When young Paul Rusch went to Tokyo in 1925 to work with a Y.M.C.A. building committee, he thought of himself as no more than a nominal Christian—specifically, a "Christmas-Easter Sunday Episcopalian." Church leaders thought his religion ran deeper. Bishop Charles Reifsnider, then president of Tokyo's St Paul's University, gave Rusch a class of ten newly baptized Christian students and told him to make good Episcopalians out them. A bit worried, Layman Rusch got some firm encouragement (through the mails) from the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, an Episcopal layman's organization in the U.S.* When he started a chapter of the brotherhood in Tokyo, he was still about as uninstructed in church ways as his students.
Last week Episcopalian Rusch, 53, executive vice president of the Japanese Brotherhood of St. Andrew and godfather, through the years, to 634 new Japanese Christians, was in Manhattan explaining the brotherhood's latest project a rural-help center in the Japanese countryside. The Kiyosato Educational Experimental Project (KEEP for short) is a group of low buildings on some freshly cleared land 70 miles west of Tokyo—a chapel, a health clinic, a 4-H-club-style tarm-improvement project and the first rural free library in Japan. Backed by the Seikokwai (Holy Catholic Church) the Japanese counterpart of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S. it is supported largely by U.S. private funds and dedicated to the proposition that democracy and democratic methods make most sense to the Japanese when based on a sound religious faith.
A Meeting House for 110,000. KEEP was begun in 1947, on land which was once used as a summer training camp for Japanese Episcopal youth leaders. Director Rusch, the only American on the staff was fortunate in finding a nucleus of these youth leaders after the war—most of them trained by the brotherhood of St. Andrew. With money and technical help from the U.S. (Rusch brought 19 purebred cattle back with him after his last trip home), KEEP's staff is busy showing the practical effects of democratic know-how to the 110,000 people in the area. High-school-age students now get books that could formerly only be gotten in a trip to Tokyo. Farmers have been taught to grow crops in land they never before thought arable.
But there is far more than "selfhelp" to Rusch's program. While teaching American know-how to the Japanese ("We took the New England village-center idea and put a kimono on it") Rusch and other Episcopal leaders are also energetically propagating their faith. The first building to be built at Kiyosato was a church, and Builder Rusch is quick to point out that, historically, it was always the meeting house that came first in old New England. Says he: "The idea we follow at Kiyosato came through realizing that American freedom was built on faith." Fifteen months after starting from scratch, St. Andrew's Chapel at Kiyosato was selfsupporting. There are now 122 Japanese communicants and 600 more under instruction. (A Japanese Episcopal rector is in charge.)