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Gerry O'Brien
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All the work in India which we undertook in 1952 has long since been handed over to local Christians. Today there are over 10,000 Indian missionaries. |
This golden jubilee year is a time for reflection and celebration. It was fifty years ago that the young Princess Elizabeth became Queen - and just think how the world has changed. As I have been looking through back copies of the Missionary Messenger magazine for the "Fifty years ago" column in The Crosslinks Magazine, it has been a fascinating insight. Those were the days when missionary recruits for the field sailed to Rangoon,
Mombasa, French Morocco or Ethiopia. During 1951 all BCMS missionaries had been expelled from China. The November 1951 magazine featured contributions from many of them with fifteen, twenty or twentyfive years service there. One wonders how they felt on arrival back home, as the preparations for the Coronation got under way. Most of them did not live to see the Chinese church emerge from forty years of repression, 40 million strong. Would that they had known what a harvest there would be from the seeds they had faithfully planted. At that time there were no BCMS missionaries in what is now Tanzania. Today about half of our overseas personnel work in that country. Then the whole of Tanganyika was part of the Diocese of Mombasa in Kenya. Today the Anglican Church of Tanzania has 16 dioceses and is growing apace. BCMS may have become Crosslinks, but the driving imperative to make God's Word known to God's World remains unchanged. What part will you take as the Crosslinks story unfolds in the next fifty years? |
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