American evangelicals have long been engaged in a visibility and identity struggle. They have sought, often without success, to gain exposure for biblical truth in the contemporary milieu. They have tried particularly hard to re-establish respect for biblical evangelism, and it may well be that they have come to a turning point. The six-day United States Congress on Evangelism attracted some 5,000 influential clergy and lay churchmen to Minneapolis this month. And it is doubtful that there has ever been a distinctly evangelical event that won more attention in the mass media.
The excitement over the Minneapolis gathering was all the more remarkable in light of a somewhat indifferent mood among evangelicals prior to the congress. Few evangelical media bothered to discuss it in advance as they did the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. Even some evangelical leaders had shrugged off the significance of Minneapolis. “What value is there in just getting together?” they asked.
Evangelist Billy Graham spoke to that point in a news conference prior to the congress opening. “Jesus spent about two-thirds of his time just meeting with his disciples,” Graham said, “and I think that suggests there is some importance to conferences.”
Disagreements abounded during the congress, and many evangelical shortcomings were brought into the open. But Minneapolis showed America that most denominations include a strong evangelical element—in many cases a majority element—and that there is an impressive area of agreement on what constitutes biblical evangelism.
Secular newsmen were surprised to learn the degree of social concern on the part of evangelicals. Delegates were reminded that American affluence entails unique responsibility by a stage backdrop taken from Luke 12:48: “Much is given, much is required.”
In subsequent issues, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will relate in more detail what went on at the congress. Texts of several major presentations will be published.
Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, preacher on the worldwide “Lutheran Hour” radio broadcast, asserted in the keynote address that “the Gospel is the product that makes everything else go. Everything else is a by-product—often invaluable, sometimes indispensable, but still a by-product.
“If the Gospel is not at the heart of the body, which is the Church, the whole thing dies. If the Gospel is proclaimed in anemic fashion, the whole thing becomes anemic. If the Gospel is demonstrated only vocally and not vitally in the everyday actions of Christ’s followers, the whole thing becomes a farce, and the world knows it.
“It is a remarkable fact that the world often has seen what is wrong with the Church before people inside became aware of what was happening. This is a practical world where people are not interested in frittering away time, energy, and resources on stuff that is obviously meaningless, purposeless, and fruitless. This is no time for fooling around. The time has come to get with Christ, and to go with him.”
Hoffmann, chairman of the national committee of the congress, added that some find evangelism distasteful because “they resent the very idea of personal commitment which the good news of Jesus Christ commands, which it demands, of a man. People can commit themselves to everyone and everything else, but not to him!
“Still others have a view of the Church that makes it seem like a social club, consisting of first-class snobs who want to make others over in their own image. If that is evangelism, they tell us, you can have it. It demeans the Church and it degrades the people whom the Church is trying to reach.
“If we who are here have contributed in any way to false impressions regarding the meaning and purpose of evangelism, we must apologize.… In behalf of the Christian groups to which we belong, we say ‘forgive us. We meant to say something else and apparently we didn’t say it very well. We have only one thing to say to you: Get with Christ, and go with him. He is everything to us and he can be—He will be—everything to you.’ ”
Evangelist Leighton Ford characterized the battle for men’s minds as crucial. “The strange plight of modern man is that while his knowledge is exploding, the whole idea of ‘true truth,’ truth which is the opposite of falsehood, is disappearing. In art, philosophy, theology, and the total pattern of his thinking, twentieth-century man seeks to escape from reason. Everything is relative. This has led inevitably to a moral revolution, a shift from an absolute ethic to a situation ethic, from a morality based on God’s eternal law to one based on man’s personal likes.
“Neither pot nor pornography forms the moral crisis of our time. That crisis lies in the widely held assumption that no moral standard is really important. There have always been those who violated society’s moral codes, but has there ever been a generation which repudiated the very idea of any binding standard?”
Ford, who alternates with Graham on the “Hour of Decision” radio broadcast, added: “The poor we have always had with us, but the gap yawns wider every year. The new factor is that poor people are learning that not everyone is poor and that change is possible. Put TV in a ghetto, let a slum mother see ads for low-calorie dog foods and electric toothbrushes when her baby has had his ears chewed off by a rat, and you’ve got a revolution!
“Racism is not just a problem of the South, or of America, or of the white man. It is a worldwide system of sin. But God has told us to confess our own sins, not those of the rest of the world. I hold no brief for James Forman’s Black Manifesto. Yet if our reaction is simply to lash back at Forman, and if we do not seek to heal the gaping, aching, rubbed-raw wounds of racial strife, then we shall deserve ‘the fire next time.’
“What, you may ask, does this have to do with evangelism? Well, let me ask what kind of Gospel we are preaching when a church sends missionaries to convert Africans but suggests to the black American that he go to his own church with his own kind? Why should the black man listen to us talk about a home in heaven, when we refuse to make him at home in our neighborhood and our schools? What, I ask you, does this not have to do with evangelism?”
For many delegates, the high point of the congress was an eloquent, fifty-minute address by Tom Skinner, a 27-year-old black evangelist from New York. Skinner pleaded with evangelicals in the name of Christ and the Gospel to demonstrate their oneness with blacks. For many, he related more articulately and meaningfully than anyone else biblical truth to the black revolution. Delegates repeatedly interrupted his speech with applause and at the close gave him a standing ovation.
