Margaret Flory: An Appreciation

The keynote address was given by Samuel Kobia, the first African Genera Secretary of the World Council of Churches.

The theme of the two days was “Mission in the 21st Century: What Are the New Frontiers?” Now that has the authentic ring of a Margaret Flory event. Yes, be sociable. Embrace each other. But don’t fail to take advantage of the insights and experiences of people from all over the world, with varying perspectives and powers.

So it was.

A good number of those at this gathering attended a similar event in the same location 24-years ago when Flory retired from her 36 years of work for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It too included a second day of grappling with issues about the church and the society.

Margaret Flory attracts people like this. The late Dora Valentin, a key figure in the Presbyterian-Reformed Church of Cuba, attended the 1980 celebration. She recalled poignantly then how isolated the Cuban church felt in the 1960s, so “full of misunderstanding and confusion … Margaret held out her hand to us … She has been the friend who has ‘run the second mile’ with us.”

Her daughter, Dora Arce, current moderator of the Presbyterian-Reformed Church in Cuba, was present at last month’s celebration.

“In 1980 Margaret called what was happening ‘restyling,’ not retirement,” said Boston’s Alice Hageman, co-chair of the planning committee for both events. “Was it ever! She has never stopped.”

Her first thought was to join a group going to China to teach. That did not transpire. But much else did.

Look at a few things from her past decade alone:

Item: Margaret wrote her first three books from 1995 to 2000.

Item: She traveled to Berlin and the Ivory Coast for two events in 1995 marking the 100th anniversary of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), the pioneering ecumenical body that stimulated the World Council of Churches. She was a strong WSCF supporter and attended 10 of its quadrennial assemblies.

Item: The Foyer John Knox, an international conference center that she had long supported, on its 49th anniversary named a new building the Margaret Flory Conference Center and brought her to Geneva for its dedication.

Item: The World Alliance of Reformed Churches invited Flory to Hungary for its 1997 assembly. Milan Opocensky, then its general secretary, flew in from Prague for her birthday.

Item: Margaret gave a speech at Tokyo Christian Women’s University in 1998, marking the 50th anniversary of her having taught there. She met with 50 of her former students. In 1948 she had been commissioned by Japanese Christian students to apologize, as she traveled home, to their counterparts in the Philippines, Korea and China for the atrocities of World War II. For her that was “a transforming experience.”

Item: Flory has been to Cuba twice in the past decade, once in 1995 for the dedication to Dora Valentin of the first Protestant church built in Cuba since the revolution. She went in 2001 for the 40th anniversary of the Frontier Interns in Mission program she initiated and administered until 1975 when it became, with her strong support, international and relocated to Geneva. John Moyer, the current FIM director, came from Geneva to discuss current frontiers at the luncheon.

Item: Flory was a key participant in a 2003 Stony Point gathering of more than 130 people who had been in the “Junior Year Abroad” program she created in 1953 and administered until it concluded in 1968.

Item: Flory taught a course this year on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to a community class at Brevard College, located 22 minutes from the airport in Asheville, N.C., where she settled in 1990. She still has her master’s thesis on the “oratory” of FDR.

Item: Unhappy with her cyberspace limitations, Margaret has upgraded her computer and is receiving intense instructions.

This remarkable past decade contains the essence of Margaret Flory’s life-long ministry. She has always had a global dimension to her work, perhaps “the first person to give that term real substance,” wrote William Gepford. A Presbyterian minister who once served in Lebanon and now works on American-Arab relations for Detroit Presbytery, Gepford is among dozens who have contributed to a book of letters for Flory (including Bishop K. H. Ting, long-time Protestant leader in China).

In his letter, Syngman Rhee, former moderator of the PC(USA), wrote: “The seeds of faith you have planted all these years are bringing wonderful fruition everywhere as church leaders, educators, peacemakers and justice makers.”

In her 36 years with the Presbyterian Church — and in the 24 years since — what Margaret Flory has done best is bring people together to expose them to each other and to the cutting issues of church and state. “People communicate; paper does not,” she has often said.

Hear another story of a life she touched profoundly. Australian-born China scholar and author Ross Terrill first came to the United States in 1963 to participate at Princeton University with 20 other Christian young scholars and pastors from around the globe in a nine-month seminar organized by Flory. She convinced Terrill to visit China on the way home, his introduction to what became his vocation.

Terrill speaks for many when he said “Margaret’s special gift is intense involvement with people all over the world and her ability to build bridges where few other mortals have built them.”

She pushed out the walls of bureaucratic structures. So in 1953 she started the Junior Year Abroad program when only a few colleges sent students overseas. They usually carried along their own faculty and mostly went to Europe.

Flory after intensive orientation sent her JYA students to Tokyo and Hong Kong and Beirut and the Philippines and Brazil and India and Ghana. They lived and studied with the people of the country. More than 1000 students took advantage of the JYA program. For most, according to the responses to last fall’s 50th anniversary event, it was a life-changing event.

In the “silent” 1950s, Margaret worried that the campuses were not open to the changes underway around the world in religion and society. In 1955, 1959 and 1963 she chaired the planning for the Student Volunteer Movement Quadrennial Conferences.

She made certain that half the 4,000 or more students who would come over Christmas to Athens, Ohio, would be from outside the United States. In 1955 alone 97 countries were represented.

Those conferences had a direct effect on the participants. One example: Martin Luther King Jr. was present at the 1959 event. Several key African Americans who had been in Athens joined in the first lunch counter sit-ins in early 1960.

That 1959 Athens Conference had organized its program around nine frontiers. Flory took that idea and created the Frontier Interns in Mission program in 1961. It placed American college or seminary graduates overseas on frontiers — the same nine used in Athens — where the church was “absent, irrelevant or inadequate.” This gave local churches, at whose invitation and under whose guidance the Frontier Interns worked, a chance to try new things. It too was a life-changing experience. Margaret always pointed out that these frontiers preceded John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” slogan in the 1960 presidential campaign.

FIM evolved over a dozen years to a fully international effort based in Geneva. Today a Frontier Intern could easily be from Lain America and go to East Timor where a new internship opened in May.

Flory — on the conviction that “the American church has much to learn from the rest of the world” — created an Overseas Scholarship Program that brought pastors and teachers to study in this country. She worked hard to find ways for them to interact with — to challenge, she hoped — Americans.

She established the “Bi-National Servants” program in 1970, a way for people who have experienced two cultures to continue to transcend borders. More than 150 people participate from 66 countries. Annual meetings take place in various parts of the world. The “servants” report annually on their engagement with their “other” communicate, in person, in letters, by e-mail.

What Flory has done — what the May 14-15 meeting hoped to recognize and experience — is to inspire and stimulate other people to share the Gospel in unexpected ways and places.

Mercy Amba Oduyoye, professor in Ghana and former WCC senior staff member, put it like this in her letter: “Margaret is my model for a woman in mission…She has been a constant companion…her brilliant smile puts energy into failing hearts.”

Margaret Flory was born in Wauseon, Ohio. She is thankful she grew up reading the Toledo Blade, a good local paper. She attended Ohio University in Athens. Ten of her relatives, most of them from Ohio, took part in the New York assemblage.

Flory ran the Westminster Foundation at Ohio University during World War II — her use of theater, music and art to engage students continued throughout her career.

She hoped to go to China to do student work, but in 1944 “history intervened” and she began her efforts — “temporarily” — for the Presbyterians in New York. There she excelled in bursting through the “strictures of the structures.”

Leon Howell is a Washington-based writer and editor who has known Flory for 45 years.