World Mission Meet to be in Mexico
Diocesan Press Service. November 8, 1963 [XV-4]
The first full meeting of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches will meet in Mexico City, Dec. 8-20, to look at the missionary task from a new angle.
The general theme for the meeting is "God's Mission and Our Task". About 200 participants from six continents are expected to attend the meeting to be held at Union Theological Seminary and at Sarah Alarcon Methodist Girls School.
Delegates are appointed by the national Christian councils affiliated with the Commission and by the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. Advisers, observers from other world Christian bodies, youth delegates and staff will also attend.
The meeting in Mexico will "not only represent six continents, but it will face six continents," conference planners state. "It will be concerned as much with the witness of the Christian church in Detroit as in Dahomey, as much with pagans in Europe as with pagans in New Guinea."
Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, Geneva, Switzerland, director of the Division of World Mission and Evangelism, has observed that the image the word "missions" still evokes in the minds of many is "that of a white man going to Asia, Africa, or perhaps Latin America."
"It is still an image shaped by the experience of the colonial era," Bishop Newbigin says. "When we use the word 'missions' we do not normally see, for instance, some of those deeply committed Christians from Jamaica going to work in the pagan slums of industrial cities in England."
"We do not have a picture of the missionaries of the Asian churches, more than 200 of them now, going out from their own countries to work in other parts of Asia", he says.