The Presbyterian Church in the USA released a report at the 1932 General Assembly entitled

Rethinking Missions.

This report was from the Board of Foreign Mission. It argued in a spirit of

theological liberalism that the church needed to, as the title has it, rethink missions.

Missions in the past, the report argued, were about bringing the gospel to heathen people.

These would be people who had never heard the gospel before, never had access to God's

word, and so it was absolutely crucial for missionaries to bring the good news of the gospel

to these people groups, and that was what the church was doing with missions.

This report however argued that as we entered into the 20th century we have a more enlightened view of

humanity and we should be far more tolerant than those of the previous generations.

That in our tolerance we should recognize that there is some validity to these non-Christian religions.

And so we need to rethink missions.

It's not so much about bringing the gospel as it is, and this is very much in keeping with trends there in the early 20th century

that missions should be about improving the social betterment and the social status

of peoples around the world.

And so there needs to be more of a concern

with issues of a social nature

than issues of a gospel nature. This was a report submitted to the General Assembly.

Of course, when Jay Gressam-Machin read this report, he could not have disagreed more strongly and probably with every single word.

He took two actions. His first action was to submit an overture to his

presbytery to challenge that report and the second thing he did was he wrote a

report of his own and he wrote an essay or a booklet really called The Responsibility of the Church in Our New Age.

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