My Top 5 Books on the Liberal Protestant Imagination

This list represents my own perhaps quirky take on the Protestant mainline in America. My primary interest is not theological development (for that, see Gary Dorrien's series The Making of American Liberal Theology), nor institutional history (a recent exemplar is Margaret Lamberts Bendroth's A School of the Church), but the logic of the mainline—how thinkers within that tradition made decisions, and lived them out, and what they believed was at stake.

Pró•testn., an expression or declaration of objection, disapproval, or dissent, often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid.…The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Protest was Protestant word number one in 1967. And Viet Nam, more than anything else, was the target.By last month even President Johnson couldn’t worship in peace without a clergyman criticizing his policies. But then the Rev. Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis of Williamsburg, Virginia, was only getting equal time for soothing sermons on the war preached by such Johnsonians as George Davis of the National City Christian Church.From the National Council of Churches building in New York and other old- and new-left offices across the country came other critiques and plans for mass protest demonstrations and draft-card turn-ins. In a year of often bitter debate, the Defense Department provided comic relief by banning from military Sunday Schools a Presbyterian paper that printed a young girl’s anti-napalm poem.Despite foot troubles, Father James Groppi applied King march strategy to Milwaukee, dubbed the “Selma of the North” for the ecumenical protest against the city’s refusal to pass a fair-housing ordinance. Nationally, Negro churchmen struggled to salvage gains with whites and to recast “black power” into a positive, legitimate concept in the face of incitement by extremists and the worst rash of riots in American history. Working capital for Negro self-improvement was the answer, many churchmen thought. In Project Equality, the anti-Kodak campaign, and other efforts churchmen tried for social leverage through church wealth.For some, particularly those at the microphone at the NCC’s Church and Society Conference in riot-scarred Detroit, morally “justified” violence was the Christian answer to “systemic” repression in the society.Other issues: Many Protestants lobbied against Catholics to liberalize strict state abortion laws. The Amish said state laws requiring high-school attendance violated their religious freedom, and many threatened to move to Latin America. Protestants—even Baptists with college and hospital budgets to meet—joined Catholics in the federal-aid lines. But in one of the year’s most dramatic protests, nearly three-fourths of New York’s 4.7 million voters rejected a new state constitution that would have eased a flat ban on aid to church schools.As the year opened congregations faced a tight mortgage market; when it closed, missions suffered international financing woes as Britain devalued the pound sterling.Evangelicals in the Church of England issued a comprehensive manifesto on social problems, and even the Southern Baptist Convention showed signs of social life. In his most important encyclical, Pope Paul VI made a moderate, Bible—quoting appeal for justice and compassion in world economics.The biggest surprise of the year was the success of Israel’s six-day blitzkrieg after Arab goading. As soon as the world caught its breath, interfaith recriminations began rolling in, and prophetically minded Protestants cast a new look toward the Holy Land (see page 35).In theology, the word was mod́•ern (adj., of or pertaining to present and recent time …). The star was semi-Bishop James A. Pike, who won every possible victory from his embarrassed Episcopal colleagues. The bishops made heresy action near-impossible and may yet say there is no such thing as heresy. Then Pike topped them by revealing he’s now a spiritualist. North of the border, Ernest Harrison, who headed the Canadian Anglicans’ new curriculum, published a book denying God’s past, present, or future existence. Polls of NCC assembly delegates and 7,441 clergymen showed considerable doubt about traditional Christian beliefs. United Presbyterians in the U. S. ratified a liberalized confession, and New Zealand Presbyterians exonerated the dean of their only seminary, who questioned Bible authority, the Resurrection, and the miracles. In a reaction against similar views in Germany, conservatives rallied to the new “No Other Gospel” movement.As usual, the word for church affairs was ec•u•meń•i•cal (adj., of or pertaining to a movement, especially among Protestant groups since the 1800s, aimed at achieving universal Christian unity and church union through international interdenominational organizations that cooperate on matters of mutual concern …). But Rome was more and more in the picture, with some Anglicans and Protestants, maybe, hoping, perhaps, that the pope might be chairman of the board of Christendom someday. Catholic participation in the NCC and the American Bible Society increased. Biggest interchurch obstacles were Mary and marriage (mixed). Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras made a historic visit to see his friend Pope Paul.Intra-Protestant mergers proceeded, the Episcopal Church voted further work toward a mass U. S. union, American evangelicals moved toward more tangible unity, and the charismatic movement—now including some Roman Catholics—oozed through the Church.In internal matters, Catholics continued to out-ferment the Protestants, with liturgical experiments, exodus of married priests, debates on celibacy and birth control, the National Catholic Reporter’s printing of the secret birth-control report to the Pope, a firing and rehiring at Catholic University, and a restructuring of the Vatican Curia.E•vań•ge•lism (n., the proclamation of the Gospel) was bigger news than you might have expected. Indonesia’s post-Sukarno mass revivals put “Christian” nations to shame. Christians remained under pressure in many countries, but Billy Graham ventured his first sermons in a Communist land and conducted a crusade in Tokyo that netted nearly as many professions of faith as there were Christians living in that city, the world’s largest. Canada’s Expo 67 reflected the current theological cleavage in its two Christian pavilions. In the United States, evangelism was a prime topic at the U. S. conference of the World Council of Churches and the Faith and Order meeting, and the American Baptist Convention tried to figure out what it was.Bomb(n., slang, an absolute failure; fiasco) of the year was Spain’s new “religious liberty” law, which put Protestants in a worse position than ever. Close runners-up: That super-secret first world synod of Catholic bishops. The little-noted nor long-remembered 450th anniversary of the Reformation, plus silly Communist stunting of the festivities at Wittenberg. The Communists’ celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of “freedom” while they continued repression of Christian and Jewish minorities. Superficial Christian—Marxist dialogues. The lack of religious reflections in Svetlana Stalin’s book. And the petty United Nations debate on a religious freedom charter.PERSONALIARepublican presidential candidate George Romney provided Look with his 1955–1966 income-tax returns. The Michigan governor gave 17 per cent of his ,972,923.58 adjusted gross income to the Mormon church.Evangelist Billy Graham was hospitalized with pneumonia and had to miss annual meetings of his board in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.Francis J. Matthews, director of community relations for the Job Corps in Washington, D. C., resigned from the Roman Catholic priesthood and married his former diocesan secretary November 8. Last year he was fired as publicist for the St. Louis archdiocese.Anglican Primate Howard H. Clark charged that the Canadian government could double its foreign aid by eliminating “unnecessary expenditures” at home.Mrs. Hazel Jean Robinson won ,000 damages in an auto-crash lawsuit in the Ontario Supreme Court, including ,300 for the services of a Christian Science practitioner who prayed for her from Chicago by telephone.Hugh McCullum, 35, a secular newsman, will become the first layman to edit the Canadian Churchman in the Anglican paper’s ninety-six year history.Canada’s Supreme Court upheld Dutch—born metalworker Dirk Hoogendoorn’s religious refusal to pay union dues. The Christian Reformed layman, a member of the Christian Labor Association, says unions support “class struggle and socialism.”Spanish author Vicente Silio, who wrote that Jesus had brothers, was acquitted of charges of “scoffing at the Catholic religion.”Maharashi Mauessh Yogi, founder of India’s transcendental meditation cult, said he will “retire” next year. Mia Farrow, 22, estranged wife of Frank Sinatra, says she plans to visit the mystic for a month early next year.The Dutch government attached the salary of Baptist pastor P. B. Huizinga, who withheld 15 per cent of his income tax to protest military expenditures.The Danish Baptist weekly reports that a Baptist pastor in Burundi, W. D. Nyakamwe, has been jailed for an antigovernment statement in a letter the post office censored.Archbishop George Hakim, 59, new Melkite Patriarch of the 500,000 Arabic Byzantine Catholics, faces a problem, since the two traditional seats of the Antioch patriarchate are in Cairo and Damascus, both hotbeds of anti-Israel feeling. Hakim, born in Egypt of Lebanese parents, once was an Arab nationalist but is now a citizen of Israel.PROTESTANT PANORAMAThe Episcopal Church of Our Merciful Saviour, Louisville, Kentucky, is the first church to receive urban-renewal funds for building renovation, and an African Methodist church there hopes for a similar deal. The 3 per cent, ,000 loan is under the 1965 housing act.The Episcopal quarterly Church in Metropolis will now be sponsored also by United Presbyterians, Methodists, and the United Church of Christ.Next month some 100,000 United Presbyterians will receive the first edition of a four-page tabloid, The Presbyterian Layman, published by the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee. Layman Editor Howard Earl, formerly an editor of Science Digest, was not among the forty-two journalists who inquired about the job through a large “blind” ad in Editor and Publisher.The Methodist social-concerns board joined eight other groups in urging the U. S. Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of treating drunkenness as a crime.The Union, New Jersey, clergy association protested display of a nativity scene at the Municipal Building. Pending an Oregon Supreme Court ruling, the cross on a hill overlooking the city of Eugene is still glowing this Christmas.A survey shows forty-five cooperative groups among the major Lutheran denominations are formed or forming in local areas.The Church of the Nazarene gained 7,532 members in the United States and 12,938 overseas in the past year, for a world membership of 453,187. Per-capita giving increased to 0.13.The parish council of Berlin’s historic Kaiser Wilhelm Church refused to let seven campus groups continue to meet there because “some student chaplains pay more attention to politics than to their spiritual duties.” Bishop Kurt Scharf condemned the action.The Dutch Reformed Church voted to permit local churches to call women pastors.St. Mary’s Anglican Church of Woolwich, England, wants a license to sell alcohol at a bar in the crypt to attract the sophisticated under-21 crowd and teach them to “drink sensibly.”MISCELLANYThe entire Franciscan seminary in Santa Barbara, California, and the first two classes at San Francisco Theological Seminary (United Presbyterian) will relocate at Berkeley’s ecumenical Graduate Theological Union, which also encompasses Jews and Unitarians.Civic leaders in Jackson, Mississippi, offered ,000 for information on the November 21 bombing of the home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, who said, “I came within one foot of being dead.” Three days earlier local Methodist renewal-center director Robert Kochtitzky and guest John P. Adams, national Methodist social-concerns publicist, escaped serious injury when his home was bombed.New York City’s Protestant Council refused to place the Lutheran film The Antkeeper (November 24 issue, page 42) on local TV, partly because it makes God too judgmental and the three-storied universe too literal. Strangely, the incarnational analogy was written by Rolf Forsberg, whose Parable film has been sold and rented to wipe out the council’s World’s Fair debts.Portugal’s Cardinal Cerejeira, 79, a close friend of Premier Salazar since they were fellow seminary students together, urged the Church to stay out of politics and confine its work to spiritual matters. The sermon was considered an answer to Catholics who are critical of the regime on the basis of papal social encyclicals.The leader of France’s 550,000 Jews charged that President de Gaulle’s recent statement that Jews have always been “an elite people sure of itself and domineering” was anti-Semitic.Christians and Muslims appear to enjoy a thaw in relations with Yugoslavia’s Communist government, Religious News Service reports. Publicity about religious figures and events is increasing.Hungarian ministers in the United States are protesting the reported arrest of three churchmen in Hungary: the Rev. Balint Kovacs, and two laymen charged with re-establishing banned youth groups.The Russian Orthodox Church has permission to print the first complete edition of the Bible since the Bolshevik Revolution fifty years ago, Metropolitan Nikodim reported on his recent U. S. tour.

The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism William R. Hutchison

This award-winning intellectual history traces three emphases—adaptation to modern culture, the immanence of God in historical processes, and faith in progress—from the end of the Civil War through the 1930s. Hutchison is sympathetic to the tradition he chronicles, but not uncritical, and the book brims with insights.

Indonesians are turning to Christianity on a scale unprecedented in modern times anywhere in the world. The Indonesian Bible Society counts 400,000 converts since 1965. It’s a “revival that seems to add another Asian chapter to the Acts of the Apostles,” said W. Stanley Mooneyham after a tour of the archipelago.The conversions are particularly significant in view of Indonesia’s pagan past and its current place as the world’s fifth largest in population. Islam has been the dominant religious influence for centuries. There are more Muslims in Indonesia than in any other country.Recently, Muslims have taken serious note of the Christian surge. One Muslim leader addressed an open letter to the Indonesian president, General Suharto, threatening “holy war” if the mass movement to Christianity in Central and East Java continues. On October 1, anti-Christian riots in East Indonesia resulted in the sacking of at least twenty-five Christian churches in and around the city of Makassar, Sulawesi. Smaller incidents had occurred a few weeks earlier in North Sumatra and even in Djakarta, the capital.But Suharto has rejected demands of Muslims that Indonesian Christians be cut off from foreign help. For at least the time being, Indonesia will keep its doors open to missionaries. “Every faith is universal,” said Suharto, “and should be able to have international contacts.” He conceded a major point to the Muslims, however, in asking that the major faiths not proselyte from each other but instead turn their attention to the conversion of the heathen tribes.Suharto spoke to Muslim, Hindu, Roman Catholic, and Protestant leaders who had been called together November 30 to discuss how growing tensions might be relieved. He said he came to the meeting himself because he fears a national disaster (for earlier reports, see story following).On the huge island of Borneo there was violence of a different sort. Rampaging Dyak tribesmen descended upon resident Chinese, some of whom were Communists and Communist sympathizers, and drove about 40,000 from their homes. There has been an anti-Chinese campaign in Indonesia ever since 1965, when a Communist coup was averted at the last minute. The Chinese are often accused of economic exploitation. And dedicated Muslims resent their fondness for pork.Despite the turbulence, the conversions to Christianity continue, with no material or social gain attached. The Indonesian constitution refers to “belief in One Supreme God” and the “freedom to every resident to adhere to his respective religion and to perform his religious duties in conformity with that religion and faith.” A Muslim daily said the storming of the churches was provoked by a Christian teacher who said Muhammad was an adulterer.Mooneyham, an associate of evangelist Billy Graham, writes in the December issue of Decision that the revival “has reached flood-tide proportions.” He says the Indonesian Bible Society traces the start of it to a little boy who in 1964 returned from school for the holidays with a New Testament.“Religious faith seemed moribund in his Communist village,” Mooneyham said, “but every evening the boy would read the stories about Jesus to his brothers and sisters. Soon some adults joined the group. Friends and neighbors dropped in.”A preacher was brought from another town, and people were baptized. Before long twelve adjacent villages were asking for a preacher, and many more people were turning to Christianity.Then came the failure of the Communist plot, which created an ideological vacuum that Christianity began to fill. Bible shortages developed. Churchmen trying to compile statistics could not keep pace with developments.Evangelicals in other countries have watched the revival closely, but so far there have been no major crash programs to capitalize fully on the fresh Christian interest. Dutch Christians increased their missionary giving by 20 per cent, but Indonesian churches said more was needed. A 1968 drive will seek to double the budget to .5 million.Billy Graham is weighing an invitation to travel to Indonesia between meetings of his projected Australia-New Zealand crusade to address an Easter Sunday rally.As a direct effect of the revival, the Indonesian Missionary Fellowship has been formed, and before very long the country may be sending out its first Christian missionaries. Observers note that missionaries from Indonesia might have much greater success in other Muslim lands than white missionaries. Another possibility is Communist China, which is said to be taking in scores of Chinese from Indonesia every week. If Indonesia’s Chinese Christians volunteer, the Gospel may gain a major means of access.THE MUSLIM BACKLASHA Muslim backlash is sweeping across Indonesia after a wave of conversions to Christianity in that land of 160,000,000 people.Contrary to the hopes of some, no relief of tension accompanied approval of plans by General Suharto, acting president, for the Indonesian Council of Churches to hold its triennial conference in Makassar October 29-November 7. Prior to that, Muslims had damaged a number of church buildings and schools in the Makassar area. Bibles, hymnals, and other Christian literature were burned.The council meeting at Makassar drew 250 representatives from thirty-eight denominations, who agreed efforts must be redoubled to accommodate the needs of new converts and the requests of many others who wish to join churches. The former youth secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference, 34-year-old Soritua Nababan, was elected new general secretary of the national council. He is a member of Sumatra’s Huris Kristeen Batak denomination, and has studied theology in Germany.Christian leaders are confident that the goal of the Muslim zealots, namely an Islamic state, will not be realized, but they do fear that a comity system might be forced upon Christians. This might mean that in certain areas no more Christian churches could be started.Meanwhile, Indonesian Protestants are eager to evangelize while doors remain open and the Holy Spirit leads men to salvation as never before in the history of the country. Evangelist John Haggai of Atlanta returned this month from a two-week fact-finding mission to Indonesia, encouraged to conduct campaigns there in 1968. All the pastors, missionaries, and church officials he contacted urged him to come.Muslim power is nowhere near its reported numerical strength (90 per cent of the population, according to the Rev. Alex Rotti of the Djakarta Regional Council of Churches). “They say that Christians number maybe ten million and the rest are Muslims, but this is not true,” said Rotti, who is also a leader in the Dutch Reformed Church. “Fifty per cent of the people of Timor, for example, are animists.”A Christian government official said, “The Muslim group is now afraid because they see the tremendous increase of Christianity. They are looking for things that will put Christians in a bad light. For example, they are accusing the Christians of using all the gifts from Christians abroad to Christianize the country according to a set plan, a certain strategy made by the Christians.”“Now they are trying to accuse us that we are on the side of Israel,” he added. “Since our country has no diplomatic relations with Israel, this would put public opinion against the Christians.”The government official acknowledged that the greatest danger is that the Muslims might stop Christian evangelism entirely. He said, however, that “we have those on our side who are in the Nationalist Party, and they are fighting to keep our five basic principles, the first of which is belief in God. The definite act of President Suharto in stating that the council meeting had to proceed—the Muslims wanted it postponed or canceled—causes Muslims to feel that they lost.”Now that Muslims know the attitude of the government, the official continued, they are looking for a way around it. They are suggesting that an assembly be established in which all religious groups will come together to discuss the situation. “We are guessing,” he said, “that in that body they will make a demarcation line to point out what areas are Muslim and which are Christian.”GAINER BRYAN, JR.ROUGH DRAFT“You are here to do a solemn thing—to assert the claim of conscience above the claim of government, the claim of justice over the claim of order. In asserting these priorities you are in harmony with the biblical tradition.”With these words, the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus, pastor of a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Brooklyn, New York, opened an interfaith draft-resistance service. Eighty-six men marched up the center aisle to deposit their draft cards in a brass alms basin.Other “peace services” were held this month in churches throughout the nation. But simultaneous rumblings of a shift in war criticism were heard from churchmen in the nation’s capital and in San Francisco.A service scheduled for St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C.—which was to have included draft-card surrenders—was banned after official church pressure. Five men later turned in their cards at a religious service at Georgetown University’s Hall of Nations after six other churches turned down the anti-draft group, The Resistance.And in San Francisco, Episcopal Bishop Kilmer Myers refused the use of Grace Cathedral for a “turn in or burn in” draft card service. The sponsoring Northern California Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam later held the service on the steps of the Federal Building (in violation of the attorney general’s orders) as fifty-six clergymen stood by. Eighty-nine men plunked their cards into an offering plate belonging to the Howard Presbyterian Church and a chalice made by Vietnamese out of an army shell case.Said Father Peter Riga of St. Mary’s College regarding the resisters: “They stand afoul of the law, but we appeal to a higher law.…”Stanford’s Robert McAfee Brown said the cards were “symbols of coercion and force, suffering and killing … but in here [the chalice] the card becomes a message of peace.”Other “services of conscience” were held in Los Angeles, where military opponents dropped their draft cards into a chalice of human blood on the altar of the First Unitarian Church, and in New Haven, Connecticut, where 1,000 demonstrators marched from Yale’s Battell Chapel to the courthouse to surrender draft documents.Eleven young men left their cards in a collection plate at the Germantown Community United Presbyterian Church after giving anti-war speeches.Conservatives regarded Myers’s refusal as a concession to heavy contributors who have been inflamed over recurring controversies. Grace Cathedral reportedly is 0,000 in debt.In a curious twist, Neuhaus, speaking at a two-day symposium on “Who Speaks for the church?” in Washington, D. C.—not at the peace service in his church—said religious opposition to the war is frequently self-defeating because it focuses on policy decisions rather than moral principles.And at the same meeting, Paul Ramsey, who recently slapped the World Council of Churches for venturing beyond its competence on social issues, declared church endorsement of specific policies was wrong both in strategy and in principle.Some observers think remarks by Neuhaus at the symposium, and the barring of services in San Francisco and Washington that would have espoused breaking the law, are a sign that responsible liberals are now shifting from a particularist stance on policy decisions to a middle way.Myers, explaining his position, said the Church, as an institution, should not lend itself to a polarization of extremes of the right and left. It should instead encourage a “rhetoric of the center,” he said.Meanwhile, the Coordinating Council of the Methodist Church set February 1, 1968, as the suspension date for Concern, a denominational social-action magazine. The Board of Christian Social Concerns contends the controversial organ is devoted to a “secular mission” rather than promotion, as originally intended.In another clergy-draft conflict, the National Council of Churches and the American Civil Liberties Union are seeking a court test of the re-classification of Cornell University chaplains Father David Connor and the Rev. Paul Gibbons and of University Christian Movement field director Henry Bucher. All three were reclassified from 4-D to 1-A delinquent after they turned in their draft cards.An ACLU official said it entered the scene because of the “intimidating nature” of General Lewis Hershey’s draft-review directive. Hershey, incidentally, said nearly three-fourths of recently surrendered draft cards actually were business calling cards, drivers’ licenses or membership cards. “Many are protesters,” noted the draft director, “until it comes to the moment of truth.”RUSSELL CHANDLERKEY BRIDGE IITwelve churchmenGeorge A. Fallon, Leighton Ford, John F. Havlik, Carl F. H. Henry, Rufus Jones, David E. Kucharsky, Harold Lindsey, John A. Mackay, T. A. Raedeke, J. Sherrard Rice, Edward H. Rockey, Carl W. Tiller. met December 2 and 3 to carry forward the “Key Bridge” dialogue on possibilities of more tangible evangelical witness and unity in American life. They agreed on the general feasibility of a multi-faceted continental evangelistic drive cresting in 1973, subject to favorable conditions.The meeting, following up a September session that was a first for cooperative-minded evangelicals, was again held at a motel adjacent to Key Bridge in Arlington, Virginia.The latest conference produced the concept of a non-organizational “evangelical Christian coalition” to advance cooperative efforts. It also will seek to present a full understanding of what it means to be evangelical and relevant in the contemporary situation.No decisions were arrived at, but significant progress was reported in discussions, and an enlarged meeting was projected for March 9 and 10. No significant differences were encountered in the discussions.Participants, clergy and lay, came from nine major denominations, but as individuals and not as official representatives of their communions. They constituted a transdenominational dialogue that reached far beyond existing patterns of cooperation.OUTLER OUTSPOKENAlbert C. Outler, internationally respected Methodist theologian of Dallas, Texas, surprised Methodist Christian—education specialists last month when he declared that Methodism is in a state of malaise.Although he is noted for his exhortations for Christian unity, Outler revealed at a Dallas education meeting that the pending merger with the Evangelical United Brethren to form the United Methodist Church upset him.The outspoken theologian, who has been personally acquainted with ecumenical meetings since Edinburgh in 1937, told the group that only Eastern Orthodox churches are less inclined toward basic reforms than Methodists.“Meanwhile, there is in the Methodist Church visible disaffection and mutiny swelling to epidemic proportions, a crisis in vocational identity and professional commitment that has already shattered the esprit de corps of our once proud itinerant system,” he said.In part, the illness is due to the “peculiar and cherished Methodist constitution and policy—a policy which used to work so well but that now is no longer working as advertised,” he maintained. “There is a self-stultifying sullenness among the clergy, generated by the feeling that being ‘pastor in charge’ no longer means being ‘in Charge’ but rather being a high-class flunky of the hierarchy on the one hand and the official board on the other—a sort of residential chaplain.”Outler charged that the Methodist system of appointment of pastors degrades pastors to a status of employes and robs them of initiative.MARQUITA MOSSSHOOTING DOWN .006America’s 330,000 churches currently show a facility-utilization rate of about .006, and the figure is declining. This means the average church makes full use of its property and equipment about one hour for every 168 in the week. No other architectural structure is used so sparingly.Evangelicals are responding to the fact of this waste by trying to make church buildings more functional, and liberals by seeking to reduce their number. The fewer-buildings bloc, which is also ecumenically inclined, finds its Exhibit A in the planned city of Columbia, Maryland, now under construction in the rolling countryside midway between Baltimore and Washington, D. C.“We seem to agree that by investing less in bricks and mortar we will be able to spend more time and energy on mission and ministry,” says the Rev. Clarence Sinclair, who heads the Columbia Cooperative Ministry.With the help of the National and Maryland Councils of Churches, Sinclair’s group is working out plans for sharing ministers and facilities. Thirteen denominations have thus far entered into a “covenant” to work together in Columbia rather than establishing competing churches. The first church building won’t be ready before Easter, 1970, but a congregation has been meeting in a town hall since September.The Lutheran Church in America, Methodists, and United Presbyterians will share responsibility for ministerial leadership in the first village church. Village two will be American Baptist, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ; and village three, Church of the Brethren, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and Presbyterian, U. S. Roman Catholics will join the venture soon.The cooperative venture was initiated by developer James Rouse, an elder in Brown Memorial United Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, who has more recently been attending the innovative ecumenical Church of the Savior in Washington. Rouse asked the National Council to arrange for the planning. Spokesmen for Rouse say he will also provide for churches that do not subscribe to the ecumenical compact.GERMANY: THESES AND PROTESTS“Jesus Christ ordered his Church to proclaim the great acts of God without fear of men. It is a mistake to think that the task of the Church is to turn the local congregations into experimental laboratories for conflicting theological ideas.” With these words the German Confessional (“No Other Gospel”) Movement closed a new protest against the “false teachings of a theology governed by the spirit of the present age.”This protest document was released at a mass meeting of 8,000 persons late last month in Düsseldorf, where the movement was christened nearly two years ago at a meeting attended by 20,000.In seven theses, the movement draws attention to biblical truths that it says are being impaired. The basis of evangelical teaching is being undermined, asserts the document prepared by forty theologians, pastors, and laymen, including Professor Walter Künneth of Erlangen University.These men acknowledge faith in the work of the Holy Spirit through the testimony of the Bible, the deity of Christ, his substitutionary and atoning death, his bodily resurrection, his return to become universal Head and Judge, forgiveness of sins with the enabling gift of the Holy Spirit to obey God’s commandments, and the Church’s task of saving lost men by fearlessly testifying to God’s great acts.The theses also dispute: that scientific study alone enables men to understand the Bible as God’s word, without the grace of the Holy Spirit; that the New Testament apostles dressed up their message in mythical language; that praying to Christ is wrong; and that following the Crucified One is possible without a tie to the Resurrected One.The last protest reads: “Ecclesiastical preaching becomes unbelieving when the leading organs of the Church allow pastors to be ordained who haven’t accepted the Gospel in the sense of acknowledged confession, and who will say the Credo with the congregation but have at the same time inner reservations against it.”JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEENPHILIPPINES: COMMON BIBLELeaders of the Philippine Bible Society and the Roman Catholic Commission on Christian Unity are planning a common Bible translation. Joint efforts are now under way for a Bible in the Ilocano dialect, the language of the northern region of Luzon—largest Philippine island. Next May, a Bible translation institute will be held at the country’s summer capital of Baguio to prepare a Protestant-Catholic Bible for residents of the Tagalog area in central Luzon. A joint Scripture—distribution program through the PBS is also in the works.THE CONGRESS THAT ALMOST WASThe Third Evangelical Congress of Latin America, until recently slated to convene in São Paulo, Brazil, this month, has become “the congress that almost was.” It has been again postponed, now ostensibly for another year, while the ecumenically oriented workshops that were to precede it were scheduled for December 11–17 in Uruguay.From the beginning, the congress has been beset with problems. At the second congress (Lima, Peru, 1961) the conservative domination was overwhelming, and ecumenical organizers decided the time was not ripe for realizing a dream of long standing—the unification of the various national church councils and federations in a single Latin American Evangelical Confederation. So this objective was postponed until the next continental assembly.Responsibility for coordination and for promotion of unity, meanwhile, was assigned successively each year to a different national council. In 1966, convening the third continent-wide congress was to be the responsibility of the Evangelical Confederation of Brazil. But this plan for passing on the torch never got off the ground.At the same time that the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA) was dissolved in favor of the Latin American Department of the U. S. National Council of Churches, ecumenical leaders brought into existence several specialized agencies. They were ISAL (church and society), CELADEC (Christian education), and finally UNELAM (“Provisional Committee for Evangelical Unity in Latin America”). Chaired by leaders of weight and vision, these agencies (along with the older ones for university and youth work) have become the focal point of the ecumenical thrust in Latin America. UNELAM and its director, Dr. Emilio Castro, have been particularly active in the effort to promote the third congress.But this became, for some Latin Americans, precisely the problem. Hardline conservatives began to fear an “ecumenical” takeover, and the anticipated São Paulo congress was at first treated with great distrust. Then it was discovered that the Brazilian confederation had no intention of being manipulated by ecumenists, and in the congress planning committee the Brazilians teamed up with conservatives from other parts of South America to write the program and call the shots in terms satisfactory to any evangelical.The counter move was to schedule a series of consultations just prior to the congress under the sponsorship of UNELAM, ISAL, ULAJE, and CELADEC. There was good precedent for this—the program had been similarly structured six years ago in Peru. But because the alphabet of organizations now is longer and more impressive, the consultations may have seemed too risky for the conservatives to tolerate.DeathsCHARLES J. WATTERS, 40, Roman Catholic chaplin on a voluntary six-month extension of Viet Nam duty; hit by a bomb as he prayed with wounded men at Dak To.J. KENNETH PFOHL, 93, veteran leader of the Southern Province, Moravian Church in America; in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.KARL GRAESSER, 64, president of the northeast district of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; in Bronxville, New York.DALTON F. MCCLELLAND, 77, YMCA representative at the United Nations and a longtime worker in India; while attending a meeting in New York’s Interchurch Center.Consequently, the congress was postponed once again. The ecumenically oriented groups then withdrew their financial backing, which reportedly came from the NCC, and scheduled this month’s Uruguay workshops on such topics as church and society, social action, social service, community organization and development, migrant problems, youth strategy, and the role of women in church and society.On the other side of the fence, the hard-line conservatives met October 25 at Rancagua, Chile, to issue a declaration to Latin American evangelicals everywhere, deploring the fact that “many groups supported by diverse agencies which are not identified with the church … are trying to lead the people of God,” and stating that “we do not agree with their actions or their political-religious publications.” They called for the formation of a committee with “firm evangelical convictions” to study the possible structure of a “South American Evangelical Confederation.”What will come from the Rancagua manifesto remains to be seen. The suggestion was a planning committee meeting in March, 1968, followed by a South American Evangelical Conference in June of the same year. Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean were considered to be outside the pale of the self-appointed committee’s responsibility. The declaration was signed by eight conservative church leaders, several of them foreign missionaries.Writes Castro, “If we take advantage of [the postponement] to study the preparatory documents, the delegations can approach the dialogue better informed, and we shall demonstrate to our surprise that our positions are not so different the one from the other. I am convinced of what our Latin American Evangelical Church needs is direct communication—personal conversations, common Bible studies. We must not grow weary in our common calling to testify to the people of Latin America concerning the integral salvation which Christ offers and the unity which he creates among those who accept him as Lord and Saviour.”No one can be sure what will happen next as dedicated and sincere Christian men on both sides of the organizational fence seek to impose their own designs upon the Latin American evangelical community. And it is anybody’s guess as to when evangelicals may again meet in a continental congress.W. DAYTON ROBERTS

Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness Grant Wacker

Even if you have never heard of August H. Strong or considered historical consciousness a dilemma, this book will reward your reading. President of Rochester Theological Seminary from 1872 to 1912, Strong led that institution through profound changes, not all of which he applauded. He found himself constantly revising his widely used Systematic Theology text in an attempt to preserve timeless essentials of Christianity while biblical scholarship pressed toward historicism, the assumption that all human knowledge, including knowledge of God, is limited by historical context and therefore subject to change. Wacker ultimately judges Strong a tragic figure, unable to reconcile two incompatible worlds.

Indonesians are turning to Christianity on a scale unprecedented in modern times anywhere in the world. The Indonesian Bible Society counts 400,000 converts since 1965. It’s a “revival that seems to add another Asian chapter to the Acts of the Apostles,” said W. Stanley Mooneyham after a tour of the archipelago.The conversions are particularly significant in view of Indonesia’s pagan past and its current place as the world’s fifth largest in population. Islam has been the dominant religious influence for centuries. There are more Muslims in Indonesia than in any other country.Recently, Muslims have taken serious note of the Christian surge. One Muslim leader addressed an open letter to the Indonesian president, General Suharto, threatening “holy war” if the mass movement to Christianity in Central and East Java continues. On October 1, anti-Christian riots in East Indonesia resulted in the sacking of at least twenty-five Christian churches in and around the city of Makassar, Sulawesi. Smaller incidents had occurred a few weeks earlier in North Sumatra and even in Djakarta, the capital.But Suharto has rejected demands of Muslims that Indonesian Christians be cut off from foreign help. For at least the time being, Indonesia will keep its doors open to missionaries. “Every faith is universal,” said Suharto, “and should be able to have international contacts.” He conceded a major point to the Muslims, however, in asking that the major faiths not proselyte from each other but instead turn their attention to the conversion of the heathen tribes.Suharto spoke to Muslim, Hindu, Roman Catholic, and Protestant leaders who had been called together November 30 to discuss how growing tensions might be relieved. He said he came to the meeting himself because he fears a national disaster (for earlier reports, see story following).On the huge island of Borneo there was violence of a different sort. Rampaging Dyak tribesmen descended upon resident Chinese, some of whom were Communists and Communist sympathizers, and drove about 40,000 from their homes. There has been an anti-Chinese campaign in Indonesia ever since 1965, when a Communist coup was averted at the last minute. The Chinese are often accused of economic exploitation. And dedicated Muslims resent their fondness for pork.Despite the turbulence, the conversions to Christianity continue, with no material or social gain attached. The Indonesian constitution refers to “belief in One Supreme God” and the “freedom to every resident to adhere to his respective religion and to perform his religious duties in conformity with that religion and faith.” A Muslim daily said the storming of the churches was provoked by a Christian teacher who said Muhammad was an adulterer.Mooneyham, an associate of evangelist Billy Graham, writes in the December issue of Decision that the revival “has reached flood-tide proportions.” He says the Indonesian Bible Society traces the start of it to a little boy who in 1964 returned from school for the holidays with a New Testament.“Religious faith seemed moribund in his Communist village,” Mooneyham said, “but every evening the boy would read the stories about Jesus to his brothers and sisters. Soon some adults joined the group. Friends and neighbors dropped in.”A preacher was brought from another town, and people were baptized. Before long twelve adjacent villages were asking for a preacher, and many more people were turning to Christianity.Then came the failure of the Communist plot, which created an ideological vacuum that Christianity began to fill. Bible shortages developed. Churchmen trying to compile statistics could not keep pace with developments.Evangelicals in other countries have watched the revival closely, but so far there have been no major crash programs to capitalize fully on the fresh Christian interest. Dutch Christians increased their missionary giving by 20 per cent, but Indonesian churches said more was needed. A 1968 drive will seek to double the budget to .5 million.Billy Graham is weighing an invitation to travel to Indonesia between meetings of his projected Australia-New Zealand crusade to address an Easter Sunday rally.As a direct effect of the revival, the Indonesian Missionary Fellowship has been formed, and before very long the country may be sending out its first Christian missionaries. Observers note that missionaries from Indonesia might have much greater success in other Muslim lands than white missionaries. Another possibility is Communist China, which is said to be taking in scores of Chinese from Indonesia every week. If Indonesia’s Chinese Christians volunteer, the Gospel may gain a major means of access.THE MUSLIM BACKLASHA Muslim backlash is sweeping across Indonesia after a wave of conversions to Christianity in that land of 160,000,000 people.Contrary to the hopes of some, no relief of tension accompanied approval of plans by General Suharto, acting president, for the Indonesian Council of Churches to hold its triennial conference in Makassar October 29-November 7. Prior to that, Muslims had damaged a number of church buildings and schools in the Makassar area. Bibles, hymnals, and other Christian literature were burned.The council meeting at Makassar drew 250 representatives from thirty-eight denominations, who agreed efforts must be redoubled to accommodate the needs of new converts and the requests of many others who wish to join churches. The former youth secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference, 34-year-old Soritua Nababan, was elected new general secretary of the national council. He is a member of Sumatra’s Huris Kristeen Batak denomination, and has studied theology in Germany.Christian leaders are confident that the goal of the Muslim zealots, namely an Islamic state, will not be realized, but they do fear that a comity system might be forced upon Christians. This might mean that in certain areas no more Christian churches could be started.Meanwhile, Indonesian Protestants are eager to evangelize while doors remain open and the Holy Spirit leads men to salvation as never before in the history of the country. Evangelist John Haggai of Atlanta returned this month from a two-week fact-finding mission to Indonesia, encouraged to conduct campaigns there in 1968. All the pastors, missionaries, and church officials he contacted urged him to come.Muslim power is nowhere near its reported numerical strength (90 per cent of the population, according to the Rev. Alex Rotti of the Djakarta Regional Council of Churches). “They say that Christians number maybe ten million and the rest are Muslims, but this is not true,” said Rotti, who is also a leader in the Dutch Reformed Church. “Fifty per cent of the people of Timor, for example, are animists.”A Christian government official said, “The Muslim group is now afraid because they see the tremendous increase of Christianity. They are looking for things that will put Christians in a bad light. For example, they are accusing the Christians of using all the gifts from Christians abroad to Christianize the country according to a set plan, a certain strategy made by the Christians.”“Now they are trying to accuse us that we are on the side of Israel,” he added. “Since our country has no diplomatic relations with Israel, this would put public opinion against the Christians.”The government official acknowledged that the greatest danger is that the Muslims might stop Christian evangelism entirely. He said, however, that “we have those on our side who are in the Nationalist Party, and they are fighting to keep our five basic principles, the first of which is belief in God. The definite act of President Suharto in stating that the council meeting had to proceed—the Muslims wanted it postponed or canceled—causes Muslims to feel that they lost.”Now that Muslims know the attitude of the government, the official continued, they are looking for a way around it. They are suggesting that an assembly be established in which all religious groups will come together to discuss the situation. “We are guessing,” he said, “that in that body they will make a demarcation line to point out what areas are Muslim and which are Christian.”GAINER BRYAN, JR.ROUGH DRAFT“You are here to do a solemn thing—to assert the claim of conscience above the claim of government, the claim of justice over the claim of order. In asserting these priorities you are in harmony with the biblical tradition.”With these words, the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus, pastor of a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Brooklyn, New York, opened an interfaith draft-resistance service. Eighty-six men marched up the center aisle to deposit their draft cards in a brass alms basin.Other “peace services” were held this month in churches throughout the nation. But simultaneous rumblings of a shift in war criticism were heard from churchmen in the nation’s capital and in San Francisco.A service scheduled for St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C.—which was to have included draft-card surrenders—was banned after official church pressure. Five men later turned in their cards at a religious service at Georgetown University’s Hall of Nations after six other churches turned down the anti-draft group, The Resistance.And in San Francisco, Episcopal Bishop Kilmer Myers refused the use of Grace Cathedral for a “turn in or burn in” draft card service. The sponsoring Northern California Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam later held the service on the steps of the Federal Building (in violation of the attorney general’s orders) as fifty-six clergymen stood by. Eighty-nine men plunked their cards into an offering plate belonging to the Howard Presbyterian Church and a chalice made by Vietnamese out of an army shell case.Said Father Peter Riga of St. Mary’s College regarding the resisters: “They stand afoul of the law, but we appeal to a higher law.…”Stanford’s Robert McAfee Brown said the cards were “symbols of coercion and force, suffering and killing … but in here [the chalice] the card becomes a message of peace.”Other “services of conscience” were held in Los Angeles, where military opponents dropped their draft cards into a chalice of human blood on the altar of the First Unitarian Church, and in New Haven, Connecticut, where 1,000 demonstrators marched from Yale’s Battell Chapel to the courthouse to surrender draft documents.Eleven young men left their cards in a collection plate at the Germantown Community United Presbyterian Church after giving anti-war speeches.Conservatives regarded Myers’s refusal as a concession to heavy contributors who have been inflamed over recurring controversies. Grace Cathedral reportedly is 0,000 in debt.In a curious twist, Neuhaus, speaking at a two-day symposium on “Who Speaks for the church?” in Washington, D. C.—not at the peace service in his church—said religious opposition to the war is frequently self-defeating because it focuses on policy decisions rather than moral principles.And at the same meeting, Paul Ramsey, who recently slapped the World Council of Churches for venturing beyond its competence on social issues, declared church endorsement of specific policies was wrong both in strategy and in principle.Some observers think remarks by Neuhaus at the symposium, and the barring of services in San Francisco and Washington that would have espoused breaking the law, are a sign that responsible liberals are now shifting from a particularist stance on policy decisions to a middle way.Myers, explaining his position, said the Church, as an institution, should not lend itself to a polarization of extremes of the right and left. It should instead encourage a “rhetoric of the center,” he said.Meanwhile, the Coordinating Council of the Methodist Church set February 1, 1968, as the suspension date for Concern, a denominational social-action magazine. The Board of Christian Social Concerns contends the controversial organ is devoted to a “secular mission” rather than promotion, as originally intended.In another clergy-draft conflict, the National Council of Churches and the American Civil Liberties Union are seeking a court test of the re-classification of Cornell University chaplains Father David Connor and the Rev. Paul Gibbons and of University Christian Movement field director Henry Bucher. All three were reclassified from 4-D to 1-A delinquent after they turned in their draft cards.An ACLU official said it entered the scene because of the “intimidating nature” of General Lewis Hershey’s draft-review directive. Hershey, incidentally, said nearly three-fourths of recently surrendered draft cards actually were business calling cards, drivers’ licenses or membership cards. “Many are protesters,” noted the draft director, “until it comes to the moment of truth.”RUSSELL CHANDLERKEY BRIDGE IITwelve churchmenGeorge A. Fallon, Leighton Ford, John F. Havlik, Carl F. H. Henry, Rufus Jones, David E. Kucharsky, Harold Lindsey, John A. Mackay, T. A. Raedeke, J. Sherrard Rice, Edward H. Rockey, Carl W. Tiller. met December 2 and 3 to carry forward the “Key Bridge” dialogue on possibilities of more tangible evangelical witness and unity in American life. They agreed on the general feasibility of a multi-faceted continental evangelistic drive cresting in 1973, subject to favorable conditions.The meeting, following up a September session that was a first for cooperative-minded evangelicals, was again held at a motel adjacent to Key Bridge in Arlington, Virginia.The latest conference produced the concept of a non-organizational “evangelical Christian coalition” to advance cooperative efforts. It also will seek to present a full understanding of what it means to be evangelical and relevant in the contemporary situation.No decisions were arrived at, but significant progress was reported in discussions, and an enlarged meeting was projected for March 9 and 10. No significant differences were encountered in the discussions.Participants, clergy and lay, came from nine major denominations, but as individuals and not as official representatives of their communions. They constituted a transdenominational dialogue that reached far beyond existing patterns of cooperation.OUTLER OUTSPOKENAlbert C. Outler, internationally respected Methodist theologian of Dallas, Texas, surprised Methodist Christian—education specialists last month when he declared that Methodism is in a state of malaise.Although he is noted for his exhortations for Christian unity, Outler revealed at a Dallas education meeting that the pending merger with the Evangelical United Brethren to form the United Methodist Church upset him.The outspoken theologian, who has been personally acquainted with ecumenical meetings since Edinburgh in 1937, told the group that only Eastern Orthodox churches are less inclined toward basic reforms than Methodists.“Meanwhile, there is in the Methodist Church visible disaffection and mutiny swelling to epidemic proportions, a crisis in vocational identity and professional commitment that has already shattered the esprit de corps of our once proud itinerant system,” he said.In part, the illness is due to the “peculiar and cherished Methodist constitution and policy—a policy which used to work so well but that now is no longer working as advertised,” he maintained. “There is a self-stultifying sullenness among the clergy, generated by the feeling that being ‘pastor in charge’ no longer means being ‘in Charge’ but rather being a high-class flunky of the hierarchy on the one hand and the official board on the other—a sort of residential chaplain.”Outler charged that the Methodist system of appointment of pastors degrades pastors to a status of employes and robs them of initiative.MARQUITA MOSSSHOOTING DOWN .006America’s 330,000 churches currently show a facility-utilization rate of about .006, and the figure is declining. This means the average church makes full use of its property and equipment about one hour for every 168 in the week. No other architectural structure is used so sparingly.Evangelicals are responding to the fact of this waste by trying to make church buildings more functional, and liberals by seeking to reduce their number. The fewer-buildings bloc, which is also ecumenically inclined, finds its Exhibit A in the planned city of Columbia, Maryland, now under construction in the rolling countryside midway between Baltimore and Washington, D. C.“We seem to agree that by investing less in bricks and mortar we will be able to spend more time and energy on mission and ministry,” says the Rev. Clarence Sinclair, who heads the Columbia Cooperative Ministry.With the help of the National and Maryland Councils of Churches, Sinclair’s group is working out plans for sharing ministers and facilities. Thirteen denominations have thus far entered into a “covenant” to work together in Columbia rather than establishing competing churches. The first church building won’t be ready before Easter, 1970, but a congregation has been meeting in a town hall since September.The Lutheran Church in America, Methodists, and United Presbyterians will share responsibility for ministerial leadership in the first village church. Village two will be American Baptist, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ; and village three, Church of the Brethren, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and Presbyterian, U. S. Roman Catholics will join the venture soon.The cooperative venture was initiated by developer James Rouse, an elder in Brown Memorial United Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, who has more recently been attending the innovative ecumenical Church of the Savior in Washington. Rouse asked the National Council to arrange for the planning. Spokesmen for Rouse say he will also provide for churches that do not subscribe to the ecumenical compact.GERMANY: THESES AND PROTESTS“Jesus Christ ordered his Church to proclaim the great acts of God without fear of men. It is a mistake to think that the task of the Church is to turn the local congregations into experimental laboratories for conflicting theological ideas.” With these words the German Confessional (“No Other Gospel”) Movement closed a new protest against the “false teachings of a theology governed by the spirit of the present age.”This protest document was released at a mass meeting of 8,000 persons late last month in Düsseldorf, where the movement was christened nearly two years ago at a meeting attended by 20,000.In seven theses, the movement draws attention to biblical truths that it says are being impaired. The basis of evangelical teaching is being undermined, asserts the document prepared by forty theologians, pastors, and laymen, including Professor Walter Künneth of Erlangen University.These men acknowledge faith in the work of the Holy Spirit through the testimony of the Bible, the deity of Christ, his substitutionary and atoning death, his bodily resurrection, his return to become universal Head and Judge, forgiveness of sins with the enabling gift of the Holy Spirit to obey God’s commandments, and the Church’s task of saving lost men by fearlessly testifying to God’s great acts.The theses also dispute: that scientific study alone enables men to understand the Bible as God’s word, without the grace of the Holy Spirit; that the New Testament apostles dressed up their message in mythical language; that praying to Christ is wrong; and that following the Crucified One is possible without a tie to the Resurrected One.The last protest reads: “Ecclesiastical preaching becomes unbelieving when the leading organs of the Church allow pastors to be ordained who haven’t accepted the Gospel in the sense of acknowledged confession, and who will say the Credo with the congregation but have at the same time inner reservations against it.”JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEENPHILIPPINES: COMMON BIBLELeaders of the Philippine Bible Society and the Roman Catholic Commission on Christian Unity are planning a common Bible translation. Joint efforts are now under way for a Bible in the Ilocano dialect, the language of the northern region of Luzon—largest Philippine island. Next May, a Bible translation institute will be held at the country’s summer capital of Baguio to prepare a Protestant-Catholic Bible for residents of the Tagalog area in central Luzon. A joint Scripture—distribution program through the PBS is also in the works.THE CONGRESS THAT ALMOST WASThe Third Evangelical Congress of Latin America, until recently slated to convene in São Paulo, Brazil, this month, has become “the congress that almost was.” It has been again postponed, now ostensibly for another year, while the ecumenically oriented workshops that were to precede it were scheduled for December 11–17 in Uruguay.From the beginning, the congress has been beset with problems. At the second congress (Lima, Peru, 1961) the conservative domination was overwhelming, and ecumenical organizers decided the time was not ripe for realizing a dream of long standing—the unification of the various national church councils and federations in a single Latin American Evangelical Confederation. So this objective was postponed until the next continental assembly.Responsibility for coordination and for promotion of unity, meanwhile, was assigned successively each year to a different national council. In 1966, convening the third continent-wide congress was to be the responsibility of the Evangelical Confederation of Brazil. But this plan for passing on the torch never got off the ground.At the same time that the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA) was dissolved in favor of the Latin American Department of the U. S. National Council of Churches, ecumenical leaders brought into existence several specialized agencies. They were ISAL (church and society), CELADEC (Christian education), and finally UNELAM (“Provisional Committee for Evangelical Unity in Latin America”). Chaired by leaders of weight and vision, these agencies (along with the older ones for university and youth work) have become the focal point of the ecumenical thrust in Latin America. UNELAM and its director, Dr. Emilio Castro, have been particularly active in the effort to promote the third congress.But this became, for some Latin Americans, precisely the problem. Hardline conservatives began to fear an “ecumenical” takeover, and the anticipated São Paulo congress was at first treated with great distrust. Then it was discovered that the Brazilian confederation had no intention of being manipulated by ecumenists, and in the congress planning committee the Brazilians teamed up with conservatives from other parts of South America to write the program and call the shots in terms satisfactory to any evangelical.The counter move was to schedule a series of consultations just prior to the congress under the sponsorship of UNELAM, ISAL, ULAJE, and CELADEC. There was good precedent for this—the program had been similarly structured six years ago in Peru. But because the alphabet of organizations now is longer and more impressive, the consultations may have seemed too risky for the conservatives to tolerate.DeathsCHARLES J. WATTERS, 40, Roman Catholic chaplin on a voluntary six-month extension of Viet Nam duty; hit by a bomb as he prayed with wounded men at Dak To.J. KENNETH PFOHL, 93, veteran leader of the Southern Province, Moravian Church in America; in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.KARL GRAESSER, 64, president of the northeast district of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; in Bronxville, New York.DALTON F. MCCLELLAND, 77, YMCA representative at the United Nations and a longtime worker in India; while attending a meeting in New York’s Interchurch Center.Consequently, the congress was postponed once again. The ecumenically oriented groups then withdrew their financial backing, which reportedly came from the NCC, and scheduled this month’s Uruguay workshops on such topics as church and society, social action, social service, community organization and development, migrant problems, youth strategy, and the role of women in church and society.On the other side of the fence, the hard-line conservatives met October 25 at Rancagua, Chile, to issue a declaration to Latin American evangelicals everywhere, deploring the fact that “many groups supported by diverse agencies which are not identified with the church … are trying to lead the people of God,” and stating that “we do not agree with their actions or their political-religious publications.” They called for the formation of a committee with “firm evangelical convictions” to study the possible structure of a “South American Evangelical Confederation.”What will come from the Rancagua manifesto remains to be seen. The suggestion was a planning committee meeting in March, 1968, followed by a South American Evangelical Conference in June of the same year. Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean were considered to be outside the pale of the self-appointed committee’s responsibility. The declaration was signed by eight conservative church leaders, several of them foreign missionaries.Writes Castro, “If we take advantage of [the postponement] to study the preparatory documents, the delegations can approach the dialogue better informed, and we shall demonstrate to our surprise that our positions are not so different the one from the other. I am convinced of what our Latin American Evangelical Church needs is direct communication—personal conversations, common Bible studies. We must not grow weary in our common calling to testify to the people of Latin America concerning the integral salvation which Christ offers and the unity which he creates among those who accept him as Lord and Saviour.”No one can be sure what will happen next as dedicated and sincere Christian men on both sides of the organizational fence seek to impose their own designs upon the Latin American evangelical community. And it is anybody’s guess as to when evangelicals may again meet in a continental congress.W. DAYTON ROBERTS

New Faith for Old: An Autobiography Shailer Mathews

A leading biblical scholar at the center of liberal Protestant scholarship, the University of Chicago, Mathews was so intimately involved in the development of that tradition that, by his own account, his endeavor to write a book about it turned into his autobiography, published in 1936. The work is less a collection of personal memories than a collection of Thoughts on Important Subjects, with chapter titles like "Democratizing Religious Scholarship," "Church Unity Through Federation," and "Building a Moral Reserve for Citizenship." Still, the autobiographical framework softens these pronouncements and demonstrates the sometimes casual, even chummy, environment in which grand liberal projects germinated.

The Flight of Peter Fromm Martin Gardner

Better known for his books of logic puzzles, Gardner here offers a novel (disguised as non-fiction) about a Pentecostal boy from Oklahoma who loses both his faith and his sanity at the University of Chicago. The book is by turns astute, poignant, and hilarious.

Indonesians are turning to Christianity on a scale unprecedented in modern times anywhere in the world. The Indonesian Bible Society counts 400,000 converts since 1965. It’s a “revival that seems to add another Asian chapter to the Acts of the Apostles,” said W. Stanley Mooneyham after a tour of the archipelago.The conversions are particularly significant in view of Indonesia’s pagan past and its current place as the world’s fifth largest in population. Islam has been the dominant religious influence for centuries. There are more Muslims in Indonesia than in any other country.Recently, Muslims have taken serious note of the Christian surge. One Muslim leader addressed an open letter to the Indonesian president, General Suharto, threatening “holy war” if the mass movement to Christianity in Central and East Java continues. On October 1, anti-Christian riots in East Indonesia resulted in the sacking of at least twenty-five Christian churches in and around the city of Makassar, Sulawesi. Smaller incidents had occurred a few weeks earlier in North Sumatra and even in Djakarta, the capital.But Suharto has rejected demands of Muslims that Indonesian Christians be cut off from foreign help. For at least the time being, Indonesia will keep its doors open to missionaries. “Every faith is universal,” said Suharto, “and should be able to have international contacts.” He conceded a major point to the Muslims, however, in asking that the major faiths not proselyte from each other but instead turn their attention to the conversion of the heathen tribes.Suharto spoke to Muslim, Hindu, Roman Catholic, and Protestant leaders who had been called together November 30 to discuss how growing tensions might be relieved. He said he came to the meeting himself because he fears a national disaster (for earlier reports, see story following).On the huge island of Borneo there was violence of a different sort. Rampaging Dyak tribesmen descended upon resident Chinese, some of whom were Communists and Communist sympathizers, and drove about 40,000 from their homes. There has been an anti-Chinese campaign in Indonesia ever since 1965, when a Communist coup was averted at the last minute. The Chinese are often accused of economic exploitation. And dedicated Muslims resent their fondness for pork.Despite the turbulence, the conversions to Christianity continue, with no material or social gain attached. The Indonesian constitution refers to “belief in One Supreme God” and the “freedom to every resident to adhere to his respective religion and to perform his religious duties in conformity with that religion and faith.” A Muslim daily said the storming of the churches was provoked by a Christian teacher who said Muhammad was an adulterer.Mooneyham, an associate of evangelist Billy Graham, writes in the December issue of Decision that the revival “has reached flood-tide proportions.” He says the Indonesian Bible Society traces the start of it to a little boy who in 1964 returned from school for the holidays with a New Testament.“Religious faith seemed moribund in his Communist village,” Mooneyham said, “but every evening the boy would read the stories about Jesus to his brothers and sisters. Soon some adults joined the group. Friends and neighbors dropped in.”A preacher was brought from another town, and people were baptized. Before long twelve adjacent villages were asking for a preacher, and many more people were turning to Christianity.Then came the failure of the Communist plot, which created an ideological vacuum that Christianity began to fill. Bible shortages developed. Churchmen trying to compile statistics could not keep pace with developments.Evangelicals in other countries have watched the revival closely, but so far there have been no major crash programs to capitalize fully on the fresh Christian interest. Dutch Christians increased their missionary giving by 20 per cent, but Indonesian churches said more was needed. A 1968 drive will seek to double the budget to .5 million.Billy Graham is weighing an invitation to travel to Indonesia between meetings of his projected Australia-New Zealand crusade to address an Easter Sunday rally.As a direct effect of the revival, the Indonesian Missionary Fellowship has been formed, and before very long the country may be sending out its first Christian missionaries. Observers note that missionaries from Indonesia might have much greater success in other Muslim lands than white missionaries. Another possibility is Communist China, which is said to be taking in scores of Chinese from Indonesia every week. If Indonesia’s Chinese Christians volunteer, the Gospel may gain a major means of access.THE MUSLIM BACKLASHA Muslim backlash is sweeping across Indonesia after a wave of conversions to Christianity in that land of 160,000,000 people.Contrary to the hopes of some, no relief of tension accompanied approval of plans by General Suharto, acting president, for the Indonesian Council of Churches to hold its triennial conference in Makassar October 29-November 7. Prior to that, Muslims had damaged a number of church buildings and schools in the Makassar area. Bibles, hymnals, and other Christian literature were burned.The council meeting at Makassar drew 250 representatives from thirty-eight denominations, who agreed efforts must be redoubled to accommodate the needs of new converts and the requests of many others who wish to join churches. The former youth secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference, 34-year-old Soritua Nababan, was elected new general secretary of the national council. He is a member of Sumatra’s Huris Kristeen Batak denomination, and has studied theology in Germany.Christian leaders are confident that the goal of the Muslim zealots, namely an Islamic state, will not be realized, but they do fear that a comity system might be forced upon Christians. This might mean that in certain areas no more Christian churches could be started.Meanwhile, Indonesian Protestants are eager to evangelize while doors remain open and the Holy Spirit leads men to salvation as never before in the history of the country. Evangelist John Haggai of Atlanta returned this month from a two-week fact-finding mission to Indonesia, encouraged to conduct campaigns there in 1968. All the pastors, missionaries, and church officials he contacted urged him to come.Muslim power is nowhere near its reported numerical strength (90 per cent of the population, according to the Rev. Alex Rotti of the Djakarta Regional Council of Churches). “They say that Christians number maybe ten million and the rest are Muslims, but this is not true,” said Rotti, who is also a leader in the Dutch Reformed Church. “Fifty per cent of the people of Timor, for example, are animists.”A Christian government official said, “The Muslim group is now afraid because they see the tremendous increase of Christianity. They are looking for things that will put Christians in a bad light. For example, they are accusing the Christians of using all the gifts from Christians abroad to Christianize the country according to a set plan, a certain strategy made by the Christians.”“Now they are trying to accuse us that we are on the side of Israel,” he added. “Since our country has no diplomatic relations with Israel, this would put public opinion against the Christians.”The government official acknowledged that the greatest danger is that the Muslims might stop Christian evangelism entirely. He said, however, that “we have those on our side who are in the Nationalist Party, and they are fighting to keep our five basic principles, the first of which is belief in God. The definite act of President Suharto in stating that the council meeting had to proceed—the Muslims wanted it postponed or canceled—causes Muslims to feel that they lost.”Now that Muslims know the attitude of the government, the official continued, they are looking for a way around it. They are suggesting that an assembly be established in which all religious groups will come together to discuss the situation. “We are guessing,” he said, “that in that body they will make a demarcation line to point out what areas are Muslim and which are Christian.”GAINER BRYAN, JR.ROUGH DRAFT“You are here to do a solemn thing—to assert the claim of conscience above the claim of government, the claim of justice over the claim of order. In asserting these priorities you are in harmony with the biblical tradition.”With these words, the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus, pastor of a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Brooklyn, New York, opened an interfaith draft-resistance service. Eighty-six men marched up the center aisle to deposit their draft cards in a brass alms basin.Other “peace services” were held this month in churches throughout the nation. But simultaneous rumblings of a shift in war criticism were heard from churchmen in the nation’s capital and in San Francisco.A service scheduled for St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C.—which was to have included draft-card surrenders—was banned after official church pressure. Five men later turned in their cards at a religious service at Georgetown University’s Hall of Nations after six other churches turned down the anti-draft group, The Resistance.And in San Francisco, Episcopal Bishop Kilmer Myers refused the use of Grace Cathedral for a “turn in or burn in” draft card service. The sponsoring Northern California Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam later held the service on the steps of the Federal Building (in violation of the attorney general’s orders) as fifty-six clergymen stood by. Eighty-nine men plunked their cards into an offering plate belonging to the Howard Presbyterian Church and a chalice made by Vietnamese out of an army shell case.Said Father Peter Riga of St. Mary’s College regarding the resisters: “They stand afoul of the law, but we appeal to a higher law.…”Stanford’s Robert McAfee Brown said the cards were “symbols of coercion and force, suffering and killing … but in here [the chalice] the card becomes a message of peace.”Other “services of conscience” were held in Los Angeles, where military opponents dropped their draft cards into a chalice of human blood on the altar of the First Unitarian Church, and in New Haven, Connecticut, where 1,000 demonstrators marched from Yale’s Battell Chapel to the courthouse to surrender draft documents.Eleven young men left their cards in a collection plate at the Germantown Community United Presbyterian Church after giving anti-war speeches.Conservatives regarded Myers’s refusal as a concession to heavy contributors who have been inflamed over recurring controversies. Grace Cathedral reportedly is 0,000 in debt.In a curious twist, Neuhaus, speaking at a two-day symposium on “Who Speaks for the church?” in Washington, D. C.—not at the peace service in his church—said religious opposition to the war is frequently self-defeating because it focuses on policy decisions rather than moral principles.And at the same meeting, Paul Ramsey, who recently slapped the World Council of Churches for venturing beyond its competence on social issues, declared church endorsement of specific policies was wrong both in strategy and in principle.Some observers think remarks by Neuhaus at the symposium, and the barring of services in San Francisco and Washington that would have espoused breaking the law, are a sign that responsible liberals are now shifting from a particularist stance on policy decisions to a middle way.Myers, explaining his position, said the Church, as an institution, should not lend itself to a polarization of extremes of the right and left. It should instead encourage a “rhetoric of the center,” he said.Meanwhile, the Coordinating Council of the Methodist Church set February 1, 1968, as the suspension date for Concern, a denominational social-action magazine. The Board of Christian Social Concerns contends the controversial organ is devoted to a “secular mission” rather than promotion, as originally intended.In another clergy-draft conflict, the National Council of Churches and the American Civil Liberties Union are seeking a court test of the re-classification of Cornell University chaplains Father David Connor and the Rev. Paul Gibbons and of University Christian Movement field director Henry Bucher. All three were reclassified from 4-D to 1-A delinquent after they turned in their draft cards.An ACLU official said it entered the scene because of the “intimidating nature” of General Lewis Hershey’s draft-review directive. Hershey, incidentally, said nearly three-fourths of recently surrendered draft cards actually were business calling cards, drivers’ licenses or membership cards. “Many are protesters,” noted the draft director, “until it comes to the moment of truth.”RUSSELL CHANDLERKEY BRIDGE IITwelve churchmenGeorge A. Fallon, Leighton Ford, John F. Havlik, Carl F. H. Henry, Rufus Jones, David E. Kucharsky, Harold Lindsey, John A. Mackay, T. A. Raedeke, J. Sherrard Rice, Edward H. Rockey, Carl W. Tiller. met December 2 and 3 to carry forward the “Key Bridge” dialogue on possibilities of more tangible evangelical witness and unity in American life. They agreed on the general feasibility of a multi-faceted continental evangelistic drive cresting in 1973, subject to favorable conditions.The meeting, following up a September session that was a first for cooperative-minded evangelicals, was again held at a motel adjacent to Key Bridge in Arlington, Virginia.The latest conference produced the concept of a non-organizational “evangelical Christian coalition” to advance cooperative efforts. It also will seek to present a full understanding of what it means to be evangelical and relevant in the contemporary situation.No decisions were arrived at, but significant progress was reported in discussions, and an enlarged meeting was projected for March 9 and 10. No significant differences were encountered in the discussions.Participants, clergy and lay, came from nine major denominations, but as individuals and not as official representatives of their communions. They constituted a transdenominational dialogue that reached far beyond existing patterns of cooperation.OUTLER OUTSPOKENAlbert C. Outler, internationally respected Methodist theologian of Dallas, Texas, surprised Methodist Christian—education specialists last month when he declared that Methodism is in a state of malaise.Although he is noted for his exhortations for Christian unity, Outler revealed at a Dallas education meeting that the pending merger with the Evangelical United Brethren to form the United Methodist Church upset him.The outspoken theologian, who has been personally acquainted with ecumenical meetings since Edinburgh in 1937, told the group that only Eastern Orthodox churches are less inclined toward basic reforms than Methodists.“Meanwhile, there is in the Methodist Church visible disaffection and mutiny swelling to epidemic proportions, a crisis in vocational identity and professional commitment that has already shattered the esprit de corps of our once proud itinerant system,” he said.In part, the illness is due to the “peculiar and cherished Methodist constitution and policy—a policy which used to work so well but that now is no longer working as advertised,” he maintained. “There is a self-stultifying sullenness among the clergy, generated by the feeling that being ‘pastor in charge’ no longer means being ‘in Charge’ but rather being a high-class flunky of the hierarchy on the one hand and the official board on the other—a sort of residential chaplain.”Outler charged that the Methodist system of appointment of pastors degrades pastors to a status of employes and robs them of initiative.MARQUITA MOSSSHOOTING DOWN .006America’s 330,000 churches currently show a facility-utilization rate of about .006, and the figure is declining. This means the average church makes full use of its property and equipment about one hour for every 168 in the week. No other architectural structure is used so sparingly.Evangelicals are responding to the fact of this waste by trying to make church buildings more functional, and liberals by seeking to reduce their number. The fewer-buildings bloc, which is also ecumenically inclined, finds its Exhibit A in the planned city of Columbia, Maryland, now under construction in the rolling countryside midway between Baltimore and Washington, D. C.“We seem to agree that by investing less in bricks and mortar we will be able to spend more time and energy on mission and ministry,” says the Rev. Clarence Sinclair, who heads the Columbia Cooperative Ministry.With the help of the National and Maryland Councils of Churches, Sinclair’s group is working out plans for sharing ministers and facilities. Thirteen denominations have thus far entered into a “covenant” to work together in Columbia rather than establishing competing churches. The first church building won’t be ready before Easter, 1970, but a congregation has been meeting in a town hall since September.The Lutheran Church in America, Methodists, and United Presbyterians will share responsibility for ministerial leadership in the first village church. Village two will be American Baptist, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ; and village three, Church of the Brethren, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and Presbyterian, U. S. Roman Catholics will join the venture soon.The cooperative venture was initiated by developer James Rouse, an elder in Brown Memorial United Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, who has more recently been attending the innovative ecumenical Church of the Savior in Washington. Rouse asked the National Council to arrange for the planning. Spokesmen for Rouse say he will also provide for churches that do not subscribe to the ecumenical compact.GERMANY: THESES AND PROTESTS“Jesus Christ ordered his Church to proclaim the great acts of God without fear of men. It is a mistake to think that the task of the Church is to turn the local congregations into experimental laboratories for conflicting theological ideas.” With these words the German Confessional (“No Other Gospel”) Movement closed a new protest against the “false teachings of a theology governed by the spirit of the present age.”This protest document was released at a mass meeting of 8,000 persons late last month in Düsseldorf, where the movement was christened nearly two years ago at a meeting attended by 20,000.In seven theses, the movement draws attention to biblical truths that it says are being impaired. The basis of evangelical teaching is being undermined, asserts the document prepared by forty theologians, pastors, and laymen, including Professor Walter Künneth of Erlangen University.These men acknowledge faith in the work of the Holy Spirit through the testimony of the Bible, the deity of Christ, his substitutionary and atoning death, his bodily resurrection, his return to become universal Head and Judge, forgiveness of sins with the enabling gift of the Holy Spirit to obey God’s commandments, and the Church’s task of saving lost men by fearlessly testifying to God’s great acts.The theses also dispute: that scientific study alone enables men to understand the Bible as God’s word, without the grace of the Holy Spirit; that the New Testament apostles dressed up their message in mythical language; that praying to Christ is wrong; and that following the Crucified One is possible without a tie to the Resurrected One.The last protest reads: “Ecclesiastical preaching becomes unbelieving when the leading organs of the Church allow pastors to be ordained who haven’t accepted the Gospel in the sense of acknowledged confession, and who will say the Credo with the congregation but have at the same time inner reservations against it.”JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEENPHILIPPINES: COMMON BIBLELeaders of the Philippine Bible Society and the Roman Catholic Commission on Christian Unity are planning a common Bible translation. Joint efforts are now under way for a Bible in the Ilocano dialect, the language of the northern region of Luzon—largest Philippine island. Next May, a Bible translation institute will be held at the country’s summer capital of Baguio to prepare a Protestant-Catholic Bible for residents of the Tagalog area in central Luzon. A joint Scripture—distribution program through the PBS is also in the works.THE CONGRESS THAT ALMOST WASThe Third Evangelical Congress of Latin America, until recently slated to convene in São Paulo, Brazil, this month, has become “the congress that almost was.” It has been again postponed, now ostensibly for another year, while the ecumenically oriented workshops that were to precede it were scheduled for December 11–17 in Uruguay.From the beginning, the congress has been beset with problems. At the second congress (Lima, Peru, 1961) the conservative domination was overwhelming, and ecumenical organizers decided the time was not ripe for realizing a dream of long standing—the unification of the various national church councils and federations in a single Latin American Evangelical Confederation. So this objective was postponed until the next continental assembly.Responsibility for coordination and for promotion of unity, meanwhile, was assigned successively each year to a different national council. In 1966, convening the third continent-wide congress was to be the responsibility of the Evangelical Confederation of Brazil. But this plan for passing on the torch never got off the ground.At the same time that the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA) was dissolved in favor of the Latin American Department of the U. S. National Council of Churches, ecumenical leaders brought into existence several specialized agencies. They were ISAL (church and society), CELADEC (Christian education), and finally UNELAM (“Provisional Committee for Evangelical Unity in Latin America”). Chaired by leaders of weight and vision, these agencies (along with the older ones for university and youth work) have become the focal point of the ecumenical thrust in Latin America. UNELAM and its director, Dr. Emilio Castro, have been particularly active in the effort to promote the third congress.But this became, for some Latin Americans, precisely the problem. Hardline conservatives began to fear an “ecumenical” takeover, and the anticipated São Paulo congress was at first treated with great distrust. Then it was discovered that the Brazilian confederation had no intention of being manipulated by ecumenists, and in the congress planning committee the Brazilians teamed up with conservatives from other parts of South America to write the program and call the shots in terms satisfactory to any evangelical.The counter move was to schedule a series of consultations just prior to the congress under the sponsorship of UNELAM, ISAL, ULAJE, and CELADEC. There was good precedent for this—the program had been similarly structured six years ago in Peru. But because the alphabet of organizations now is longer and more impressive, the consultations may have seemed too risky for the conservatives to tolerate.DeathsCHARLES J. WATTERS, 40, Roman Catholic chaplin on a voluntary six-month extension of Viet Nam duty; hit by a bomb as he prayed with wounded men at Dak To.J. KENNETH PFOHL, 93, veteran leader of the Southern Province, Moravian Church in America; in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.KARL GRAESSER, 64, president of the northeast district of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; in Bronxville, New York.DALTON F. MCCLELLAND, 77, YMCA representative at the United Nations and a longtime worker in India; while attending a meeting in New York’s Interchurch Center.Consequently, the congress was postponed once again. The ecumenically oriented groups then withdrew their financial backing, which reportedly came from the NCC, and scheduled this month’s Uruguay workshops on such topics as church and society, social action, social service, community organization and development, migrant problems, youth strategy, and the role of women in church and society.On the other side of the fence, the hard-line conservatives met October 25 at Rancagua, Chile, to issue a declaration to Latin American evangelicals everywhere, deploring the fact that “many groups supported by diverse agencies which are not identified with the church … are trying to lead the people of God,” and stating that “we do not agree with their actions or their political-religious publications.” They called for the formation of a committee with “firm evangelical convictions” to study the possible structure of a “South American Evangelical Confederation.”What will come from the Rancagua manifesto remains to be seen. The suggestion was a planning committee meeting in March, 1968, followed by a South American Evangelical Conference in June of the same year. Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean were considered to be outside the pale of the self-appointed committee’s responsibility. The declaration was signed by eight conservative church leaders, several of them foreign missionaries.Writes Castro, “If we take advantage of [the postponement] to study the preparatory documents, the delegations can approach the dialogue better informed, and we shall demonstrate to our surprise that our positions are not so different the one from the other. I am convinced of what our Latin American Evangelical Church needs is direct communication—personal conversations, common Bible studies. We must not grow weary in our common calling to testify to the people of Latin America concerning the integral salvation which Christ offers and the unity which he creates among those who accept him as Lord and Saviour.”No one can be sure what will happen next as dedicated and sincere Christian men on both sides of the organizational fence seek to impose their own designs upon the Latin American evangelical community. And it is anybody’s guess as to when evangelicals may again meet in a continental congress.W. DAYTON ROBERTS

Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools Jackson W. Carroll, et al.

Are theological education and formation really that different at evangelical and mainline seminaries? To find out, Carroll and three other sociologists immersed themselves in the cultures of two unnamed schools, surveying the literal and ideological landscapes. The resulting portraits of the schools are rich, revealing, and, indeed, quite different.

Elesha Coffman is assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, senior editor of Christian History magazine, and Christian History <link url=”http://blog.christianitytoday.com/history/eleshacoffman.html”>blogger

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