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This is Mission Scope. On this side of your tape is an update on foreign missions for the third quarter of 1980. The Foreign Mission Board's new president, R. Keith Parks, has set a goal of visiting

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different areas of the world as soon as possible in order to become better acquainted with the missionaries and the work. On our first feature, we will hear impressions from Park's recent trip to West Africa, along with comments by John Mills, Area Director for West Africa.

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On our second feature, J.D. Hewley, Area Director for Europe and the Middle East, joins Keith Park in reporting on our fraternal relationship with Baptists in Eastern Europe. And the third feature highlights developments in South America, reported by Brian Brasington, Area Director for Western South America.

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now feature one, Keith Parks and John Mills. Dr. Parks, we'd like to know about your trip to West Africa. Well, we went for the purpose of helping to lay a cornerstone and have a dedication for a new Baptist building in Monrovia, Liberia. We didn't fulfill that purpose due to the

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coup there. But along with that purpose, the broader reason was in order for me to get better acquainted with the work in that part of our mission field that I had not seen before, and to get acquainted with the missionaries. Of course the events in Liberia and the accident that claimed the life of the missionary in

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Nigeria occurred during your trip, and those were matters of concern, but how did those particular events affect your relationships, the things that you might have taken in had they not occurred? Well, of course, one big thing that happened, I never did get to see any of the work in Liberia, so it changed the whole

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reason for going at that time. Were you impressed with any differences in West Africa as compared to the other areas of the world where you've been? Missionary spirit, the kinds of work they're doing, that sort of thing?

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National life? Well, of course there were some things that were different in a way and some things that were very much the same. I think, for example, Nigeria and Brazil both show the effect of having been there a long

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time in that you have more large congregations, you have more mature national leaders, you have larger institutions, and you can just tell the impact of the work has had time to really season and mature and flourish. On the same trip, however, in Senegal, the work is just struggling to get a foothold.

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And in the Ivory Coast, some of it is fairly new. Of course, none of it started until 1960, so it's a new field as compared to Nigeria. So there were those kinds of similarities. I also was impressed, as I am everywhere I go, with the overwhelming need of the urban situations.

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If you fly in over these great cities and realize that there are so few Christians of any kind, and that we have not been able to make a significant impact on the urban scene, I really am concerned that we try to find ways to really impact these great metropolitan areas. But there are many things that are remarkably the same around the world,

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and I don't know that I sensed anything that was unique to Africa. Of course, there are differences, language, customs, the way they do things, but the exuberance of singing when it's more in their natural language and rhythm is similar to what you find in the rest of the world. So it was helpful to see, and I certainly

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got some insight that I hadn't had before. I was very impressed with the quality of commitment and stick-to-itiveness that a lot of the missionaries are showing. What Hazel Moon is doing with the work among the lepers there is just a striking example of a person committed to people and loving them and really serving them.

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And then Ruth Womack in her work at the Cursi Children's Home. Again, you know, we're often accused in missions of staying with the same thing, but that home started as an orphanage, and they found this wasn't the way to go,

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and it became a well-baby clinic and a nutritional center. And the average stay is 27 days for a child. And I think it has remarkably adapted to the need of the community the approach she's taken of the African mothers or big sisters or whoever coming in and living

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as they would at home. I like that. I like that much better than trying to impose Western style furnishings and so forth. So I think they've done a good bit of this in their work with the lepers as well as the work with the children. Two unsung heroines greatly impressed Dr. Parks.

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Their story ought to be told. Ruth Womack out at Cursey Children's Home. It's almost a same kind of thing in ministry to those kids and their families and what they're doing.

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And Hazel Moon out at the health service, which is mainly the residue of lepers. This is almost like the Mother Teresa story India. Well it's impressive there's no question. Now they don't do what a lot of people here would

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do. They deliberately keep it low-key. They don't put the babies in bed. They sleep on mats on the floor, encourage the children home because that's what they're going to go back to. Their parents help feed them. She gives supplements that they need but it keeps it African food. She forces family to come in with kids where we didn't used to do that, but this is a training program to get them

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to where the kid won't die when he goes back home. And you never saw such enthusiasm and almost adoration somebody as Ruth Walmakes when she walks into that situation. And same thing's true with Hazel Moon out at the health service and we We really don't know what's gonna happen when Hazel comes.

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She's coming to retire. So we don't know where we're going. The government may step in to keep that going, but you see there's not the emphasis

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because leprosy is not now a big group. It used to be, so there was a big program. Now it's been almost licked. But what you've got out there is people who had it.

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Their cases by and large have been arrested, but no fingers, no toes. They wouldn't be accepted back in society. They go home, they're gonna be outcast.

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It's a ministry to people like that. It was very impressive. Dr. Parks did it just right. I wish I'd had a good picture.

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The old man who's the chief sits out there. He leads in the church, and they just built a new little church out there with their own hands.

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Not a finger on his hand, standing with his Bible. And Dr. Parks reached out and took those hands with no fingers.

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The average visitor will shy away pretty quickly from a leper. Meant a whole lot to those people that he went down the line shaking hands with everybody.

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You don't have to be afraid of 'em. It's not that dangerous. Just plain old soap and water will kill a leprosy germ. But it was very significant.

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- John Mills was reflecting on some things from his point of view, and he told us about your meeting with the lepers and shaking hands with the man who had no fingers. How did you feel about that?

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He was saying that it had a great impact on them. Of course, I've been around work with lepers before, and I am aware that it's not a highly contagious disease, so it was a natural thing to shake hands with them.

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the i felt sort of that it in thailand and in other places and uh... the greeting out there is often to grasp both of their hands and their hands with both of mine which seemed to be a normal thing and that he really didn't have

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uh... the pastor that you can't with didn't didn't really have a hand so i really wasn't aware of it but uh... uh... it was just a normal greeting to me i felt very much at home

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I felt like I'd been there before, you know, kind of thing, because I've been in similar situations in Thailand and in other places. But they're wonderful people.

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- In what way did you see church happen? - Well, one of the most thrilling examples was in Abidjan. It was a church that one of the missionaries, along with this local, actually a detective,

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started and the thrilling thing to me was that they didn't really have a place to meet. They had a couple little buildings and they had roofed over the patio in between them. I would guess you get 250-300 people in there, but they have six or seven hundred members of the church. So on Sunday the members stay away or

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stay outside in order that the visitors or the new people can come in. And they They had to clear off a place for us to sit down. When they had the Lord's Supper, they asked all the members to stand. There must not have been over 15 or 20 out of that whole crowd who stood.

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And that was the reason the deacons had been invited to come and be the ushers and the hosts. Members were in the side rooms or even outside, and most of the people were visitors or new Christians who had not yet been baptized.

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They had 13 house churches, they said, where their congregations met across the city. And then each night they had a separate group in order that all of them, they couldn't all come at one time. So they'd have youth come one night, and the men one night, and the women one night, and

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various groupings like that. But this lay pastor had done his studying through theological education by extension. He was trained as a detective. He'd been led to Christ up in Senegal.

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He was a Muslim and been led to Christ by another Muslim who was one of our first converts there, as I understand it. So it's a thrilling story that I'm sure will be told

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in many different ways. But it was one of the exciting things of seeing church really take place. They had some sketches of buildings

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that they hope to build someday, but they were talking about doing it themselves. Across the street in a sort of an open pavilion type, they had some of the children in Sunday school.

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And so they were just making do without much facility and having a terrific time. - And now feature two on Eastern Europe with J.D. Huey and Keith Parks.

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- The main purpose of the trip at this time was to meet Dr. Parks in Paris. He had been in Africa. And he was invited to attend a meeting

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of the Roushlikon Baptist Seminary Executive Board in Paris. And after that, the meeting of the European Baptist Federation Council. Dr. Parks attended a part of the meeting

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the executive board of the seminary. And he attended more of the meeting of the Council of the European Baptist Federation. Now this is a very important and a very representative body of European Baptists. Every Baptist union or convention in Europe is represented on Council. Eastern Europe was well represented. There were three Russians

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there, for example, and representatives of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and And then the last day of the meeting, the Romanians arrived. They had had passport and visa problems, so they missed most of the meeting. I might say here that Romanian Baptists continue to be probably the fastest growing Baptist group in Europe.

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and one of the fastest growing in the world. They have problems, but they haven't been daunted by their problems. Eastern European Baptist leaders have been concerned for some time because of the kind of literature their people are getting.

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There has been such a scarcity of Christian literature that the people seize eagerly anything that they can get their hands on. Baptist leaders of Eastern Europe have been saying for some time, "We need Baptist books, Baptist literature."

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And during this meeting of the European Baptist Federation Council, a committee was set up. This committee will have various functions. One is to supervise a translation and literature distribution

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center, which will probably be set up in Vienna. The place is a little indefinite, but it will probably be in Vienna. Because the borders between Austria, Hungary,

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and Yugoslavia are open. People can pass freely. And I hope we're going to have funds to help them with this, because this is a rather expensive thing.

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And there are some organizations, you know, that concentrate just on literature, and they raise thousands or millions of dollars. We can't match them, I'm sure,

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but this is going to be one of our needs. Dr. David Russell told at a small meeting which I attended, about an experience he had in one of the Eastern European countries. He said the lay pastor of a little

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church asked him, "Would you like to see my library?" And he said, "Yes, I would." So they went into a room which had fruit spread out on the floor on papers drying. But they tipped around the room, and the man picked up three books, and he said, "This

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is my library." One was a badly worn and much-used Bible. The other was a concordance to help him find references in the Bible. And the third was a commentary.

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And Dr. Russell said he opened the commentary and saw on the fly leaf "Constantinople, 1877," a commentary of the books of the Bible from Galatians to the end of the New Testament published in 1877. So that highlights, I think, the need of literature in Eastern Europe.

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I sensed a sort of an upbeat mood of the East European Baptist leadership. They're very excited about this short-term summer institute at Roushlikon. They call it CITE, S-I-T-E. It is the month of June.

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This year they already have 60 students registered, most of them from East European countries, quite a number from Romania, Yugoslavia, and yet one or two in Brazil,

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one or two in Australia, some in the States, other European countries. They have professors from both East Europe and America as well as a couple of Russian professors.

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I'm glad you mentioned SITE. This is a summer institute of theological education at Rüschlichen. They will have a full house this summer, especially from Eastern Europe again. There were more Eastern Europeans last year who came than Western Europeans,

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and this year even more are coming. Many of these people can get out of their countries for a month much more easily than they can get out for eight or nine months of study. So they couldn't come for regular theological education, but can come during a vacation period, an extended vacation period. So I think the SITE program is meeting the real need.

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And one thing, one feature of the CITE program is that each student is given a mini-library, a selection of books to take back with him to his own country. Contribution, they're given free.

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Is this an identified list of books that they take back? I mean, they take back specific titles, or they just have a group to choose from? No, they take back specific titles.

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I think everybody gets the same thing. And I don't know what things are included, but a concordance, I think, is included. And some set of commentaries, maybe a Bible dictionary,

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basic book. While talking about Christianity in a resistant area, I understand that you heard some direct reports from Eastern Europe.

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Could you share some of the specifics on that? Yes, I was very thrilled with some of the reports I received from Mr. Bishkoff, who is the Director General of the Russian Baptist, Alexei Bishkoff. And also from Pastor Zidkoff from the Moscow Baptist Church.

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Both of them were saying that there were more young people in attendance in the services, some of them even from atheistic homes. Zidkoff said his church in Moscow, about 5,200 people, had baptized 130 last year and already baptized over 100 this year.

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I asked him if there was any restriction legally. He said not as long as they worked within their church building. They're not free to proselytize on the street, pass out tracts or anything. I asked him if young people from atheistic homes, non-Christian homes, were allowed to

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come. He said they were. They were having more in attendance. Some of them were being converted.

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They're not allowed to baptize them until they're 18, at which time they're fully adult and therefore free to make their own choices. Bischoff was telling about the evangelistic response in Siberia and about a medical doctor who had given up his practice to go with a team of about 200 on a, I guess we'd call

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them 49ers, they were going to look for gold out in Siberia. And this doctor had gone strictly to witness to them, had left his practice, but he was having a very effective ministry. And Bischoff was saying there's quite a response in Siberia now.

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And I was interested, of course, and I asked Bischoff about literature and Bibles. He said they had distributed about 150,000 Bibles this last year, all legally, open and above board. They insist that whereas they have followed the legal channels,

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they have followed government regulations, that within their churches they're totally free in their Bible teaching and their worship and their invitation and everything they want to do within that building. That by following regulations they're free to distribute Bibles to provide literature

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and so forth. In talking with them and hearing them talk, I really felt a oneness of spirit with them. One of the things that I have sensed about Christianity is that wherever I go, even when I don't speak the language, there is a feeling of identity and oneness with people who are

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genuinely Christian. Now feature three with Brian Brasington on Western South America. What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in your area right now? The most exciting thing that is taking place right now is the strong evangelistic push

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that we are seeing throughout all of western South America. Now this strong evangelistic thrust is taking place in all of the countries in western South America right now. The people in most of the areas are extremely receptive, where in many cases there have

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been closed doors, we're seeing that doors are open. You said that there's more receptivity and people are more open right now than they've been in a long time. What reason? Okay. Number one, I would say that radio has had a big part in this. Everybody has their

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little transistor radio. And so we have had many, many programs on trans-world radio, and this is a powerful station, 500,000 watts throughout Latin America. It's just like a local program, and we have put quite a bit of money into these programs. It's paying off. We also have used HCJB radio station out of Quito, Ecuador, and then we have used

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local stations and all, but the fact that daily here is the program coming in and as they listen, well, you just can't help but be affected by this if you continually, you know, listen to it and the Holy Spirit works in the lives of the people. We have seen, Well, for instance, last year we had a church to be received into the convention that, first

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of all, there was a small group of people in the central mountain area in Peru who heard the radio programs, they came together and started listening to the programs together, and then from there they started praying and reading the Bible together, and then they They organized into a mission and then from there into a church and then they came into

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our convention. So this is just real exciting. Did they have any leadership from outside during this process? No, they didn't have any.

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They didn't have any outside leadership until they were getting ready to organize into a church. They came down to Lima and asked Dr. Carlos Garcia, who is pastor of the First Baptist Church and one of our missionaries, Steve Ditmore, to come and meet with them and to

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help them. And so Dr. Garcia went up two or three times, but that was it. I mean, this has been done that way. Out of this and all, and we have groups like this just all over South America, we now have

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a program that's getting ready to be aired. It starts right from the beginning. Now you know Jesus Christ, and in your area you want to find someone else who knows Jesus Christ, and it helps them.

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We would send, for instance, let's just take, say, Ayacucho, and this is in the mountain area of Peru. Here's a person here who writes in and says that I've come to know Jesus through the radio program.

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Then we check our files for other people in Ayacucho, and we will send, say, to that person these other names and addresses and suggest that they get together. And then following this, we have radio programs now that will lead them in Bible study and then lead them in the basic doctrines of the Church, and then write on up how to establish

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and organize a mission, and then how to establish and organize the local Church. We also have special people who are connected just to radio follow-up. For instance, Dan Rupp will be going to Cali, Colombia, and his job will be to follow up and meet with these small groups throughout the country of Colombia that have come to

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know Christ through the radio programs. So radio really is one big thing that has helped to, say, open the door. [BLANK_AUDIO]