An officially appointed committee consisting of Dr. Sherwood E. Wirt, chairman, Dr. W. Stanley Mooneyham, and Dr. J. Sherrard Rice drew up an evaluation of “what the U. S. Congress on Evangelism means to the future of the Church.” Here is the complete text:
The first U. S. Congress on Evangelism can best be described, we believe, in the words of Acts 4:31: “And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together.”
During these five days past we have seen the Church in microcosm. We have seen her radiant in the splendor of her united witness to the Lord Jesus Christ. We have seen the frailty, impotence and sin of her daily walk. We have joined in the Church’s struggle to carry out her ministry of healing and redemptive love right here on Grant Street. We have beheld the Church rocked, challenged, and even exposed by the humanity around her; and we have sought to learn all over again what it means to follow Jesus.
We believe that what has happened this week in Minneapolis has not happened before in our lifetimes. We thank God for the experience. We believe that evangelicalism in America has had a new birth of freedom: freedom from old cliches, freedom from narrow loyalities, freedom from restricted fellowship, freedom in Christ to proclaim the Gospel in love to the family of mankind.
We shall go from this city in the strong conviction that we shall never be the same, and we are carrying with us a message that will make sure that our churches will never be the same. Our fervent prayer and desire is that we shall be empowered to win men and women to Jesus Christ in such a fresh and appealing way that God the Holy Spirit will be pleased to send spiritual awakening to our land and to the world.
As the Word of God has been preached in full power from this platform, we have tasted the new wine of God’s liberating spirit, and the old wineskins seem strangely inadequate to contain it. The wind of the Spirit has blown through our assembly. Together we have undergone a baptism of love, and we covet it for our churches. We do not believe as Karl Marx did that men can change that world; but we believe that God can. We dedicate ourselves to be instruments, available to the moving of his Spirit, and responding in obedience to his command with the word of the prophet: “Here am I, send me.”
