LINK WITH PACIFIC

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 29 August 1942, Page 4

LINK WITH PACIFIC

L.M.S. BUILDING LONDON HEADQUARTERS No building in London has closer links with the Pacific than one I entered the other day, by St. James’s Park Station. It is the Headquarters of the London Missionary Society, which for nearly 150 years has played a vital part in the development of native life in the Pacific Islands, said the Rev R. R. Williams, in a 8.8. C. talk. Just inside the door hung a fine ship's bell which used to ring on the decks of John Williams IV, one of those missionary schooners which have meant so much in the South Sea Islands. Now, John Williams V lies at Suva, in Fiji, cut-off for the moment from its usual voyage round the Gilbert Islands. An old friend of mine, Cecil Northcott, one of the chief secretaries, told me that in the Gilberts one of their most plucky missionaries is holding out at Beirut, with his large school of young man and women, training there for Christian service. The L.M.S. is deeply concerned at the news from the Pacific. The Gilberts and the Cook Islands and their missions in Papua, where seven men are still in the mission stations on the south-east coast, are continually in their thoughts. At the London Headquarters they know what bombs mean from personal experience. A Nazi bomb actually blew’ to pieces an original map of the Zambesi, made by David Livingstone himself but the British workmen found the tattered bits and they have been pasted together wonderfully well. Other precious papers, concerning early settlements in the Pacific, were in safety. The Mitchell Library at Sydney will be glad to know this, for a few years ago it sent a representative to make records from these very papers.

Keeping up the missionary spirit in bombed and evacuated churches is a tough job, but the society is rising to it. Although over a hundred Congregational Churches are destroyed their missionary gifts are £4.000 more than they were last year. A Cockney boy evacuated to a Devonshire village collected £1 in what we call “Ship Ha’ pennies” to help keep the “John Williams” in commission. British children have raised nearly £6.000 in the same way—£7o of it coming from one Lancashire town. Anxieties come not only from the Pacific Islands. Madagascar, an important field of work, is sealed up. 120 missionaries are under restrictions in China, twelve of them in Hong Kong. Yet, even in wartime, a whole new field of w’ork, with 16 missionaries, has been developed in Western China. As the General Secretary, Mr Chirgwin, says, in his April letter, “It is a miracle that things like this should take place in a day of total warfare.”

One of the things which keeps the society going is the encouragement coming from their friends and supporters in Australia and New Zealand. In spite of the anxieties which these Dominions are going through, London notices with gratitude how well their missionary gifts are being kept up. There, as in England faith can be seen at work.