Page 5615 – Christianity Today (2024)

C.T.’s annual survey and evaluation.

People, their diversity of religious beliefs, styles of worship and living.

Most people are interested in other people. This survey of books published in North America from the middle of 1978 to the middle of 1979 concentrates on books that are about the people called Christians. Some of these Christians flourished long ago, but their influence remains pervasively with us, whether or not we know it. Others are still very much alive. Many are within the great tradition of orthodoxy, while others are on or outside the fringes. Some books, mentioned because they help to give perspective, are about those who follow non-Christian religions. The beliefs of people, particularly their religious beliefs, are very important and they are featured in many of the books in this survey. But also important are the ways that people worship and the manner in which they live their lives; books have been included that focus on these areas. I have not had space to mention all relevant books, and undoubtedly I missed some titles. Many thanks go to the publishers for their cooperation. Some of the books mentioned here already have had or will have fuller reviews published in our pages.

Before looking at the various topics—by time, place, or theme—into which most books readily fit, there are 10 titles to which I would like to call special attention. They are books that all theological libraries should acquire and major academic and public libraries will want them as well. Church and personal libraries can put at least some of them to good and repeated use.

Most people have become aware in recent years of a far greater number and diversity of religious denominations than they previously thought existed. While we have long had brief guides to most of the older groups that are somewhere in the Christian spectrum, we have until now lacked reasonably good information on most of the groups that arose in this century, including many that are well within the framework of historic orthodoxy as well as many that are very clearly outside it. With all the publicity about “cults” it is well to be reminded that not every unfamiliar group is bizarre and even those that are differ enormously among themselves. Henceforth, the names of Melton and Piepkorn will be associated with comprehensive descriptions of the beliefs of religious bodies in America, most of which have exact or close counterparts around the world.

The Encyclopedia of American Religions is a massive 1,200-page, two-volume work published by Consortium Books (P. O. Box 9001, Wilmington, NC 28401) and written entirely by J. Gordon Melton, a United Methodist pastor who has a Ph.D. in church history from Northwestern. He briefly presents what he has been able to learn about some 1,200 distinct groups. This excludes American Indian religions, because of their complexity, and the numerically far greater religious organizations such as magazine publishers, schools, evangelistic teams, or councils of churches that supplement the work of the primary groups. Melton finds 17 basic “families” but users are free to disagree. For example, Methodist and holiness churches are separated while Baptists and Churches of Christ are joined. Nevertheless, it is easy enough to use the index to find the group you want. Users will also find their own group is described far too briefly, complexities are smoothed out, and statements that were accurate a decade ago have not always been updated. But remember, this is the work of one person and he has been at it since the sixties. He has tried to be fair and accurate and his mistakes are not those of one who doesn’t care about detail. So far as I can tell, the book is generally accurate as far as it goes. He is particularly strong on his own Methodist family and also on spiritualists, witches, flying saucer groups, and the like.

Arthur Piepkorn died in 1973, but he had mostly completed the seven-volume work Profiles in Belief, which began to be published by Harper & Row in 1977. Unlike Melton, he includes religious bodies in Canada. Piepkorn was for many years before his death a professor of systematic theology at the Missouri Lutherans’ Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He is somewhat more theologically oriented than Melton and the greater length of his work allows him to give more historical background to the major traditions. Both men keep their own theological convictions in the background, not because they do not have any but because they realize that beliefs must be taken seriously and treated respectfully. This is something that, generally speaking, previous compilers of encyclopedias of religious bodies have not been minded to do. Piepkorn’s first volume was on Eastern and Western Catholicism and his second featured Protestant families that started before 1800 (except the Quakers). This year a third book appeared that treats the holiness movement, the Pentecostals, and various evangelical and a few other groups that emerged since 1800. For no apparent reason these are presented in two “volumes” that are separately paginated and indexed but are bound together. Three more volumes are due, one on “New Thought” groups and two on non-Christians. There are important things about a group that often Piepkorn doesn’t tell, such as whether the membership is black, white, or mixed. A sociologist would certainly have written a different kind of encyclopedia than either Melton or Piepkorn, and maybe one should. But in the meantime these two mammoth works are available to compare with each other, to answer questions put to them by journalists, scholars, pastors, parents, rival evangelists, and a host of others who want to know approximately what a certain group is teaching, when it began, about how many members it has or at least claims, and sometimes the part of the continent where they are concentrated.

The Westminster Dictionary of Worship, edited by J. G. Davies (Westminster), was first published in Britain a few years ago and most of the contributors are British. Nevertheless, the volume is of international value. For active members of the traditional liturgical churches, much of the information is elementary, although even for them it can be helpful to have a convenient account of the historical origins of various customs and objects. Of course, for persons outside such churches this work will be of even more value in supplying authoritative, brief descriptions of candles, canonical hours, chalices, and the like. What is especially commendable is that worship is not understood solely in “high church” forms. Pentecostals, Plymouth Brethren, and many other groups have entries describing their worship and also their practices with regard to such acts as baptism. There are also articles summarizing worship in the other major religions. Since most related reference works focus on doctrines, it is especially good to have this volume on the practices of worship throughout Christendom.

Also from Britain a related book, The Study of Liturgy, edited by Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold (Oxford), is different in key respects. Brief references are made to Protestant practices, but the focus is on Anglicanism and Catholicism. Instead of alphabetical entries there are some 60 articles of a few pages each. They are normally in historical order tracing liturgical development generally and then in detail for baptism, eucharist, ordination, the divine office, and the church year. This is intended finally as a book to launch serious study, with copious references to literature for further research. It will not be used as widely as the Westminster Dictionary of Worship, but it will be used far more intensively.

Perhaps the most inviting book just to sit down and read through among these initial 10 titles is Christianity in European History by William Clebsch (Oxford). In his preface, the author best explains what he is up to: “This book, then, ungrudgingly departs from the style of history that tries to tell something about as many important people and happenings as possible. Instead, it tells a good deal about the few people and happenings that best exemplify the various ways that European humanity has expressed itself through the forms and patterns of the Christian religion. Instead of bemoaning selectivity as a grim necessity, the book turns selectivity into a cheery virtue. Only by so doing can one write a little book of history about a big subject of history.… Beginners and experts alike can broaden their perspectives on life by imagining themselves sharing the circ*mstances and the humanity, the hopes and the fears, of the wide range of Christian experiences and styles of life here narrated.” If you have been turned off from reading histories that seemed too much like telephone directories, try Clebsch. We need more competent historians who are willing to venture forth in this way. Leave to dictionaries and encyclopedias the attempt to mention everything; write history as a story.

Speaking of such works, be sure to look for the brand new three-volume Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion published by Corpus (P.O. Box 875, Palatine, IL 60067). There are some 25,000 articles in its nearly 4,000 pages. Since Catholics sponsored it, they are the focus of the work, but there are non-Catholics among the contributors. The nonpolemical tone will make this a widely usable tool for quick reference.

Another book that ranges selectively throughout the centuries of Christianity is Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (Simon and Schuster). There are 15 essays, mostly by women college and seminary professors, on a range of topics such as women in early Christian communities, women in the holiness movement, liberated nuns throughout American history, and the struggle for priesthood in Episcopal and Catholic churches. This book also represents many others that are concerned with one of the less studied aspects of Christian history.

The third volume of Jaroslav Pelikan’s projected five-volume history of the development of doctrine appeared last year as The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (University of Chicago). Pelikan uses only 300 pages to provide a masterful, readable summary based upon years of careful study in the primary sources. Those who already appreciate medieval theology will of course welcome this volume. Those who think that nothing good happened between Augustine and Luther especially need to read it. One does not have to come away convinced that those theologians were right in order to applaud their effort to understand the teaching of the Scriptures in the context of the age in which they lived. We may have good reason to feel that they let culture have too much influence in shaping their theology, but then we must ask if future generations will view us similarly.

Leapfrogging from the Middle Ages to more recent times brings us to The Gospel in America: Themes in the Story of America’s Evangelicals by John Woodbridge, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch (Zondervan). There is no better historical overview of the bewildering variety in evangelicalism. The movement’s tangled roots, tempestuous quarrels, and contemporary challenges are ably sketched. The three authors, young evangelicals teaching respectively at Trinity, Wheaton, and Notre Dame, do not try to mention everything, so the book is not a complete survey. But for that reason it is much more readable and the various themes that they have written on, such as the role of the Bible and of revivalism, are important ones. They mix theological evaluations in with their historical reporting somewhat more than modern writers tend to do, but that will not offend a large part of their intended audience. They have written this book very much on the college and adult study group level; knowledge of church history and theological terminology is not presumed. The book can also serve as an introduction to outsiders who want to know more about this “born again” movement that is in the news.

Besides the study of women and of evangelicals, another comparatively new trend is books about blacks. The section below on Africa mentions many notable works and this is matched by studies of Afro-Americans. The most comprehensive of these is Black Religions in the New World by George Eaton Simpson (Columbia). It is the product of more than 40 years of research and field work throughout the hemisphere. Simpson tells of black religions in Middle and South America with obvious African ties, of blacks who joined the historic denominations that had begun among Europeans, and of the numerous exclusively black movements originating on this side of the Atlantic. He summarizes what has been learned for those who want to know a little, while his full documentation and bibliography direct the researcher to further sources.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

Can the WCC get on course?

WCC thinking is a revolutionary doctrine indistinguishable from current Marxist concepts.

Between Amsterdam 1948 and Nairobi 1975 the World Council of Churches has shown an increasing interest in the problems and demands of the Third World. In [doing so, it] has moved from a largely Western concept of political responsibility to a more radical ideology that by 1975 embraced the concept and practice of “liberation theology.”

In its early years the WCC advocated creating “the responsible society” by peaceful, democratic, and constitutional means. Gradually this gave way to a qualified approval of violent and revolutionary change in the Third World, and in several cases even support for terrorist groups. Western political norms were replaced, at least in part, by an ideology that laid the chief blame for the ills of the Third World on the sins of the West, particularly the United States—its foreign policy and its transnational corporations. At the 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society, WCC thinking on “rapid social change” was transformed into a revolutionary doctrine that became most dramatically evident in the Program to Combat Racism.

In diagnosis and prescription, the WCC’s liberation theology is strikingly similar to current Marxist concepts. The positions the WCC has taken in some controversial situations have been indistinguishable from those taken in Moscow or Havana. The most dramatic example is the “humanitarian” grants to the two Marxist-led guerrilla groups in the latter part of 1978: $85,000 to the so-called Patriotic Front, which was seeking to shoot its way into power in Rhodesia, and $125,000 to SWAPO, which was fighting toward the same objective in South West Africa—both against interim interracial regimes. There were three reasons for this concurrence in the perspectives of the WCC and the Marxists: (1) The WCC’s almost obsessive concern with “white racism” tended to blind it to all other factors in the situation. (2) The WCC leaders tended to find Marxist “solutions” to racism more convincing than peaceful, constitutional, and democratic approaches. (3) WCC leaders persisted in seeing a radically changed racial-political situation in obsolete and nonfactual terms. Hence, the Rhodesian and South West African cases in 1978 are full of irony: the issue was no longer race or racism but rather how power was to be transferred and what policies the new majority regime was likely to pursue. In the real world the net effect of these WCC grants was to support guerrillas who sought to install by terror a minority authoritarian regime against the parties that were vying for power by democratic and constitutional means.

Another point of concurrence between the WCC and the Marxists was Vietnam. The WCC’s (1966) Geneva Conference said U.S. military action to defend South Vietnam against aggression from the North “cannot be justified” but was only mildly critical of that aggression itself, which it called “the military infiltration of the South by the North.”

The concurrence of the WCC and the Marxists on certain Third World issues does not mean that the WCC leaders were Marxists. It does suggest, however, that these leaders found Marxist analyses of the cause and cure of such problems more convincing than the more gradual, democratic, and peaceful approaches. One reason for this is the dogged determination of many religious leaders in an increasingly secular society to seek to recapture moral authority, if not headlines, by running with the radical-chic pack—which usually takes its cue from the hard Left on political issues. Trendy clergymen and laymen are often engaged in a thinly disguised rivalry with secular revolutionaries for “relevance.”

The Jamaica meeting of the Central Committee in January 1979 makes it clear that the concept and practice of liberation theology has prevailed in the inner circles of the Council. But the debate before, during, and after this meeting shows that the issue is far from settled. For years there has been a growing backlash against the radicalization of the WCC. This has been expressed in verbal protest and also in the withholding of contributions not only to the WCC’s social-action efforts but to the ecumenical movement in general.

The wellspring of WCC radicalism may be the Geneva headquarters staff [one of whom] reportedly said WCC officials admit that the staff are “nearly all socialists.” This does suggest a strong influence of Marxist thought at the core.

The double standard sometimes found in WCC pronouncements on repression or human rights suggests an apologetic posture toward, if not an affinity for, socialist and Marxist rather than democratic and nonsocialist regimes in the Third World. In the last decade or so, WCC spokesmen have often protested alleged violations of human and political rights in the Western democracies and allied nations, while remaining strangely silent about more grievous violations in Marxist states or in Third World countries that embrace, at least in part, the Marxist model.

The ambiguity toward Marxism—a mixture of infatuation and fear—that characterizes the Third World ideology is evident in both secular and Christian circles in the West. This ambiguity stems from a profound confusion between ends and means—the ends of justice, freedom, order, and plenty and the appropriate means for achieving these goals, or at least moving toward them. The Marxists have a clear-cut diagnosis and simple answers. They play upon Western feelings of guilt. These feelings are especially strong among upper-middle-class intellectuals and idealists—and it is mainly persons of this sort who founded and still shape the WCC.

Christianity offers no simple cure for poverty, injustice, or lack of freedom. And so Christians who are rightly concerned about the world’s ills are often confused about how to mitigate them. Many Western Christians, feeling guilty that they are rich while most of the rest of the world is poor, are prone to exaggerate the sins of their own society and play down the great evils of the Marxist solution. Looking at the vast problems in the Third World, they are sometimes beguiled by the totalitarian temptation—the acceptance of a temporary tyranny to impose order and justice on poor, confused, and often unwilling people. The democratic and peaceful way seems too slow, undramatic, and unfashionable.

The churches as churches should take no sides in armed power struggles in Rhodesia or elsewhere. Governments and Christians as citizens should support what they believe to be right or in their interests. If the WCC insists on supporting terrorists over an interracial coalition seeking power by peaceful means, it should not do so in the name of humanitarian aid. That is a sham. Refugees on both sides of the Rhodesian border needed help, and any aid to the political force on either side would enable it to divert more resources to the fighting. Further, the WCC had no way of ascertaining how the guerrillas would use the funds, and it made no provision for monitoring their use. Nor did it channel the grant through a respected impartial agency like the International Red Cross—because, according to one WCC official, this would have implied that the WCC did not trust the guerrillas.

The WCC’s Central Committee should have been honest with itself, its member churches, and the world by invoking the Christian concept of the just war to explain the moral basis of its grants. In fact, that was precisely what it was doing, but it lacked the courage or candor to say so. Had it done so it would have undercut the charges of hypocrisy and double-talk and earned respect for an honest explanation of its direct involvement in a political power struggle. But it would also have faced the herculean task of documenting what made revolutionary terrorism just.

There are several measures that would help the WCC and its constituent denominations make a more responsible political witness in our troubled world:

1. The WCC should ponder deeply the long theological and ethical heritage of its Protestant and Orthodox member churches—a heritage that draws upon the Old Testament prophets, the teachings of Jesus, and the writings of the great theologians down to the modern interpreters of this tradition. The rich body of Christian social teaching needs to be studied, refined, and updated. In “leapfrogging from one problem to another,” says Paul Ramsey, the WCC has been escaping the difficult task of rebuilding a “disintegrated” social ethic. Among other things, this rebuilding would mean a renewed emphasis on the Faith and Order mission of the WCC and a more vigorous dialogue between the Faith and Order movement and the Church and Society movement.

2. The churches have frequently acted with superficial knowledge and with little understanding of either political theory or the dynamics of social structures. Ecumenical leaders should make fuller use of the research and analysis of social, political, and economic issues generated by universities and public-policy research centers.

This information not only would be vastly more trustworthy than the ideological slogans of the extreme left or right, but it would help to distinguish what should be preserved, what should be improved, and the best means of accomplishing the desired objectives. Churches cannot be and should not strive to be competent in scores of complex economic and political issues that only specialists and large agencies are capable of handling. Their realm of competence is moral judgment.

3. The WCC should develop a clearer understanding of the different but complementary functions of church, state, and citizen. The church is the conscience not only of the state but of society as a whole. Hence the church can speak to the contemporary situation by making broad moral judgments but not by giving specific advice better left to individual Christians and other citizens working in these institutions.

4. The WCC should use more fully the rich diversity of traditions and gifts within its ranks. The Geneva staff has suffered from too much ideological hom*ogeneity. Church and Society activities, including the Program to Combat Racism, have been run largely by a self-perpetuating elite who have been heavily influenced by the radical liberation approach to the Third World. There has been some diversity, but far too little. An effort should be made to recruit a headquarters staff more varied in theological, ethical, and political outlook. The social-action establishment has often been more eager to talk to Marxists than to conservative evangelical Christians. This is a sad irony. Also largely excluded from inner WCC circles are persons who have special knowledge or skills on matters with which the WCC is occupied but whose ideology deviates too far from the current ecumenical fashion.

5. One way of increasing the diversity of the WCC in the Church and Society area is for the Council and its constituent churches to become more democratic, more reflective of the millions of Christians they represent. Most Protestants believe in the “priesthood of all believers,” which means that clergy and laymen have equal responsibility for the Christian mission. If politicians benefit from consulting the man in the street, ecumenical leaders would likewise benefit from consulting the man in the pew. Politicians, unlike intellectuals, cannot afford to be elitists.

The problem is complicated by an organizational fact. Cynthia Wedel, one of the WCC presidents, laments that “half the member churches cannot be represented even in the Central Committee, and many who represent their churches on commissions and committees have no direct access to the decision-making bodies of their own churches.” This problem would not be so serious if the Geneva staff and the laymen in the pew were guided by the same ethical norms and committed to the same causes, but, as CHRISTIANITY TODAY pointed out, if they are “marching to different drummers, the elite can take up a position that, if not arrogant, is highly condescending.”

6. The primary obligation of the WCC in the political realm is to speak to its member churches, not for them. Council and denominational leaders should seek to clarify political and social issues in the light of the Christian ethic and to motivate individuals to be responsible citizens. This is by far the most important task. WCC pronouncements should be more like papal encyclicals, which instruct the faithful in basic moral precepts and relate those precepts to current realities. There are situations of grave danger or great opportunity when the Council may appropriately address pronouncements to secular authorities or other agencies, but these statements should focus on moral judgment rather than on specific policy or tactical advice. In the name of all that Christianity stands for, the churches should raise their voices against genocide, the refusal of a government to permit impartial humanitarian aid to civilian victims of war or natural disaster, and other cases of gross inhumanity.

7. The WCC should not presume to speak for the churches, much less for their millions of members. The Council has neither a theological nor an institutional justification for claiming to represent Christians from 100 countries. Perhaps this confusion over whom the WCC represents is not really that serious, because there is little evidence that church pronouncements either instruct or influence statesmen. After all, morally concerned statesmen who from childhood have been instructed by Christian ethics are wise enough to reject foolish advice from the churches precisely because of their loyalty to what the churches fundamentally stand for. Christian men and women in positions of political responsibility are in a far better position to relate the Christian ethic to the perplexing and sometimes tragic realm of political necessity than are professional churchmen, because the statesmen have been disciplined by a deeper sense of history and chastened in the crucible of responsibility.

8. The churches should make the fundamental distinction between a condition and a problem. The vast majority of regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are weak, fragile, and poor and are run by authoritarian elites. The range of political and economic choice is very narrow, but great expectations are engendered in these countries by their envy of the West’s wealth and power. Ever present is the totalitarian temptation, which seems to offer a short cut to control, modernization, and plenty.

In all Third World Countries expectations far outpace the available material and human resources. This is the condition of the Third World. A condition in this sense cannot be changed; it must be faced and endured. Perhaps over time a condition will alter and yield some problems that can be at least mitigated, if not solved. This tragic Third World situation is a mirror, perhaps a distorted mirror, of the human situation.

The utopian Marxists and theologians sympathetic to them both have a naive and stereotyped view of the Third World. They look upon it as malleable, subject to external manipulation, responsive to quick reform or revolutionary transformation. The liberationists of the West have selected Third World spokesmen who share their romantic vision. Utopians of all stripes refuse to accept the intractable realities of the Third World.

The course of wisdom and moral responsibility for the WCC would be to encourage the peaceful and lawful forces that are trying to deal constructively with the problems of poverty, injustice, and lack of freedom. There have been, of course, situations so rigid or dangerous that armed violence was the only responsible option. The strike against Pearl Harbor and North Korea’s invasion across the thirty-eighth parallel in 1950 were situations that justified a violent response. Most crises are more ambiguous.

WCC leaders should develop a deeper appreciation for the tenacity of the political, economic, and ethnic problems in the Third World. Only then will the Council’s words and deeds speak to the real condition of concerned citizens and statesmen in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who are trying to make a better life. We would all do well to recall the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer, “God, grant me the courage to change what can be changed, the patience to accept what cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

The few churches are alive and well and more accessible.

One man’s impressions of its Christians and their churches.

Twenty-five years of study and even occasional writing about Siberia had not prepared me for the reality. At New Year there was less snow in Irkutsk than in England. The majestic Angara river, the only outlet from the huge Lake Baikal, never freezes as it sweeps through Irkutsk. Neither does the hospitality of the people, which becomes warmer as you go east. The immense distances shrivelled on the last day when I travelled from a hotel in Irkutsk, four-fifths of the way across Asia to the Pacific, to my bed in Kent, England, between sunrise and midnight (with, of course, a time difference of seven hours).

Siberia. The word strikes terror, bringing with it associations of exile and death. But Siberia is also a land of opportunity and it has areas of great natural beauty interspersed among the expanses of the taiga, the evergreen-forested plain.

Although I found time to see Lake Baikal and other wonders of nature, people were at the heart of this visit, as they have been on other journeys to the Soviet Union. Intourist provided a major surprise in Siberia, for never before in my experience has a meeting with a priest been included as part of an excursion. We were but an ordinary tourist group with no religious affiliation; yet our charming Intourist guide, a Ukrainian now living in Siberia, not only took us into two active Orthodox churches, she even prearranged with the priest of the church in the little village of Listvyanka on the shore of Lake Baikal to welcome us and open the church of St. Nicholas.

Father Andronik greeted us warmly at the door of his church under a cloudless sky, with the village behind him sparkling in the piercing clarity of the atmosphere—an enormous contrast to the industrial pollution of Irkutsk, 50 miles away. Our guide invited us to put questions to the priest and asked me to interpret. Father Andronik is 29, recently ordained a monk. He began a career in engineering, eventually combining it with study by correspondence for a theological degree.

One of our group, who had visited the Russian monastery on Mount Athos, asked about the significance of the new policy of the Soviet regime that allows a limited emigration there. Fr. Andronik said he knew personally some of the 25 who had already gone and said these were to be followed soon by another 15. Would he like to be one of them, we queried. Although he did not say, he was enthusiastic about his priesthood. It has taken him first of all to the only Orthodox church in Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Republic, where he worked “as though a missionary” among the Buddhists in their main stronghold in the Soviet Union.

I could scarcely believe my ears: I was hearing all this from a young monk, in the context of an Intourist tour, though the official line for decades has been that religion was dying out and no longer played any significant role in the country at large.

The other official visit was to the Znamensky (“Sign”) Convent. The convent has long since lost its nuns, but has become the cathedral, replacing the beautiful church in the city center a mile away. The latter is now empty, except for a workman or two engaged in the huge task of restoring the interior. But the Znamensky Convent was a hive of activity, even in the middle of the afternoon on a working day, two hours before the start of the daily service. There must have been 50 old women there, absorbed in buying candles, praying, and crossing themselves. This was insignificant, however, compared with the service of daily liturgy two days later on a Friday morning. There was a half-full church at eight, with at least 15 schoolchildren present—not a single one looking as if he had come for any other reason than to pray.

Although unannounced, I was received with the warmest hospitality by Bishop Serapion, who lives within the cathedral compound. The Anglican Bishop of the Arctic does not have so daunting a task as that which faces the Bishop of Irkutsk. He may have the largest diocese in the world: 29 open churches scattered over an area larger than the whole of Europe, east and west. His jurisdiction encompasses the whole Pacific coast, from the Bering Strait, 3,000 miles northeast, and Vladivostok in the southeast, to the Krasnoyarsk Region, 600 miles northwest.

The minute number of open churches reflects the region: except for Antarctica and Alaska, it is the most sparsely populated in the world; it also bears a legacy of persecution suffered under Stalin and Khrushchev. Memory of one of the victims is still fresh in the minds of tens of thousands of local people. He was Archbishop Veniamin of Irkutsk, one of the most loved and respected of all postwar leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, a man prepared to face the authorities head-on and suffer the consequences when the rights of believers were being infringed. In 1961 he was brought to court on the absurd charge of acquiring heating oil for his cathedral illegally. That there was no other charge virtually proved this man’s complete integrity. Somehow he survived this and succeeding years of intense pressure at his post before he was removed in 1973—probably by political maneuver—three years before his death.

Following this man of heroic faith, Bishop Serapion, who came from Moscow, cannot have found life easy, either practically or spiritually. Yet he told me he had consecrated new churches in no less than four towns in the far east last year, including the important centers of Sovetskaya Gavan and Komsomolsk-na-Amure.

The central square of Irkutsk contains the only Gothic building in Siberia, a Roman Catholic cathedral erected by Polish exiles in the nineteenth century. It is now a “concert hall,” boasting a fine organ, but there are no signs of a Catholic congregation here or anywhere else. As though to compensate for the loss of one Christian minority, however, others have emerged and show signs of vigorous life.

There are two registered Protestant congregations: one Baptist and one Lutheran; the latter is not even found in Moscow or Leningrad. I could not find the Lutherans, as the only map and information I possessed were inadequate. Perhaps Intourist will eventually provide the traveller with all he needs for his varied travels and will not consider such aid against the interests of the state. Persistence, however, did lead me on the very first morning to the Baptist church, a green, newly-painted wooden building in a suburb on the other side of the Angara from the town center. On a Wednesday morning, the building was shuttered and barred. There was not even a notice positively identifying it as a church; it could have been a large, private house. But several people had been helpful in pointing out the way, thus it was evidently known in the area. The caretaker eventually came, and she told me there would be a service in the evening.

I returned at six, happy to miss my evening meal for the opportunity to worship with this isolated group of people. The service followed the usual Soviet Baptist pattern of hymns, prayers, and sermons in sequence; it lasted an hour and 40 minutes. Pastor Yevgeni Raevsky, the Senior Presbyter of Eastern Siberia, was in charge, assisted by a group of five younger men. There were 14 in the choir, 10–7 girls and 3 boys—in their teens or early twenties.

There were about 40 people in the Wednesday congregation; undoubtedly on a Sunday the church would have been crowded beyond its capacity of a hundred or so. After the service I was caught in a conflict I had experienced before. While the congregation crowded around, wanting me to talk, the pastor had issued instructions to one of his deacons to bring me immediately into the vestry. To my chagrin, after a brief formal conversation, the pastor called for a taxi to take me back to the hotel. I protested that I wanted to stay and talk to people, whereupon one of the younger assistants interceded for me and I was allowed to remain, and this proved to be one of the highlights of my entire visit. I found this was a young people’s prayer meeting, with 22 young people, divided evenly between male and female, crowded into the vestry. The prayers were fervent and uninterrupted, lasting for an hour. Six of the youths took turns reading a few sentences from the Bible, reflecting, and then leading the group in open prayer. They emphasized support for the “suffering” and “those in difficult circ*mstances in the Red Army” (military service is compulsory).

Such a meeting is still illegal, according to the strict letter of the law. But the registered churches have recently followed the lead of those that are unregistered in organizing special activities for their young people, and they have gained a new following in so doing. It was wonderful to see Bibles in the hands of six or seven of those present, a sign of an improving situation. If every tourist would take in only the one Russian Bible that Soviet authorities usually allow (there was a legal import for the first time last year of 25,000 Bibles), that situation could be slowly but steadily improved even further. Sadly, the majority of tourists are afraid to do this, or they are unaware of the help they might bring.

I left Siberia and the burgeoning faith of its young for Mongolia with its religious void. It may be one of the few countries in the world without a single Christian; but that is another story.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

The possibilities demand creative dedication and support.

Hardly a week goes by without some newspaper or press service reporting about pending court cases on religion in the public schools. Michigan, North Dakota, Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado: all have been in the news over this issue. The list is not exhaustive.

Pollsters know that among young people, interest in religion has increased noticeably in the last five years. And that interest often begins in high school, where the legal battles—even 16 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision on prayer and Bible reading—continue to be fought.

Is it legal to teach the Bible in public schools? If so, how? Is it actually being done? What is the latest legal opinion on the subject? Should evangelicals get involved in the fray? Dare we leave it to the secularists? To answer these and other questions at the start of a new school year, CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor at large Cheryl Forbes interviewed Jon T. Barton, a former English teacher at Santa Monica High School, an evangelical, a curriculum consultant in “religion studies,” and an expert witness in the most important legal case on Bible teaching in the public schools in 16 years, the Chattanooga case. Schools on Fire, which he wrote with lawyer John Whitehead, is to be published this fall by Tyndale. To evangelicals, the study of the Bible in the classroom is one of the most important issues in public education today. (Of greater importance to many are questions of the moral influence of teachers on students in lower grades and the impact made by doctrinal theories propounded by teachers in upper grades.) In the following edited version of the interview transcript, we present both information and, we hope, a vision for what Christians can do to turn around the public school system.

Question: What is the state of religion studies in the public schools?

Answer: There is great interest by students, but hesitancy among teachers and school boards about what is legal. In 1963 the Supreme Court simultaneously handed down two decisions: the Murray and Schempp cases. Those decisions took devotional Bible reading and prayer out of our public schools. I stress the word “devotional.” But the majority opinion, written by Justice Tom Clark, said that “it certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion when presented objectively as a part of a secular program of education may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

Justice Brennan in agreeing with Clark added that to ignore the Holy Scriptures would be to ignore one of the major elements that helped shape our history and culture.

So although the Supreme Court has not given educators any guidelines on how to do it, it has said the Bible can be taught. For 16 years now we have had a problem: people think that the Bible was eliminated from the curriculum of our public schools. That is not so.

Q: Are there state laws that govern the teaching of religion?

A: It is legal everywhere to teach the Bible. The question is not, Can we? but, How can we? Therefore, some states have given guidelines. Ten years after Schempp, in 1973, California became the first state to enact legislation allowing the academic study of religion in the public schools. Shortly after that, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Vermont enacted comparable legislation. Michigan specifically outlined the qualifications people need to teach religion. California merely listed five criteria for a course: need for factual accuracy, need for empathy, no oversimplication, sensitivity, and avoidance of ridicule and prejudice. Also, a teacher in California is encouraged to take 36 semester hours of upper-level religion courses from a nonsectarian college. That is in addition to the semester hours he needs for certification—courses in education and in his major (English, history, social studies). These requirements demand a lot. However, I can say from my experience that if a Christian teacher is committed to seeing the Bible used fruitfully in the public schools, he can find ways to do it. And the rewards are enormous.

Q: Can you explain the distinction between sectarian and nonsectarian schools?

A: No state has ever said what a nonsectarian school is. No one really knows, because the Supreme Court has not defined religion. When I wanted to take courses at Harvard Divinity School I called the state department of education to see if they would accept that work. They asked me only one question: Does the school have required chapel? You can see from this how vague the whole area is. The courses a teacher needs are almost invariably taught only at a church-related college. But such a setting might be considered.

Q: What should a person do, then?

A: He should call the appropriate agency (the state department of education, perhaps) and say, “I want to go to ________college. Will their courses be acceptable to you?”

Q: Is it true that religion studies and theological studies are different?

A: Yes. The courses teachers need must be objective—“secular” in nature, if you will. Unfortunately, too many people think that an evangelical can’t be objective. They think that because you’re committed, you can’t be open-minded.

Q: Is it possible to define the word “objective” legally? And isn’t there a problem with the school board’s underlying assumption that evangelicals are not objective while nonevangelicals are objective?

A: Yes. But I think an evangelical can teach a Bible course without violating either his beliefs or the law. When I started a Bible literature class in Santa Monica High School, I was also an assistant pastor of a local church. But the school board had certified me as academically objective by having already appointed me to teach English. So I found no real problems.

Q: Is the lack of a legal definition of “objectivity,” then, a key to three issues: where you study, what you study, and what you teach?

A: Yes, so you end up with a de facto definition, and the burden of proof is on the teacher. The person to convince of your objectivity is the principal.

Q: How would you convince him of the objectivity of a proposed elective in Bible literature?

A: In the course outline you present, you should emphasize the primary sources—the biblical books. It’s the secondary materials that label us—the books and articles that concentrate on theological interpretation.

Q: Is it possible to study a subject only from primary sources?

A: I only mean to “emphasize” the primary sources. In a Bible literature class, for instance, you should spend most of the time reading the Bible. Basically, let the text speak for itself. When interpretation is called for, simply apply the common rules of literary criticism. Leland Ryken’s The Literature of the Bible (Zondervan) is an excellent example of how to do this.

Q: Let’s get back to the question of progress since 1963. You say people haven’t realized the extent of what could be taught in the public schools. But couldn’t it also be that evangelicals have been unwilling to go along with such legal requirements as neutrality?

A: Well, that’s surely part of the problem. A recent survey found that 16 years after Schempp many schools were still not strictly adhering to constitutional guidelines in teaching Bible literature. Now, it’s true that the Bible is a religious book, but it is not only a religious book. It has its literary side, too.

Q: There are a lot of people willing to teach the Bible from a secular perspective. Why should evangelicals do it?

A: Because evangelicals should not forfeit the teaching of the Bible.

Q: But may it not be too great a compromise to teach Scripture from a perspective that is not devotional or evangelistic?

A: To abandon the field to secularists is a grave mistake. The Bible will speak for itself if we read it. Suppose we have to do this in a literary way. It’s still the Bible, and God can still speak through it. Students will be affected.

Q: Doesn’t this approach ignore the purpose of the Bible?

A: But if you don’t teach the Bible as a source book for culture you’re cutting off students from centuries of art, music, and literature. I think Christians teaching in the public school are similar to the early Christians who had to conduct themselves wisely in the face of sharp antagonism and the tendency of others to misconstrue their motives.

Q: How did your students respond?

A: Some were totally unconcerned with the things I was trying to get at. But there were others who were interested. I had students return after graduating from high school to tell me they had become Christians, partly through those classes. Who knows what makes a person ripe to accept Christ? Why not a class in Bible literature?

Q: What kind of students take the class?

A: Christians and non-Christians. Bright students and average ones. Although I never asked, most students in the course of the semester would tell me what they believed. Eventually, my course grew to three sections per semester and one or two during the summer. Our first time around we signed up 86 students; the principal had been afraid we wouldn’t get 15.

Q: What kind of course was it? How should you teach the Bible?

A: My course was called “The Bible as Literature.” There are two basic approaches: the Bible as literature, and the Bible in literature. The Bible as literature takes the Bible as its primary source—studying it for its historical content, names, places, people, and events—which presupposes that the teacher has a good background in the Bible and such related fields as archeology. Or you could study Psalms as poetry, or Esther as having the ingredients of a short story, and so forth. The Bible in literature is not used as often. I think it should be the more frequent approach. Literature becomes primary, the constant among the variables. You read certain works of literature in light of their biblical allusions. Because I could point to other schools teaching the Bible as literature, I decided to call my course by that name. It’s important to have a precedent. Really my class should have been called, “The Bible and Literature,” because both approaches were used.

Q: What textbooks are available?

A: Perhaps the most widely used is The Bible Reader. It is the result of an interfaith cooperative effort by a rabbi, a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, and a humanities professor. It selects and abridges important passages of the Bible and highlights them with historical, linguistic, and cultural information.

Then there is The Bible As/In Literature, coedited by Ackerman and Warshaw, two pioneers in the field. They give key stories, poems, or excerpts from novels. For example, the biblical account of creation precedes a reading of James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “The Creation.” The editors developed the book from courses they had taught. It successfully combines both the “as” and “in” literature approaches.

Q: What about religion studies? I thought most public schools just taught Bible literature.

A: Some schools offer electives on world religions, which are known by three names—comparative religion, history of religion, or religion in history. Bible literature comes under the broad category of religion studies. And notice I said “religion,” not “religious.” That’s an important distinction. “Religion” is a noun, a name; “religious” is an adjective that implies an attitude. “Values” courses, known variously as values, values clarification, moral and ethical values, affective values, also come under religion studies.

Q: Tell me about the Chattanooga case.

A: That is the most significant legal opinion since Schempp. The Chattanooga case is in some ways, though, unlike any other Bible literature approach.

The program began in 1922. An outside group, the Bible Study Committee, selected its own director of the program, and he screened all the teachers. Then those teachers developed a curriculum that they took to the Chattanooga city schools and the Hamilton County schools. The committee provided teachers and materials at no cost to the schools.

When Schempp passed in 1963 a knife was driven into this kind of program. Many schools discontinued it, though there were exceptions, such as the Dallas Bible plan, which has never come under legal scrutiny because it is a release time program.

But Chattanooga was different. The legal suit brought against the city for using the program raised a couple of serious questions. One was whether there had indeed been a significant curriculum change since the Schempp decision of 1963. I was hired to help rewrite the program’s curriculum before the case went into court. (The judge made it clear that if there had been no new curriculum, the city would have had no defense at all.)

Q: What was the court’s decision?

A: First, the Bible Study Committee had to forfeit any connection to the school board. The final authority of who should be hired and what the curriculum should be must rest with the school boards. Since something on the order of a quarter of a million dollars has been raised a year, mostly by evangelicals, to underwrite the program, some people now are wondering whether to continue financial support. How do we know, they ask, if the curriculum will be what I can accept?

A second question raised in court: Is the intent of the program to propagate a religious viewpoint specifically an evangelical one? Or does it rather help to create a greater appreciation of the literary and historical qualities of the Bible? To make sure the latter course was taken, the court wanted uniform, minimum standards for selecting the employing teachers. Most states have no such legislation. This decision could not set a precedent. And the judge required minor changes in the elementary curriculum.

Q: What does the Chattanooga case do for Bible literature programs throughout the country?

A: First, it reaffirms that the Bible can be taught at all grade levels in the public schools. This is a much broader base than educators have generally thought since Schempp. Moreover, the judge said that to ignore the Bible would be to “ignore a keystone in the building of an arch.” And second, the Bible may be taught independently from other sacred literatures. I had been asked in court whether a Bible literature class can be objective if no other sacred literature is taught along with it. That, say some opponents, violates the principle of pluralism. Yet, the court clearly said that the Bible can stand alone in the curriculum.

The key to the Chattanooga case rests with the response of the Christian community. They must continue to pray for and financially support the Bible study program despite relinquishing control over it. Christians need to trust that if God can raise up believers to teach the Bible academically in the public schools, he can also see to it that the right people are going to be placed in positions of authority to administer the program that is cause in itself to continue giving support. Proposition 13 overnight knocked the supports out from under the traditional approach to school funding. Within 22 days of its passage, 33 states began a comparable approach to tax revolt. Every state is now dealing with some kind of tax limitation question. Few school districts have passed a bond issue—the bread and butter of school finance—for the last five years.

Property taxes traditionally finance four people-related services: fire, police, welfare, and education. Since people are losing confidence in welfare, support for it will be restricted. But people will not settle for severe cutbacks in fire and police. That leaves education. Many school districts will no longer have the money for certain programs. For example, in my school, all guidance counselors for the coming year have been eliminated. Some states have emergency funds available, but they won’t last long. Only Texas has a reserve of any consequence.

Q: Will religion studies programs suffer?

A: It’s possible. But the interest among teachers and students for those electives is high. That’s a plus. Also, outside groups could raise the money to provide a Bible study program that a public school board would run. I don’t know that every school district would respond the way Chattanooga did, but it’s one solution: the public raises money, the schools administer programs. If the Chattanooga decision holds up, then people in communities throughout the country could purchase materials and even provide money for a teacher’s salary for a Bible literature program.

Q: Is that really practical?

A: It’s at least possible. But Christians and Christian groups should consider it. It would be the single biggest opportunity within the framework of the law to see a turnaround in our public schools.

Q: Let’s back off and look at the big picture. How hopeful are you that evangelical teachers in public schools can do something worthwhile?

A: Many of us have made the mistake of thinking we can’t do much to teach about the Bible, or moral values, or the Judeo-Christian heritage. I think we should resist the temptation to throw up our hands in despair. Instead we should explore the opportunities God gives us—and there are lots of them.

He would have spared the 10,000 of Sodom and Gomorrah if as few as 10 had been “righteous.” That’s a striking ratio—1000 to 1. What would happen if we began to see our mission in the public schools this way? Under God, a single believer might play a part in the salvation of one thousand others.

Jesus told his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth.” Christian teachers in public schools are the salt, the preservative. And the Bible, appropriately taught, can be part of the savor.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

It has majored in politics—to the detriment of missions, evangelism, and its own theology division.

Back in the inquisitorial 1950s, Senator Margaret Chase Smith commented that freedom of speech had been so abused by some that it was not exercised by others. A case can be ruined equally by silence and by overstatement. Thus the World Council of Churches has reason to be grateful to the more outrageous of its critics who in the past have, as it were, debased the coinage by unruly demonstrations and scurrilous articles. From this developed the unlovely conciliar tendency to dismiss as fanatical and contentious those who opposed “the ecumenical movement” (deft propaganda having made that term synonymous with the Geneva-based body). Even thoughtful churchmen who had misgivings about the WCC maintained a decent reticence because they recoiled at the way in which dissidents of the extreme right had expressed protest.

The council is now into its fourth decade. Demonstrations against it have all but vanished. But this does not mean that criticism is waning. Far from it. It has increased, become more sophisticated, more reasoned, more responsible—and originates often among those who are themselves actively involved in WCC-member churches. Such strictures came from the floor at the 1975 Nairobi assembly, to the healthy discomfiture of the establishment.

There have also been books, two of the more notable published in 1967. Ian Henderson, a radical Scots theologian, produced the highly entertaining and shamelessly overwritten Power Without Glory. He pointed to the WCC as a divisive factor, and suggested that whoever it was who marveled how Christians loved one another didn’t really know them very well. Paul Ramsey’s Who Speaks for the Church? was a much more impressive work. He warned against “a surrogate world political community” with its own “shadow state department” that told the governments of the world what to do. It was a prophetic word that fell on heedless ears.

This summer saw the publication of Ernest W. Lefever’s From Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World (reviewed in our July 20 issue), an excerpt from which we carry on page 25. Renowned columnist George F. Will contributes to this book a typically incisive foreword. “What is at issue,” says Will, who holds the Ph.D. from Princeton, “is not ‘activism’ versus ‘quietism’ in Christian life. Rather the questions are whether the WCC is an appropriate instrument for Christian action; and whether the WCC is active on behalf of decent causes; and whether the WCC is indecently quiet about indecencies committed by regimes and movements on the left.”

This is an area in which the WCC has always been vulnerable, and one wherein it can be judged by what it says—and leaves undone. One of the reports received at Amsterdam expressed the challenge admirably. “It is part of the mission of the Church,” said the document on “The Church and the Disorder of Society,” “to raise its voice of protest wherever men are the victims of terror, wherever they are denied such fundamental human rights as the right to be secure against arbitrary arrest, and wherever governments use torture and cruel punishments to intimidate the consciences of men.”

At a WCC Consultation in The Hague in 1967, an official statement urged that in speaking our on international affairs the church should be prepared to say a “costly word,” declaring the truth even when “men will not dare to utter it.” Alas, doughty conciliar spokesmen often shrink into embarrassed conciliar diplomats as the spotlight moves from Chile and South Africa to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. For too long what we have been told about the Eastern bloc is that delicate WCC negotiations are continually going on behind the scenes, and that these would be prejudiced by publicity. (Six million Jews dead in Nazi concentration camps might bear mute testimony against that line of reasoning.) This in turn permits the Geneva executive blandly to reject certain types of criticism as ill-informed, implying that if we knew all we would trust the wisdom of those involved to speak those costly words we would want them to speak on our behalf.

But a further factor emerges here. Not only should we distinguish between the WCC and the ecumenical movement, we must also distinguish between the conciliar and the curial, the WCC and its paid servants. Lefever makes a crucial point here in his book (p. 7): “In a formal sense the World Council of Churches operates by Western democratic procedures.… However … the WCC headquarters staff is highly influential because it determines the agendas for discussion, develops project proposals, plans conferences and proposes themes, commissions preparatory materials and selects authors, and in general employs the means available to the senior staff in a large organization.” The point is underlined when Lefever somberly discusses the prosocialist prejudices of the headquarters staff.

He traces the growing involvement of the WCC in Third World politics since 1948, and deals particularly with the Program to Combat Racism. Speaking of the 1978 grant to Rhodesian guerrillas, Lefever says: “Here was a Christian body supporting an organization that had recently killed 35 members of Christian missionary families. Here was a grant given in the name of racial justice to terrorists who were attempting to destroy an interracial regime pledged to majority rule and replace it with a self-appointed ruling elite.”

It is both ironic and tragic that when the WCC hits international headlines it has nothing to do with the things that belong to our peace. Rather is it a reflection that the WCC has majored in politics—and done so to the detriment of missions, evangelism, and even its own theology division. This imbalance dismays many believers who would like to see an equally vigorous Program to Combat Atheism, or a Program to Commend Christ. To that might be added a Program to Promote Civil Rights that would not discriminate because of the nationality of the victim or the size and influence of the oppressor.

Until it gets problems and priorities sorted out, the World Council of Churches need not be surprised if the world’s uncommitted adopt the kind of Nietzschean stance cited by John Baillie at Amsterdam in 1948: “I will not believe in the Redeemer of these Christians till they have shown me that they are redeemed.”

Is Relevance Tossing To And Fro?

Contemporary Americans doubtless think more readily of the heavens as populated by airplanes than by angelic hosts. They are more likely to begin the day with a deodorant than with the Decalogue, to carry a wristwatch than a Bible, and to go to a movie than to meditate on divine things. So the summons to be relevant, to meet this secular generation where it lives, needs to be heard.

The modern cry for relevance, however, all too often serves as a pretext for vacating essential features of the gospel. For example, certain denominational book editors use “relevance” as their excuse for offering books that depart notably from traditional beliefs. But then these books sell very poorly, which raises the question: to whom are such editors seeking to be relevant? The rank and file? Or a small elite very much like themselves? Fallen humanity is constantly “on the outs” with God’s Word. But Christianity’s basic mission is to hew to God’s timeless Word, not to weave a deft path through the “out” and “in” words of successive generations.

Concentration of the mass media on the momentary more than on the eternal is costly to the modern spirit for a multiplicity of reasons. The major networks marshall technical skills to escalate an emotive impact and to evoke maximal response by thrusting the viewers into the very midst of major battles and controversies. But the passing parade of short-term crises has a notable capacity for eroding dedicated engagement. Long before American forces withdrew from Vietnam one campus newspaper editorialized: “You hear people saying, ‘The war is a dead issue. The ecological crisis is more crucial! What has actually happened is that napalmed jungles, blood-spattered soldiers, and burned-out villages have been milked for all the full-color magazine covers and features they can supply. The ecological crisis is just what our jaded palates need—a refreshing and colorful change.’” With the arrival of the energy crisis, recently symbolized by Three Mile Island and long lines at empty gas stations, we do indeed have a change—though hardly refreshing.

Only if these contemporary crises are persuasively linked to the long-term human crisis of spirit, truth, morality, and conscience can one expect from a secular age the motivations for consistent sacrifice.

A vacuum in respect to the transcendent provides an open door for all the spurious führers whose manipulation of human pawns can only lead to a showering disillusionment. But a summons to the justice and justification of the self-revealing God and to the public duty he requires of us alongside the inner purity that biblical religion promotes can bring new life and power to a renegade humanity.

The gospel is enduringly good news, and ought to greet a generation enervated by bad news like a dramatic discovery of oil and natural gas. Great and good news is what the human spirit needs today if it is not to be sunk by despair. News can be big news and yet be bad news or even untrue. Yet news can also be true without being great, like an announcement that the crime rate has declined a notch or two. But the good, great, and true news that Jesus the crucified and risen Savior offers sinful humanity a life faith for eternity, and stands ready to cancel the guilt and power of sin in their daily existence, and to renew their sense of moral earnestness, meets every person at the point of private desperation.

The most exciting book announced at the recent Christian Booksellers Convention was The Church Janitor’s Bible Commentary, published by Boiler Room Press of Kokomo, Indiana. The editor, Claude Faucett, was kind enough to give me a free copy and explain the merits of the book.

“People think church janitors are illiterate,” he said, “but we listen to more sermons than the deacons do. We have to be in church—they don’t! This commentary is especially for church janitors because they need special help.”

“How scholarly is the material?” I asked.

“Well, there’s no Greek in the book,” Claude explained. “Greek is an Attic language, and church janitors spend most of their time in the basem*nt. But the contributors have done their homework.”

“Who are the contributors?”

“We chose 66 church janitors from 25 different denominations, and assigned each one a different book of the Bible. We insisted on choosing men who had been janitors at least 10 years. Anybody who’s been taking care of a church building for 10 years ought to know something about the Bible.”

Claude was especially enthusiastic about the special emphases in the book.

“Any Bible passage that has anything to do with janitorial work gets a full treatment,” he said. “We have 10 pages on the landscaping in the Garden of Eden. We have 25 pages on the ark, with a special essay on windows. The tabernacle gets over 200 pages, with a lot of new material on how to hang curtains. The information on furnaces in Daniel 3 is worth the price of the book. We didn’t want to put a damper on that one.”

But Claude Faucett has one great anxiety.

“I’m afraid other trades will pick up this idea, and then we’ll have a lot of commentaries being published. There might be a Farmer’s Bible Commentary, or a Doctor’s Bible Commentary. We might have too much of a good thing.”

Boiler Room Press is now hard at work on The Church Janitor’s Own Hymnal. Songs like “Open the Gates of the Temple,” “The Church’s One Foundation,” “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night,” and “Just Outside the Door” will receive special treatment. “Janitors know a lot about keys, so this hymnal should be a success,” Faucett confided. “I can’t read music myself, but I love to sing. I can hardly wait for the book to come out.”

As for me, I could wait a long time.

EUTYCHUS X

Black and Beautiful?

The article “The African Church Struggles into Her Third Century” by Tokunboh Adeyemo (July 20) is the finest thing I have read on the church in Africa. It was worth the price of a book and certainly contains as much truth and information as one would receive in most books. It will certainly help us to pray more intelligently for the church and for the people of Africa.

DICK HILLIS

Overseas Crusades, Inc.

Santa Clara, Calif.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria, I can say that most Africans would rather American Christians do less analysis of Africa and more honest soul-searching of our own selves, to eliminate the color and race stereotypes which infect our outlook so profoundly that the disease has become commonly accepted as normal.

REV. GORDON DALBEY

Seaside Community Church

Torrance, Calif.

Church Management

Norman Shawchuck’s article “Church Management: The Architecture of Ministry” (July 20) was superb. It makes this old veteran’s heart rejoice to see a respected periodical picking up this theme on a consistent and competent basis. I am more convinced now than ever before that not all of our problems are spiritual—many are managerial.

OLAN HENDRIX

Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability

Pasadena, Calif.

For years evangelicals have accused liberal theology of allowing secular thought to dictate its doctrinal content. Let us beware lest we find ourselves occupying the same position with regard to principles for running the church.

CRAIG DIBENEDICTIS

Souderton, Pa,

Talk about mixed emotions. I was so delighted to see an article on church management as we face a revolution of changing styles and techniques in this area. Yet, you missed so much.

There was no mention of the National Association of Church Business Administrators, or of the wide variety of certification programs associated with this professional association. Excluded were the long-established training programs of the National Institute for Church Management, the Church Management Seminars at Memphis State University, and the Candler School of Theology program for Church Finance and Administration.

I know the value of your contributions in your July 20 issue; I merely trust that you will expand your coverage.

R. RONALD BURGESS

Coordinator of Religious Affairs

Memphis State University

hom*osexuality

Robert Johnston’s reviews of books available on hom*osexuality and the church probably run counter to a good many readers’ views. But I’m voting with him on the titles he’s covered. Not enough is being said that points to the redemption possible in Christ for the person struggling with hom*osexuality, or the change that can come to the person whose life is surrendered to the Lord. And plenty is being said otherwise.

Nationally there is a growing number of believers who are willing to step forth and say, “Yes, I was a hom*osexual. But I’m not gay any more.” The implications will be far-reaching. The effect this can have on the way the Christian community handles sexual problems alone boggles the mind. We are finally getting to the place where we can see that Christians do struggle with sexual sin in a variety of forms. Adultery, incest, and premarital sex also need to have the light shined on them so that we can deal with them—and be assured of God’s forgiveness.

ROBBI KENNEY

Director, Outpost

Minneapolis, Minn.

Dialogue with Moonies: Lunacy

I was shocked when I read your news report on the dialogue between Moonies and evangelicals (“The Moonies Cross Wits with Cult-watching Critics,” July 20). How could such a thing be deemed possible?

The whole thing seemed to be just another ploy by Moon to attain respectability for a movement that is diametrically opposed to our Lord and the spread of his kingdom.

MICHAEL PERKINS

North Hollywood, Calif.

I think Sawatsky’s statement that “the [Moonie] movement as a whole may become slightly more orthodox” is a lot of rhetorical hot air. I think down deep most “orthodox Christians” would concede Hell having a better chance of freezing over.

REV. RON CARTER

Open Bible Church

Bloomington, Ill.

For Christian parents, few issues are as important as the education of their children. Unfortunately, evangelicals are sharply divided between those who support Christian schools and those who choose to keep their children in public schools. As firm believers in the importance of Christian education, my wife and I enrolled our children in private Christian schools from kindergarten to college. We have never regretted it. But I have never once voted against a tax bill for the support of public schools, for I also believe in them. I want to live in a community of educated people and, therefore, I gladly support good public schools. Separation of church and state does not mean that public schools must be delivered over to atheism and immorality. It does mean that the religion of one particular group cannot be advocated by the public schools. That poses a problem for evangelicals who are deeply concerned about moral and spiritual issues; at the same time, it is also a terribly important protection for evangelicals. In a pluralistic society there is no simple solution to this problem. In certain situations, private Christian schools are part of the solution (we shall have an article on this in a forthcoming issue); in other situations they are no solution at all, and they are never the whole solution. In this issue, “Teaching the Bible in Public Schools” and “Parish Support for Public Schools” suggest practical ways in which the church in North America can relate itself to public education.

Common grace commands us to participate.

The other day I came across an intriguing article. In it, a young evangelical demanded an end to Christian support for the present campaign to make hom*osexuality respectable. Arguing his stance, he said Christians had no business to subscribe to the value system of the society they were living in, and so be part of its decay. Rather, Christianity was a counterculture. It is this idea that made me think.

To be certain, the idea is very much in the minds of young evangelicals. They are right in their effort to call Christians back from assimilation into worldly values and concerns. We should be glad for their determination to take the New Testament ethos seriously and for their refusal to adapt themselves to the manners of Mammon and its corollaries. There can hardly have been a situation in history when Paul’s exhortation “Do not be conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2) was more appropriate than today.

But does this make Christianity a “counterculture”? Are Christians to be dropouts of culture, or else guilty of compromise and appeasem*nt? Is there no alternative between “Christian counterculture” and what has been critically termed “culture Christianity”?

The problem is the theological basis from which to address the breakdown of social morality. There is reason to think that the “counterculture” attitude of today could be an immediate continuation of what has been called a “lifeboat ethic,” that is to say, the traditional attitude of withdrawal and exclusivity, but garbed in modern language.

A “lifeboat” approach has played a role in recent debates over ecology and the world food crisis: if there are too few resources for a growing humanity and not everybody can survive anyway, then let’s hold fast to what we have got, and abandon the rest of humanity.

There is, of course, the earlier use of the same metaphor among evangelicals denoting the tendency toward nonparticipation in society and public life. Groups with this disposition see “the world out there” as the ship doomed to shipwreck while they themselves have boarded the lifeboat and are trying to pull away from the place of imminent disaster.

Could it be that this attitude of separation from society is responsible for the paradox that the catastrophic decay of morals in the modern world is pioneered by the same segment of humanity that boasts the highest percentage of Christians, church attendance, even born-again believers? Is it that they exercise their faith and ethos strictly in private, to an extent that has never been known in the history of Christianity?

“Counterculture” says that we have nothing in common with the general public or its value system. I question that presupposition. Is it true that only Christians must not reject hom*osexual relationships? According to the Old Testament, at least the Jews would think similarly.

Also, is it a peculiarly Christian concern to reject abortion? Hippocrates (460–380 B.C.), in his voluntary oath as a medical doctor, promised never to be party to the destruction of unborn human life. It is only today that the Hippocratic oath has been emptied of this resolve. Moreover, is it an exclusively Christian position to safeguard marriage and the family by opposing easy divorce? Today, as we approach a situation where 50 percent of all children grow up in “single-parent families,” even secular experts are concerned with what that might mean in terms of the disintegration of society.

We are far off the mark if we believe that the Ten Commandments are just for the Christians (or worse: solely for the Jews). In fact, they describe the very fabric of human life in terms of ethics. They are the grammar of creation. Also, the works by which Christ intends to judge humanity in the day to come—feeding the hungry, giving shelter to those who are exposed, and fellowship to the sick and imprisoned (Matt. 25:31–46)—speak of the basic needs of human existence as of so many moral demands. There is a moral structure to life as such.

The trouble is that evangelicals, old or young, sometimes show little regard for the concept of creation and of God’s creation ordinances. This is why some of them find it difficult to say anything about anything outside the church.

Incidentally, the concept of withdrawal from the world may even become a powerful self-deception among evangelicals. While they reject public responsibility, they necessarily continue to buy and sell, and as they do it with a bent to value neutrality in an area that does not touch their real life with Christ, they will quickly find themselves susceptible to being steered by the existing values of the marketplace, even if it is only at the price level. It is uncanny how quickly in the field of business and elsewhere the proclaimed idea of Christian counterculture can change into “culture Christianity,” Christians following the pattern of their secular environment.

At this point, we need to remind ourselves that in the New Testament terms like “world” and “nature” appear in two meanings: as creation, and as fallen creation. We should see culture similarly. God’s culture commission (Gen. 1:28) sends us to work on the civilization of the world. Man is the vice-ruler in God’s creation. We cannot throw away the concern for creation and culture because both have fallen under the spell of sin and become diseased.

Christianity should be neither “counterculture” nor culturally determined. Following the Incarnation, it is neither mere other-worldliness nor mere this-worldliness. A little phrase in the Gospel of Luke (16:12) could teach us the proper position: Christ expects his disciples to be “faithful in the alien” (as the Greek reads; RSV and NIV already represent an interpretation). “Faithful in the alien” means that our earthly existence and its cultivation are not our home and final destiny. Nevertheless, we are not to abandon it, but move in it faithfully and conscientiously. We are to apply God’s standards to his creation, even as it is alienated.

There are, then, two tasks for the Christian, one in the church, the other in creation at large; for both realms are God’s property, and we are his stewards in them.

Klaus Bockmühl is professor of theology and ethics, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

Somehow, it seems, controversial minister Carl McIntire, 73, of Collingswood, New Jersey, always manages to stay one step ahead of creditors, and tax collectors.

The founder of the Bible Presbyterian Church and assorted other separatist organizations survived a near-fatal illness last fall that left him weakened for months but no less determined to carry on his fight against Communism, ecumenism, and what he feels is wishy-washy evangelicalism. From his hospital bed in Philadelphia, he directed important planning for this summer’s tenth congress of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC), which he and other separatist churchmen organized in Amsterdam in 1948 in opposition to the World Council of Churches. His wife Fairy and aides meanwhile scurried frantically to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay back taxes and thereby forestall takeover of McIntire’s beachfront conference complex in Cape May, New Jersey, where the ICCC was scheduled to meet in late June.

In all, an estimated 4,000 delegates and visitors from several dozen countries attended at least part of the ten-day ICCC congress, which was held at the Christian Admiral, McIntire’s flagship hotel and auditorium in Cape May. Many delegates from Third World countries relied entirely on McIntire for their expenses, placing further financial pressure on him. (Many Asian participants, however, paid their own way.) Wan, his cheeks sunken, the still-recuperating separatist leader led many of the sessions himself, and he reportedly had a major role in drafting most of the congress’s statements and resolutions.

As expected, McIntire was reelected to the ICCC presidency, and J. C. Maris of the Netherlands was reelected general secretary. (Maris’s denomination, the 75,000-member Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands, withdrew from the ICCC in 1977. In explaining their action, the church’s leaders alleged that McIntire was autocratic, was too politically oriented, and was vague about financial dealings. Prior to the severance, several ICCC staff members in Maris’s office quit, citing financial irregularities.)

In a series of resolutions, the congress predictably:

• Condemned Marxism “in all its forms,” and declared that the message and mission of the church “includes the exposure of and the opposition to all error, including Marxism-Communism.”

• Criticized the United Nations-sponsored International Year of the Child, saying it attacks the Ten Commandments by “inciting children to rebel against their parents,” and denounced attempts to create test-tube babies.

• Opposed America’s diplomatic recognition of mainland China, the Soviet-American SALT agreements on weapons limitations, and religious legislation in India that can be used to curb evangelism.

• Condemned liberation theology as satanic, oppressive, and antibiblical.

• Accused the National Council of Churches of hypocrisy in opposing U.S. efforts to develop nuclear power while remaining silent about similar endeavors under way in Communist countries.

• Upbraided the World Council of Churches for its “defamation” of Chile following the ouster of Marxist Salvador Allende, and expressed oneness with the people of Chile in their fight against Communism.

• Upheld the inerrancy of Scripture, and criticized the “new evangelical movement, which fellowships with unbelief and says that one may deny inerrancy but still be called an ‘evangelical.’”

In other actions, the delegates approved a McIntire-envisioned International Accreditation Association of Schools and Colleges, voted to receive 54 new member churches (the ICCC now claims 325 member denominations—many of them very small ones—in about 65 countries), and for reasons of limited finances agreed to hold its 1983 congress in Cape May again instead of Vancouver, where the WCC’s general assembly will meet.

During off-hours, participants congregated in language-group prayer meetings, took in illustrated lectures on unidentified flying objects, led by Robert Barry of McIntire’s UFO bureau, and strolled in the perfect weather among the town’s splendid examples of Victorian architecture or along the beach.

For McIntire, the congress festivities offered rare moments of refreshing relief from steadily worsening circ*mstances. The aged eight-story, 333-room Christian Admiral, McIntire’s flagship property acquired in 1962, showed signs of serious disrepair and neglect. Barriers at the front entrance kept visitors away from an area where bricks and concrete were torn loose. Structural cracks were plainly evident. Behind, the $1.5 million library-classroom-administration building, constructed years ago for McIntire’s Shelton College, stood as a painful reminder of Shelton’s departure to Florida when New Jersey took away its license in a dispute with McIntire.

Farther down the beach Congress Hall—McIntire’s most modern conference property in Cape May—was unable to be used for guests, because of building code deficiencies. Across the street from Congress Hall lay the charred remains of another McIntire property, the vintage Victorian-style Windsor Hotel, torched by a still-unknown arsonist only weeks earlier.

The Windsor fire came amid a series of legal skirmishes between McIntire and the Cape May city council over the issue of taxes. Despite the minister’s contention that his property deserved tax-exempt status, the city insisted that he pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. At one point the city fathers took steps to ensure that taxes would be paid first out of any insurance reimbursem*nt in the event of a McIntire property loss. McIntire warned that by its action the city council was inviting his enemies in town to commit arson. Sure enough, the Windsor burned down shortly afterward. Critics at first pointed an accusing finger at McIntire. They suspected he had opted for insurance proceeds instead of costly repairs. McIntire, however, disclosed that because of sagging finances he had been forced to let the Windsor’s insurance policy lapse months earlier. For him it had been a total loss.

The Cape May tax issue is still in the courts. An appeals court last month overturned a lower court ruling and ordered McIntire to pay nearly $200,000 in back taxes on the Christian Admiral. The ruling noted that McIntire occasionally rented space at the Admiral to secular organizations. Cape May’s city attorney said that McIntire now owes more than $600,000 in overdue taxes.

At the same time he was fighting to survive in Cape May, McIntire also was struggling to hang on to his properties in Cape Canaveral, Florida. In 1971, with only a $54,000 down payment, he acquired for $14.5 million a commercial space industry complex that had been developed at the Cape by Shuford Mills of Hickory, North Carolina. The complex included two office buildings, the 200-room Hilton Hotel and 1,500-seat convention center, 280 apartment units, and 300 acres suitable for condominium development. With the scaling down of space shot activities at nearby Cape Kennedy, the business that had leased the complex pulled out, and Shuford was happy to find a buyer.

McIntire, however, fell behind in payments, and in 1974 Shuford quietly took back everything except the hotel-convention center, an office building that McIntire had converted for use by Shelton College, and a 24-unit apartment building the minister had bought outright for an undisclosed sum to house retired people. McIntire fell further behind in payments and Shuford gave him an ultimatum: pay in full by July 1 or get out. With help from contributors and a commercial lender, McIntire squeezed in under the deadline with the $1.15 million balance due. In all, he ended up paying a total of $3.2 million for his college and hotel conference facility at Cape Canaveral. He also had shelled out $55,000 a year for taxes.

It appears now that McIntire may want to sell his Florida property. Attendance at Bible conferences there has been less than encouraging, and last year only 40 students were enrolled at Shelton College. Currently, McIntire and his aides are negotiating with New Jersey officials over plans to bring Shelton back to Cape May. Tenants of the building behind the Christian Admiral have been told they must vacate by September 1. New biography sheets on Shelton president Glenn Rogers and chancellor McIntire list Shelton’s location as Cape May.

If McIntire sells his Florida property, he should have enough left over to repay all his creditors, pay his Cape May tax bill, make a few urgent repairs, and perhaps give him a new lease on life. If so, it will not be the first time that he has had a golden touch.

For example, in 1971 McIntire bought the deteriorating YWCA in downtown Atlantic City for $143,000 and announced plans to open a Bible institute and hold Bible conferences for the public. No Bible institute was opened, and only a few conferences were held. With casino gambling on the horizon, he quietly sold the building for $550,000 in September 1977 to a pair of local investors, Harvey Fischer and Edwin H. Helfant. Shortly after buying the property, Helfant—who had links to syndicated crime, according to news sources—was found slain in gangland execution fashion. The building—only a block from the Resorts International casino—has since been torn down and the property sold again, this time to anonymous buyers, apparently for purposes related to gambling.

No heir apparent is in sight to take over McIntire’s U.S. work when he leaves the scene, but several strong candidates are available to take the ICCC helm, probably guiding it from a foreign port. One of the most likely of these is K. L. Nasir of Pakistan, a former long-time member of the WCC Faith and Order Commission and former president of the United Presbyterian Seminary in Pakistan. He helped to lead the United Presbyterians out of the WCC in 1968. Currently he is president of Faith Seminary in Pakistan and an ICCC vice-president.

Turkey

Terrorist Target

In a report distributed this summer, Operation Mobilization reports the death of Dave Goodman, who had been working in Turkey as a teacher for the past three years. According to a CHRISTIANITY TODAY correspondent, the 25-year-old American was shot by a man who rang his doorbell at eight o’clock one morning. The killer escaped with his partner in a waiting car. Because of the intense fear of terrorists, who have been responsible for numerous killings during the past two or three years, the search for witnesses among neighbors has proved fruitless.

It has been suggested that Goodman, whose wife was pregnant, died because he was an American, and not because of any Christian connection. It seems just as likely that he was the first Christian to be killed for his faith and witness in Turkey since World War I. While the Turks of Asia Minor particularly have never been so intensively evangelized as now, the sobering fact remains that there is still no organized Turkish church under Turkish leadership with members who are converts from Islam.

Badly needed is a readable Turkish translation of the New Testament that can be followed easily by all ages. Such a work is in the course of preparation. Translators have so far allowed the Pocket Testament League to print 100,000 copies of John’s Gospel. It is hoped that the United Bible Societies will agree to sponsor the complete translation.

Czechoslovakia

Checking Tourist Generosity

Three young American tourists were detained last month by Czech authorities in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Lenore Hunt, 23, of Galesburg, Illinois, Albion Buckingham, 26, of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, and Michael Birks, 21, of Fairfax, California, were seized by Czech officials on July 3, and were still being held incommunicado at month’s end. No U.S. officials had been allowed to speak with them.

The group, members of the Summer Youth Training in Europe organization, a program affiliated with Slavic Gospel Association, was found in possession of religious literature, including Czech Bibles intended as gifts for Czech churches. Officials in Prague have indicated that a charge of unlicensed importation of literature is pending for the arrested Americans.

Summer Youth Training in Europe spokesman, Rom Maczka, said it was customary for touring students from Christian colleges in the United States to take gifts, including religious literature, to the churches on their travels through Western and Eastern Europe. “Nothing in Czech law,” he said, “prohibits the carrying of such literature into the country. The literature in question was available for inspection. It was not of a political nature.”

The absence of communication from the young people, and the silence of Czech authorities concerning them, has raised fears that the group is undergoing interrogation.

Israel

The Government’s Hidden Hand: Sinister or Harmless?

The Israeli government supports an antimissionary organization, Yad Le’achim. Fifteen percent of the organization’s yearly budget comes from the Ministry of Religion’s secretive Special Projects Fund and its top officials are government employees.

So claims Alhamishmar, one of Israel’s daily newspapers, reporting a recent interview with one of the Yad Le’achim’s special agents who majors in infiltration of missionary ranks and “exposure” of their “hidden identities.” The man described one case in which the organization harassed an individual suspected of being a missionary until the person concerned fled the country.

When contacted about this report, the director general of the Israeli Ministry for Religious Affairs, Israel Lippel, denied that any government employees served with Yad Le’achim. While confirming that the organization does receive government subsidy, he said the assistance was intended for Yad Le’achim’s major educational work among immigrants and not its secondary antimissionary thrust.

A recent spate of articles on “the mission” (a term used derogatorily to describe Christian groups in Israel) has centered on two Christian schools run by the Anglican and Scottish Presbyterian churches in Jerusalem and Joppa respectively. Christians have learned to regard such incidents as preparation for steps to be taken against civil liberties with a view to further inhibit Christian witness in Israel.

Already Israel has a law forbidding parents to send their children to a school of their own choosing if the proposed school teaches a religion other than that of the parents.

BARUCH MAOZ

World Evangelization

Tempering the Weak Link in the Missions Chain

Churches helping churches in missions. That is the thrust of a new movement that is catching hold in the churches of North America.

Meeting at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, last month for its fifth annual conference, the Association of Church Missions Committees (ACMC) fielded 700 delegates from 153 churches and organizations. This was up from 300 two years ago, and from 500 last year. And more than half were first-time attenders.

Overwhelmingly, the participants were lay members of local missions committees, there to learn how to make missionary programs in their churches more effective. They attended workshops such as “caring for your missionary family,” “the cost of missions today,” “missions education for children,” and “counseling the prospective missionary,” and traded notes over their meals as to what “worked in our church.”

In plenary sessions they listened to mission specialists Edward Dayton, David Howard, J. Christy Wilson, and Ralph Winter, pastors Stanley Allaby and Gordon MacDonald, and Haitian Christian leader Jean-Claude Noel.

ACMC was born out of the realization by missionary strategists at Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission that the local church was the weak link in the world evangelization chain. Eighty-five percent of all North American Protestant churches, they found, lack a lay body to take responsibility in missions. Churches with a committee typically functioned without written policies, with little or no missions expertise, and with little continuity. In 1973 C. Peter Wagner, in his book Stop the World, I Want to Get On, identified the need for a lay organization dedicated to the centrality of the local church in world missions.

Fuller Seminary and the William Carey Institute organized a National Institute for Missionary Committee Chairmen the following year; 63 churches sent representatives. During the institute, Stephen Tavilla, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler and a member of Grace Chapel, Lexington, Massachusetts, called a meeting to gauge interest in creating an ongoing association of churches. The 26 churches represented at this meeting established ACMC and formed a steering committee.

Tavilla remains the president of ACMC. Donald Hamilton, a former Xerox Company executive and at the time executive director of the William Carey Institute, was tapped as the ACMC executive director. John C. Bennett is the organization’s associate director.

Today, the Pasadena, California-based association has a $267,000 budget, and seven full-time and four part-time staff. More than 400 churches belong, and Hamilton says that new churches are now joining at the rate of one a day. About 60 percent of the churches are affiliated with some 30 denominations, while about 40 percent are independent.

Still, most of the at least 335,000 local churches in the United States and Canada have never heard of ACMC. And the association reckons that although 10 percent of the churches may have some kind of missions program, the interest and commitment of the majority of these is peripheral. ACMC defines a functional church missions program as one that has an established and functioning missions committee, the basic decision on the use of the mission funds of the church, a personal relationship between church and missionary, and an annual conference or other vehicle for special missions emphasis. It reckons that as few as 5,000 churches, or less than 2 percent of all congregations in North America, share all of these characteristics.

Member missions committees pay annual dues (for basic services) according to the church’s annual missions budget: $30 for those with a budget of $10,000 or less, more on a sliding scale for those with larger budgets. Finances are still shaky for ACMC, since dues currently cover only about 16 percent of the budget.

New members receive the Missions Policy Handbook as part of their membership. This looseleaf workbook, reprinted after the initial 2,000 printing was exhausted, identifies 60 issues in organization and policy which should be considered by the local missions committee, laying out possible variations. It has already stimulated dozens of churches to move from fragmentary or no written policies to comprehensive written guidelines.

Several Bible colleges and seminaries are using the Handbook in their course work in missions in the local church. Students at the Columbia Graduate School of Missions, for instance, must work through the Handbook for their course project, coming up with a suggested missions policy for the churches they attend.

A research report on church self-evaluation, evaluation of mission agencies, and evaluation of missionaries has been prepared with the participation of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association. (Deeply involved churches seek controlled access to field evaluation of their missionaries’ performance; mission agencies seek standardization of reporting to curb the proliferation of paper work.) Demand is building for an evaluation handbook that will help churches interpret and act on the results of shared evaluation.

The association sends a bi-monthly 12-page newsletter to members, holds regional seminars, operates a resource desk and document center for its members, and serves as a source for print and audiovisual materials.

ACMC caters to a broad evangelical spectrum. It subscribes to the National Association of Evangelicals statement of faith and the Lausanne Covenant. Some denominations have reservations about ACMC intervening in any way between its local churches and its missionary arm. An affiliate membership category allows some 15 denominations to use and adapt ACMC materials. These have taken the ACMC helps and, says Hamilton, “laundered them in reformed theology,” or in Wesleyan, Pentecostal, or other traditions.

But denominational congregations as much as independent churches can measure the financial impact that ACMC involvement can carry. Nineteen churches responded to an informal ACMC survey of churches that had joined two years earlier. Their collective missions budgets increased by the sum of $2.3 million over the two-year span.

Grace Evangelical Church of College Park, Georgia, illustrates the dynamics. Started by six couples five years ago, it called as pastor William Waldrop, an Army retiree, in 1975. He attended the 1976 ACMC conference. The church made its first missions faith promise of $5,000 that year. Its 1977 faith promise jumped to $35,000; last year it jumped to $110,000. The congregation still numbers only 140 members.

Waldrop, elected to the board last month, basically attributes the spectacular rise in missions enthusiasm at Grace Church to the influence of ACMC.

HARRY GENET

World Scene

An evangelical agency came out with a bold denunciation of the Somoza regime in late June, several weeks before its downfall. The Latin American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies, based in San José, Costa Rica, issued a declaration offering support in “the struggle to annihilate this dictatorship,” and reconstruction assistance. The center is affiliated with the Community of Latin American Evangelical Ministries (commonly known as CLAME); Orlando E. Costas is the director.

A building described as “the world’s largest evangelical church” was dedicated in Saõ Paulo, Brazil, last month. Some 8,000 persons attended ceremonies opening the headquarters temple of the Brazil for Christ Evangelical Pentecostal Church, founded in 1955 by Pastor Manoel de Mello. The massive temple took 17 years to build. It is surpassed in size, however, by the main building, which is nearly as long as a football field. Roman Catholic Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns and World Council of Churches general secretary Philip Potter took part in the dedication.

Greece moved to establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican last month, a move opposed by the Greek Orthodox Church, Holy Synod.

Demand for the Bible is up sharply in Poland after Pope John Paul II’s visit there in May. The Frankfurt Bible Society in West Germany reports that an extra printing of 20,000 copies of a pocket edition were “bought immediately.” A Polish-language New Testament of 16,000 copies sold out as well, the society said, and urgent orders for 25,000 additional copies have been received.

Romanian Orthodox priest Georghe Calciu has been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment (see May 25 issue, page 47). Two members of the free trade union also received sentences: one for ten years, and one for five-and-one-half years. Romanian religious dissidents imprisoned during the last 12 months now number at least 30, according to Keston College.

The two Pentecostal families who took refuge in the American embassy in Moscow one year ago are hardly alone. The U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe has recently published a list by name and address of more than 10,000 Soviet evangelical Christians who have publicly declared their intention to emigrate from the Soviet Union, but have been prevented from doing so. The Washington-based government agency is chaired by Congressman Dante Fascell (D-Fla.). Commission member John Buchanan (R-Ala.), a Baptist minister, is credited with pushing the project of compiling, translating, and arranging the information. The list is believed to document only about half of the believers who desire to emigrate.

Czechoslovakian Christians are celebrating the 400th anniversary of an old Czech translation of the Bible (the Kralice) by publishing a new translation in Slovak. Authorities are allowing the Czech Ecumenical Council of Churches to print a first edition of 120,000 copies. The United Bible Societies are providing the paper. 16,000 copies of Scripture portions from the new translation, issued last year, were sold out in a few weeks. While Czech is the literary language of the entire country, Slovak is the contemporary language for 30 percent of the population.

The All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) has asked its general secretary to please come home. Canon Burgess Carr has been on a sabbatical leave in the United States since March 1978. When he left Kenya, the controversial religious leader, a native of Liberia, was involved in a dispute with the Kenyan government and said he had “no intention of going back there.” The AACC general committee, meeting in Yaounde, Cameroun, urged Carr to return from his self-imposed exile by September. It also expressed concern about the financial situation of its 118-denomination organization. The committee attributed the problem in part to an overdraft caused by the construction of the new AACC headquarters in Nairobi. Kodwo E. Anlkrah of Uganda is serving as interim general secretary.

The Israeli government has ordered Quaker welfare workers to stop providing legal aid to Arabs in the West Bank. The Legal Aid Center of the American Friends Service Committee in East Jerusalem has provided counsel for Arab landowners who appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court against the military government’s requisition of property to be used by the army or by Jewish civilian settlers. The Israeli government contends that the Friends are duplicating its services. An American official said, however, that he is unaware of any legal aid provided by the Israeli government for Arabs.

The United Mission to Nepal has begun to recruit missionaries from surrounding Asian nations. The UMN, formed 25 years ago when the Nepalese government refused to allow numerous organizations to work in the country, recently added three new member bodies, bringing the total to 32. At this year’s annual meeting, the mission decided to aim at acquiring 25 percent of its new personnel from Asia. Carl J. Johansson, the recently installed executive director, has completed a 10-year American Lutheran Church pastorate in Minnesota and previously served as a missionary in Tanzania.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Burma was formed last year to promote cooperative endeavor among the small evangelical constituency, it was recently learned. Robin H. Seia, a Free Will Baptist evangelist, was appointed general secretary. Burma is a predominantly Buddhist state, with Christians found almost entirely among minority tribal groups.

Construction on what was to have been the largest Roman Catholic church in Asia has been halted—at least for now. The Basilica of the Holy Infant project was the idea of Imelda Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines. Construction work atop a mountain 12 miles east of Manila began this spring on the multimillion-dollar basilica designed with a 10-story dome, and to accommodate 50,000 worshipers. When Mrs. Marcos asked for Cardinal Jaime Sin’s blessing on the project in early February, he refused. “The top priority today is for adequate housing for the poor and not luxurious housing for the Holy Infant,” he wrote her. “We were told that the money would come from contributions,” Cardinal Sin said, “but I’m afraid it would have been donation by force.” After a visit from the Cardinal, President Ferdinand Marcos ordered a halt to construction in April.

The Christian community in South Korea is experiencing extraordinary growth. In fact, according to a newly issued Asia Theological Association pamphlet by Joon Gon Kim, six new churches are being started every day. The Haptong Presbyterian Denomination has almost doubled in under five years—from 680,000 in January 1976 to 1,100,000 now, the report says. Seoul’s Full Gospel Central Church reports that about 2,500 new members—mostly new converts—are being added each month. Its membership stood at 88,000 in June.

China is wooing the Tibetan Dalai Lama. Reliable sources indicate that the People’s Republic has been making overtures for about two years to the Tibetan spiritual leader and Tibetan refugees exiled since 1959 in Northern India. The Dalai Lama last month acknowledged interest in accepting a federation of Tibet with China.

China’s National People’s Congress has enacted new laws to protect religious beliefs, according to the New China News Agency. The new criminal law, enacted last month, provides for up to two years in prison for any official “who unlawfully deprives a citizen of his legitimate freedom of religious belief or violates the customs and folk-ways of a minority nationality to a serious degree.”

Tourist smuggling of Bibles into China has apparently caused officials to retract part of their relaxed travel restrictions. Customs inspectors are again implementing restrictions against Bibles found in suitcases or in the mail. A Hong Kong resident who sent more than 200 Bibles into the People’s Republic over a week’s time in June had them all returned to him undelivered.

Five ministers have been ordained in an irregular ceremony by the more conservative dissident faction within Japan’s largest, and liberal, Protestant denomination, the Kyodan. The faction, known as Rengo, began in 1969 out of disagreements over the church’s response to student demonstrations. It was formally organized in 1976. The ministers it ordained will not be recognized by the Kyodan.

Deaths

Called Home while Away from Home

Tragic accidents last month claimed the lives of two prominent evangelicals: Nathan Bailey, former Christian and Missionary Alliance president for 18 years and past president of the National Association of Evangelicals; and J. Barton Payne, noted theologian and a past president of the Evangelical Theological Society. Each man died far from home—while overseas for ministry-related work.

Bailey, 69, died of internal injuries suffered in a July 10 automobile crash near Nottingham, England. He was returning from a meeting with English CMA church leaders when his rented car collided first with the back end of a truck and then with an oncoming car, after he unsuccessfully tried to pass two vehicles ahead of him. No charges were filed, said Robert Battles, CMA general secretary who also was in England at the time, and an inquest was to last through July. Bailey’s wife, Mary, also in the car, was listed in “guarded condition” in a Nottingham hospital.

Bailey, who headed the worldwide ministries of the CMA for six three-year terms, from 1960 to 1978, had stopped in England after being in Hong Kong. There he had been reelected president of the Alliance World Fellowship at its quadrennial conference. (The Fellowship is an international advisory council of church leaders representing the CMA constituency of over one million members in some 10,000 CMA churches in 47 countries.) He served as president of the World Relief Commission from 1967 to 1976, and then was president for two years of National Association of Evangelicals.

For J. Barton Payne, 56, professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in Saint Louis, death came in Japan, where he was on a sabbatical lecture tour. Known as an “enthusiastic mountain climber” by his friends (he once climbed Mount Olympus), Payne began a solo ascent of Mount Fuji early last month. Three helicopters and more than 40 persons—including students from two Japanese seminaries—began looking for Payne after the noted theologian did not return when expected. His body was found July 5 about 1,000 feet from the summit of the mountain’s 12,400-foot conical peak.

Spokesmen said Payne died from head and neck injuries suffered in a fall. Although he lay in below freezing temperatures, Payne probably died immediately and not from exposure. (Hiking on Mount Fuji is limited to July and August because of the cold; even in July, the average temperature at the summit is only 41 degrees.) The weather was reportedly poor on the day of his climb, with rain, probably high winds, and reduced visibility. The next day, typhoon conditions turned back other climbers.

Payne’s funeral and cremation was July 6 at Fuji-Yoshida, and his wife, Dorothy, and son, Philip, a TEAM missionary, both spoke at the service. A memorial service was planned for Payne at Covenant Seminary at the beginning of fall classes. Payne was a frequent writer for theological journals, an author of several books, and a contributor to work on the New American Standard Bible and the New International Version.

LESLIE R. MARSTON, 84, for 29 years a bishop of the Free Methodist Church and a former president of Greenville (Illinois) College; July 14 in Winona Lake, Indiana, after a stroke.

Personalia

W. Sherrill Babb, 39, has been appointed president of Philadelphia College of the Bible. He succeeds Douglas B. MacCorkle who resigned in 1977 after a 14-year presidency. Formerly dean of faculty at Moody Bible Institute, Babb is chairman of the Research Committee of the American Association of Bible Colleges.

Habeeb Hazim (Ignatius IV), 59, was officially enthroned last month as the head of the 1,500,000-member Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. He succeeds Patriarch Elias IV who died of a heart attack on June 21. Ignatius IV is a Syrian by birth.

Pauline Webb has been appointed to head religious broadcasing on the World Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) beginning in October. A Methodist, who is a member of the World Council of Churches executive commmittee, she is a strong campaigner for the appointment of women ministers.

The Baptist World Alliance general council meeting last month in Brighton, England, nominated officials for offices to be voted on at elections during the BWA Congress in Toronto next July. They are Gerhard Claas for general secretary and Duke K. McCall for president. Claas, who would succeed Robert S. Denny, is a West German pastor now serving as BWA associate secretary for Europe. McCall, who would succeed David Y. K. Wong of Hong Kong, is president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

The South African Leadership Assembly

An incredulous black youth said, “It was like a dream, sitting next to whites, talking to them and singing with them.”

And in a sense, the South African Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA) was like a dream—but a fulfilled one for its organizers. Many said the meeting could never happen, considering the bitter racial and church divisions in South Africa. Special interest groups on the right and left politically had lobbied against it.

But over 5,000 participants, almost equally divided between blacks and whites and representing almost every denominational, racial, and ethnic category in the South African ecclesiastical mosaic, came together last month in Pretoria for the week of meetings. Officials said that SACLA represented a wider range of cultural backgrounds than any previous meeting in the country, which has more than 3,000 denominations and church groups. Indeed, the participants’ only mutual link was their Christian faith.

Because of their differences, the participants felt tension and uncertainty when the sessions began. David Bosch, University of South Africa theologian and chairman of SACLA, doubted whether there had ever been a large meeting of Christians “as fragile as this one.” He said in his opening address, “The whole assembly can blow up today.”

But what emerged from the meetings was a new spirit of unity, rather than an explosion. In some cases, dialogue between persons from different backgrounds took place for the first time. Louise Wigens from Durban, white and 16 years old, said, “I came from Kenya eight years ago, but SACLA was the first time I’ve had a chance to speak to people of other races.”

Methodist theologian Elliot Mogojo summarized: “There is yet hope for South Africa—that came out of SACLA.” Mogojo and other participants had the view that “SACLA worked.” They believed the meetings showed a oneness, which many had considered an impossibility within the fractured South African context.

For the first time, hundreds of whites had a chance to hear firsthand the anguish of their fellow Christians across the color line. Unity was demonstrated by scenes of whites and blacks embracing in Christian friendship. Political rivals shared the same platform: Piet Koornhof, the Nationalist government minister in charge of black affairs, and Kwazulu chief Gatsha Buthelezi, a frequent critic of the government’s apartheid policies, called each other “brothers in Christ.” And conservative evangelicals joined the standing ovation for Bishop Desmond Tutu, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, who previously viewed by them with intense suspicion.

The spirit of unity at SACLA, while distinct, was somewhat qualified. For some participants, the bottom line of success was that SACLA didn’t fall to pieces after it started; the week of lectures, worship sessions, and group discussions ended without a major confrontation. But there were undercurrents of tension that surfaced before and during the meetings.

As Bosch said, “The fact that we are here today is nothing short of a miracle.” The often vitriolic opposition to the assembly from groups such as the Christian League of Southern Africa on the right, or militant black groups on the left, kept an unknown number of potential delegates from attending. Presumably, the right wing opposition was responsible for painting a hammer and sickle on the SACLA banner on the main gate of the meeting site, and for deflating dozens of delegates’ car tires. One Afrikaans SACLA organizer described an “almost constant conference with the security police” for the two weeks preceding the assembly.

As it was, the men who developed SACLA from their experience at the Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly (PACLA) in Nairobi in December 1976 faced an almost impossible task. They wanted the South African church to experience the oneness that they, as black and white countrymen, had discovered in the Kenyan capital.

The week-long activities followed a three-day preparatory conference for about 1,000 delegates. SACLA itself took the form of several parallel conferences: for high schoolers, university students, youth leaders, congregational leaders, and national leaders—as well as plenary meetings for the assembly as a whole.

Some three dozen foreign visitors attended, including Northern Ireland’s Cecil Kerr; England’s Tom Houston; Orlando Costas and Bruno Frigoli from Latin America; and Mennonite professor John Yoder, Ron Sider, and Don Jacobs from the U.S. African visitors included Kenya’s Archbishop Festo Olang and John Gatu. Ugandan Bishop Festo Kivengere was forced to cancel his visit because of the tense situation in his country.

The SACLA experience of a “oneness in Christ,” which delegates saw as transcending political or cultural differences without ignoring them, took time to jell. Many delegates came with reservations or suspicions, and wanted to safeguard (if not actually promote) a certain viewpoint. Bosch identified four factions at the conference.

• Those who wanted SACLA to become a springboard for a major evangelistic thrust in the southern African subcontinent.

• Those wanting church renewal to be the focus of the assembly.

• Those anxious to keep politics out of religion, wanting SACLA instead to bring the country to national repentance.

• Those who believed SACLA should speak forcefully and unequivocally to the political issues of the day.

In SACLA’s first days, differences were fueled by various disgruntlements. White political conservatives, and probably moderates, too, were put out when Latin American Orlando Costas said: “Jesus Christ is today one with the outcast and oppressed of the earth.… We can affirm that Christ today is a black Southern African, a poor Latin American.…”

Likewise, those stressing the need for far-reaching social change were unimpressed by the impassioned testimony of Justus Du Plessis, head of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa: they thought Du Plessis had downplayed the social aspects of reconciliation.

A group of young Christians, feeling that SACLA was neglecting the political and social issues in South Africa, staged a sit-down demonstration to protest the superior lunch served to delegates at the national leaders conference. Taking the title of a book by simple lifestyle advocate Ron Sider, a guest speaker at SACLA, they displayed posters reading “Rich Christians in an age of hunger,” adding “Enjoy your lunch.” While the delegates enjoyed their meal of steak and fruit salad, the youths read passages from the Bible.

Other grumbles came after several high-powered scholarly presentations: these left nontheologians in the audience in ignorance or bewilderment.

But then came two changes in the mood at SACLA. First, the papers delivered in the second half of the week became secondary to a rising sense of expectation from people who wanted something tangible to emerge from SACLA. There were frustrations among young black delegates in particular, who felt the assembly was skirting the vital issues of political change. They hoped increasingly for some unmistakable commitment by SACLA to politically oriented change in the country.

Then there was a new shift in the atmosphere. Rather than anxiously hoping for some dramatic climax or resolution of the assembly, most delegates suddenly seemed to realize that what they were wanting had already taken place—that they had been living SACLA’s message to South Africa just by meeting together.

That blacks and whites had come together—sharing homes, meals, prayers, hurts, and aspirations in the face of all that South Africa has heard about the merits of separation—constituted the message of SACLA. Speaker after speaker asserted that God’s people belong together. It was they who now needed to provide the model to the rest of their country.

Despite its success, many black and white participants realized SACLA was something of a contrived situation. For them, the meaning of SACLA was the need to take the assembly’s spirit of Christian oneness back to their local situations.

Only if “the failure and impotence of the church of God,” as Anglican Archbishop Bill Burnett put it, were replaced by a model spirit of unity, could the church hope to make an impact on the country. Sider said it was a farce for the church to criticize apartheid when it did not practice unity itself.

There was an urgent need for repentance on a national scale, said SACLA program chairman and evangelist Michael Cassidy. And many delegates also indicated that the church must get its own house in order before it dares to bring its message of reconciliation to the rest of South Africa.

There was little time at SACLA to work towards these ends. Said Chief Buthelezi: “Let us remember that we face an increasingly violent situation. It depends on what those who are playing leadership roles in South Africa today do, on both sides of the color line, whether this violence we face will escalate or not.”

He continued: “Only if we are true to our Lord can we as leaders perform that task successfully. It is by accepting the Lordship of Christ in our lives as leaders that we have a ghost of a chance in the task of successfully preventing hell from being let loose in South Africa.”

For the school children, university students, youth leaders, clergy, and laity who heard him, the charge was to live full Christian lives in the various leadership positions of their local situations. For them, SACLA was only a beginning.

Nicaragua

Squeezing Drops of Blessing from the Bitter Fruit of War

Guatemala-based correspondent Stephen Sywulka filed this report early last month, before the resignation of President Anastasio Somoza and the transfer of control in Nicaragua to a Sandinista-backed junta.

As National Guardsmen and Sandinistas slugged it out in bitter and bloody fighting, evangelicals and foreign missions personnel were caught in the middle.

Communication has been difficult during the latest round of conflict, which began in early June as leftist-backed Sandinista guerillas began another major uprising against the government of President Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled the country for 43 years and owns a good portion of it. But there were no reported injuries or deaths of missionaries or pastors among the estimated 10,000 persons (mostly civilians) killed in Managua in recent weeks. The majority of foreign missionary personnel has left the country.

“It would seem that the Lord has greatly protected the believers,” said Rafael Baltodano, a member of the Latin America Mission who left Managua with his family June 29. The Baltodanos’s home is in one of the barrios taken by the Sandinistas, and they were forced to seek refuge in the Baptist hospital for 10 days before leaving the country.

CAM International (formerly Central American Mission) reported that its three missionaries who remained in Nicaragua were safe. One of them, Mark Robinson, had been on the Atlantic coast at a church conference when the fighting broke out, and there was uncertainty regarding his whereabouts during the two weeks before he was able to get back to Managua. His family and other CAM dependents had been evacuated to Panama on a U.S. embassy flight; two other missionary families were out of the country when hostilities began.

The Nicaragua Bible Institute in Managua closed during the fighting, but most of its students, including five from other Central American countries, were unable to return home for nearly three weeks. The institute—operated by CAM and located on the relatively calm southwest side of the city—also took in about 75 refugees. Many churches served as refugee centers, reported institute director Joe Querfeld.

One CAM-related church was occupied by the Sandinistas and used for a time as a command post. The rebels later abandoned the church and a nearby Christian bookstore, and both structures were relatively undamaged. The bookstore lost almost half its stock to looters, however.

There were reports that Sandinistas had commandeered other church buildings in the eastern sector of Managua. Several church buildings, including the new Gethsemane Baptist Church, were damaged by rocket and shell fire. Hundreds of homes and businesses likewise suffered damage from the street-by-street fighting and the indiscriminate bombing, mortar, and rocket fire by the National Guard. Large sections of the city lay in ruins.

CEPAD—the Evangelical Committee for Development—has served as the coordinating agency for a majority of the evangelical churches and missions in Nicaragua. Set up after the 1972 Managua earthquake, CEPAD is a permanent development agency, largely funded by Church World Service.

During the current conflict, CEPAD has worked closely with the Red Cross, primarily in providing food to refugees in Managua. Nearly 20,000 families, representing 100,000 persons, have received CEPAD services, said CEPAD president Gustavo Parrajón. His agency has been able to maintain political neutrality and the respect of both sides.

Several Christian relief agencies from the United States, including World Vision, World Concern, the Mennonite Central Committee, and Church World Service, along with Good Will Caravans of Costa Rica, were putting together a joint aid program for Nicaragua. By July 1, they had sent by airplane over 40,000 pounds of powdered milk and high-protein cereal. These supplies, which also included some medicines, were distributed by CEPAD personnel. The group also prepared to stockpile supplies in Costa Rica for shipment when the highways were again open.

World Vision, CAM, Good Will Caravans, MAP International, and other agencies also have been active with programs for the sick and injured and for the thousands of Nicaraguan refugees. Of 80,000 Nicaraguans in Costa Rica and 40,000 in Honduras, about half are considered refugees.

The ongoing crisis challenged Nicaraguan evangelicals on several fronts—economic, political, and spiritual. Massive aid programs will be needed to revive the devastated economy. Political uncertainty remained; many evangelicals, particularly the young, sympathized with the rebels, although there was uneasiness over the Communist influence in the Sandinista camp.

And to the atmosphere of fear and suffering, some evangelicals applied a gospel witness. One missionary woman, whose home stands near an area of fierce fighting, witnessed to her neighbors while machine gun and mortar fire rattled in the background, and 14 made Christian commitments.

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

Mennonites

Smoke Signals from Smoketown

“We’re not here to pick a fight; our stance is irenic—peacemaking,” said Pastor William Detweiler of Kidron (Ohio) Mennonite Church, one of the conveners of an ad hoc consultation of Mennonite evangelicals last month at a Smoketown, Pennsylvania, motel.

With that, the 20 leading pastors, educators, and laymen—all but one of them members of the 98,000-member (Old) Mennonite Church or the 60,000-member General Conference Mennonite Church—began sorting out the issues in their denominations that troubled them most.

Several common themes quickly emerged. Among them: the authority of the Word of God is being eroded on some fronts, rank and file Mennonites are being misrepresented on social issues by a few outspoken leaders and writers, evangelism and piety are not being emphasized enough, and respect for the Anabaptist biblical heritage of the Mennonites is giving way to adulation of cultural Anabaptism. As a consequence, several participants noted, some Mennonites have left their churches, and more than a few who remain are giving their money elsewhere, especially to evangelical parachurch ministries.

Detweiler, cospeaker with his brother, Robert (also a consultation convener), on “The Calvary Hour” Mennonite broadcast, warned that a “low view of the inspiration and authority of Scripture,” held by some Mennonite educators and clergy, is a threat to the churches. Pastor Albert Epp of First Mennonite Church, Newton, Kansas, spoke critically about “humanistic trends” and theologically liberal “pseudo-intellectualism” spreading in Mennonite circles.

Some participants lamented a decline in spirituality among adults. Veteran professor J. C. Wenger of Goshen Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, commented: “Often the students in our seminaries are more concerned about spiritual realities than are their professors.”

Another convener, Pastor Kenneth Bauman of First Mennonite Church, Berne, Indiana, called for a reexamination of priorities. Publicly, he said, “We have shifted from a scriptural emphasis to a political one.” Broadcaster-pastor Arthur McPhee of Harrisonburg, Virginia, asked for “more accountability in our institutions.”

Exhorted Pennsylvania Pastor Ivan Yoder: “Let’s keep the gospel clean; let’s resist the temptation to let it degenerate into a social gospel.” Bishop David Thomas of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, reminded the group that Jesus was involved with the whole person, a fact that has social implications; but he acknowledged that there is “an increasing gap between those people who are speaking and writing and those who are in the pews.” Some participants charged that a few Mennonite activists are taking controversial social action positions apart from biblical bases, giving all Mennonites a blackened public image. “Let us not turn our ethnic nonconformity into a new ethical nonconformity,” advised Nathan Showalter, president-elect of the Eastern Mennonite Board’s home ministries division.

Much of the discussion centered on the so-called war tax issue. Owing to their views of what the Bible teaches about peace and the separation of church and state, the Mennonites from their beginnings in the 1500s in Switzerland have been pacifists. This stance usually involves exemption from military service, but some Mennonites think it should involve far more. They say that Christians should not pay taxes that go to support the military, and a few refuse to pay the estimated military portion of their income taxes. Other Mennonites argue that such practices are acts of disobedience to Christ, who taught that his followers should pay their taxes.

To a man, the consultation participants agreed that Christians should pay their taxes. Professor Wenger, one of the translators of the New International Version New Testament, declared that payment of taxes is part of the wider submission to the state that Mennonites have always espoused. “The government has been kind to us in granting relief from conscription, yet our church is constantly on [the government’s] back,” complained William Detweiler. He added that the gospel, as proclaimed by headquarters people, often comes across as a witness to peace instead of as the good news in Christ regarding salvation.

During the consultation’s 10 hours of deliberation, the participants drew up a six-part statement for circulation among congregations of the two Mennonite bodies. The statement:

• Reaffirms the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture.

• Affirms “the central need of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ as Savior,” and the need to reflect the personal piety and joy that comes from this encounter.

• Calls for a reexamination of priorities with emphasis on “the saving power of the gospel,” making sure that “all of our social ministries and ethical decisions [are] the fruit of our experience of the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ.”

• Urges that evangelism be given renewed emphasis.

• Sets forth the biblical basis for paying taxes (“We regard taxation as the power of the state to collect the monies needed for its budget and not as voluntary contributions by citizens”).

• Upholds the “centrality” of the local congregation and states that denominational agencies are “servants” of the congregation. (“It is easy for these agencies to become unaware of what is happening and what the concerns are at the local level and so fail to represent and serve the congregation.”)

Though couched in soft-sell—irenic, says Detweiler—language, the statement is bound to disturb the peace in some Mennonite circles.

The lone non-Mennonite, Simon Schrock, a literature evangelist from Virginia and a member of the Beachy Amish (an ecclesiastical cousin of the Mennonites), exclaimed: “This meeting has been long overdue. Why haven’t you spoken out over the years?” A number of the participants, who identified themselves as representing the silent Mennonite majority, nodded agreement.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Jewish Christians

Messianic Congregations form Mini Denomination

Some Jewish Christians worship together in services, which, at least in liturgy and music, resemble those in synogogues. Now, many of these Jews, who often call themselves “believers” or “Messianic Jews,” have formed what constitutes a denomination: the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations.

Dan Jester, 31, spiritual leader (pastor) of the 150-member Beth Messiah Congregation in metropolitan Washington, D.C., was elected president at an organizational meeting last month in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and 19 congregations from the United States and Canada joined as charter members. These congregations have an average membership of 50, said Jester, of which about nine or ten have full-time, paid, spiritual leaders.

The Union will promote congregational planting, organization, and growth among Messianic leaders, said Jester, a Wheaton College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School graduate. He also would like production of common worship materials since “there is a problem of duplication of educational and worship materials” among congregations.

Many Jewish Christians are members of mainline Protestant denominations, some of which (the Assemblies of God, for instance) have ministries specifically for Jewish Christians. But Jester believes that Messianic worship, since it reflects the Jewish identity, enhances the evangelism potential of Jewish Christians to Jewish nonbelievers.

Faith, Science, And The Future

Putting Science on a Leash

A strong movement within the World Council of Churches to temper science and technology with Christian ethics and social purpose was behind the 13-day World Conference on Faith, Science, and the Future held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last month.

The conference was attended by more than 450 scientists and theologians from some 77 countries. Both groups expressed a keen awareness of the global effects of technology that get out of control; both see Christian ethics as one source of control.

In a welcoming speech, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, declared, “A technology that ignores or disregards the question of Christian ethics, especially the value it places on humanity, will quickly reduce the earth to a desert, the person to an automaton, brotherly love to planned collectivization, and introduce death where God wishes life.”

Charles Birch, an Australian biologist, argued that science has projected “A mechanistic world view” that regards the universe as a machine, and that Christian theology has accommodated itself “uncomfortably” to this perspective.

At a preconference session, more than 100 science students from 55 countries worried that education is not doing the necessary job of tying values to technology. Many complained that educational systems pump them full of scientific knowledge without accompanying consideration of the effects of that knowledge on society.

North American Scene

Over 1.1 million unmarried couples lived together in 1978—double the number in 1970—according to a recent United States Census Bureau report. Other statistics: there were 48 million traditional households with married couples in 1978; however, eight million families last year were supported by women not living with a husband—a 44 percent increase since 1970. More than one-fifth of all households in 1978 consisted of individuals living alone—40 percent more than in 1970.

Roughly 12 million Canadians, or one-half of the population, are “secularists” who have no active commitment to organized religion, according to the Canadian Church Growth Center (based on 1977 statistics). It indicates that the “secularists” are neither open to, nor seeking, any religious orientation. Other figures show that the major religious body is Roman Catholicism: Catholics outnumber Protestants by almost three to one. Old-line Protestants—United Church, Anglican Church, Lutheran, and Reformed—comprise less than 5 percent of the population, and “heterodox” groups, mainly the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, have so grown that their attending constituency is 1.6 percent of the population.

The transition to evangelical leadership at King College was completed last month, after a Bristol, Tennessee, chancery court approved the transfer of control of the Presbyterian (Southern) school to a new board of trustees, King College, Inc. (see the June 29 issue, page 45). The court, in effect, approved an agreement reached earlier between the old board of trustees and the incorporated body of five evangelical Presbyterians, who had offered financial rescue to the school on condition that it have a greater evangelical emphasis.

About 14,000 married people, priests, and members of Roman Catholic orders attended the Worldwide Encounter conference at the campus of Kent State University last month. The couples, who represented all 50 states, came to the conference to learn how they could improve the quality of their marriage. About two million persons have participated in the program since it was begun in Spain 20 years ago and spread to nearly 40 nations.

A controversial bill that would deregulate the broadcast industry appears to be dead for this session of Congress. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin (D-Calif.), was aimed at revamping the 1934 Communication Act. The broadcast portion of the bill proposed an immediate end to federal regulation of radio, and a 10-year phasing out of federal regulation of television. If the bill is approved, licenses would be made permanent and the equal time provision and fairness doctrine would be abolished. The proposal received stiff opposition from religious groups, educators, labor unions, and other groups concerned with the quality of television programs.

The Denominations

Summer Time, and the Church Is Convening …

Summer for the local church means vacation Bible school, Sunday school picnics, and sparse attendance. But for most Protestant denominations (and tourist-hungry U.S. cities), summer means annual conventions. At denominational gatherings in recent weeks, scriptural inerrancy and hom*osexuality were among recurring concerns.

The Lutheran Church/Missouri Synod, which in recent years has weathered doctrinal turbulence, observed a comparatively placid biennial convention last month in Saint Louis. J.A.O. Preus, president of the 2.7-million-member body, told the 1,100 voting delegates, “Since the church has just emerged from a major doctrinal controversy, this calmer convention is needed.” He advocated greater emphasis on global witness as part of the convention theme, “God Opens Doors.”

Past doctrinal arguments weren’t ignored entirely, however. After some of the most heated debate of the convention, the delegates voted 861 to 147 to continue their “fellowship in protest” with the American Lutheran Church.

Since 1969, LCMS and ALC pastors have been allowed to preach in each other’s churches, and members of both bodies have been able to worship and have Communion together. However, synod delegates in 1977 voted to place this altar and pulpit fellowship in protest primarily because of the ALC policy allowing women’s ordination and its more liberal view of biblical inspiration.

Some delegates last month in Saint Louis preferred that ALC links end without delay; a convention report noted that doctrinal differences between the two churches have grown. However, the delegates voted to reject a proposal to end fellowship immediately. Unless the LCMS perceives a change in ALC policy during the next two years—such as a strong stand in support of biblical inerrancy—Missouri Synod officials have speculated that the fellowship might be terminated at the 1981 convention.

The synod also adopted a new denominational hymnal, Lutheran Worship, which will be available late next year. The hymnal was prepared by the synod after it pulled out of a joint project with three less conservative Lutheran bodies on the hymnal, Lutheran Book of Worship. The Missouri Synod had opposed the latter hymnal, citing liberal doctrine.

At the other end of the theological spectrum, the United Church of Christ took action on several social issues. The 703 delegates at its twelfth biennial convention called for an end to the death penalty, for a halt or slow-down of nuclear energy plants until safety problems are solved, and for members to conserve energy and adopt more frugal lifestyles.

Pastor Loey Powell publicly disclosed her lesbianism as she led a worship service at the meetings. This upset the more conservative delegates, but they took no action against ordination of hom*osexuals; instead, by a wide margin, the assembly voted to continue its policy of leaving ordination decisions to the local church authorities. The 1.8-million-member denomination became the first to ordain avowed hom*osexuals when, seven years ago, a Mill Valley, California, congregation ordained William Johnson. The New York Times reported the same congregation ordained Powell and two other acknowledged lesbians last year.

Nathanael M. Guptill, head of the Connecticut Conference, was elected moderator of the UCC; he succeeds Milton Hurst, dean of students at Talladega (Alabama) College. The delegates also approved six more years of study and discussions with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in preparation for a decision on whether to enter formal union negotiations.

Other denominations took these actions at their conventions:

• The Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) by resolution opposed accepting that hom*osexuality is “normal, desirable, or Christian.” The 170,000-member denomination will celebrate its centennial next year.

• The Church of the Brethren approved a paper that indicated the diverse understandings of the Bible held by members of the 180,000-member denomination. Conservatives, particularly within the Brethren Revival Fellowship, had wanted a strong proinerrancy statement. But a five-member committee, authorized two years ago to study Brethren positions on the nature and function of Scripture, could not agree on a single statement; instead, its paper contained eight statements. Among these, the paper affirms the inspiration of the Bible while not agreeing whether inspiration is a finished or continuing process. The paper also calls the Bible a “fully trustworthy guide for our lives,” while not agreeing whether trustworthy means inerrant.

• The General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, a 45-year-old fundamentalist group based in Schaumburg, Illinois, adopted resolutions opposing government regulation of private schools, reaffirming the inerrancy of Scripture, and commending exiled Soviet pastor Georgi Vins and the Soviet underground church—while repudiating the officially recognized church in that country as having capitulated to government control. Delegates also elected Paul N. Tassell, a Bob Jones graduate and Des Moines, Iowa, pastor, as national representative of the 240,000-member denomination; he succeeds Joseph M. Stowell, the church’s top official for the past 10 years.