Missionary Call

Part of the church experience of childhood was the awareness that people who were in many ways regarded as superheroes had left their homes in New Zealand and gone overseas to found the church in benighted countries. 

My family had friends among these wonderful souls, especially among the handful who worked with the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society, which was the overseas mission arm of the Baptist Union of New Zealand. 

One of the support organisations for this work was the Baptist Womens Missionary Union, of which my aunt was Treasurer, and on which my grandmother had taken a leading role. My mother’s distant cousin and my father’s friend, Royston Brown, had been a missionary before the war. 

The NZBMS had been allocated two districts in Bengal, Brahmanbaria and Chandpur, in which to establish mission stations. They were a few miles apart, with another district, Comilla, in between, where the Australian Baptists worked. The NZBMS also had a station at Agartala, the capital of the neighbouring Native State of Tripura, ruled over by a maharaja at the pleasure of the British-controlled Government of India. 

While Brahmanbaria and Chandpur had been mission stations for half a century, Tripura had only just allowed Christian missionaries to live and work there since just before the war, thanks to the efforts of NZBMS staff in establishing cordial relationships with the Tripura Royal Family. 

Missionary work of this kind was always regarded in my family and, so far as I could understand, in the Baptist church as a whole as the most important job a Christian could take up, standing above the work of the ministry in New Zealand, and above the most highly regarded professional jobs of service industries like medicine and education. 

So for young people growing up in this religious atmosphere, there was always the challenge of training for the pastorate in a New Zealand congregation, or, even more difficult and meritorious, of training to be a missionary overseas. The difficulty was compounded by the problems of working in a foreign language, and lurid stories from earlier times of tropical diseases, and high death-rates among missionaries in some parts of the world. 

Of course, much of this was exaggerated, as we came to realise years later, but there was a large element of truth in it before 1945. (In practice, I was the first missionary of the NZBMS not to suffer from malaria) 

In 1951, I went to see my distant relative Royston Brown, to ask him what I should do to make sure I would be ready to work in the missionary situation for the NZBMS. He was then Chairman of the mission’s Council. He suggested I get a good master’s degree and training as a teacher, and a couple of years’ experience in a New Zealand school, and then apply to the NZBMS to be sent as a missionary.  

He explained that the mission school in Agartala would need a trained teacher at its head to lift the level of education provided from primary to secondary. 

So I proceeded  to follow his advice, and eventually in 1957 left Auckland by ship with Audrey, and Janet, who was going to marry Rev Stuart Avery, for Bombay and Calcutta. (Photo at left: Budding missionaries, 1957: Brian Smith, FG, Muriel Ormrod, Edward Mills; in front: Audrey, Janet Avery)

In the meantime I had continued to be involved in the Church at Epsom, and then later in Hamilton, teaching Bible Class, running with the Harrier Club, and editing the national Bible Class Magazine, "Contact", in 1955 and 1956. While at Epsom I continued to play the organ. In 1956 and 1957 I studied extra-murally for papers for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity from Melbourne University, but although I passed most of the subjects for those preliminary years I never completed the course. 

So again my religious practice was largely social and intellectual, although I am sure I believed my emotions and my deeper personal life was 100% committed and involved in the Christian way of life.