Some call it an “underground” movement. Others describe it as the closest thing to New Testament Christianity this country has ever seen. But those involved—thousands of bearded, long-haired, rather unkempt former hippies—term it a “spiritual revolution.”
“These kids still look like hippies,” says the just-over-thirty youth minister of Hollywood (California) Presbyterian Church, Don Williams. “But the change on the inside is miraculous!”
“This ‘revolution’ is taking place almost completely outside the organized church,” Williams adds. “Christian kids today are out talking about Christ on the streets, in churches, at the beach.” He parallels the rise of Christianity with the fall of hippiedom: young people are disillusioned, he believes, when the hippies’ solutions don’t work, and they turn to Christ for workable answers.
Although their appearance raises eyebrows at many churches, some churches not only accept these young people but go out looking for them as well. One such church, First Baptist of Beverly Hills, brings Sunset Strip hippies in for Friday-night rock concerts and sends its pastor, Barry Wood, out to witness and counsel on the strip. Another is Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. This independent church has a thousand members, half of them teen-agers who, three times a week, pack the auditorium for youth services that often last past midnight.
Two years ago Calvary Chapel’s minister, Chuck Smith, realized that “kids who had been on drugs were looking for a way back.” “They had accepted Christ,” he says, “but there was no place to go.” The result was a Christian commune—the first of hundreds now dotting the West Coast—“closely related to the early Christian practice of believers’ living together and sharing what they have.” New residents in the communes begin with a two-week “free ride” in order to orient themselves to a new way of life. Then they must decide whether to get a job to help support the commune or to enter a witnessing ministry. A married couple usually is in charge of each house.
It’s not a bad way to live, claims a long-haired, bearded runaway from Boston. “I really dig commune living,” Jeff says. “Hippie communes fall apart because each person is doing his ‘own thing.’ But a Christian commune grows and thrives because we’re all bound together by Jesus.”
To reach yet another segment of the youth culture is the aim of Christ’s Patrol. From headquarters in an abandoned movie theater in Rosemead, California, members go out on the streets, to the beaches, and to local hangouts in order to meet bikers and members of outlaw motorcycle gangs on their own grounds.
“We feel like nobody really cares about the bikers,” says president Phil Smith, “but we love them.” “Blade,” as his friends call him, adds: “Bikers passed the church by because they couldn’t see anything real. But as violent as they were for the devil, they become violent with love through Christ and for him.”
Smith is a licensed minister who began to witness to bikers on the streets of England several years ago. He then carried the work around the United States. Since this ministry began five years ago in Cleveland, chapters have sprung up in twenty-one U. S. cities.
These independent ministries in the Los Angeles area are linked by the Hollywood Free Paper, founded six months ago and edited by Duane Pederson, 31. Every two weeks, 75,000 copies hit campuses, streets, beaches, and parks with an evangelistic message. For the churches, the paper provides information about what other Christians are doing. Farther north, in the San Francisco area, Right On serves a similar function.
If this evangelistic youth movement is “underground,” it is because no one can accurately estimate its effect; new converts and organizations appear daily. If it is a “revolution,” it is because of changes in the lives of young people. As one of them exclaimed: “Man, I was on drugs for two years! It was a nowhere trip. Then I met a guy in the park who told me about Jesus Christ and the permanent high he offered me. I accepted Christ that day, and I haven’t been the same since.”
Adds Williams about these revolutionized young people: “ ‘Clairol Christianity’—only God knowing for sure if you’re a Christian—is a thing of the past.”
RITA KLEIN
A ‘Satellite’ Abandoned
The Christian and Missionary Alliance, which planned to establish a “satellite seminary” adjacent to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago, will have to seek an alternative. The whole deal is off. CMA officials had been planning the cooperative venture with Trinity, operated by the Evangelical Free Church, for three years.
The Free Church Board of Education had adopted a resolution expressing itself as feeling favorable toward the proposal, and proceeding on that action the CMA purchased twenty acres of land for erection of buildings adjacent to the Trinity campus. CMA officials disclosed, however, that earlier this year they were notified that the Free Church Board of Education had decided to terminate the negotiations. Free Church spokesmen cited additional costs and administrative burdens and “internal problems” as key factors in their decision.
The news stunned the more than 1,000 delegates attending the seventy-third annual General Council of the CMA in Toronto last month. The CMA does not have a seminary of its own at the present time, and had counted on affiliation with Trinity.
Observers also had viewed the proposal as a healthful reversal of the trend toward educational fragmentation that has long characterized the U. S. evangelical scene.
Under the affiliation plan, CMA students would have taken some classes at Trinity and some at the newly established satellite campus under CMA professors.
Many in the CMA feel they are losing promising young men to other denominations because they have no seminary of their own. Prior to the Trinity negotiations, the CMA had for a time recognized the Graduate School of Theology at Wheaton College for its prospective ministers, and a special curriculum had been arranged for CMA students who matriculated there. The CMA terminated that arrangement several years ago.
Pregnancies By Permission
A Church of England clergyman has suggested that married couples be licensed by the state to have children according to the level of their intelligence. Said the Reverend Stanley Owen, rector of Elmdon-with-Bickenhill: “It may sound drastic, but the position is such that if drastic measures are not taken, the result will be absolute murder.” In Owen’s view a normal couple should be licensed to have two children, a couple graded as inferior should be limited to one, and an exceptional couple could have three or four. Such rigid state birth control would prevent starvation in the year 2,000, he says.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Manila Crusade: Bold New Program
A bold cooperative program of evangelism that will involve the entire Philippine Christian church during the next five years was unanimously approved last month. Planners of this aggressive thrust are dedicated Filipino churchmen who compose a national group called the National Fellowship for Philippine Evangelism (NAFE).
This group sponsored the eight-day All Philippines Congress on Evangelism May 12–20 atop the hills of Cainta, Rizal, on the outskirts of Manila. More than 300 delegates and observers from some fifty-six denominations and Christian organizations of the country attended. Most of the NAFE members were participants at the Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism held in Singapore in 1968; the rest attended the Berlin World Congress on Evangelism in 1966.
The Philippine congress served as a launching pad for the new evangelistic program and will be followed by a year of regional seminars on evangelism throughout the Philippines. These will be followed, in turn, by a two-year Evangelism-in-Depth program. The ultimate goal of the congress is to set up at least 10,000 evangelistic Bible study groups all over the country; these are expected to be the outgrowth of a national evangelistic crusade in Manila to be held after the in-depth program.
The venture, first of its kind in the Philippines, is considered to be the most carefully planned follow-up to any evangelism congress held in Asia.
During the year of preparation for the Philippine congress there were strong doubts among conservative evangelicals about the participation of churches from the conciliar and ecumenical groups. But these feelings dissipated under the ministry of Dr. Leon Morris of Australia, the main Bible-hour speaker. Conservative and liberal Philippine church leaders studied the Bible together for eight days under his leadership.
Issues on theology were for the first time brought into the open by the young and brilliant theologian from India, Dr. Saphir Philip Athyal. The dean of the Union Biblical Seminary in Yeotmal, Maharashtra, was given a standing ovation for his lectures on the theological dilutions that hinder evangelism. It may be too soon to conclude that the sharp theological cleavage between conservatives and liberals was finally healed, but at least the major differences were made clear.
The congress declaration, presented to the delegates in the final-day plenary session, was hailed as a document for the Philippine church now and in the years to come. Major points in the four-page declaration include a clear statement on evangelism as the primary task of the Church, a categorical definition of the evangel, an endorsement of the centrality of the Word of God, a comprehensive statement on social concern, and a bold declaration on national leadership. After about an hour of deliberation, the congress unanimously approved the declaration and read it in unison. Thunderous applause followed.
The delegates minced no words in confessing that they had come short of the Great Commission, that they had not given primacy to evangelism in their respective churches, and that they had not been responsive and alert to the challenge of evangelism at a time when the country is ready to respond. They admitted “we have pursued a divisive and fragmentary witness when we should have shown a more cooperative and corporate program of evangelism.”
A high point was the paragraph on national leadership: “We hereby declare … our responsibility to reach our own people with the message of Christ. We do not assert this as a right as if the task of the Church is the sole prerogative of the Filipino. We simply and boldly accept the challenge … because we are convinced that the time has come when we as nationals must lead our own people in the task which God has given to the Church in this our land.”
A note of gratitude to foreign missionaries read: “We will always be grateful to missionaries from other lands who have served in our country, and will continue to welcome them as fellow laborers in God’s vineyard.”
What seemed the capstone of the congress declaration was the full endorsement of the program proposed by the NAFE. The Philippine church now looks forward to five years of a corporate and cooperative program of evangelism; its representatives at the congress seemed convinced the effort could well be the most significant chapter in the church’s history.
NENE RAMIENTOS
Catholic Decline
For the first time this century, the Roman Catholic population of the United States decreased last year. As of January 1, there were 47,872,089 U. S. Catholics, down 1,149 from the previous year. Other decreases were in the number of converts, priests and seminarians, and Catholic school students. The number of bishops was up, as were over-all resident parishes, and marriages.
Personalia
Johnson C. Smith University, a small, predominantly black, Presbyterian-related college in Charlotte, North Carolina, will have a white, Roman Catholic dean of freshman studies next fall. Chancellor Leo McLaughlin of Fordham University will help devise an experimental curriculum there.
The newest member of the nude musical Oh! Calcutta is the daughter of Episcopal Bishop Robert W. Hatch of western Massachusetts. Dancing nude doesn’t bother 22-year-old Louise: “It’s very free and very nice. I just feel sorry for people who get uptight about it.”
Composer-arranger Duke Ellington received the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana, this month for his contributions to sacred music.
To preserve “the good Christian people of Georgia,” Governor Lester Maddox threatened to sue two newspapers whose editorial writers, he says, are “lying devils and dirty dogs.” The only publication containing truth these days, says the governor (who may in turn be sued by the papers), is the Bible.
New president of the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association, representing more than 835 missionaries, is Donald E. Hoke, president of Tokyo Christian College.
In Syracuse, New York, a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church won $100,000 in his suit against the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company. Norman R. Davis accused the firm of discrimination when it fired him for sharing his religious convictions with fellow employees.
“Art of Living,” the weekly radio series begun in 1936 by Norman Vincent Peale, will have as speakers this summer Dr. Charles L. Copenhaver, minister of the Reformed Church of Bronxville, New York, and Keith Miller, its first layman, the Episcopalian who wrote Taste of New Wine.
United Methodist Francis L. Garrett will become Navy chief of chaplains next month, succeeding Chaplain James W. Kelly. Garrett, who will gain the rank of rear admiral with the post, won the Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious service” in Viet Nam.
President C. A. Kirkendoll of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, has been elected one of nine bishops of the 400,000-member Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
Simpson Bible College will have a new president next month: Mark W. Lee, a Christian and Missionary Alliance minister … The dean of faculty of Westmont College for fifteen years, Frank L. Hieronymus, has resigned, tentatively to return to his former post of professor of history … A former Harvard professor will be Mennonite Goshen (Indiana) College’s tenth president. Dr. J. Lawrence Burkholder will assume the post in July, 1971.
Paul B. Henry, son of the founding editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, received his Ph.D. in political science at Duke University this month and will teach at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the fall.
Union Seminary in New York, an interdenominational Protestant school, and Woodstock College, the oldest Jesuit seminary in America, jointly appointed Father Raymond E. Brown a professor. Brown will assume the position, perhaps the first of its kind in the United States, in July, 1971.
They Say
Dr. Bob Jones, president of Bob Jones University, regarding the four students killed at Kent State University by National Guardsmen: “Those young people got exactly what they were entitled to. I’m all for the police shooting to kill when anyone is in mob violence attempting to destroy property and attack law enforcement officers. More power to them.”
Religion In Transit
Having won dancing privileges, coeds at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, asked permission to wear slacks. Their request denied, they inched up their skirts daily till officials relented. Now they’re dancing in slacks at the Baptist school.
Theological, linguistic, and musical comments were recently published in a “companion” to the 1964 edition of the United Methodist Hymnal. The ecumenical encyclopedia, which covers every period of church history and every form of hymn, was in preparation for eight years.
Eight weeks on the best-seller list (prepared by the New York Times Book Review) and selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club were some of the credits of the New English Bible two months after its publication.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled unconstitutional a proposal to pay teachers of secular subjects in parochial schools with state funds.
Baptized membership in the American Lutheran Church declined during 1969 for the first time in its ten-year history.
Deaths
PAUL W. LAPP, 39, professor of Old Testament and archaeology at Pittsburgh Seminary; former director of the American School for Oriental Research in Jerusalem; drowned near the island of Cyprus.
CLARENCE S. RODDY, 72, professor of homiletics and practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary for more than fifteen years; in Silverton, Oregon.
World Scene
“How much does a missionary cost? We want to buy one.” The question came from Congolese Christians who have not had missionary leadership since the nation won its independence. Doors are wide open, according to Berean Mission.
Haitian Christians reaped a two-to-one harvest from a three-day Lay Institute conducted last month by Campus Crusade for Christ International. Five hundred Haitians, armed with French versions of the Four Spiritual Laws, counted a thousand conversions.
A candidate for baptism into the sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses nearly landed instead in the stomach of a twelve-foot crocodile. Two hundred other candidates for immersion in a river near Lusaka, Zambia, released the crocodile’s captive—and then released the crocodile. “It is a creature of God,” said the local leader.
Divorced New Zealand Anglicans may now remarry in the church if they regret the failure of their first marriage and approach the second with “an avowed intention to abide by the lifelong intent” of their vows.
Baptized Christians compose about four-fifths of 1 per cent of Japan’s population, according to the Japan Christian Yearbook. The 803,615 Japanese Christians include members of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant groups.
Forty-one Congolese churches, formerly that country’s Protestant Council, recently united to form Church of Christ in the Congo.
