Page 43 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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was still considerable popular demand for the schools that

remained open. In 1954 the enrollment at the Basrah School

of High Hope was reported to have grown to three hundred. The

Basrah Girls’ School had more applicants than it could accept

and the Bahrain Girls’ School had grown to a surprising one

hundred and thirty-eight students.' This healthy growth

record was even more surprising in light of the fact that the

mission schools were in competition with an increasingly com­

prehensive and well-organized state school system.

The desertion of the Mission by outside financial sup­

port did not really cripple it in any long-range sense, des­

pite Mrs. Storm’s lamentations. But the spiritual desertion

of the missionaries by the West was much more serious and a
!
greater source of demoralization. The new American isolation­

ism of the thirties and forties had made itself felt very

strongly upon missionary circles. Rev. Pennings summed it

up particularly poignantly in an article he wrote in 1945

entitled "The Changing Conditions in Arabia:

"The decrease in giving since the highwater mark
of some 25 years ago has often been ascribed to the
financial depression. True, it was a depression but
a spiritual rather than a financial one. • • • The numbers
of people who ask about our work with deep concern is
much smaller than it used to be." 72

In the post-War years, therefore, the Mission found

itself increasingly isolated and turned more often to its
own internal leadership for direction rather than to its

The annual mission meetings
supporting churches at home,
in the Gulf became more assertive and decisive in laying