Spirit, Mind & Body

During World War II, a captured Japanese officer thoughtfully examined a football that the Y.M.C.A. had just given his P.W. camp as a gift from his enemies. Later, he approached the Rev. Fredrik Franklin, a Swedish Y.M.C.A. missionary in the Far East. "Mr. Franklin," he said, holding up the football, "is this Christianity?" Said Franklin: "Yes, sir, I believe it is."

Last week 10,000 delegates gathered in Paris to mark the 100th anniversary of the World's Alliance of Young Men's Christian Associations. As Delegate Franklin told his story, the football seemed an appropriate symbol of the Y.M.C.A.'s rugged, straightforward and successful type of Christianity.

"We raise our kids in bamboo huts and city flats," Franklin told the delegates from 70 countries. "We are high church and low church, orthodox and unorthodox . . . We are colored and colorless, Africans and Scandinavians . . . We speak a hundred languages."

Young & Gay. The activities of the Y.M.C.A. movement are almost as diverse as its 4,242,819 world members. It employs 5,704 full-time professional secretaries (the term for Y.M.C.A. local administrative officers), operates 8,360 headquarters buildings, 247 armed services centers, 186 industrial workers' centers, 89 refugee camp associations, 252 holiday hostels, 72 summer camps, and scores of schools and colleges. In almost every corner of the world people are familiar with its escutcheon, a red triangle whose sides symbolize the association's three concerns: spirit, mind and body.

To some, spirit seems to be the least of the three. A lot of people see the "Y" only as a chain of economical young men's hotels, a place of gymnasia, swimming pools and evening classes. Yet the Y.M.C.A.'s aim was set down clearly a hundred years ago in a statement called the "Paris Basis": "To unite those young men who, regarding Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour . . . desire to be His disciples . . . and to associate their efforts for the extension of His Kingdom among young men."

The Y.M.C.A. was founded in London on June 6, 1844 by a committee led by two young dry-goods clerks, George Williams and Edward Beaumont. From the first it was a religious movement of laymen, in spirit ecumenical, evangelical and often puritanical. Aimed at young workers who had become indifferent to religion in the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution, the Y.M.C.A. had no formal religious creed, urged its members only "to exert a Christian influence in the sphere of their daily calling."

Within a decade the idea had spread through England to the Continent, and to Canada and the U.S. The budding associations soon began branching into education. In 1855 the first World Conference convened in Paris. To all established Y.M.C.A.s went a letter describing the kind of delegate that the conference expected: "We also want them to be young and gay in order to demonstrate that the Y.M.C.A. is not an empty name, that we are not tiresome and boring young men . . . but that by God's grace it is our Christian faith that makes us young and happy."

Flexible & Friendly. Over the century the Y.M.C.A. multiplied more than a hundredfold. It lost much of its early puritanism, expanded its services in every direction. A herald of the physical gospel, it celebrated its liturgy in the gymnasium, introduced sports into dozens of lands (basketball and volleyball are Y.M.C.A. inventions). Working with youngsters, teen-agers and adults, it taught everything from swimming and driving to painting and how to prepare for marriage.

Because the Y.M.C.A. never attempts to proselytize for a particular sect, it has attracted not only all denominations of Christians but non-Christians as well. Almost 90% of India's 30,000 members are Hindus. In Japan and Ceylon many members are Buddhists. Even Moslems have joined the Y. The Vatican, suspicious of the Y.M.C.A.'s deep Protestant roots, has warned Roman Catholics against joining. Despite this, some 25% of the Y.M.C.A.'s 2,230,000 U.S. members and about 95% of Philippine and South American members are Catholics.

The Y.M.C.A.'s flexibility and good will have made it welcome in most countries, but it has also been proscribed in some. Spain's Y.M.C.A. has been closed since the Civil War, and the Y in the U.S.S.R. and most of her satellites has been scuttled. Red China, however, has permitted it to continue operating.

Overseer of the Y.M.C.A.'s worldwide work is its general secretary, Pennsylvania-born Dr. Paul M. Limbert, 57, a minister of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, who lives at the Y.M.C.A. World's Committee headquarters in Geneva. A onetime education and religion teacher at Columbia University Teachers College, he is the third American in succession to hold the post. In Paris, at the start of a fortnight's conferences, discussion groups and campfire meetings, Dr. Limbert heard the Y.M.C.A.'s growth and prosperity proclaimed in four languages (with the help of a 6,000-earphone translating system).

But, by its own standards, the Y.M.C.A. is measured not merely by its material growth, its prosperity or its technical proficiency. What counts is the propagation of Christianity in every area of life. That, in the eyes of its leaders, is the great challenge for the Y.M.C.A.'s second century. Says the report from the Y.M.C.A. World's Committee to the Paris conference: "Have we sufficient faith in God and the power of His word to let Him use us wholly for His purposes and not our own? Are we willing to be first His children, taught by Him, then His disciples, and finally His fellow workmen in the extension of His Kingdom? . . . We do not know; we hope and pray that this will happen."

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