Emphasizing evangelism and social concern, in that order, the National Association of Evangelicals rolled merrily past its twenty-fifth anniversary convention. To the disappointment of some, delegates sidestepped growing pressures for wider evangelical unity.1The NAE claims a direct constituency of 2.5 million and a “service constituency” (people organizationally unrelated but receiving NAE benefits) of ten million. Many additional millions of evangelicals have no common fellowship (see Feb. 17 issue, p. 52).
Convention speakers reflected social concern and made it a recurring theme. But a 977-word manifesto made clear the NAE principle of placing needs of the soul above those of the body. The document affirms the Great Commission as “the sole and sufficient preoccupation of the Church.” In a companion “covenant,” NAE’s common ground is given as “acceptance of the infallibility and plenary authority of Scripture.”
During the three-day convention, held this month in the Staffer Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles, plans were announced for a second World Congress on Evangelism, patterned on last fall’s meeting in Berlin. It is being projected for 1970, possibly in an Asian city. A North American Congress on Evangelism is also in the works, for 1968.
The Rev. Billy A. Melvin, until now the chief administrator for the Southern-oriented 173,000-member National Association of Free Will Baptists, was named executive director of NAE.
At $25 a plate, 1,000 persons jammed the hotel’s Pacific Ballroom for a silver anniversary dinner address by Billy Graham. The evangelist said “we have become complacent about our social responsibilities and are in danger of theological complacency.” He asserted that “doctrinal compromise also brings moral compromise.”
Clyde W. Taylor, general director of NAE, reported that “concerned evangelical fellowships are appearing in all the major denominations, united to preserve their witness to the Gospel.” These, he said, may serve as a bridge to wider evangelical fellowship. “The NAE has the door wide open to welcome and encourage them.”
Taylor cited NAE’s social consciousness as having broadened to include relief work and leadership training in Viet Nam, job training in Latin America, reclamation and resettlement in Korea, and welfare agencies across the United States.
The Rev. Aaron M. Hamlin, vice-president of the National Negro Evangelical Association, urged Christians to battle discrimination. “If Christians can feel the release of the Holy Spirit to fight the spread of pornographic literature,” he said, “they can also lift their voices in the cause of racial justice. It is true that it will not always be possible to agree on means to an end, but there is no excuse for not making earnest attempt to arrive at an end.” Hamlin said he was not calling for an emotional crusade “but for prayerful consideration of concrete ways to witness to racial minorities by concerned action as much as by passionate word.”
Resolutions adopted by NAE delegates voiced support of the proposed Dirksen prayer amendment in Congress and of existing laws that grant draft exemption to conscientious objectors. Alarm was expressed, however, at recent moves to liberalize the legislation on conscientious objectors.
Conservative Confession Of ’67
There’s another confession of 1967, and it came this month from the conservative Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (358,000 members). In the first comprehensive doctrinal statement issued by the 117-year-old denomination, its theological commission asserts that the Bible is the “infallible authority and guide for everything we believe and do.”
Besides giving a long definition of Bible inerrancy, the twenty-four-page statement says the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds and confessions in the Lutheran Book of Concord (1580) give “expression to the true doctrine of the Scripture.” Like other Lutherans, the Wisconsin Evangelicals believe that “through Baptism the Holy Spirit applies the Gospel to sinful man, regenerating him,” and that “Christ’s true body and blood are received in the Lord’s Supper.” But Wisconsin rejects all evolutionary theories in favor of creation in “six normal days.” It also calls “organizational union” a “false ecumenicity,” and opposes civil disobedience.
President Carl J. Lawrenz said the confession was prepared after “requests from outsiders” for information about Wisconsin Synod beliefs.
Bucking The Baptist Tide
At a time when other Southern Baptists are hard put to support their colleges, the Florida Baptist Convention voted this month to start a new college near West Palm Beach that would be barred from accepting federal aid.
All trustees and administrators must be Baptists, and a “strong preference” will be shown toward Baptist teachers. A full-page doctrinal standard was dropped in favor of two “basic and over-riding principles” of belief: the Bible is “the inspired word of God and is a sufficient guide for salvation and the Christian life,” and “Jesus is the virgin-born son of God and the Lord and Savior of all who trust him.”
President Robert Spiro of Jacksonville University, a veteran Baptist educator, doubts whether the school can find enough good Baptist teachers with these beliefs to get regional accreditation.
About $750,000 has been pledged to the school, which may open by the fall of 1968.
In other school news, the Greek Orthodox Diocese of North and South America announced plans to strengthen liberal arts and eventually turn its Holy Cross Theological School in Brookline, Massachusetts, into a comprehensive “Hellenic University.”
And Seventh-day Adventists decided to work toward merger of two California schools: Loma Linda University (1,100 students in medical and health fields) and La Sierra College (1,700 students in liberal arts).
A Protest On Evangelism
Seventy-five New Jersey ministers in the American Baptist Convention have attacked the denomination’s evangelism secretary, Jitsuo Morikawa, asking the General Council to make a “re-evaluation” of the whole evangelism department.
The department under Morikawa has become permeated with “nascent universalism,” according to the statement, and his policies were blamed for both a decline in baptisms over the past decade and “increasing uneasiness” in local churches.
Issued one month before the denomination’s mid-May annual meeting, the document protests Morikawa’s views of salvation, quoting him as saying that the doctrine “has to do with a new society rather than a redeemed individual soul.”
Meanwhile, the Methodist Board of Evangelism, anticipating the denomination’s merger with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, asked that the united church formally make evangelism “the first business of the church.” Backing up the proposal, the board outlined a program of evangelism that could cost $5 million.
Opposition to that merger is being rallied by sixty-six pastors in the Methodist Southern California-Arizona Conference because it retains Methodism’s racially segregated jurisdictions.
Canada: Missions Upsurge
The United Church of Canada will appoint forty new missionaries in the current fiscal year—double last year’s total and the largest number since 1925, the year the denomination was formed through merger.
The number of missionary deaths and retirements has not been disclosed, so the net change is unknown. The United Church also set a goal of sixty new missionaries for the coming year and is optimistic about topping its budget.
Missions was a point of some controversy at last year’s General Council, and many conservatives see a radical change in the UCC approach. Donald Flemming, former Tory finance minister who is chairman of the missions commission, denied that his report reflected any “departure from the traditional evangelical emphasis.” But the United Church Observer challenged his assurances, pointing out that the report had little or no emphasis on “proclamation, winning, persuading, converting, making disciples of all nations, or ‘winning the world for Christ in this generation.’ ”
Dr. Norman Mackenzie, an agricultural missionary to India now serving as personnel secretary for the missions board, is not convinced that there has been a shift in missions ideology. “My basic concern is to serve mankind and to start where there is a need, believing that man’s deepest need is spiritual. I feel that most of us who go out are evangelists, though we differ slightly in emphasis,” Mackenzie said. But, he added that he did not take the initiative in evangelism and told people about Christ only upon inquiry.
J. BERKLEY REYNOLDS
Bishops Accede On Divorce
Canada’s Roman Catholic bishops, who represent half the nation’s population, announced they will not oppose proposed laws to broaden grounds for divorce (see April 14 issue, page 48). The bishops also gave free reign to Catholics to join the YMCA and YWCA, since their “pronounced Protestant evangelical tradition has gradually worn down and disappeared.…”
Disappointing Agenda
Roman Catholic liberals are disappointed in the advance agenda for the first synod meeting of world bishops this September. Included: mixed marriages, doctrine, and internal administration. Excluded: the celibacy requirement, birth control, ecumenism, war and peace, and even the poverty problems raised in the Pope’s latest encyclical.
At their meeting this month in Chicago, the U.S. bishops reportedly replied to a world-wide order from the Vatican for a search-and-destroy operation on heresy by denying there is heresy among American churchmen.
Mormon Waiver Watched
The General Commission on Chaplains and Armed Forces Personnel, a civilian church organization representing more than thirty denominations, is reportedly taking a wait-and-see attitude toward President Johnson’s executive order waiving educational requirements for Mormon chaplains. The commission supplies 1,600 of the nation’s 4,000 chaplains.
“Our raising a public protest over the erosion of standards for chaplaincy candidates seems to have lessened the problem,” says A. Roy Appelquist, executive secretary of the commission. “Most of us thought there would be a large increase coming in under the waiver, but that has not been the case.”
Appelquist says there are “only about nineteen or twenty chaplains in all three services” representing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon).
Appelquist says the commission has always recognized the right of the Chief of Chaplains to grant individual waivers for candidates who did not meet the seven years of required training. But he says many churches oppose the blanket waiver given the Mormons by President Johnson last year. Mormons do not require seminary or comparable training beyond the four-year level.
Dedicating A $16 Million Campus
In a notable display of evangelical unity, Oral Roberts and Billy Graham shared the same speaker’s rostrum at this month’s dedication of the $16 million campus of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. The ceremony was attended by 20,000 persons.
Among other participants were Oklahoma Governor Dewey Bartlett (a Roman Catholic), U. S. Senator A. S. Mike Monroney, Tulsa Mayor James Hewgley, Jr., and state education administrators.
City officials say the 420-acre campus has become Tulsa’s biggest tourist attraction since it opened nearly two years ago (see Sept. 24, 1965, issue, page 47). The ultra-modern campus has seven major buildings focused on a ten-story prayer tower faced with mirrors. Seven more buildings are on the drawing boards.
Roberts, who was installed as president in the ceremonies, said he expects the present student body of 550 to increase to 3,000 by 1970. The university has state accreditation but will have to wait until it graduates its first class in 1969 to gain regional accreditation.
A sign of the quality of ORU’s facilities is the comment by Ford Foundation consultants on the six-story Learning Resources Center they helped plan: they call it “one of the two most creative facilities on any American campus today.” The computerized information-and-retrieval system permits students to obtain maximum information on a subject. They can sit at telephone-type booths and dial recorded lectures they want to review. Some lectures are even videotaped when illustrations are important.
Graham commended Roberts and other ORU officials for seeking academic excellence coupled with a distinct spiritual emphasis. He predicted that ultimately ORU “will be able to compete with any secular university in the world.”
“God has given Dr. Roberts some unusual gifts, and he is utilizing them to the fullest,” Graham said. “I believe all evangelical Christianity is proud of what is happening here today.”
Graham, who has long harbored a dream to establish a similar institution, said in an interview he is now thinking more in terms of an international Bible college than a liberal arts university.
BILL ROSE
Indonesia: Fastest Missions Frontier
After turmoil and a national blood-bath in which hundreds of thousands died, Indonesia apparently is now the fastest-growing frontier of world Christianity. At the end of March, world mission leaders returned to Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States with appeals for emergency funds to help the over-crowded churches.
Addison J. Eastman, Asian missions director of the National Council of Churches in the United States, said membership in Indonesia’s Protestant churches has grown by 150,000 in just eighteen months. Various sources report local results in the multi-racial nation of 3,000 islands, which has the world’s fifth-largest population:
East Java: 30,000 converts in a few months; fifty new Bible-study groups formed in the capital of Djakarta. Central Java: thirty new congregations in largely Muslim towns. West Java: 4,000 persons newly professing Christ in the city of Bandung. Sumatra: 19,000 baptisms last year in the North; Protestant membership up 50 per cent in one year in the Karo-Batak region, with 6,000 more being prepared for baptism. West Borneo: thirty new congregations. Celebes: three new independent denominations with a membership of 60,000.
One reason for this growth is the large campaigns in main cities, a form of evangelism virtually unknown before in Indonesia, with its strong high Calvinist tradition. In addition, Eastman says new members hope “the Christian Church can provide a base from which to work for meaningful and humane social progress for the entire nation.” The Church, he said, is filling a “spiritual vacuum” after years of extreme political turmoil climaxing in the revolt against the Communist Party in the fall of 1965. Another result of the shake-up is the downfall of President Sukarno, who kept Islam from becoming the official state religion even though the population is 90 per cent Muslim.
