wanted her to attend high school in the states. I remember visiting neighboring churches when missionary speakers were scheduled. At age 10 when filling out my first church pledge card, I pledged it all for “the red side” (benevolences which I understood to be missions) instead of the “black side” for current expenses. By this time I had my own income (from caring for chickens) and remember figuring what would be a double-tithe.

I attended Taylor University, an unofficial Methodist holiness school named for famous Methodist missionary Bishop William Taylor. Taylor was a maverick, who gained fame by street preaching in San Francisco during the Gold Rush and went on to preach on five continents. He violated comity arrangements in India, started churches there, organized an annual conference and applied for representation at the General Conference.

When he started his own “self-supporting” missionary society, Taylor ran into trouble with the missionary sending agency of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He surrendered his clergy credentials, was elected to General Conference as a layman, and was elected bishop (probably not possible today) and assigned to Liberia. I have on my shelf all 13 of the books he wrote. Taylor University became the school of choice for many who would become Methodist missionaries. One of the most famous of these was John Wengatz who had a building named for him at Taylor. In large part because of Taylor influence, the North Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church (before merger) was usually first or second in giving to Advanced Specials for the denomination.

In the late 1960s as district youth coordinator, I helped organize one of the first mission trips for teens. We took 30 youth to Haiti to work at Grace Children’s Hospital (we were just learning—30 is far too many). We organized two more mission trips after. As a district superintendent in the 1980s, our district sponsored missions banquets, missions saturation weeks, and missions conferences.

Good News connections were valuable. One of our favorite missionary couples, Ken and Loraine Enright, were engaged in pioneer work in the Congo and later organized the Kafakumba Training School. The Enrights had been called to missionary work when at Taylor University under the influence of John Wengatz.

Two missionaries we knew, Dr. Glen Eschtruth and Burleigh Law, were martyred in the Congolese Civil War. The Enrights were captured, while others had homes destroyed. Through it all the work flourished. The church in the Congo became known as the fastest-growing conference in Methodism. One conference multiplied to five. Other missionary couples, John Enrights (Ken and Lorraine’s son), Ken Vances, Marv Wolfords, Harold Amstutzs, Nate Steury and Elinda (Enright) Steury worked with the Enrights.

As noted in earlier articles, the overseas UM missionary situation changed with the 1972 Methodist-Evangelical United Brethren merger. The merger led to the creation of a new UM structure featuring bureaucratic superboards including the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM). It took 63 pages of the 1972 Discipline to prescribe the structure and responsibilities of the new board, more than the length of the entire Discipline in earlier years.

With former traditions no longer in place to contribute to stability, the new board took a radical turn to the political and religious Left. Under the Board of Missions of the former Methodist Church, missionary outreach was focused on world evangelism and winning persons for Christ.  That changed. The sending of traditional missionaries, especially evangelicals, was no longer a part of the new GBGM strategy. Traditional missions (the board even changed the word missions by dropping the “s” to mission) was seen as paternalistic and part of an old colonialism. While the board sent some new missionaries it also turned away hundreds of would-be missionaries. The church under the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church counted 1,742 overseas full-time missionaries in 1960. With the new philosophy in place, despite the addition of former EUB missionaries, by 1977 the number had been reduced to 660. It did not help that certain evangelical missionaries were disaffiliated (no longer official UM missionaries) by GBGM, including four couples associated with Kafakumba.

Today, fewer than 200 foreign full-time missionaries serve through GBGM.

Despite this, the church in the majority world (Asia, South America, Africa) is thriving. I remember one letter from John Enright saying they had started 50 new churches in one year. When United Methodist missionaries had to depart the Congo because of the civil war there, the Kafakumba operation moved to Zambia. Pastors from four different countries today come to the school for four weeks each summer, bringing their families. After eight years pastors are fully credentialed. The result? In 1968 at the time of merger, there were almost 11 million United Methodists in the United States and only a small number in Africa. Recently, in one count (before disaffiliation) there were 12 million UMs in the world, but fewer than 5 million were in the U.S while over 6 million were in Africa.

It has been my privilege to serve as part of the Kafakumba Training School Endowment Committee, made up almost entirely of lay persons (I am the only clergy), almost all of whom are from Indiana. The committee has over one million dollars invested in an endowment fund which operates the school and pays for about 80 students and their families to attend each summer. Much of our support comes from former United Methodist pastors and churches now part of the Global Methodist Church. Can the GMC and the UMC work together?

There are, of course, serious problems facing the African Church. Africans deal with situations that Americans find difficult to understand: grinding poverty, lack of educational opportunity, serious health crises, and aggressive Islamism. There have also been incidents of lack of financial accountability. Furthermore, Africans themselves do not always speak with one voice since they are divided by language, nationalities, cultures and—a special African problem—tribalism.

Yet, God continues to bless. The church in Africa needs the American church. But it needs a strong evangelical voice to bring about reconciliation, cooperation and continued growth.

There are all kinds of reasons why the African voice is muted at United Methodist General Conference. So what is the future? Can the more conservative African Church continue to work with American United Methodists who continue to slide further into theological and social progressivism? With Good News no longer in the mix, the future is unknown. The opportunity for disaffiliation has not been made available for Africans.

And so we continue to pray and to work for the church, for peace and reconciliation and faithfulness.