Baptist World Alliance relief efforts in Post-Second-World-War Europe: the Baptist World Alliance, the official global fellowship of Baptists, was created at the Baptist World Congress in London in 1905

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr-Spring, 2001 by Richard V. Pierard

Among its many activities is the promotion of cooperative effort in the relief of suffering people, which now is the function of the division of Baptist World Aid. This venture into relief had its beginning in the aftermath of World War I. After unsuccessful attempts by U.S. Northern and Southern Baptist bodies to reestablish relief connections on the continent, the Baptist World Alliance decided to commission the Rev. J. H. Rushbrooke, a London pastor who was fluent in German and had extensive ecumenical experience in Europe, and C. A. Brooks, the European representative of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, to investigate the situation in the war-stricken areas of Central and Eastern Europe. Traveling from May 10 to July 8, 1920, they covered 6,400 miles and visited Baptists and, when possible, civil officials in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Austria. They sought to discern the immediate and long-term needs of the Baptist communities and assist in restoring fraternal contacts with the continental Baptists.

They reported back to a conference at Baptist Church House in London, July 19-23, 1920, attended by seventy-two delegates from Baptist unions and conventions in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and eighteen European countries. The conference considered the implications of their report and made recommendations to be acted on by the member bodies of the BWA whom they represented. Five recommendations were adopted: devise means of relief for Baptist churches in the stricken areas, meet the need for trained ministry in Eastern Europe, extend Baptist work throughout the continent, uphold the religious liberty of Baptists who were suffering persecution in Romania, and create a fulltime BWA commissioner to coordinate the European work. (1)

The intention was to set up a single Baptist Relief Fund for Europe that would meet the physical needs of people. United States Baptists were to give $1,000,000--one half through the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society and one half through the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention--and to this would be added whatever gifts might come from other bodies in the country. Supplementary contributions came from Baptist bodies in Britain, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Norway, Sweden, and Spain, while individuals in several countries gave directly to the fund. The governing idea was that the agency for distributing the money should ordinarily be the Baptist unions or conventions in the recipient countries. Their representatives were present as members of the London conference and assisted in drawing up estimates of the amounts required and statements about the precise purposes to which they would be applied. They agreed to submit full reports and audited accounts to the Baptist Commissioner for Europe, the position to which Rushbrooke was unanimously elected. (2) In Italy and France, the two American mission boards had their own people supervising the distribution of funds, but these were regarded as part of the common effort and were included in the commissioner's financial reports. The relief program raised around $1,500,000 in money and goods, most of which went for assistance in Hungary and Poland and famine relief in Russia. (3)

The Coming of World War II and the Baptist Response

J. H. Rushbrooke, the principal architect of the post-World War I relief effort, was named the BWA's Eastern Secretary in 1925 and first general secretary in 1928. Then at the sixth Baptist World Congress in Atlanta in July 1939, he was elected president of the BWA. Walter O. Lewis, a Southern Baptist mission executive, was chosen to succeed him as general secretary. The coming of the Second World War put him in a difficult situation. Lewis was unwilling to cross the Atlantic and take up residence in London, which forced Rushbrooke to "fulfill his role as President in a General Secretarial manner in Europe," as his biographer Bernard Green put it. Green added that it was difficult for Rushbrooke to "liaise" with Lewis because of the distance and Lewis's tendency to act without consulting him. He went to the United States for the executive meeting and other BWA business in May-July 1940 and urged the group to have firmly defined policies to meet whatever situation might arise. He was undoubtedly disappointed when the executive on May 21, 1940, decided instead to open a temporary office in Washington, D.C., and function with an American-based "administrative committee" that would supplement the existing London-based structure. (4) Still, as hostilities widened, both men stressed the need for Baptists to plan for relieving distress during and after the war, and they had some support in the executive. Also, Lewis lent the BWA's endorsement to Herbert Hoover's program (National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies) for feeding starving populations in areas overrun by Germany that was initiated in the fall of 1940. (5) Although the enterprise functioned in 1941-42, it was thwarted by the British determination to slap a total blockade on the European continent. (6)