“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of

God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.”

(Romans 1:16)

Out of the agony and defeat our nation suffered in the early months of the Second World War, there came a terse, sardonic expression: “Too little, and too late.”

The men and materials we rushed to one critical point of conflict after another were just too inadequate and they arrived too tardily to stem the crushing tide of conquest. That was the story in the Philippines as our valiant soldiers fell back on Bataan before overwhelmingly superior armaments and numerical strength. It was the same situation as they retreated from island to island in the South Pacific. The best our nation seemed to be able to do as one weary month after another dragged by was too little and too late.

Then at long last, an aroused people, putting aside all their small selfish concerns and personal pleasures and private profits and uniting all their labors, all their emotions, all their resources, in one mighty concert of effort, rose up and grasped a great victory.

Recently, the old cynical expression of those bitter early war years, is heard again among us — “Too little and too late.” Now it is used with reference to our missile race with Russia and the fight for the control of outer space. When Russian scientists beat us to another impressive first, someone shrugs and says of our pitiful attempts: “Too little and too late.” When the material and technical assistance we send to backward countries in the Cold War is of no avail and they defect to communism in spite of all we can do, we hear someone say: “Just another case of too little and too late.”

Is it amiss to introduce this well-known expression with all its emotional connotations at the beginning of the World Mission Season in our church this year? How often we have been too late with too little in challenging situations confronting the Kingdom of Christ, with the result that we have not only failed to win an objective, we have seemed to lose our investment.

When the war closed in Japan, their national leaders begged the Christian forces of America to send missionaries by the thousands. We answered by sending them by the tens and twenties. We already know it was too little, and now it is about too late to repair our failures. Since war’s end, we have seen Christian Missions driven completely out of China. Recent letters from the Sandy Marks’ in the Belgian Congo tell of Civil War there. The ancient tribal hostilities are blazing again and the work of the mission and its services are slowing down. Will it soon be too late in the Congo because we were there with too little while we had opportunity?

But it is not just too little cash contributed and too few recruits dispatched for the foreign legions of Christ which trouble the church at this juncture — though our failures in these crucial areas have been conspicuous. Do you know what our average per-member outlay for world missions was in the Southern Presbyterian Church last year? $4.80 per person — not per week, not per month, but $4.80 each for the entire year of 1959. That is less than the price of a ticket to the Ole Miss/Tennessee football game. That is not nearly the cost of a night at the theater.

Do you know how many new missionary recruits we sent into the foreign legions of Christ this past year? Here is a brief, sad paragraph from our official Board’s report:

“The missionaries of our church have said they could use more than 400 new missionaries in strategic fields. The Board of World Missions called upon the church for more than 200 this year. Less than 30 young people have responded to the call and are going out this year, not enough to take care of replacements and hold the force at present strength.” Too little and too late.

But our too little and too late failures in the world mission of Jesus Christ go deeper than cash contributions and new recruits.

First, and most conspicuously, we have done too little thinking, too superficially, and too late on the implications of the Christian Gospel with its power of salvation for all peoples everywhere. Leslie Newbigen, dynamic leader of the International Missionary Council, points out the crucial need for Christians today to out-think the adversaries of the church. Charles Malik, distinguished statesman and Christian leader, representative from the Lebanon to the United Nations, in an address on “The Duty of Christians Today,” placed high on his list of Christian responsibilities these two: One, the duty of the Christian to understand the nature of the rising hopes and problems of the emergent, backward, colonial, colored peoples of the world, and two, the duty of the Christian to understand the real nature of communism.

“There is the sloppiest and most irresponsible understanding of communism today,” says Charles Malik, “but the Christian has absolutely no excuse to be muddled up and confused in his mind about communism. The nature of this movement, its threat to Christianity and to mankind’s best hopes, the Christian must understand intelligently, think constructively about, and meet with tenacious opposition.”

The dramatic and oft ridiculed figure of John Foster Dulles, dedicated Secretary of State, flying from one quarter of the globe to another, now to this troubled area and then to another, always carrying two books: one, his Bible, and the other, an authoritative document on doctrinaire communism, is a noble example for every Christian man and woman in these times. To know and understand the enemies of the Kingdom of Christ, and to know and understand the faith itself, in all its purity and power for these days — this hard, solid thinking is a primary and sacred duty.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” is never an excuse of pardonable ignorance for a Christian man, but rather an indictment of culpable and repairable guilt. We can think of it, we can do something about it, if we will give some time and thought and reading and discussion to world problems and world peoples, instead of idly wasting our time in our self-centered amusements and lazy diversions. Turn off the TVs, interminable Western violence shows (you have already viewed every possible variation of cowboy gunplay) and pick up a thought provoking book on World affairs or communism or Christian Missions. Go to the meeting on missions and skip the bridge party once in a while, before it is too little and too late again for us forever.

But there is another area of our contemporary life which impinges on the world mission of the church even more fundamentally — our too little and too late living of the gospel message right here in America to prove its saving power in every area of human concern.

When we Christians in the United States are ashamed of the gospel and do not proclaim its truths in our conversation, nor live by its precepts in our family and business and social activities, that Gospel’s power is short-circuited far afield.

Anne Eisner Putnam, writing in this month’s National Geographic of her return after three year’s absence to the remote Pygmy country deep in central Africa, says: “When I found time to go exploring I noticed many changes. Civilization had come to the Ituri Forest. Now there were six stores and a bakery opposite the entrance of Camp Putnam. Nearby stood a new motel with a gasoline pump. The natives had formed the habit of going to this new trading center to drink beer. Even worse, many of them had taken to smoking marijuana.”

Cleo Blackburn says: “Never before have people known so much, so quickly, so widely about so many . . . especially about the bad things in life, particularly the bad things in the lives of others.”

When a Negro minister’s house is dynamited in Birmingham, it is news that day in Bombay and Beirut. Hodding Carter, from Greenville, Mississippi, writing in The Saturday Evening Post this month about his visit to South Africa, says that while he was there, the American news story most often seen in South African papers were releases on the Poplarville, Mississippi lynching.

One of our Presbyterian missionaries now in the field says: “The attitudes and conduct of church members in their local communities are just as much a part of the proclamation (of the gospel) as the sending of missionaries; our inconsistencies and prejudices go far towards discrediting the gospel that we commission missionaries to proclaim.” (William Crane, Presbyterian Survey — February 1960)

But the influence on our own youth close at home is all the more devastating with reference to our needed recruitment for Christ’s foreign legions. Reisman’s, The Lonely Crowd, reports this actual interview with a twelve-year old American girl in a conversation about the comics: “I like Superman better than the others,” volunteered this twelve-year old, “because they can’t do everything Superman can do. Batman can’t fly, and that is very important.”

“Would you like to fly?”

“I would like to be able to fly if everybody else did, but otherwise it would be kind of conspicuous.”

Of course, Reisman uses the illustration to buttress his thesis that ours is an other-directed society rather than an inner-directed one. And in such a culture, the youth of church will be motivated to Christ-like service in the world mission of the Kingdom only when the group — the culture — in which they live, is saturated with the quality of self-giving.

Don’t we know why there are so pitifully few of our young people volunteering for world mission posts? It’s too little, too late there, because our living of the Christian gospel and our display of its power in our lives has been too little and too late to attract their attention, fire their imaginations, and direct their destiny.

Finally, of rock bottom concern for us in this season of World Missions, is our confession of our sin. Will we again be too little and too late here?

When the terrible rioting broke out in Leopoldville in the Congo, and large congregations of black people gathered at the mission church the next Sunday in Luluabourg, William Crane, one of our missionaries, says he sensed the tension in his aid and he felt some of his closest African friends acted unusually cool toward him. News of relatives of these Congo people had not come through, but all had heard how the soldiers and police led by white officers had fired upon the mob, killing numbers of Africans. Now Crane felt that as a white man he was a symbol of repression even among those friends of long standing. “Under the direction of the native pastor, the time came when in the order of service the congregation usually offered prayers of intercession for the sick, the bereaved, and those in need. But this day, Pastor Kanyinda announced: ‘All of us are worried about our relatives and friends in Leopoldville, and presently we shall offer prayers for their protection. But before we pray for ourselves, we shall have one prayer of confession, asking God’s forgiveness for the sins we have committed against the white people.’ For a few minutes there was ominous silence, and then not just one, but three or four members of the congregation rose, and one after the other, prayed out their hearts in contrition. It was as if a cloud had been lifted, and the reconciling love of God had come in to heal and cleanse . . . Who was it that said: “Redemption is the real revolution?’” (William Crane, Revolution and the New Tribe — Presbyterian Survey, February, 1960)

This is the revolution our world is needing and it is waiting only on our sincere confession and repentance. And now is the time for us for genuine confession of our sins of injustice and prejudice, and violence and unconcern for the peoples of all the earth. For His Kingdom cannot come in us, nor His will be done by us, nor by His church’s mission accomplished through us if our confession of our sin be too little and too late.

Just a year before he died, John Foster Dulles concluded his remarks to the graduates of Union Theological Seminary in New York with these words: “Out in Tennessee, there is a plant that turns out bombs. Here (in this Seminary) we have a plant that turns out ministers (and missionaries) of the gospel. The two seem remote and unrelated. Actually, the issue of our time, perhaps the issue of all human time, is which of the two outputs will prevail.”

We in Idlewild Church stand also on the threshold of a new and epochal commencement for us — the completion and use of a new youth building. Can we not take home to ourselves Foster Dulles’ figure? I do not believe it is too much for us to say — the issue for our time may well turn on the quality of output of these two Tennessee institutions — the one in the Far East and the other, the west of Tennessee.