WORLD’S CRYING NEED

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 16, 14 October 1926, Page 8

WORLD’S CRYING NEED

OPPORTUNITY FOR THE CHURCH. Dominion Special. Auckland, October 13. A strong appeal to the Church in New. Zealand to increase its activities in various mission fields cf_ the world was made by Archbishop Averill in his charge to the synod. “Whether history repeats itself or not, it is significant that many great advances in missionary endeavour have coincided with national or world upheavals,’’ the Archbishop said. “We cannot but associate the splendid and bold action of th* Missionary Council of the Church Assembly in England, in issuing the world call to the Church, as a direct outcome of the upheaval and revelation of the Great War.”

Compared with the pre-war period, the world was an open book in which could be read its strength and weakness, he said. The crying need was for some unifying force to bring peace and order out of chaos. Because of the world’s inability to find any real basis of reconstruction, thinking men had been compelled to look to Christ as the onlv hope and security fot permanent peace. The Mohammedan world was undoubtedly in a state, of transition. It had come to a parting of the wavs, and it behoved the Christian Church to grasp the opportunity which was hardlv likelv to present itself again. There was a distinct danger of the more enlightened Moslems drifting from their ancient moorings into the atheist net of Soviet Russia, in which event their case would be worse than ever There did not seem a possibility of the Moslem world revolving round a new centre and for a time renewing its strength and broken nnitv without a holy war. The task before the Church might seem impossible, but Christianity was the fritimnli of the impossible.