Talking to The Mission Society’s founders, one gets a sense of how Tom Brokaw must have felt when he was interviewing people for his book, The Greatest Generation. Mostly pastors and missionaries, those who laid the groundwork for what would become “The Mission Society for United Methodists” took bold stands that they probably never dreamed would be required of them. Their lives had been intercepted, both by the needs of the world – and of a church they loved. Like for Nehemiah, the needs themselves would become a calling. In celebration of The Mission Society’s 25th anniversary, upcoming issues of Unfinished will include a few of the hundreds of stories that could be told about people who helped shape this ministry. May these accounts remind us what God can accomplish when we say yes to Him.

Recently, my husband and I had lunch with H.T. and Alice Maclin at the S & S Cafeteria in Atlanta. This is a familiar stomping ground for them. They have lived in Atlanta since 1972, after returning – with their four children – from 20 years on the mission field in the Congo and Kenya.

Dr. H.T. Maclin is the founding president and president emeritus of The Mission Society. Prior to that, he served for nine years as an executive with The United Methodist Church’s official sending agency, The General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM), the agency under which he and Alice had served in Africa.

In 1983, when H.T. left the GBGM post to become the president of the then start-up mission movement – The Mission Society for United Methodists – he and Alice had served in some capacity with GBGM for nearly 30 years. How do you, at age 55, decide to make such a daring career leap? How can a person ever discern whether a decision is based on presumption or on faith? We wanted to know.

In a London library
In a sense, H.T. explained, making this decision had begun more than 20 years earlier in a library in London. That’s when, on an extended leave from the Congo, H.T. read a three-volume history of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). The CMS was founded by laity and clergy who believed the Church of England’s official mission agencies had abandoned the task of evangelization. “I could not help wondering if a time would come when we would witness something similar in our own denomination,” he remembered. At that time, H.T. had been noticing that fewer missionaries were being sent out from The United Methodist Church, and that some who were retiring from the field were not being replaced. He had also become aware, during a recent stint to the States, of a general change taking place in the Board’s “theology of missions.”

For H.T., the dissonance – a certain uneasiness – had begun to mount.

Out of Africa
Twelve years after those days in the London library, and after having served in the Congo and Kenya, H.T. and Alice left Africa (hoping to one day return) in order to take care of their aging parents. H.T. told us what happened next: “I was nominated by the Board (GBGM) and joined the staff in 1974 as its field representative for mission development in the Southeastern Jurisdiction, the largest of the five jurisdictions. My point of contact in each of the 178 districts was the district superintendents, and they would often invite me to come to a district preachers’ meeting to make a presentation and give ministers a chance to raise questions about global ministries, etc. After I had been through several of these meetings, I got so I could predict with great accuracy what these pastors wanted to ask me. One question was, ‘Why aren’t we [The United Methodist Church] sending more missionaries?’ I would usually try to answer that in my opening remarks by saying something like:

World missions for our church began in 1832 with the sending of Melville Cox to Liberia. In the nearly 150 or so years since then, we have established churches in more than 60 nations around the world. When Alice and I first went to the Central Congo in the early 50s, we did not have, for example, a single missionary performing the role of pastor. Why not? Because by then they were all African. And when we arrived, the first African district superintendent had been appointed, and now, all the superintendents and bishops are African.

Don’t you agree with me that the point of mission is establishing the church – and that the church will never really be the church as long as it is dependent upon the pastors, superintendents, and bishops being American? And we [the GBGM] have been remarkably successful in establishing the church.

“These pastors would ask, ‘But why aren’t we sending missionaries to new places in the world?’ And I would tell them, ‘Well, that’s just where the Board [GBGM] happens to be. It believes that our energy should be spent in strengthening the existing church, and that the existing churches then will be more likely to be successful in reaching other areas where the Gospel has not been heard.’

“But then there would always be someone at the meeting – I could count on it – who would say, ‘Yeah, but H.T., what about the nearly two billion people* in the world we keep hearing about who have yet to have the opportunity to respond to the Gospel? Don’t we have a continuing obligation to reach out to them? I know we have people who feel called to be on the frontier of mission and among unreached people.’

“And I would say, ‘Yes, we do have that obligation, but that’s not where the Board’s emphasis is right now. And if you wish to do that sort of thing, you have to find another agency with which to do it.”

Availability
There’s much more to the story. Later, H.T. would go on to communicate his deep concern to the Board about some of the very issues posed by these pastors (who were sensing the need for The United Methodist Church to send missionaries to new and frontier mission fields, and to be more engaged in reaching those who had never heard the Gospel). At the same time, unbeknownst to the Maclins, others – like Dr. Gerald Anderson (a former GBGM missionary and executive director of the Overseas Ministries Studies Center) and the Rev. Virgil Maybray (an elder in The United Methodist Church’s Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference) along with the members of the Evangelical Missions Council, which Maybray headed – had been similarly very concerned about The United Methodist Church’s mission efforts and, independent of each other, were speaking out.

Following the election of the new head of the GBGM’s World Division (a selection which underlined for H.T. the change in the Board’s mission theology), it seemed clear to the Maclins that the Lord was calling them away from their work with GBGM, to help launch what would be The Mission Society for United Methodists. H.T. Maclin resigned from the GBGM in late 1983.

The Maclins have always lived in such a way that they could be open to follow God’s leading in such decisions. Throughout their marriage, they have lived debt-free, with the exception of a home mortgage and, they confess (laughing), one set of encyclopedias for their children. Not strapped with debts, the decision was less complicated. “We could live on my salary, if we needed to,” Alice told us. (In 1983, she was serving as a professor at DeKalb College in Decatur, Georgia, where she would develop its first-ever Teaching English as a Second Language department and would author several manuals on the subject.)

Beginnings
After a meeting of concerned missionaries and pastors in November of 1983, who agreed to launch a new sending agency and to help find initial funding for it, The Mission Society for United Methodists was incorporated on January 6, 1984, headed by Dr. H.T. Maclin. (Dr. Maclin had not been part of the November meeting, but was tapped by the group to lead the new effort. The Rev. Virgil Maybray would join later as vice president). The Mission Society was then, and has always been, funded solely by the gifts of individuals, businesses, and churches. In 2006, as Dr. Granger explains, the name was shortened (“for United Methodists” was deleted) to better represent that The Mission Society networks with and sends out missionaries from a number of denominations, and that its objective is the extension of God’s Kingdom and not just a particular denominational expression.

In May of 2008, the General Conference of The United Methodist Church passed a resolution affirming the work of The Mission Society and encouraging cooperative efforts between it and the GBGM.

Challenges ahead
So The Mission Society was born 25 years ago of a desire implanted in the hearts of church people to help their church further its reach in world missions. Its aim was and is to provide more opportunities for mission service for those who sense God’s calling, and to partner with the worldwide Body of Christ to offer Christ – through word and deed – to the world’s underevangelized and unreached. Since then, more than 450 missionaries have been sent. (Currently 225 are serving in 32 countries.) Throughout the years, The Mission Society has been used of God to communicate to thousands of people the message of love and Jesus.

It now stands at the threshold of a new chapter. As you will read, some of its biggest challenges may be only just beginning.

– Ruth Burgner, editor 

*Today, the number of unreached people is estimated to be 1.8 billion.