STANTON H. WILSON
is a Western Australian and received his ministerial training at the Federal college of the Bible, Glen Iris. Mr. Wilson has had successful ministries in South Australia, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and is now serving the Church at Brighton, Victoria.

      "There are five points to the compass. North, South, East, West, and the point where you are. It is very easy for me to say that "God so loved the world" and to forget that that means that "he loved me and gave himself for me," and loved you and gave himself for you. Our concern to win the world for Christ commits us to a programme of persons. It is a basic Christian belief that every individual soul is of infinite value to God.

MODERN MASSIFICATION.

      We live in an age when persons are commonly regarded as little more than numbers on a form, entries on a file, or records in a book. This modern "massification" of society is unchristian in its concept and in its consequence. The individual is being lost in the mass. Paul Tournier in his "Doctor's Case Book," says that a doctor's danger is that he ceases to think of a man as a person. He begins to think of him as an ulcer case or a lung case. Then he tells of a doctor friend in Switzerland, where therapeutic abortions are legal. A woman had come to this doctor to gain his consent for the operation. She insisted on referring to the child in question as "this little collection of cells." One day the doctor suddenly put a question to her. "What name", he said, "would you give this child if it were to be born"? At once the atmosphere of the conversation changed. One felt that as soon as she had given him a name, he ceased to be a collection of cells and became a person. "It was staggering", concluded the doctor "I felt as if I had been present at an act of creation." The sacredness of personality is the most disturbing faith that a man can hold. Because every man is of infinite worth to God, people, all people, must be of prime concern to the Christian church. That brings me to the first thing that I want to emphasise.

THE WHOLE WORLD OF PERSONS.

      Christianity is related to the world of persons. Christianity is the religion of the Incarnation. Christ, the Word made flesh, stands at the centre of our Christian faith. For the Church is more than an earthly society, a mere product of history. It is an extension of this same Incarnation. For us, the life in the Spirit can never be disembodied. Redeemed believers are to live in newness of life, in a world of persons. There is no other kind of human life. We are called to be in the world, though not of it. God's holy will has to be done, down here, even here in this Babylon. "Thy will be done on earth" is the prayer characteristic of all true Christians. The

Church must always identify herself with the whole of humanity.

THE CHURCH IN ACTION.

      A church which is not continually concerned with the world is not only an impediment but an impertinence in such a world as this. The Church, to be the Church, must be "down to earth," "up to date," and "on the ball" all the time. For Christianity is not only a message to be believed, it is also a deed to be done, and we who are of the Church today must give the Gospel life and breath, and body, and arms, and feet. Just as long ago men saw God at work in the hands and feet and wounds of Jesus, so today, we are to be His hands and His feet and if need be His wounds, too. Christianity can never remain an idea. It cannot long survive as an abstraction. Be assured that every doctrine has its duty and every truth carries its corresponding task.

      We must live, as J. B. Phillips puts it, under "the solemn sense of being entrusted, by God, with the Gospel." We are the only Gospel the careless world will read. And that is why our Christian faith must be primarily expounded in the framework of day-to-day living. Dr. Temple once said, "Of all the religions of the world, Christianity is the most materialistic." It is therefore required of every Christian that he present the essence of his faith with clarity and humility and without fanaticism and arrogance. It is in action, and not in diction that we are deficient.

INEXPENSIVE PROTESTANTISM.

      It was Canon Dick Shepherd who, after years of preaching in the open air to people who were either hostile or indifferent to the Church stated that he was convinced that the greatest single handicap that the Church has is the unsatisfactory lives of ordinary professing Christians. Let us all humbly confess that we, every one of us, have paid lip service to a faith which we have made far more vocal than vital.

      We praise the sacrifice in our missionaries abroad but we do not emulate that same laudable quality in ourselves at home. Our stewardship is often at the level of the Scotsman who directed that £500 from his estate be paid to the widow of the Unknown Soldier. We have by and large settled down to a rather comfortable and inexpensive Protestantism.

      Our faith has become to us a sedative when it ought to be a stimulant. Let him deny it who will, there is gone from the Christian faith of today something of that rugged scrutiny, of that careful self-examination, which was a part of the religion of the prophets and the apostles and the martyrs of long ago. Our economic prosperity is not conducive to marked generosity. A lady told a friend of mine the other day that there were so many appeals in her local church that it now costs her almost as much to go to church as to the pictures. And she didn't suspect anything incongruous in her complaint.

DISCIPLINE AND DEDICATION.

      Few men in our time have been keener students of Russian communism than Bishop Fulton Sheehan and few men in any decade have been more trenchant in their attacks on Russian communism than this Roman Catholic Bishop, who, this year, stated, "I believe that when Russia does disintegrate, Russia will be one of the great spiritual and moral nations of the world because one thing that communism has done in Russia is that it has restored a sense of discipline and dedication which is very much on the decline in the Western world." And then he went on to point out that where Russia has taken the

      Cross without Christ, modern Christianity to some extent, has taken Christ without the Cross and reduced their religion to a tawdry cheap and sentimental affair.

      The thing which concerns me in the church life of Australia today, is, that on the one hand there is this lack of discipline and dedication and on the other hand an alarming detachment from the life of the world at large.

DETACHMENT.

      In the early 1920's every lovesick swain was singing the lines "We'll build a sweet little nest, Somewhere in the west, And let the rest of the world go by" and now thirty years later that love song has hardened into an insular and unrealistic attitude to life. Our economic prosperity is even making vast areas of church life self-contained, comfortable and complacent. This is one world. "Togetherness" is the basic constitution of humanity.

      Do you remember the words by John Donne:--"No man is an island entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind." And so I put it to you, that the world is one and we are all involved in the blame for the very things which we deplore. George Bernard Shaw said, "You must either share the guilt of the world or go to another planet". Paul reminds us that "no man liveth to himself."

      It was Dr. J. S. Wale who presented the same truth rather pictorially when he said:--"The most distant star is disturbed every time my young son throws his teddy-bear out of his pram." Each of us is bound up in the life of the rest of us. "While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is, criminal element, I am of it. While there is a man in gaol, I am not free." It is in these lines, surely, that one catches the authentic accent of the Christian spirit.

      Believing then, as we do, in the essential Fatherhood of God and the essential Brotherhood of Man, we must also accept in the area of Christian concern and Christian action, that "the field is the world." There must be a "togetherness" which involves the Church in suffering with the world and in service for the world. And what a world!

      The Church simply must face up to the fears and fundamental facts with which humanity is haunted. No Christian dares to dismiss the spectre of starvation which stalks abroad in the world today.

STARVATION.

      We need to remind ourselves that in a world where millions go to bed hungry every night and millions have no bed to go to, you and I have food and clothes and comforts and luxuries, and enjoy a standard of living that is second to none in the world. But these standards of ours are not world standards. We belong to the privileged minority. It was for people in our position for whom the Lord said--"To whom much is given of him shall much be required."

      Poverty anywhere is a danger to mankind everywhere. But starvation is not only an international problem, it is a matter of prime Christian concern. Berdyaev said: "Bread for thyself is a material question; bread for thy neighbour is a spiritual question." It is my business as a Christian, that the United Nations reports that two-thirds of the world's population are underfed and that there are two hundred million starving children in the world today.

      Last year, through Inter-Church Aid, Christians sent twenty seven million pounds for distribution to

the needy Christians throughout the world and, of this, the churches in Australia gave .2 of 1 per cent. From the Christians of this land of peace and plenty and prosperity, .2 of 1 per cent! Do you see what I mean by "detachment"?

      But let me not seem to oversimplify this matter of starvation.

      What the world's starving millions need, beside food for today, and in some senses more, is the opportunity to earn their food for themselves. They do not ask for charity; they only ask for a chance in life. This means that Christians must exert a Christian influence on the international trade policies of their countries. We owe no man, no country, our patronage, but we owe every man his right to life and liberty and happiness.

      This raises the second problem, world problem, of which the Christian Church in Australia seems unconcerned, almost unaware.

      I refer to the problem of

POPULATION.

      It is one of the most urgent and alarming issues confronting the world and the Church today. I find myself in perfect agreement with Harry Emerson Fosdick who stated:--"One of the most basic issues in the world today, on whose solution even our hopes of ending war depend, is the population problem. Until mankind can be educated out of its careless, casual, unthinking, unpurposed, merely animal propagation of children, into thoughtfully planned parenthood, many of man's dearest hopes are impossible. Planned parenthood, rightly understood, is socially constructive and its central aim is family life at its best."

      The 1957 United Nations Year Book says that the world population will double itself by the end of the century. This is because it is increasing at the rate of forty-seven million per year. In the lifetime of your children, this world will have twice as great a population as it has today.

      Think what that means in Indonesia, for instance, where there are eighty million people living in a country whose nearest shore is only four hundred miles, from the Australian coast line. Eighty million people, of whom one million are totally blind, and where seven hundred people die every day from T.B.--from this one scourge alone!

      Or go a few further flying hours to the north to Japan with ninety one million people whose life expectancy has increased from forty years to sixty years in the last two decades. Ninety-one million people living in a land only half the size of the State of South Australia. And remember that Japan is a country only 14 per cent of the surface of which can be cultivated. Does it surprise you when I tell you that there were one million legal abortions in Japan last year? And does it shock your Christian conscience when I say that it is estimated that there were another million illegal abortions. Is this the only answer to a terrible problem? Have we, as Christians, no better solution to propound? And, if so what is it? Is it too much for us to stand alongside the great Methodist Church of America and say: "We believe that planned parenthood, practised in Christian conscience, may fulfill rather than violate the will of God"?

PRIVILEGE AND OPPORTUNITY.

      These two world problems, starvation and population, are nowhere more critical than in East Asia, in which area of the world God has sent the Christian churches of Australia. This is a position of great privilege which we hold in an hour of great opportunity to show our neighbours that we are

concerned, vitally concerned, for their social, economic, and spiritual welfare. They need that "togetherness" which is uniquely Christian, and they need it now before it is too late. And it will be too late for them, and us, and all the world, unless somehow by God's grace we can surmount this third fearful problem to which I want to refer. The problem of

WAR.

      I know the problem is vast and complex and immense. But is man the highest power in the Universe or is God? The only way to build a better world is to begin with God. For too long, too many Christians have been deterred by the feeling that they are only amateurs. Are we therefore to leave the peace of the world in the hands of the experts? God forbid! The experts in education are not saving the world, the experts in science are not saving the world.

      Charles Lindberg recently said: "I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft that I loved, destroying the civilisation I expected them to serve. While the lifesaving miracles of medicine are being perverted towards the murderous ends of biological warfare." Not in all history have we had such knowledge in our heads, and such technical devices in our hands, and yet never has the threat of danger and death and total destruction been so real and so imminent.

A MATTER OF EXISTENCE.

      R. G. Casey warned us, as lately as last month, that military satellites which could concentrate deadly cosmic radiation on one particular country or another were a possibility of the future. This, he said, he had learned from the scientists of several nations. Either we are going to learn to live together, or we must consent to die together. It is a matter of existence--of life or death. "To be or not to be"--that is the question!

      In all fairness, let me say, it is not technology that we need to fear. Arnold Toynbee in his latest book says:--"Technology, in itself, is neutral. It is just physical power which can be used for good or for evil, but it is neither good nor evil, until human beings employ it for the one purpose or the other." There then lies our basic problem, in persons, in their behaviour, in their morals. Dr. C. E. M. Joad has summed up this generation by saying, "We have the powers of gods but we use them like irresponsible school boys."

CHRISTIANITY AN IMPERATIVE.

      It has been estimated that the world spends sixty thousand million pounds every year on defence. Crippling isn't it? Crazy, isn't it? Sixty thousand million pounds a year on defence! Either our racial prejudices, our partisan spirit, our national resentment must be annihilated, or we will be annihilated. The world can only survive as God created it to survive, that is, with men as brothers and God as the father.

      Arthur H. Compton, Nobel Prize winner in atomic physics, sums up the situation in a sentence when he says, "Science has created a world in which Christianity is an imperative." And may I ask, how else can Christianity march forth to save the day, than in your shoes and in mine?

      If our religion is not related to the world of persons, then it simply is not the religion of Jesus. Christianity

is for such a world as this, teeming as it does with just such problems as these. At the heart of our faith is the fact that God loves the world. Before a world of such dire need, I want to say finally, that

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH MUST BE UNITED.

      In our divisions, our strength is being dissipated and our witness is weakened. The presence of world problems is not secondary and secular, an unworthy incentive to Christian unity. Why, in the mind of the Master, Himself, the imperative to Christian unity was based on His primary concern for an unbelieving world. In the garden He prayed that His followers might be one, not as an end in itself, but as a means to the end that the world might believe.

      Christian unity is needed not merely that we might sit together in heavenly places, but that we might stand together in unheavenly places. The Church was never intended to be a "Holier-Than-Thou" group. "One aspect", writes O. C. Quick, "one aspect of the Church's holiness on earth consists precisely in the fact that it exists primarily for the sake of those who do not yet belong to it." Jesus Christ is the Universal Saviour, and as such, has commissioned the Church to take His Gospel into all of the world. To quote Paul Althaus: "The Church stands before God on behalf of the whole of mankind and not just for its own members."

      We are entrusted with the whole gospel for the whole world. The whole human community is God's human family; and every man is my brother. He may be broken and beaten; his body may be filthy and his mind filthy too, but he is still my brother--and what is more--a "brother for whom Christ died"!

JOIN HANDS NOW.

      In this world of persons of infinite worth, God has set us to be the channels of His purpose and the agents of His will. Is it too much to ask that with such a Gospel for such a world, we surrender our pride and prejudice and partisan spirit and join hands now? Tomorrow may be too late!

      In the waving wheatfields of Western Canada one summer, a little girl of three was lost. The police went out; the tradespeople went out; the school children went out. All that day and all the next, they searched but the child could not be found. Then an old farmer called the searchers together. "For two days now", he said, "we've searched with no result. Let's all join hands and form a line, and comb through the wheatfields together." So, all that morning they continued their silent and sombre march and at high noon, the father stumbled on a little inert human object. He threw up his hands and with a heart-rending cry, exclaimed: "Too late! . . . O God, Why didn't we have the sense to join hands sooner!"

      Look at the world: War, Starvation, Degradation! . . . our world . . . God's world! May God give us the sense to join hands, before it is too late. The Divine Moment is now. Let us go forth together and attempt great things for God, and then we may confidently expect great things from God.

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