Page 5817 – Christianity Today (2024)

Christmas, as everybody knows, is a time to be merry. It is a time for parties, gaiety, good food, gifts, traditions, carols, and happy expressions of peace and good wishes for the coming new year. We think about shepherds rejoicing, angels announcing “good tidings of great joy,” and Mary “magnifying and praising God” for the coming of the Christ-child. Enthusiastic anticipation, exciting activity, pleasant memories, and warm feelings all merge into something called “the Christmas spirit.” But great numbers of people, even in our churches, experience Christmas very differently. For them, the season to be jolly is instead a time of discouragement, fatigue, anxiety, and unhappiness. Suicide rates jump sharply in the days preceding Christmas, and recent studies show an increase in the number of Americans who consult psychiatrists between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Even people who rejoice in the activity and message of Christmas sometimes find themselves facing what has come to be known as the Christmas depression.

There are at least four reasons for this yuletide unhappiness. First, there is the increased pressure that many people feel: pressure to get the shopping done, the cards addressed, the house decorated, the presents wrapped, the food prepared, the bills paid. It is easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of preparing for parties, visiting with friends, practicing for the cantata, getting the Sunday-school program ready, and attending to numerous other seasonal activities. In the midst of all this activity, our resistance gets down, we do not get enough sleep, we overeat (or drink too much), and as a result we tend to be more irritable, impatient, and inefficient—all of which can make us feel more pressured and anxious. For some people, the traditional Christmas gathering of the family increases the feeling of pressure. Old resentments, family rivalries, and insecurities that normally are kept hidden suddenly reappear, often accompanied by anxiety and depression. In many families there is also worry over a family member who drinks too much.

Loneliness is a second cause for Christmas depression. Students and servicemen and others who are away from home, widows and others who grieve, the sick and elderly, people who feel unloved and friendless—all tend to feel discouraged and lonely when everyone else is preparing for parties or visits with friends and relatives. Even people who have no problems with loneliness during the rest of the year are likely to feel unhappy and rejected when they have no one with whom to share the joys of Christmas. Sometimes this leads to self-pity or a “poor-little-me” attitude, to resentment at being left out, and to envy of those who appear to be happy at the holiday season.

Feelings of inadequacy are also accentuated at this time of year. Recently two psychiatrists, one in Europe and one in the United States, reported that most of their Christmas patients are people who felt inadequate and unwanted as children. Over the years these feelings become buried in the unconscious, but they rise to the surface when the person begins to compare himself to the perfect Christ-child, whom everyone wanted, worshiped, and adored. Some people feel inadequate because they cannot entertain as well as their friends, saddened because they cannot afford the gifts they would like to give their children, frustrated because they cannot give presents that are as expensive as those they have received, or guilty because they have overlooked someone or received a gift they feel is undeserved.

Perhaps all of this unhappiness comes because Christmas seems to be a time of increased Satanic activity. Whenever people begin to think about Christ, it appears that the devil becomes more active. The Scriptures, for example, report increased demonic activity at the time when Christ was on earth in human form. More recently, the expanding Jesus movement has been accompanied by Satan worship and a resurgence of interest in the occult. At Christmas, more than at any other time of the year, Christ’s name and birth are predominant. It is not surprising, therefore, that Satan is especially active at this season, distracting people from the babe of Bethlehem, creating misery instead of joy, and even providing his own substitute for the divine Christ in the form of an old man named Santa Claus who is eternal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, infallible, the giver of good and perfect gifts, the symbol of happiness, and a powerful judge who judges on the basis of works.

Becoming aware of the existence of Christmas depression is the first step towards helping ourselves and others who tend to get discouraged at this time of the year. There are also some practical steps to combat it. First, we can make a deliberate effort to reduce holiday pressures. We can start our preparations early, eliminate what really does not need to be done, and plan activities that will focus on the real meaning of Christmas, the birth of God’s son. Most of the busyness of Christmas is our own fault. It comes because of poor planning, procrastination, or disorganization, and it tends to crowd out. Perhaps we need to spend more time considering how we can be still at Christmas and know that He is God.

Second, Christians should ponder ways in which they can help those who are lonely or in need at Christmas time. This may mean giving of our money, time, and energy to make others feel wanted and remembered. It may mean opening our homes to others and sharing Christmas, or giving to those who have less than we do. We spend so many dollars on gifts and food for our own families, so little on others who are ignored at Christmas or in need.

Third, we should give special consideration to what we teach our children about Christmas. Saying little about the Christ of Christmas, over-stressing frenzied activity or the receiving of gifts, teaching children to believe in Santa Claus, doing little to minister to the needs of others at Christmas—these are all ways in which we teach children that Christmas is something other than a celebration of the coming of God’s Son.

Fourth, those who are counselors, pastors, teachers, and parents should be alert to the pressures and discouragement that others feel at Christmas. We need to show a tolerance and compassion for those who find this to be a difficult time of year. Counselors should make themselves available to reassure and encourage people who are in need. Psychologists give a lot of short-term support to those who experience Christmas depression; similarly, we who are Christians should be willing to bear one another’s burdens in a special way at this time of year.

Finally, each of us must actively draw near to God at Christmas. Caught up in the holiday season, we easily let our devotional life slip. A Christ-centered Christmas is not likely to come automatically. It comes because we deliberately make room for Christ in our holiday activities. And that is the one sure way to make it really a season to be “jolly.”

Here in Washington, as elsewhere, a few November days gave us a chilly foretaste of winter as the temperature dipped below 40°. Our “missionary kids” from the Congo and Nigeria shivered at the bus stop, and our native African buttoned up her overcoat and tried to think warm. But our hardy general manger was still wearing his summer jacket; he hails from Minnesota, and his problem is the Washington summer.

We are delighted to note that Wheaton College has honored evangelist Billy Graham (who is a member of our board) by naming one of its programs the Billy Graham Graduate Program in Communications.

Our former co-editor Frank E. Gaebelein and his wife, Dorothy, are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary this month.

My book, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, is off the press at long last, delayed by printing and paper problems. Readers who want copies can obtain them at local religious bookstores or order them directly from our book-publishing branch, Canon Press.

Different facets of the current religious scene in Scotland are to be found in four recent happenings. First, I reported in these pages some years ago a Hebridean island’s fight against the introduction of a Sunday ferry service. Fortified by a sizable police contingent from the mainland, however, the march of progress won “the day sin came to Skye.” The even more rigidly Sabbatarian island of Lewis is now confronted by a painful dilemma: a $15 million construction project that would bring much needed employment may not materialize if Sunday work is ruled out. “They don’t only want 200 acres of our land,” said an islander. “They want part of our heritage as well.”

Our heritage has been further eroded by a new hymnary for use in the Church of Scotland. Our own congregation has not yet adopted it, and my copy (kind gift of a friendly Episcopalian) lay unopened for two months. I was afraid of what I would find—or what I wouldn’t. What would a faceless committee in Edinburgh know or care about hymns that evoked for me memories of people and places long gone?

Finally courage came. I opened the book and compared it with a single section of the old one. Not counting hymns on which savage wounds had been inflicted, there was a distressing list of the fallen. “The Ninety and Nine” was a predictable casualty, as was “Rescue the Perishing.” No longer was there “A Fountain Filled With Blood,” no longer “Showers of Blessing.” And “A Debtor to Mercy Alone” was necessarily a concept alien to man come of age. But I nearly wept for the insensitivity that axed “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I closed the hymnary at that point. One day I’ll look for the good things in it—when I have recovered from the shock of finding myself so obviously a yesterday man.

A third piece of bad news was that Bishop Carey of Edinburgh took umbrage because the Church of Scotland declines to take episcopacy into its system (see “The Bishop and the Kirk,” News, September 28). His public expression of displeasure from the pulpit of the mother church of Presbyterianism caused a national furor and did nothing at all for the cause of holy chumminess within this realm. I felt sorry for him (you know how a dangerous charity tends to creep in unless prejudices are regularly exercised), and pondered whether a bishop who spoke his mind had not something going for him after all.

Was the man trying to break new ground in inter-church exchanges, with diplomacy flung overboard in favor of total candor? The perils of this line of thought need no underlining, for what might it not do for the ecumenical movement? Of course I need have no fear: it’s all in the I-had-a-dream category—a fallen world simply couldn’t take that much truth in its daily diet. Charles Péguy, that remarkable Frenchman the centenary year of whose birth this is, would have agreed. “The man who wishes to remain faithful to truth,” he said once, “must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, indefatigable renascent errors … [and] inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.”

Finally, here in St. Andrews has taken place a conference on evangelism described as “a unique assembly in the annals of Scottish church history.” Inter-church relations face peculiar problems in a land where the Church of Scotland lists 1.15 million members, Roman Catholics claim some 800,000 baptized, and no other church has more than 50,000 communicants. The smaller groups, moreover, include the rigid Calvinism still found in Highlands and islands, a largely High Anglicanism, and the distinctive church order of Christian Brethren.

All the main Scottish groups were represented at St. Andrews among the 400 delegates whose coming together had been inspired by the 1971 European Congress on Evangelism in Amsterdam. That the conference was held at all was a triumph; that it was obviously so worthwhile, even more so.

There was robust self-criticism, not least in the findings of a questionnaire sent to the Church of Scotland’s 2,000 congregations. Asked what evangelistic efforts had been planned over the past twelve months, 500 replied, but only thirty-two of these reported any such planning, and not all even of that small number of plans had been carried out. The Gospel Radio Fellowship, which organized the enquiry, ruling out the suggestion that the 1,500 non-respondents were too busy evangelizing to reply, found that many ministers either regarded their congregations as somehow “special,” to be handled delicately, or pointed out that the east of Scotland was widely recognized as unreceptive soil for evangelistic enterprises.

Other sobering facts emerged: the lament by both a vagrants’ hostel superintendent and a detention-center chaplain that most of their voluntary helpers were non-Christians; the frequency with which the use of church buildings was denied to young people lest property be damaged or the congregation’s reputation endangered; an attendance of only eleven after 1,700 male members were invited to a church meeting by letters signed and delivered by the pastor; the harmful effects when Christian groups are obsessed with one particular emphasis to the neglect of others (the presence of a strong charismatic voice at the conference itself was sporadically evident). A particular plea was made to stop sniping at Billy Graham and others, with the reminder that many men were in the ministry today because of mass evangelism in the 1950s.

The professed aims of the conference were three: to wait upon God for his way forward; to bring people together over denominational and other barriers; and to show the tools and resources available for churches in evangelism. The debates were pertinent, lively, and conducted in such a fine spirit that CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S representative naughtily asked at the press conference if there had been prior agreement to avoid potentially divisive subjects (there hadn’t). Particularly heartening was the large contingent of younger Church of Scotland ministers in attendance.

It is reported that on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution two conferences were held in hotels on the same Moscow street. One was sponsored by the Orthodox Church; the principal item on the agenda was vestments for the clergy. In the other meeting, Lenin and his friends drew up final plans to overthrow the existing regime. Citing this story, a 1960 Scottish booklet commented: “We may deplore Communism and all it stands for, but it may be the judgment of God on a Church which, preoccupied with trivialities, has become blind to the basic needs of the age.”

There was ample proof in the humble and down-to-earth manner in which the St. Andrews assembly went about its business, and in the plans it made to continue its task, that in the land of John Knox there is under way a prayerful, dedicated determination that the lost provinces of religion should be recovered.

“Maybe there should be a new group,” suggested Des Moines Baptist pastor Paul Tassell in his keynote address to the thirty-second annual convention of the American Council of Christian Churches. “It could be called the National Association of Un-Separated Evangelicals and Agnostics—N.A.U.S.E.A.”

There was antidote aplenty at the Ames, Iowa, meeting last month, and a large dose was prescribed for Key 73. In an afternoon symposium entitled “Key 73—Satan’s Masterplan to deceive,” several things that especially upset the ACCC were identified: participation with Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and members of the National Council of Churches, and the use of contemporary music and modern versions of the Bible.

President Thomas E. Baker of the Bible Truth Institute in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, cited differing meanings for “salvation” among Key 73 participants in his town. One, said he, proffered a sort of salvation by works, another salvation by either faith or works, a third salvation by baptism. In addition, Baker lamented, Key 73 gave townspeople copies of Luke and Acts in the Today’s English Version. “The King James Bible is the one and only Bible that [best] represents the Word of God in the English language,” he asserted, eliciting hearty Amens. ACCC officials carefully noted that his views on Bible translations were not officially those of the council but nevertheless accurately reflected the sentiment of many members.

Another symposium participant chided Key 73 for subjectivism. Pentecostalists preach experience, said Professor James Hollowood of Maranatha Baptist College in Watertown, Wisconsin, and the Roman Catholic mass is essentially a drama to make one feel close to God. “Key 73 makes people feel they know a Christ,” he said. That Christ “may make them shout, roll, or feel good, but he doesn’t save.”

In an interview, newly elected general secretary L. Eugene Mohr, 39, suggested that instead of clustering under an umbrella like Key 73, local churches should “continue and intensify biblical evangelism.” On a local level, he said, issues are less likely to become confused. Mohr, an Iowa General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC) pastor, will assume duties at the ACCC’s Valley Forge headquarters January 1.

Moving from its consideration of Key 73 as a defrauder of the faith, the council honored venerable Robert T. Ketcham, 84, a founder of both the ACCC and the GARBC, the ACCC’s largest constituent (210,000 members), with its first Defender of the Faith award (see photo). It was presented by ACCC president Ralph G. Colas, a Waterloo, Iowa, GARBC pastor.

Once that award might have gone to radio preacher Carl McIntire, also an ACCC founder and its predominant personality until control was wrested from him a few years ago, leading to a split in 1970. The usually vocal Bible Presbyterian minister from Collingswood, New Jersey, slipped quietly into—and out of—Campus Baptist Church, which hosted the convention. ACCC officials generally agreed he was “looking for friends.” At times he was seen standing alone.

McIntire didn’t take any large contributors with him, according to one official, but he apparently didn’t leave any either. Financial support of the council has been lagging (last year’s income: $32,000), but the treasurer’s report showed a modest balance and council leaders expect a boost from the sale of half-interest in more than forty acres of their Valley Forge headquarters land to a local developer. Also, says Mohr, interest in the ACCC is on the upswing, and an ACCC program on NBC television last month resulted in a lot of mail.

Reports from regional representatives emphasized their political activities: opposition to sex education in public schools and abortions in St. Louis, and support for capital punishment and the teaching of creation as well as evolution in California.

In other business, without discussion or dissent the forty-two voting delegates among the seventy-eight registrants (more than 300 attended the public evening sessions) reelected officers and passed half a dozen resolutions, including criticism of World Council of Churches activities (“deceptive and disastrous to the cause of Christ”), the charismatic movement (it’s not “in harmony with the Word of God”), crime on the streets and in government, and Key 73 and other “unscriptural alliances,” including the upcoming International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. The delegates reaffirmed their dedication to “biblical evangelism,” called for renewed emphasis on biblical teaching concerning the Holy Spirit, and encouraged the establishment of Christian day schools.

“Our resolutions may be characterized as negative,” confided general secretary Mohr, but “hardly any other council or group of churches is giving the unfavorable considerations. On the positive side, we still believe in preaching the Gospel, preserving the faith revealed in the New Testament, and promoting historic Christianity.”

The ACCC lists twelve constituent bodies plus a number of independent churches and individuals as members.

Diversified

Restructure and doctrinal accommodation marked the annual convention of the Christian Business Men’s Committee held last month in Cleveland. About 1,400 attended, including 257 voting delegates representing 161 of CBMC’s 667 local chapters (CBMC’s total paid membership: 12,000, an all-time high). The delegates voted to establish an international council, giving autonomy to any country with ten or more CBMC affiliates. Presently, three “areas” outside the United States—Canada, Australia, and Europe—have representation on the board, but until now CBMC’s overseas policy has borne a very evident (and sometimes, to nationals, objectionable) made-in-the-U.S.A. stamp. A full-time president will head the U. S. operations—possibly only a case of CBMC executive secretary Evon Hedley’s changing titles at CBMC’s Glen Ellyn, Illinois, headquarters.

At the request of overseas members, CBMC’s board proposed dropping the word “pre-millennial” from the CBMC statement of faith while calling for more emphasis on reaching business and professional men for Christ. But widespread pre-convention opposition to the proposed change led the board to withdraw it. CBMC’s U. S. branch will continue to affirm belief in the pre-millennial return of Christ. A compromise agreement, however, exempts from such affirmation overseas members—many of whom are affiliated with churches that hold an a-millennial position (belief that Christ’s kingdom is spiritual rather than literal and already exists).

Key convention speaker Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia testified of Christ’s importance in his life, and attorney Alfred Jackson of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, was elected to a second one-year term as chairman of the CBMC board.

For Sale, Quick

Caught in a financial crunch, the American Baptist Seminary of the West voted this month to close its campus in Covina, California, and move to Berkeley.

Founded as California Baptist Seminary in 1944 in Los Angeles by American clergyman Fred Drexler to be a voice for evangelicalism within the Northern Baptist Convention (later American Baptist Convention and now American Baptist Churches), it was not until 1958 that the ABC finally gave it official recognition. In the sixties the denomination’s theologically liberal Berkeley Baptist Divinity School (founded in 1871) became engulfed in theological controversy with its rather conservative constituency and suffered mortal financial wounds, forcing a merger with the Covina school (and a name change) in 1968 and the later closing of the Berkeley campus. Part of that campus—much of it rented to the University of California—now will be reactivated.

The seminary (it has 125 full-time students) is deeply in debt and behind in salaries. Several offers on the Covina property, valued at $3 million, fizzled, including one by the charismatic Melodyland School of Theology.

Some ABC members are concerned that a liberal trend already evident in the school will become more pronounced when it moves to Berkeley (some of the ABC’s eight seminaries are among the most liberal in America), but President C. Adrian Heaton says faculty members and trustees will continue to be required to sign an evangelical statement of faith, something Drexler included in the articles of incorporation.

For The Dogs

Flushed with success over the recent high-court reversal of his conviction for violating the California Education Code in granting diploma-mill doctoral degrees, Kirby Hensley has gone on to dedicate the First Church of Universal Life of Berkeley, California. Hensley claims he has freely dispensed 2.5 million ordination certificates (including those requested “for dogs, cats, raccoons, and leopards”) and, for a fee of $20 each, 20,000 D.D. degrees in the past eleven years. The Berkeley edifice, built by Mormons in 1954 for $210,000, is the largest property acquired so far by his non-creedal, autonomous “congregations.”

The semi-literate Hensley, welcomed by a well-dressed audience of 150 with the song “Hello, Kirby” sung to the tune of “Hello, Dolly,” said his objective in establishing the Universal Life Church was “to show that there is no man upstairs running the show.” “All I need is a little room,” said Hensley. “I don’t want to go to heaven or hell or be dominated by the church or the state.… This is the day of the individuality of man against corporate structures.”

He wants his church and D.D. ministers to receive the same tax and draft exemptions as recognized churches and ministers. And he’s confident that a recent marriage-for-one-year he performed in Los Angeles will stand up in court.

The service included reflections on Tom Paine’s thought by Unitarian attorney Peter Stromer and good wishes from Mormon leader Curt Bybee. The service had begun with a folk-song rendition of “There is a Balm in Gilead,” a balm for which loquacious Kirby expressed no need.

ROBERT L. CLEATH

Mission To The Strip

What’s a nice Southern Baptist boy like Jim Reid doing talking to nude showgirls backstage in the nightclubs of Las Vegas?

Counseling, that’s what!

Actually, the Reverend Jim Reid is no mere boy; he’s a 44-year-old married man and father of six and is known in the gaudy show and gambling city as the “strip chaplain.” For three years Reid has ministered to the employees and stars of some twenty major hotels as part of a new thrust in resort ministries by the Southern Baptists.

A few hundred miles to the northwest, four Southern Baptist ministers are engaged full time in related evangelism to hordes of tourists who swarm to Lake Tahoe summer and winter.

Robert A. Wells, superintendent of missions for the Nevada Baptist Association, says the operation is “the most extensive resort ministry in the continental United States.”

In fact, the outreach has been so successful that Wells taught a two-unit course in resort ministries this fall at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary near San Francisco. The classes are believed to be the first offered on the subject in a major seminary.

Reid, a former SBC pastor in a suburb of Las Vegas, took in a stage show one Saturday night and wondered where the performers would be going to church the next morning. Nowhere, he decided. “I saw a vast mission field that wasn’t being touched,” he recalled in an interview.

The United Presbyterians had a chaplain in Las Vegas, according to Wells, but Reid is the first to minister strictly to show people. Reid, who wears show clothes and speaks the casino jargon, talks about his “ministry of presence”: “It simply says you’re there, that’s all.” Hanging around backstage, playing casino and chess, Reid got to know the stars and stagehands by their first names. “Some of the best counseling I’ve ever done is with nude showgirls who would never come to a church or my office,” Reid told seminarians at Golden Gate considering like ministry.

Reid’s first worship service to the casino crowd was in the Oo-la-la Lounge. “There was a painting of a tatooed lady on one wall and a sword swallower on the other,” he chuckles. “We called them our patron saints.”

Reid, assisted by a converted stagehand who has been licensed to preach, now conducts three regular Bible studies on stage between shows, has five prayer-therapy groups, and teaches English and reading classes. Out of the fifteen persons who attended his first Bible study on Mark’s Gospel at the Desert Inn, twelve who were uncommitted made professions of faith in Christ.

Reid has a TV program in which he interviews converted stars, and he also performs exorcisms, “breaking spells of witchcraft right and left.”

Important allies are restroom attendants in the lounges and hotels: when they see troubled tourists they hand out copies of Good News For Modern Man and tell them to see the strip chaplain. Reid says 47,000 copies have been distributed.

The Lake Tahoe ministry, directed by Chuck Clayton, pastor of Kings Beach church on the north shore of the mile-high emerald-colored water, includes Christian day camps in public campgrounds eleven weeks each summer. Volunteer workers camp with vacationers, and lead campfire and coffeehouse raps with youth and adults in the evenings, too. Clayton conducts informal services at the top of ski lifts in the winter.

Wells traces the beginning of the resort work to the summer of 1970, when a honeymooning Southern Seminary (Louisville) couple conducted services in an unused chapel at Squaw Valley built for the 1960 winter Olympics.

“We discovered that there’s a big revolution right now in how to use leisure time,” said Wells in an interview. “We like to think of our ministry as a soft sell. It is unique, but it can be done in any resort area. Leaders of other denominations are saying, ‘How can we tune in with you and help?’”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Religion In Transit

Thousands of free copies of Merlin Carothers’s best-seller Prison to Praise are being distributed through the Department of Corrections to inmates in California prisons.

Ohio authorities accepted a plan by evangelist Rex Humbard’s Cathedral of Tomorrow to repay about 4,000 security holders in forty states who had purchased $12 million in cathedral securities alleged by state and federal officials to have been illegally issued. A judge, however, ordered a section deleted from a covering letter. It advised investors of their right to donate all or part of their securities to the cathedral or to other parties.

A landmark conference of fifty or so evangelicals, many of them “name” personalities and most of whom hold liberal social and political views, will meet during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend at the Wabash Street YMCA in Chicago. They plan to hammer out a major declaration on biblical faith and social concern.

Stopping short of direct endorsem*nt of ordaining professed hom*osexuals, the 42-member executive council of the United Church of Christ asked local denominational units responsible for ordinations to consider seriously a UCC agency’s statement on hom*osexuality. The statement concludes that hom*osexuality as such is no bar to ordination.

The 15,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas published a half-page ad in the Dallas Morning News urging Christians to support Israel in the Mideast crisis by writing letters to congressmen and making donations to the Jewish Welfare Federation.

Best-sellers: more than 2.5 million copies of Norman Vincent Peale’s A New Birth of Freedom, a 24-page booklet on America’s heroes published this year, and 4.5 million copies of his One Nation Under God have been distributed, mostly in schools, which get them free. The latter booklet, published last year, traces religious currents in American history.

Death: Shirley Wagers, a 72-year-old man, after being bitten by a rattlesnake at a snake-handling service in a church near London, Kentucky.

The Christian Reformed World Relief Committee of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is training volunteers to act as spiritual counselors when disaster strikes an area, augmenting relief efforts.

A record 1,889 messengers (delegates) dispensed with the planned program at the three-day annual meeting of the Missouri (Southern) Baptist Convention to concentrate on settling a year-long controversy over convention leadership and alleged finances. A number of board members were replaced and a committee was instructed to implement policy reforms, including a closer accounting of finances. The central figure in the controversy died in August.

A survey shows there are 75,000 black Southern Baptists among a total membership of 12.6 million. About 130 blacks are denominational employees (10 staff, 120 clerical) and 110 serve as home missionary personnel.

While 68 per cent of those surveyed in a 1969 Gallup poll said premarital sex is wrong, only 48 per cent say so now.

Personalia

Methodist bishop Abel T. Muzorewa of Rhodesia, an evangelical who is one of his land’s leading civil-rights advocates and president of an organization working for majority government in Rhodesia, is one of six recipients of United Nations awards for achievement in human rights. If his government does not lift a travel ban against him, the bishop will be absent from the awards event December 10 in New York.

Brazil will have its first non-Catholic president when Ernesto Geisel, 65, takes office next March. Though not a practicing Lutheran, the career military man is a product of Brazil’s German Lutheran colony, and his maternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor.

Staffer Ann Douglas of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), daughter of a black United Presbyterian minister in Greensboro, North Carolina, was named IFCO’s acting director.

Austin Miles, reputedly America’s top circus ringmaster, was named by the Assemblies of God to be its first international show-business chaplain. A licensed AOG preacher, he has been active in outreach and Sunday-school work in circus circles.

Greater Europe Mission’s new Canadian director: Reuben Goertz, formerly a missionary to Germany and an executive of a Nebraska children’s home.

Pastor Gilbert D. Smith of Trinity Church, Victoria, is the new moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of British Columbia. A native of Ireland, he describes himself as a conservative evangelical theologian.

Canadian Christian and Missionary Alliance regional superintendent William J. Newell is the new executive director of World Vision of Canada.

Ex-queen Frederika of Greece, who fled in the coup of 1967, says she has converted to the 1,200-year-old Indian philosophy of Advaita, which stresses the importance of scientific reason. She has been studying the religion at Madras University in India and now wants to spread it to the West. Princess Sophie, her 25-year-old daughter who is wife of Spain’s Don Carlos (named by Generalissimo Franco as his successor), has joined her in the faith.

World Scene

Between 100,000 and 150,000 Ethiopians have perished in droughts, another two million are threatened, and 88 per cent of the nation’s cattle are gone, according to a British relief-agency report. The Sudan Interior Mission, deeply involved in relief work, says disease is making matters even worse. Meanwhile, government officials in neighboring stricken Southern Sudan have appealed to the missionary-manned Africa Committee for Rehabilitation of Southern Sudan (ACROSS) to supply short-term “Protestant Christian” teachers for secondary schools and the University of Juba.

Construction has begun on the first Christian hospital in 98 per cent Buddhist Cambodia, says World Vision’s W. Stanley Mooneyham. Meanwhile, as the first fifty-five-bed stage gets under way in Phnom Penh, World Vision is establishing medical clinics, including two mobile ones, and building homes for 6,500 refugees and five schools for 1,000 children.

The Ecumenical News Service of the South African Council of Churches reports “enormous interest” in the charismatic movement. Anglican bishop B. B. Burnett disclosed he speaks in tongues, and newspaper stories have cited outbreaks of glossolalia among the theological faculty and students at Anglican St. Paul’s College and at Rhodes University, where Presbyterian, Congregational, and Methodist ministers are trained. The Durban Tribune says the movement is widespread in the Catholic Church.

Twenty-three South Korean Baptist churches conducted a simultaneous evangelistic crusade last month, and there were 14,000 conversions, according to a Korean news service.

Of the 245 South Korean foreign missionaries, 204 are working with overseas communities of Koreans and 41 are involved in cross-cultural mission (involving a foreign language and environment), notes Correspondent Sam Moffett.

World Council of Churches staffer Graeme Jackson says the Evangelical Church of North Viet Nam has 10,000 members and 26 pastors. He recently visited church leaders in Hanoi.

If certain mission-appeal brochures are correct, somewhere there’s a believer in a Bible-deprived Iron Curtain country hunched over his short-wave set, pencil and notepad in hand—listening to a missionary station in the West broadcast Scripture passages at dictation speed.

That is one of the more glamorously advertised aspects of missionary broadcasting, which for the most part conforms to a time-honored format of sermons, Bible teaching, music, news, and prayers. There have been a few innovations lately, however. One of them is KGEI’s series of programs beamed to Latin America explaining and upholding the civil rights of much-abused South American Indians. The 50,000-watt Far East Broadcast Company station on the San Francisco peninsula is run by Jim Bowman, son of Far East’s co-founder and president Bob Bowman.

Missionary radio broadcasting got its start on Christmas Day forty-two years ago when a tiny transmitter on an Equadorian mountain beamed a gospel message to Latin America. Today, station HCJB (Heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings) in Quito is one of a select Breed of broadcast facilities that reach into the nooks and crannies of the globe delivering the Gospel in most of the world’s major languages—hurdling the barrier of illiteracy.

The breed has grown since 1931 (previously, in 1924, a Dutch group had begun gospel programming to Holland) to include sixty-five missionary groups and numerous other organizations that produce programming but are not engaged in broadcasting. Chief among the mission groups are World Radio Missionary Fellowship (WRMF) in Miami, which operates HCJB, among others; the California-based Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC), which boasts twenty-two stations around the world; and Trans-World Radio (TWR) in Chatham, New Jersey, operating primarily in Monaco and on the Caribbean island of Bonaire.

The number is likely to increase. After a ten-year freeze on licenses to American companies seeking international broadcasting rights from American territory, the Federal Communications Commission recently began accepting new applications. On deck are requests from Billy Graham for a million-watt station in Hawaii; TWR for a station in Puerto Rico; and the hitherto domestic Family Radio Network for an international license for New York City’s WNYW, which it recently purchased from the Mormon church. Ben Armstrong, a former TWR director of radio and now executive secretary of National Religious Broadcasters, said he expects quick FCC approval of many of the applications.

The move could cause a spurt of activity on the gospel broadcasting front. Organizations that formerly sought locations close to their target areas because of weak signals now find overseas locations and frequencies drying up. Powerful North America-based medium-wave stations beaming programs to large segments of the world’s population are not outside the realm of possibility and are looking more attractive to prospective Christian broadcasters.

“The trend is definitely to the superpower station,” said Armstrong. “Already there are quarter-of-a-million-watt stations in Korea and the Philippines.” (Medium-wave stations provide better signals than short-wave, and with the advent of transistor radios, sets are becoming more accessible to overseas listeners even though the current majority of overseas receivers are short-wave.)

But the tendency to more powerful stations is not necessarily a good thing, says a former FEBC missionary who asked that his name not be used. Unless content is upgraded to suit the cultural venue of the target audience and unless the dependency on American-produced-and-oriented programming is decreased, million-watt transmitters will draw no more listeners than a ten-watt station, he believes.

Paul McClendon, communications professor at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, surveyed Christian broadcasting in the Philippines (FEBC’s major territory) and agreed. Writing in the International Christian Broadcasters’ Bulletin, McClendon found 580 hours being broadcast on secular stations and “programmed largely by evangelicals and, deplorably, largely to evangelicals.” FEBC, he declared, “is a notable example of predominantly Christian-to-Christian programming largely due to antiquated state-side dominated programming policies.” While applauding FEBC’s operations and aims, McClendon called for more media research, professionally trained staff (both missionary and national), and modernized approaches to the task.

WATERGATE REPLACEMENT

Texas attorney Leon Jaworski, the new Watergate special prosecutor, is a ruling elder in Houston’s First Presbyterian Church. He is the son of a Protestant minister and a graduate of Baylor University, a Southern Baptist school. Handling the Bible used in his swearing in, he told reporters in a nationally televised press conference that he was no stranger to the book and that “in the days to come I will probably need it more than ever before.”

At a Southern Baptist conference in New York two years ago he called on the church to take a leading role in reestablishing a national dedication to the acceptance of law while firmly denouncing the concept that the individual has a right to choose which law to obey and which to defy. He said he felt the church had not discharged its responsibility to the rule of law (the remark was made at a time when some church leaders were endorsing acts of civil disobedience). “I want it to fulfill its mission to God and country so that every Christian can point to it with justifiable pride,” he concluded.

Understandably, the article raised hackles at FEBC’s Whittier, California, home office. “Not fair,” said Far East’s executive head Eugene R. Bertermann, who pointed out that seven of FEBC’s sixteen Philippine stations are provincial in nature, providing news, drama, and music to local surrounding areas and in the regional languages. “Not one,” Bertermann said, “has back-to-back religious programming.” Indeed, he added, many of the Philippine stations have a “heavy cultural” emphasis. In all, said Bertermann, FEBC broadcasts 342 hours daily in sixty-one languages and reaches into Latin America, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Russia, Korea, Japan, China, and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, insisted the ex-FEBC missionary, mission stations around the world are too dependent upon American program supply. “Many of them are totally out of the cultural context for these stations. Talking about the North American evangelical scene is irrelevant to a half-naked Mohammedan on a Philippine island.” And, he charged, many of the programs are taped by large American churches on “an ego trip.” By buying time on an overseas Christian station they can claim their services are heard around the world, he said.

Furthermore, domestically dependent station administrators are wary of innovative communication techniques. “Anything with more of a beat than Mantovani or Guy Lombardo is out”—stations are fearful lest word of new programming get back to supporters in the States and cause a dry-up of funds.

The fear is all too real for most stations. They are totally dependent on North American financing. Every penny of FEBC’s $2.5 million annual budget must be raised at home, said Bertermann.

At a recent convention of the Chinese Christian Broadcasters group in Hong Kong, a converted former Red Guard from mainland China told the group he’d listened to foreign radio, found the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) to be the most reliable, and considered religious programming “unreal and dull.”

Mainland Chinese listen to Christian stations, FEBC research has found, though few letters get out. HCJB and TWR say they get response across the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. HCJB reports 948 letters from the Soviet Union and 973 from East Germany alone, in 1972.

Recruiting professionally trained communications experts and creative programming personnel and then allowing them to use that creativity may be one answer to the lag of content behind the broadcast power emphasis, said the former FEBC missionary. Secondly, mission stations should increase the amount of media training they’re giving to nationals.

FEBC holds media seminars for personnel and provides on-the-job training. Of the 400 staff, 300 are nationals, said Bertermann. Trans World and WRMF provide similar training. In Kenya, the African Inland Mission, working with nationals, provides as much programming as it wants for the government-operated Voice of Kenya (and was recently invited to do the same for VOK television). Afro-Media, formed by interested national and missionary broadcasting groups, plans to set up film and television production units and to cash in on the radio opportunities on the continent as well.

Missionary radio is at a crossroads. With many of its pioneers still alive and providing much the same programming as in earlier days, there is conflict with a younger group of media-oriented missionaries who grew up with modern techniques and want to use them, said the former FEBC staffer.

Radio is still the most successful way of getting the Gospel across sealed borders or into those countries that are purging foreign missionaries. For Christian broadcasters, crossroads or no, it’s a heady time.

How Now, Fow

Taking its cue from the evangelical movement in the Anglican Church in England, the three-year-old Fellowship of Witness is an intellectually oriented group advocating spiritual renewal along biblical lines in the Episcopal Church in America. This month more than 200 persons attended a regional FOW conference in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, to take a closer look at the renewal goal. The emphasis was on lay involvement in ministry. Especially lamented was the “phenomenon” in many parishes where the clergyman is a teacher, fund-raiser, social activist, administrator, counselor, pastor, preacher, and celebrant all rolled into one while the layman is seen as little more than a source of funds to keep things going.

TOUGH ON SIN

It’s getting worse all the time for sinners in Libya. The government has resurrected a 1,400-year-old Islamic religious law that prescribes public flogging and possible imprisonment for adulterers and fornicators. The law specifies how many lashes, where they will be applied, and when (“a pregnant woman shall be flogged two months after she has given birth”). Prime Minister Muammer el-Gaddafi, a devout Muslim intent on making Libya a truly Islamic state (97 per cent of its people are Sunni Muslims), upon seizing power in 1969 banned alcoholic beverages and closed down bars, belly-dance night clubs, and gambling centers. He also recently shut down women’s hairdressing salons.

Speakers included English Anglican theologian J. I. Packer, Anglo-Catholic theologian J. V. Langmead Casserly, renewal-minded author Elisabeth Elliot Leitch, and FOW vice-president Peter Moore. Moore, who heads an independent ministry to private schools in New England, co-founded FOW in 1970 with theologian Philip E. Hughes, a teacher at Westminster Seminary and assistant rector at a suburban Philadelphia Episcopal church. FOW is now the American branch of the Evangelical Fellowship within the world-wide Anglican Communion. The international fellowship was begun in 1961 by London pastor John R. W. Stott, a leading evangelical scholar, and now has branches on all the continents.

FOW promoted its concerns from a booth in the display area at the recent Episcopal convention, and it participated in the denomination’s first national evangelism conference last fall in Memphis. The impact of the latter event was extensive, says Moore, explaining that it sharpened the focus on what evangelism is and served notice that the church must face up to its responsibility to evangelize. “Within the church we long to see again a bold affirmation of the power of God to redeem and change lives and institutions,” comments FOW president John Guest, rector of a suburban Pittsburgh church.

The FOW group has no formal membership, only a mailing list of about 1,000 and a few friends who chip in to meet expenses. Adherents tend to be well educated, including a number of laymen in the professions. Among them are persons who are also involved in the growing lay-witness and charismatic movements in the church (see November 9 issue, page 64). Some are associated with the Episcopal Charismatic Fellowship, which is less than a year old, has a mailing list of 2,000, and expects 10,000 at a national conference in Denver next May. FOW leaders, however, feel that the charismatics are in danger of placing too much emphasis on experience and not enough on theological content. On a different front, FOW backs church involvement in special action but insists that it must be Christian, with biblical underpinnings, and not be disguised humanism.

One thing is clear: there are unmistakable signs of spiritual renewal in the Episcopal Church. FOW is one of them.

RUSS PULLIAM

The Ax Falleth

Leon Modeste, director of the Episcopal Church’s controversial anti-poverty program, received a termination notice last month in an unexpected move by Bishop Roger Blanchard, the church’s executive vice-president who plans to retire next spring along with Presiding Bishop John E. Hines. Prior to the denomination’s convention in September in Louisville, Kentucky, Modeste and his staff discussed their possible replacement because of an expected move to restructure all social-action programs under a single mission-strategy committee, a move subsequently adopted at the convention. However, Modeste says, he thought his staff of six-years’ experience would help with the phasing-in of the new program.

THANKS, CHAPLAIN

“In recognition of … devotion and leadership, and of the worldwide ministries of all chaplains,” the chief of chaplains from each of the three service branches received the 1973 “Upper Room Citation.” The twenty-five-year-old award, sponsored by the daily devotional guidebook, was presented to chaplains Gerhardt Hyatt (Army, and a Missouri Synod Lutheran), Francis L. Garrett (Navy, a Methodist), and Roy M. Terry (Air Force, also a Methodist) last month at a banquet in Washington, D. C. Hyatt told the 550 people present that he could gladly accept the award as a “symbol” of the fine job done by all military chaplains.

In response to Modeste’s query about the termination notice Bishop Blanchard said that was his interpretation of what the church wanted. Modeste says he mentioned the situation to presiding bishop-elect, John M. Allin, and he quotes Allin as saying he “was frustrated” because he was not consulted on the decision. “It’s hard to believe that such a major decision was made without consulting the new man,” says Modeste of Allin’s disclaimer.

No other programs are being handled in such a manner, Modeste claims. “Our program has always been treated differently. There’s a double standard here,” he alleged, claiming that only black staffers received termination notice while “the white guys were transferred out, with the reason given that they were needed elsewhere.”

CHERYL FORBES

Back To Basics

Against a backdrop of concern over a crisis of authority in modern Protestantism, a top-level conference on the inspiration and authority of Scripture convened last month at the Ligonier Valley study center near Pittsburgh. It featured seven theologians (John H. Frame, John H. Gerstner, John Warwick Montgomery. Clark H. Pinnock, and Robert C. Sproul from the United States; J. I. Packer from England; and Peter R. Jones from France) in an intensive week of lectures, debate, and discussion. About 150 pastors, theological professors, students, and lay leaders attended.

The speakers presented a variety of papers demonstrating the contemporary need of the Reformation principle sola Scriptura, and found wanting the proposals by some for “limited inerrancy.” Affirming that God is the Lord of language, they also rejected the argument against inspiration that human language is inadequate to convey God’s words.

At the conference’s conclusion the seven leaders signed a declaration setting forth the inerrancy of Scripture “as originally given through human agents of revelation,” an article of faith seen as “crucial” for all Christians.

K. ERIC PERRIN

Within These Walls …

There’s a house in New Windsor, Maryland, that United Methodists esteem as very special. Built around 1760, it was the home of Robert Strawbridge, the reputed father of Methodism in North America. In it the first Methodist convert was won (Mrs. Strawbridge led neighbor John Evans to Christ when he came to do the spring plowing) and the first Methodist class was held (Evans later became its leader).

Strawbridge, an itinerant Irish lay preacher brought into the Methodist movement by John Wesley himself, administered the first Methodist baptisms shortly after his arrival in America about 1760, and by 1773 half of all Methodists on the continent were in Maryland.

Last month the denomination acquired the house and adjoining land. A shrine association, acting for the church, paid $56,000 for it and now seeks $100,000 to pay off the mortgage and restore and develop the property as a public shrine. The structure was originally an 18 by 20 foot log cabin (the area between the chimney and TV antenna in photo) but has been covered with clapboard and enlarged over the years.

The Disciples: Middle Americana

If a denomination described by its leaders as largely “middle American”—the class that reputedly provided President Nixon with much of his grassroots support—officially assumes a somewhat anti-Nixon position, the President must really be in trouble. That’s how it looked at the week-long, biennial general assembly of the 1.3 million member¹Of the 1.3 million, 884,000 are listed as “participating” members. Many of the remainder belong to churches that do not cooperate with the denomination but are nevertheless counted because of traditional relationships. Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), held in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“I’m very disappointed with his leadership,” said newly elected church president Kenneth Teegarden in an interview. “I hope, though, that we can avoid the necessity of impeachment.” He apparently expressed the feelings of many of the convention delegates, feelings backed by resolutions. Among their actions on a busy final day (they passed nearly thirty resolutions in five hours—almost as many as they had passed during the previous four days), the delegates designated November 18 as a day of prayer for the nation and called on Nixon and all other parties to cooperate fully with courts and investigators. However, they pulled back from supporting a resolution calling for impeachment should he fail to cooperate, primarily because they felt the resolution was “pre-judgmental.” The nearly 8,000 delegates (half voting but all allowed to debate) also approved a statement issued in July by the church’s general board that called Watergate and related incidents “symbols” of the current “moral bewilderment.” (Earlier, a request by the 122-member board that it be allowed to make further statements in its own name was rejected. Delegates wanted such authority vested in the biennial assembly only.) A somewhat related measure was approved calling for legislation to protect newsmen and their sources from prosecution threats.

Among the other resolutions tackled was one approving amnesty for those in “legal jeopardy” for non-violent resistance to the Viet Nam war. Provisions extending possible coverage to persons charged with more serious offenses were removed after delegates bogged down in prolonged debate. Teegarden said privately before the vote that amnesty provided the nation an opportunity to forgive and forget. “Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the war, or the blame to be shared, the war is past. It should now be a healing time,” he said.

Two other amnesty resolutions—one opposed and one calling for no vote on the divisive issue—were defeated. (The latter resolution was presented by the 1,900-member Speedway Christian Church of Indianapolis, largest congregation in the denomination.)

Other touchy topics included abortion and capital punishment. A resolution was approved calling for “disciplined” study of the abortion issue among congregations, and urging support for those facing an abortion decision. The resolution fell short of endorsing abortion itself, despite seeming strong support for such a stand in the assembly hall. Abortion, said one delegate during the debate, is “one of the most loving acts possible” in some circ*mstances. On the same day they passed the abortion resolution, delegates also reaffirmed their opposition to taking life through capital punishment.

As for housekeeping, the delegates, with only one dissenter, chose Teegarden, 51, to succeed A. Dale Fiers as general minister and president. Fiers, an ecumenical leader who represented the Disciples at COCU and the National Council of Churches, retired at the Cincinnati convention, making Teegarden the second man to hold the six-year presidency since the church was restructured in 1968.

In a first, a woman was elected moderator, the denomination’s top non-salaried post. She is Jean Woolfolk, a Little Rock, Arkansas, lawyer and insurance executive. (The first vice-moderator is Seattle judge James A. Noe, who was featured in a Key 73 television special, “Faith in Action.”)

With a woman as moderator for the next two years, discussion on women’s role in the church was a natural. The issue was not—as it was in the recent Episcopal convention—whether to admit women to the ministry but what to do with them once they’re there. “We’ve had ordained women from the beginning,” said Teegarden, “although there aren’t many local women pastors.” For the women, that was the crux of the matter. (The Disciples have 189 women in the ministry, 144 of them ordained. Fourteen serve in local pastorates although only two hold the job full-time. About two-thirds of the women are Christian-education ministers. Currently, fifty women are studying at Disciples seminaries.) Many women delegates complained that pay and opportunities are unequal for ordained women.

In response, delegates: suggested that congregations call more women as their pastors; proposed that congregations wipe out job and title distinctions between deacons and deaconesses; urged more women to enter the ministry; and recommended equal pay for women staffers. To top it all, delegates called for full ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

Evangelism, while not a top priority, got some attention at Cincinnati. After electing an Ames, Iowa, minister, Roy C. Key, as president of the church’s National Evangelistic Association, the delegates adopted a program of evangelism and church growth proposed by the church’s domestic-affairs staff. The plan calls on congregations to organize evangelism-training programs for lay people and set a goal of increasing baptisms and membership by at least 10 per cent.

Teegarden indicated that highest on his priority list is the continuation of ecumenical moves (delegates reaffirmed support of COCU and the National, Canadian, and World councils of churches, and they approved a draft plan of procedures should the Disciples ever unite with another group). Acknowledging that “we’re not as successful in evangelism as we might be,” he said he believes a unified church can do more to reach a “broken” world than could a “broken” church. While the Disciples did not approve Key 73 participation on a denominational basis (they did provide some funds), “the department of evangelism and many local congregations participated vigorously,” Teegarden said.

In other actions, the assembly meekly reconsidered and approved a feasibility study for a four-year multi-million dollar special-projects campaign, possibly to start in 1975. They had shocked confident church staffers by rejecting the proposal earlier in the week. Delegates accepted the plan only after being assured that the final decision would rest in their hands at the 1975 San Antonio, Texas, convention.

BARRIE DOYLE

Restoring The Faith

Religion in American Life (RIAL), a 24-year-old interfaith organization dedicated to promoting religion in the mass media, is focusing this year’s campaign on the problems of violence, continuing a trend of recent years toward treatment of social issues. Last year’s brotherhood campaign attracted free media time and space worth $12 million.

RIAL is backed by forty-three Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish bodies; its president is Lutheran Church in America executive George F. Harkins, and the current budget is $300,000. A number of agencies and business firms donate services and funds.

RIAL’s stated purpose is to underscore the message of religious institutions by encouraging persons to put their faith to work in daily life. But, reports New York Times religion writer Edward B. Fiske, an increasing number of RIAL’s backers feel that the faith part has not been stressed enough in recent campaigns. (What is “religious,” they ask, for example, about a picture of a revolver with the caption, “20,000 die of gunfire annually”?) A proposed program for next year’s campaign that would have continued the social-action trend was sent back to committee by RIAL’s board of religious leaders with instructions to look for balance.

Skinner’S Strategy

“A New Beginning” was more than a theme; it was a description of what happened when black evangelist Tom Skinner and his team visited St. Petersburg, Florida, for an eight-day crusade, his first after more than a year’s absence from the crusade platform and his first campaign in a Southern city. Eighty churches cooperated, bringing together many persons of differing backgrounds.

The effort had been eighteen months in the making and at several points had almost faltered. In a city where Christians are isolated as well as polarized it was not easy for people to trust each other, explained Richard Parker, Skinner’s crusade coordinator. “It was the first time many had ever worked under black leadership, and we found out a lot about each other.”

Skinner himself saw the venture as a sign of the new direction his work is taking. “Our goal is to build ‘community’—groups of people who are committed to each other and living out the life-style of heaven,” he said, adding that the purpose would have been achieved in St. Petersburg even if the crusade had never happened.

Total attendance reached more than 13,500—considered good for an area where 40 per cent of the population is past sixty, crusade officials pointed out. Disappointingly, however, the black turnout did not reflect the city’s one-third black population. Skinner, a mainline evangelical, is not well known in the black community, and the latter is not “crusade” oriented.

Some 450 persons decided to “acknowledge Jesus Christ as owner of my life” at the meetings in Dayfront Center Arena. A follow-up program directs them into small groups for Bible study and sharing, another effort to foster “community.”

Instead of pronouncing a benediction at the end of each session, Skinner asked everyone to form small groups to get acquainted (“part of the new beginning is reaching out to someone”). His strongly biblical messages had few references to social or political issues, but it was these social-political comments that drew applause from the largely conservative audience. At the final rally the evangelist invited city officials to discuss the Christian and politics (“we want to show that the Gospel involves social justice”). Vicemayor J. W. Cate urged those in the audience to “talk to the people in your city government. We never hear a great outcry from the Christian community.” Skinner himself met with a number of the city’s black leaders and groups to discuss community building.

The community theme Skinner preached in Florida is the same concept he has successfully promoted among members of the Washington Redskins football team, where he is official team chaplain. He is confident that “the model we are producing will spread to the other teams.” Skinner says he usually spends Friday nights rapping with a dozen or so of the players in Bible study and discussion of the Christian community idea (“they’re committed to it”). After Saturday morning practice the group is expanded to include wives and friends, and the discussions continue. Thirty-five or so team members gather at Sunday pre-game services to hear Skinner preach.

Building a community of Christians committed to Christ and to each other is also the goal of Skinner’s ministry on black college campuses. His organization—Tom Skinner Associates (TSA)—is concentrating on fielding workers at ten leading black schools (Grambling, Florida A & M, Atlanta University, Morgan State, Howard, Hampton, Fisk, Tuskegee, Jackson State in Mississippi, and Louisiana State). Declares Skinner: “Until TSA began a strategy to evangelize and disciple this vital segment of society, there was no systematic evangelistic outreach among the future black leadership in the United States.”

Support for TSA’s various ministries is coming more and more from the black community, says Skinner, with an estimated 60 per cent of TSA’s $467,000 budget still coming from white sources. The work is expanding, and Stanley Long, former American Tract Society executive, recently signed on as TSA’s executive vice-president.

LOIS OTTAWAY

The Contribution Of Mcgavran

God, Man and Church Growth, edited by A. R. Tippett (Eerdmans, 1973, 447 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Robert Recker, associate professor of missions, Calvin Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Here is a book of which note must be taken, not just because it is a festschrift in honor of evangelical missiologist Donald McGavran, but because it is an honest attempt to deal with the complex of “God, man, and church growth.”

An introductory section draws “Three Portraits” of Donald Anderson McGavran and gives a bibliography of his works.

Many of McGavran’s main points—his emphasis on “church planting” rather than just individual conversions, his insistence that good stewardship in missions today requires the use of such tools as statistics and systems analysis, and others—are generally accepted by those interested in the Christian mission. McGavran is weakest in those areas in which he has engaged in polemics: namely, his understanding of the concepts of mission, evangelism, salvation, Church, and Gospel. A number of the contributions to this volume take up some of the “shibboleths” without much thought. They dogmatically affirm that others are attempting to “rationalize substitutions for the gospel appeal,” and that “in our day when there appears to be such conspiracy to reduce the total mission of the Church to inter-church aid, political action, economic betterment or the quest for social justice, one fact stands out clearly: Those who advocate this reductionism uniformly betray a low view of Scripture.” Can these sweeping generalizations stand up under scrutiny? I do not believe so. They do not do justice to many men and women who are earnestly struggling with the Gospel as norm and judge of their lives, with the nature of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over the nations and over the development of history, with the inalienable union of the convert’s submission to Jesus Christ as both Saviour and Lord, and with other big questions.

All this discussion is not simply motivated by demonic attempts at perversion, willful blindness to Scripture, or a desire to opt out of the evangelistic encounter with the world.

But the main contribution of this book, as suggested by its title, is its central focus on church growth as the precipitate of and goal of the encounter between God and men. The focus on “church growth” rather than the coming of the kingdom of God may be faulted as horizontalism or as the ultimatizing of the penultimate. The Church is not an end in itself but must be caught up in the mission of God, embodying in some measure his will, and pointing beyond itself to the One whom it represents.

Nevertheless, recognizing that biblically we must acknowledge the unique significance and importance of the Church of Christ in the total context of God’s purpose for his cosmos, every child of God must be interested in the growth of Christ’s Church. The Church-planting emphasis can be healthful and productive if the Church is understood in the context of the mission of God, and is seen as representative of the Christ who came to do the will of his heavenly Father.

The title of this book demands that the reader deal with the traditional theological discussion of the relation of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. However, this traditional concern is here centered on the advancement of the kingdom of God. The sovereignty-responsibility debate surfaces again in the question: What causes the Church of God in history to grow and increase? The editor speaks of McGavran’s seeing “both the human and the divine side of ‘open doors.’”

I see the McGavran school as a sort of protest against a docetic spiritualistic concept of church growth. He emphasizes the responsibility of the human agent to know the situation and then to use his best tools to carry out the will of God—namely, that his Church grow. This emphasis contrasts sharply with the passive “leave it to God” mentality. Does God truly work through men, through his Church, or not? Are the results influenced by the quality and intensity of the work and witness of the human agents? Does it make any difference in results whether the sermon is good or not, whether the witness of the Gospel is unmistakably clear or not? Only if the answer to such questions as these is Yes does it make any sense to study church history, to picture in graphs the growth or the decline of a denomination, to try to isolate the reasons for periods of rapid growth and for periods of relative stagnation. McGavran can only be applauded for emphasizing the truth that the doctrine of salvation by grace does not absolve Christ’s Church of responsible stewardship of the Gospel.

It is of interest to me that the apostles who are pushing Christian responsibility and stewardship in the social, economic, and political areas of human life are standing on the same platform with McGavran. Even those who advocate violent revolution in the name of Christ are challenging the Christian Church to recognize its responsibility as the new community in Christ and to witness to the transcendent quality of the life in Christ, the life that hungers and thirsts after righteousness.

What is the dividing line between these two groups, then? It all comes down to these basic questions: What is the meaning of being a “disciple of Christ”? What is the nature of the “salvation” into which Christ has ushered those who believe? What is the nature of the Church with which those who “know” Christ are now identified? What is the meaning of the history of the New Testament era—between the ascension of Christ and his return in glory? Concern for these questions cannot be used to circumvent the crucial importance of men’s entrance into the kingdom of God, but such questions do radically influence both that flow into the Church of Christ and the continued existence and vitality of the Church of Christ. The church must not only herald a verbal message but must in its total existence be “in Christ” and thus be a parable unto the children of men. Its new life must be such that, like the early Church, it attracts men to come and see the reason for such a wonder. The unity of word and life is of crucial concern for “church growth.” God wills not only the “babe in Christ” but also the “mature man in Christ,” and the call at the beginning is a call to wholeness and responsible maturity in present human society.

The overwhelming concern set forth in this book is revealed in the subheadings of the editor’s concluding chapter: “God’s Purpose and Man’s Responsibility,” “God’s Work in Human Structures,” “God in Human History,” “God and Man in Field Situations,” and “Research Techniques for the Work of God.”

The theological section is one of the weakest. Although the importance of theology is recognized, this statement from the concluding chapter is a good characterization of the theology of the church-growth movement: “These church growth theologians see no hope for a missionary philosophy hanging on a few isolated ‘proof texts’ and word studies without context.” Arthur Glasser has made a beginning, but perhaps the aspect of “concurrence” in the doctrine of divine providence would open up vistas for accenting human responsibility in the mission of God. Jack Shepherd represents McGavran as affirming “that God has purposed to accomplish His mission through human instrumentality.” Perhaps the most helpful essays in this work are those in the areas of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. Contributions by Kraft, Kwast, Murphy, Kjaerland, and Winter are of special interest.

The contribution of David Barrett arouses mixed response. I believe he is correct in citing the “fringe elements” as “one of the problems of outstanding success in mission.” However, when he speaks of the NKST Church in Tivland, Nigeria, and states that a million Tiv profess to be Christian, he is engaging in hyperbole or wishful thinking. This may be true of a third of a million. Is this an equivalent of saying, as it might be read, that all animists desire to become Christian? I fear that this is putting too much content into the answers given to the census-takers.

A more serious discrepancy is his assertion that “pastors and missionaries in the Tiv Protestant Church have put into practice McGavran’s philosophy and methodology more than the churches in, probably, any other African people on the continent.” This is not true, though McGavran’s thinking may have had some influence on certain people in the last few years. I believe that under God the credit must go first of all to some early outstanding evangelistic missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa; secondly, to their emphasis on setting up Christian primary schools and classes for religious instruction in the bush; thirdly, to their accent on the production of and distribution of Christian literature (including their translation of the entire Bible in Tiv); and finally, to their ability to understand the Tiv mentality. However, all this would have been in vain without the parallel emergence of strong, aggressive Tiv-Christian leadership, a great craving on the part of the Tiv people to learn to read Christian literature, the insistence of the Tiv people on their need for an educational structure, a scrupulous guarding by the Tiv church of its rapport with the tribe at large, and its strong sense of “self-identity” in the face of the foreign mission structure. If anything, the last few years have seen a bogging-down of the aggressive evangelistic action of the national church and an increased interest in church structures, mission-church relations, the questions of the seat of authority, and the like. Africa of all places is a picture of the effectiveness of the word-deed witness of the ordinary Christian and of the special role played by the native evangelist, catechist, and Bible-school teacher. Later on, the African nurse and dispensary attendant became key figures in leading many to Christ.

Whether one is a devotee of McGavran or not, there are many good little tidbits in this book, and it can serve to challenge us all to reexamine our activity in Christ and try to make it the most responsible and productive activity possible.

Shame And Glory

The Missionaries, by Geoffrey Moorhouse (Lippincott, 1973, 368 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Richard V. Pierard, professor of history, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.

Although generations of Europeans and North Americans have been stirred by accounts of heroic missionary endeavors, the trend today has shifted; all too often we now read that missions were the vanguard of imperialism and the force that tragically destroyed indigenous cultures and societies in non-Western lands. Therefore, British journalist and author Geoffrey Moorhouse’s thoughtful, highly readable, and remarkable balanced account of the progress of Christian missions in Africa (the scope of the book is not global, as the title implies) is a breath of fresh air.

To be sure, he does not sidestep these accusations. He notes that most missionaries did not see anything positive and valuable in African life and culture. Since these outsiders were “incapable of making a distinction between European and Christian values,” they could not escape from the constricting bonds of their own culture. In addition, most were obsessed with matters of sexual immorality, insufferably racist, and too closely tied to the advances of European expansionism, as for example, in Uganda.

Nevertheless, Moorhouse portrays vividly the hardships that these pioneers endured, not only the physical but also the spiritual trials—the failure of the Africans to respond to the Gospel. His character sketches are a major strength of the book, and he excellently captures the essence of such figures as Crowther, Livingstone, Anna Hinderer, and Mackay without manifesting need either to glorify or to debunk their achievements.

The author’s assessment of the forces that impelled men and women to embark upon missionary service is especially interesting. I would quarrel with his suggestion that missionaries came “in proportions approximating to purely national instincts for expansion and appetites for colonisation.” The impact of the evangelical revival seems to be a better explanation for the British predominance in missions during the nineteenth century. He does bring out the fact that the foremost influence on persons who choose Christian service abroad was not the Scriptures as such but rather missionary books and biographies and the influence of parents and acquaintances.

His discussion of untoward behavior by some missionaries simply points up how much the old nature persisted even in these men of God. Of course, this comes as no surprise to those who have experienced the infighting of church politics. Such people can readily attest that many Christians, even those in places of leadership, have hardly achieved a high level of sanctification.

Although critical of many aspects of the missionary enterprise, Moorhouse does not downplay its positive achievements—the campaign against slavery, the education of Africa’s present leaders, the bringing of medical aid and agricultural technology to aid its people. And he rightly acknowledges the deep spiritual motivation of the great majority of the missionaries. His evaluation of the successes and failures and his explanation of the differences between Protestant and Catholic accomplishments are sound.

Even though the number of converts seemed rather small and expatriate missionaries can no longer dominate the continent’s religious life, the growth of indigenous African churches reveals the vigor of the faith that the missionaries introduced. Perhaps missions in Africa were not as much a failure as some critics have contended. Moorhouse does not think so, nor do I.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

The Evangelical Response to Bangkok, edited by Ralph Winter (William Carey [305 Pasadena Ave., South Pasadena, Cal. 91030], 153 pp., $1.95 pb). Fourteen reactions to the World Council-sponsored meetings on the theme “Salvation Today,” held in Thailand in January, 1973. Striking evidence of the wide gap between professing Christians on the good news and communicating it to unbelievers.

The Psychology of Religion, by Wayne E. Oates (Word, 291 pp., $7.95). A good survey of the variety of impacts of any religion on individuals. It reflects years of study and teaching by a Southern Baptist seminary professor and counselor.

Historical Geography of the Holy Land, by George A. Turner (Baker and Canon [1014 Washington Bldg., Washington, D. C. 20005], 368 pp., $11.95). Geography and history of Palestine interlaced in one volume. Interestingly written by a professor at Asbury Seminary. Abundance of photos and maps.

English Biblical Translation, by A. C. Partridge (Seminar, 246 pp., $10.50). A major addition to the scholarly study of the history of the English language; examines translations of the Bible from before Wycliffe to the New English Bible. Theological libraries will want this.

Behold, I Come, by Ralph Earle (Beacon Hill, 86 pp., n.p., pb). A leading scholar in the Wesleyan tradition offers a book-by-book survey of the New Testament teaching on the Lord’s return.

Old Testament History, by Charles F. Pfeiffer (Baker and Canon [1014 Washington Bldg., Washington, D. C. 20005], 640 pp., $12.95). Complete history of Jewish people up to the birth of Christ by a well-known evangelical scholar. (Seven of the eight parts have been separately published over the past several years.)

Why Do Christians Break Down?, by William A. Miller (Augsburg, 124 pp., $2.95 pb). A penetrating analysis of the Church’s contribution to emotional breakdown among its members and also its potential as a source of restoration of mental and emotional health.

Scripture and Confession, edited by John Skilton (Presbyterian and Reformed, 273 pp., $4.95 pb). Essays by past and present professors at Westminster Seminary on the biblical warrant for confessional documents. Although there is particular reference to United Presbyterian confessional disputes, the book has wider application.

New Testament Fire in the Philippines, by Jim Montgomery (William Carey Library, 209 pp., $2.50 pb). The field director of Overseas Crusades in the Philippines analyzes the mushrooming success of Foursquare Pentecostal missions in that land. He refrains from debating usual points of diversion in an attempt to grasp the principles at work. Conclusion is a challenge for evangelicals to review and revise present methods.

To Turn From Idols, by Kenneth Hamilton (Eerdmans, 232 pp., $3.95 pb). A persuasive, scholarly exposé of contemporary substitutes for God, one of the most popular being the “great god Change.” Deals with the role of imagination in calling forth both false images of God (idolatry) and those which communicate truth. Challenging arguments.

Brazil 1980: The Protestant Handbook, by William Read and Frank Iveson (MARC [919 W. Huntington Dr., Monrovia, Cal. 91016], 405 pp., $7.50 pb). A study of the recent and exciting past and proposals and prospects for the future of the Gospel in one of the world’s largest countries.

Escape From the Money Trap, by Henry Clark (Judson, 124 pp., $2.35 pb). Does a good job of helping us to consider the question, “How can we use all our economic resources in a Christian way?”

Exodus, by Alan Cole, and Jeremiah and Lamentations, by R. K. Harrison (Inter-Varsity, 240 pp. each, $5.95 each). Latest additions to the excellent series of “Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries.”

Christian Witness Among Muslims, anonymous (Africa Christian Press [Box 30, Achimota, Ghana], 96 pp., $1 pb). A good, practical book which, though written with sub-Saharan Muslims in view, is adaptable for use elsewhere.

Amnesty? The Unsettled Question of Vietnam, by Arlie Schardt, William Rusher, and Mark Hatfield (Sun River [5 S. Union St., Lawrence MA 01843], 148 pp., $5.95). “Now!,” “Never!,” and “If …” are the positions advocated respectively by the three authors. Intelligent examination of an important ethical question.

Jesus Now, by Malachi Martin (Dutton, 317 pp., $7.95). A former Jesuit professor surveys the subtle but pervasive proclivity of people to create “Jesus-figures” (he discusses twenty-six of them) that embody their own ideas. He proves his point by doing just that himself.

Born at Midnight, by Peter Cotterell (Moody, 189 pp., $3.50 pb). A missionary interestingly depicts the development of evangelicalism in southern Ethiopia.

The Grand Design of God, by C. A. Patrides (University of Toronto, 182 pp., $7.50). A fine account for scholars of the Christian tradition of historiography as it is reflected in works of literature and works of history.

Early Quaker Writings 1650–1700, edited by Hugh Barbour and Arthur O. Roberts (Eerdmans, 622 pp., $9.95). With a well written introduction and two indexes this reference volume offers a wide variety of British and American Quaker thought.

Look at Me, Please Look at Me, by Dorothy Clark and Jane Dahl (David C. Cook, 125 pp., $1.25 pb). Stirring account of work with mentally handicapped children in church activities. Deals with distractions and frustrations as well as joys.

Enemy Versions of the Gospel, by Herchel H. Sheets (Upper Room, 72 pp., $1 pb). A look at the teachings of Jesus as understood by the people in the gospel narratives who opposed him. Even these criticisms inadvertently proclaim good news.

Introducing the New Testament, by Archibald M. Hunter (Westminster, 224 pp., $3.50 pb). This third edition of a popular work is a thorough revision and updating. Hunter stresses the New Testament’s continuing relevance.

Pre-Existence, Wisdom and The Son of Man, by R. G. Hamerton-Kelley (Cambridge, 322 pp., $23.50). A scholarly study of the various forms taken by the ideas of pre-existence in early Jewish and biblical traditions as they emerge in the various New Testament writings.

A Literary Survey of the Bible, by Joyce Vedral (Logos, 243 pp., $2.50 pb). A text for public high school English classes that is not “tilted” against evangelical views.

Buddhism, by Yushim Yoo (Scarecrow, 184 pp., n.p.). A subject index to periodical articles on Buddhism in English from 1728 to 1971. A valuable reference tool.

’Til Divorce Do Us Part, by R. Lofton Hudson (Nelson, 132 pp., $4.95). Case histories, historical background of what Jesus and Paul said on divorce and remarriage, and some practical advice. An attempt to apply the Scriptures to a pervasive problem faithfully but with less rigidity than is customary in evangelical writing on the subject.

Lucid Anti-Abortion Essays

Abortion and Social Justice, edited by Thomas W. Hilgers and Dennis J. Horan (Sheed and Ward, 1972, 328 pp., $6.95, $1.95 pb), is reviewed by John Marshall, editorial assistant, Canon Press, Washington, D. C.

In contrast to the heated and uninformed arguments that characterize much modern talk against abortion stands this admirable collection of essays. The three divisions, dealing with the medical, legal, and social objections to abortion, are edited by two notably qualified members of the medical and legal professions. Each contributor brings to this study a vast command of the technicalities of his profession and their application to the subject. None of the essays argues directly from a theological premise, but definite religious points of view appear in several.

The first two essays are the most interesting for the medical layman. The development of the fetus from conception to birth is discussed with appreciable clarity and detail to refute the pro-abortionist contention that the fetus is passive and non-autonomous.

In one article the multiplicity of abortions is seen as the result of social and economic problems; the need is to solve these problems rather than to liberalize abortion laws. How this is to be done is not discussed here, but later another writer concludes that “the hearts of men must change” before the “aborting society” can be abolished. In the legal section is the statement, quoted with approval from an outside source, that “only the Christian doctrine of man can effectively moderate the tyranny of scientific techniques.” Conclusions such as these typify the general moral and ethical tone of the work.

This volume offers forceful polemic, copious statistics and references, and a respectable level of scholarship. Readers on both sides of the abortion controversy would definitely profit by coming to grips with its vigorous and lucid statements of anti-abortion thinking.

Excellent, But …

A Commentary on the First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, by Ernest Best (Harper & Row, 1972, 376 pp., $10), is reviewed by Robert L. Thomas, professor of New Testament language and literature, Talbot Theological Seminary, La Mirada, California.

This volume is the sixth to appear in Harper’s “New Testament Commentary” series. In some respects Best’s work is more valuable than its predecessors because of its closer attention to grammatical, linguistic and textual matters as well as its greater proportional length. Without doubt it will be received as a major contribution.

Best has done much to update studies in the Thessalonian epistles by assembling a mass of documentation that includes articles and books from recent years. Regrettably, he failed to notice D. Edmond Hiebert’s The Thessalonian Epistles (Moody, 1971). Hiebert’s work is slightly longer than Best’s and contains a much more extensive bibliography, excluding the non-English sources upon which Best is at times dependent. However, Best’s index of authors includes 260 names, a great wealth of resource data.

Best’s treatment of introductory areas in some cases coincides with long-standing orthodox practices. He endorses Pauline authorship and traditional place and date of writing. Yet he does not hesitate to raise questions about such matters as the historical accuracy and Lucan authorship of Acts and the Pauline authorship of Ephesians and the pastoral epistles. His extensive introductory remarks are perhaps highlighted by a discussion of Paul’s opponents at Thessalonica.

Best’s skill as an exegete is continually evident. One cannot help being impressed by, for example, his unusually good discussion of phthano in I, 2:16. His insistence on arriving at one and only one primary interpretation in difficult passages is also refreshing (as with en barei in I, 2:7). He displays in most cases good grammatical awareness, as well as a skillful handling of synonyms. His discussion of debated passages is thorough.

The overall excellence of the exegetical treatment is marred here and there, however. Discussion of eklogen in I, 1:4 becomes more theological than exegetical. Solutions to two interrelated problem passages in I, 1:45 (eklogen and hoti) seem irreconcilable with each other. In reaching his conclusion about the proper syntax of “through Jesus” in I, 4:14, he fails to incorporate it into his translation of the verse. He reveals a lack of awareness of the millennial position’s explanation of “forever” in I, 4:17, as he does in relation to the restrainer (or katechon, II, 2:7) when he fails to make even a passing allusion to the Holy Spirit view of identification, a rather widely held position.

This last omission is perhaps due to Beat’s unwillingness to allow Paul’s theology in Thessalonians to be developed enough to include a formulated Trinitarian doctrine. A further area of theology is impinged upon, that of bibliology: any semblance of inerrancy in Scripture is ruled out when Paul in Romans is made to contradict what he had written earlier in Thessalonians.

Best takes pains to transform the epistles’ eschatological emphasis into something relevant to the modern world by means of an existential explanation of Christ’s return. First-century mythology is remolded into that of the twentieth century. In so doing the author reflects his approval of formgeschichte’s distinction between the Christ of Christianity and Jesus of history. He parallels the return of Christ with “a supposed point of creation,” which he says no one any longer dates a few thousand years before Christ, but which rather stretches to a point so far away that it need not be reckoned with. By analogy the same is true with the Parousia. It is just as wrong to think of “a real physical End” as it is of “a real physical Beginning.” “The End is not an event in history but outside it.”

All in all, this recent entry into the field of New Testament exegesis deserves a place among the top works on Thessalonians, though the conservative reader will find it repugnant in some of the areas outlined above.

Kenneth Scott Latourette called the last century the “Great Century” of missionary advance. This missionary surge was a distinctively Western, white undertaking. The century was also one of developing colonialism, and some view the missionaries as co-laborers with the political and economic forces in what has been called in our century “imperialism.” However true or false the charge, it is fair to say that both colonialism and missionary outreach have run into some rough weather in the last few years.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europe provided most of the overseas missionaries. By the end of the century North America had displaced Europe in Protestant missionary activity and had become the strongest base from which missionaries and money flowed to the unreached regions of the world. Now North America has faltered. It remains to be seen whether this is just a pause to regroup or whether the leadership will pass to some other area of the world. But the accumulating evidence suggests the latter.

Virtually all the large U. S. denominations are engaged in mission retrenchment and retreat. The Southern Baptist Convention is a notable exception. The others are reducing their staff drastically and cutting their budgets at a time when inflation demands larger rather than smaller outlays. The picture among groups and agencies that are distinctively evangelical is somewhat brighter but allows for no special rejoicing. The Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (missionary arm of the National Association of Evangelicals) and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (the agency of the faith missionary organizations) have reached a plateau; while their income is increasing, the number of missionaries they support remains relatively stable. The smaller evangelical denominations reflect a similar picture with some exceptions.

The overseas missionary picture has changed as well. Some fields are closed and others are semi-closed. Mainland China is closed. India is hard to enter. Bangladesh with its 75 million people has few missionaries. Parts of Africa that are struggling for black supremacy and for national identity and hegemony regard the white man as an enemy. Latin Americans, in rejecting America’s economic power, have tended to resent its missionaries as well. Yet however loud the voices of those who declaim against Western missionaries, there is still a great demand for more of them by the national churches and many national Christians. And the call for replacements and reinforcements is not being met by Western Christians.

On the positive side of the ledger are some important developments. The Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship will hold another missionary conference at Urbana, Illinois, at the end of this year that may well attract ten to fifteen thousand students from all over North America. Campus Crusade for Christ is laying its plans for finishing the task of world evangelization in this century.

Most promising of all is the Congress on World Evangelization that will convene in Lausanne, Switzerland, next July. It is an outgrowth of the 1966 Berlin Congress on Evangelism but will go far beyond anything attempted by that gathering. It will link evangelism and missions in a new and important way. It has for its purpose the development of a strategy to complete the New Testament missionary mandate. And it will focus on the Third World, which may be the major source from which the future missionary impulse will come. Indeed, Lausanne may serve to encourage the sending of missionaries from the Third World to North America, an interesting reversal that has already begun.

Perhaps the gravest problem facing evangelical churches is their declining missionary passion, their lack of vision of a world that really is lost without Christ. The secular spirit of the age and materialism—that is, worldliness—have overtaken the churches. Parents no longer are willing to give their children to God for the mission fields of the world, and the attitude of many evangelicals is: “Here am I, Lord—send my neighbor.”

Any reading of the Bible should convince us that Christ’s second advent is dynamically related to the fulfillment of the Great Commission. And Jesus himself said prophetically: “You shall be my witnesses … to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This statement leads us to conclude that missions have not reached a stalemate, that another great missionary surge will precede the coming to earth of the Lord Jesus Christ. But it will start with renewal among the churches. It must be begun by prayer, strengthened by commitment, enlarged by sacrificial giving, and accompanied by the offering of our young people as bearers of the imperishable message to perishing people around the globe. “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (John 20:21).

Thanksgiving: The Spirit Of ’73

Perhaps Thanksgiving should be recalled this year. Perhaps we should post a “Day called on account of …” notice over November 22. Many Americans might feel there is precious little to give thanks for in this stormy, shock-a-day period of our national life.

This Thanksgiving gives American Christians a special test of their faith. When things go well, thanksgiving, though often neglected, comes easy. But what about those times when God chastens a people for their national sins? What about those times when he seems to be sending cursings rather than blessings?

America still has its great freedoms, and a form of government that seems strong and resilient enough to meet the tests put to it. It still has more material blessings than any other country in the world. For these and other boons its people should express thanks.

Of more direct concern for Christians, however, is what Paul told the Thessalonian believers: “In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” This means we are to give thanks for chastening, even for the cursings that may come because of national sins. It means thanking God for allowing untoward events in order to bring about spiritual quickening and a return to faithfulness to the Creator. Even more than blessings, adversity should bring us to our knees in thankfulness, remembering that it is only due to his mercies that we are not consumed.

The Appeal To Resign

Among the many voices calling upon President Nixon to resign was Time magazine, which did so in its first editorial in fifty years of publication. The editorial argues that morality requires Mr. Nixon’s removal from office and that prudence would dictate resignation as the least painful means to that end.

We are opposed to his resignation. The charges against him are indeed serious, and his attempts to persuade us that they are false have so far been inadequate. But resignation would leave us in doubt about whether or not he is guilty, and it would also enable his accusers to evade the heavy responsibility that must fall upon them if the charges are false. The charges should either be proved—and impeachment is the constitutional means for proving them—or withdrawn.

Those who are asking Mr. Nixon to resign are tacitly admitting that the Constitution, with its provision of impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” is not an altogether sufficient rule for public life and policy. At an earlier point in American history, the moral context for interpreting constitutional and statutory questions was provided by a widespread consensus based on the teachings and principles of the Bible. With the increasing secularization of American life, this once dominant biblical culture has been obscured, forgotten, even explicitly repudiated. But now, in a time of worldwide crisis when adequate national leadership seems a life-or-death matter, we suddenly discover that human conventions are no adequate substitute. It is not enough merely not to have demonstrably violated the explicit provisions of the Constitution. Something more is required for leadership. But where is this something to come from, and by what standard is it to be judged?

The long battle of the secularists to destroy America’s spiritual heritage and to establish a morality of the lowest common denominator, based on secular legal conventions with nothing borrowed or learned from alleged revelation, has been largely victorious. But such a lowest common denominator suddenly is proving inadequate, and we now hear appeals for “moral principle” from many who ridiculed them when they were voiced by religious leaders and—perhaps hypocritically—by many of those now under accusation. Make no mistake: we are for moral principle. But it cannot be created out of whole cloth. American society, if it is looking for guidance as to what is right, not merely “constitutional,” must turn back to an authority it has largely abandoned: to the Bible, the only perfect rule of faith and practice.

The Mortality Of Presidents

When John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, voices were raised charging the American people as a whole with collective guilt in his slaying. Such charges are false. Yet it is true that before his death, vast and widespread forces were at work to destroy him. His tragic death made him a martyr figure, and we conveniently forget that when he was murdered he was on a mission to patch up a malignant quarrel in his own Democratic party, one that he feared might hamper his reelection to the presidency. He was being subjected to a campaign of abuse, ridicule, and even vituperation in the media, and his former image of dynamic popularity had sadly tarnished. Kennedy’s successors, Johnson and Nixon, as we well know, have been the target of even greater and more persistent denigration.

We would not suggest that Kennedy did nothing to deserve the attacks of the media; certainly Johnson brought much of the odium on himself; and it has been Nixon’s peculiar talent not only to follow policies that merit condemnation but to react to justified criticism in such a way as to antagonize even those inclined to sympathize with him. The point, however, is this: Each of the last three presidents has become involved in a process that has ultimately destroyed him. In Kennedy’s case, the process had begun but was short-circuited by his murder; Johnson was driven from office broken in spirit; in Nixon’s case, the final outcome remains to be seen. Each of these men may have at least partially deserved the destructive hostility brought to bear on him. But all of them, different though they were, were similarly ground down by adversity and animosity while apparently in possession of the highest honors and privileges a powerful, rich nation can offer.

All Americans should reflect on this question: Have we created, in the modern presidency, an office that so combines awful responsibility, vast power, and messianic pretension that no mortal can occupy it without suffering personal disaster? Christians should examine their consciences, inquiring whether they have followed the biblical injunction to pray for those in authority—or have left them an easy prey to spiritual wickedness in high places. To the extent that we have not prayed, we can begin now, too late to undo past disasters but in time to forestall new ones.

Challenging The Code

The U. S. Supreme Court showed good sense last month in turning down an appeal from Billy James Hargis to reinstate his tax-exempt status. Hargis was deprived of exemption for his Christian Echoes National Ministry, Incorporated, for engaging in political activity. A now well known clause in the Internal Revenue Code limits exemptions to churches and organizations organized and operated exclusively for religious purposes “no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, and which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.” Surely ministries that seek to influence legislation or elections can be organized and supported as separate entities.

The court acted wisely in refusing to hear arguments claiming that the exemption clause discriminates against activists. This was the line of reasoning in a brief supporting Hargis filed by the National Council of Churches, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, and several large denominations including United Presbyterians and United Methodists. Most if not all of these have expressed themselves in opposition to the prayer amendment apparently without considering that the current ban on religious exercises in public schools discriminates against pietists.

The group also argued that restraints of the exemption clause “have the potential of seriously weakening if not destroying the wall between church and state.… The prospect of the government deciding what should or should not be legitimate areas for religious concern and activity cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment requirement of government neutrality.” It is true that the clause causes some serious problems because it sets up the IRS as something of a religious arbiter. However, the group did not argue against the clause as a whole but only against its “limitations,” namely substantial lobbying. If the restraints were removed, the IRS would still have to decide which organizations were religious and thus eligible for tax exemption. We submit that this would be profoundly more difficult, and we also see such an arrangement as an open invitation to a host of political organizations to plead for “religious” status.

The question whether any lobby should be taxed deserves separate consideration. Tax exemption is a considerable benefit granted by the people as a whole to specific groups. It is one thing to let certain people be helped in a way that need not affect others. But is it not unfair to expect this privilege to be used to influence legislation and elections the results of which affect everyone?

Hargis is still as free as ever to engage in politics. All the government asks is that he be subject to taxation just as other lobbies are and that he not be allowed any more tax-deductible contributions than any other politician.

Still Awaiting A Redeemer

“Let us roar with a new and last roar of the beginning: Am Yisroel Chai!” (the people of Israel shall live). The Israeli army’s motto? A Hebrew anthem to strengthen Israel’s spirit? Though perhaps applicable to the recent turmoil in the Middle East, the cry ends a new oratorio by composer Marvin David Levy, whose opera Mourning Becomes Electra was performed during the Metropolitan Opera’s first season at Lincoln Center. Masada commemorates the tragic mass suicide on April 15, 73 A.D., of 960 Jewish men, women, and children who preferred death to slavery under Rome (the account follows Josephus; see “Israel Remembers Her ‘super Alamo’!” by Raymond L. Cox, September 14, 1973, issue). Titus three years before had destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, which fulfilled Jesus’ prophecy that the holy city would fall. Flavius Silva, governor of Judea and Roman general, led the siege against Masada.

The fortress, built by Jonathan the high priest, brother and successor of Judas Maccabaeus, and later strengthened by King Herod, was considered impregnable, with its thirty-seven towers seventy-five feet high and an enclosing limestone wall eighteen feet high and twelve feet wide. But Silva’s battering rams and torch volleys convinced the people inside that the Romans would conquer them, too. Eleazar ben Yair convinced all but two women, who along with five children hid in a water conduit, to kill each other—and leave behind a storehouse of food to let the Romans know they chose death. The remains of the fortress are about thirty-five miles southeast of Jerusalem on the west bank of the Dead Sea.

The oratorio was commissioned by Antal Dorati and was given its world premiere in Washington, D.C., this month by Dorati and the National Symphony. Levy used texts from Josephus, the Bible, and Isaac Lamdan’s poem “Masada.” Metropolitan Opera tenor Richard Tucker was the soloist along with solo speaker George London, also of the Metropolitan, and the large University of Maryland chorus. As the chorus whispers Psalm 79, which laments the destruction of Jerusalem by the heathen, a tape blares out the horror of Hitler’s Germany. “Never again! Never again shall Masada fall!” shouts the chorus. Masada becomes a symbol for all the persecution the Jewish people have suffered.

When Levy began writing this exciting oratorio over a year ago, the Middle East was calm. Shortly after its completion war again erupted. With cries of death, blood, deliverance, and the wail of a fugitive who sees only chaos in a land out of whose depths came the prophecy of redemption, Masada seems to mean more than history. “Where is the last redeemer? Why do his footsteps still delay? Why do the false prophets still stand high on the wall?” asks the chorus. Levy captures the agony of Israel and the strength of its faith in Yahweh (tenor and chorus sing the traditional “Shema Yisroel, Adonoy Elohaynu, Adonoy Echod!”—Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One). Masada also strikingly reminds us that God is sovereign in dealing with his people, and that though they do not recognize it, the redemption they desire has come.

God’S Green Earth: Pleasant Under Glass

Within our world thousands of little worlds are being created every day. We refer not to “spheres of influence” nor to individualistic transcendental meditation, but to the current craze for terrariums (or terraria, if you’re a stickler for Latin), which has hundreds of shop clerks peering from behind glass-enclosed foliage.

“Terrarium” means literally “earth place.” It is the name for a small ecosystem of various plants, usually housed in a transparent enclosure that retains moisture. Terrariums are easily assembled (as the commercial kit-makers have discovered, to their capital delight) and require almost no maintenance. They can be made inexpensively from canning jars, bell domes, fish bowls, or various other containers (one with a large mouth and no lid should be covered with plastic wrap or a glass plate.)

A few peaceful hours of terrarium-making might be a welcome change from the mad rush of Christmas shopping and result in gifts likely to please apartment dwellers, shut-ins, college students, grandmothers, office workers, teachers, perhaps even some children. For a little action, the terrarium can be planned to include a turtle or lizard. Whatever form it takes, the “earth place” gives it owner the pleasure of watching a lush mini-world grow—and perhaps a close-up reminder of the genius of the Creator.

The Greatest Missionary Of All

A missionary is, quite simply, one who is sent on a mission, and the Lord Jesus Christ was the greatest missionary of all. His leaving glory and coming down to this sin-cursed world made all subsequent missionary endeavor possible, and far exceeds it—even when it is all considered together—in magnificence.

Nowhere is our Lord’s missionary role better summarized than in what was probably a separate hymn incorporated by the missionary Paul into his letter to the Philippians (chapter 2, verses 5–11). Our Lord’s coming as a missionary was unparalleled because of the vast gap between who he was, God himself, fully entitled to equal worship with the Father (v. 6), and what he became, the one who “made himself of no reputation,” becoming a servant—not even a man of high station (v. 7). Christian missionaries go as sinners (albeit redeemed) to fellow sinners. However great the cultural barriers, however much the difference in standards of living, there is no comparison with the difference in circ*mstances (not in personality) between Christ as Lord of glory and as the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth.

The missionary life of our Saviour also reveals the hostility of so many men to the message of divine grace even when it was proclaimed by one who was without fault. Christ “became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (v. 8). (The deity of Christ is, by the way, implicit in this phrase, because to mortals death is necessary; we have no choice whether to “obey” it.) Most Christian missionaries experience this hostility, though usually not so extreme and never, because missionaries and their supporters are sinners, without giving at least a little basis for opposition. Our Lord’s experience reminds us that even if missionaries were perfect there would still be opposition to them.

Finally we note the ultimate triumph of our Lord’s mission, when there will be “bestowed on him the name which is above every name” (v. 9), when “every knee” (v. 10) shall bow to him and “every tongue” (v. 11) confess that he is Lord. Of course, no Christian missionary will be so exalted, but all Christians, those who go as missionaries and those who send them forth, will share as the body and bride of Christ in the glory of that ultimate triumph.

Whenever discouragement arises over the missionary task, whether because of the poor conditions or the negative response or questioning of the ultimate value, let us remember—and worship—the greatest missionary of all.

This column by the late Executive Editor ofCHRISTIANITY TODAYis reprinted from the November 20, 1964, issue.

A favorite device of lawyers—a normal procedure, in fact—is to call in question the competence of witnesses. Any one of a number of avenues of attack may be used: the witness’s integrity; his understanding of the subject, if he is called as an expert; reliability of the sources of information advanced—anything that might raise in the minds of the jury a question about his truthfulness and his knowledge of that about which he is testifying.

Because of the large part that the Apostle Paul plays in the New Testament, from the ninth chapter of Acts on through his thirteen epistles, he has been subjected to objective and subjective scrutiny by Bible students in every generation to determine the source of his religion, his authority to speak thereon, the validity of the doctrines he proclaims, and the binding nature of the rules for Christians and the Church that he lays down with such certainty and clarity. Fortunately, we are not left in doubt about any of these things.

Three things in large measure explain Paul and his place in the message and history of the Christian faith: a unique conversion experience with the risen Lord, direct revelation of divine truth, and an intimate knowledge of and faith in the Old Testament Scriptures.

Paul’s conversion. The history of the Christian Church is replete with stories of unusual conversions and such conversions continue to happen today. But none of these stories of life-changing confrontations with Jesus Christ compares to what happened to Paul on the Damascus road.

Paul met Jesus Christ in person, and the dazzling splendor of the risen and living Lord blinded him. He heard our Lord’s voice with his ears and received from him specific instructions. His was not a general call to witness to which all who know and love the Lord are subjected; it was rather a specific call to a certain task at that time in history. He was, the Lord told Ananias, “a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” (Acts 9:15).

Years later, in speaking of this experience before Agrippa, Paul quotes the Lord’s command to him: “But rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you” (Acts 26:16).

There are numerous evidences of Paul’s spectacular and complete conversion, none more conclusive than the fact that he immediately started on his God-given task as a Spirit-filled witness. He appeared in the synagogues of Damascus but did not carry out his original intention of arresting believers. Rather, “immediately he proclaimed Jesus, saying, ‘He is the Son of God’” (Acts 9:20).

Direct, special revelation. Not only did Paul have a unique experience with Christ, a conversion different from other conversions; he also received direct revelations from the Lord. For that reason we read Paul’s letter knowing that the inspiration by which he spoke and wrote was also unique.

In his letter to the Galatian Christians, Paul told them he was not expressing his own view or the opinions of others: “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:11, 12).

Writing to the Ephesians, Paul again refers to this special revelation: “… assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation.… When you read this you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ … as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit …” (Eph. 3:2–5).

Paul probably received many direct revelations. In his second letter to the Corinthian church he refers to one of them, when he was “caught up to the third heaven”; at this time he “heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter” (2 Cor. 12:1–4).

Not only did the other apostles recognize Paul as one of their number, but Peter writes with candor of Paul’s letters: “So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scripures” (2 Pet. 3:15, 16).

Place of the Old Testament Scriptures. Paul was a highly educated and intelligent Pharisee and as such was deeply versed in the Old Testament. His years at the feet of Gamaliel evidently gave him training second to none. But until his conversion and infilling with the Holy Spirit, he was like the Jews about whom he wrote: “For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away.… When a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:14–17).

From the beginning of his ministry Paul used the Old Testament Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God. A study of his sermons, recorded in the Book of the Acts, shows his dependence on that record for proving Christ to be the Messiah. In his epistles he affirms Christian doctrine and ties that doctrine to the Old Testament revelation.

In his defense before Felix he says, “But this I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the law and written in the prophets” (Acts 24:14).

Finally, the nature and predicament of man and God’s provision for him came to Paul as a direct revelation from the Lord Jesus Christ, who said to him: “‘… the Gentiles—to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me’” (Acts 26:17, 18).

It was testified of the Lord that he spoke with authority. What we need to know is that Paul spoke by that same authority, and his message is valid today—God speaking to us. The “relevance” of Paul’s message is questioned by some; but as is true in other parts of God’s Word, the eternal principles and specific doctrines that are laid down we ignore to our own loss.

According to the record, the credibility of Paul is unassailable. Lacking similar experiences we can but thank God for the man through whom he has done so much for the Church, and who at the end of his life was able to say with assurance, “I have fought the good fight.”

The best-kept secret, I maintain, is not the Coca Cola formula but ministers’ reservations about the value of visitation. Their reluctance to talk about this is partly due to a feeling that they could never get laymen to understand their misgivings. Visitation is probably the most sensitive spot in lay-clergy relations. Murmurings by church members often have to do with apparent pastoral neglect. If this point of friction is left unattended, serious discontent could set in and hinder his ministry.

In seminary, misgivings about pastoral visitation are only lightly, if ever, touched upon, lest the seeds of cynicism that lodge in seasoned workers be injudiciously planted in eager aspirants. But once on the job the new pastor may soon learn that door knocking doesn’t cause the church to grow. Pastors have been known to make 1,000 calls a year and at the same time witness a decline in church attendance. This experience would certainly give a pastor second thoughts about visitation, and his own effectiveness.

One reason for pastoral dissatisfaction with visitation is that often a visit never rises above the level of a social call. The conversation naturally starts with immediate factors—the weather, activities of the moment, an amusing anecdote. When the pastor tries to shift to a serious matter, such as knowing the Lord, the conversation may stall. Probing and pressuring are resisted. The atmosphere may become tense, and the person may try to change the subject. When he leaves the pastor feels they have been on a merry-go-round: they got off where they started, and though the ride has been pleasant they have gone nowhere.

Another cause for pastoral discontent is that the house call consumes a lot of time. Driving out to see rural families or fighting traffic across town takes up valuable time that could be used more productively.

The most irritating consumption of time comes when the pastor gets caught in a conversational trap. He feels like Winnie-the-Pooh in the story by A. A. Milne “in which Pooh bear goes visiting and gets into a tight spot.” (Poor pudgy Pooh got stuck in Rabbit’s front door for a week!) Not wanting to seem rude, the pastor finds it hard to break off conversation with a parishioner whose tongue is stuck in high gear. John Henry Jowett (1864–1923), whose eminence allowed him to reveal his true feelings, said pastoral visits tend to be “a tragic waste of a strong man’s time.”

A third cause of difficulty may be temperamental preference. A pastor may seem to revel in talking, since he chose preaching as his occupation. But this assumption isn’t necessarily true. Compulsion is behind the call to preach. Some preachers do love to hear themselves talk, unfortunately. But others crave solitude and time for reflection. I have heard numerous pastors say that for them visitation is the most difficult and exhausting aspect of the pastorate. Hours of conversation can be more taxing than preaching.

A yellow caution light flashes at the intersection of church duty and family needs. A too demanding congregation can indirectly hurt their pastor’s relationship with his family. He shows good sense when he draws the line on persons who demand (rather than require) an unreasonable amount of his itme. I have known preachers whose marriages ended in divorce primarily because the husband-pastor paid more attention to stray sheep than to his affection-starved wife. And if the pastor leaves fathering to mother, the children gain the impression that their father cares more for others or for his own success than for them. How to divide attention between the family and the church family can become a major area of tension. Laymen need to realize this and try to help their pastors work it out.

Some pastors decide to limit rather than eliminate visitation. Cutting back this practice may arouse protests. Jonathan Edwards “went in response to special needs, not as a routine exercise” (Ola Winslow, J. Edwards, p. 125), which lost him support. Joseph Parker, the poetic preacher of nineteenth-century London, had a similar philosophy. After serving five years at his first pastorate, he was called by Cavendish Chapel, Manchester. In his acceptance letter he made the following statement part of the official records:

As a pastor I cannot visit for the sake of visiting. At all times I am glad to obey the calls of the sick and the dying, or to guide the truth seeker; but in continuous rounds of so-called pastoral visitations I do not believe, and such cannot promise [Life of Parker, p. 55].

Few laymen would accuse doctors of cold professionalism because they do not make house calls; people realize that most ailments are not critical, most patients can come to the office, and house calls are an inefficient use of the doctor’s time. Cannot laymen also believe in the pastor’s deep interest in his people when he limits house calls and encourages office consultation?

Poll the average Protestant congregation and I wager you will find a veneration of visitation. Geoffrey Chaucer’s parson would be much to their liking:

Wide was his parish, houses far asunder,

But never did he fail, for rain or thunder,

In sickness or mischief [sin], to visit

The farthest in his parish, small and great,

Going afoot, and in his hand a stave.

The claims made for visitation are nearly as outlandish as those made in television commercials: a visit activates the sluggish, cures whole families of Sunday absenteeism, and charms away their well-established reluctance to make deep commitments.

On the positive side is the experience of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1961 the congregation numbered 17; now it is over 2,000. It has an intensive visitation program, which has worked.

Two things ought to be noted: (1) This visitation program is primarily one of lay witnessing. Each week 300 or more members go out to meet and greet people in Christ’s name and with his Gospel. (2) The callers aim at sharing the story of God’s love in Christ.

Pastors or church members who are dissatisfied with the state of pastoral visitation would do well to suggest a candid discussion of the matter. The pastor and concerned laymen could scrutinize together the demands, the dangers, and the opportunities of visitation. These are some points that might merit discussion.

1. Pastors might be able to make the time they spend in visitation more effective if they did not have to play the numbers game. The monthly visitation score sheet with a total in three figures looks impressive, but what is more important: the number of calls or what was accomplished in them? Some church boards wisely leave visitation patterns up to the pastor’s discretion.

2. A pastor may see visitation as a temptation to be diverted from his primary calling: preaching. The traditional call to the ministry and the standard ordination services emphasize the public proclamation of the Scriptures. Pastoral care is part of the call, to be sure, but a heavy stress is on the pulpit.

The house-to-house circulation of the apostles in Acts (2:46; 20:20) must be understood as formal proclamation sessions. As P. T. Forsyth wrote, “Teaching from house to house meant for the apostles not visitation, but ministering to the church gathered in private houses” (Positive Preaching, p. 59).

3. The minister may feel that vigorous visitation will give him the image of being out to further his own future. Certainly the gleam in a salesman’s eye is based more on the potential commission than on interest in the well-being of the client. It is easy for a pastor to slip into the desire to collect new members instead of being content to share the Gospel with those who won’t come to church.

4. The demands of the pastorate chew up days and nights without letup. Laymen cannot take the pastor’s place in the study, but they can help him in contacting people. The visited person may not wish to confide in a layman; he may want a trained counselor. Yet the lay visitor can break down barriers and form friendships.

Laymen sometimes regard pastoral visits as a proxy fulfillment of an obligation they don’t want themselves. They assume the preacher is paid to do this and that they don’t have to help. But laymen should pitch in and play a supportive roll.

One step in getting laymen to lend a hand is to get them to realize that they do visit, every day. Comments at work, conversations on coffee breaks, telephone calls to neighbors, and letters to friends are forms of communication. Speaking for Christ is not a task limited to the pastor; every Christian is to testify to what God means to him and what God has done for him in Christ. Bible study is a preparation; prayer is a propellant. The two together will help us to represent Christ.

Pastor and laymen can complement each other in the visitation program. Laymen may have the advantage of being more able to relate to other laymen and the disadvantage of being untrained in giving well-rounded, well-rooted presentations of the Scriptures. In many churches lay visitation is a once-a-year semi-frantic activity that veers off course. A balanced program of visitation should involve pastor and people year round.—The Reverend JOHN LEWIS GILMORE, Worland, Wyoming.

An Old-Fashioned Mystery Story

Watching the kaleidoscopic play of light and shadow along the edge of the tracks had put me in a semi-hypnotic state. The train was rushing along at full speed now after a brief stop at an obscure town.

“May I sit here?”

I roused from my trance to see a young man in full clerical garb complete with Celtic cross motioning to the seat next to me.

“Of course,” I responded.

After he was seated I turned and in my most flippant manner asked, “What do you hear from the man upstairs these days?”

“Beg pardon …”

“Oh nothing. I was just making a poor joke.”

“Oh, I see.” He chuckled. “Well, he still believes in us.”

“That must make him a minority of one,” I said sourly.

“Not really. I too believe in humanity.”

“It’s certainly a wonder. Seems to me that we’re a faithless lot and that God would be sick of us by now.”

“Yes, but he recognizes our weaknesses and how hard it is for some of us to believe.”

“You mean it really doesn’t matter to God whether or not we believe?”

“Well, of course he’d prefer for us to believe …”

“What?” I responded.

“I don’t understand.”

“What would he prefer for us to believe?”

“In him …” he said hesitantly.

“Which him? The Jews have one him, the Muslims another, and you Christians have one who says everyone has got to believe his way.”

“I think you’re interpreting us as more narrow-minded than we really are!”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” he continued. “You see, the important thing is to have faith in something. After all, no matter how different our paths we’re all heading for the same celestial benevolence.”

I was puzzling over his response when I realized the train had come to a stop. The delay seemed unnecessarily long for the size of the station.

Two men in dark suits came through the passageway into the car and stopped by our seat. One of them produced a wallet containing an identification card and emblazoned with a badge.

“I’m Lieutenant Bernardo and this is Sergeant Acquanita. May we see your identification, please?” It wasn’t really a question.

I produced my driver’s license. Lieutenant Bernardo looked from the license to me and back again several times but seemed satisfied.

My seat companion, after a moment’s fumbling, produced a wallet with documents that appeared to satisfy the sergeant.

“What are you looking for, officer?” I asked.

“We had word,” the lieutenant answered, “that a fugitive from justice was traveling on this train.”

“Heck of a clever rascal,” the sergeant added. “Seems to be able to pass himself off as almost anything. Why, he might even try to impersonate a minister,” he said with an amused smile at my companion.

“As a matter of fact, sergeant,” I broke in, “I think you’ve found your man. I can attest that this man is not a Christian minister. In the past fifteen minues I have given him every opportunity to do his job. No real minister could have failed so completely. Arrest your man!”

EUTYCHUS V

Between Magic And Religion

In your issue of September 14 are recorded the tragic deaths of two diabetics who were deprived of insulin under the mistaken idea that a faith healer had cured them (News, “Diabetic Deaths”). A good antidote to this erroneous thinking is found in Paul’s account of the thorn in his own flesh (2 Cor. 12:7–10). In answer to the Apostle’s thrice reiterated prayer the Lord did not remove that “messenger of Satan.” But neither did he answer the fervent supplication of his servant with a flat no.… Paul called on the Lord to come to his side and help or comfort him by removing the thorn in his flesh. God did answer by coming to his side and comforting him with the assurance, “My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

But in coming to Paul’s help, God did not do so in exactly the way Paul had requested. God’s reply makes clear that God himself—not Paul’s prayer, not Paul’s faith—is the Lord. Here is the great divide between magic and religion. Magic seeks to take God into man’s service and use him to carry out man’s wishes. True religion is submitting to God’s Lordship, and recognizing his privilege to answer our prayers as he sees best. It is Jesus’ word in Gethsemane, “Father, not my will but thine be done.” And it is the Apostle’s response here: “Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

WM. C. ROBINSON

Professor Emeritus

Columbia Seminary, Decatur, Ga.

Claremont, Calif.

Clarification

In a recent advertisem*nt, Robert Branch was listed as the author of So Your Wife Came Home Speaking in Tongues? So Did Mine! The name “Robert Branch” is the pseudonym and not the author’s real name.

RUBY RHOADES

Public Relations

Fleming H. Revell

Old Tappan, N. J.

Patient Sufferer

Conscience compels me to reply to the letter from Donald Hoger (Oct. 12) in which he accuses Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod president Jacob Preus of lacking love. As one who worked as assistant to Dr. Preus for eighteen months I can testify personally to his patience, forbearance, and love shown toward those whose correspondence constituted a vicious attack upon his person. It is one thing to disagree with a man’s theological stance. It is quite another to vilify him both privately and publicly. President Preus has patiently suffered far more abuse than most of us would ever tolerate.

PAUL A. ZIMMERMAN

Ann Arbor, Mich.

For Continued Assistance>

In your September 14 issue, a news report (“Tragedy in Timbuktu: Africa’s Creeping Calamity”) and an editorial (“Lord, When Did We See Thee Hungry?”) refer at length to famine in Africa, and as usual they are extremely well written. Merely as a matter of information, may I add this bit of data for your files and any possible future reference: Medical Assistance Programs has responded to this emergency need in the drought-stricken areas with massive help, including many tons of medicines valued at more than $300,000. A MAP Disaster Relief fund has been established for continued assistance here and in future emergencies.

DAVID R. ENLOW

Director of Communications

Medical Assistance Programs

Wheaton, Ill.

ERRATUM

The correct price for the Living Word Commentary is $3.95 rather than $8.50 as noted in the August 31 issue, page 31.