Wanted: Lay Missionaries

In The Ugly American, bestselling plea for a better U.S. Foreign Service (TIME, Oct. 6), the authors virtually ask that Washington send abroad platoons of everyday saints, preferably with engineering degrees. The idea was eagerly echoed and extended last week by a conference that in effect urged all American Christians abroad to act as missionaries.

Forty ministers and laymen assembled at the Presbyterians' Gilmor-Sloane House in Stony Point, N.Y. for a week-long "Institute on Overseas Churchmanship," under sponsorship of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Participants --mostly Presbyterians, with a sprinkling of Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans and Episcopalians--included an architectural engineer who commutes to Korea, a doctor and his wife going to Iran, a minister on his way to the American Church in Paris. Conferees listened to experts on such varied subjects as the mission work of the church, on the implications of the industrial revolution in Asia for Christianity, on population problems, "cultural empathy," and on Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Roman Catholicism. Again and again they returned in their discussions to the problem of changing the stock image of the American as a materialistic go-getter.

Organizer John Rosengrant of the Presbyterians' Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations summed it up: "When Americans go overseas, they should be able to demonstrate that their lives are centered in a basic Christian philosophy. A Christian should live his values wherever he goes."

How to do this? Working with local community services, churches, hospitals, welfare agencies, schools, but above all through personal example. The kind of "lay witness" called for is sometimes possible only with close friends, "but the door of personal testimony is never fully closed, and the word spoken by the sincere man . . . carries more weight than he realizes. The 'home with the open door' is everywhere one of the most immediate human influences. As an oil executive, engineer or businessman, [the Christian] should consider his main objective not in terms of dividends for shareholders, or power for America, or prestige for himself, but as an essential Christian ministry. This will call for imagination and courage and deep faith; yet it is the way to a satisfying adventure."

So successful was Stony Point's appeal to adventure that the United Presbyterians are planning a similar session for students in the spring and two larger conferences next year.

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