Magyar Egyház, 1955 (34. évfolyam, 1-10. szám)
1955-09-01 / 9. szám
MAGYAR EGYHÁZ 13 Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church came into being. A few months later the first women missionaries ever sent by a woman’s organization into a foreign country, sailed for fabled India. They were Isabella Thoburn, a teacher, and Clara Swain, a doctor. Isabella founded a school for girls that became famed Isabella Thoburn College for Women, the first Christian college for women in the Far East and soon the first woman to become a college professor in all Asia was graduated. Dr. Clara’s influence was felt in the graduation of a woman as the first physician of her sex east of Suez. Presbyterian and Baptist women soon followed suit in the missionary field. The Presbyterians sent Helen Norton to China and the Baptists chose Burma as their missionary outpost. By the turn of the century a large inter-denominational committee was formed. Women were at last working together across denominational lines on world affairs. In 1908 the Council of Women for Home Missions was organized, and in 1915 the Federation of Women’s Boards of Foreign Missions. By ’29 the National Council of Federated Church Women emerged. In 1941, the week of Pearl Harbor, this body, with the two mission groups, became the United Council of Church Women. By 1951 this great group of women, through its Board of Managers, voted to become a General Department of the proposed National Council of Churches, which was constituted that year. Through the years of growth, church women have worked doggedly for the things in which they believed. Take the realm of race relations — twenty years before the Supreme Court ruling banning segregation in the public schools, church women, hand-in-hand with the former Federal Council of Churches, were fighting such discrimination. From the start, church women supported all measures to protect women and children in industry. Minimum wages, equal pay for equal work, extention of social security, low-cost housing on a nondiscriminatory basis and federal aid to education with safeguards against government control were all championed. Thousands of refugees are free from the camps and compounds of Europe and many communities in the United States have been enriched by the infusion of Old World cultures, thanks to the religiously motivated women in America. Women — and a good many men — deplore the fact that few denominations ordain women and that relatively few sit on church-policy-making bodies. They help suppport countless hospitals, schools, colleges, and other mission work around the world. The church women of America are never idle. Their national assembly in Cleveland in November will chart the course ahead. Their end product is unity of action in the building of a world Christian community. --------------o------------RELIGIOUS INTEREST GROWING . . . The mid-century tide of interest in religion — sweeping America ever since World War II — appears to have reached new flood heights. More Americans than ever before in history — better than six out of every ten persons — are church members. Americans are donating more money to religious enterprises than ever before. Churches are staffed by the greatest number of ministers in history and there are more new churches than ever — with construction figures breaking all records. The new annual statictics are given in a survey of the activities of 268 religious bodies during 1954 in the Yearbook of American Churches published Sept. 15 by the National Council of Churches. The new grand total of American church members in all faiths is 97,482,611 — up 2,639,766 from a year ago for a record breaking 60.3 per cent of the population, a figure which compares with 49 per cent in 1940 and a mere 16 per cent a hundred years ago. Church membership figures by faiths show there are 57,000,000 Protestants; 32,000,000 Roman Catholics and 5,500,000 Jewish. Sunday Schools are overflowing with a new total of 37,623,530 students and teachers — up 2,234,064 over last year’s previous high for a phenomenal 6.3 per cent increase. The year also chalked up a close to two per cent rise in new church congregations for a total of 300,056 — an increase of 5,597 and reached a new high — 213,167 — in the number of clergymen in active charge of local churches. Last year this figure was 207,618. (There are doubtless more for only 219 of the 268 religious bodies reporting in the survey gave figures on clergymen.) To accommodate new throungs of worshippers new churches are also going up at a record breaking pace. Americans are also providing more financial support for their churches than ever before — at a rate three times greater than membership increases. In Protestant and Orthodox churches alone, contributions totaled $1,537,132,309 for a per capita avearge of $45.36 over the year, a rate of giving increase of 8.5 per cent over the previous year. Other religious bodies do not make stewardship figures available, but estimates indicate a total for all faiths exceeding two billion dollars annually. Dr. Benson Y. Landis, Yearbook editor pointed out that no one factor can be said to be responsible for the unprecendented degree of religious interest. “The awesome destructive power of atomic energy may have something to do with it,” he said. “But beyond ascribing membership increases to such known factors as unusually high brithrates, accelerated evangelism programs and shifting population trends from the cities to the suburbs, it is difficult to point to the cause.” The only source of statistical data for all religious faiths in the Continental U.S., the Yearbook shows the relative strength of Protestant and Roman Catholic churches have remained virtually the same since the beginning of the century and before. Since 1940 the Protestants have increased by 20,000,000 while the Roman Catholic increased by 11,000,000. In 1954, 35.5 per cent of the population were Protestant; 20 per cent were Roman Catholic. In 1940 the percentages were 28.7 Protestant, 16.1 Roman Catholic.
