This Weelk in Texas Methodist ;;History  January 19

Travis Park MECS in San Antonio Hosts Missionary Council  January 1939

San Antonio was, and is, a great place for a winter meeting.  It has a mild climate, excellent transportation connections, and all the tourist attractions one could wish for.  In January, 1939, Travis Park hosted the Missionary Council of the MECS.  At times the entire church auditorium was filled to standing room only capacity to hear some of the most prominent speakers of the denomination. 

Everyone assumed that unification with the MEC and MP churches would occur so this would be the last Missionary Council meeting of the MECS.   Unification would bring new challenges, but most attendees believed things would run smoothly because the MECS and MEC had been cooperating in foreign missions for decades as attested to by the Centenary Campaign. 

The foreign mission field of most concern was East Asia.  Methodists, both North and South, had poured missionary resources into China, Korea (or Chosen as the conquering Japanese had renamed it), and Japan for decades.   That work was now in peril as the imperialistic Japanese government was determined to exert its dominance through the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.  Japanese militarism had a strong religious component as Shinto received new emphasis and western religions such as Christianity were suppressed. 

On the other hand, delegates were also optimistic about the future of the church after Unification.  Preliminary unification documents indicated that the newly-created Methodist Church would adopt two emphases—Mission and Evangelism, although no one knew what new structures would emerge to meet those goals.   They did suggest that instead of all funds being funneled into a central agency and then disbursed to missions, that local churches adopt a particular mission or missionary. 

Much of the program was quite conventional.  The liquor traffic continued to draw condemnatory speeches.  The need to combine the personal and social gospel was a theme used by several speakers.   Communism, Fascism, and Humanism were conflated, and the answer to all three was, as usual, a personal relationship with Christ. 

One of the speakers was Arthur Moore, MECS bishop who had been assigned to foreign missions.  He stressed the need to continue working in both China and Czechoslovakia.  Moore had served as pastor of Travis Park so he was back in his old pulpit.   All of the other active MECS bishops were also there, as was Forney Hutchinson of Boston Ave. in Tulsa,  W. G. Cram and Mrs. J. H. Spiller rounded out the MECS delegates.

The Methodist Protestant Church as represented by its President J. H. Straughn as there were no bishops in the MP Church J. W. Hawley of the Board of Missions.

The MEC church sent Bishops Edwin Holt Hughes, Ralph Cushman, Alda Leonard,  and Ernest Richardson.  Mesdames W. H. C. Goode and Thomas Nicholson also represented the MEC. 

Probably the most memorable part of the meeting for Texas Methodists was not part of the program. 

One of the lay men to attend was W. W. Fondren  (b. 1877)of Houston.  He was already well known for his philanthropy directed to SMU, Southwestern, Rice, Scarritt, and the Methodist Hospital.  .  He died in San Antonio while attending this meeting.  Mrs. Fondren (Ella) (b. 1880) lived another 43 years and continued and expanded the philanthropic work of the family.