John Mott:
The Link Between
the Rockefellers and Wycliffe Bible Translators
Mott Auditorium, named after John
Mott, is on the campus of the U.S.
Center for World Mission. The USCWM was founded by Ralph Winter.
In his History of Revival Richard Riss tells how revival came to Mott
Auditorium:
Found: > http://www.grmi.org/renewal/Richard_Riss/history/mott.html
Note: Riss is a historian/proponent
of the false revival.
"Similar in intensity to
Toronto and Melbourne is what happened at Mott Auditorium on the campus of the
U.S. Center for World Mission. Beginning in January of 1995, John Arnott of
the Toronto Airport Vineyard and
Wes Campbell of New Life Vineyard
Fellowship in Kelowna, B.C. began taking various trips of two or three
days each as guest speakers at Mott Auditorium".
Shortly after their visit a woman
had a vision that Mott Auditorium would be the center of revival for all of the
Los Angeles area. This was soon confirmed
by two children who simultaneously had a vision of the 'glory of God'
descending upon Mott Auditorium. They claimed to have seen "angels, doves,
and people of all nationalities in unity at a banqueting table. There was also
a huge canopy of the Holy Spirit falling upon the building from heaven."
The Mott Auditorium serves as the
worship center for Harvest Rock Church/ HRC.
Che Ahn is the senior pastor of
HRC and HRC's affiliated Harvest International Ministries/ HIM. [HRC was
formerly known as Vineyard Christian
Fellowship of Greater Pasadena.] Joy Ahn is the daughter of Che Ahn and was
one of the children who had the 1995 vision. Lou and Therese Engle are the
Associate Pastors of HRC "with a prophetic vision to see revival fires
spread across the globe."
Harvest Rock Church web site
found: > http://www.harvestrockchurch.org/
Returning to the
man John Mott:
Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon gives rare insights into John Mott's career and his
association with John D. Rockefeller, Sr., John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Cameron
Townsend, founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Following excerpts taken from:
Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson
Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil,
Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Harper Collins, New York, © 1995:
Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon book cover:
In this triumph of investigative
journalism, Colby and Dennett show how Nelson Rockefeller and the largest
American missionary organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, founder Cameron
Townsend, worked with the U.S. and foreign governments to secure the resources
and 'pacify' indigenous people in the name of democracy, corporate profit, and
religion, resulting in massacre and genocide.
The Religious Rockefellers
On the advice of John Mott, evangelical
leader of the YMCA, [Nelson Rockefeller, Jr.] had tried to launch a Christian
missionary crusade to save the world from communism, only to see it collapse in
debt and scandal. [pg. 12]
The Peaceful Conquest of the World
In December 1929, Junior [John D.
Rockefeller, Jr.] received an urgent letter from one of his most trusted
envoys. John Mott had just returned from a tour of Protestant missions in Asia,
and he was quite agitated. Mott was a millenarian who hoped to hasten the
Second Coming by evangelizing the world "in this generation." But he
was not a Fundamentalist; he believed that science was the probing of God's
mind, and the strident proselytizing he had witnessed among the Fundamentalist
missionaries in China deeply worried him. Unless more tolerance and social
concern were shown by American missionaries throughout the Third World, the
missionaries would find themselves facing the same kind of angry nationalistic
reaction he had just witnessed.
After popular revolutions had
broken out in both Mexico and China in 1910, Junior sent Mott to set up a China
Medical Board to blend medical science and religion into a powerful new
institution, the Peking Union Medical College. "If we wait until China
becomes stable, Mott told the members of Junior's China Medical Board, "we
lose the greatest opportunity that we shall ever have." Mott understood
that the Rockefeller fortune could shape the political future of the world's
most populous nation. "That nation will only have one generation in its
modern era," he wrote after the proclamation of the Chinese Republic in
1911. "The first wave of students to receive the modern training, will set
the standards and the pace."
To realize his vision, Mott became
a shrewd fund-raiser among rich men like the Rockefellers. He incorporated the
sales pitch of a Wall Street broker. "To ask money of a man for the
purposes of the world-wide Kingdom of God is not to ask him a favor," he
once wrote. "It is to give him a superb opportunity of investing his personality
in eternal shares." Money was "so much stored-up personality,"
he argued, accumulated days of human labor that survived its owners and
therefore could be used after death to extend the owner's life on earth.
This concept of the
transubstantiation of money into an immortal soul bore a striking resemblance
to the family's rationale for a perpetual Rockefeller foundation; indeed, Standard
Oil was Mott's organizational model. He incorporated the culture and
methods of corporations into the missionary movement. Over the years,
millions of dollars poured into Mott's pursuit of a streamlined, efficient
evangelism.
Two significant factors lured Mott
into locking himself firmly within the Rockefeller orbit. One was the global
vision of Senior's [John D. Rockefeller, Sr.] closest investment advisor, Baptist minister Frederick
Gates. The other was China and its huge potential harvest of souls, which had
possessed the mind of American Protestantism since its first missionaries
boarded the clipper ships of the China trade sailing out of New England's
harbors.
Gates had been captivated by the
thought of the family fortune moving into foreign markets. With Standard Oil
taking the lead, he argued that the advance of the American corporation
represented the Will of God, Standard Oil's kerosene had literally lit the
lamps of China since the 1890s, inspiring the company to commit its own form of
blasphemy by lifting its product's slogan from the New Testament: "the Light
of the World."
To Gates, the growing cultural
independence of the global market and the accompanying spread of
"English-speaking" Protestant missions bore evidence of "one
great, preconceived plan." A "study of the map of the world"
disclosed to the cleric that the different missions were really a single
"invading army," whose "masterfulness of strategy and tactics…[was]
controlled and directed by one master mind," God.
If Senior [Rockefeller] was put
off by this unreconstructed Calvinist doctrine of predestination, Gate's
emphasis on the relationship between missionary efforts and commercial conquest
had a more practical saving grace…
Mott shared Gates's vision, but
not its complacency…
But the modernists' efforts were
crippled by lack of funds and support from their colleagues. Most missionaries
in the Far East were traditionalists and recent converts to the Fundamentalist
cause; they preferred to concentrate on saving souls by evangelism alone,
assuming the imminence of the Second Coming. Meanwhile, Chinese communists who
had survived Chiang Kai-shek's massacres at Shanghai and Canton and had
followed Mao Tse-tung into the countryside were winning thousands of recruits
by assisting peasants who were struggling against wealthy landlords.
Mott was shocked and concluded
that time was running out for American missionaries all over Asia. He wanted
Junior to convene a meeting at the Rockefeller town house to discuss the urgent
need for another great mission: modernizing the world's Christian missions to
the Third World. [pgs. 32-35]
Secularizing Foreign Missions
…To modernist liberals,
Rockefeller's measures in Latin America seemed infinitely preferable to the
"Big Stick" of Theodore Roosevelt. A post-World War I movement to
change the methods and style of U.S. intervention from gunboat diplomacy to
dollar diplomacy, were now associated with the Rockefeller's Council on Foreign Relations. Through
their efforts, Latin America became a sort of laboratory to test the strategies
for future foreign policy toward the Third World in general.
Junior was open to Mott's concerns
about sectarian missions and American inflexibility to nationalist sentiments
in underdeveloped countries. Nine years had passed since their last crusade,
when Mott had warned hundreds of businessmen, politicians, and ministers that
they must move beyond old sectarian principles and denominational rivalries if
they were to defeat the specter of revolution…
Now, nine years later [1929],
America's Protestant lay leaders who had not listened to Mott's original
warning seemed more receptive. The stock market had crashed just two months
before, in October. Antagonism between the classes would grow again in the
United States, just as nationalist resentments were already reappearing abroad.
Christ's message of love was needed for all. Mott was right. It was time to
act. [pgs. 37-39]
Enter Cameron
Townsend
Apostolic Vision: The Rockefeller Pillars
In May 1930, when Fundamentalist
missionaries from around the world gathered at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago
to attend its Annual Missionary Rally, many of them were angry about the growing
power of Rockefeller-funded modernism…
Throughout his life, William
Cameron Townsend had accepted God's Word in the Bible without question. He owed
his beliefs to his father…
But in spite of Cam's lifelong
reverence for the Word, his work had come under growing scrutiny by his mission
elders over the past five years. Locked in battle with modernists abroad as
well as at home, Cam's fundamentalist superiors were doubtful about his
doctrinal purity.
And they had reason to be…Even
his inspiration for becoming a missionary had been John Mott. Mott had
delivered a passionate speech before Cam and other students at Occidental
College [Glendale, CA] on "evangelizing the world in this generation." Cam,
"impressed by how little I had done to witness my faith," took up the
call, ask for a draft deferment, and moved to Guatemala to sell Bibles. When he
arrived, he found his superiors at the Central American Mission (ironically
referred to as C.A.M.) to be unwavering in their adherence to Fundamentalist
tradition.
The Central American Mission was a
conservative body. Although it reluctantly agreed to collaborate with John
Mott's Committee on Cooperation in Latin America during World War I and joined
other missions in dividing up Central America like pieces of cake, the mission
had never forgotten its roots in the Moody Church, the cathedral of
Fundamentalism. [pgs. 41-43]