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Last week, the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago issued a statement to the Southern Baptist Convention regarding the denomination's plans to bring 100,000 missionaries to the Windy City next summer. "While we are confident that your volunteers would come with entirely peaceful intentions, a campaign of the nature and scope you envision could contribute to a climate conducive to hate crimes," the letter said. According to the Chicago Tribune, the statement was "prompted by the concerns of local Jewish leaders" who are already upset about the Southern Baptists' September campaign to pray specifically for the conversion of Jews during the Jewish High Holy Days. And, though Southern Baptist leaders have been careful to promise the missionaries will not target specific religious groups, many of the negative comments about the plan focus on targeted evangelism.

Targeted evangelism, particularly targeting Jews, has always been controversial. The archives of Christianity Today are filled with discussions of the topic. Today we publish one of our earliest editorials on the subject, "Christmas and the Modern Jew," an unsigned editorial from the December 8, 1958 issue of the magazine. In that same issue, we ran an article by Rabbi Arthur Gilbert, then director of Interreligious Cooperation for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, on the "Christian Approach to the Jew." In today's ChristianityToday.com postings, we turn again to a well-known rabbi, Yechiel Eckstein, president and founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, to help us as Christians tounderstand the Jewish perspectiveon targeted and general evangelism. (We are also republishing Billy Graham's famousstatementin a 1973 issue of CT that he "never felt called to single out the Jews" for evangelism and his reiteration of that stand in aspeechbefore the American Jewish Committee four years later.)

During the sacred seasons of the year, whether Christmas, Good Friday and Easter, or the Hebrew Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), the question of the Christian witness to the Jew inevitably comes to special focus. The current articles in Christianity Today recognize the awesome implications of the claim that Jesus of Nazareth is the unique incarnation of the living God. So extraordinary is this claim in its involvement of the whole race that the Christian dare not muffle its pronouncement, nor dare the Hebrew ignore it. It is as impossible for the Christian missionary to hide the Light of the World in a Gentile cellar as it is for the spiritually-concerned Jew to evade the question of the promised Messiah.

Yet in our era the Christian witness often seems to lack both good missionary strategy toward the Jew and a sensitivity to his situation in life. However compelling they may be, evidences of Jesus' Messiahship are not necessarily the best point of contact with the twentieth-century Hebrew. He sometimes wonders why, since New Testament times, Christians so often have treated the Jews so much like the Jews treated the Old Testament Canaanites and other Palestinian pagans (since the Hebrews then considered themselves under divine command, whereas Christians profess devotion to Jesus Christ, who taught that love fulfills the commandments and who required the love of enemy and neighbor alike). The long story of persecution of the Jew in the so-called Christian West has only too often dropped a silencing curtain over the Christian witness.

In the twentieth century, however, the Jew is increasingly aware that not all who call Christ Lord need really be identified with his Kingdom, any more than all who call Abraham father need really be Jews. The conflict between faith and secularism among Jews regathered in Israel has reiterated the spiritual problem with new impact. Even many a Jew in the West, who has no desire to surrender the culture and comfort of the New World, and therefore invests money rather than muscle in the Palestinian vision, nonetheless also recognizes the seeming worthlessness of life today. Most men are now convinced that doing things faster holds no guarantee that life becomes better. Actually the age of speed seems the more swiftly to have deteriorated morality and spirituality.

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November (Web-only) 1999, Vol. 43