John A. Mackay - Missionary and Ecumenical Ideas

Missionary and Ecumenical Ideas

Mackay strongly emphasized sensitivity to and experience of the reality of God in Christ and authentic conscious experience of life in Christian community. Frequently asked to preach, his sermons called for response on the part of his hearers. Mackay wrote devotional literature in English and Spanish. He believed in a personal and incarnational approach to foreign missions by which the missionary would become a member of the community and earn the right to be heard through particular service that met specific needs within the receiving culture. These might include the demonstration of authentic Christianity in action through educational, medical, or agricultural service. This gift of service offered a platform through which the missionary could effectively proclaim the faith that he held.

At the Oxford Conference on Church and State in 1937, Mackay coined the phrase that became the byword of the conference, “Let the Church be the Church.” He yearned for the Church “to become in its historical existence the dynamic instrument of God’s will, which it actually was in its eternal essence,” He influenced historical development within the ecumenical movement by his strong advocacy, as at the Central Committee meeting of the World Council of Churches at Rolle in August, 1951. For him “the church is the fellowship of those for whom Jesus Christ is Lord.” He believed the Church was truly the Church when it was a missionary Church, and he worked to bring into balance the Church universal, the Una Sancta, with confessional movements within various faith traditions. Mackay advocated visible unity of the Church. His high Christology also stressed a unity of spirit with a diversity of treasures from the various Christian traditions. In this way Mackay helped to lay the foundation for spiritual ecumenism among fellow Christians across denominational lines. Travelling in Chile in 1965 Mackay agreed with Fr. Juan Ochagaria, dean of the Catholic University of Chile’s faculty of theology, that the task of both Catholics and Presbyterians is to “make Christians.”

In 1964 in Lima, Mackay was presented with the Palmas Magisteriales, a civic honor and the highest government award for educational services to Peru.

In his final years Mackay moved to a Presbyterian retirement community in Hightstown, New Jersey, and died early on June 9, 1983. Coincidentally, the General Assembly of his denomination voted to join the Southern Presbyterian Church later that same morning. It would have pleased Mackay because he had worked for many years for the reunion of the Northern and Southern Presbyterian Churches.

Each of the Mackays' three daughters married Presbyterian clergyman, and their son, Duncan Alexander Duff Mackay, named for the Scottish Free Church missionary to India, Alexander Duff (missionary), was an active layman and elder, while working for the U.S. Foreign Service and later the Inter-American Development Bank.