Page 5617 – Christianity Today (2024)

I had not seen my preacher friend Emeritus Thatcher for several months, when I met him coming out of Ace Hardware. He was carrying a shovel and he informed me that he was now in the business of renting holes.

“Well, not actually renting holes,” he explained. “I’m really digging wells, which are holes of a sort. I’m building a park in which I duplicate the wells that Abraham and Isaac dug. I think people will want to pay to visit these wells and renew their faith. It’s a step toward the deeper life.”

Emeritus is calling the venture “Wells Go Far,” and he hopes to establish branches in every major city. “You can always find a vacant lot,” he said, “and it just takes some elbow grease to transform it into a Wells Go Far park.”

At his first park, he featured dramas from Genesis, such as Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and Isaac meeting his bride. They were going to present Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishmael, but the local Arab nationalist league threatened to test an atomic bomb if they did. “We Christians have to expect persecution,” Thatcher declared.

The sacrificing of Isaac posed a problem at first because the ram kept getting loose from the thicket and running away. Emeritus solved the problem by putting iron on the ram’s horns and hiding an electromagnet in the bushes. When he pushed the button, the ram was free. “Of course, we didn’t really kill the ram,” he said. “The local SPCA threatened to fill up our wells if we did. But, we have to expect persecution.”

While studying his Bible one day, Emeritus hit upon the idea of also letting people build “faith altars,” just as the Old Testament patriarchs did. Now he has a collection of rocks near each well, and for only $5.00 a visitor can build his own altar the same way Abraham did. “Some people may laugh at this,” said Emeritus, “but many visitors have had life-changing experiences because of the altars. One man dropped a rock on his foot and had to be taken to the hospital. There he fell in love with his nurse and they’re going to be married at the park at the end of next month.”

Being a traditionalist, Emeritus calls the names of the wells after the same names Abraham used. “We were going to write the names in Hebrew, but some of the local kosher butchers threatened to dump their garbage in the wells if we did. But, we have to expect persecution.”

Well, well, well.

EUTYCHUS X

Cheryl Forbes, gifted writer and former CHRISTIANITY TODAY assistant editor, has concluded her six-month stint as Eutychus IX. Cheryl has the distinction of being the only woman Eutychus—but she will not be the last. As she lays down her (Eutychus) pen, Eutychus X picks up his pen and immerses it in a new bottle of ink for the next six months.

The Editor

Courageous and Honest

A special thank you for Ted Ward’s article “The Church in the Intermediate Future” (June 29). It is more than good and insightful. It is creatively in touch with the future of the church. His works are a courageous and honest probing in awesome respect for the providence of God.

DONALD CHARLES LACY

First United Methodist Church

Princeton, Ind.

Christianity in America needs to return to its biblical heritage and thrust before its people the presence of God now. God will take care of tomorrow (the distant future).

God’s future is present when we can cast aside our three-car garage, our private pew, our tax writeoffs, and our secularity and become free to live according to the will of God.

REV. BOB WARD

Rapidan Lutheran Parish

Orange, Va.

The Virgin and the Vatican

In reference to the editorial “The Pope in Poland” (June 29), my husband and I both found one sentence in particular disturbing and paradoxical: “His excessive references to Mary notwithstanding, the evidence indicates that Pope John Paul II is Christ-centered in his thinking.” Rather, we feel that his excessive references to Mary indicate that he is not Christ-centered in his thinking.

BILL AND RUTH HOLLEY

Reno, Nev.

As a Catholic who reads your periodical with interest, I must take exception to your editorial comments on the Holy Father’s visit to Poland. You indicate that Catholics have learned from Protestants in the area of Bible reading. This is true, but Protestants can and should also learn from Catholics. One area where this can be done is in devotion to Mary. Comments about “excessive references” to the Blessed Virgin are not helpful. Dialogue is a two-way street and we can all profit from it.

GERALD HERRIN

Pella, Iowa

Why did you find it necessary to ruin what was otherwise a very positive editorial with what I and other Anglicans regard as a “cheap shot” about his “excessive references to Mary”?

As one who loves the Blessed Mother in the same manner and degree as does the Holy Father I find that this devotion (commanded by Scripture in Luke 1:48) not only adds a new dimension to my commitment-in-faith to her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, but also provides me with an example of what through God’s mercy and my faithful obedience to his will and commandments I may one day become.

REV. FR. G. D. WIEBE

St. Martin of Tours Church

Walnut Creek, Calif.

I read your editorial, “The Pope in Poland.” I was very pleased to see most of your comments, but you allowed your Protestantism to overcome your Christianity by being disobedient to God and unscriptural in your reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Please see Luke 1:48–50.

We honor the Blessed Virgin Mary not for her person but for the God that came through her; not for the personal worthiness that she had, but rather for her obedience to God’s declaration to come through her and receive flesh.

GEORGE J. TZANGAS

President

Worldwide Orthodox Renewal for Christ

A Good Example?

Regarding your editorial “Taking a Costly Stand” (June 29): Certainly Christians are often called to take costly stands, and certainly all of us fail to live up to what we are called to. But I seriously question your use of Anita Bryant as a good example for evangelicals to look up to in this area.

Surely she is “forthright.” But in this forthrightness she has shown much ignorance and lack of love for those who struggle with hom*osexual problems.

MARTY HANSEN

Chicago, Ill.

Had evangelicals and priests taken a stand on the issue of hom*osexuality before Anita Bryant did, she would not have had to take a stand herself.

DAVID L. GERMAN

Shepherd, Tex.

Ire over Ireland

I was both dismayed and disheartened by the lack of knowledge or understanding shown in the editorial, “The Travail of Northern Ireland” (June 29).

Neither Speaker O’Neill nor Governor Carey is my favorite political figure, but I can only applaud their courage in bringing to light a situation too long ignored.

Somehow your editorial seems to indicate that Northern Ireland “terrorists” were the only ones shedding blood in this horrible period. Or, alas, that it is only deplorable when British blood is shed. You do not recount any British provocation or participation. Are we then to assume that the British are the “good guys” while the Irish are the “bad guys”?

MONICA DURKIN

Cleveland, Ohio

Thank you for your understanding editorial on the troubles in Northern Ireland. As one who is English, Protestant, and temporarily living in the U.S. with several Irish Christian friends, I have been appalled to discover how easily Irish-Catholic politicians in the U.S. can exploit the tragedy for themselves. Perhaps even sadder is the lack of understanding among U.S. Christians for their brothers and sisters in Ulster, both Protestant and Catholic, who do not want any more violence yet do not want union.

Bernadette Devlin—known for her support for terrorism—once announced that when union was obtained, the battles in the streets would really begin as a workers’ republic was founded! All is not always what it may seem on the surface.

PAUL D. GARDNER

Jackson, Miss.

Religious Radio

I appreciated Jim Pennington’s comments in the June 29 Refiner’s Fire (“Christian Radio: Breaking Out of the Gospel Ghetto”).

I’ve been in broadcasting 13 years now and am grateful finally to see a handful of progressive stations and formats emerging. KNIS, for one, is a noncommercial Christian radio station serving Reno/Carson City/Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The format is 80 percent contemporary Christian music with air personalities making brief and thoughtful remarks in between cuts. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.

TOM HESSE

Program Director, KNIS-FM

Carson City, Nev.

Christian churches have worshipped God in catacombs deep in the earth, behind prison walls, on mountain tops, in open fields, in storefront halls, in beautiful cathedrals, in tin-roofed barns, and in neighborhood homes; but the Spirit of God has been equally present in all. With the growth of the church and the changing structure of the church, the construction of buildings for the worship of God has become big business. Evangelicals seldom can avoid the troublesome question: “What sort of church building shall we erect? Or, indeed, ought we to build at all?” It’s a rare congregation in which some earnest members do not opt for doubling or tripling the use of the old building “so we can send more missionaries to the field.” Others, equally sincere, argue for a strictly functional, no-nonsense structure with plenty of help from the faithful membership “to keep the labor costs in line.” Still others will hold out for a noble and beautiful edifice that will reflect, however faintly, the manifold splendor of God. Coming from opposite ends of the evangelical spectrum, Thomas Howard (pp. 18 to 23) and Ronald Sider (pp. 14 to 19) boldly probe the alternatives and seek to provide guidance for today’s Christians on an issue that defies easy solutions.

Last month an unemployed hairdresser in Wales won nearly $1.75 million on the football pools. Skill had nothing to do with her accurate forecasting of match results: she knew nothing about the game Americans call soccer.

About $500 million is wagered yearly on the pools in Britain. On legal gambling of all kinds, Britons spend annually at least $6 billion—say $106 for each citizen. At a rough guess the comparable figure for Americans is $275, but wages are just about that much higher proportionately to account for the difference.

Someone has called gambling “the growth industry of the 1970s.” New Jersey legislation permitted casino gambling in Atlantic City, with the result that “property taxes quickly soared in the decaying resort city, and … developers planned to spend more than $1 billion for casino-hotel complexes there during the next ten years” (Encyclopedia Britanica).

In 1948 a Lambeth Conference resolution in England drew attention to “the grave moral and social evils” attendant on large-scale gambling; warned that it frequently led to “the deterioration of character and ruin of homes”; urged that no church organization should profit by it; and deprecated “the raising of money by the State, or by any organization through sweepstakes or similar methods, however good may be the object.”

The government was not listening to the bishops, though twenty-six of them sit in the House of Lords, for in 1956 the Conservative administration introduced Premium Bonds. Customers could buy these at any post office. The principal remained intact and was returnable at any time on application. The interest, after a three-month interval during which the government profited, went into a lottery. Maximum prize: about $2,000. At that time a Labour parliamentarian expressed scathing denunciation of the whole wretched business. “Britain’s strength, freedom, and solvency apparently depend on the proceeds of a squalid raffle.” That denouncer in due course became prime minister, and suffered a sad sea change, for he promptly multiplied the biggest prize by five. Squalor is in the eye of the beholder.

Thus did Britain move a step nearer to the national lotteries so beloved of some Continental friends. However Premium Bonds are regarded (and they have not lacked defenders), a word from John Knox has a certain pertinence: “Give the devil entry with his finger, and straightway he will shoot forth his whole arm.”

So it happened. Shortly afterwards, the Betting and Gaming Act gave gambling, according to a Church of Scotland report, “its biggest boost of the century,” with betting shops and bingo halls two of the more spectacular results.

Gambling confronts the Christian with a critical problem. It is not, alas, seen as such by some churches, a substantial portion of whose income depends on their not seeing it. A mass of specious trivialities is trotted out here. They say that the man who gambles is little worse than he who gives money away; that there are moderate gamblers just as there are moderate drinkers—and immoderate book-buyers. Argument on this level with its tacit stress on losses can ultimately prove only that abuse of gambling is wrong, and that the ecclesiastical gamblers have an imperfect grasp of the Christian gospel. Would it be overmuch simplification to suggest that gambling is wrong more for its gains than for its losses?

In his Inventing the Future (1963; a reading of which, with its 1972 sequel The Mature Society, I recommend to all), Dennis Gabor suggests three dangers that confront our civilization: “The first is destruction by nuclear war, the second is being crippled by over-population, and the third is the Age of Leisure.” The first two, he holds, could make life very unpleasant, but people would cope. “Only the Age of Leisure will find man psychologically unprepared.”

A Scottish judge, thinking along the same lines, has described as characteristic of our age the misuse of leisure and the worship of false gods. Gambling is indictable on both counts. It may be, like alcohol, “the quickest way out of Manchester,” but Maurice Maeterlinck would disagree. He calls gambling “the stay-at-home, squalid, imaginary, mechanical, anaemic, and unlovely adventure of those who have never been able to encounter or create the real, necessary, and salutary adventure of life.”

Not only does it discourage more “natural” forms of activity, it tends to become not just a recreation, but the very center of life. Its demands on money and time can be insatiable—and can be heedless of the effects on others. It is certainly gain at the expense of others. It looks not to work, but to chance, for reward, and the man who makes chance his idol is in a moral decline.

Of course this industry gives employment to a vast army of people: betting shops alone in Britain number many thousands. This led to a somewhat bizarre interlude in 1972, when a top lay official on the staff at Church of England headquarters in Westminster attempted his own form of outreach. He helped found the Union of Bookmakers” Employees (TUBE), for which the fraternity showed touching gratitude. Challenged on whether this was the sort of thing the church had hired him to do, he reportedly replied, “It is our duty to help all who seek our assistance—even if they are atheists.”

I recall having trouble with that statement at the time. It seemed to be saying, “No matter what your thing is, let the church help you do it.” And that in turn might prompt the question, Why encourage people to do together what they ought not to be doing at all?

Two years earlier, however, the bishop of a northern England diocese had chaired a meeting in London. Its aim: to keep alive small gambling clubs whose licenses the government might have withdrawn.

Yet a remarkably unequivocal declaration had come some years before that, from William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury for three wartime years. “Gambling,” he said, “challenges that view of life which the Christian Church exists to uphold and extend. Its glorification of mere chance is a denial of the divine order of nature. To risk money haphazard is to disregard the insistence of the Church in every age of living faith, that possessions are a trust, and that men must account to God for their use. The persistent appeal to covetousness is fundamentally opposed to the unselfishness which was taught by Christ.… The attempt to make profit out of the inevitable loss of others is the antithesis of that love of one’s neighbor on which our Lord insisted.”

Now there’s as sound an utterance as ever came out of Canterbury. I would like to think of it as the authentic voice of the Church of England rightly informed.

J. D. Douglas is an author and journalist living in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Evangelist Luis Palau had a good idea of what he was getting into when he traveled to northeast Scotland last month for a series of brief crusades. He had heard this was one of the most difficult regions in all of Britain in which to try to generate new spiritual life. A variety of circ*mstances seemed to confirm this:

• A Scottish television station produced a one-hour documentary that made the point that the only empty buildings in Aberdeen, now an oil boom town, are churches. And it is true that many other churches have closed and been converted into apartments, offices, appliance warehouses, and garages.

• A Church of Scotland minister said a whole generation of the working class has been missed; not one person in his congregation works with his hands.

• Most churches are top-heavy with older members. Philip Simpson, general secretary of the YMCA in Aberdeen, said, “Young people think church is dull and boring … that it’s a place for middle class people and old ladies with big hats and they want nothing to do with it.”

A small group of Scots saw these needs, got together and prayed; then they invited Palau. His final ten days in Scotland would be spent in Aberdeen, where there had not been a unified evangelistic effort for an entire generation.

Evangelist Billy Graham, who was successful in mass evangelism in England and Scotland during the 1950s, had advised Palau: “Don’t conduct a prolonged series of meetings in an outdoor stadium in any part of Britain at any time of the year.” The problem was that there were just two choices of facilities in Aberdeen: the Music Hall, indoors, with a seating capacity of 2,000; and the football (soccer) stadium, which is outside and accommodates 20,000. The local committee prayed, then decided on the football stadium.

Palau came with his team, including Jerry Edmonds, director of the Moody Bible Institute Chorale, and Dave Pope, a popular Christian singer in Britain. They provided music during the Aberdeen crusade, which began in cold and rainy weather that held down attendance: an audience of about 3,000 huddled in one portion of one section of the huge stadium during the first several nights.

Palau admitted he had some doubts for a while because of all the empty seats. But the Aberdonians were optimistic: they saw instead the seats in which people were seated, and said they had not seen so many people at a religious event in their lifetime. A local reporter wrote about “The Miracle in the Rain,” and the response to Palau’s invitations to Christian commitment was good—40 to 50 persons each night, 70 percent of them under 20 years of age.

There were other meetings besides those at the stadium. Astronaut James Irwin spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at the Music Hall; Pope gave two concerts to overflow audiences at the YMCA; ventriloquist Audrey Benmuvhar and a drama group, “Carpenter’s Workshop,” from Northwestern College in Minnesota, appeared in schools; and local young people carried signs in downtown Aberdeen inviting people to the stadium, so that on the last two nights nearly 5,000 persons attended.

Committee members said that crowds would have picked up noticeably if the crusade could have continued for another week. It seemed as though it had taken the first ten days to break down the Scottish reserve. While the older folk were a bit skeptical of Dave Pope and his band’s bouncy, contemporary music, they were beginning to clap their hands and tap their feet as they sang, “He’s Coming Back.” (The nightly crusades were broadcast throughout Europe and to North Africa and the Middle East over one-million-watt Trans World Radio in Monte Carlo.)

At the end of the Aberdeen crusade, Palau explained that he had come without illusions. He said, however, that he was “very pleased”: “I’ve seldom been at so much peace in a crusade. And when you consider the weather, the attendance has been tremendous … the response of the people [has been] good.”

He further observed: “The crusade set precedents, it clarified people’s thinking about mass evangelism, galvanized the Christian forces, it has brought ministers together, it has made the evangelicals feel a new confidence to speak boldly for the Lord; fringe people are realizing evangelicals have convictions and will not back down.”

The churches will be challenged to nurture the new converts, such as the policeman and his wife who found Christ early in the crusade and cancelled vacation plans in order to attend all the meetings, and the journalist who sent Palau a note on the last night of the crusade: “Sorry, I didn’t come forward tonight, but thanks for the greatest gift in the world.” Albert Wollen, Palau’s pastor in Portland, Oregon, was in Scotland and helped ministers organize Bible classes; at least five congregations took part.

Palau wasn’t sure if Scotland was ready for a spiritual harvest, or whether this was the time to sow seed. But some observers note a stirring throughout Great Britain. Pete Meadows, editor of the evangelical Buzz Magazine, says that church attendance in Britain (now estimated to be only 4 or 5 percent of the population) has stopped its decline, and is beginning to level off. He said that many churches are learning lessons from the church growth movement.

In North Wales at Easter, about 3,500 young people gathered for a Spring Harvest. Next year, Spring Harvest will be combined with a national congress on evangelism, coordinated by the British Evangelical Alliance, and about 12,000 young people are expected to attend.

Another sign of new life is the increasing number of evangelical ministers—an increase of about 200 in northeast Scotland in the last 10 to 15 years. David Temple, a Church of Scotland minister who headed the counselors during the Aberdeen crusade, calls this increase “the great hope as far as the Church of Scotland is concerned.”

Evangelical Christians and editors of Christian publications see Palau as the man for the times in Britain. He’s been invited to the Glasgow area next spring for ten weeks, where he will conduct crusades and apply the lessons learned in northeast Scotland. The prospects are for a larger attendance in Glasgow, partly because of the successful meetings held there by Graham in 1955, and partly because more churches will be involved there than in northeast Scotland.

Personalia

King J. Coffman, who recently ended his 31-year career in the United States Army with the rank of colonel, was appointed president of Christian Service Brigade. His primary duties will be working with the field staff and church constituency of the Wheaton, Illinois-based organization, which produces various Christian training programs for boys.

Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson, 57, on June 8 announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. A 10-term congressman and a member of the Evangelical Free Church, Anderson is regarded as one of the best orators in the House and was the first Republican representative to call for President Nixon’s resignation during the Watergate scandal.

Michael Griffiths, general director of Overseas Missionary Fellowship for the past ten years, has been named principal of London Bible College. When he assumes the post next fall, Griffiths becomes the third principal in the 33-year history of the school—England’s leading Bible college.

The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a self-governing watchdog agency that organized formally in March, has its first executive director: Olan Hendrix, most recently the publisher of Regal Books and best known for his management seminars, was appointed to the full-time post by the temporary ECFA board of directors. His ECFA office will be in Pasadena, California, at the Huntington Sheraton Hotel. ECFA was established to promote voluntary and responsible financial disclosure among Christian organizations.

The United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia elected as its new president Nathan M. Pusey, 72, president emeritus of Harvard University. The organization, which was established in 1932 as the Associated Boards for Christian Colleges in China, had the largest religious claim compensation for properties expropriated by the People’s Republic of China. He is a former member of the World Council of Churches Central Committee.

Jewel Freeman Graham was elected president of the national Young Women’s Christian Association at its recent national convention in Dallas. Graham, a member of the Unitarian Fellowship of Yellow Springs, Ohio, was a former vice-president of national YWCA, and is a black leader in interracial education.

Deaths

OSCAR NAUMANN, 69, president for 26 years of the 400,000-member Wisconsin Evangelical Luthern Synod; June 18, in Milwaukee, of a massive stroke.

PATRIARCH ELIAS IV OF ANTIOCH, 65, a leader of Arabic-speaking Eastern Orthodoxy, who had under his jurisdiction the 152,000-member Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America; June 21 in Damascus, Syria, of a heart attack.

Malaysia

A Muslim-leaning State Curbs Its Zealots

Muslim extremism in Malaysia is creating a backlash. The former prime minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman, in his capacity as national president of Perkim (the Malay name for the Muslim Welfare Organization), disclosed recently that some 20,000 Muslim converts in Malaysia have reverted to their original religions in recent years.

“The Tunku,” as he is popularly called, attributes this phenomenon to the growing number of Muslim dakwah movements in the country. Militant and extreme in their views, these Muslim missionary groups are characterized by a total rejection of material progress; converts are known to burn or throw into the river such “worldly” possessions as TV sets. While attempting to spread their conservative brand of Islam, the dakwahs have created a negative response to the religion, says the Tunku. The dakwahs’ aggressive stance has led to several reported incidents of desecration of Hindu temples. Hindu priests have retaliated violently, resulting in at least one intruder killed. National publicity of such incidents has been kept to a minimum—the news media giving the issue a wide berth.

In a move that stressed the gravity of the situation, the Malaysian government said it would consider using its Internal Security Act against persons responsible for the destruction of temple idols. The Security Act provides for the indefinite detention of individuals without trail.

Malays constitute a majority 47 percent of the population and are nearly all Muslims. Other ethnic groups include Chinese (34 percent), Indians (9 percent), and tribal people (10 percent). Christians—about 4 percent of the population—come primarily from the tribal and Indian populations. Missionary observers also note potential for response to Christian witness among that segment of the Chinese who have abandoned their traditional Buddhist-Confucian heritage.

Burundi

Evicted Missionaries: Pawns in Tribal Feud?

Fourteen U.S. Protestant missionaries were among the 52 missionaries expelled June 11 from the Central African state of Burundi on charges of engaging in anti-government activities. They were given 48 hours to leave the country.

Of the Americans who were expelled, six each were from the World Gospel Mission and the Free Methodists, and two from the Evangelical Friends.

Lewis Hedges, one of the expelled missionaries of the World Gospel Mission, said, “No one seems to know how the government decided on which missionaries were to go and which were to stay.” He said he had only two and a half hours in which to do all his packing.

When asked how the ejections might affect the national church, Hedges worried that “the expulsion order will worsen the existing lack of trained leadership in the national church.” At the time of the expulsions, the spiritual condition of the Burundi church was “very encouraging,” and “an evangelical revival spirit existed among the churches,” he said.

According to John Robinson, the general superintendent of the Mid-America (formerly Kansas) Yearly Meeting of Friends, a division of the Evangelical Friends Alliance, one of the two Friends missionaries heard of the expulsion order while in Nairobi for medical tests. James Morris, the field superintendent of the mission who has spent 25 years in Burundi, was given only a 48-hour reentry permit into Burundi, Robinson said. However, 13 Friends missionaries were not affected by the order.

When contacted at the Burundi Embassy in Washington D.C., Clement Samdira, the charge d’affaires, said, “The missionaries were expelled because they violated the law. As foreigners, they have no political rights, but they were preaching politics in churches and were encouraging people to engage in ethnic activities.”

Samdira declined to answer whether these missionaries preached the allegedly political sermons during a given week or extending over a longer period of time.

Burundi, one of the poorest nations of Africa, is about the size of Maryland and has a population of about four million. Fifty-two percent of the population is Roman Catholic and 8 percent is Protestant. Most of the other missionaries expelled were European Roman Catholics.

Like many other African countries, Burundi is vulnerable to tribal confrontations. The country is comprised of three ethnic groups: Hutu, 85 percent; Tutsi, 14 percent; and Twa, 1 percent; with the Tutsi clearly in control.

In April 1972, an unsuccessful attempt by the Hutu to overthrow the ruling Tutsi resulted in the massacre of an estimated 100,000 Hutus, mostly the influential and educated. Many church leaders, apparently because of their education and leadership potential rather than their religion, were killed. This caused a dearth in leadership from which the local churches were recovering before the recent expulsion order.

World Scene

The Mexican government continues its ban on evangelical radio broadcasts. An official letter from the Secretary of the Interior’s legal office to evangelical announcer Alejandro Garrido last month stated that “it is not possible to remove the prohibition” on Spanish language religious radio programs imposed in July 1978. A Mexico City newspaper quoted the same office as saying the reason was that programs, particularly broadcasts along the U.S. border, often promised miraculous cures. A spokesman for the National Commission of Evangelical Executives, which represents 90 percent of the evangelical community in Mexico, denounced this “flagrant violation of human rights” that confuses legitimate evangelical programs with “a few charlatan broadcasters.”

Latin America has a new magazine for pastors and church leaders. The 36-page quarterly Continente Nuevo (“New Continent”) was launched last November by the Luis Palau Evangelistic Team. The magazine is published in Mexico City.

A conference of Latin American charismatic Catholic leaders in Lima, Peru, was attended by the archbishop of Lima. Thus Cardinal Juan Landazuri, who earlier served as first vice-president of CELAM III, put his stamp of approval on charismatic renewal in the Roman Catholic Church. The 90 participants at this sixth Charismatic Catholic Encounter for Latin America were elated. They closed the conference with a nine-hour evangelistic meeting that drew 10,000 persons. Hundreds responded to an invitation to accept Christ.

Namibia’s Roman Catholic prelate has broken with the dominant Lutheran church’s strong backing of SWAPO. Last December German-born Bishop Rudolph Koppmann joined with Lutheran and other church leaders in a pastoral letter deploring South Africa’s decision to go ahead with elections in Namibia without United Nations supervision. But he finds the current UN plan for elections “too wishy-washy” and the Finnish and Evangelical Lutheran Churches “openly pro-SWAPO.” He blames the South West African Peoples Organization for importing Soviet influence and, along with South Africa, for escalating the guerilla war.

The Irish Presbyterian Church has voted by a wide majority to continue suspension of its World Council of Churches membership for a second year. At its General Assembly last month, the church also recognized a motion to be presented to next year’s assembly that would terminate WCC membership. Also in Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley, clergy leader of the Protestant hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, led all others in elections to the European Parliament.

Georgi Vins’s family has joined him in the United States. The wife, five children, mother, and niece of the exiled Soviet pastor arrived last month, the same night as Vins was addressing the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The family is living in a rented house in Middlebury, Vermont. Vins has stressed that he ought not to be identified as a human rights dissident, or as a campaigner for Russian Jews wanting to emigrate, or as part of an underground church. “Reform Baptists meet openly,” he says. “We only want separation of church and state as guaranteed in the Soviet Union constitution, and the freedom to preach the gospel.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan has announced he will resign in January. Coggan, primate of the Church of England, will be 70 in October. For the first time, Anglican clergy will have a voice in the selection of their leader. Prior to the formation of a Crown Appointments Commission in 1977, only government officials presented their selection to the Queen for her formal appointment.

Pope John Paul II will summon the Roman Catholic Dutch hierarchy to a “special synod” in an unprecedented effort to resolve their deep differences. The meeting with the seven bishops is slated for early next year in Rome. The Dutch clergy is among the most theologically “progressive” in the Catholic Church, and feisty Bishop Jan Matthijs Gijsen of Roermond has taken strong exception to these trends. Earlier this year he warned Catholic politicians against supporting legalization of abortion in the country, saying they should be refused the sacraments if they do.

It was something like a summit meeting. At their World Mission Center in New York City last month, Unification Church seminarians met the “enemy”: evangelicals who have written extensive critiques of Sun Myung Moon and his 25-year-old movement.

No hostility was expressed. The writers and seminarians cordially discussed agreed-upon topics in the Skyline Room of what was formerly the New Yorker Hotel—far removed from the hectic streets of Manhattan 39 floors below.

What emerged from the weekend discussions, however, was some significant information for the writers about the Unification Church. Some of the material, they said, had never been published, or acknowledged by as authoritative a Unification leader as the American church president, Neil Salonen, who attended.

Conference dialogue reflected much on the future of the movement; its theology, said UC public affairs director Kathie Lowery, now is in a state of “germination.” While that theology increasingly uses “Christian” terminology, asserted one evangelical, it remains as “unchristian as ever.”

Unification seminarians (several said they don’t mind being called Moonies) have been inviting evangelicals to so-called dialogues for more than a year. The first was held at the Barrytown, New York, campus last summer (August 18, 1978, issue, p. 40), followed by another in October. Conferences have been conducted subsequently with British, Wesleyan-Arminian, and charismatic evangelicals.

But this conference was more “sensitive,” said Pat Zulkosky, student coordinator for evangelical conferences at the seminary, and negotiations for it lasted over an eight-month period.

James Bjornstad, professor at Northeastern Bible College and author of The Moon Is Not the Son, served as spokesman during the planning for the writers who attended: Brooks Alexander, director of Spiritual Counterfeits Project in Berkeley, California; Jerry Yamamoto, also of the Spiritual Counterfeits and author of The Puppet Master; and Ron Enroth, Westmont College sociologist and author of Youth, Brainwashing, and the Extremist Cults. (Later additions were Irving Hexham, Regent College professor, and this reporter, who served primarily as an observer.)

“I came to New York to ask some questions and get some answers [about the cult],” explained Bjornstad. He said the evangelicals wanted those answers from someone with the authority “to speak for the church.” They requested that Moon, or at least international president Bo Hi Pak, attend. They also asked that the conference be held on “neutral” ground, rather than at the seminary.

Assisting Zulkosky during the negotiations was evangelical trend watcher Richard Quebedeaux. As convener for the last six dialogues, Quebedeaux has helped decide the format and which evangelicals to invite. Quebedeaux says evangelicals have criticized him for this role, which he says brings him a $600 monthly stipend from the seminary; but he feels that apologies from him aren’t necessary.

“I don’t agree with Unification theology at all,” said Quebedeaux in a telephone interview. (He recently finished a favorable book about Campus Crusade President Bill Bright.) But he said he likes Moonies as persons, and their openness to theological discussion. The dialogues encourage mutual understanding, says Quebedeaux. He believes the Moonies have been unfairly and inaccurately represented, to some extent, by the news media. (He plans to teach a course at the seminary later this year in the history of evangelical Christianity.)

Quebedeaux, like church historian and dialogue moderator Rodney Sawatsky, of Conrad Grebel (Mennonite) College in Waterloo, Ontario, anticipates one theological benefit from the Moonie-evangelical dialogues: that Unification doctrine, now in a state of flux, might be moved closer to orthodox Christianity.

Sawatsky, a church historian who prefers to be called “orthodox” rather than “evangelical,” commented, “I expect that few Moonies will be converted to my own position, but the movement as a whole may become slightly more orthodox.” He added, “I know that I’m being used by the Unification Church, so I ask myself to what extent is my involvement legitimate?”

Conference details still were being finalized just prior to its start. The evangelicals agreed to meet at Unification headquarters in New York as a compromise. And they accepted Salonen as the representative of Unification leadership, after being told that Moon and Pak weren’t available. (Moon was fishing in the Hudson River, next to the seminary, on the eve of the conference.)

Attending with Salonen, 36, Unification Church in America president since 1972, and public affairs director Lowery, were eight Moonie seminarians—representative of the “intellectual cream” of the church, said Salonen. Several have already graduated from the 100-student school’s two-year program and are engaged in doctoral work at such schools as Yale and Harvard. Also included was seminary professor Warren Lewis, a non-Unification member with a Church of Christ background; Lewis says he’s at Barrytown because “the Moonies provided me a place to teach Christian thought.”

The evangelical writers arrived on a Thursday, and spent the night at a Kingston, New York, hotel (in keeping with their neutral territory policy). The next morning, a driver, who said he had been Moon’s personal chauffeur for several years, took them to the seminary. After preliminary introductions, a brief tour and lunch in the school cafeteria, the entire group traveled three hours by car to New York, where serious discussions began that evening.

The seminary students still were excited about the “matching” (engagement) ceremony conducted by Moon at the New Yorker over Mother’s Day weekend. Moon “matched” (paired off for future marriage) over 700 couples—many of whom had never met prior to the ceremony. Several seminarians proudly showed pictures of their future spouses, saying Moon had known just the right “match” for them.

After the engagement ceremony, Moon administered his “holy wine” to the couples, which signified their release from original sin. All persons, living or dead, must be matched to achieve full salvation, according to Unification doctrine. That would include Christ, said Salonen, who said Christ has already been matched with a young woman now living in Korea. Salonen said it is his personal belief that several drops of Moon’s blood were in the wine used at the first engagement rite in 1960: the original wine has been preserved for use at all future rites, being multiplied through dilution, said Salonen.

At the start of the conference, the Moonies and evangelicals agreed to discuss topics including: Christology, deprogramming, Moonie fund raising, and Moon’s role in the church. The dialogues are important to the Unificationists, Lowery said, since there “are many issues of misunderstanding” between Unificationists and evangelicals.

(The Unification Church goal, as stated at the conference, is “unification of world religions on the basis of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” The recent Moonie-evangelical dialogues and other Moonie interfaith efforts reflect that goal. The church already has tried to obtain, and been denied, membership in the New York City Council of Churches. Young Oon Kim, seminary professor and one of the church’s top theologians, wrote in her Unification Principle and Christian Thought that she hoped dialogue between the Unification Church and “various Christian denominations” will begin.)

The Moonies made it clear during the dialogue that they believe themselves “Christians.” They were unhappy when an evangelical once used the term Christian to refer only to the writers.

But the evangelicals frequently said that Unification theology falls outside their definition of Christianity. The seminarians indicated beliefs that: Christ is not fully God, that Christ did not fulfill his mission, being able to provide only spiritual salvation; that a Lord of the Second Advent (possibly Moon) will complete the salvation process and usher in God’s earthly kingdom; and that all persons eventually will obtain salvation—even Satan.

The Moonies said that they do on occasion pray to spirits, and that Moon and his wife (the True Parents) are prayer intercessors and frequently appear to Unificationists in dreams. When asked, Salonen acknowledged that Moon consulted with medium Arthur Ford some years ago; but Salonen asserted that spiritism is minor to Moonie theology.

Salonen, who said he “may be one of the Americans who knows Moon best,” also told the evangelicals:

• The controversial 120-day training manual was issued by Ken Sudo, now a New York Unification leader, and was not authorized by the church. “I wouldn’t stand behind it … not any of it,” he said; he detects doctrinal errors in this manual, which cult authorities often say embodies the concepts of “heavenly deception” and Moon as Messiah.

• The Unification Church had a $23 million income last year—90 percent from street fund raising and the rest from various business enterprises. (Lowery refuted statements by defected church member and deprogrammer Allen Tate Wood, who, in a recent New York Post interview, claimed that annual street solicitations exceed $219 million.)

• Over 400 Moonies have gone through deprogramming, and “a little more than half of them have come back [to Unification].”

Of particular interest to the evangelicals were comments about the changing Unification theology and proposed revisions of Divine Principle, Moon’s compiled teachings, which one seminarian stated are “essential” for understanding Scripture.

Salonen said the English version of Divine Principle is being revised. He said Moon wants to write “a definitive version of the Divine Principle” in Korean after he ends his 21-year public ministry in 1981. Salonen said Moon is thinking of extending that time period by two years, however. Divine Principle is not church canon or equal with Scripture “as it is currently written,” said Salonen.

Quebedeaux noted, in a telephone interview, that the Unification Church seminarians—as in any religious group—are about “five years ahead” of the rest of their church. He said the seminarians are more liberal and less dogmatic: “Whereas the seminary is interested in dialogue, the movement is interested in conversions and witnessing.” (The Unification Church invited over 70 theologians from various backgrounds to the Virgin Islands later this month, where they will present critiques of the Divine Principle.)

One seminarian disliked the stereotyped image of the “brainwashed Moonie” and said no one like that attends the seminary. “If anything, the seminary is a deprogramming center for brainwashed Moonies,” he told this writer.

Toward the end of the dialogue, Salonen wanted the groups to find points of agreement “… rather than trying to pretend that we are edging toward each other theologically, which I don’t think is the case.” A mutual fight against p*rnography would be a start, he said.

The evangelicals, however, were hesitant about cooperative efforts. Alexander of Spiritual Counterfeits said, “I don’t want to do anything that will help to promote what I believe is a wrong approach to understanding reality [Unification theology]; therefore, I have to be very careful about my participation.”

The group did agree that deprogramming, in most instances, is wrong. And when challenged by the evangelicals about Moonie fund raising tactics, Salonen acknowledged that Moonie fund raisers have been guilty of working under “front names.” Moon and the church do not condone such practices, but the autonomous nature of mobile fund raising teams makes it difficult for the church to halt such practices, he said. Salonen partly blamed the problem on Japanese teachers in the movement: “In the Orient, loyalty is more honorable than honesty.” The evangelicals conceded that some evangelical groups have on occasion acted under “front names,” also.

Unification membership in the United States stands at 7,000 full-time “missionaries” and about 37,000 members overall, said Lowery. Moon moved his headquarters to the United States in 1973, but Lowery said that the Unification Church in America, like church units in other nations, functions more or less autonomous of any “parent” body.

The U.S. church is encouraging Moonies to move out of the communal church centers, said Lowery. Now, she said, Moonies are encouraged to “actualize their faith in the larger community.” They are encouraged to visit nonmembers and have “more traditional living arrangements.”

Along this line, the evangelicals asked why Unification seminarians attend churches in the Barrytown area. Salonen said the seminarians aren’t trying to “bring people out of the churches.” But, he said, “we don’t have to prove that it [church visitation] doesn’t promote the goal of evangelization, because it does.”

The conference ended with evangelicals and Unificationists thanking each other for their warmth and candor. Salonen thanked moderator Sawatsky for “riding herd on a potentially explosive situation.”

Seminary graduate and Yale student Jonathan Wells said his participation in evangelical dialogues has opened his “theological perspective.” His impression has been that the Unification Church, although perhaps in a heterodox sense, “is in the Christian tradition.”

On this point, the groups did not agree. Although they were invited, none of the evangelicals attended the Unification Sunday worship service in the New Yorker Grand Ballroom later that morning.

North American Scene

Underground Evangelism and Jesus to the Communist World have called off their legal duel. In an agreement reached on June 29, but still to be finalized in the courts, L. Joe Bass and Stephan Bankov of UE and Michael Wurmbrand of JTTCW withdrew all charges in their multi-million-dollar defamation suits, and waived any right to raise the charges again. The settlement (see March 2, 1979 issue, page 50) brings years of bitter public recriminations to an end while leaving a number of questions unresolved.

A study commission of the Episcopal Church has recommended the ordination of hom*osexuals whose behavior is “wholesome.” Its report, which did not define wholesome, will be considered at the denomination’s triennial convention in September. The controversial report also loosened the ban on premarital sex between engaged persons. Regarding the biblical treatment of hom*osexuality, the report said, “We do not take the Bible literally, we take it seriously.”

Ordination of women was officially approved for the Reformed Church in America by action of its General Synod last month. During the past several decades, over 40 women reportedly have received training at the 351-year-old denomination’s two seminaries. Some of these graduates were ordained, and their ordinations have not been challenged. The synod vote resolves an issue that has surfaced in nearly every annual meeting since 1958.

Lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment occupied delegates attending the biennial meeting last month of the 1.3-million-member American Baptist Churches. Outgoing president Cora Sparrowk addressed a pro-ERA rally in a telephone speech to the convention. Perhaps not convinced, the delegates voted down (784–427) a resolution urging that all future nationally-sponsored ABC meetings be held only in states that have ratified the ERA. William F. Keucher, a Bloomfield, Michigan, pastor, was elected president of the denomination.

The six-year-old Presbyterian Church in America has reached maturity and is “moving forward,” said newly elected moderator William Joseph of Montgomery, Alabama, at the denomination’s annual meeting. Delegates authorized continued expansion of foreign and domestic work, and approved a record 1980 budget of $4.5 million for its national agencies—17 percent more than in 1979. A statistical summary of the PCA, which was formed as an act of separation from the Presbyterian Church in the United States (Southern), shows increases between 1974 and 1979 in the number of PCA churches, from 260 to 444; ministers, from 196 to 584; and communicant members, from 41,000 to 74,000.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada voted its commitment to double church membership in the next ten years. Kenneth G. McMillan, church moderator and general secretary of the Canadian Bible Society, selected a committee to lead the project. The committee chairman will be Dennis Oliver, formerly of the Church Growth Society of Canada, who has been doing church growth work for the Presbytery of West Toronto. The Presbyterian body has declined in membership from 203,000 in 1964 to about 167,000 this year.

Church-related colleges have a unique function in American life and should resist government interference, said speakers at the first National Congress on Church-related Colleges and Universities. Over 700 delegates—representing 23 denominations and 800 colleges—gathered last month at the University of Notre Dame for the weekend conference, which kicked off a major two-year effort to strengthen the role of church colleges.

Inerrancy Commotion in the Southern Baptist Convention

A Bible battle erupted last month at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Houston, Texas. And the battle lines were drawn according to one’s interpretation of scriptural inerrancy.

In the end, the conservatives won—at least, in the sense that Adrian Rogers of Memphis, Tennessee, was elected president of the 13-million-member denomination. Rogers believes in an inerrant and infallible Bible and hails from the conservative camp. In a postelection news conference, Rogers, pastor of the 11,000-member Bellevue Baptist Church, said, “I was saved in a church where the Bible was the Word of God … I have never moved from that an inch.”

But some Southern Baptists felt uncomfortable during the three-day meeting when conservative spokesmen attacked Southern Baptist seminaries as “liberal,” and engaged in preconvention politicking. One Louisiana pastor complained of these conservatives, “They may be as orthodox as Peter, but they’re as mean as the devil.”

An influential coalition of conservatives, led by Paige Patterson of the Criswell Center for Biblical Studies in Dallas, and Paul Pressler, a Houston appeals court judge, had supported Rogers for president and received credit for engineering his first-ballot victory. In at least 15 states, meetings were held prior to the convention, in which conservatives encouraged messengers (delegates) to attend the convention and to elect a president committed to biblical inerrancy.

Pressler and Patterson had made charges of “liberal” teachings in the six Southern Baptist seminaries. Certain faculty members, they said, did not hold to the traditional Baptist position of an infallible Bible. Evangelist James Robison and superchurch pastor W. A. Criswell of Dallas First Baptist voiced the same criticism and announced they would cosponsor a series of 15 to 20 conferences around the nation, beginning in August, to build support for scriptural inerrancy and expository preaching.

In response, the seminary presidents held a news conference in Dallas, in which they defended their allegiance to the Bible. The presidents said they knew of no professors who would not uphold the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message Statement, which reads, in part, that the Bible “has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error …”

President Duke McCall, whose Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville was one singled out as having liberal faculty, said much of the debate was over the “infallibility of human language”—that “we are in agreement on the inspiration of and authority of the Scriptures.”

McCall told reporters, “The original manuscript, which we do not have, is inerrant.… If you’re talking of an existing manuscript, you can’t say it’s without error. If you’re using inerrant to mean the message of God comes through by the Holy Spirit, it’s inerrant.” (The presidents also indicated they will support the Criswell-Robison meetings.)

Understandably, tensions were high even before the first of the 16,000 Southern Baptist conventioneers hit town. Then, speaking at a pastors’ conference in Houston two days before the convention, Criswell set the tone for things to come.

He announced to his audience, “We’ll have a fine time here, if for no other reason than to elect Adrian Rogers as the next president of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Criswell’s statement apparently violated an unwritten rule against presidential endorsem*nts by former presidents of the convention.

Criswell was followed at the podium by Robison, a Fort Worth-based evangelist whose organization so far has raised $9 million for a series of 15 prime time television crusades to be aired during the next year. Robison denounced any professors in Southern Baptist seminaries who deny inerrancy, and said, “Friends, when Satan attacks, he attacks from within.”

In interviews, some messengers defended the integrity of the Southern Baptist seminaries and thought the conservatives were quibbling over semantics rather than orthodoxy.

Clifford Belcher of Liberty, Missouri, said the only difference between most messengers and the conservatives was that the conservatives “were rolling up their Bibles and beating everyone over the head with them.”

The conservative view was expressed in Houston by Larry Lewis, pastor of Tower Grove Baptist Church in St. Louis. He wanted inerrancy stated in more precise terms, and introduced a resolution calling on seminary trustees to employ only people who believe in the “the divine inspiration of the whole Bible, the inerrancy of the original manuscripts, the existence of a personal devil and a literal hell, the actual existence of a primeval couple named Adam and Eve.…”

There might have been a divisive controversy after Wayne Dehoney, Louisville pastor and a former president of the convention, introduced a subsequent resolution to reaffirm the present Faith and Message Statement. (Lewis believed the statement could be too loosely interpreted.)

A compromise, however, was worked out between Dehoney and newly-elected president Rogers in some behind the scenes as well as platform bargaining. The men agreed that inerrancy, as defined (but not written) in the Faith and Message Statement, applied to the “original autographs,” which satisfied Dehoney. Then they agreed to interpret the Faith Statement as meaning the original manuscripts were scientifically, doctrinally, historically, and philosophically without error—a key point for conservatives. They explained this agreement to Lewis, who agreed to withdraw his resolution.

In a resolution pleasing to moderates, the messengers expressed “profound appreciation” to seminary professors. (Resolutions committee chairman Weldon Gaddy told concerned conservatives that the resolution was not a blanket endorsem*nt of all professors.) The same resolution also said that complaints against faculty members should be taken to the trustees at the seminaries where they teach, as prescribed in the procedures of “historic Baptist policy and the guidelines of the SBC constitution.”

This year’s convention may have been unique because of the campaigning and rhetoric, which on occasion was as hot as the jalapeno peppers served at concession stands inside The Summit convention center. Spokesmen in the inerrancy debate held scheduled and unscheduled press conferences for any of the 275 accredited newspersons interested.

Harold Lindsell, editor emeritus of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, held two news conferences in which he discussed his new book, The Bible in Balance, the sequel to his controversial Battle for the

Bible. Each conference became an open forum for debate over inerrancy. Both books have entire chapters where Lindsell names several Southern Baptists who, he says, deny inerrancy.

In an interview, Lindsell suggested, as Rogers has, creation of a special committee to locate those Southern Baptist seminary professors who do not hold to the traditional Southern Baptist position of an inerrant and infallible Bible. These faculty members should be “let go,” Lindsell said.

The Pressler-Patterson coalition was criticized both publicly and privately for its alleged use of dishonorable campaign tactics. Pressler, whose status as a bona fide delegate was questioned, defended himself on all counts in an emotional speech. He also said he was representing a church in Houston of which he was an “honorary” member.

The net result, however, was a resolution that the convention “disavow overt political activity and organization as a method of selection of its officers.” And the convention authorized registration secretary Lee Porter to make an investigation of voter irregularities.

Porter told the Baptist press that he had planned to make a study of messenger registration and voting at the 1979 convention, even without the motion. He said, “We found some churches which had more than 10 messengers [the maximum allowed], and we found some people who had double registered.”

An issue almost as controversial as inerrancy—separation of church and state—merited little discussion at the convention. But the Christian Life Commission had created a slight stir by its announced support of the widely disputed Internal Revenue Service proposal to remove the tax exempt status of private schools found to be racially discriminatory.

William Elder, of the Christian Life Commission, explained this stand as “a commitment to fight racism.” Said he, “We simply don’t agree that separation of church and state is at issue here.” But the messengers adopted a resolution that opposed the IRS proposal, and all IRS “intrusions into church-operated schools.”

Conservative-liberal tiffs aren’t new to the annual meetings, said Porter Routh, who retires this month after 28 years as secretary-treasurer of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee. Routh recalled the late J. Frank Norris’s attacks on liberalism in 1939, and criticism by conservatives of the Broadman Bible Commentary in the early 1960s. “These things generally tend to work out toward the middle,” he said.

Such may have been the case toward the end of the convention. Rogers promised to bring an attitude of love and reconciliation to the presidency, and at a news conference, denied having any part in the Patterson-Pressler coalition, saying he represented no splinter group.

“I love Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, but if I can’t love all Southern Baptists, I don’t have a right to be president,” he said.

Rogers spent more than two hours in a fence-mending meeting with editors of the convention’s 34 state newspapers. Several editors had criticized the conservatives for politicking, and, in turn, had been attacked publicly by the conservatives. Rogers also spent time with seminary presidents, including William Pinson of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary and Duke McCall of Southern Baptist in Louisville.

Rogers, a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, stuck to his earlier statements, however, that some Southern Baptist seminaries have faculty members who do not believe in inerrancy. He told the Baptist editors that Southern Baptists probably are unaware of the extent of liberalism in the seminaries—that some professors “are so glib … so good at semantics … that the rank and file have not yet found out what some professors believe.” Rogers has indicated he will name proinerrancy Baptists to those convention committees that have the authority to appoint seminary trustees.

(Rogers was a founder and, until several months ago, a board member of the Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship. The group was formed in 1973 by conservatives committed to biblical inerrancy and to exposing liberalism in Southern Baptist seminaries. Rogers’s Memphis church gives $36,000 a year to the adjacent Mid-America Baptist Seminary—not one of the six official Baptist seminaries—that was established as a conservative alternative to the “liberal” seminaries.)

Committee appointments are the most direct way a Southern Baptist president can affect the character of the denomination. Presidents are primarily image-makers for the denomination, say Baptist watchers, and are allowed only two single-year terms.

Observers wonder if Rogers will be challenged for reelection at the annual meeting next year in St. Louis: Baptist presidents customarily are voted to a second term without a challenge.

Only time will tell, they say, whether this year’s meeting was just another family squabble or an indication of a resurgence by conservatives.

Seminaries

Fuller’s Problems Are Psychological but Real

What began as a routine reevaluation by an American Psychological Association (APA) accrediting team has resulted in a major controversy for the 140-student School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

Central to the debate are five psychology students whose protests deferred the accreditation process, and a proposed sexual standards statement, which the so-called Group of Five has criticized.

A three-member site team visited Fuller in January, and in a report submitted to the APA Committee on Accreditation, lauded the psychology school and recommended its reaccreditation: “The entire institution appears to be characterized by a blend of scholarliness and public service into which the psychology program fits nicely. The result is a very bright well-qualified group [of students] who are very clear that they have chosen Fuller for its unique combination of psychological and theological training.” The accreditation committee reportedly voted to approve the site team’s report.

However, subsequent protests by the Group of Five to APA President Nicholas Cummings contained “conflicting information,” said Meredith Crawford, administrative officer for accreditation. Crawford said that Cummings referred the protests to the accreditation committee, which “voted to defer action until a second site team could visit the campus” to investigate.

The seminary was notified late last month that the second APA site team intends to visit prior to August 10, if possible. While this second study will be “time consuming and distracting,” President David Hubbard said, “it will also give us opportunity to make clear that the five students who have raised questions about Fuller stand virtually alone.”

Psychology student Anne Glasser first made public the protests of the Group of Five, which apparently had contacted the APA without the knowledge of other students or faculty at the school. In her May 22 letter to psychology students and faculty, Glasser revealed her discoveries that the five had been communicating secretly with APA members personally and by letter “their belief that Fuller’s program is in violation of APA standards.”

The five students, including Ray Towne, then the president of the psychology school’s Graduate Union, had protested a reported lack of academic freedom, alleged situations of “dissertation tampering,” and a more definitive sexual standards statement, which at press time was being considered for approval by the seminary.

Glasser, who said she learned about the protests from the Group of Five firsthand—during an evening conversation—asserted in her letter that the group had submitted various documents to “prove” its contention and hoped to use its “alliance with APA to force the faculty and administration of the School of Psychology to change their attitude and policies.” She also reported that the group had been “lobbying intensively” for over two months “without informing their fellow students of their activities.”

In a meeting with psychology students three days after Glasser made the findings public, members of the Group of Five acknowleged contacting the APA. But they would not disclose the exact nature of their charges against Fuller. Some students expressed feelings of betrayal to the group for their having jeopardized the school’s highly prized APA approval without first making grievances known through regular channels at the seminary.

In a special election the next week, Towne was recalled as GU president by a vote of 122–8 (a 91 percent student turnout). A motion was also in process to have Group of Five member Scott Scribner recalled from his post as a GU representative. (The remaining three—Geoffrey Sarkissian, Gregory Wheeler, and Stanley Conrad—hold no student government positions.)

When contacted about its activities, the Group of Five refused to comment. “We have decided not to talk because of excessive speculation; our main concern at this time is protecting our own interest in the school,” said Scribner.

The faculty passed a motion saying that no action should be taken against the group until full knowledge of its communications with the APA was made available. However, 109 students signed a statement, sent to APA executives, that said the Group of Five does not represent their views. The statement also disavowed the group’s “unilateral and secretive initiative.” They affirmed the school’s established processes for lodging grievances and its unique identity as part of a theological seminary.

Fuller’s six-year graduate program in psychology is one of 103 clinical psychology programs in the country approved by the APA and the only approved program that is connected with a religious institution. APA approval—likened to endorsem*nt of a medical school by the American Medical Association—enables a school to attract better students and faculty, and to secure more federal grants and prestigious internships for its students. Fuller’s program was first approved by the APA in 1973, and the school was up for its five-year reevaluation this year. (Fuller with a total of 1,800 students, also has separate schools of theology and world mission.)

Some have questioned the psychology program’s seminary ties, but the APA site team reported no conflicts. The site team had asked (as described in its report) “the outside training directors to help them address the issue of any consequences resulting from the religious orientation of the training program. They [training directors] readily gave a number of examples of positive results (ability to relate to religiously oriented patients; ability to handle difficult life situations presented by patients which were beyond the ability of other students) but no indication of any negative consequence was noted.”

One psychology professor suggested that the APA could deny approval if it determines that the school’s credal statement is an infringement of academic freedom and that its proposed sexual code is an infringement of ethical freedom. If that happens, he predicted that Fuller would take legal action against the APA and fight to retain approval.

Others, however, were confident that Fuller would be granted APA approval even after a second site team visit. Said one professor, “The APA struggled last year over whether or not a religious institution that discriminates in the hiring of faculty can be approved and they passed it overwhelmingly. Their own attorney has it in writing that they would have no legal grounds to stand on because of the issue of religious freedom.”

Fuller would not be willing to drop its proposed sexual standards statement in order to insure APA approval, said President Hubbard. “We have to take whatever stands we feel are openly and confessionally Christian,” he said. “APA is very important to us but so is our fidelity to our Christian convictions.”

According to Hubbard, the need for such a statement arose last October after an anonymous letter was sent to Fuller trustees by a group calling itself the Fuller Alliance for Gay Students (fa*gS); the letter acknowledged the presence of gay students among the Fuller student body. The situation was aggravated by a second letter sent by fa*gS to Christian schools throughout the country, in which the group promised support to any hom*osexual students coming to study at Fuller.

The administration said it could not determine for sure whether the letters came from an authentic student group, from an off-campus organization, or as a prank.

Evangelicals Concerned (an information and support group for hom*osexual Christians, which endorses “covenanted” practicing hom*osexuality) described the formation of fa*gS in its winter 1979 newsletter. The same newsletter listed Fuller School of Psychology professor Phyllis Hart as an EC advisory board member.

The seminary already has statements on student conduct and procedures for student discipline in its catalogue and student handbook, respectively, said Hubbard. One requirement for graduation, said Hubbard, has been that a student have “conduct in accord with standards of wholesome Christian character.”

However, Hubbard said the seminary felt it needed to “spell out a little more clearly what we view as wholesome Christian conduct.” The proposed statement specifically refutes as unbiblical any sexual activity outside of marriage, as well as hom*osexuality; it “represents making specific and concrete a set of standards that we’ve always adhered to as an institution and that have affected our admissions and counseling procedures.…” said Hubbard.

He explained further: “We have to go on the record in some cases a little more specifically, particularly if we ever anticipate that the institution may have to exercise discipline, because the courts insist on standards that are spelled out beforehand and on carefully described and executed procedures.”

PHYLLIS ALSDURF

Christian Science

Mixed Bill of Health in Centennial Checkup

Without fanfare, some 7,000 Christian Science members from around the world took note of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the First Church of Christ, Scientist—the “Mother Church,” begun by Mary Baker Eddy—during the church’s annual meeting last month in Boston. The meeting was closed to the press, and featured no special centennial observances because, as a spokesman explained to reporters, leaders wanted to “emphasize spiritual rededication” instead.

Harvey W. Wood, chairman of the Mother Church’s board of directors, indicated that the “growing interest in Christian healing by people of many faiths” is a source of encouragement to Christian Scientists (whose ranks have thinned greatly in the last 25 years). Such interest, he said, shows that many people are swinging away from materialistic thinking and “reaching out to learn more of man’s relationship to God, and the spiritual basis of true health and wholeness.”

(Christian Science holds that personal well-being—including health—depends primarily on the way one thinks about life and God. Professional medical care is usually shunned. Physical conditions are not ultimate realities, but rather “externalized forms of mental states which can be changed by the human yielding to the divine,” explained a recent Christian Science Monitor article. Mrs. Eddy, who “discovered” Christian Science as a method of healing in 1866 and later established the Christian Science Church to promote it, defined God as Life, Truth, Love, Principle, Mind, Soul, and Spirit.)

The centennial saw the Mother Church and its some 3,000 branch churches in 51 countries in an unclear state of health. Materially, the signs seemed good, but other areas, such as church membership, did not appear so promising.

The Mother Church alone has an estimated $350 million in assets, including property and trusts. Its Boston headquarters was built eight years ago for $82 million with no mortgage. Financial reports show the group as debt free with cash balances of $70 million on hand; about $3 million of the sum is designated for specific purposes. Church leaders decline to say how much of the church’s income comes from contributions. Members are charged a per capita tax of one dollar per year for the Mother Church.

Expenses last year were $29 million, including $6.2 million to cover a deficit incurred by the Monitor, the highly respected newspaper published daily in the United States (178,000 circulation) and weekly overseas (16,000). An endowment fund established a year ago to help support the Monitor now stands at $3.2 million, with contributions pouring in at the rate of $250,000 a month, said a spokesman. (The Monitor receives about $6 million annually in circulation income, and an equal amount in advertising revenues.)

In accord with Mrs. Eddy’s instructions to avoid emphasis on numbers, the church issues no membership statistics. But most observers place current active membership at between 200,000 and 225,000—a decline of perhaps 100,000 or more since the church’s heyday several decades ago. Many of the members are middle-aged and elderly women, attendance at many large churches is sagging, and leaders privately lament the lack of interest among young people in the church’s teachings. Church officials acknowledge that 257 branch churches and 97 storefront reading rooms have been closed in the past ten years.

One possible barometer of membership strength and activity is the number of Christian Science practitioners and teachers. These full-time lay workers are listed in the monthly Christian Science Journal (circulation 160,000), and their numbers have declined radically in a number of metropolitan areas in the past 25 years, according to an informal survey by CHRISTIANITY TODAY. For example, the number of practitioners in metropolitan Chicago declined from 355 in 1954 to 73 last year. Others areas showing losses since 1954: San Francisco, from 205 to 46 last year; New York, from 359 to 104 last year. Even Boston showed a decline: from 215 to 125 last year. A similar pattern is seen in churches overseas.

Christian Science leaders acknowledge that the church has experienced decline, but say it is one that is no worse than what some other denominations have experienced lately. The church is merely going through a “pause, a chance for a second wind,” Christian Science historian Robert Peel told a Wall Street Journal reporter earlier this year.

Whatever its numerical strength, the church over the years has had a clout that belies its numbers. A network of Committees on Publication monitors legislation on state and federal levels to make sure Christian Science members are protected. As a result, practitioners are accorded the same status and benefits by the Internal Revenue Service as are ordained ministers. Blue Cross and Blue Shield in 14 states, along with hundreds of insurance companies, cover “care” provided by Christian Science practitioners under a special category similar to psychiatric treatment. (A practitioner, who may or may not make personal visits, usually charges from $2 to $15 a day to pray for an afflicted person; for infirm persons unable to remain at home, the church operates 33 rest homes.)

The Committees on Publication also keep an eye on press coverage about Christian Science, and they are quick to point out inaccuracies. For the past year, the committees have been fending off attacks by a handful of dissidents known as United Christian Scientists. The dissidents are led by David Nolan, 33, of San Jose, California, who was excommunicated by the church for his divisiveness. Nolan, who claims a mailing list of 120,000, charges that the church’s Boston leadership has become totalitarian, corrupt, and infiltrated by Communists. These charges are dismissed as ridiculous by the leadership.

About 500 Christian Science members with special training and credentials are listed as teachers. The designation qualifies them to teach a two-week course in Christian Science doctrine once a year. Classes are limited to no more than 30 students, who pay $100 for the course—an amount stipulated by Mrs. Eddy in the church’s 1895-vintage manual.

Christian Science services are led by lay persons. On Sunday, a Bible lesson, printed in the Christian Science Quarterly (160,000 circulation), is read from the pulpit; members are expected to have studied it during the week. A midweek service focuses on local church needs, and personal testimonies are given. The same 26 topics, as designated by Mrs. Eddy, are repeated twice a year. Each church is required to have a reading room where members and the general public can study and purchase Bible study materials.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

hom*osexuality And The Church

This survey of several books on hom*osexuality is by Robert K. Johnston, associate professor of religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The flood of books and articles on hom*osexuality is unstanched. Here are evaluations of several titles that were issued last year by major religious publishers. Previously reviewed in these pages were Williams, The Bond that Breaks (Regal), and Scanzoni and Mollenkott, Is the hom*osexual My Neighbor? (Harper & Row), in the May 5, 1978, issue and Barnhouse, hom*osexuality: A Symbolic Confusion (Seabury), and Philpott, The Gay Theology (Logos), in the November 3, 1978, issue. Williams’s is the best source currently available for the Christian who wants a solidly evangelical and biblical exposition on the topic, but little concrete help for counseling is provided. Scanzoni-Mollenkott rightly argue that Christians need greater understanding of and compassion toward hom*osexuals, but their biblical “solutions” seem strained.

A book by Jerry Kirk, The hom*osexual Crisis in the Mainline Church (Nelson, 192 pp., $3.95 pb), will be of real service and is on an elementary level. Kirk is a pastor experienced in counseling hom*osexuals, and he writes about them and their hom*osexuality (the distinction is important) in a style that is both biblical and compassionate. Kirk’s particular focus is the issue of ordaining hom*osexuals in the United Presbyterian Church, but he broadens his discussion beyond that question as it relates to his denomination.

Kirk rightly understands the ultimate issue at stake in this discussion is one’s faithfulness to God’s authoritative, revealed will. He also understands that Christians can only discover this by a careful reading of Scripture in its rightful context. In declaring that Scripture opposes hom*osexual activity, moreover, Kirk does not only criticize those who are hom*osexual: he also castigates those of us who are not, but who react with blatant or subtle forms of hatred of hom*osexuals. This also is unbiblical. Mutual repentance is the order of the day.

Richard Lovelace, a professor at Gordon-Conwell seminary who served on the United Presbyterian task force on hom*osexuality, has written hom*osexuality and the Church (Revell, 158 pp., $6.95). His book provides an able summary of the classical and contemporary theological discussion. After capsulizing the relevant writings of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Barth, and Thielicke, Lovelace concludes that hom*osexuality must indeed be considered a sin. Although he mentions several modern writers who challenge this assessment, Lovelace concludes that their growing acceptance of hom*osexual practice is because of a “false religion” that is opposed to biblical revelation, a “cheap grace” that ignores repentance, a “powerless grace” that denies the possibility of cure, and an “antinomian ethic” that undercuts the balance between law and gospel.

Lovelace’s synopsis of theological opinion will prove useful, but the book could have been better. At times he seems to hint that hom*osexuality is uniquely heinous. Also, one wonders why his biblical discussion begins with the specific texts on hom*osexuality before turning to the wider context of human sexuality in general. Moreover, Lovelace wrongly ties human sexuality in Genesis to marriage rather than first grounding it in the image of God. Doing it Lovelace’s way affects one’s attitude toward the sexuality of all people, young and old, who are unmarried.

A very different kind of book is hom*osexuality and the Christian Faith: A Symposium, edited by Harold Twiss (Judson, 110 pp., $3.95 pb). This is a collection of representative articles on the subject of hom*osexuality that have appeared recently in leading periodicals. This is an excellent book for those who want to be stimulated by a cross-section of the current arguments over hom*osexuality in the wider Christian church.

Tom Horner’s Jonathan Loved David: hom*osexuality in Biblical Times (Westminster, 163 pp., $5.95 pb) suffers from all the defects the title might suggest, and more. Horner inundates the reader with information and surmise, some pertinent and some not, but all intended to challenge the common view that the Bible considers hom*osexual practice to be a sin. His basic methodology seems to be: if one dubious argument isn’t sufficient, perhaps there is greater strength in ten. He believes that Gilgamesh (in the epic Mesopotamian tale) could have been a hom*osexual, that there might have been hom*osexual relations between David and Jonathan and between Naomi and Ruth, that Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” might have been hom*osexuality, that Jesus didn’t marry because he might not have been the “marrying kind,” that Jesus thought highly of eunuchs (“who were most often hom*osexually inclined”), and that most, if not all of the biblical condemnations against hom*osexuality, are in reality attacks against idolatrous practice. Therefore, says Horner, it is wrong to conclude that the Bible is against genuine hom*osexual love. This book will win few converts, but it does show the extent to which biblical texts are being twisted.

Understanding Gay Relatives and Friends (Seabury, 128 pp., $3.95 pb) is by Clinton R. Jones, an Episcopal minister who pleads with readers to empathize with and accept hom*osexuals. According to Jones the problems hom*osexuals encounter are caused by blind prejudice, faulty stereotyping, and dreams unrealized because of social pressure. Questions of morality or of sin never surface in the book. Gay ministers are advised that they might have to deceive their congregations. Monogamous hom*osexual relationships are stressed, but Jones is open to bisexual and extramarital relations as well. Theology seems irrelevant; biblical “literalists” are, of course, chastised. A Christian approach to hom*osexuality is reduced to that of empathy, sensitivity, and concern. While these are important and too often lacking, they hardly constitute an adequate Christian response.

We Speak for Ourselves: Experiences in hom*osexual Counselling (Fortress, 146 pp., $4.75 pb) is by Jack Babuscio, a hom*osexual who heads a counseling service. Like Jones, he believes that problems among his clients “spring from negative societal reaction to hom*osexuality rather than from anything inherent in the hom*osexual orientation itself.” But unlike Jones, he does not seek to base this half-truth on “Christian” sentimentality. In arguing his case, Babuscio uses the personal testimonies of some seventy practicing hom*osexuals. They discuss such topics as stereotyping, identity, social pressure, sexual ambivalence, civil rights, marriage, family, religion, “coming out,” and participation in the gay community. Evangelicals can learn from the testimonies (hence, this book is more useful than those of Horner or Jones), but will disagree with many of the conclusions.

At the other end of the spectrum of books on hom*osexuality is Tim LaHaye’s The Unhappy Gays (Tyndale, 207 pp., $4.95 pb). Although LaHaye, a well-known pastor and author, does not overlook or attempt to explain away the moral and spiritual aspects of the topic (as Horner, Jones, and Babuscio do), his book is faulty for three reasons. First, LaHaye asserts his willingness to listen to hom*osexuals and to learn from them, but his conclusions show little evidence that he has done so. For example, he rightly recognizes that there are wide differences among gays, yet he presents a stereotypical description. Second, LaHaye at times is self-contradictory. He criticizes Kinsey’s findings as unreliable, for example, only to use them later in support of his contention that hom*osexuality has become epidemic. Third, throughout his book LaHaye uses cavalier, cruel, and false generalizations: those who are single are said to have their happiness seriously threatened by the lack of posterity; those who “pump iron” are probably hom*osexual; artists who draw nudes might be motivated by hom*osexuality. LaHaye has failed to treat the topic responsibly.

Greg Bahnsen’s hom*osexuality: A Biblical View (Baker, 152 pp., $6.95 pb) is superior in every way to LaHaye’s work. Bahnsen is a theologian who until recently taught at Reformed Seminary in Mississippi. He takes the biblical texts seriously, and he evidences a wide knowledge—albeit conservative and idiosyncratic—of the political process. Moreover, Bahnsen truly wants to treat the hom*osexual fairly and with compassion. Nevertheless, the book strikes me as unnecessarily unbending and unintentionally unloving. Bahnsen communicates self-righteousness, despite protests to the contrary. Unfortunately, in this he mirrors the vast majority of Christians. Although he does interact with opposing viewpoints (his bibliography is excellent), Bahnsen’s style is to focus on the weakest arguments of his opponents, not their strongest. Bahnsen believes that hom*osexual desire as well as actual behavior is sinful. He denies the validity of attempts to distinguish orientation or propensity from cultivated desire and lust. A crucial question, and raised by hom*osexuality as but one example, concerns a merging of private morality and public legality that Bahnsen seems to advocate. He argues that Christian conviction is based in “God’s universal and objectively valid moral standards,” and as such, should be the goal of all public policy. Christians know what others need, he claims, and should seek legally to impose their will on society. But if this is true, should we not require everyone to worship and arrest those who use profanity? Bahnsen admits his book will be inflammatory to many, and he is only partially justified in believing that this will happen because he is proclaiming the whole counsel of God.

Somewhat better than LaHaye and Bahnsen is another evangelical contribution, which is notable in its attempt to speak both theologically and pastorally. The Gospel and the Gay (Nelson, 202 pp., $3.95 pb) is by Kenneth Gangel, president of Miami Christian College. Theologically, Gangel believes that “the issue of hom*osexual practice boils down to one simple question: ‘Do you believe the Bible?’” This promising beginning, however, is undercut by his seeming suspicion of all forms of biblical scholarship. He realizes, for example, that the citizens of Sodom were bisexual and wanted to commit a violent, gang rape, but he fails to demonstrate these insights in his exegesis.

Pastorally, there are sound aspects to Gangel’s advice and he seeks to be balanced. But his major case study of a “cure” is of a bisexual, not an exclusive hom*osexual, hence, his generalizations are suspect. Gangel does stress that hom*osexuals need interaction with receptive Christians who practice acceptance and love, although his cautions to heterosexuals about being ensnared could cancel his exhortation.

The issue of hom*osexuality will tire many Christian readers. We are entitled to wonder if the topic has not been blown out of all proportion both within society and within the church. But as with the question of racial justice, the failure of the church to deal adequately with an important dimension of human experience, as well as the heightened consciousness of those who feel oppressed, has forced the topic high up on the agenda of church and society. This is as it should be. The Christian church is daily demonstrating rejection and lack of true love to a segment of society that particularly needs it. On the other hand, sentimentality in the guise of Christian love is no substitute for a biblically defined faith. The contemporary pressure on the church’s position regarding hom*osexuality should be welcomed, for with it comes the opportunity to clarify our understanding of biblical teaching. Christians must struggle to be both lovingly critical and critically loving as they address both hom*osexuality and the hom*osexual. Toward that end books such as some of these, and more to come, can help us to discern and apply God’s will in this matter.

Rebuking The Wcc

Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World, by Ernest Lefever (Ethics and Public Policy Center [1211 Connecticut Ave., Washington, DC 20036], 128 pp., $10 and $5 pb) is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, lecturer at large, World Vision, Arlington, Virginia.

This is a very significant volume. It is an unsparing evaluation and criticism of the World Council and its actions toward the Third World by the director of Georgetown University’s public policy center, who was once associate director for international affairs of the National Council of Churches and who holds a doctorate in ethics from Yale.

Lefever believes that justice, freedom, and peace are indeed matters of Christian concern. He gives no encouragement to withdrawal from social involvement, but he also has no illusory visions of social utopia.

The author criticizes the WCC for the disproportionately prosocialist composition of its Geneva headquarters staff. He notes that the WCC’s mounting interest in the Third World has been marked by increasingly radical theology to the extent that it now contributes to Marxist guerilla groups. He deplores repeated WCC protests against violations of human and political rights directed against Western democracies and their allies while more grievous infractions in Marxist or Third World countries are ignored.

“The course of wisdom and moral responsibility for the WCC would be to recognize the peaceful and lawful forces that are trying to deal constructively with the problems of poverty, injustice and lack of freedom,” he writes. “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 greater evils of the Marxist solution.” Lefever notes that liberation theology underrates the values of a market economy versus a socialist economy. Instead of being a root cause of poverty, industrial capitalism shaped societies that could hope to eliminate stark poverty.

Lefever calls the WCC to rebuild its disordered vision of social ethics by holding a profounder regard for the truly Christian inheritance, and by developing a fuller understanding of the respective roles of church, state, and citizen. The WCC would profit by reflecting the divergent views of professional specialists within its own circles, he rightly stresses, instead of leaping over available research resources in deference to preconceived positions.

Universalizing the Jewish experience.

All of Bernard Malamud’s fiction has been remarkably similar in design and theme. No matter what the changes, he reworks the same “idea.”

The atmosphere in Malamud’s fiction is always one of hard times, gloom, and enclosure. The heroes, usually Jewish, recall by their actions the lives of Samson, Job, Joseph, Ephraim, Hosea, and other Old Testament characters. The pattern of their response to life, moreover, suggests the timelessness of the Arthurian Grail myth and its predecessor, the myth of the Fisher-king. And the imagery and symbols within the novels and stories are consistent with the universal archetypes of Jungian psychology.

Malamud’s plots are also of a piece. The protagonist, insulated from his true self, seeks a new life or a substitute existence. In the process, the new knowledge is sometimes repressed and hidden, with catastrophic results. At other times, the individual incorporates his new awareness into his life, bringing a form of redemption.

Malamud’s characters can also be generalized. Tormented as we first see them (a catalogue of the opening lines of Malamud’s works is a pessimistic melange indeed), Malamud’s heroes despair, rebel, bumble, curse, submit, and seek escape. Critics have noted that Malamud’s major characters often resemble the Schlemiel—“struggling, striving, always en route, but destined never quite to arrive.” The heroines in Malamud’s novels are all like Iris Lemon in The Natural, at once both sweet and sour. Moreover, each is, in the Grailmyth imagery, a “lady of the lake” who protects and nurses orphans and teaches knights. The temptresses, or antiheroines, by contrast, seek to corrupt, reflecting in their actions their own diseased breasts and sexual inadequacies.

In tone Malamud’s writings demonstrate the greatest variety and perhaps inconsistency. The Natural, a novel about a baseball hero that is patterned after Greek mythology, is narrated by what one critic has labeled “equal parts Mel Allen and James Joyce.” A New Life, a novel about a liberal, Eastern English professor who moves West to Cascadia College to begin anew, has a tone that is now comical, then touching, now using pat characterizations, now fresh and alive. In The Tenants, the story of two writers, one Jewish and one black, who live in an otherwise deserted tenement, a reader wants to laugh and cry simultaneously. Malamud’s tone works well in The Fixer, an account of a Russian Jew who is wrongly imprisoned, The Assistant, the story of a young man who robs a poor Jewish store owner, and two works of short stories, in The Magic Barrel and Rembrandt’s Hat.

Malamud creates the events and characters to explain his view of life.

The fiction depends on morality nurtured by Judaism. Throughout his works, Malamud reiterates that the fullness of life is not to be discovered through deception or greed, but only through compassion. His characters learn that lesson through suffering and failure.

In “The Lady of the Lake” Malamud tells the story of Henry Levin, who, as Henry R. Freeman, goes to live a new life in Europe. He meets his “lady of the lake,” but he hides his true identity. When she asks him if he is Jewish, he tells her “no” three times. She shows Henry her tattoo from Buchenwald. Her heritage, she says, is too important to marry a non-Jew.

In The Fixer, Yakov Bok, a handyman, flees his Jewish Shtetl or ghetto for freedom and opportunity. He, too, pretends to be a Gentile. But though he finds a job and a place to live with an anti-Semite, he is wrongly accused of murdering an innocent Christian child and using the blood to make matzos for Passover. Most of the book takes place in prison. As he waits for his trial, he asks “Why me? Why did it have to happen to a poor, half-ignorant fixer?” Bok realizes eventually that “being a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors.”

It is not through the simple exchange of one life for another, but through the offering of compassion to one’s fellow sufferers that a new life is ultimately achieved, Malamud believes. In The Assistant, Malamud’s finest novel, Frank Alpine initially believed that “at crime he would change his luck, make adventure, live like a prince.” But he is drawn back to the prison-tomb of Morris Bober’s grocery, the place he has just robbed. He becomes Bober’s assistant. Frank at first despises Bober’s self-chosen poverty, but as the novel proceeds he takes Bober’s place both figuratively and literally. At the end of the novel, Frank is working the store, providing Bober’s daughter Helen with money for her education, hoping she will return his love. Frank converts to Judaism. To become truly a Jew means for Malamud to become a man.

Seeking to protest what he believes to be a false devaluation of man in our day, Malamud has provided a moral vision of man and his possibilities. With his tough, bittersweet portrayals, he has sought to remind man of what humanity means. The Jew is a prime example of the real possibilities for all mankind. Bernard Malamud has found in the Jewish experience a paradigm for the human. He has universalized the Jewish drama.

But isn’t Judaism more than this? Isn’t Judaism, first of all, an encounter with Yahweh? Yes. And orthodox Jewish and Christian readers will find Malamud’s vision incomplete therefore. But don’t too quickly dismiss his insight into the reality of life. Malamud enfleshes themes central to the Old Testament wisdom literature of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs. He sets before his readers life and death, but admonishes us to choose life. The writer of Proverbs put it this way: “Does not wisdom call, Does not understanding raise her voice?… Happy is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors. For he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord; But he who misses me injures himself; all who hate me love death” (Prov. 8:34–36).

Robert K. Johnston teaches religion at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The art of working for and through people.

Good management principles, far from being restricted to the business community, can play an important role in the church and in Christian organizations. Good church management by clergy and lay officials enables the church to establish and carry out its mission. Management involves both organizational and spiritual leadership, and it requires that leaders work through and with people to achieve the group’s goals and purposes.

Why Worry About Management?

Why should Christian workers be interested in management? I can think of several reasons. First, management is a powerful teaching tool. Through management one’s teaching and preaching take on visible, corporate form. When people listen to a sermon on stewardship of time and resources, they hear what the pastor says; when they observe the way the pastor structures and leads the officers and committees, they see what he or she means. The difference is significant: people remember only about 25 percent of what they hear, but about 70 percent of what they see. In other words, what you do thunders so loudly in my ears that I can’t hear what you say. Management is one way of fleshing out our theology so that people can see as well as hear the Word of God.

Second, Christian leaders should be interested in management because a rapidly changing environment requires new procedures in order for the church to be effective. Before his death in 1947, Alfred North Whitehead said, “The rate of change in our time is so swift that an individual of ordinary length of life will be called upon to face novel situations which have no parallel in the past. The fixed person for the fixed duties who in the old society was such a godsend will in the future be a public danger.” How much more true his statement is thirty years later! Either you manage the change going on in your church, or the change manages you.

Managing change does not mean stopping change, however. No one can do that. A good manager learns to modify the organizational structures and methods so the church can remain effective in the midst of change.

Rapid change brings much uncertainty. The only certain thing today is the certainty of uncertainty. It simply isn’t good enough today to “do things the way we’ve always done them.” Emerson called that kind of attitude “a foolish consistency.” Change (and the uncertainty it brings) creates both problems and opportunities. A church will either be pushed by problems or led by a vision of opportunity. Its leader’s style of management will largely determine which will be the case.

Effective management will help to prevent your group from losing sight of “the Way,” and to use all of its resources to acquaint a changing world with the unchanging promises and mercies of God.

Third, good management will broaden a church’s decision-making base. People today tend to criticize leaders and refuse to take their word at face value. Twenty years ago, when a national leader spoke, people responded, “How true!” Now they say, “Prove it!” Whether we like it or not, our congregations reflect this sentiment. They no longer trust church leaders to set directions and make major decisions alone. Church members want a greater share in decision making. They want the structures and policies of the church to be public and open for critical examination.

Unfortunately, some church leaders have earned the mistrust of their congregations. I recently talked with a pastor and church board who are hiding $80,000 in a secret savings account. The congregation knows nothing of this money. The board fears that people would reduce their giving if they knew the church had this money. They do not trust the congregation to make good decisions to remain faithful in their giving to God’s work. But what they should really fear is the type of organizational climate such a practice creates—one that likely already influences the pattern of giving in that church, though the pastor and board are not aware of it.

Management practices that treat the group as immature cause people to be immature. Goethe said, “Treat people as if they are what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”

When the pastor preaches unity and participation but manages in a “Lone Ranger” style, making unilateral decisions and working alone, the congregation hears a gospel of love and acceptance but sees only isolationism and one-upmanship. Similarly, sermons of love and justice do not jibe with covert board actions.

Perhaps the greatest management concern for the church is that it be organized and managed so that it fully reflects the truth, love, and justice that God demands of all leaders and institutions. Management practices, like speech, can be untruthful. In preaching and teaching, the church can speak the truth. In good management practices, the church can do the truth. Perhaps doing is more effective in some ways than speaking. The medium of management is a powerful message.

A Theology Of Church Management

Management in the church is theology in action. The structures and programs of the church give body to the life of Christ within the organized church. Management practice is perhaps the purest form of practical (practicing) theology, giving flesh and blood to the sacraments, creeds, liturgies, and to the confessions of the church.

Just as pastors are called to perfrom priestly and prophetic duties, so are they called to manage. In his Institutes, Calvin writes that Christ’s office gathered together the three separate offices of ministry in the Old Testament: prophet, priest, and king. The kingly office was a call to manage wisely and effectively the human and organizational resources put under one’s care by God. Not only did Jesus incorporate these three offices into one ministry, but he challenged those who were to follow him to continue in his ministry. This includes today’s pastors. To accept only a part of the pastor’s threefold office is to cripple the ministry of Christ to that congregation.

The Bible in various ways stresses the importance of good management. In 1 Corinthians 4:1, Paul writes, “We must be regarded as Christ’s subordinates and as stewards [managers] of the secrets of God” (NEB). When we are called to manage in any part of the church, we are entrusted with the care of an organization that has the marks of eternity upon it. Further, God has given several gifts of ministry to the church, including pastors (Eph. 4:11).

Pastors share not only in Christ’s calling, but also in his anointing. God anoints the pastor through Christ, so that “the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and power, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” (Isa. 11:2, neb). This anointing applies to the ministry of management just as seriously as to the priestly and prophetic ministries; it is not to be shunned or taken lightly.

Church leaders often question whether management has any place in the church, since it implies authority and accountability, and since secular organizations use it. Yet Jesus and Paul had much to say about management, as expressed in the words stewardship and steward. It does no damage to Scripture to insert the terms management or manager wherever stewardship or steward appear. Try this with Jesus’ parable of the unrighteous manager (Luke 16) or with 1 Corinthians 4:1–2. Managers are expected to show themselves trustworthy. If we observe the behavior of responsible, truthful, and humane managers, we will find that it conforms to the concept of stewardship in the New Testament.

Management combines authority and accountability. Authority without accountability is ownership; accountability without authority is workership. A manager has authority but is also accountable to the owner. Is this not the same as stewardship? Church management or stewardship is accepting responsibility for a part of the church while remaining fully accountable to the Master and Head of the church. It requires not unique concepts and skills as much as a clear sense of who has given us this stewardship and to whom the church belongs.

The main qualification for church managers is to have the faith and wisdom perhaps best described in James 1:5–8 and 3:13–18. They should make no excuses for ignorance and lack of skill in their responsibility, but they should believe that God will anoint their efforts to gain and apply effective skills. An integral part of preparation for church management is the manager’s own spiritual growth. Management and spirituality go hand in hand. Both are part of a pastor’s call; both are spiritual gifts that can be developed.

A final aspect of a theology of church management is what I call the principle of versatility. God is a God of variety and has created a world of variety. The church reflects a variety of needs, interests, and skills. In order to minister effectively to its own members and to the world, the church must be versatile or flexible in the way it responds to the needs of the time and place in which it finds itself. It must regularly initiate, change, and terminate many of its external forms and ministries in order to be true to its Great Commission. It should be neither passive nor reactionary; rather, it should actively seek the best possible ways to “stake its claim” of God’s rightful ownership of the church and the world.

Paul’s description of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12) expounds this principle of versatility most clearly. Members of the body are all different in appearance and function, yet are all subject to the head and vitally important to the health of the whole body.

This principle requires that leaders be open to pluralisms of programs, structures, and ministries. Leaders who try to mold the church after their own preferences or understanding deny other members, whose interests differ, the spiritual and material resources they need to be fully effective. A church is not a collection of little tin soldiers who look, think, and act alike. This was not true of Jesus’ disciples, nor of God’s creation in general. Pastors should desire and develop the same kind of versatility.

Resources for Church Management

There are many more church management resources than can be listed here. Those following are some examples that relate explicitly to topics discussed in the article.

1. Theory X-Y. You can measure your own view of persons and learn more about McGregor’s Theory X-Y by ordering a Management Appraisal Survey by Jay Hall, Teleometrics International, 2203 Timberloch Place, Suite 104, The Woodlands, Texas 77380 ($4.00); Organization Styles in Community Groups and Leadership Roles in Community Groups, both by Jerry Robinson, College of Agriculture, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801 ($.75 each).

2. Leadership Styles. You can discover your own preferred leadership style, other styles you may develop, and the conditions under which each is appropriate by ordering Taking a Look at Your Leadership Styles by Norman Shawchuck, Organization Resources Press, 2142 Oxnard Drive, Downers Grove, Illinois 60515 ($5.00).

3. Church Management and Systems Theory. Books include Management for Your Church, by Lindgren and Shawchuck, Abingdon, 1977 ($7.95); The Management of Ministry, Anderson and Jones, Harper & Row, 1978 ($8.95); and Getting the Church on Target, Lloyd Perry, Moody, 1977 ($6.95). Experiences in Activating Congregations, by Shawchuck ($4.45), and Dry Bones Breathe by Robert Worley ($4.95) both published by the Center for the Study of Church Organizational Behavior, McCormick Theological Seminary, 5555 S. Woodlawn, Chicago 60631.

4. Management Training Programs for Church Leaders. Some seminaries are now offering D. Min. degree programs that focus on church management. Courses are so structured that pastors need not take study leaves or be away from their churches on Sundays. Two schools that have such programs are Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago.

5. Leadership: A Practical Journal for Church Leaders. Beginning in January, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will publish this quarterly journal to provide practical information on church management for pastors, pastoral staff members, elders, deacons, and other church leaders. Watch for announcements in September issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY or write to Leadership, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60187.

Approaches To Church Management

Several issues will determine to some degree the success leaders will have in managing a church organization. First is their view of human nature. Thomas Jefferson said, “Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them for their own benefit; and those who identify with the people, have confidence in them, and cherish and consider them as honest and safe with the public interest.” Bonhoeffer in Life Together asserts that the church belongs to God and its members are his children and delight. Pastors who complain about the church they serve fail to recognize its relationship to Christ or his devotion for it.

Management practices can betray one’s view of human nature. Some church leaders tend to distrust people, and to see them as lazy and unequipped to handle significant responsibility. As a result, these leaders will work to gather power to themselves, to control information, and will hesitate to allow any groups a significant measure of autonomy. When the people resist or grow apathetic, this kind of leader may complain that the group lacks motivation or is not spiritual enough. Management literature often describes this view of persons as “McGregor’s Theory X.”

Other church leaders view their members differently. They assume that people belong to their church because they sincerely desire to serve God and others, and that each one has some ability to serve and potential for growth. This kind of leader empowers people and structures, sees failure not as sin but as part of the growing process, places greater emphasis on granting forgiveness than on seeking permission, sets persons free to explore ministries in keeping with their interests, and leads the congregation in celebrating every small and great success. This view of persons has been called “McGregor’s Theory Y.”

The leader’s view of persons has tremendous influence on the organization’s climate and its effectiveness. A group with a “Theory X” leader will be more of a “one-man show,” perhaps with little enthusiasm or celebration. A group with a “Theory Y” leader will probably have more member involvement, strong mutual support, more celebration, and more freedom for God’s Spirit to motivate and inspire.

Another view of persons, sometimes called “Theory Z,” embraces a naïve, unrealistically high opinion of people’s capabilities. Leaders of this kind are the opposite of “Theory X” leaders: they do not provide enough structure or direction to the group. The members feel respected and comfortable, but nothing gets done.

A second issue that determines the success of a leader is the relationship between his or her leadership style and the overall maturity of the group. Each leader has a preferred style of leadership. Each will tend to use that style even when it is inappropriate and ineffective. Few church leaders know what their preferred style is, what other styles are at their disposal, and under what conditions a given style becomes most appropriate. Further, they tend to be oblivious to the leadership needs of the group and respond only to the tensions inside themselves. Pastors can greatly increase their effectiveness by developing a variety of leadership styles and the ability to use each one at the right time.

When to use a particular leadership style depends in large part on the group’s leadership needs—that is, their maturity in relation to a particular task. A skillful leader must learn to analyze the task-relevant maturity of the group and modify his or her leadership style accordingly. The inability to adapt in this way often explains why leaders are effective in some situations and not in others.

A third issue of importance to leaders is how the church relates to its environment. The church is an open system: it both influences and is influenced by its environment. From its environment the church receives new members, supplies, finances, and so on. Into its environment the church sends committed members, missionaries, and monetary or social help.

The environment of the church is changing faster and more unpredictably than ever before. Church leaders must develop the skills to read the signs of environmental change, establish new goals and programs in response to it, and manage the conflict that will inevitably arise when change is introduced. No single tool or technique exists to do this. What is needed is a basic understanding of the organization of a church and the skills to manage it appropriately amid the tension between the need for change and the congregation’s reluctance to change.

Unfortunately, Bible colleges and seminaries have not adequately equipped church leaders for this part of ministry. Practical theology courses deal more with how to conduct funerals and how to visit in the hospital rather than with the largely neglected management issues of making decisions, managing conflict, setting goals, and evaluating. Pastors and church leaders need these skills today in order to keep the church on target. Theological education has equipped leaders to be mechanics—that is, to do what’s needed to keep the machine running. But church leaders today must be architects, not mechanics; managers and shapers of the future, not precedent followers of the past. Guiding your church toward an open system through a better understanding of organizational theory and management skills will help you to be an architect.

We cannot escape the fact that the church requires management. Every leader has his or her own management style. Any time you spend to improve your management skills will pay dividends of personal satisfaction and greater effectiveness in the ministry of your church. We must no longer try to meet today’s challenges and problems with yesterday’s tools and concepts.

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

A time of doctrinal strife and self-discovery.

In 1960 Harold Macmillan, then British prime minister, gave his famous “wind of change” message in Cape Town at the end of his tour of Africa. “The wind of change is blowing through this continent,” he said, “and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”

Change! This is the crucial word in understanding the dynamics of African history. In his book Africa’s Search for Identity (1966), V. C. Ferkiss writes: “Africa is a land where people are on the march, imbued with new faiths, especially nationalism, and armed with confidence in their destiny. It is a continent rushing from darkness into vigorous, often violent awakening.”

Within the past two centuries, Africa has experienced three significant epochs. Like the Dark Ages of European history, Africa went through its dark period when little or nothing was known about it in the West. The northern part of the continent was separated from the south by a veritable iron curtain of Sahara desert. Its coasts were impenetrable and its forests, often called jungles, were impassable. Explorers described Africa as “a white man’s grave.”

Then came the period of colonization when, after the abolition of the inhumane slave trade, the tropical lands were sought partly out of curiosity and partly as sources of valuable raw materials. Once the conquest had taken place, the political and economic control was in foreign hands. As Donald M’Timkulu points out, “The goals of African society were set by others, and Africa existed for the benefit of Europe. Naturally, this was a period of cultural dislocation.” The Christianity that had twice before (in the fourth and fifteenth centuries) failed to penetrate into the life of the indigenous peoples finally had its way by the beginning of the nineteenth century. It came in different “brands,” a fact that jeopardized the unity of the message.

The traditional foundations of African peoples have been shaken by all the changes, and everyone is asking the question, “Who am I?” This search for identity sets the tone for a proper understanding of contemporary events in Africa.

The Socio-Political Revolution

The growth of national consciousness has resulted in the rise of 46 independent countries in sub-Sahara Africa where in 1957 there were only two—Liberia and Ethiopia. The transition time has been so short that the transfer from colonial dependence to national independence has been rough and uncertain. In every part of sub-Sahara Africa, the handing over of political power was brought about by the pressures of an irresistible tide of nationalism. Africans began defining themselves as such in contrast to those who oppressed or despised them.

Since unity is strength, it became necessary for the leaders to seek political unity at all costs. In many of his public addresses and in his leading publication, Africa Must Unite, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana expressed the ambition to bring all African nations under what he described as the “United Nations of Africa.” His dream was not totally realized, but his advocacy of unity reached its climax at the creation of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963.

The OAU charter enunciates four cardinal principles of modern African nationalism: national sovereignty, continental liberation, pan-African unity, and world nonalignment. Though instability, bloodshed, coups and countercoups, and general unrest have marked our political arena in the last decade, the fact remains that the spirit of unity is the spirit of Africa. It is a spirit not limited to politics; it forms the bedrock for ecumenical movement in Africa.

The nationalists’ platform for independent Africa promised not only the creation of democratic states but also a better life—and the downtrodden common man gave this his hearty endorsem*nt. Nkrumah’s slogan, “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else will be added unto it,” became popular. This humanistic hypothesis was to result in three major realities: unprecedented urbanization, with about 25 percent of Africa’s 360 million persons living in cities; a manipulative authoritarian government; and a secular society characterized by a shift from permanence to change, from the universal to the particular, from unity to plurality, from the absolute to the relative, and from passivity to activity. Constant student demonstrations and military coups indicate dissatisfaction and loss of confidence in their political leaders. Southern Africa is becoming a buffer state for a power struggle between West and East. Millions of fellow Africans are on the run today as refugees. A political Utopia is an illusion.

The Cultural Revolution

During the colonial period the African way of life underwent some incisive changes. The doctrine of racial superiority evidenced in politics, economics, education, science and technology, religion, and culture was to be repudiated with the turn of the sixties. Throughout the independent African nations is an awakening of interest in the traditional culture of their forebears. Black means are sought to propagate the new ideology: music, painting, carving, arts and crafts, university degrees in African studies with cultural emphasis, seminars, and, of course, publications. The rise of Black Power in America simultaneously with national consciousness in Africa cannot be mere coincidence.

Two dangers face evangelical Christianity in Africa. First, many Africans identify Christianity with imperialism. Western culture was assumed to be Christian culture. With this type of confusion and the deterioration of Western culture coupled with the loss of political power, one is not surprised at the concentrated efforts of the nationals to uproot any form of foreignness. One national journalist reportedly said, “Cultural revival is out to liquidate the work of the missionaries and their deception which made our people throw away their precious heritage.”

The second danger can be described as “ecclesiological conformity.” The debate in many of the churches today centers around what type of music, arts, painting, architectural designs, and officiating garments should be used. “Should Jesus be given a black face in pictures?” is a popular question. Some of our theologians even claim that “Jesus Christ has come to fulfill and not to destroy African religion.”

Evangelical Christians are bound not only to correct the errors rampant in our day but also to give a defense of their faith (1 Pet. 3:15–16). As Dr. Byang Kato said, “The attitude of Christians toward cultural renaissance need not be negative. Culture as a way of life must be maintained. But where a conflict results (between Bible and culture), the cultural element must give way.”

A fellow student, Tony Evans, put it more succinctly: “Black must be biblical before it can be beautiful. Where blackness and Bible bump heads, blackness must go.”

The Ecclesiological Struggle

The winds of change and the search for identity have not left the church in Africa unaffected. Churches of every denomination are jammed with young and old. Church authorities estimate that there are more than 100 million Christians among the 360 million black Africans. Ironically, the church was not prepared for such unprecedented growth; it brought problems such as universalism, ecumenism, humanism, pluralism, and syncretism. The growing tendency is toward what John Stott has described as “a fruit co*cktail of religions.”

Unfortunately, many disciples are caught in our evangelistic nets but remain untaught in our doctrinal institutions. How many average churchmen know that Christ alone saves? How many are convinced that the Christ who saves is able to keep day by day—and that no help is needed from the native medicine man? How many understand the implications, made by some of our theologians today, of assertions such as an errant Bible, authentic revelation outside of the Bible, and Christ’s fulfillment of African expectation? When churches try to exist without sound doctrine, how easy it is to compromise.

Evangelicals have spent a great deal of time and resources in condemning ecumenical activities in Africa. Instead of reacting against the conciliar movement, it is time for us to take initiatives. Nothing is wrong with unity based on biblical principles. But never shall we sacrifice divine commands at the altar of carnal fellowship. Compassion is an intrinsic part of the gospel, but political, economic, and social liberation cannot replace the spiritual regeneration and reconciliation of man to God. Rather than moratorium, biblical Christianity should maintain “partnership” that is the legacy of the apostolic church (Rom. 15:24; Phil. 1:5; 2:25; 4:15). The church is of Christ wherever it is located. This christological uniqueness must be upheld though forms and expressions of worship may take on local colors.

The Theological Debate

The theological deficiency of churches in Africa has led to the rise of many sects, heresies, cults, and numerous other false movements all over the continent. Several attempts have been made both by individuals and by groups to combat the situation. In 1969 the All-Africa Council of Churches published Biblical Revelation and African Belief, written against African background with the main thrust showing the authenticity of the traditional beliefs based solely on the validity of general revelation. While the scholarship of this work is admirable, its universalistic presuppositions and objectives create serious problems. Concentrated efforts are being made in our universities and other places of higher learning to produce theology for our churches, but the output so far cannot truly be called “Christian.” The proponents of this African theology, however, not only use Christian terminology, but claim to be Christians. This led Kato to state, “African theology seems to be heading for syncretism and universalism.… In the African evangelicals’ effort to express Christianity in the context of the African, the Bible must remain the absolute source.”

Another unacceptable proposition concerns black theology. Tom Skinner, considered to be moderate, defines it thus: “If theology is the study of God, when we talk about Black theology, we are talking about the study of God through the black experience.” Originating simultaneously with the Black Power movement of the 1960s in North America, black theology alleges that white theology has exploited the black man and now turns the tables by calling for black economy, black power, black churches, and black ideologies. It does not hesitate to align itself with the Black Muslim movement. Black theology is gaining some ground in Africa, particularly in the deep south, but in my assessment it seems to be a Marxist philosophy wrapped in the garb of theology. In places of apparent quietness and political stability, black theology has no message. In actual fact black theology is as foreign to Africa as the alleged Western theology.

Things To Come

Looking ahead, one could be as extremely pessimistic as Tai Solarin, who wrote in 1961 in the Lagos Daily Times, the newspaper with the widest circulation in West Africa, that Christianity has no future in Nigeria. History has proved him wrong. On the other hand, one could be as overly excited about the zeal and enthusiasm of African Christians as Billy Graham, who pleads for African missionaries to America.

One thing is sure: the church of Christ has come to exist in Africa regardless of Satanic opposition, and in accordance with our Lord’s words in Matthew 16:18. Besides promoting the persecution of the saints, which African Christians should be prepared for, Satan delights in sowing falsehood wherever the truth of the gospel message is sown. This sober reality constitutes the threats to the church in Africa, the threats posed by syncretism, sectarianism, secular humanism, ecumenism, universalism, and pluralism.

Like the sixteenth-century Reformers, evangelical Christians in Africa—and elsewhere—must reaffirm their “total unconditional and exclusive commitment” to the authority of the Word of God. The theological battle in Africa will be won or lost in the arenas of the truths concerning inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, and absolute authority of the Scriptures. It is imperative, therefore, for African evangelicals to establish proper priority, proper perspective, and proper programs in relation to God, in relation to the body, and in relation to the world.

The Priority Of The Church

The singular purpose and duty of the church, says the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, a noble function exemplified by the life of our Lord (John 17:4). Like her Head, the church has a primary and fundamental duty of glorifying God, and does it by praising him (Ps. 50:23), doing his will (Gal. 1:24), acknowledging who he is (Rom. 1:21), bearing fruit (John 15:8), suffering with him (Rom. 8:17, 30), loving one another (John 13:25), good works (Matt. 5:16; 1 Pet. 2:12), and by her purity (1 Cor. 6:19–20).

The church also has the responsibility of edifying her members. To this end, spiritual gifts, talents, and other ministries are being bestowed on every genuine member of the church (Rom. 12:6–8; 1 Cor. 12:7–11, 28–30, etc.). Pastor-teachers must teach their members how to discover their God-given abilities, and encourage them to exercise such abilities according to the measure of grace (Rom. 12:6), to the glory of God (1 Pet. 4:11), and for the perfecting of the saints (Eph. 4:12–13). The concept of “Body Figure,” wherein unity in diversity predominates, rules out selfishness, schism, moratorium, and monarchism. When we humbly exercise our gifts in love, we have an abiding testimony before the watching world. In unity lies strength.

To the world the church has the responsibility of witnessing for Christ and discipling the nations (Acts 1:8; Matt. 28:19). This does not preclude works of charity that are an intrinsic part of the good news, but it does suggest that the church needs to be cautious. The church is not an organization for social and political asylum, nor should it use divine resources to bribe people into God’s kingdom. Since the church is in the world but not of the world, she should not be indifferent to the social, political, and economic struggles of mankind, but neither should she sacrifice its ambassadorial functions at the altar of social involvement. Our Lord Jesus Christ liberates the total man: the material and the immaterial (John 8:36). The biblical sequence begins with internal spiritual regeneration and reconciliation of man to God, manifesting itself in an external physical transformation and reconciliation of man to man in society.

The theological prospects and religious movements in Africa resemble the world of the second and third centuries of the Christian era. Theirs was a time of doctrinal strife that called for ecumenical efforts to formulate creeds and a positive Christian apologetic. Likewise, evangelicals in Africa need a system that will express theological concepts in terms of African situations. Theology in Africa should scratch where it itches. Evangelical African theologians need to tackle such problems as polygamy, family structure, spirit world, worship, and Christians’ responsibility to the government, and present biblical answers. Also, we need Christian apologists who, like Tertullian, will without compromise uphold the uniqueness of the biblical faith and present a defense to the intellectual world. To accomplish such an objective, sound and advanced theological training is imperative. Its price can never be too high to pay.

Finally, whatever organizational programs we decide to undertake must reflect our priority, perspective, and objective. We must, individually and corporately, do our utmost in the power of the Holy Spirit for God’s highest and the good of mankind.

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