10
Chapter Ten
The opening meeting of the conference was a devotional one in the morning. I stood with Jenny in the back of the church where we had attended prayer meeting, waiting for Joe to come and the meeting to begin. Missionaries of every size and shape, and of as many doctrinal persuasions as could be admitted among those who call themselves evangelical, poured through the door past us.
“Hazel! How are you? You cut your hair!”
“Hi, Harry pal. Whendya get down?”
“Stay here with Mother, Betsy; hold Mother’s hand. Betsy! Stay here, I said. We’ll sit down in just a minute.”
“Well, praise the Lord, Mike, that’s just what we’ve been hoping for. Wonderful. Just wonderful. Right in the main plaza? And they didn’t bother you at all? Last time we tried to hold a meeting there we got rotten tomatoes. Say, I’d like to go back there and hold a campaign with you!”
“It’s the most delicious stuff. I have the recipe if you want it”
“. . . told her that was not what I meant but she went right ahead and wrote to the director. . .”
I would have known they were missionaries almost anywhere, except for a few who didn’t quite fit the pattern. They were solid, serious, earnest types for the most part, the young men with a certain eager stretch to their necks, the older ones with a weariness around the eyes and a droop to the shoulders. The women were pale—make-up was worn timidly by a few—and most of their hair styles were several years out of date. They came in self-consciously, gently shoving their children before them, looking around for a place to sit near the back. Jenny introduced me to a few who stopped to speak to her.
“Margaret Sparhawk? Oh, you’re the new one with the mountain Indians now, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes—with IFC, aren’t you? How do you like working with the Indians?”
“How is it up there—pretty rough, huh?”
My answers to these and other questions were not very articulate. Fortunately the people did not seem to expect answers.
I began to glance over some of the literature spread out on long tables on either side of the door. The titles revealed how other missionaries felt about their calling: “Latin America, Land of Opportunity for Christ,” “What Is the Church’s Responsibility to Lost Tribes?,” “Is God Calling You?,” “How to Know the Will of God for Your Life,” “Ecuador in Her Hour of Crisis,” “The Unfinished Task,” “The Unreached Millions,” “The Great Commission and You.” Such themes, in my college days, represented the kind of attitude toward which I aspired. Now as I read them over, glancing now and then at the people who came in the door—people whom the tracts had recruited—I knew that the attitudes represented were no longer to be merely aspired toward, but ought indeed to be mine at this moment. Were they mine?
“So I said to her, I said, ‘Why on earth didn’t they put you in a place where . . .’”
“Bill—see you after this meeting for the board conference, OK? Right in back of the Sunday-school room.”
“Sandy!” This time it was Jenny speaking. “Sandy, you come straight back here. . . . Well, why didn’t you say so sooner? The meeting is almost going to start. Oh Margaret, would you hold George while I take Sandy. . .”
The pianist—it was Miss Blake again—struck a few determined chords, executed several runs, and the speaker and song leader took their places on the platform. People hastily found seats and the meeting began, following the same pattern as the prayer meeting on the preceding night—Scripture reading, prayer, and a devotional message from the Reverend Ira J. Perkins, pastor of a large church in Toledo whose Gospel broadcasts had collected a great deal of money for missions in Ecuador. Ecuador was his special project and Mr. Perkins plugged it whenever he had the chance. He was introduced by the chairman of the largest mission board represented at the conference.
“We all know what a blessing Mr. Perkins’ broadcasts have been to us—back home in the States and here by shortwave—so we’re looking forward to a time of real blessing here together this week, with him and with the Lord. Mr. Perkins, we’re glad to have you.”
Mr. Perkins was a small man with a very powerful voice. He began by telling us what a privilege it was to be a missionary to the missionaries. Then he told one or two humorous stories and proceeded to speak about bearing fruit for Christ, using the fifteenth chapter of John as his text “The secret, beloved,” said Mr. Perkins, “is to abide. Abide in the Vine. Christ is the Vine. Just abide. Now isn’t that simple? You and I get so busy running here and there, doing things for Christ, trying to serve the Lord, when all He tells us to do is abide.” He explained in careful detail how the branches abide in the vine, and left me wondering, as I had wondered all my life, what Jesus had meant by the word abide. The secret that Mr. Perkins had set out to divulge was still a secret to me.
“Good message, wasn’t it?” I heard afterward. “My, that was a blessing. You get so dried up on your station, it’s good to hear something like that. Take in for a change instead of always giving out—you know what I mean.”
Then there was a coffee break, called a “Fellowship Hour,” during which everyone seemed elated and busy and said the same things over again to one another. I did not find much to say to these people, and spent the time standing with a cup of coffee, trying to overhear others’ conversations. “Our work” and “our mission” and “our Indians” and “our tribe” were phrases I heard again and again. They all seemed to belong, they knew the lines, and they wore—I must be imagining it—the same masks. All carried well-worn Bibles, the men large, dog-eared black ones with overlapping Morocco covers, the women smaller ones, some of them with colored bindings, some with names engraved in gold. I noticed in the coffee hour something that had escaped me when I watched the men coming into the church before the meeting. There was a hail-fellow-well-met spirit among them here, but they seemed to see only one another; they acknowledged the presence of women, but without looking any of them straight in the eye. The women on their part—young, pregnant wives, single women with hope in their eyes, overweight older ones, attractive and unattractive—looked as though they had sacrificed much for the cause of Christ, and, stabbed with shame, I thought, Who am I to be their judge? God looks on the heart.
There were certain shades of distinction between members of different mission boards. There were boards which forbade their women to wear make-up, boards whose members were vegetarians, boards which drew their recruits from among Midwestern farmers and boards which required attendance at the same Bible college, boards which had a preponderance of single ladies and boards whose members had been born, nourished and cherished by a single denominational group and had survived only by conformity to that regime. I had once heard someone remark that a missionary could be the laziest or the most overworked person in the world. Here I saw both kinds.
Suddenly I felt an overwhelming claustrophobia It was not only the heat that stifled me. Finding myself inextricably packaged and labeled in the same box with these who bore their labels, it appeared to me, so easily—not to say proudly—put me in a state almost of panic. Someday, God willing (but suppose God willed and I didn’t?)—at any rate, someday by the grace or something of God, I would fit into the box. Someday the label would justly apply to me, but not yet. Definitely not yet. I did not meet the qualifications, I could not pass inspection, certainly I was not up to the standards declared on the label. There were still far too many contradictions within me. Perhaps this conference would have some salutary effect.
The next meeting was a series of reports from representatives of the various participating missions. Again it began with a hymn—just two verses, the first and last, of “Send the Light”—and a brief prayer in which the leader asked the Lord’s blessing on our gathering together this morning, “that everything might be done to Thine honor and to Thy glory, in Jesus’ name, Amen.” It was so predictable to me that I hardly had to listen, and caught myself examining the shading of the letters on a motto which had been strung across the front of the room: “All Power Is Given Unto Me.” The lettering was neatly done, in gold with red shading, like the motto which arched over the minister’s head in my little home church. He had stood, as it were, on exhibit before the words “My tongue shall speak of Thy Word.” All that his tongue had spoken had fled from my memory but the claim remained, a convincing label.
Eleven American and two British mission boards participated in the annual conference. A spokesman for each gave a survey of its work and the achievements of the past year. We heard first about evangelism among children of the coastal cities. Four hundred and twenty-three Bible club meetings had been held in churches, homes, stores, and on public plazas. Several thousand Scripture portions had been memorized by the children, four children thus winning a free week at youth camp—they had memorized entire chapters of the Bible. A number of incidents were recounted of the children’s having been punished for attending meetings and then of their having won their parents to Christ in the end.
A thin, handsome, well-dressed man told of radio broadcasting in fourteen languages. The Gospel was being given out over the airwaves night and day—with cultural programs in between, of course, along with news reports and music—and letters poured in daily to tell of blessings received. “A microphone ministry is not always an easy one—it can be deadening. Pray for us, that the quickening power of the Holy Spirit will anoint each broadcast as it goes out, reaching into homes of people who would never darken the doors of a church.”
Then a stocky, red-faced missionary from Nebraska told about importing pure-blooded bulls and a special breed of rooster in order to help the mestizos who live in the lowlands to improve their cattle and poultry. “God can use a thousand methods to get people to listen to the Gospel, and if we can help them physically—they sure need it down our way—then they’re more likely to listen to the preaching on Sundays. We have two classes a week for farmers, when we give them instruction on fertilizers and feeds and breeding and things like that, and then at the end we have a little message from the Lord for them.” He told of three who had come to Christ through this means, and had found farming more profitable since their conversion.
A missionary from the eastern jungle gave statistics about the numbers of tribes and the probable number of people in each. “Of course, nobody really knows—they haven’t made a complete census. We’re working in three of the tribes . . .” and he went on to tell of baptisms in jungle rivers (‘The crocodiles never seem to come around when we’re baptizing somebody. Guess even the devil keeps his distance—for a while anyway!”), schools for Indian boys, prenatal clinics for Indian mothers, snakebite cases successfully treated, portions of Scripture translated into Indian dialects, even a witch doctor who had been converted and insisted on turning over his fetishes to the missionary.
A member of another board reported on their work in a different section of the jungle—schools, clinics, churches, even literacy classes for adult women who until now didn’t want to learn to read. “In fact, the men didn’t want them to learn for a long time, but now they are loosening up and letting their wives come to classes, so we praise the Lord for this step. One of the younger women has actually been helping my wife in the translation work, an unheard-of thing only a year ago. So pray for the jungle Indians. Scripture says there will be some from every tribe and nation, and we believe God has called us to work with Him toward that end.”
“All power is given unto Me.” I looked at the words again behind the speaker. He was talking now about the distribution of tracts in marketplaces in the sierra cities. Of the thousands scattered like seed (and here he spoke of the prodigality of nature: “Think of the seeds God wastes!”) there were a few examples of fruit, that is, souls saved because of having picked up a tract. “For every thousand thrown away, if we win one soul it’s worth it! Amen? Amen!” And most of the congregation seconded it!
The chairman closed the meeting with a plea for more concerted prayer for the work which was going on, and for more laborers to be “thrust into the harvest fields.”
“Truly,” he concluded, “as we look about us in this great field of opportunity here in Ecuador, we see much land yet to be possessed, and the laborers are few. May God give us purer, more dedicated hearts, and a real burden of prayer.”
He and the others who had spoken used a language and a distinctive tone that echoed through my mind from a thousand pulpits, pulpits of plain wood, carved wooden pulpits, painted pulpits, but each of them the dais of like men, men who with a notable facility and sameness of phrasing could present what was called the missionary challenge. I had never thought of these phrases as platitudes, and I did not question what they had to say. Like the primitive tribesman who, upon hearing a recording about God, was convinced of its truth because it said the same thing each time it was played, I accepted what they told me as true. It was supported, I believed, by Scripture, and I took it as the voice of God, quite unaware at the time that it little moved me. I deplored, in concord with the preachers, the coldness of my own heart. I capitulated to their arguments that the deficiency of my missionary work now must lie in my own lack of prayer, my failure to surrender to the Lord, and my imperfect apprehension of the power of the Holy Spirit.
“Shall we bow in prayer?” said the chairman. We bowed, and there was a cacophony of coughs and throat clearings.
“Our Father, we thank Thee for what we have heard this morning about Thy work here in Ecuador. We thank Thee for what Thou hast done in this beloved little country, through those who have given themselves to Thee for Thy service here. We ask that Thou wilt bless each work here represented. We pray especially for the believers in each area, that Thou wilt make them strong Christians, faithful to Thee in the midst of temptation and the pull of the old life and its associations. Be with each of the missionaries and guide them in their future service for Thee. Give us a renewed vision of what it means to serve Thee and a deeper burden for souls in Thy great harvest field. May we go forth from this meeting refreshed and strengthened to serve Thee, for we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
There were to be separate meetings of the various mission boards during the evening, and I was expected to present my report to the session of Indians for Christ. I spent the afternoon preparing for this. It was quiet in the house while the others were taking their siestas, but concentration was difficult afterward. I went over and over what I had seen and heard in the morning. What could I say to match that kind of success story? What was there to say? There was no point in getting panicky about it—after all, there would only be a few people, it would be informal, and obviously they were not going to expect much from a newcomer who had only been working a few weeks on a station. Just tell them about the situation—the ideal location for my house, the thousands of Indians within an hour’s walk, the contact with Pedro and Rosa, the beginning on the language. What else would they want to hear? It was very simple, really, and something to praise the Lord for.
It was stifling in the dark little room. The house was long and narrow, and the central rooms had no windows at all, though the ceilings were exceedingly high. I thought of my own little house with its small, cold rooms and its sunshine and red geraniums, the wind whipping around the corners at times, the deep silence at other times. George cried off and on during the afternoon and I could hear Sandy’s piping “Mommy!” up and down the hall. I would have given a great deal for some of Indi Urcu’s solitude. The general atmosphere of this house was one of confusion, as though the whole family had just arrived from somewhere and had not yet unpacked. It was like that a year ago, too, I recalled.
But for this evening I had been invited to dinner, along with a Dr. Lynn Anderson, to the Rogerses’. Frances had introduced me to Dr. Anderson during the coffee hour and, now that I looked back on it, there was something distinctive about her, something—could I call it reality?—which made me look forward to the evening.