The New Breed of Missionary : With Computers, an Air Force and Millions of Dollars in Financial Support, Southern California Christians Are Leading a New Evangelical Movement Overseas

AND IT CAME TO PASS in the spring of 1985 that Tom Feldpausch went forth into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, taking with him his wife, Becky, and their two boys, Aaron and Isaac. Armed with only a Bible and three phrases in the local dialect, the young missionary couple settled in the tiny village of Yaru, deep inside a trackless mangrove swamp on a tributary of the sluggish Sepik River.

The 3,000 Namia tribesmen, for whom the Feldpauschs had come to translate the New Testament, were no strangers to cannibalism. Until 1960 they had carved enemies into entrees, and most of the natives over 35 had pierced septums through which bones had once protruded. Some now had a grade-school education and, in theory, the majority were Christian. But animism’s grip remained strong. If neither prayer nor penicillin cured the sick, Yaru’s women were not averse to donning coconut fronds, surrounding the prostrate warrior and swaying to the beat of a jungle drum.

During the day, the Feldpauschs listened to the voices around them as the villagers hunted pigs or gathered sago, the edible pith of a palm that can be cooked into a starchy bread. At night they wrote down phonetically what they’d heard, trying to ignore the fruit bats nesting in the roof and the insects pounding on the window screens. They endured the humidity, grew accustomed to torpor and eventually stopped hearing the buzz of the swamp that began 10 yards from their house. Rain was their water; baths came from a bucket. They lived no better than their neighbors, which probably is why, by the end of their first year, Tom and Becky had hepatitis and their eldest son shook with malarial fever.

“I believe our faith has been tested,” says Feldpausch, a slight man with a red beard whose self-effacing demeanor belies his dedication to evangelism. “We’ve confronted people who use black magic, and we’ve seen what natives claim are the results of their sorcery. But we’ve never had anything to fear. Our God is stronger than any jungle spirit.”

Every Wednesday at dusk a conch shell sounds three times, summoning the Christians of Yaru to worship. Moving slowly through the shadows, Feldpausch and the tribesmen head toward a thatched long house perched atop stilts at the edge of the swamp. The church has few amenities. A rude stairway hacked into the trunk of a tree serves as the entrance. Inside are no prayer books or pews. Neither is there an altar. But there is no shortage of Christian faith. Conducted in the sepia glow of a kerosene lamp, the service is a celebration filled with a cappella hymns and personal accounts of God’s power. Feldpausch is an active participant, especially when lending harmony to “Bringing In the Sheaves,” but though he occasionally offers a prayer, he never gives a sermon.

“I came here to meet these people and learn their language, not to preach,” he explains, walking home through stands of banana trees. “I can’t come here and use my Western values to make moral judgments. I just want to translate the Bible so that when we leave, the word of God will remain.”

TOM FELDPAUSCH IS NO ABNER HALE, the xenophobic 19th-Century cleric in James Michener’s “Hawaii” who harangued the “heathen” when not covering Polynesian maidens in muumuus. Neither does he resemble Pearl Buck or Tom Dooley, whose missions earlier this century served as refuges from Asian anarchy and communism. Feldpausch, a former insurance adjuster from Van Nuys, and his wife typify a new generation of evangelists that rejects the role of the Good Shepherd and the recitation of psalms. In diverse and often surprising ways, these modern missionaries dedicate their lives to both the material and spiritual development of impoverished societies.

In Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, Baptists help Hmong tribesmen, traditional cultivators of the opium poppy, market substitute crops such as strawberries and coffee. Catholic Relief Service workers oversee literacy programs for Vietnamese boat people awaiting resettlement in Philippine refugee camps. Seventh-day Adventists operate many of the largest hospitals in East Asia. If anything unites these Christian workers, beyond a belief in Jesus and his promise of eternal life, it is the pragmatic insistence on personal involvement. “A missionary has to sacrifice and work with the people,” says 64-year-old Robert Morse, a China-born missionary who has committed five Asian languages to writing. “Well-appointed mission stations and New England-style church buildings are completely useless. In a pagan world you have to reach the people at the bottom.”

For almost 2,000 years, missionaries have labored to fulfill the great commission of Jesus recorded in Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” Today, more than 250,000 Christian missionaries--more than four times the number at the turn of the century--are at work throughout the world. The United States is the main source of Christian missionaries. More than 6,000 Catholics and 64,800 Protestants from the United States can be found in 181 foreign countries.

Christianity is the world’s leading religion. More than 1.5 billion people, nearly one of every three persons on this planet, call themselves Christian. Though the percentage of believers remains low in Asia, where Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian beliefs prevail, 93% of Latin Americans are Christians, as are 87% of the 25 million people in the 20 island nations of Oceania. If the present conversion rate continues, half of the African continent’s people will have accepted Jesus by the year 2000.

In contrast to decades past, when some peasants passively accepted baptism in return for bowls of rice, most recent converts in the developing world are motivated evangelicals. In Guatemala, where Protestant fundamentalists account for more than a quarter of the population, pressure from “born-again” Christians led to the 1985 election, the first true test of democracy since a CIA coup in 1954 deposed Guatemala’s elected president. Though Protestants are far less vocal in Asia, they could determine South Korea’s political future if properly mobilized.

“At least as widespread and significant as the Islamic renascence is the rapid spread of conservative Protestantism in the Third World,” Boston University economist Peter Berger writes in his recent book, “The Capitalist Revolution.” “The upsurge of evangelism in the United States, dramatic enough in itself, is thus part of a global religious movement of immense power.”

BECAUSE OF ITS GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION and ethnic mix, California has become the center of missionary support activity in the United States. Nineteen percent of the 661 missionary organizations in America are here. Southern California has more Protestant missionary organizations than any other area of comparable size in the world. They range from Wycliffe Bible Translators in Huntington Beach, which supervises 5,500 Christian linguists, to Global Opportunities, a tiny job-placement office in Pasadena that matches evangelical Christians with secular jobs in countries hostile to traditional missionary activity. World Vision in Monrovia, with an annual budget of $232 million, sponsors development and disaster-relief projects in 90 nations and underwrites the Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center, a statistical data bank that serves as a Who’s Who for Protestant mission agencies.

Though the developing world is awash with American films, music and advertising, the impact of California mission groups is probably more profound. Gospel Recordings in downtown Los Angeles distributes Scripture, Bible stories and hymns in three-fourths of the world’s known language dialects. The records and tapes are often delivered by one of the “born-again” pilots flying for Mission Aviation Fellowship (a.k.a. the Missionary Air Force), a 150-plane airline based in Redlands that provides logistical support to isolated missions in 33 countries.

Some of Southern California’s larger missionary organizations have offices worthy of multinational corporations. The headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ at Lake Arrowhead near San Bernardino is a 2,700-acre resort with Spanish-tiled bungalows, hot springs and an Olympic pool that was designed for Esther Williams. Once a favorite location for Hollywood trysts, the hotel now caters to Christian conventions. But on nights when business is slow, CCC’s yupscale staffers can--for a modest fee--check into the suite where Nicky Hilton and Elizabeth Taylor spent their honeymoon.

Christian universities in Southern California have a world view that emphasizes global missions. Many children of overseas missionaries attend the University of Redlands’ Religious Studies department or the School of Intercultural Studies and Missions at Biola University in La Mirada. Westmount College in Santa Barbara and Azusa Pacific University in the San Gabriel Valley also have curricula that accent fundamental evangelism. But the premier center in the world for missionary thought and advanced training is Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Started in 1965, Fuller’s School of World Mission today has 360 students studying for a degree in missiology. Basic Bible study is not part of the program. Courses such as phenomenology, intercultural communications and leadership perspectives fill the Fuller catalogue. “To be effective, a cross-cultural experience must be preceded by a heavy dose of social science,” says Paul Pierson, 59, the school’s dean, who was a Presbyterian missionary in Brazil for 15 years. “We used to think Africans had to give up their native dress and take European names. Now we take a serious, affirmative and much more humble approach.”

FOR MEMBERS OF WYCLIFFE Bible Translators bound for Asia and the Pacific, sensitivity training begins on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, where Wycliffe’s Summer Institute of Linguistics runs a mountaintop jungle camp outside the town of Medang. Built in the style of a banana republic army barracks, the school is surrounded by jungle in which newly arrived missionaries sweat off years of double cheeseburgers while learning to wield a machete, bake bread in a mud oven and lash jungle vines into mattresses. Though the initial phase of the 3 1/2-month course is pure Outward Bound, the core of the program is a series of cross-cultural experiences culminating in a five-week stay in a remote village. Before families venture forth alone, however, they take group treks to villages and then discuss what happened. Such a meeting took place recently after a 10-kilometer jungle hike.

“I made a cultural blunder when I handed the headman a plate and assumed he’d serve himself,” admits a Lutheran from Minnesota.

“Yes, but your guide saved you from embarrassment when he grabbed the plate and served the old man,” says a Vermont computer programmer.

“I didn’t know how to respond in the next village when we were asked for money,” another novice volunteers.

“In situations like that, consult your guide,” says camp director John Champ, 42, a former Vietnam helicopter pilot from Oregon who looks as if he’d stepped from the pages of an L. L. Bean catalogue. “Why do you think those people were so hospitable?” he asks.

At first, no one answers. Finally, one of the missionaries, a South Korean bound for the Solomon Islands, says: “Because it’s their culture.”

“No,” says the first missionary. “They wanted us to return the favor and give them something.”

“But they didn’t owe us anything,” the Korean objects. “We created an obligation by coming into their village and demanding hospitality.”

“Well, in a sense you were doing something for them by paying attention to their language,” Champ says. “Not many outside people go there. You went to explain technology and record their language. By letting them fix the meals, you let them pay back the kindness and avoid a debt relationship.”

“Is it proper to reciprocate with cash?” a woman asks.

“Depends,” Champ says, “but as a rule, in a village it’s better to give a gift than cash. By giving a person money you signal you’ve paid off the obligation. But he might want a reciprocal relationship. Remember, cash doesn’t enter the obligation system in their minds.”

WHILE NOVICES IN NEW GUINEA concentrate on nuances, the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena focuses on the big picture. Founded by Ralph Winter, a native Californian whose father helped plan the Los Angeles freeway system, the center has identified 17,000 “unreached people groups” that have never heard the Gospel. “Pioneer mission work is not over,” Winter, 62, insists. “In addition to assisting national churchmen, we should be sending missionaries to where there are no churchmen at all.”

Located on a tiny campus that once belonged to Pasadena (Nazarene) College, Winter’s center is an evangelical think tank where 300 people working for 60 mission agencies gather and evaluate data. Their goal is a world in which every person has heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The main vehicle for this massive task is the Global Mapping Project, an ambitious effort to establish a computerized data base that provides readouts on the growth of global Christianity.

“There are missionaries who say that when a harvest field is ripe, it doesn’t matter which way you enter with your sickle, but they don’t realize we’re living in an analytical age,” Bob Waymire, director of the Global Mapping Project, says while peering through his horn-rims at two maps contrasting Protestantism and Islam. “Our goal is to bring light to the harvest fields and forests around the world so the harvest force can reap more efficiently.”

Until Waymire was recruited by the Lord in 1969, he was a Lockheed missile engineer. The military perspective he gained during development of the Poseidon and Polaris missiles comes in handy. “In wartime a field general has to know his own strength and that of the enemy. That’s why we have our computers monitor 40 religions. I can’t plan my own strategy unless I know what the Muslims, Hindus and Taoists are doing.”

In many respects, Waymire’s office resembles a high-tech war room. Bookshelves bulge with statistical abstracts detailing the size and location of obscure tribes. Five computer programmers supplement six permanent staffers who dash between graphics stations and personal computers linked to missionaries in the field. Down the hall, a laser printer etches color-coded maps.

“A lot of these missionaries go into the field for the wrong reason,” Waymire sighs. “Maybe they saw a slide show or decided it would be nice to baptize people. Our analysis shows that there’s a maldistribution of the harvest force. Trying to convince a missionary that he shouldn’t be where he is will be difficult.”

JESUS’ CALL FOR EVANGELISM “unto the uttermost part of the earth” was largely ignored after his death. Only two of the 15 men named apostles after the Ascension tried to convert the world’s 900 million Gentiles. The original 12 (minus Judas, of course) preferred to preach to the 3 million Jews living around Jerusalem.

After the Roman general Titus sacked Jerusalem in AD 70, the apostles finally began to deliver the Good News of Jesus Christ. But were it not for the apostle Paul, whose letters to struggling congregations make up 14 of the New Testament’s 27 books, Christianity might have remained a minor sect within Judaism.

America’s entry into the missionary field came in 1812, when Adoniram Judson led half a dozen Congregational families from New England to India. A second wave of Protestants, fired with enthusiasm for the Gospel and a belief in the ennobling aspects of Manifest Destiny, went overseas in the decades after the Civil War. U.S. officials relied on missionary translators when they signed the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin that opened China to foreign trade. In 1912, when Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Manchu Dynasty, Methodist bishops in China were instrumental in securing speedy recognition for the new republic.

Many of these missionaries were denounced as imperialists when Chinese Communists proclaimed the People’s Republic in 1949. A similar pattern emerged in Africa during the 1960s, when 32 of the continent’s 51 countries gained independence. For “mainline” denominations, the age of proselytism was over. Not so for America’s evangelicals. For every missionary affiliated with the National Council of Churches who has returned home since 1970, two others attached to fundamentalist, or “faith,” denominations, have gone overseas. The result is that a denomination such as the Christian and Missionary Alliance, with only 227,000 members in the United States, now fields three times as many missionaries as the 9.5-million-strong United Methodist Church.

Protestant evangelism has been made possible by a dramatic spiritual resurgence. In 1966 so many Americans had rejected organized religion that Time magazine rhetorically asked, “Is God dead?” on its cover. Today the answer is an emphatic no. According to a 1986 Gallup poll, almost half the country believes that religion is playing an increasing role in American life. A concurrent study by the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut shows a 9% increase in regular church attendance among once-alienated baby boomers born between 1945 and 1954. A UCLA-trained nurse from San Luis Obispo, Joy Sanders saw hospital work as too confining and opted for the life of a missionary. Since moving to New Guinea 10 years ago, she and her husband, Arden, have translated seven books of the Bible, built five libraries, started numerous village literacy programs and organized a writers’ workshop in which natives record tribal legends. But the relationship hasn’t been all one-sided. “I can grate a coconut, use a machete, deliver a baby and fix a snakebite,” Sanders says. “These skills may not come in handy back in the United States, but I can’t imagine a more fulfilling life.”

The methods used by missionaries depend on the country they’re sent to. In Thailand, where the national religion is Buddhism, the Gospel is proclaimed in TV specials featuring a Thai rock band called the Messengers. Villages without electricity are visited annually by a troupe of student actors from the Christian Communications Institute in the city of Chiang Mai.

“Our goal is to make Bible stories appeal to a peasant audience,” says Joan Eubank, a former Broadway actress. “Our story of the prodigal daughter is about a Chiang Mai girl who is beguiled by the big-city vices of Bangkok. We’ve made the rich man in the story of Lazarus the head of the Golden Triangle opium trade. In our story of Esther, Mordecai is a local bureaucrat who fights for honest government and religious freedom.”

On the island of Borneo, the sophisticated communication techniques used in Thailand give way to an older style of evangelism. Here, as in other corners of Asia, the message of Christ is delivered much as it was in the days of the apostle Paul--by wiry men and women who walk alone through the jungle convinced that Christianity is not one of several paths to Heaven but the only faith by which one can escape the fires of Hell.

DUDLEY BOLSER HAD BEEN WALKING barefoot three hours through a rain forest when the jungle canopy high above darkened and began to sway. The gibbons fell silent, and the keen of a thousand insects was abruptly supplanted by the howl of an approaching monsoon. Edging across a log bridge splashed green with moss, he clambered over a series of tree roots and quickened his pace. After 22 years in Indonesia, the 47-year-old Christian and Missionary Alliance evangelist had an appreciation for the jungle and a respect for the force of a tropical storm.

The village of Pakan in the clearing just ahead housed only 42 families. All of them appeared to be present an hour later when Bolser arrived to conduct the evening service. A cool breeze drifted through the windows, and lightning flashed soundlessly in the distance as he opened his Bible and gazed at the Dyak natives sitting on the floor. “Praise the Lord,” he said softly in Indonesian. “Rejoice in his love and prepare for the Second Coming.”

“There are people who mock us because of this belief,” he said as the kerosene lamp threw shadows against the clapboard walls. “They may seem educated, but their heads are empty. Believe in the promise of the Lord. Be ready for his return.

“Be aware of Satan’s power and on guard against those he controls,” Bolser says, unfurling a picture that shows a sinister claw preparing to pluck a baby from its cradle. Bolser flips to another drawing, this one showing another hand floating serenely above a bloody spike.

“Whose hand is this?” Bolser asks.

“Jesus’,” the Dyaks respond in unison.

“Yes, we know that because there’s the nail. This hand is stronger than the other. Jesus rose again on that Day of Death.

“Accept the Lord,” Bolser says, flipping to a final picture that shows the earth nestled snugly in a pair of upturned hands. “Once in the safe hands of Jesus, there’s no other power that can touch you, and you will sit on the throne of eternal life.”

As the lamp begins to sputter, Bolser bows his head. The Dyaks close their eyes and begin to pray, lips moving silently. It is time to close the Bible, but before the service ends, a final hymn softens the night: “Hands of the Lord.”

Dudley Bolser and his wife, Nancy, arrived in Indonesia in 1965. It was a period that Indonesian President Sukarno called “the year of living dangerously,” when the world’s fifth-largest nation was on the verge of a communist coup. Ethnic Chinese communists, in anticipation of an imminent victory, were already digging graves around the school in Bandung where missionaries received language instruction. But in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, missionaries who had already entrusted their fate to the Lord were equally concerned with the availability of fresh produce. “We didn’t have an airstrip back then,” Bolser remembers. “Our food was dropped from the air, which tenderized the meat. We had some oranges dropped once, and they were tenderized, too. We just wrung out the burlap bag and had our juice.”

The Bolsers established their mission station at Balai-Sepuak, a town strung out like a bacillus along a river stained brown by the tannic acid from rotting vegetation. In one of his final acts, Sukarno had declared malaria abolished, but the mosquitoes that thrive in the 200 inches of rain Balai-Sepuak receives each year never got the message. Four times Bolser got malaria, but the fevers passed.

“I was a curiosity at first,” he admits, as he sloshes toward home through a swamp knee-deep with water and alive with mosquitoes. “The first four years we just let the people get to know us. By year eight they began to talk freely. Now they come and tell me their problems.”

Within the missionary field there is growing pressure on pioneer evangelists to turn over their stations to young Indonesians. Though the logic of nationalization is beyond dispute, missionaries such as Bolser are reluctant to leave. Like combat veterans in a war, they realize the need for new recruits, yet they know that attrition will claim its share of the new missionaries.

“I believe Satan is a real personality, not some nebulous power,” Bolser says. “I know Christ is coming and victory will be ours, but Satan is still out there lurking in the dark.”

INDONESIA’S MUSLIM leaders dismiss pioneer evangelism as a minor irritation. American money is the main threat to Islam’s primacy, they insist. It is the steady flow of cash from American churches to missionaries that has enabled Indonesia’s Christian population to almost triple in the past decade.

“There’s millions of Christian dollars coming into this country from all over the world,” fumes Lukman Harun, chairman of the Islamic Solidarity Committee. “Christians go into the poorest villages in Java and build a school. Then it’s a clinic, and finally a church.”

Harun dismisses the Middle East as a source of funds with which to fight back. “You know the mentality of the Arabs,” he sighs. “Their money flows between governments. American money is more effective because it goes directly from one church to another.”

Last year Americans contributed $1.3 billion in support of overseas missions. Though conclusive data is hard to come by, the leading source of funds is thought to be Southern California, which has more “born-again” Christians than any other part of the United States and is home to more than half a dozen Protestant “super-churches”--such as La Canada Presbyterian and Lake Avenue Congregational in Pasadena--that conduct their own independent missionary programs.

Few churches are more active in their support of missionaries than Grace Community Church in the San Fernando Valley. Nearly a quarter of its congregation has received evangelistic training. A council of elders supports 75 missionary families with a $1.05-million missions budget. Ten new couples are sent out each year, with an additional 200 on the waiting list. “Our commitment to preaching the word of God is underscored by the personal relationship we have with our missionaries,” church elder Bob Wilson says.

Many people from Grace Community spend from three months to several years as short-term missionaries. About 29,000 temporary missionaries, up from 5,000 in 1973, are currently overseas. Career missionaries discourage the use of the temporaries, arguing that most of them are ineffectual. But organizations seldom discourage temporary assignments, since 40% of the short-termers eventually become career missionaries, and those who return to the United States usually become generous contributors.

Several organizations rely heavily on short-termers. About 200,000 people a year become Mormons because of contacts made by short-term missionaries. Campus Crusade for Christ sent 1,300 students overseas last summer. CCC’s International Ministry supervisor, Ted Noble, believes that junketing evangelists have a strategic role to play in the missionary field. “In countries that limit missionary visas, we can send in students as tourists. Sure, they won’t speak the language, but they can help show a film on the life of Jesus that’s dubbed with the local language.”

NOWHERE DOES the controversy over short-term missionaries rage more openly than in Papua New Guinea, where 3,330 career missionaries already compete for the attention of fewer than 3 million locals. It is hard to think of a country more hospitable to Christian evangelists. The PNG constitution calls for complete religious freedom. The Wycliffe Bible Translators’ support base at Ukarumpa has grown over the years into a semi-autonomous town with a missionary population of 1,000. A 37-year-old Wesleyan from Oregon attends Cabinet meetings and advises 34-year-old Prime Minister Paias Wingti. Unfortunately, not all missions practice the Golden Rule that they preach.

When Pope John Paul II visited New Guinea in 1984, he was denounced as the anti-Christ by a group of Protestant fundamentalists. Last summer a Seventh-day Adventist revival in the highland town of Goroka turned ugly when the featured evangelist announced that Catholics and Lutherans weren’t really Christian.

“Most of these short-term evangelists are too aggressive, and some are really bizarre,” says Gernot Fugmann, director of the Melanesian Institute.

When Catholics on the island of Matupit danced in traditional garb through the Seventh-day Adventist section of town last September, the four-day riot that ensued prompted some members of Parliament to muse that perhaps complete religious freedom wasn’t such a good idea.

“First come the Catholics who say we can drink, and then come the Protestants who say it’s a sin,” says Mahuru Rarua-Rarua, a member of Parliament from Port Moresby. “Now the Mormons want to deny us tea, coffee and cola. You white men can be deceptive when it comes to Christianity.”

Evangelists traipsing through Papua New Guinea form a veritable rainbow coalition. Last October, traffic got so heavy that Abdul Akhbar Muhammad, a national assistant to Louis Farrakhan, found himself competing for attention with Charles Colson, the “born-again” Christian “plumber” from the Nixon White House. But, hey, no problem. “Chuck and I were together in Fiji and Sydney both,” Muhammad laughed. “He’s preaching for Christ, but I think this nation of black people needs to discover Islam.”

FEW DEVELOPING NATIONS can afford New Guinea’s spiritual circus. Certainly not neighboring Indonesia, where numerous ethnic groups inhabit an archipelago of 3,000 islands. Since its brush with communism in 1965, the country has maintained stability by strict enforcement of pancasila , a policy that makes minority rights subservient to national interests. It’s a frustrating concept for Western missionaries, who chafe under certain restrictions and are prohibited from open proselytism. But by avoiding confrontation, the world’s largest Muslim country has ensured an atmosphere in which other religions are not only practiced but allowed to grow.

Indonesia has one of the world’s fastest-growing Christian populations. Some of the future ministers who will lead Indonesia’s Christians into the next century are now students at the Evangelical Theological Seminary on the island of Java. Since establishing a viable village church on an island that is overwhelmingly Muslim is a requirement for ordination, the Church Planting course taught by Greg Gripentrog is always full.

“There are several ways to make your initial contact,” Gripentrog explained one morning to a room full of seminarians. “The easiest is to use relationships within a family. Establish a friendship with one son or daughter and you’ll eventually have a relationship with the entire family.”

A graduate of Cal State Long Beach, Gripentrog, 39, typifies a new breed of missionary that neither preaches nor baptizes. Instead, he and 270 others affiliated with Overseas Crusades in Milpitas, Calif., give local pastors the organizational structure and public relations skills on which to build their own ministry.

Gripentrog advises students to carry a bag of coffee and some sugar on their first visit to a village. Once the contact is made, students must keep alert for weddings, so that relationships can grow throughout the extended family. “Remember that a marriage of individuals is actually a joining of families,” he says, moving between desks in the tiny concrete room. “Think of these relationships as the bridges of God.”

Since its founding eight years ago, ETS graduates have baptized 6,000 Indonesians and started 325 churches. The accomplishment would have been impossible, however, without help from American missionaries, says seminary founder Chris Marantika. “America is the best example of Christianity in the world,” he says. “We couldn’t have even started construction without $50,000 from the Los Gatos Christian Church. Christians in the United States continue to provide 70% of our budget. If we can link America’s resources with the manpower of the Third World, we can win the whole planet for Christ.”

Marantika’s vision may not be all that improbable. Once firmly planted, churches are difficult to uproot. In Nicaragua there has been a sixfold increase in church attendance since the Sandinistas came to power. More than 36% of the people in the Soviet Union remain Christian despite seven decades of communism. In the People’s Republic of China the number of practicing Christians may be as high as 40 million. “Christianity is a growing and vital force throughout the developing world,” Ralph Winter says. “The Cultural Revolution failed to wipe out the church in China. Now nothing can.”