I never went near a Playboy Club till I went to Lausanne II in Manila. I thought they had all been closed down because they had proved unprofitable. But our “land package,” as it was landed us at the hotel Playboy Club remains alive and kicking, and when we checked in, the desk clerk handed me complimentary passes to it. My strong-minded wife grabbed, tore up, and handed back the passes in silence. Good for her! Left to myself, I suppose I would have taken the passes, just because they were given me (I’m a wimp, I fear, that way), and trashed them privately; but Kit’s gesture was the appropriate one.
The management got us into the Playboy Club after all, by the simple expedient of serving our meals there. Someone must have said something, because after the first meal the bunny girl at reception vanished, and after two days the eating place itself was changed. Yet throughout the Congress, the German contingent held their morning prayer meeting in the Playboy Club, and one of them said gleefully that they were turning it into the Prayboy Club for the duration. I thought of Cornwall’s Billy Bray, who told a gang of yobbos that if they carried out their threat to nail him up in a beer barrel, he would shout “Glory to God!” through the bung-hole. I wish I had more of that victory-side spirit.
My vividest memory of the hotel, however, is of standing in a crowd with Kit, wearing an identification wristband and a blue label round my neck bearing my name, waiting to be numbered off to walk out of the foyer to the bus that would take us to the Convention Center. We were not heading for a gulag or concentration camp, but it felt like it.
We were actually in what England’s Church Times, reporting the congress, headlined as “Murder and Mayhem in Manila.” Murder? Yes. A union official had been killed on the premises, and the day after his funeral the staff went on strike. Glass was broken, there were punch-ups, the police fired shots, and thereafter we were picketed. The land-package people negotiated continued service for Lausanne folk, but we had to travel in couriered groups. We prayed. Did that make a difference? Well, none of us suffered violence, and surely that was part at least of God’s answer.
Our wristbands and labels were to get us through the tight security at the Convention Center, where an eye-catching notice told us to leave all our weapons at the door. Manila was full of weapons, carried by armed security guards, police, soldiers, and probably others; it is a wildish city, and we were advised not to walk out at night. Like Calcutta, Manila has a vast poverty problem, with thousands of people living off the huge municipal garbage dump. And it is the pedophile capital of the world, where children are sold into prostitution at a horrifically early age.
But Manila was not all horrors. Recent years have seen spectacular evangelical church growth there, largely Pentecostal in style; and alongside Lausanne II ran the “parallel congress,” a Filipino venture, as large as Lausanne itself, borrowing Lausanne speakers and concerned with evangelizing the Philippines. I found there an exuberance and expectancy that, frankly, I missed in the bland, laid-back, production-number sessions of Lausanne itself. Pentecostal electricity? Call it that if you like; I am not bothered about the label. But, oh boy, wasn’t it refreshing!
And then on Sunday, halfway through, the Roman Catholic Church, which claims 85 percent of Filipinos and was not, I suppose, willing to be upstaged, held an all-day Bible rally attended by tens of thousands, featuring testimonies to conversion (not called that, of course; renewal after postbaptismal lapsing is the Roman concept), and raising funds to buy Bibles for the destitute. Kit and I saw some of it on television. Who would have expected such a thing? Surely the Holy Spirit, as well as Satan, is busy in Manila.
So back we came to cool-cat, brittle, affluent, self-indulgent, unchurched Vancouver, full of thoughts, and none the worse for our adventure.
