This is an article from the April 1986 issue: What About the Kids?

Mission Awareness

Mission Awareness

Church Assembly Declares Mission to Hindus a "Preposterous Idea"

Demonic influence among unreached peoples is not always the cause of their failure to hear or respond to the gospel.

William Carry, the man who is now called "the father of modern missions," was convinced God had called him to preach the gospel to the "Hindoos" of India. But he did not make it to India without opposition.

Many of us are familiar with the negative response of an older minister to Curry's appeal to establish societies for the propagation of the gospel: "Sit down, young man. If God wants to save the heathen, He can do it without your help or mine!"

We are not so familiar with other opposition that Carry, his two partners,Joshua Marshman and William Ward, and other pioneer missionaries encountered.

According to Gustav Warocek (History of Protestant Missions), the Directors of the East India Company protested British Parliamentary, decisions of 1793 which sought, among other things, "the extension of sound knowledge and the elevation of the religious and moral condition of (the Hindu) peoples?

Said Company officials: "The sending out of missionaries into our Eastern possessions is the maddest, most extravagant, most costly, most indefensible project which has ever been suggested by a moonstruck fanatic. Such a scheme is pernicious, imprudent, useless, harmful, dangerous. profitless, fantastic. It strikes against all reason and sound policy; it brings the peace and safety of our possessions into peril," Oswald J. Smith in The Challenge of Life says. In 1796, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed the following infamous resolution: "To spread the knowledge of the gospel amongst barbarians and heathens seems to be highly preposterous."

"One speaker in the House of Commons said that he would rather see a band of devils let louse in India than a band of missionaries."

Vishva Hindu Parishad Seeks to Evangelize the West

According to Professor Johannes Aagaard of Athus University. Denmark, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHF) is "Hinduism's international missionary council,"

One of the organization's primary goals, Aagaard says, is 'to establish an order of missionaries. . . (for) the purpose of propagating dynamic Hinduism .... and to open, manage or assist seminaries or centers for spiritual principles and practices of Hinduism.. in all parts of the world.

Dave Hunt, a student of the calls and of the spreading influence of Hinduism and the occult in America. says (David Hunt. Peace, Prosperity, & the Coming Holocaust. Harvest House Publishers, 1984):

Included under the VII? umbrella organization are such groups as Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Practical Yoga of Vivekananda's Vedanta Society, the Theosophical Society of Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner's Anthroposophy, and virtually every other Buddhist and Hindu sect operating in the West.

These are all missionary organizations. and they have converted millions of people to the HinduBuddhist world view.

Such activity by Christians would net be talerated for a moment in a Hindu country. India has excluded foreign missionaries from entering its borders since shortly after it gained independence yet she sends her missionaries to the world protesting tolerance for all religions and claiming 10 teach only science.

On the Other Side of the Iron Curtain

There was never a time when I left the home of an underground believer that I didn't hear him say, 'Tell the Christians in the West that we pray for them ... every day!" I always felt awkward in those situations. My inability to respond sickened me.

Finally, one day, I turned in exasperation and demanded, "Why do you pray for us?"

"Because," the man replied, "at least here we know that we are in spiritual warfare. But in the West you have been so lulled to sleep you don't even know that there is an enemy. So we pray for you because you are in greater danger than we are." Whaley, a pioneer church planter in Eastern Europe, in recent letter to friends.

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