Keeping Up With ...

"I want to go full steam ahead until the old boiler bursts," says the Rev. E. Stanley Jones, whose fame overseas as an American evangelist is matched only by Billy Graham. Jones was formally retired by the Methodist Board of Missions in 1954, after 47 years of work --but retirement meant only that he was freed from all church assignments to set his own unflagging pace. In 1963, for example, he spent six months hopping from one missionary outpost to another in Asia and Latin America, filled 736 preaching engagements, spent his vacation writing his 24th book, a spiritual autobiography. Last week, after eating his way through a nation-crossing round of dinners in honor of his 80th birthday, Jones flew off to the Far East to start another round of preaching. "Eighty is a wonderful time to begin," he says.

"I can do as much now as I could 40 years ago," says Jones, and it does not seem to be an idle boast. He can still do 30 fast push-ups without breathing hard, credits his energy to eight hours of good sleep a night plus "grace, grass* and gumption." The most important of these, unquestionably, is grace. Jones believes that "the chief business of the Christian is reconciliation." He has spent a lifetime trying to reconcile East and West, white man and black, the world and Jesus Christ.

Between Two Worlds. Maryland-born Methodist Jones went to India as a missionary in 1907. He began preaching among low-caste Indians, but eventually decided that it was more important to evangelize among the high-caste Hindus, who made up the intellectual and spiritual leadership of the country. Out of this new mission to the top people grew Jones' rewarding friendship with Poet Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi.

Jones firmly believed that Christians, if they hoped to conquer the world for Jesus, would have to meet Eastern cultures on their own terms. He not only learned Hindi and Urdu, as did most other missionaries, but dressed in Indian clothes, openly sided with the independence movement. Today Jones finds that the spiritual gap between East and West has narrowed mightily. "We used to say that the mission field was on the map, but now I know it is in the heart," he says.

"For the Japanese, the bottom dropped out after the war, and their philosophy of life collapsed. Inwardly they had lost their way. In India and elsewhere, there has been an outer revival of old faiths but an inner decay of the foundations on which those faiths are based. In Africa, the old faith is going out from under them and modern secularism is taking its place. In South America, they've got everything to sustain democracy except a moral and spiritual foundation. And that's the disease of modern man."

"My Faith Holds Me." The presence of the disease everywhere makes a man susceptible to the cure, Jones believes. "I would say that Christianity is growing among the thoughtful. We're now in the process of trying to learn how to live. There is more neurosis and more unhappiness with outer prosperity than ever before. So far we have found out the thousands of ways not to do things. Now we've tried everything else and only Christianity is left, a Christianity that is universal and dynamic."

Jones's own life confirms his beliefs. "I don't hold my faith," he says; "my faith holds me. It's Christ or nothing, and you can't live on nothing. I've been a very ordinary man doing extraordinary things because I was linked up with grace."

* His word for vitamins.

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