# LCMS Convention Workbook_St. Louis Missouri_1969_S10
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

10 MISSIONS

has been developing for some years, with large baptisms
annually. The Jeypore Lutheran Church, however, was
caught without the Indian manpower or the missionary
personnel to meet the situation. German missionaries
were refused entry visas. It became possible to send
Rev. Ian Kleinig from our New Guinea mission field
to Orissa for this work because of his Australian nation-
ality. Now, 4 years later, the doors have closed tighter,
making it impossible for even Commonwealth mission-
aries to enter India. But Rev. Kleinig has been able to
remain and in this short period has become the real
mainstay of this exciting work among the approxi-
mately 600,000 Konds in Orissa.

3) Ministries of Healing. The IELC is increasingly
a church in mission to the towns and villages in which
its congregations are situated. Wandoor Hospital in
Ambur has doubled its extension services to leprosy and
tuberculosis patients.

Increasingly hospitals have priced themselves out
of reach of the people who need their services the most.
Is there a new rationale by which the health care and
the ministry offered by the hospitals in Ambur and
Wandoor can be taken to the community? Bethesda
will shortly launch one of two pilot projects in the world
for working out a rationale for health care in developing
countries. Bethesda was selected as the laboratory for
this development by the Christian Medical Commission
of the WCC.

4) Mission to Society. The church reaches out to the
world around it as a healing community — offering the
healing of Christ the Savior. The IELC has now begun
several economic self-help programs in the Nagercoil
area. An Indian pastor with special social-work training
is assisting people in the villages to face their problems
together and help themselves. A little money and a lot
of effort go a long way where need is so great. Unfortu-
nately even the little money is sometimes not available.

f. Ceylon. The Government of Ceylon has limited us
to three missionaries in that country. Rev. James Fergin
and Rev. Larry La Dassor, both Americans, are working
among the laborers in the tea plantations in the high-
lands of Ceylon. Pastor Philipdoss, an Indian national,
works as an evangelist and pastor in both the Tamil and
Sinhalese languages, while the missionaries in the high-
lands work only in Tamil.

The Ceylon work until recently was connected with
the Nagercoil District of the IELC. The political tensions
between India and Ceylon, however, have made it diffi-
cult to continue this arrangement. Nevertheless, the close
tie with India continues, and the IELC occasionally ar-
ranges for seminars for the brethren in Ceylon. Ceylon
congregations also send some of their youth to Concordia
Seminary, Nagercoil, India.

The work in Ceylon is still in the ‘‘planting” stage,
but it has progressed steadily in the last 2 years (30 bap-
tisms in 1968). In the tea estates, small congregations,
or cells, are being developed. Lay members of each
community are being trained to minister to the needs

of their fellowship. Although we cannot claim to have
found a full answer to ministry in the vast Tamil-speaking
tea country of Ceylon, we look with expectation to in-
novative solutions as God strengthens the 325 Lutheran
Christians there in their mission.

g. Change Everywhere. As we approach the 75th
anniversary of the Missouri Synod’s involvement in
God’s mission overseas, we are aware that the mission
has drastically changed. That change is best expressed
in the Mission Affirmations: The Church Is God’s Mis-
sion. We can no longer deal with missions as one of
many activities the church “has.” The church is mis-
sionary, and the church—‘‘the two or three” gathered
in unpronounceable little hamlets everywhere — is God’s
personal letter to men in each place.

Some view the passing of a glorious and romantic
missionary era with regret. Some bemoan the fact that
the Christian population of the world was once 36 percent
but now has shrunk to 27 percent. The overseas mission
of the church, however, testifies to a much more hopeful
and exciting assessment of a true situation. What new
developments God has readied around the world! The
27 percent of today is scattered on every continent of
His world. Surely God calls us to a stronger commitment
—to expending ourselves in a multidirectional global
mission without having the satisfaction of speaking of it
as “our” mission in this or that part of God’s world, to
being co-workers with all the saints who have been called
out of darkness to show forth His marvelous light.

2. New Guinea: Each in His Own Tongue

a. The Land of Time Catching Up. A small expedition-
ary force, led by New Guinean guides, puffed up one
slope and slipped down the next, forming a long train
that spread out single file as it moved thrcugh the New
Guinea bush. That was the picture in those early days in
1948 when missionaries Burce and Hintze from America
and Kleinig and Freund from Australia entered the terri-
tory of the Enga people. But today the “land that time
forgot” has become the ‘land of time catching up.”
Twenty years of contacting tribe after tribe, of instruc-
tion and baptism, of the introduction of business and
new modes of agriculture, of beginnings in medicine and
education has meant 20 years of rapid change, growth,
and development in the Western Highlands District of
New Guinea.

Dr. Oliver R. Harms was invited by the Wabag Lu-
theran Church, now 40,000 strong, to join in the celebra-
tion of 20 years of unprecedented outpourings of the
Spirit in October 1968. Appropriately the anniversary
was observed at Yaramanda, where the first missionaries
had begun their labors.

b. Phase II. The completion of 20 years of mission
activity also marked the close of the initial era of planting.
Expectantly and a little fearfully, Wabag Lutheran
churchmen and 96 European missionaries sought God’s
guidance for Phase II of a movement that had grown
too vast to be easily explained or readily predicted.

The passing of one phase and the beginning of an-