Singapore is a swamp-to-riches story. For centuries the island at the foot of the Malay peninsula was little more than a mangrove swamp. Only Malay fishermen paid it much heed. In 1819 the legendary Sir Stanford Raffles of the British East India Company, impressed by the island’s harbor possibilities, built a trading post there. The island soon became a British colony, noted for its middle-man role in international trade. Immigrants poured in, mostly from southern China, to work in rapidly developing rubber and tin industries. Self rule came in 1959. A two-year experiment as a member state of the new nation of Malaysia ended in 1965 when leaders concluded that the island could make out better on its own.
Singapore today is a booming modern metropolis and Southeast Asia’s leading port, the fourth largest in the world. It is the queen city and garden spot of the Orient. The government is fairly clean, and so is the social exterior. The well-groomed downtown streets, lined by trees and scrubbed frequently by afternoon tropical showers, are not marred by the seamy bars and massage parlors that plague many other big cities. Pockets of poverty exist within the city republic’s 226 square miles, but the per capita income of its 2.3 million residents—75 per cent of them Chinese—is the largest in Southeast Asia. The city is also a beehive of Christian activity, and what is happening among Christians there may have important significance for all of Asia.
About half of the Chinese population (English and Hokkien Chinese are the main languages) is identified with traditional Chinese religion, including Buddhism. Ten per cent or so of the Chinese profess Christianity, but the majority of the other Chinese are not associated with any faith. Malaysians comprise 15 per cent of the population, and most are Muslims. Indians, whose forbears were imported as cheap labor by the British, account for 8 per cent of the population; about three-fourths are Hindus.
Chinese Protestants and Roman Catholics are rather evenly divided numerically. Anglican and Catholic missionaries arrived shortly after Raffles set up his trading post, the Plymouth Brethren came in 1856, and the Methodists began work in 1885. The Methodists, with about 15,000 members, are the largest of the Protestant bodies. The Anglicans have about 6,000 members and there are strong minorities of Presbyterians, Plymouth Brethren, and Pentecostals. About half of the congregations are English speaking.
A number of Christian leaders acknowledged in recent interviews that a “spiritual upsurge” began in the early 1970s, and they said its impact has been felt in most of the churches. They pointed to rapidly growing congregations, the spreading house-church phenomenon, the influx of large numbers of young people (more than half of all Singaporeans are under age 25), the burgeoning charismatic movement (especially among Catholics and Anglicans), the increasing interest in full-time Christian work on the part of young people, and the emergence of evangelical emphases in circles once considered theologically liberal. There are an estimated 100 Bible-study and prayer groups that meet in downtown offices, some before work, some after, but most during lunch hour. One lawyer, Hin Hiong Khoo, hosts a Tuesday lunch-hour session in a penthouse; between 200 and 300 persons attend. Twelve Christian bookstores are located in the city and their sales are spiralling.
It is not the first time the island has experienced a spiritual awakening. Many of the current pastors and church leaders were converted before World War II during a revival led by famed Chinese evangelist John Sung, according to physician-pharmacist Benjamin Chew, 71. Still carrying on an active medical practice, Chew is an example of the seemingly indefatigable and committed Christian leadership one repeatedly encounters in Singapore. He is president of the Youth for Christ and Keswick Conference boards of directors, chairman of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF) Council of Singapore, chairman of the official board at the 600-member Bethesda Katong Church (Plymouth Brethren), and he is active in the Christian Business Men’s Committee and the Gideons. He is also general chairman of the week-long Billy Graham crusade that will be held in a 60,000-seat stadium in early December. Chew is confident that the Graham rallies will attract capacity crowds. Evangelist Grady Wilson of the Graham team held a campaign in 1965 that was attended by capacity audiences of 3,500-plus at the National Theater. “That was a big crowd in those days,” says Chew. Nowadays the annual week-long Keswick conferences on deeper spiritual life attract that many to the theater location.
Fifty years ago, says Chew, there were few Christians and no missionaries. For the most part, church growth has been slow but steady over the years since then, he adds, with big boosts during the Sung and present-day awakening. Virtually all of the Chinese-speaking churches have remained evangelical throughout the years, he says. The Methodist churches, some with the reputation for liberalism, have become more evangelical over the past five years, he affirms. As proof, he points to young pastors who studied at liberal U.S. seminaries but who “are preaching the Gospel now.” Even the church’s top leadership, says Chew, “is on fire”—an assessment confirmed by several lay Methodists. The largest Protestant church in Singapore is Wesley Methodist with more than 1,000 members. Its pastor, Tony Chi, is an evangelical.
The switch to evangelical views among liberals, Chew believes, can be attributed in part to the evangelical orientation of the charismatic movement, which many have joined. “The movement has some negative aspects,” he says, “but there is a genuine core that is truly of the Holy Spirit.” For the most part, he comments, non-charismatics and charismatics are getting along fairly well with each other. One of the most interesting results of the charismatic influence, says Chew, can be seen among Roman Catholics. Many individuals now speak of a personal relationship with Christ that they never had before. Catholic priests and school principals regularly invite Protestant evangelical evangelists to speak in their churches and schools.
Anglican bishop Ban It Chiu is a frequent speaker at charismatic gatherings, and he leads a teaching session on Friday night at Saint Andrews cathedral. He reportedly became a charismatic during a period of spiritual frustration while attending the controversial 1973 “Salvation Today” conference in Bangkok, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. He was joined a short time later by canon James Wong, who had just returned from study at Fuller Seminary in California.
Wong, like many charismatics from non-Pentecostal backgrounds, does not believe that tongues is the necessary sign of Spirit baptism. He did not speak in tongues until months later, but he insists that the initial experience he had was a valid charismatic one: “The Holy Spirit touched my life.”
The Holy Spirit moved among many other Anglicans, says Wong, and one result has been ten new Anglican congregations in the past four years. Six are house churches with strong lay leadership and an average attendance of about fifty each. “People in this city are basically responsive and open to the Gospel,” affirms Wong, “but they are hesitant about entering a traditional church.” House churches, he indicates, provide a way around the problem. Not all house churches remain that way. Saint James Church, which began in a house in 1975, now has its own building and a congregation that numbers more than 200.
Charismatic activity among Anglicans is confined largely to the four English-speaking congregations; those in the twenty-one Chinese-language congregations tend to frown on the movement. The renewal, says Wong, has led to evangelistic fervor. It has also prompted new worship styles. Communion services are more informal and believer’s baptism by immersion is practiced. Many of the charismatic house congregations in Singapore gather in one place several times a year for a joint worship and celebration service. Thousands attended a conference on renewal in March.
Wong, a key figure today in worldwide evangelical leadership ranks, believes that the masses of Singaporeans “have a greater God consciousness than ever before,” and he believes that the city spiritually may be on the verge of something big.” Meanwhile, he has taken a leave of absence from parish duties at the 300-communicant Church of the Good Shepherd to minister to the various house groups and to head up coordination of an Asian Christian leadership conference. The conference will bring hundreds of pastors, missionaries, and lay leaders to Singapore in November from throughout the Orient. Evangelistic outreach strategy will be uppermost on their agenda. Most recently Wong has been busy with other Singapore Christian leaders in last month’s Congress on Evangelism for Malaysia and Singapore.
The charismatic movement has gained a wide following among business and professional people. Among the most prominent is Ewe Kheng Goh, 53, a third generation Christian who owns a photo supply firm. He is president of the local Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International chapter and chairman of the local Gideons branch, a rehabilitation ministry for ex-criminals, and the Chinese section of the Scripture Union organization. He is also an elder of the independent Church of Singapore and treasurer of the Graham crusade committee.
Of Plymouth Brethren background, Goh became a charismatic fourteen years ago under the preaching of a Pentecostal woman evangelist. Goh opened his home for meetings and invited the evangelist to preach. The Brethren, however, “did not want our converts,” says Goh with a chuckle, “so we started a house church for them.” Some 1,000 have been baptized since then, he says, and the house congregation has become the Church of Singapore, with from 450 to 500 at two services on Sunday mornings. It is led by ordained clergy.
Another turned-on businessman is Goh’s son-in-law, Jimmy Teo, 27. Teo is a financier who heads a brokerage firm known as the M. G. (for Mission Group) Corporation. Teo says he founded the company primarily to underwrite missionary projects. There are 3,000 islands south and east of Singapore in Indonesia, he says, and “people there are really open and responding to the Gospel.” So far, Teo has supported forty short-term missionaries working among the many poor people—including one million Chinese—on several nearby islands. His missionary teams have built two churches on the islands.
Teo also wants to demonstrate that Christian principles can be applied to business management. Too many Christian businessmen compromise those principles, he believes. Among those he’s most wary about, he says, are certain itinerant American missionaries and evangelists who have allegedly bilked him and other businessmen, including Goh, out of thousands of dollars.
Another businessman touched by the charismatic movement is Oon Theam Khoo, a management consultant and former university teacher with a Methodist background. Both he and his wife, a stockbroker with Anglican roots, were educated in American colleges. Their faith did not become real until a medical crisis occurred in the family, they say. Under the ministry of bishop Chiu they experienced renewal in 1976. They launched a house meeting where from 140 to 180 gather on Saturday nights and 30 to 60 on Wednesday nights for Bible-study. Among the regulars are several Catholic priests. Everyone is expected to attend his or her own church on Sundays. An average fifteen or so persons are baptized every two weeks, say the Khoos, who attend both Christ Methodist Church and the Church of Singapore.
The openness of the population to the Gospel was demonstrated graphically in the Here’s Life Singapore effort sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ a year ago. Spearheading it was Victor Koh, 28, who has been Campus Crusade’s Singapore national director since 1975. Koh and his staff of twenty-four spent one year preparing for the campaign. They trained 7,000 volunteer workers from 110 churches and raised about $100,000 locally. Koh says 25,000 persons were contacted individually as a result of the media phase of the campaign. Of these, 9,100—more than one-third—prayed to receive Christ, reports Koh, and more than 5,000 enrolled in Bible-study classes and other follow-up programs. Many are now members of churches.
Koh, who is chairman of English-speaking work at the 600-constituent Geylang Methodist Church, believes that Here’s Life did something for the entire Christian community. The effort was, he says, the greatest show of Christian unity in the history of Protestant work in Singapore. It was the first time that Chinese-speaking and English-speaking churches came together for cooperative ministry. A national prayer movement was launched, enlisting a record 8,000 in an around-the-clock prayer campaign. It was the first time that media were used so extensively in evangelism, and telephone outreach was discovered to be extremely effective in overcoming urban barriers, says Koh. Congregations and individuals have been sensitized to evangelistic endeavor as a result of Here’s Life, he adds. The number of churches have organized witness teams, some churches have had to add services to accommodate increased attendance, and some churches have spawned other churches. There are now a greater number of trained Christians, states Koh, and all of this should make planning of the Graham crusade easier.
Koh indicates that university students are especially responsive to Christian witness. He believes that one out of every four that are approached effectively will become a follower of Christ. Some 16,000 were approached with the Gospel on campuses last year, he says, and 4,000 of them professed faith in Christ.
In addition to Campus Crusade, the Navigators and Varsity Christian Fellowship (related to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship) are engaged in outreach on university campuses. Varsity has 300 members, with 600 in contact groups. Leaders say that the ratio of Christian students to the university population is higher than the ratio figures in the general population.
Youth for Christ, with a staff of twenty, works with public high school students in fifty YFC clubs. More than 1,000 professions of faith were registered last year, according to YFC records. Experienced journalists on YFC’s staff publish Impact, an impressive slick-paper magazine that is one of the best sources of Christian news on the island. The Scripture Union organization has a ministry to students at mission-operated schools.
Victor Koh says that he hopes Singapore will become increasingly a missionary-sending base. Missionaries have already gone from Singaporean churches to the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, and even Africa. Koh himself plans to become a missionary for a three-year term with Campus Crusade in the Philippines. Christian higher education will assume greater importance as more young people prepare for church-related locations. Among the Christian schools are:
• Trinity Theological College, supported by the mainline denominations. Its sixty-five or so students receive a theologically liberal education, but observers say that the influence of the charismatic movement on campus has tempered some positions.
• Singapore Bible College, a thirty-year-old independent evangelical school with 100 students. It has had to turn away applicants and a $450,000 program is underway to remedy the space problem.
• Far East Bible College, a Bible Presbyterian school with about two dozen students.
• Discipleship Training Center, an evangelical project with between one and two dozen students engaged in graduate-level study.
There are several other small schools, including a Seventh-day Adventist one. The Baptist and Pentecostal churches normally send their students to schools in neighboring Malaysia.
Several Singaporeans were among the 162 participants from fourteen countries who attended the Chinese World Missions Seminar in Baguio, the Philippines, in March. It was sponsored by the Hong Kong-based Chinese Coordination Center of World Evangelism, an offspring of the 1974 Lausanne evangelization congress. The conferees were reminded that more than 800 million Chinese reside in mainland China and that an estimated 38 million live elsewhere around the world. Of about 4,000 Chinese congregations, only 110 participate in the global missionary endeavor, a seminar leader noted. He also said that 403 active Chinese missionaries are at work in nine countries, but only twenty are engaged in cross-cultural ministry.
Deaths
C. ADRIAN HEATON, 63, former president of the American Baptist Seminary of the West; in Pacific Palisades, California, after a long illness.
THOMAS MACDONALD, 87, long-time missionary leader and emeritus general director of the Bible Christian Union mission agency; in Quarryville, Pennsylvania.
U.S. missiologist Ralph Winter almost brought the seminar participants out of their chairs when he declared: “The early church sent its best men, Paul and Barnabas, out to be missionaries. So should the Chinese church today. Do not think that only the young people should go. Chinese churches should [also] send their most seasoned leaders.”
It’s a sure thing that Singaporeans will be among those who answer the call.
The Growing Issue: Saints in Sodom?
The media spotlight will focus attention this month on the United Presbyterian homosexuality debate, but that does not mean that homosexuality is not just as live an issue in other denominations. As the Presbyterian General Assembly in San Diego decides whether to accept a task force report regarding ordination of avowed homosexuals, other religious groups are passing resolutions, publishing studies, issuing orders, and otherwise getting into the controversy.
Release of the United Presbyterian document in January (see February 10 issue, page 48) has stirred an avalanche of protests from that church’s members in official and unofficial gatherings (see March 10 issue, page 62). Sessions (local congregational boards) and presbyteries (district governing units) have turned out a variety of pronouncements which say, in effect, that regardless of what the San Diego meeting does, they will not ordain avowed, practicing homosexuals. Many of the documents will reach the denomination’s top governing body in San Diego as official communications.
The intensity of feeling on the subject was demonstrated last month when the United Presbyterian Twin Cities Area (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Presbytery spent four hours discussing it. The district body, which usually supports liberal causes, concluded the meeting by simply asking the general assembly to take more time before deciding the ordination question. A resolution opposing homosexual ordination was defeated by a vote of 98 to 111. The presbytery also tabled a motion which would have put it on record in opposition to removing some legal protection for homosexuals in a St. Paul city ordinance.
Ordination of a lesbian in the Episcopal Church two years ago started an uproar that continues despite the departure into the new Anglican Church of North America of many objectors. Homosexuals within the Episcopal Church have done their part to keep the controversy going. “I know several homosexual bishops,” author-priest Malcolm Boyd, himself an avowed homosexual, said late last year in a news conference announcing formation of the “Committee for Justice in the Episcopal Church.” The panel was established to put pressure on the bishops on the issue of women and homosexuals as priests. A New York vicar, Henry Sturtevant, said the committee had the support of a group of bishops who were unwilling at that point to be identified publicly. Boyd complained that since he announced his sexual orientation more than a year ago he has been “totally unemployable.”
One of the reasons cited for formation of the committee was the stand taken by the Episcopal House of Bishops at Port St. Lucie, Florida, late last year. The statement passed by that body declared that ordaining practicing homosexuals would “require the church’s sanction of such a life-style not only as acceptable but worthy of emulation.” The position was based on a report written by a theology committee headed by Bishop John H. Burt of Ohio. At a meeting of Burt’s diocese early this year the House of Bishops stand was reaffirmed, but the vote was less than an overwhelming reaffirmation. In the clergy section, only forty-two of the eighty priests approved the ban on homosexual ordination. The lay delegates approved it by a wider two-thirds margin.
Six hundred Southern Baptists attending a national “life style” seminar heard a University of Louisville professor call for decriminalization of homosexuality after saying that ordination of homosexuals was contrary to biblical teaching. Henlee L. Barnette drew applause from the Nashville audience when he stated, “It is incredible that the Southern Baptist Convention … would call for the denial of basic civil rights of a minority group on the basis of sexual orientation.” He was referring to a 1977 convention resolution that commended the campaign of Anita Bryant and others against a Miami ordinance that guaranteed certain rights to homosexuals. Barnette, professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Louisville medical school, said, “If churches really believe in the Christian and democratic way of life, they should work actively to decriminalize laws against homosexual behavior between consenting adults, to eliminate discriminatory laws in employment, housing, and public facilities.”
The Louisville professor called on churches to admit homosexuals as members “if they meet the criteria applied to any other prospective member and seek to follow the biblical norms for sexual expression.” Taking a harder line on ordination, he noted that a minister “is to exemplify the Christian ideal in all areas of life, including sexual behavior.” Thus, he contended, ordaining such a person violated clear biblical teaching. He said there is “no single passage in the Scripture that supports sex relations between consenting male adults,” and general condemnation of such acts is found in both the Old and New Testaments.
In the United Methodist Church the discussion has warmed up considerably since the denominational “gay” caucus and New York City’s Washington Square United Methodist Church sponsored an “educational conference” on homosexuality late last year. The highly publicized meeting called attention to the fact that the host pastor, Paul Abels, was an avowed homosexual and conducted “covenant” services to unite same-sex lovers. When his bishop, W. Ralph Ward, was asked about his conduct he responded that he would not use his appointive power to “go on witch hunts.” He noted that the congregation had asked for Abels to be returned but that an appointment elsewhere in the New York Methodist Conference for the minister was unlikely.
Bishop Edward G. Carroll of Boston was one of the conference speakers, appearing as “a deeply concerned person” but not “for the United Methodist Church,” said a United Methodist Communications report. He said some lesbians convinced him “their relational love was based on the Christian value of enhancing the other rather than the self.” On the question of ordination the bishop said, “I would want to make a decision on the basis of each individual person because of the multilithic definition of homosexuality.”
Another speaker was Charlotte Bunch, an associate at the Public Resource Center, Washington, and formerly president of both the Methodist Student Movement and the interdenominational University Christian Movement. “As an affirmed lesbian,” she said, “I want to be seen as capable of being a minister, not ministered to.” She charged the church with being one of the architects of homophobia (fear of homosexuals).
Even though the event at Washington Square church drew only 100 participants, it drew fire from across Methodism. Charles W. Keysor, founder of the “Good News” evangelical movement within the denomination, immediately demanded that four bishops be disciplined for their open “support” of homosexual activists in the church. In addition to Bishop Ward of New York and Bishop Carroll of Boston, the “Good News” leader singled out Bishop Melvin Wheat of Denver and Bishop James Armstrong of the Dakotas, who sent greetings to the Washington Square event. An editorial in the evangelical movement’s magazine warned that unless action is taken against the bishops a constitutional crisis will develop in Methodism.” The Council of Bishops was asked to “act decisively in order to protect their corporate and individual credibility before the church.”
Another issue that has stirred up some United Methodists is the discovery this year of a Gay Rights National Lobby desk in the Methodist Building on Washington’s Capitol Hill. The denomination’s Board of Church and Society is the landlord for the valuable office space, and a variety of organizations have leased quarters for lobbying activity there. The board did not lease directly to the homosexual lobby, the Texas-based United Methodist Reporter learned after a Texas pastor asked the paper about the group. The weekly, which publishes regional editions all over the nation, reported that the lobbying organization sub-leased from the homosexual Metropolitan Community Church. MCC has been in the building since 1975. Until this year, however, no one had publicly questioned the propriety of having the MCC there. When the Reporter asked the Board of Church and Society executive George Outen if MCC was not a national federation of homosexual congregations, he responded that he did not know but would confer with the agency’s officials to find out. The board is scheduled to review its spaceleasing policies at a meeting this month.
The ferment over the sexuality issue has also hit the Jewish community. There is a four-year-old synagogue in New York’s Greenwich Village that sometimes attracts more than 300 homosexuals to its services. The New York Times reported, “Now, it is part of New York life, involved in United Jewish Appeal fund-raising efforts, tree-plantings in Israel, and offering classes in Hebrew.” An article in Judaism, the scholarly quarterly of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, suggested this year that such congregations could be recognized if they do not restrict their leadership or membership to homosexuals.
Leaders of seven national Orthodox Jewish organizations were not as kind to the homosexual movement in a statement issued in February. “This moral rot has reached the point where the security and very existence of our republic is in peril,” they declared in a joint statement. “The Law of Sinai, which is the foundation of our civilization and of our legal system, must not be replaced by the law of Sodom and Gomorrah.” They condemned the homosexual rights movement as a “cancer [that] must be permanently removed from our midst.”
Roman Catholics have waded into the fray also, but most bishops in America have stood firm against the cries for official recognition and support of homosexuals as priests and teachers. In Australia, however, a prominent Jesuit educator has come up with the idea of a patron saint for homosexuals. In a booklet published late last year Desmond O’Connor suggested the adoption of St. Aelred of Rievaulx, a Twelfth Century English monk, who probably “deflowered his chastity” in “an intimate friendship” with Earl Henry, son of King David of Scotland. “Aelred,” wrote the Jesuit, “must have been one of the most loving and lovable men who ever lived.”
Love and Marriage
More than 1.5 million men and women lived together out of wedlock in 1977, according to a U.S. Census Bureau study released last month. The study shows that more than one-fourth of these persons were under age 25. The total figure represents an increase of 14 per cent over the 1976 findings and a whopping 131 per cent increase over the 1970 total.
The study also notes a “dramatic upsurge” in the divorce rate. There are now eighty-four divorced persons for every 1,000 who are married—a 79 per cent increase since 1970, says the report. (Divorce increased by 34 per cent between 1960 and 1970.) The study shows that there are 8.1 million persons who are divorced and have not remarried.
Other findings:
• Most of the recent increase in divorce has been among younger couples.
• Women stay divorced longer before remarriage, and have a lower incidence of remarriage.
• The number of women from age 20 through age 24 who have never married increased from 28 per cent in 1960 to 45 per cent last year. Among men, the proportion increased from 53 per cent to 64 per cent during the same period. “The postponement of marriage among young adults is one of the most notable trends regarding marriage and family living in recent years,” says the study.
• The median age of first marriage among men was 24 and for women 21.6, an increase for both sexes of one full year since the mid-1960s.
Forecast: Cloudy But Dry
Prohibition is still an issue in some parts of the nation. Voters in the Chicago suburban village of Winnetka turned out in record numbers last month to decide whether a ban on sale of liquor would be continued for another four years. In the forefront of those in favor of ending the ban were restaurant owners (and apparently many of their patrons), who pointed to the increased revenues for the village coffer from liquor taxes. Leading the opposition were members of Winnetka Bible Church. The church’s pastor, David S. Gotaas, had urged members to get involved. Some of the 700 members circulated among commuters at train stations and handed out pamphlets urging a “yes” vote for “quality of life.” Others quietly spread the word among neighbors and friends.
Local elections in Winnetka usually attract between 150 and 200 to the polls. This time, 2,332 turned out, and they voted to keep the village dry (but by only 186 votes).
In the past five years a number of neighboring communities have gone from dry to wet, including Evanston—home of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
KAREN MULLER
Congo Crackdown
The Marxist government of the People’s Republic of the Congo has banned more than thirty religious groups—including the Assemblies of God and the Seventh-day Adventist Church—and all religious youth organizations, according to a report published by the Ecumenical Press Service (EPS). In explaining its recent action, the Brazzaville government said that the groups were dissolved because their aims and activities did not agree with the general interests of the nation and its revolution. Buildings, furniture, and other property owned by the groups were confiscated, said the EPS report.
Seven denominations and organizations were permitted to continue their existence: the Roman Catholic Church, the Muslim Committee of the Congo, the Evangelical Church of the Congo (affiliated with the World Council of Churches), the Salvation Army, and three indigenous sects.
The remaining religious groups, however, are no longer permitted to teach religion to young people, EPS was told. The only recognized youth organization now is the Union of the Socialist Youth of the Congo—the youth wing of the nation’s sole political party.
Religion in Transit
West German police are engaged in an extensive search for members of the Children of God sect, according to European press reports. COG leaders have been accused of “inciting” young people to become involved in prostitution, robbery, blackmail, and pornography. Government investigators reportedly have identified some 120 hostel-type residences in West Germany where COG members practice procurement and prostitution.
Higher education regents of the Baptist General Conference have decided to close 172-student Vancouver Bible College over the objections of its president. Bob Anderson. A denominational official said that during the twenty-one years of Baptist General Conference ownership it produced only twenty-four graduates for the church’s Canadian ministry after an investment of $1.25 million. Currently the debt is $700,000.
The last remaining state law banning clergymen from holding public office, Tennessee’s, was declared unconstitutional last month by the Supreme Court. The test case arose from the election of Chattanooga minister Paul A. McDaniel to a state constitutional convention.
Sunday school attendance is off sharply in Canada. The Anglican Diocese of Toronto reported an enrollment drop of 68.6 percent from 1962 to 1976. In the same period the United Church of Canada Sunday school enrollment dropped 62.1 per cent.
Eden Publishing House, established in 1850 by a predecessor of the United Church of Christ, has been closed. Also going out of business was the Eden-Heidleberg Bookstore of St. Louis.
The Gutenberg Bible owned by General Theological Seminary, the first complete Gutenberg sold in more than fifty years, brought a record $2 million last month. Germany’s Stuttgart Library was the buyer.
The nation’s first woman divinity school dean, Sally Teselle of Vanderbilt, has resumed her maiden surname, McFague, after a divorce from Gene Teselle of the faculty. The first woman to be regularly ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in the United States, Jacqueline Means, has filed for divorce from her husband of twenty-five years, Dalton Means.
