After two World Wars the second half of the 20th century was bound to be turbulent, and was, as overseas territories claimed their independence one after another and the well-established church missionary societies and agencies, products of the Great Missionary Movement going back over 150 years, found themselves in uncharted waters — first China, followed by India, then Africa and most recently Europe — with Edinburgh 1910 leading to the the formation of the International Missionary Council (IMC), the recent arrival of the World Council of Churches, 1946, and the potential of Vatican 2 all sitting somewhat uncertainly if not uncomfortably on the horizon. 'Development' was the buzz word and the formation of church development agencies — mainly Christian Aid, TEARFUND and CAFOD — were lining up the troops and training the officers.
In the turbulence, three 'church related but not church governed’ bodies (SPCK, USCL and the Bible Society) were in danger of being sidelined despite their long history and experience. The one person who spotted the threat, particularly to literature and education, was the Archbishop of York, Donald Coggan, who responded by launching the Archbishop of York’s Fund (AYF) to fill the gap, motivated on the one hand by his deep commitment to literacy, literature and education and on the other by his desire to secure a satisfactory British response to events in other quarters, and both undergirded by a holistic approach spelt out in the AYF Trust Deed entirely in line with the history of SPCK and USCL/RTS.
Four Major Charities Looking for Money
The result by the end of the 1950s was four major charities, with a combined history of more than 500 years committed to Literacy, Literature and Education all looking for money. Coordination was not on their agenda. Co-operation was highly unlikely. Their problems and solutions were not at all the same but for all four 1960 was to prove something of a watershed.
In the case of SPCK, the Lambeth Conference of 1958 had drawn particular attention to the importance of literature in the life of the church and within a year SPCK was busy with a Survey making a realistic assessment of current needs around the world. Its Report, Literature for the Anglican Communion, published on Founders Day 1960, was well received by the press, both church and secular, and described in the SPCK’s Annual Report as ‘the most important event of the past year.’
- a call to be prophetic in terms of the human situation, social, political and economic factors.
- a sense of urgency to raise the profile of literacy, literature and libraries to a level comparable to that of food, health, poverty and natural disasters.
- a strategy to provide the tools for the new, younger and growing churches around the world.
- a commitment to literature on every conceivable topic for the wellbeing of humanity.
They were looking for £1m over five years but more important than the money was the Report’s objective, content and underlying philosophy, which turned out to be a forerunner for principles and practices to be further developed in and after the Feed the Minds Campaign and to become the backbone of UK literature work with the wider church for the rest of the century. These were
Without money, however, the Report was worthless. The money was not there nor likely to be there in the foreseeable future without a massive Campaign.
USCL (United Society for Christian Literature/RTS), a hundred years younger than SPCK, unashamedly ecumenical from the outset and more closely related to the Free Churches, was running a parallel organisation with similar problems.
Working alongside both but with more specific objectives was the Bible Society, founded shortly after USCL by some of the same people, and currently looking for an extra £550,000 for increased circulation of the scriptures.
Somewere in the wings, and closely related to USCL, was CBMS (Conference of British Missionary Societies), an alliance of the major UK missionary societies (including many evangelical Anglican ones) for whom literature was only one string to their bow and (with the possible exception of the Methodists) usually regarded literature as something of a 'Cinderella’, the child in a bustling family, never given much credibility, even less attention and always came last when the goodies were being handed out. Standing further back were the British churches which had never quite cottoned on to Thomas Bray’s enthusiasm for basic education in the homeland and assumed that all their overseas problems could safely be left to their adjunct missionary societies.
The Cry of Hunger
Overshadowing them all came the Cry of Hunger from the developing world. By the end of the 1950s, with Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America all engaged in greatly enlarged literature programmes as a result of the rapid spread of literacy, and education making constant appeals for help to the (western) mission and supporting agencies on an unprecedented scale, all the institutions were fully stretched and feeling the strain.
In 1960, responding to a suggestion from the German Missionary Council that ‘literature work in missions and younger churches’ was in need of co-ordination, the International Missionary Council (IMC) proposed a consultation
‘to consider the strategy of Christian literature and the co-ordination and development of the work of the national Christian agencies’.
The response was regional rather than global. In Africa in 1961, for example, the All-Africa Conference on Christian Literature and Audio-Visual Communication meeting at Kitwe, Zambia, was attended by 90 delegates from 20 African countries and 23 denominations, together with consultants from Asia, Europe and North America. In a thorough discussion of the problems, solutions were proposed and criticised, concrete plans developed, priorities decided, and the practical issues of time, place, personnel and finance worked out with church leaders by representatives of supporting agencies and the operating bodies. Similar consultations were held in other regions.
In Europe in 1962, the WCC Department of World Mission and Evangelism held a slightly different consultation at Bethel-bei-Bielefeld (Germany), composed mainly of Europeans and North Americans but including representation from Africa, India, East Asia, the Near East and the Pacific, to discover how western resources in money, people and technique could best be used to help literature development in regions still needing support. This led to the formation of the WCC Christian Literature Fund (CLF) with plans for exchange of information, concerted planning and combining resources in every sphere of the work. It provided the catalyst for change.
The Catalyst for Change
The post-war world had seen the development of the ecumenical and international community structures in the form of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the International Missionary Council (IMC), with the British churches relating to the one and the CBMS to the other. The Christian Literature Fund, with a target of £2m, was the child of both and looking to Britain for £200,000. With long histories and distinctive traditions every one of those British Societies treasured their independence but some, especially those whose major if not only commitment was to literature, were beginning to feel the pinch in a way that suggested further cooperation might be a more productive way of reailsing their objectives if only as a counter to the cry for hunger, embodied in the phrase 'Minds are Hungry too'. This climate provided a catalyst for radical change in the way Britain handled Christian literature overseas.
First out of the blocks was the Archbishop of York’s Fund (AYF), led and driven by the sheer dynamism and commitment of Donald Coggan, Archbishop of York, an evangelical, fully committed to the importance of the Bible, closely related to both the Bible Society and SPCK, not a million miles in theological thinking from USCL, and held in high esteem by the British Churches. Who better to coordinate the British response and galvanise them all into action with a National Campaign with an initial appeal for £500,000 for Christian Literature.
The WCC request came first to the Conference of British Missionary Societies, who hoped (and possibly expected) the bulk of the money to come from the Archbishop of York’s Fund, but when the current needs of SPCK, USCL and the Bible Society were taken into account, and bearing in mind that all the money was going to finish up in the one pot in Geneva, it soon became obvious that duplication must be avoided, and the solution was to bring together the Archbishop of York’s Fund, the two Bible Societies (British and Scottish), the two specialist Christian Literature Societies (SPCK and USCL) and to increase the appeal to £1m with one national Campaign under the banner
‘Feed the Minds of Millions’