Page 5905 – Christianity Today (2024)

Who is the latest hero of the youth culture? Jesus Christ, it seems. The trappings of the “Jesus movement” are by now familiar: bell bottoms, beads, and long hair, gospel-rock music, underground papers, marches in the streets, confrontation evangelism, coffeehouses and communes. “So Jesus has become ‘hip’ this year,” quips the cynic. “‘Jesus people,’ ‘Jesus freaks’—it’s all a fad.” Is it really?

To be sure, the broad evangelical awakening going on today bears the marks of the so-called youth culture. To write it off for this reason, however, would be shallow for the critic and disastrous for the church. The Jesus movement must be given more than a cheap sociological and psychological explanation.

Where did it all begin? Out of the ashes of Haight-Ashbury? As an aftermath to the Sunset Strip riots? Among the disillusioned of the drug culture? Yes, and much more. The movement began spontaneously over a wide front. In the last three years, the West Coast, the supposed center of sensual pleasure, has ironically reached a flash point of despair over this world and spiritual longing for another.

The igniting took many forms: the political spark of the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley, offering an alternative to dominant Marxism; the Pentecostal spark of Calvary Chapel, a church context for wide revival; the youth-culture spark of “The Salt Company Coffee House” in Hollywood, communicating to this generation in gospel-folk rock music; the communal spark of “The Mesa” in Palo Alto, and “Jesus parties” attended by hundreds of teen-agers; the militant spark of the “Jesus Army” in Seattle; the student-ministry spark of “The Light and Power House” near UCLA; the hippie spark of several hundred youth forming “The Church in the Park” in Covina; the denominational spark of “Lutheran Youth Alive”; the underground-paper spark of the Hollywood Free Paper and many others.

What are distinguishing features of the Jesus movement? First of all, this spiritual outburst is student led. The initiative has passed from the professional Christian worker, be he pastor, youth leader, or campus-ministry staff member. Up until now, youth evangelism has been inaugurated by adults. Now it comes by youth. The same hip teen-ager who last year turned his friends on to drugs may now be turning them on to Jesus. In an era when students have led the protest against war and racism, we should not be surprised that they have taken the Gospel of Christ and moved it into their world. Tens of thousands evangelize today rather than just a few paid professionals.

Furthermore, this student leadership is emerging out of the youth culture with integrity. We are not being subjected to the embarrassing spectacle of adults who look like flower-children with pot bellies. We would expect composer Larry Norman to release an album of gospel-rock music because this music is Larry. His conversion has not suddenly given him a taste for Christian tunes in waltz and fox-trot tempo. Lonnie Frisbee, of Calvary Chapel, wears long hair and a beard as he preaches to thousands, because Lonnie was a long-haired “freak” before his conversion. Becoming a Christian has not meant a crew cut because that’s not Lonnie.

The Gospel of the incarnation is being acted out again in the youth culture, as the Word becomes flesh in these particular lives and their particular style. The institutional church that has no contact with the culture of this generation is being confronted by a new breed of Christians who call this culture home. Whether the churches can embrace these authentic Christians in their own culture is an open question, and with the answer rests much of the future.

A Methodist pastor in Houston asked me recently whether the Jesus movement was not just a resurgence of old “fundamentalism.” By this he apparently meant a rigid orthodoxy, a hardened legalism, a cultural negativism. Sadly, he had missed the heart of the movement, which is both personal and spiritual. Youth who have been saturated with rock music, sex, and drugs are not reverting to a sterile, authoritarian religion. The new birth, the death to ego that they were promised through LSD but never found, are now theirs in Christ. Some areas of the movement are caught up in speaking in tongues, again finding a profound spiritual experience filling the hole drugs had left. While the churches have often been little more than social clubs, youth today are finding spiritual power and life back on the streets, where it was in the first century.

Another important element of today’s awakening is its communal nature. Love is not a thesis or a slogan; it’s an experience and a life. The false dichotomy of evangelical and social gospel does not exist on the personal level for these new Christians. While perhaps naïve about the social implications of the love ethic, they love one another and show it with an outstretched hand or a meal. Again and again reporters are staggered by the shining faces and the embraces of these young believers. That there are hundreds of Christian communes on the West Coast is more than a hangover from the hippie world; it is the fulfillment of the quest for community by alienated youth.

Jesus said that the mark of discipleship is love “one to another.” In countless living situations that love is now demonstrated. At the Virgil House, a Christian commune on Virgil Street in Hollywood, scores of drug addicts, street people, and “crashers” have found their lives transformed by the love of Christ displayed in the residents’ warm fellowship. New forms of discipleship are emerging, and the materialism and individualism of nominal church members are being “put down.” Worship has turned heavily toward experience. Jesus is not an idea but a presence to be realized in feeling as well as thinking. Youth who have hallucinated on LSD will not be satisfied by cold, impersonal liturgies where all the action is in the pulpit or at the altar.

At the same time, this awakening is bringing a return to the Bible. The issue of truth is again before us, not just the pragmatism and functionalism of modern America. Most of these new Christians “take the Bible literally.” What does this mean? It means, first of all, that they reject modern philosophy and theology that they feel are merely mental games, “head trips.” If it is true that this is an irrational age, this is not all bad for evangelical Christianity. The doctrine of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ are not rational. Rationalism created an anti-supernatural bias and a destructive biblical criticism that have undermined the Christianity of several generations. Through the acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God on faith, biblical Christianity with its absolute ethics is again being taught and believed in the land.

In looking at the Jesus movement, thoughtful Christians raise some questions. A speaker can get a crowd to roar simply by pointing heavenward and shouting, “Jesus is coming soon!” This apocalyptic attitude is as much cultural as theological. Despair over the population spiral, hydrogen stockpiles, and pollution is easily met by Christian hope, especially for youth who have dropped out. The danger of this in excess is the loss of a sense of history and the abandonment of social responsibility by the “now” Christian. The New Testament holds the tension; it must not be broken.

Unfortunately, the rejection of this world’s system often becomes a rejection of this world, especially by those who are in adolescent rebellion anyway. It is discouraging to walk along Hollywood Boulevard and be greeted by “Repent or perish” rather than “Jesus loves you.” Social alienation finds its extreme beyond the commune in modern monastic orders such as the “Children of God,” who renounce employment and private property for a continual indoctrination and an imposed discipline.

In a sensate culture the stress on experience is to be expected. The New Testament is filled with feeling words. Once again, however, this must be held in tension. There is truth for the mind as well as love for the heart. A super-subjectivism holds many new Christians, and they describe Jesus in drug language as the “ultimate trip” or the “greatest high.” This often leads to false expectations in dealing with personal problems and living in this world. One seldom hears the hard words of Jesus on discipleship and suffering. Any psychological insight is too often rejected out of hand as “worldly.” The danger of over-subjectivity must be balanced by serious Bible study and mature reflection. If the organized church rejects these unconventional believers, where will they get the teaching they need?

As a counter to the permissive society and to the extreme subjectivism just described, other new believers fall into legalism. This is a natural danger for any new Christian. For most of these problems the answer is simple: association with mature members of Christ’s body who are secure in their freedom. This is the real challenge of the Jesus movement: Can the organized church welcome these new Christians with love and patience?

Adult Christianity in America is too often up tight and performance-oriented. We preach justification by faith and live justification by works. Our worship tends to be cold and impersonal. We are guilty of judging by appearance, as did the Pharisees. Now a new stream of the Spirit is moving across the land. Tens of thousands of youth are “turning on” to Jesus. They need to find the full body of Christ. They need to know of Christ’s Lordship over all of life. They need grounding in the Word of God. Their gifts to us are zeal, and love in true community. Can we receive from them and give to them? This decade of church history will be determined not by the success or failure of the NCC and COCU but by our response to the Jesus movement.

Donald M. Williams is minister to college students at Hollywood Presbyterian Church in California. He has the Ph.D. from Union Seminary and Columbia University and held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He is a founder of several projects in Hollywood: a drug rehabilitation program, Virgil House Christian Communal, the Salt Company Coffeehouse, Art Company, and Art and Book Store.

The host rose to his feet, waited for silence, and then in a toast heard round the world declared: “The Chinese people and the American people have always been friendly to each other. We express our good wishes for the American sportsmen and people.”

A few weeks, even days, before, this statement of people-to-people good will would have been considered highly unlikely. But something had happened in Peking’s inner chambers to alter the twenty-year-old policy of keeping the Americans at a well marked distance. As incredible as it seemed, American athletes and newsmen were now standing on the ancient Chinese earth—and a leading member of the All-China Sports Federation was offering a toast to their health.

That week all other news stories took a back page. And for once, the leading news dispatch from Asia was not laced with body counts, success or failure of the latest bombing mission, and pathetic tales of refugees in flight, though the war continued and Asian suffering was no less intense.

The historic ping pong tournament quickly set new diplomatic wheels turning, and within a matter of weeks President Nixon was electrifying the world with an announcement that he planned to visit Red China.

China’s smile was both predictable and baffling. Analysts began analyzing. Commentators commented. Practitioners of that esoteric science called “China watching” watched and listened more carefully than ever before.

What does it all mean? Is this a sincere gesture of friendship to the United States, or is it a defiant move calculated to agitate the leaders in the Kremlin? Is it the start of a long and painful process of cementing cracks in international relations? Or is it simply a knee-jerk reaction to the American government’s relaxation of certain travel and trade restrictions?

There are lots of questions, and few solid answers. But one thing is certain: China continues to ease out of her two-decade-old, largely self-imposed isolation.

To argue that China is removing all barriers to the West would be the height of naïveté. But it does appear that there might now be greater opportunity for an open forum between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Although even our age of instant everything has not made Peking and Washington allies overnight, obstacles now seem somewhat less formidable.

Chou En-lai is certainly not forsaking his half-century-old dedication to Communism, which he espoused during his student days in France. As host at-large for the Americans he simply exercised his strong other side—that of Chou En-lai the statesman, the capable go-between who played the key role of moderate so well during China’s recent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Peking’s instant thaw chilled some, but most Americans seemed to warm quickly to China’s diplo-athletic move. Congressmen, athletes, tourists who had been everywhere else, and professional and arm-chair China-watchers began seeking visas to visit China. Promoters of the feminine form made efforts to invite Chinese models (in padded blue jackets and trousers?) to participate in an American beauty contest. Chinese table-tennis players were invited to play in the United States. American tennis professionals began searching for mainland Chinese who could be asked to take part in a U. S. tennis tournament.

Evangelical Christians throughout the United States joined in the excitement. “Could this be the open door for which we’ve prayed so long?” many asked. For some weeks one group had rhapsodized that a campaign for the evangelization of China “would begin exactly sixty days after the U. S. State Department approves travel into China.”

This concern for China should be recognized as well-meaning, but much of the thinking is woefully misguided.

Even before the table-tennis team went into China, one Christian group with an apparent flair for the dramatic suggested that 1,000 three-man teams be immediately mobilized to evangelize the China mainland—a feat to be carried out by a “two-week crusade.” These traveling triumvirates—composed of preacher, musician, and layman—would be the vanguard for the new thrust into China. The literature this group sent out challenged the reader: “Let us be ready to be first” into China with the Gospel.

And you can bet your fortune cookies that in the days ahead this kind of thing will be proliferated by malinformed Christians who, though they mean well, are so immersed in the concept of “send the foreign missionary to China” that they show shocking insensitivity to the China scene as it actually is.

Another Christian mission has stated in its official China policy that when its missionaries go back to China, they should return to districts where they formerly worked and “dig up” any treasure they might have buried there at the time of their hasty 1949–50 retreat.

Is there really a chance we will return to a place of former ministry and act like the mob of capitalist lackeys that Peking has so effectively convinced its people we are? Are our actions going to support the time-worn accusations that all foreigners are suspect and that missionaries from the “bad old days” were nothing more than poachers on Chinese terrain, guilty of an opportunistic Christian capitalism?

During this time of a newly heightened awareness of China, Christian missions need to scrutinize their motivation for involvement. Is this the historical time for the foreign missionary even to consider a move back into China? If it is true, as some reports indicate, that the Body of Christ in China is very much alive and functioning, is it not possible that by rushing in we might quench the work of the Holy Spirit already begun in the lives of Chinese believers?

Christian missions must determine before God that they are more concerned for China and its people than for a possible “big story” to adorn the front page of a newsletter. Just how sensitive are we to the needs of Christ’s disciples on the mainland? Have we seriously considered our potential future relationship to that body of believers? Do we really empathize with these witnesses who have shared Jesus Christ with fellow Chinese during years of suffering and persecution? Or would we, given the chance, ride rough-shod over that body with a foreign import that does it “the way it has always been done”?

Another piece of Christian literature on China recently predicted that when Mao Tse-tung dies, the government will come crashing down and China will immediately fling its doors open wide, readily accepting the Gospel.

Such thinking is painfully wishful. Groups that make such irresponsible statements seem to be unaware that the government is currently run by a committee, and that China has always been and always will be too big to crumble all at once. In fact, the future Chinese leaders who are waiting in the wings may well be more totalitarian and ruthless in their management of the country than those presently in control.

I suggest that we read the signals from Peking with considerably more care, especially at this time of heightened excitement. Chou En-lai has invited a few Americans in to China to have a peek. He did not say, “Welcome to open house!” Chou told the visitors that a new page had been opened in Chinese-American relations. He did not say that major policy problems between Peking and Washington had been solved, or that solutions were imminent. It does not appear very likely that Americans, Europeans, and any other camera-laden visitors will be rushing into China in the near future. China may some day play host to the ubiquitous Western tourist, but not just yet.

Evangelistic zeal must be maintained. But Christians, whose primary concern should be sharing the message of redemption in Christ, need to subordinate their desire to be the “first ones into China” to a prayerful waiting on God for his direction. All of us involved in Christian mission need to pray that God will deliver us from that kind of promotional activity that leads us to capitalize on the suffering of others for the untidy purpose of keeping our own operations solvent. Rather than contributing to an already foggy situation by high-strung rhetoric and high-handed appeals based on incomplete evidence, should we not as Christians humbly ask God to direct our thoughts toward China, so that we may know his purpose for that country of 800 million?

Good strategy always involves a process and seldom includes an immediate solution. Our concern for China needs to take a form a great deal more substantial than hastily-conceived plans hatched from a few weeks of unrealistic enthusiasm.

It is always tempting to draw a major conclusion from a minor premise, and we are close to doing just that regarding China. Perhaps Toynbee was right when he observed that Americans are like a large dog, wagging its tail in a small room. Americans are well known for their generosity, boldness, and periodic reckless advances. Sometimes we are so raring to go that we become blind to the possible negative repercussions of our actions.

In The New Man for Our Time, Elton Trueblood reminds the reader that “error is neither patent absurdity nor obvious falsehood; for the most part, it is truth out of context.” For a Christian to want to share his faith is right. For a follower of Christ to want to see Chinese on the mainland come to know God reflects obedience to the Great Commission. But the important questions remain: Who, how, when? We will be guilty of driving truth out of context if we do not supply the right answers to these questions. And at this point, the answers are written deep in the heart of God.

Robert Larson is executive secretary of the Asia Study Group, a Hong Kong-based service ministry of World Vision International that has primary study interests in Mainland China. He previously did three years of research in Hong Kong for Far East Broadcasting Company. He has a master’s in Chinese language and literature from Stanford.

If this has been a summer for strikes, it has also been a summer for salvation. Reports filtering in from all over the country show that large numbers of people are being converted. In the Billy Graham campaign in Oakland, California, the spiritual temperature was high even though the weather was uncommonly cold for midsummer, and the response to the invitation was proportionately greater than that in any other campaign Mr. Graham has conducted in a quarter of a century.

European evangelism is bound to get a big boost by the European Congress on Evangelism, to be held in Amsterdam August 28 to September 4. I expect to cover it personally and to seek out contributors to our columns, for CHRISTIANITY TODAY has a worldwide ministry.

One of our British contributing editors, the Reverend Maurice A. P. Wood, principal of Oak Hill Theological College, has been appointed bishop of Norwich. Congratulations are in order to this Anglican who has both a keen evangelistic passion and a scholar’s bent, and who in service to his country in wartime won the Distinguished Service Cross.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has among its writers and editorial staff a number of women. Shortly we expect to list some women among our contributing editors also, an overdue step. We’ll announce these additions in due time.

The last issue of September marks the end of our fifteenth year of publication. I’d appreciate greatly the prayers of God’s people that we may not only inform our readers of what is happening but provide dynamic and positive leadership, looking toward a great spiritual awakening in this last third of the twentieth century.

I find myself in Sydney, Australia, a long way from home, but only a few hours removed from the theological goings-on of Western Europe. These days there is no such thing as isolation; I knew this before, but am discovering it in new ways. We live in a global village theologically, as in almost every other way. The death of Reinhold Niebuhr was known here in Australia as soon as it would have been in Amsterdam. The same theological problems fill the pages of the journals here that keep us reading there.

We live in a single theological world, and that is something to be glad about. To be a theologian is no longer the interesting hobby of a few scholars neatly tucked away in a corner of a university, on a side road away from the freeways of life. Theology has to be on the mainroads of life or it has lost its directions.

Theologies are measured these days by a standard of relevance; the basic question asked about a theology is whether it is relevant, significant for the fundamental questions of human existence in this time. A lot of theological work that, yesterday, we assumed was vitally important and true may today be pushed aside. The historical dimensions of theology get short shrift from this disposition; to those who find only what fits directly into today’s situation important, church history and the history of dogma are studies of theological relics.

But this trend is not a pure blessing; it often carries theological poverty in its heart. Examples are not hard to find. Theological stars, like Hollywood discoveries, rise and fall in the Church’s firmament, and after their fall it turns out that the stars hadn’t shed much light after all. But in this atmosphere, even modest warnings against theological confusion and stupidity, to say nothing of heresy, are shrugged off; what has clarity or truth to do with relevance?

The compulsion to turn one’s back on history can be fatal. The present time can become a myth, an idol that is most fragile. A student can get so immersed in this time that he loses the opportunity to gain the information he really needs to be relevant, theologically, for this time.

I am glad to be able to say that this opinion is shared by more young theologians today than in the recent past. Many young students have rediscovered history. And these are not students who have reacted against the demand for relevance and have retreated from the stern demands that true relevance makes on the theologian. They have, on the contrary, discovered that the route to relevance in the present often leads through the past.

The European student who reads only the publications of the last ten years or so has become a somewhat ridiculous figure. There are symptoms that people are beginning to catch hold of the obvious—that the only way to understand and minister to one’s own time is by understanding the past. Isolation from history brings, in the end, fruitlessness for the present.

To accept this is, of course, a far cry from the historicism or the historical relativism many of us reject. But it is the discovery of the inexpendable usefulness of the past for grasping the meaning and truth of the Gospel for our time. Not to see this is to condemn oneself to irrelevance, no matter how contemporary one’s jargon may sound. On the other hand, not to see that the past must be brought to bear on our ministry in our time is to be orthodox for the sake of orthodoxy, instead of for the sake of service.

I believe that no significant and ministering theology is possible without intense involvement with the past. This was true of Aquinas, of Luther, of Calvin; it was just as true of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Niebuhr, or anyone else who has been significant in the world of theology. They were sensitive to the tensions and conflicts of the past in direct relation to their sensitivity to the tensions and conflicts of their own times. None of them turned his back on the needs of his day in order to play peaceful theological games with the past. The urgency of their own time forced them back into history to see what God had done and what God had led men to say and do back there.

To leave theology to modernity-intoxicated men who live only in the shallows of contemporary thought is to throw theology into the hands of theological delinquents. The stars of sheer relevance are not long on stage. They offer a bargain-counter theology; it may be tempting to people who want to become stars themselves without the bother of such nettlesome stuff as exegesis and history and other “irrelevancies” in the curriculum. But what they offer is a very inferior product that is obsolete at the next turn of the corner.

So we greet the new theological generation, a generation that appears to have seen through the simplistic bandwagon fads of much theological sloganeering. This generation seems ready to get to work again, free from arrogance, liberated from glittering generalities. To get to work, really to work—this is a decision that bears a promise of greater fruitfulness in theology for the today of Christ’s Church in our world.

Sunshine, rock festivals, and Jesus add up to the ideal way to spend the summer for thousands of young Christians from coast to coast. Each area has its own angle. On a North Carolina beach the Gospel is preached from an ice cream parlor. In Texas 10,000 Baptist youth joined in a “spiritual blitz” of Fort Worth. And in California the July 4 message was “Come to Santa Barbara for sun and Son.”

Billed as Spiritual Independence Weekend, the Santa Barbara happenings included two afternoons of beach evangelism and a “Jesus is the Rock Festival” sponsored by Areopagus, a coffeehouse ministry.

Over a thousand people gathered in an open-air amphitheater in the hills south of Santa Barbara to hear the witness of California’s top Jesus-movement musicians. Surrounded by eucalyptus, pine, and live oak trees, the natural bowl was filled with the folk and rock sounds of groups such as Gentle Faith, Bridge, and Ron Salsbury and the J. C. Power Outlet. Solo performers included folksinger Larry Norman, jazz pianist and singer Tom Howard, flamenco guitarist Drew Crune, and blues guitarist Randy Stonehill.

Though the groups are all veterans of Jesus rock festivals, they agreed that this one was the “heaviest concert” in which they had ever performed.

“The Spirit was so heavy—there was a real movement of the Spirit,” explained David Carlson, associate director of Areopagus. In addition to the usual free-for-all singing, clapping, and shouting, personal testimonies and exhortations by the singers produced an unusual closeness among everyone present: long-haired Jesus people, young straights, older conservatives from local churches, and performers.

Though some responded to the altar call, the majority attending were Christians, and the festival was one of celebration and uplift for the church rather than outreach. About one-fourth of those gathered were long-haired and hip: hitchhikers, dopers, street Christians, and members of nearby Christian communes such as Shepherd by the Sea.

Besides playing at the rock festival, the musicians performed in the afternoons on three Santa Barbara beaches, while witness teams from local churches spoke personally with vacationers. Californians, well aware of Jesus people through recent publicity, took their beach appearances in stride. But the message was Jesus Christ, not Jesus people—and that left some wondering. Others made commitments.

While gospel rock echoed through Santa Barbara, similar sounds were heard in Minneapolis and Portland, where more Jesus rock festivals marked the Fourth of July weekend.

Duane Pederson, publisher of the Hollywood Free Paper, transported the California phenomenon to Minneapolis, leading two rallies of about 400 people each.

The “J-E-S-U-S” cheers quickly became popular, as did a rock version of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” Carrying well-worn Bibles and wearing “Happiness is knowing Jesus” buttons, the crowds were for the most part Christian and conservative in dress, though some long-hairs were present.

On the shores of Lake Minnetonka new Christians spoke of their conversion experiences and fifteen were baptized by a dunking in the lake.

A marathon four-hour festival with seventeen performing groups rocked Portland on the afternoon of July 4. Held in the football field of the University of Portland, the event drew more than 2,500 people, including some priests, nuns, and other establishment Christians.

Lutheran Youth Alive, a lay movement among members of several Lutheran denominations, sponsored the festival as part of a weekend conference for encouraging evangelism.

As the festival began, John Rondema, northwest director of LYA, turned down the loudspeakers, fearing to disturb local residents in the surrounding neighborhood. To his amazement they came and asked him to make the music louder again.

About 1,000 high school and college Lutherans attended the full conference, learning outreach techniques such as Campus Crusade’s four spiritual laws and engaging in one-to-one evangelism.

Earlier, forty prayer groups had gathered on the grass to call for a movement of the Holy Spirit. From fifty to one hundred conversions occurred throughout the weekend.

The singing of “Amazing Grace” by the whole group with hands held high “for the Lord” closed the festival on a high level of feeling, according to Watford Reed, Portland news correspondent for CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Representatives of the Roman Catholic university welcomed the Lutherans and afterward expressed hope “that all of us may grow more deeply in the life of Jesus Christ, whom you preached so beautifully in your stay with us.”

At another football field in Hereford, Texas, young Baptists held an evangelistic crusade that resulted in 583 professions of faith.

The overwhelming response may have been partially due to the amazing experience of the two main speakers just before the rally. Terry Bradshaw, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Debbie Patton, Miss Teenage America of 1970, were flying in a private plane to the rally when the craft developed engine trouble.

The pilot prepared for a possible crash landing at the closest airport, but the radio went dead and the landing gear locked. While the other passengers prayed, Bradshaw wrestled the landing gear loose and manually lowered it into position, following instructions from the pilot.

After the Hereford crusade, Bradshaw went on to speak to 14,000 young people at the Texas Baptist Youth Evangelism Conference in Fort Worth. One of three Bible-reading, witnessing Christians on the Pittsburgh team, he said he would take Jesus with him as he returned to training camp in July.

“I realize that my right arm and all the talents I have were given to me by God, but … he can take them away,” stated Bradshaw, adding that he would continue to love Jesus Christ if this happened.

A former Cleveland Browns football star, the Reverend Bill Glass, also spoke to the Baptist youth. The conference often turned into a spontaneous revival with all the color of a rock festival as both long- and short-haired youth shouted “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” pointing one finger skyward to signify “one way in Christ.”

The spirit poured out in a “blitz” of Fort Worth as 10,000 young people scattered through the city singing and telling about Jesus. Two days of meetings resulted in 158 professions of faith and 404 rededications.

Folk and traditional music presented by youth choirs and personal testimonies formed most of the programs. At one point, the 14,000 listeners rose to their feet cheering and applauding Skip Allen, son of the President of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

“I blew off of LSD and turned on to Jesus,” Skip said, after describing the roller coaster of despair that led him to attempt suicide twice. The decisive influence for him was a talk given by Justin Tyne, a former drug addict who operates a Christian coffeehouse in Los Angeles.

Another youth gathering, this one with the emphasis on soul-shaking speakers rather than musicians, was the fifty-first International Christian Endeavor Convention in St. Louis. Keynoter Bill Glass was joined by black evangelist-author Tom Skinner, Dr. Myron S. Augsburger, president of Eastern Mennonite College and Seminary, and Dr. W. Stanley Mooneyham, president of World Vision International.

For exemplifying “the heart of the Christian Endeavor pledge,” Vonda Kay Van Dyke, Miss America of 1965, was presented with the Distinguished Service Citation. Dr. Laverne Boss of Grandville, Michigan, was elected president of the organization.

Though delegates spent most of their time in conference groups, noontimes were devoted to witnessing on downtown St. Louis streets.

While Christians across the country try street witnessing, rock festivals, and crusades to win others to Christ, a North Carolina group uses a simple come-on: ice cream.

The Circus Tent Ice Cream Parlor is located near the site of the Wright brothers’ first flight on the Outer Banks, a popular family vacation spot with miles of national seashore including the pirate Blackbeard’s island.

Crowds fill the four-year-old Circus Tent every night, eating concoctions such as the Fat Lady Sundae and the Sword Swallower Dessert. Meanwhile, Christian folk groups perform and witness, and movies like “The Parable” are shown. Many of the vacationers enter the spirited discussions held after the shows, and many are converted.

Those who flee the message in the tent may wander through the award-winning garden outside and find a little chapel inviting prayer and meditation.

From California to North Carolina, it’s harder for Americans to take vacations from God this summer.

Gospel Via Tube

Christian young people from Texas and California are appearing on a new weekly television variety show this summer. The Monday-night show, called “The Newcomers” and aired nationally by CBS, features fresh musical and comedy talent. Host Dave Garroway is attempting a television comeback.

“The Californians,” a ten-member musical group from the Lemon Grove Baptist Church near San Diego, appears on the program each week. Two young women who have sung in Baptist churches in Dallas, Cynthia Clawson and Peggy Sears, have been soloists. Robert Tamplin, executive producer of variety programs for CBS, is an active member of Hollywood Presbyterian Church; his secretary teaches a Bible class each Thursday afternoon for studio employees.

Evangelical visibility on television this summer extends to the educational network with the appearance of Dr. Sherwood E. Wirt on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line,” taped for broadcast on August 4. Wirt is editor of Decision. the most widely circulated religious periodical in the world. He appears with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer, an Episcopal layman who teaches philosophy at Notre Dame. They discuss Wirt’s new book. Love Song, a translation of Augustine’s Confessions.

A Protestant Debut

Ukrainian Protestants finally have a New Testament they can call their own. Protestants are a sizable but somewhat overlooked minority among the 50 million people in the world who speak Ukrainian. Until now they have been obliged to use Scriptures slanted¹Mary is rendered not as the “highly favored” one but as “blahodatnaya.” which implies that she imparts grace. toward the Orthodox and Catholic faiths.

It took the initiative of a Ukrainian Canadian clergyman—the Reverend James Hominuke—and his family to bring out “the first truly Protestant edition” of the New Testament and Psalms in Ukrainian. The family operates an evangelical printing and publishing enterprise in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Hominuke, a graduate of Northern Baptist Seminary, has already devoted nine years of his life to the Ukrainian translation project. He hopes to continue until he completes the whole Bible.

Hominuke brings to the task not only a rare resourcefulness and perseverance but a scholarly understanding of both the Bible and the modern Ukrainian language. His press already has to its credit the publication of an 1,163-page Ukrainian-English dictionary financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the East European Fund in cooperation with the University of Saskatchewan.

The new Ukrainian New Testament and Psalms appears in an attractive maroon hard cover with thin, quality paper (initial press run was 5,000). It builds somewhat on a translation made in Ukraine in the mid-nineteenth century by a literary group that sought to embrace Christian truth minus Orthodox accretions, but was not Protestant as such. The whole Bible has been available in Ukrainian only since 1903. Since then there have been two complete translations, one by a Ukrainian Orthodox prelate in Canada published in 1962 by the British and Foreign Bible Society, the other by the Vatican in 1963.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Personalia

Two Southern Baptist missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Potter, 38 and 36, of Marshfield, Missouri, were found slain in bed at their residence in Santiago, Dominican Republic, in early July. The murders were the first among the denomination’s 2,500 missionaries since 1951, making a total of five such deaths since 1861.

Alan Walker, world evangelist, author, and president of the Methodist Church in New South Wales, will be awarded the annual Upper Room Citation for 1971 on August 26 in Denver.

Television and nightclub star Cliff Richard has been named outstanding singer of the year by the Songwriters’ Guild of Great Britain. Since meeting Billy Graham, Richard has combined preaching and singing, getting fifty records into the top ten in his thirteen-year career.

Billy Graham has been named honorary chairman of Explo ’72, a Campus Crusade for Christ-sponsored congress on evangelism to be held in Dallas next June.

The Reverend Wilmina M. Rowland, a Presbyterian from Philadelphia, became the first woman to offer the opening prayer during a session of the U. S. Senate.

Sister Taddea Kelly, a member of the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary, is the first woman to hold a senior Vatican office. The California nun will direct a division of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for Religious Orders and Secular Institutes.

Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, Archbishop of Washington for twenty-four years, has turned 75 and submitted his resignation, in compliance with a 1968 policy recommendation of Pope Paul VI.

The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a couple cannot be denied the right to adopt a child because they are atheists, allowing Mr. and Mrs. John Burke to keep their two-year-old daughter, Eleanor.

The Reverend Jim Wilson, a Canadian who has developed youth ministries in Korea for the past seven years, was appointed executive director of Youth for Christ International.

The Baptist General Conference elected Robert A. Johnson, a layman from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as its moderator.

Bob Jones III, 32, was invested as president of Bob Jones University, replacing his father, who became chancellor of the school in Greenville, South Carolina.

John A. Evenson, full-time film producer with the American Bible Society, will be ordained to a part-time ministry by the Lutheran Church in America. The appointment is the LCA’s first call to a “tent-making ministry.”

Former Representative Henry C. Schadeberg (R.-Wis.) will return to the pastoral ministry at the First Congregational Church, Greenville, Michigan, after serving eight years in Congress. He is probably the first clergyman to return to pastoral work after being elected to Congress.

Religion In Transit

Three non-subscription periodicals showed large circulation gains over 1970, according to the Associated Church Press directory. Decision, the Billy Graham organ, gained 500,000; Abundant Living, by the Oral Roberts Association, gained 650,000; and the American Bible Society Record gained 100,000. Several denominational publications showed losses.

The Interreligious Council of Southern California, a primarily Judeo-Christian federation, has accepted the membership application of the Islamic Foundation of Southern California.

The fourth annual Charismatic Clinic will be held at Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California, August 15–23.

International headquarters of Wycliffe Bible Translators will move to five-acre grounds in Huntington Beach, California, a few miles from its present location. Ground was broken for a 60,000-square-foot office building, a museum and auditorium building, and twenty transient housing units.

The interdenominational agency Faith at Work has moved its national headquarters from New York City to Columbia, Maryland, a planned suburban city being developed on a large site between Baltimore and Washington, D. C.

The Office of Economic Opportunity will give an additional $159,307 to school voucher experiments, apparently in the belief that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against parochaid does not affect the principles of the voucher plan.

The Texas Legislature legalized the selling of liquor by the drink for the first time since pre-Prohibition days. Church lotteries were legalized, too, and indirect aid to church colleges was approved through $4 million in tuition equalization grants for needy private-college freshmen and sophom*ores.

The Lutheran Church in America has designated 1973 as a year of special emphasis on evangelism.

Third World Media News, a national news service to gather and distribute news of minority groups, has been established through a $30,000 grant by the United Presbyterian Church to Ecu-Media News Services.

Christians have no monopoly on the problem: Reform Judaism rabbis recently discussed the growing tensions between congregations and their rabbis; the rift was said to threaten synagogue life in the United States.

You can tell where the money is! Senator Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wis.) topped senatorial journalistic earnings last year by pulling in $9,800, $3,500 of it for two articles in Playboy magazine. Low man was Senator Harold B. Hughes (D.-Iowa), who snapped up a $35 largess for an article in Theology Today.

Deaths

LYNN HAROLD HOUGH, 93, Methodist educator, particularly in the field of Christian humanism, former Drew Seminary professor and National Council of Churches figure; in New York.

KARL AUGUST REISCHAUER, 91, United Presbyterian missionary pioneer and educator instrumental in founding Tokyo Women’s Christian College and the Japan seminary of the Church of Christ; in Duarte, California.

W. HAROLD ROW, 59, Church of the Brethren peace and service ministry leader; in Washington, D. C., after a two-year illness.

JOHN F. WESTFIELD, 64, secretary of church development and building for the United Church of Christ; in New York after he was struck by an auto.

United Methodists’ “silent minority” (evangelicals) began clearing its throat at the renewal group’s first national convention in Dallas last year. This year it found its voice at a four-day convocation (July 7–10) in Cincinnati, and the evangelicals plan to make that voice heard at the highest levels of Methodism.

“We have moved out of the criticizing stage into the action phase,” said Dr. Robert G. Mayfield, general chairman of the Convocation of United Methodists for Evangelical Christianity. “Evangelicals now have power within our own hands to gain representation on our national boards, commissions, and agencies.”

The evangelical strategy to influence the United Methodist hierarchy hinges on laymen. The plan is to elect evangelical laymen as delegates to jurisdictional and general conferences and encourage “selective giving” in the pews. As the convocation met, the denomination reported basic benevolence giving was down 10 per cent from a year ago.

“We are not promoting a cash boycott but regard selective giving as sound stewardship,” explains the Reverend Charles W. Keysor (Keysor’s article “The Silent Minority,” published in Christian Advocate magazine in 1966, launched the “Forum for Scriptural Christianity” and its publication, Good News magazine, which sponsored the Cincinnati and Dallas conventions. Keysor is pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Elgin, Illinois.)

Two of the twenty-eight convocation seminars were aimed directly at showing evangelicals how to “work within the decision-making processes” of the church. One workshop, conducted by two young Ohio pastors, was called “Strategies for Influencing Annual Conferences.” The other was led by a Dallas pastor on “The Fine Art of Selective Giving.”

Advice given evangelicals attempting to influence church conferences coupled the spiritual with the practical: Read your Bible, pray, get a copy of the Methodist Discipline and Robert’s Rules of Order, watch the professionals—then speak up.

The strong possibility that bucking the establishment lessens a minister’s chances of getting appointed to the better churches was met with the blunt assertion: Where can an evangelical go but up anyway in the United Methodist Church? And where can a bishop send him that God can’t use him?

The bone in the gullet of Evangelical United Methodists was described by the keynote speaker, Dr. Leslie H. Woodson, board chairman of the Forum. He told the 1,600 delegates: “Evangelicals have been given curriculum resources which we cannot use, assigned pastors we cannot follow, handed programs we cannot share, and given leaders we cannot trust. Yet we are told to give our tithes while we starve to death.”

The evangelicals are causing some concern—and obvious irritation—to certain church bureaucrats. At a press conference, representatives of United Methodist publications and agencies were so hostile to the panel of convocation leaders that the religion writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer described it more as a “medieval inquisition than a press conference.” Referring to the public meetings—featuring swinging singers from Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, inspirational messages, and hearty singing and loud “Amens”—one church publication representative said it made him “want to vomit.”

While most of the messages were inspirational, the convocation was far from a “pie-in-the-sky” production. Dr. Gilbert James of the Department of Sociology of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, conducted a hard-hitting seminar on “The Evangelical Flight From the City.”

Church-Sponsored Renewal

While out-of-power evangelicals map strategy to bring the United Methodist Church back to theological orthodoxy, the establishment is running a program of its own to aid spiritual recovery. It’s the Lay Witness Renewal Mission, developed under the direction of the United Methodist General Board of Evangelism. A number of lives have been changed.

How does it happen? Laymen of various backgrounds and ages, many of them coming a great distance at their own expense, are invited into a local church for a weekend of spiritual sharing and discovery.

One by one, members of the visiting team relate simply, honestly, and briefly the problems and joys of living a life of faith. They don’t preach or use high-pressure tactics; in simple words they tell of meeting Jesus Christ and how he changed their lives.

After the initial witnessing there is sharing and informal prayer in small groups. In an atmosphere of love and acceptance even the most reserved person feels free to express his doubts and frustrations. In no way do the team members suggest they are perfect, and perhaps it is in this context—one human being honestly relating to another—that the Holy Spirit works.

One Minnesota minister said of a recent mission in his church: “This is very low-key evangelism. All these people do is come in and tell what Christ means to them, but it gets other people excited.”

Five hundred people gathered at a recent Lay Renewal Conference in Wisconsin to learn how to become more effective lay witnesses. In groups of three, sitting with knees touching, they experimented in communicating their faith. Each person had the opportunity to witness, listen, and evaluate.

Young people stood in line waiting to testify to the whole group. Many of them visited a nearby town, confronting people on the street with their eager witness. A feeling of spontaneity and love prevailed; one young woman expressed the wish that she could “take this spirit of love and acceptance back to my home church.”

Perhaps the ability to take such an experience “home” is the key to the reality of renewal. Since a lay witness mission in Minnesota, one Methodist church has seen a spiritual emphasis restored in the life of its people and the formation of a dozen or more small groups to sustain this new life. About ten of the members participate in lay missions in other churches.

One person, in new awareness, noted: “After all those years of listening to sermons that told me how to grow, I finally discovered that first I needed to say ‘yes’ to Christ, and I did.”

MARIAN PARRISH

Dr. James’s address, “The Christian as the Agent of Change,” was laced with Scripture but highly critical of evangelicals who prefer joining “harmless knife-and-fork clubs” to confronting social ills in a way that could cause conflict with vested interests. It was widely applauded. Warned Dr. James:

“A ‘decision for Christ’ is not necessarily the regeneration of a believer, and saying ‘yes’ to a list of religious propositions does not necessarily result in the new birth. Where does social action start? At the Cross, and it could very well end there literally for us, if we take our commitment seriously.”

Even Arthur West of the United Methodist Office of Information—whose stomach apparently was feeling better at this point—ran up to Dr. James to declare: “You just saved the day for some of us.”

Young people at the convocation had separate meetings; they reflected the hyper-fundamentalist feeling of today’s “Jesus People”—and also their concern.

They began with a panel on racism in which a Cincinnati black pastor and a Mexican-American pastor from El Paso, Texas, both charged that blacks and Chicanos are “second-class citizens” in the church. The Reverend Robert Stamps, Methodist chaplain at Oral Roberts University, later gave a moving account of a “miraculous” healing he had witnessed and then delivered one of the hardest-hitting sermons on racism that this reporter has heard in years.

“Blacks and Chicanos should not just be included in the Church—they are the Church,” Stamps told about seventy-five young people. “It’s not enough to give somebody a tract. The saving gospel is always a social gospel.”

Had he attended the evangelical Methodist convocation in Cincinnati, John Wesley’s heart would have been warmed all over again.

Alaska’S ‘Apostle’

A historic-preservation grant of $6,822 by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to the 1,000-member Metlakatla Indian Community on Annette Island, south of Juneau, will preserve a cottage in which the Reverend William Duncan, often called “Apostle to the Alaskan Indians,” lived from 1887 until his death in 1918 at the age of 86. The home of the English-born Anglican priest will house a library and museum.

In 1857, Duncan, newly ordained at age 25, was sent by the Church of England Missionary Society to convert Indians in British Columbia to Christianity. He was highly successful with members of the Metlakatla tribe.

Thirty years after his arrival in Alaska, Duncan visited President Grover Cleveland to plead for a new home for his people. The Canadian government, he said, was trying to force the Indians to move to government-controlled reservations. Also, the Anglican church was trying to remove him and require the Indians to follow a more regimented form of formal worship.

President Cleveland granted the Indians homesteading rights to any land they selected in nearby southeastern Alaska. Duncan and 800 members of the tribe moved by open canoe to the then uninhabited Annette Island. Suffering extreme hardship, they built log houses and established new trading outlets for fish and furs. The indomitable clergyman who led them and shared their sufferings ministered among them for thirty-one more years, without support from organized mission groups.

The Annette converts are associated today with the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Hutterite Hassle

Hutterites, normally indifferent about political issues, are objecting to Manitoba legislation they feel strikes at the heart of their basic principles. The bill, which has received first reading in the provincial legislature, would force the Hutterite colonies to give money to any member who leaves them.

Communal living is a fundamental with the group, which traces its origin back to 1528 in central Europe. Jacob Hutter led a wing of the Anabaptist movement to adopt “community of goods” based on Acts 2:41.

Four centuries of often intense persecution forced the Hutterian Brethren throughout Eastern Europe and thence to North America. Two-thirds of the world’s 11,000 Hutterites now live in the three Canadian prairie provinces; the others live in Montana, Washington, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.

Hutterite leaders contend that any attempt to disrupt the community of goods is an infringement of their religious liberty. And, adds the Reverend Jacob Kleinsasser, a Manitoba spokesman, the Hutterites will leave the province if the legislation becomes law. If the forty colonies did pull out of the province, Manitoba would lose 4,000 rural residents at a time when the farm population is already in sharp decline.

LESLIE TARR

Ira Sabotage Continues

The reform program of the Northern Ireland government has taken another step forward now that provision has been made for minority-party members to have more say in policy-making.

Welcomed by the parties concerned, the measure will do little to modify the tactics of the illegal Irish Republican Army, which continues its attacks on police and military patrols, as well as general disruption of life and trade in the province. Incendiary bombs and devices placed in factories, stores, and public buildings have caused a number of fires.

Extensive precautions were taken to keep the peace during the Twelfth of July celebrations, when thousands of Orangemen marched in commemoration of victory gained at the Boyne over the Catholics in 1690. Protestants deny that the celebrations are an affront to the Catholic community, which, they point out, is free to celebrate like occasions in its own history.

S. W. MURRAY

On Criswell’S Brow

“This is my real calling,” quipped Dr. W. A. Criswell of the Dallas, Texas, First Baptist Church as he dug a hole in which to plant a tree recently in the young Baptist Forest between Nazareth and Mount Tabor. The immediate past-president of the Southern Baptist Convention told how the people of his church had raised more than $2,000 for the project because “our Lord loved this land.”

“Please observe,” joked a ceremony official, “that the first water for the trees is holy water—the sweat off Dr. Criswell’s brow.”

More than 100 million trees have been planted in Israel since the founding of the state in 1948. Some 400 members and friends of Criswell’s church attended the plaque unveiling and tree planting. Criswell and congregation, in the Holy Land for the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, also took part in a symbolic groundbreaking in the strip that borders Upper Nazareth (Jewish) and the old city of Nazareth (Arab) for an anticipated “Baptist-Jewish Friendship House.”

DWIGHT L. BAKER

God In Small Type

Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn may publish his newest book, August 1914, in the Soviet Union if he prints the word “God” in small type.

Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize for literature last year, writes this in his prologue to the book, which was published in Paris recently. The order was reportedly given by the Russian office for censorship.

The Russian author says of “atheistic narrowmindedness”: “If we write the names of regional party leaders and of the secret police with capitals, why shouldn’t we use capitals for the highest, creative power in our universe?”

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Catholic Lay Group Seeks World Parley Of Christians

The National Association of Laity, a 12,000-member group devoted to reform of the Roman Catholic Church, wants a worldwide Christian meeting: “a council of the entire Church called by independent laity, not subject to appointments or control by Pope or bishops.”

The suggestion was in one of several resolutions passed by the body at its fifth annual convention on the Bronx campus of Fordham University. The world-wide gathering, the resolution said, should go through at least three phases: a study of strictly Catholic doctrine and structural questions; an investigation of the common problems of all Christians; and a study of common grounds with all who believe in God.

The NAL was established four years ago in the aftermath of Vatican Council II. The name was changed from the National Association of Laymen at this year’s meeting in deference to its women members, who are said to compose half the body of twenty-five local chapters.

In another nod to women, the association called on the American representatives to the fall bishops’ synod in Rome to recommend the ordination of women as priests.

The 600 delegates also adopted a statement on abortion that struck a middle course between traditional Roman Catholic doctrine and statements presently being made by many liberal Protestant bodies. It said that forbidding abortion under any circ*mstances is “much too narrow and totally ignores the rights of the mother and father and of the family in general.” But the delegates went on to say: “The abortion-on-demand position is equally as narrow … proclaiming the superior and absolute rights of the mother to determine the fate of the unborn fetus.” About 60 per cent of the delegates favored the abortion statement.

NAL outgoing president William Caldwell, 44, an aluminum-company executive, lamented that liberal Catholics don’t appear as interested in church reform as in the past. But, he continued, people are “just as interested as ever in living their day-by-day lives as Christians and they are open to all sorts of new religious life styles.”

Dr. Joseph O’Donoghue, the NAL’s only paid staff member and one of the priests suspended in 1968 by Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington, D. C., for opposing Pope Paul’s birth-control encyclical, said the liberal reform group was attempting to forge an alliance with conservative Catholic laymen. All strata in the church are interested in “spiritual development,” according to Caldwell. Two resolutions, introduced by O’Donoghue, were supportive of conservative Catholics.

Other resolutions favored the removal of all U. S. troops from Viet Nam by December 31, and congressional action to stop the funding of military operations; the encouragement of diverse liturgical forms with laymen allowed to exercise their own “lay priesthood” in liturgies in family homes or “wherever they may choose to gather”; and a continued strong stand for open financial accounting by Catholic dioceses and institutions.

At one NAL presentation, Sister Janice Raymond of the Sisters of Mercy gave a paper on “Women’s Lib and Nuns.” Women have been seen in three major roles, she said. One is “relational,” such as being “Jenny’s mother,” or “John’s wife.” Another is that of a sex object, as in the “Playboy cult.” The third she called “the eternal feminine.” In the case of nuns, she added, this involves “the consecrated Virgin syndrome.”

In a separate development, a draft—possibly the final version—of a constitution for the Catholic Church stirred up a beehive of controversy in Europe between progressives and the Vatican old guard. Progressives were sounding the alarm that the document, called Lex Fundamentalis and composed of ninety-five canons, could freeze present church reforms, thus stifling the spirit generated by Vatican II.

The world’s 3,000 bishops had been asked to give approval (by mail) of the document by August 1, a date said to preclude responses from many national hierarchies and scholars. The document is not set for discussion at the world bishops’ synod in October, but the Vatican hopes for final approval from a special commission of cardinals immediately following.

Reaching The Groovy Ones: Jesus Nightclub

The Gospel is going high class on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, once the turf of the unpretentious Jesus people.

Right On, a Jesus nightclub believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, opened last month in a building once the scene of topless and bottomless shows, female impersonators, and lesbian entertainment.

With a dark-wood bar (soft drinks only) and tables, elegant red walls and carpeting, pool tables, and a door charge of $2.50, Right On is designed to appeal to the young sophisticates who visit other clubs on the Strip, according to co-manager Barry Wood, pastor of First (Southern) Baptist Church of Beverly Hills.

“The groovy ones with change in their pockets are not being touched,” says Wood. He thinks that the current emphasis on hippie culture in evangelistic circles has resulted in a neglect of the middle-class, over-25 age group.

Right On’s unique ministry reaches out through both entertainment and preaching. In addition, Christians ready to witness mingle in the crowd.

Opening-night shows before a full house featured Larry Norman, perhaps the best-known Christian pop singer in the country; the Philharmonic, a Christian rock group; Karon Blackwell, a folk-soul nightclub performer; and Cynthia Clawson, a singer in the television summer variety show “The Newcomers.”

Located among nude clubs, discotheques, and gas stations in the heart of the Strip, the building is being leased for four months from Bill Gazzarri, who also operates a teen hard-rock dance hall featuring movie projections and closed-circuit television of the young writhing dancers in jeans and hotpants.

Scheduled summer appearances in Right On include the first Hollywood performance of Jimmy Owen’s new Christian rock musical, Show Me (see May 21 issue, page 50) and a new two-act play, Requiem for Man.

Wood insists on professionalism and first-class talent. Some disagreement exists over just how much preaching should occur and how many Christians should be placed in the audience, but managers hope to avoid both extremes—appealing only to church-goers and becoming too secular.

Two and a half years ago, His Place was evicted from the adjacent building because owners felt the Gospel was bad for Strip business. Blessitt’s staff prayed that business in the buildings would stagnate. His Place has moved, but the Gospel is going Right On.

NEWS

A more fitting theme for the forty-ninth biennial convention of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod could hardly be imagined: “Sent to Reconcile.” As the convention opened in Milwaukee last month, everyone agreed reconciliation was sorely needed. The 2.8-million-member denomination has been increasingly riddled with tensions and suspicions—mostly over doctrinal matters—since Dr. Jacob A. O. Preus took over as Synod president two years ago.

At the convention’s close, delegates were still divided—even over whether the tumultuous eight-day session had moved factions closer together or further apart. The net result was to please those happy with Missouri’s apparent shift toward a more open stance on doctrine and relations with other Lutheran bodies. And to make unhappier those already upset by what they see as a drift toward unionism and the lack of synodical authority to make binding convention resolutions on doctrine.

The church may have moved a shade to the right from its position at Denver two years ago. But overall, the important victories went to the theological moderates. Preus could only say at a closing press conference: “It is not quite correct to call this a major defeat.”

This was the showdown convention between progressive forces and conservatives who wanted to roll back pulpit and altar fellowship with the American Lutheran Church (enacted at Denver), disengage the Missouri Synod from the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., and bind LCMS pastors, teachers, and professors to convention interpretations of the Bible.

Of particular concern to the progressives was Preus’s bid for “adequate machinery” to oust—if it came to that—professors at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis who have been the subject of a lengthy investigation for alleged heretical teachings. Moderates won four of five vacancies on the eleven-man Concordia Board of Control, causing seminary president John Tietjen to remark: “I don’t think any faculty member is in jeopardy.”

Both sides came to Milwaukee in battle dress (each time delegates entered the auditorium they had to “run the gauntlet” past a formidable array of leafleteers boosting pet causes). Odds-makers were picking the conservatives to have a slight edge in their fight to erect firmer fences around the position that inerrancy is to be understood as meaning that Scripture is literally true.

President Preus led off the taut meetings, attended by 1,035 voting delegates and another thousand advisers, youth delegates, and visitors, with a strongly worded, comprehensive, and extremely candid report. It laid bare the doctrinal issues facing the Synod. And it clearly enunciated Preus’s own views on each point.

Preus made no bones about the deep polarization and probable schism threatening the church. Speaking about whether variations of doctrinal opinion—especially regarding biblical inspiration and authority—should be tolerated within the Synod, he said:

“The question that has to be answered by this convention is whether we are willing to allow such matters (and many more) to be regarded as open questions on which we may take any position we wish. If the Synod feels that we should be this permissive and wishes to understand Article II of the Constitution in this loose sense, then let us realize that we have departed from the position maintained by Dr. Walther¹Dr. C. F. W. Walther, the first president of the Missouri Synod. In 1868 he wrote a long scholarly article on “The False Arguments for the Modern Theory of Open Questions.” and other fathers of our church. If we do not want this kind of latitude because we feel that it threatens the faith we confess and the message of reconciliation with which we have been entrusted, let us state clearly … that deviations from the official position of our church must be dealt with and cannot be permitted.”

In general, progressives and moderates argued that rigid adherence to Synod statements would commit them beyond their ordination vows and would impose a “strait jacket” of biblical interpretation not called for by the church’s constitution. (Missouri’s constitution sets only the Scriptures and the exposition of them in historic Lutheran confessions as its criteria of belief.)

After hours of parliamentary haggling and stiletto-like wielding of Robert’s Rules of Order, a conglomerate resolution was approved that incorporates a statement by the Council of Presidents of the church.

On a 485–425 vote, the original conservative-sponsored statement “To Uphold Synodical Doctrinal Resolutions” was replaced by the presidents’ affirmation (adopted in February of 1970). It calls on Missourians to “honor and uphold” synodically adopted statements as “valid interpretations of Christian doctrine.” But it adds that they shouldn’t be given “more or less status than they deserve.”

After the main vote, but before the resolution was perfected by being lined with the preamble and “whereas” sections of the original conservative resolution, Preus stepped down from the chair on a point of personal privilege. Bitterly disappointed, he said the action would cause “great difficulty,” and would set the Synod back to its status at Denver “with all its attendant confusion.”

The rejected resolution, Preus said, “represents my heart and soul and mind.” In a rare show of unity, however, after passing an implementing resolution that said resolutions do not “make or give birth to Christian doctrines,” delegates stood and sang the doxology.

Moments before, though, an unidentified young man in the gallery shouted out, “The Spirit of Christ is being choked by Robert’s [Rules].” Later, Preus said he was inclined to agree. And that night at a rally held by the very conservative Federation for Authentic Lutheranism, spokesman Alvin E. Wagner of North Hollywood, California, told several hundred persons that conditions in the LCMS were “irremediable” and that his group was “preparing a divorce.” FAL leaders estimated fifty major congregations would pull out.

Fellowship with the theological middle of the Lutheran triumvirate—the American Lutherans—was reaffirmed, but pulpit exchanges and intercommunion have not been enacted by about 1,000 of the 6,000 LCMS congregations since the 1969 decision declaring fellowship. The Milwaukee resolutions “freeze” any further implementation of fellowship with the ALC, and express “strong regret” over the ALC’s decision last year to ordain women ministers.

Missourians declared that the “Word of God does not permit women to hold the pastoral office …,” and the Synod “respectfully” requested the ALC to reconsider its positive position on the issue.

ALC president Kent Knutson delivered a heart-warming, hand-holding homily on the virtues of fellowship between the two churches (“Missouri Synod, we love you”) before the crucial vote, but he made it clear in a press conference that Missouri wasn’t going to call the tune for the ALC: the ordination of women was a closed issue.

Delegates also decided to continue Synod’s participation in the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. But, as in the ALC matter, conservatives won what some considered partial victory by hedging participation with restrictions. Committee studies of both ALC fellowship and Missouri participation in the LCUSA will be reported at the 1973 convention in New Orleans. A LCUSA task force will take a critical look at the council’s operations and its theological stance.

In other actions at Milwaukee, delegates:

• Ruled willful abortion is contrary to the will of God.

• Declared the church has the right to influence government, business, labor, and other segments of society through corporate statements and action; two attempts to bar the church from speaking on “secular issues” were defeated.

• Retained the much disputed parish education program, “Mission: Life,” but ordered revisions and cautions to make the material conform to approved doctrine.

• Abolished the post of executive director of Synod, now held by Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht of St. Louis, and created a new position called “administrative officer.” Wolbrecht’s exact status was left dangling.

• Set a goal of 125,000 new converts during the Synod’s 125th anniversary next year.

• Voted to take part in Key 73 evangelism efforts “as far as fellowship principles will permit.”

• Rejected membership in the Lutheran World Federation for the third time in nineteen years, but indicated willingness to move toward re-establishing fraternal relations with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

As time wore on during the Milwaukee convention it seemed progressives and moderates got themselves better organized and mustered more votes on key issues—a repeat of what happened at Denver. At any rate, it seemed clear at Milwaukee that if Preus wanted Missouri to waltz, he wouldn’t get to call all the tunes.

Transplant Trepidation

The most difficult moral and ethical problems to face surgeons, lawyers, and theologians in the next few years will arise from the perfection of organ-transplantation techniques, according to the heart specialist who taught Dr. Christian Barnard how to transplant hearts.

Immunology problems (rejection of an implanted organ by the receiver’s system) will be solved within five years, Dr. Derward Lepley, Jr., said in a speech to the Religion Newswriters’ Association in Milwaukee last month. Then there won’t be enough donors to fill the need. “Who will get the organs that can be transplanted?” asked Lepley, an American Lutheran Church member and head of the surgical team that performed Wisconsin’s first heart transplant in 1968.

Citing the moral problems involved, Lepley said diabetics wanting “new” pancreases, emphysema sufferers desiring lung transplants, and cardiac patients waiting in line for “new” hearts will cause a mammoth headache for those who must make the critical decisions. Factors such as age, race, life expectancy, and ability to pay further complicate the matter; as a partial solution Lepley suggested that boards composed of doctors, lawyers, and ministers be assigned to decide individual cases.

He also said the anticipated large-scale success of transplanting human ovaries and uteruses will raise thorny legal and religious questions about parenthood. That issue, which “has exploded over the past three years,” makes it necessary to decide: “Who is the individual born” in such a case? The newswriters’ annual meeting was held in conjunction with the biennial convention of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in Milwaukee. Lepley spoke at the awards banquet; Ray Ruppert of the Seattle Times won the RNA Supple Award for outstanding reporting of religious news during 1970.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

‘Divisions In Cod’S Army’

Still smarting from the 1969 rejection of the proposed merger with Britain’s Methodists, Anglican unionists raised the matter again at their general synod in York last month. They made no concessions but stuck by the old scheme, which has been accepted by the Methodists.

At York, the Church of England lineup, speeches, and voting all followed a now traditional pattern: archbishops and most bishops in favor, followed by a majority of clergy and laity; high churchmen and evangelicals against, aided by a maverick or two. One of the enfants terribles, the Reverend Christopher Wansey, declared that both Anglicans and Methodists were “divisions in God’s army”—and divisions in the Church were not necessarily wrong or unhappy.

The vote: 307–163 favored persevering with the scheme. Dr. Ramsey considered it “a fair majority,” but it was 10 per cent short of the required 75 per cent, and 2 per cent less than two years ago.

Regular Baptists

Nearly 2,000 registrants at the fortieth annual conference of the General Association of Regular Baptists last month passed resolutions denouncing p*rnography, abortion on demand, and profanity and sexual suggestiveness on television.

They charged that public schools are “permeated with an anti-Christian philosophy in both content and method” that is “increasingly” corrupting children from Christian homes, and they asked for the establishment and support of private Christian schools. They also reaffirmed belief in the verbal, plenary inspiration of Scripture and the Bible’s position as “final authority” in matters of faith and practice. The number of GARB churches grew by thirty-seven in the past year to 1,426.

European Congress

Billy Graham will be the only non-European to address the seven-day European Congress on Evangelism beginning August 28 in Amsterdam; over 1,000 delegates are expected.

Among major speakers are Gilbert W. Kirby, congress chairman, who is principal of London Bible College; Dr. Gerhard Bergman of the German “No Other Gospel” movement; John R. W. Stott, a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, who is probably the best-known Anglican evangelical; and CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S correspondent Jan Van Capelleveen.

There will be contributions also from Professor Carl Wisloff of Norway, José Grau of Spain, pastors Henri Blocher and Charles Guillot of France, Professor Paaro Kortetangas of Finland, and Professor Hendrik R. Rookmaker of the Netherlands.

Today an emerging evangelical vanguard of state university graduates (and a smaller number from evangelical campuses) who are disenchanted with modern culture are calling, in the name of the Gospel, for a radical faith and a revolutionary commitment. Their discontents include not only secular society but also institutional Christianity. If they reproach the contemporary world-view for its technocratic depersonalization of human values, no less do they fault the ecumenical churches for secularizing the supernatural Gospel, and the evangelical churches for spiritualizing man’s material needs. On the edge of the Vietnamese war, most of them question the legitimacy and effectiveness of violence in settling international differences, though not all are pacifists.

Some of these young people have emerged from the youth counter-cultural revolt to a thoroughgoing Christian commitment. While they share the evangelistic concern of the Jesus people, they are not content simply to withdraw from the world they once knew, nor do they think Christianity can long survive in free-floating patterns not theologically informed. And they are determined to bear Christian witness at socio-cultural frontiers.

Not a few are attending evangelical seminaries for an exposure to dogmatics and apologetics. They do not question the validity of the gathered church, though some question the legitimacy of the ministry, as it is presently conceived, as a Christian profession. Few of them think the pulpit ministry is their thing; most are unsure just what their vocation is. Some hopefully contemplate exploratory careers in mass communications, free university or community student centers, and the like.

A dozen or so of their number attending Trinity Evangelical Divinity School plan soon to mount their witness through a sub-culture newspaper. They hope to champion a Christian faith matched to the contemporary mind-set. They insist that what Christians offer must be intellectually satisfying, ethically sensitive, and experientially adequate. In the modern context, their message is radical. The supernatural, not society, is the decisive setting for human life; sin, not environmental deformity, is man’s basic problem; Christ and catastrophe are life’s only enduring options. God’s offer of new life through Jesus Christ crucified and risen is their good news. They are committed to an authoritative Bible.

To this point many evangelical churches will approve. However, an establishment imprimatur means little to the new vanguard. Many evangelicals, they complain, uncritically espouse a two-car materialistic faith and a pro-American Gospel; their social and political values, moreover, are not derived from the Bible. Thousands of such evangelical churches, they say, concentrate on microethics (personal legalisms) to the neglect of macroethics (war, race, and poverty are most frequently mentioned). The student world, we are told, has largely gained the impression that Christian identification involves at least a neglect of the issues of social justice if not the negation of any commitment to it.

The questions that the young intellectuals feel they must answer are pressed upon them by non-Christians whose primary focus is the reality of the body, of society, of this world. In this milieu the worst of all options open to the evangelical is to be silent and tolerant toward social wrongs, for this adds up to implicit participation in them. A biblical faith alive to social ethics and energetically addressed to the multitudes in captivity to American culture is indispensable.

Most of these aroused intellectuals shun not only the traditional pulpit ministry but also a career in the military or in corporate business. As they see it, if the “just war” ethic is applied to Viet Nam, they want none of it. And if capitalism is to be identified with freedom to pollute the earth or to promote cigarette addiction through the mass media until government interferes, or with buy-at-your-own-risk manufacturing, they want some moral alternative. Modern America little senses how much of the revolt against inherited traditions has been bred and nourished by recent political and commercial compromises of those ideals.

Perhaps more evangelical churches than one might suspect will say, “Right on!” But these young intellectuals are wary of the right and are leaning toward the left. They are committed to social revolution and to eliminating social injustice. This does not mean, however, that they espouse anarchy or the forceful overthrow of government; after all, recent American presidents and leading evangelical evangelists alike have embraced the term revolution. Nor do these young people attach post-millennial Kingdom of God expectations to political change. What they promote is a humane society in which personal values hold the center of human existence. And because the political left is against the Vietnamese involvement and specializes in the vocabulary of values, the young evangelical vanguard finds a ready shelter and welcome there.

The left-leaning intellectuals desperately need funds for the bold, creative thrusts through which they seek new visibility for the Gospel. But because of apprehensions about the left—derived from the long-standing correlation of theological liberalism and political liberalism—the evangelical establishment has taken little interest in funding nonconformist evangelical ventures that combine biblical theology with a leftward look in socio-political affairs. Funding is more likely to be available from ecumenical agencies that will overlook a strenuous emphasis on biblical theology if evangelicals can be involved for political change. Even in an ecumenical context, evangelical intellectuals can probably be counted on not to muffle their gospel witness. But by its support or non-support of their efforts the evangelical establishment will, as many of these young people see it, confirm or disavow the charge of being socially insensitive and identified with a right-wing cultural establishment.

Evangelical churches are not alone in facing an identity crisis. The young evangelical intellectuals themselves face such a crisis, and detachment from an authentically evangelical milieu could worsen their plight. If, as they feel, fundamentalist Christianity has forgotten that all cultures remain subject to God’s judgment, and that no economic system is to be regarded as identical with the Kingdom of God, then does not the new vanguard itself repeat and compound that error by uncritically supposing that the program of the political left is identifiable with the content of God’s New Covenant? Should not any philosophy of society—left or right—furnish and sustain norms of commitment and action? Should evangelicals be taken in by a Marxist antithesis of personal and property values, or is property, rather, a personal right and stewardship?

The young intellectuals and the evangelical churches need each other—the one for evangelical illumination, the other for social concern. It would be the saddest of mistakes if, instead of complementing and building each other, they were to exhaust themselves in mutual destruction.

With the resurgence of lay movements within the Church, it is increasingly important that we who are laymen have a clear understanding of the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Christ founded his church with laymen, and they should remain the strength and stay of every department of his work.

I want us to think about a word that carries deep spiritual significance, one whose concept is absolutely essential to the Christian faith. That word is atonement.

At the level of our worldly experience, atonement means a satisfactory reparation for an offense or injury. Unjust as some awards may be, payment for injury to persons and property resulting from an automobile accident, for instance, carries with it the idea of an atonement to the one injured.

In the realm of the spirit and of theological usage the Atonement means “at-one-ment” between God and man, made possible by Christ’s death on the cross for our sins and all that is implied thereby.

We must frankly admit that no one definition of the Atonement can possibly cover all the marvelous facets of this sublime truth. What is very clear in biblical teaching, however, is that Christ died for our sins, taking upon himself the penalty rightly belonging to us, so that, through faith in him, we are freed from our penalty and guilt.

There are immediate as well as eternal results of the atonement that transcend many other doctrines of Christianity. In fact, many other doctrines revolve around the central truth that Christ, God’s Son, came into this world to make atonement for our sins.

Man’s need for the Atonement goes back to the basic problem of sin.

Sin is a universal disease; it affects all men everywhere. Our news media daily recount multiplied acts of overt sin against God and man, and if we are honest we will face the dismal fact that we ourselves daily sin against God in thought, word, and deed. The Bible tells us that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).

And sin has its effect: its wages are death—separation from God. Man’s need for the Atonement can be understood only in the light of God’s holiness. Because of that holiness, fellowship is impossible, for between unregenerate man and this holy God there is a gulf of separation across which no man can pass.

The atonement of Christ, designed in the councils of eternity and carried out on the Cross of Calvary, is God’s marvelous way of combining in one glorious act his holiness, righteousness, and justice with his love, mercy, and forgiveness. It is the bridging of the chasm.

On the Cross we have the eternal Son of God, also the perfect Son of man—the only person who ever lived who could take on himself the guilt, the penalty, and all the implications of sin and make it possible for the believer to be completely transformed into a new person, righteous in God’s sight.

These are not my ideas but the clear teachings of the Bible. To evade them requires rejection of words capable of no other honest interpretation.

But some quickly object: Does this not make God a vengeful being, full of hate that can be only requited by the sacrifice of his Son? Just the opposite is the case. It is because of his great love for mankind that God provided atonement through his own Son, whose death alone would suffice.

Perhaps man’s greatest stumbling block is his unwillingness to admit either the awfulness of sin, with its rebellion against God, or the holiness of God, into whose presence nothing unclean or rebellious can come. Recognize these two truths and all other implications of the atonement fall into a glorious picture of God’s love and grace.

Humanists and others may reject the truth of the substitutionary atonement, saying that it makes God a bloody tyrant, willing to forgive only on the basis of the sufferings and death of a sacrificial victim. These people speak of the blood atonement as a “slaughterhouse religion.”

But if God loved us enough to send his Son to redeem us, there must have been a valid reason. Certainly it was not a matter of tyranny, but rather of the magnitude of sin’s offense and the necessity for the greatest possible sacrifice—the death of God’s own Son.

What is man that he should argue with his Creator? Who is he that he should question his Redeemer? How can he rightly question the God-designed method whereby he may be freed from the guilt and penalty of sin? Surely God is neither arbitrary nor unreasonable in laying down the terms of his own free gift.

In the Atonement the Lord Jesus Christ has done something for us that no one can do for himself. Salvation is a matter of believing, not achieving; of accepting God’s gracious gift by faith and in no other way.

The great marvel of the Atonement is its end result for mankind. Through our faith in Christ our sins and guilt are imputed to him—he has become sin in our stead—and his righteousness is imputed to us so that we, redeemed sinners, become righteous in God’s sight. Impossible? We have God’s word that it is true. Unbelievable? Not when viewed in the light of God’s love. Unacceptable? Only to those who willfully reject it—and who are therefore lost.

The Apostle Peter writes, “And he personally bore our sins on the Cross, so that we might be dead to sin and alive to all that is good. It was the suffering that he bore that has healed you” (1 Pet. 2:24, Phillips).

The Apostle Paul is equally explicit about the Atonement: “For I passed on to you Corinthians first of all the message I had myself received—that Christ died for our sins, as the Scriptures said he would; that he was buried and rose again on the third day, again as the Scriptures foretold” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4, Phillips).

Christ’s atonement for our sins was foreshadowed in the Old Testament sacrifices: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Lev. 17:11).

How serious it is if we reject God’s offer! The writer of Hebrews warns, “If we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who violated the law of Moses died without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:26–29).

Those confronted by an epidemic (cholera, for instance) may gain immunity from the disease by receiving an injection of vaccine. Men, all of whom are confronted by the fact of sin and its consequences, may receive forgiveness and eternal life by receiving into their hearts Jesus Christ and his atonement for them.

PAY YOUR MONEY AND TAKE YOUR CHOICE

He looked at me intently, and his big brown eyes radiated all the cosmic concern that an eight-year-old is capable of as he asked, “Dad, how can I become a race-car driver?”

Frankly, I didn’t have the foggiest idea. And as it turned out, the problem was more complex than I realized.

It seems that some months ago he and his older brother entered into a type of agreement that is frowned upon in our house and usually goes under the name “bet.” The terms were that he has to pay his brother five dollars if he does not become an astronaut.

I began to smile as he told me about it, but the gravity of the matter was reconfirmed by his solemn look. Put yourself in his place. You have your whole life ahead of you. The excitement in anticipating a career as an astronaut has palled. Now nothing looks quite so exciting as driving a race car. But standing in the way is a bet that involves the gigantic sum of FIVE DOLLARS and a considerable amount of personal pride. I tried to assure him that when the time came to make the final decision, the five dollars wouldn’t really matter. But it didn’t seem to help much. He still feels vocationally boxed in.

A few months after this incident I talked with a twenty-eight-year-old whose vocational problem was similar. It seems this young man holds a Ph.D. in a rather obscure branch of engineering. He got this degree, he said, “sort of by accident.”

The way he explained it, his grades were good in physics and so he was encouraged to consider engineering. When he finished his bachelor’s degree, he was encouraged to consider specializing in an area where there was scholarship money and little competition.

As a result he holds a Ph.D. and a considerable commitment to a field that he finds unrewarding.

The two incidents brought to mind my own vocational choices and the fact that we are often called upon to make these choices before we have the necessary information or maturity of judgment.

Perhaps the Church can help. Perhaps we should abandon our preoccupation with four-year liberal-arts colleges and take another look at the two-year junior college. Perhaps the churches by providing a two-year program could give the student a good liberal-arts foundation within a Christian perspective and still leave him time to pursue a specialized vocation.

Perhaps they could, but I’ll bet you five dollars they don’t.

BOLD ABOUT ABORTION

The latest in your series of articles and editorials on abortion (“Abortion: The Psychological Price,” by Kenneth J. Sharp, June 4) expresses certain opinions which need further examination.

The overriding fact about abortion under any circ*mstances and for any reason is that an innocent human being is killed. This has been stated quite boldly even by pro-abortion groups such as the California Medical Association.…

When morally responsible people express an opinion favoring abortion, there are usually two factors at work. One is that they are thinking of abortion as “termination of pregnancy,” not as taking a human life. The second is that they are not aware of how abortions are performed. On this latter point, abortion has to be one of the most barbaric methods ever devised for killing. There are laws in most states that prohibit the killing of animals by the cruel processes used to kill the innocent unborn baby.…

But above all one must bear in mind that the human being who begins life [because of rape] is innocent, and simply cannot be killed because the circ*mstances of conception are emotionally painful.…

A careful examination of liberalized abortion laws, such as the one in California, reveals that rather reasonable sounding reservations, such as permitting termination of pregnancy in the event of a serious threat to the mental health of the mother, have become through interpretation abortion on demand. This was not, perhaps, intended by the legislators, but it is what has happened, and what will happen everywhere there is any relaxation in abortion laws. There is a massive movement afoot in the culture to make abortion solely a matter between a mother and her doctor. These forces are pushing for, and take immediate advantage of any change in abortion laws, or any weakness or equivocation on the part of those who oppose abortion.

Donald S. Smith Associates

Anaheim, Calif.

THE LAST RESORT

The Dallas Independent School District has received a number of letters from readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY who were concerned over the editorial, “Making the Rod Count” (June 18).…

We feel that each student has the right to receive an education that will prepare him to be a productive member of society, to explore relevant materials which relate to his learning ability, to be treated by faculty and students with courtesy and respect, and to participate in the development of standards within his school community. We also expect students to respect the rights of others, to abide by school regulations, and to recognize and accept the authority of faculty and staff.

We firmly believe that the relationship between teachers and students should emphasize the positive and de-emphasize the negative. In addition, we feel it is the principal’s responsibility to maintain order and discipline in his school in order to insure its effective and efficient operation.

Occasionally, despite the efforts of the faculty and fellow students to provide a worthwhile and effective educational environment, there are some students who cannot or will not control themselves and repeatedly disrupt the school program.… Through counseling and special attention, these children usually develop self-discipline and a more positive self image. But, … there are times when corporal punishment is the only process remaining.… This technique is used as a last resort, just as a parent spanks as a last resort.

General Superintendent

Dallas Independent School District

Dallas, Tex.

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS

Praise the Lord for fresh winds blowing! I hear the strains of the Hallelujah Chorus. Thank you for Calvin Linton’s “Literary Style in Religious Writing” (June 18, July 2).… His voice crying in the wilderness of words refreshes as only the unexpected oasis that sends forth living springs of water to the dying soul.

Okeene, Okla.

BALANCED DISENCHANTMENT

Stanley Sturges’s revelation that polarization exists within the Adventist church will not surprise anyone familiar with groups of human beings and how they act (“The Growing Quarrel Among Seventh-day Adventists,” June 18). What is more remarkable is the undeniably large measure of unity evident among so heterogeneous a church, whose two million members include almost every nationality, culture, color, and educational level.

Sturges is correct when he deplores “the slavish use of her [Ellen G. White’s] comments to support almost any point the writer wishes to make.” Compilers of such lists have probably done more damage to Mrs. White’s image as a Christian leader and writer than all her detractors together. However, Sturges errs when he says Adventists put E. G. White writings on a par with the Bible. Some unwittingly do. But she herself spoke of her writings as a “lesser light to lead men and women to the greater light”—the Bible.

Though disenchanted with certain aspects of Adventism, Sturges is to be commended for a certain balance. His is no vengeful tirade. In fact, I have never seen so many complimentary things about Mrs. White in any other evangelical paper.

Book Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association

Mountain View, Calif.

As a Seventh-day Adventist in his early thirties and one who has worked inside the church and outside for ten years now, I would like to report there is no “growing quarrel”.… Like a fresh breeze, revival has been spontaneously and quietly spreading through our ranks for several years. Beginning with our young people who are falling in love with Jesus Christ, the revival and reformation are permeating Adventists of all ages everywhere.

Seventh-day Adventists are a people who love Christ. Because this is so, most of us are too busy trying to fulfill the commission he gave each of us to have time for quarrels.

Instructor of Journalism

Andrews University

Berrien Springs, Mich.

CONFUSING COMMISSIONS

Mr. Tarr’s report on the Canadian Presbyterian General Assembly (News, “Canadian Presbyterians: Down the Middle of the Road,” July 2) illustrates what happens when a reporter, unconnected with the church written about, fails to get the official record or otherwise to check his report.

I refer in particular to his paragraph on the “charismatic renewal.” The appeal to Assembly from a member of the Westminster Presbytery concerned the presbytery’s procedure. A judicial committee of Assembly made a preliminary report that the procedure was in order. It was the presbytery itself that petitioned for the appointment of a judicial commission, which was granted. The judicial committee, with two members added, became the commission. That commission has now found the presbytery’s actions legally correct, and is proceeding to make an investigation under wide terms of reference. The doctrinal aspects were not handed to another “commission.” The Assembly’s standing committee on church doctrine has been assigned the duty of making a study and of reporting to another Assembly.

Clerk of Assembly

The Presbyterian Church in Canada

Ontario

THE COLOR OF TRUTH

Having heard one verbal report on the 111th General Assembly, and having read all of the printed reports which came to my attention from official and liberal sources, there seemed to linger a questioning echo in my mind. That echo I now believe to have been “the death knell of the Presbyterian Church as a historic entity,” reverberating all the way down to Texas.

The reports I read no doubt were factual, as statistics are factual, but they lacked the subtle color and the “ring of truth” expressed and implied in Russell Chandler’s smoothly written report, “Death Knell for Southern Presbyterians?” (July 2).

The professionals who wrote the other reports could sell arrowheads to Indians, but they can’t fool a battle-scarred conservative with fifty years of observation stored in his mind.… Thank you for the excellent report; well-written, restrained, statesman-like. Tyler, Tex.

SLEEPING LIFE AWAY

CHRISTIANITY TODAY quoted me as saying that I’m against the church (News, “Graham Crusade: Satanists Lose to Jesus Power,” July 2). This is a misquote. What I did say is as follows: Street people that we reach for Christ today are turned off by formalism and “church” that has a form of life but not life itself. I’m referring to the great sleeping giant, evangelical fundamentalism.

Chicago, Ill.

PREDETERMINED NONSENSE

I read with interest your report on tongues-speaking (News, “Testing Tongues,” June 4).… It seems that the study, reporter, and forthcoming book have already predetermined tongues as nonsense. However, the Holy Spirit cannot be tested scientifically, for he is God.

Highland Heights Presbyterian Church

Little Rock, Ark.

HUMORLESS JUDGMENT

I … appreciate CHRISTIANITY TODAY. I read it with real profit.

However, I criticize your editors for what I consider a judgment of poor taste in the use of the so-called art of Mr. Lawing (“What If …,” July 2). For a conservative religious periodical I thought this was a cheap attempt at humor.

East District Bishop

Church of the United Brethren in Christ

Grand Rapids, Mich.