Shifting Gears

What the Japanese Baptists need, thinks Andrew Quincy Allen of Dallas, the Texas Baptists have got. Last week he arrived in Tokyo to give them some of it.

Andrew Allen, 52, is a precise and practical man, with a windburned complexion and a flat drawl; he became Sunday school secretary of the Texas Baptist Convention in 1949, and since then has worked out his own theory of how to do his job. "Small units," he says crisply. "The small unit concept is what has built the Texas Sunday school system, and Sunday school is our best evangelistic opportunity. You build a church by building the Sunday school. When you reach people in Sunday school and teach them the Bible, you get the money; they want to expand the kingdom of God."

The next step, says Allen, is "visitation. You could have beautiful buildings and train your teachers until they were Ph.D.s, but if you didn't get out and knock on doors and let them know you're interested, you wouldn't get them to church. You can come and visit one of our classes, and then two or three of the members will be out to visit you the next week, instead of just saying, 'We're glad to have you.' We are glad to have you, and we're coming out after you."

With Dr. William L. Howse of Nashville, an official of the Southern Baptist Convention, Allen has begun a three-week tour to expound his Sunday school building ideas to Japanese Baptists, also plans to conduct clinics and conferences in Hong Kong, Java, Korea and the Philippines under the sponsorship of the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Southern Baptist Convention.

"In Japan," says Allen, "they feel that Sunday school is too childlike. Part of my task is to try and help them see it is not childlike, but manly and womanly. We're going to try to get them to understand our idea of the teacher, and get them to recognize that you cannot do your best teaching without knowing the problem of the pupil--visiting him in his home, learning about his personal life, his family life, his recreational life, his business life. They also have to see the importance of many rooms. You can't reach a five-year-old girl in the same room with a 50-year-old man. If they follow our advice, they can't help growing." Japan now has 65 Southern Baptist churches and about 8,000 members. Allen says confidently that with Texas Baptist techniques the Japanese can have 1,000 churches and 100,000 members within the next 25 years.

After only a few days of Texan Allen's ingratiating techniques, Japanese Baptists were impressed. Said one Tokyo pastor: "We're going to have to shift gears in our thinking."

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