The International Convention of Christian Churches (Disciples), meeting in Texas for the second time this century, gave a standing ovation to Martin Luther King, opposed barriers to inter-racial marriage and adoption, and endorsed ICCC civil-rights action.

Despite such daring doings in Dallas September 23–28 and crucial steps toward centralized “restructure,” the Disciples did nothing about the structured segregation within their own “brotherhood.”

Originally, King was to appear alone, but conservative queasiness caused the addition of lawyer Robert Storey, former vice-chairman of the United States Civil Rights Commission, who made a strong stand against King-style civil disobedience. The exciting clash between Storey and King overshadowed the evening’s third star, John Wright of Pittsburgh, first Roman Catholic bishop to address a Disciples assembly.

King said “the church must remove the yoke of segregation from its own body. Only by doing this can it be effective in its attack on outside evils.”

Take the Disciples. They have parallel Negro-white conventions in six states and modified segregation in two others (Tennessee integrated this year). The 587 all-Negro congregations among the 8,000 in the ICCC have their own annual meeting, the National Christian Missionary Convention.

In August the NCMC voted to continue a study of merger with the ICCC, which Negroes also attend. But the NCMC’s jovial leader, Emmett Dickson, said Negroes must “share in the administration,” get more board positions and jobs with church agencies, and generally “share in the exhibition … the drama of the brotherhood.” He says persisting racial lines are as much a matter of Negro clannishness as of white bias.

The NCMC wanted a resolution to urge calling of pastors on a non-racial basis, but the Dallas steering committee turned it down because the NCMC met after the July 25 resolutions deadline. Although a few white Disciples clergymen serve Negro churches, no Negro serves a white church.

After criticism at the convention of segregation at the Disciples’ showcase church, National City Christian in Washington, D. C., the Rev. George Davis reported the 1,100-member congregation now practices open membership and has taken in five American Negroes.

Denominational executives this spring proposed, then withdrew, a motion to require public exposure of racial policies among Disciples churches in cities where conventions are held. But the conventions themselves have long been fully integrated, one reason the denomination has rarely met in Dixie.

In the resolution on inter-racial marriage and adoption, which spurred the most emotional debate of the week, the steering committee eliminated the reference to the denomination’s own National Benevolent Association.

The convention approved a report on staff civil-rights work. This was done despite a petition from 139 Dallas Disciples against “indecorous” political action. “There is enough of God’s work to be done to keep us all busy,” the petitioners said. The Disciples also approved a last-minute resolution deploring the burning during the convention of Negro staffer John Compton’s home in Westlake, Ohio, a previously all-white suburb of Cleveland.

Nobody breathed a word about how race relates to restructure, which passed its first hurdle in Dallas. The centralized design, as expected, was sent to congregations for a quick look (they are supposed to respond within seven months) and is headed for approval, after revisions, at next year’s convention. The ICCC also established a mass assembly of elected delegates from congregations, regions, and agencies, replacing a system of whosoever will may come—and vote. Proponents say this plan, which will begin next year, makes the Disciples a denomination for the first time.

Conservative congregationalists charged that restructure was part of a master plan to get the Disciples into the giant church being formed by the Consultation on Church Union. The restructure chairman, Granville Walker, flatly denied this, but admitted Disciples can’t act on merger without restructure. “Who could unite with 8,000 autonomous congregations and 127 separate agencies?” he asked.

Those agencies are free agents, and each must decide if it wants to come under the umbrella. As for the congregations, leaders admit some will leave the denomination on the restructure issue. The increasingly disloyal opposition claimed that when the time comes for COCU consummation (in Dallas this was estimated to be sometime between 1973 and 1976), less than half the Disciples will go into the huge new denomination. Legal groundwork is being laid in advance on both sides.

Integration: A Rough Road

Methodist officials rejected a plea for unilateral denominational action against poverty and racial inequity in Mississippi and voted $70,000 for the National Council of Churches’ controversial Delta Ministry. Meanwhile, Delta lost its director, 35-year-old Arthur Thomas, who is moving to Washington.

At least two Protestant ministers in Grenada, Mississippi, spoke words of condemnation from the pulpit last month after acts of racial violence against local Negro school children. The Rev. C. B. Burt of the First Methodist Church had almost half of his congregation come to the altar in response to his call for contrition for the violence. The Rev. Emmett Barfield of the First Presbyterian Church also spoke out.

In Macon, Georgia, the minister of a Baptist church and two of his assistants were fired in a dispute over the seating of Negroes. The church is located on the campus of Mercer University, a Southern Baptist school.

Negro Baptists Rap ‘Black Power’

Negro Baptists are split on civil rights strategy, but neither side sees any value in the “black power” slogan now brandished by Negro militants.

The National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., which takes a dim view of civil rights demonstrations, said in a resolution at its Dallas meeting that power is segregation in reverse and that those who promote it are “guilty of the same type of prejudicial thinking and feeling that they have so long condemned in white segregationists.”

The same week in Memphis, the new president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., Gardner C. Taylor, told his denominational meeting that black power is a “sick slogan produced by the diseases of a sick society.” While the black-power “distortion” is an understandable result of denial, he said, “we have come far too far now to change directions. We must march on to an integrated society.…” In Taylor’s analysis of American cultural history and national identity, “black and white have inextricably and irrevocably affected each other.”

Taylor’s unsuccessful bid to unseat Joseph H. Jackson, longtime president of the NBC, led to the 1960 pullout and formation of the Progressive Convention, which supports non-violent civil rights demonstrations. Taylor was the first Negro president of the Protestant Council in New York City.

The NBC resolution said that if black power means only growing political, economic, and educational strength, it is “not needed,” because this is what Jackson has promoted for years. In fact, Jackson this year sounded faintly like a black-power advocate as he said Negroes must develop appreciation of their own race and build a solid Negro-owned business base, even if they have to hire a “white front” to do it. And he said, “We will be better off when we make it known we are not for that type of integration that saddles us with cheap, undesirable white people.”

The convention resolution said that “it matters not how non-violent civil disobedience may be, it is a form of lawbreaking and lawlessness, and it can never be considered a virtue” in America.

A related resolution said the political statements of the National Council of Churches do not speak for the NBC, and that the NBC belongs to the National Council only for fellowship. The 5.5-million-member Negro body is the NCC’s second-largest member and makes up one-eighth of its constituency.

The law-and-order emphasis and condemnation of direct action brought predictable praise from the Texas press and from such white conservatives as Governor John Connally, a convention speaker.

Mrs. Mary Olivia Ross of Detroit, president of the women’s auxiliary, spoke on a pressing subject many rights leaders want to forget—instability and matriarchal structure in Negro families. She said, “The Negro family must add to our society more strong men, brave men, and respectable men. This begins at home. The image of the Negro man must be raised. Family life must be strengthened, for out of the family must come women and men who must shape and guide the destiny of our nation and of the world.…”

“There are too many men without manhood; too many men without maturity; too many men without morals; and too many men without simple manners.”

The 25,000 NBC visitors—who experienced considerably less trouble getting rooms than delegates to previous Dallas meetings in 1891 and 1944—held a memorial service at the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

The Gospel With Candor

In his early teens, Tom Skinner led a blood-lusting Harlem gang. At 24, he is the energetic figure in a pioneering group of Negro evangelicals, aiming his new war of words at two groups:

Fellow Negroes. He says their hope lies not in anti-white bigotry or aimless agitation but in saving faith in Christ like that which ended his gang days.

White evangelicals. He charges they have been “almost totally irresponsible” by avoiding needs of Negroes.

Unlike many evangelists who are out of touch, Skinner has talked at length with such diverse Negro leaders as Martin Luther King and the martyred black nationalist Malcolm X. And last month he was invited to the South African embassy in Washington for a chat with the ambassador.

Skinner was in Washington for two weeks of services in a dance hall run by a rhythm-and-blues radio station. With a voice as big as his athletic, 210-pound frame, he preached, leaning back and forth across the pulpit, gesturing, sometimes squinting. Behind him, murals lit by lurid neon lights depicted Negro aspirations: engineer, doctor, college graduate. Speaking without humor and in the flawless English of an award-winning college actor, he spoke of the social alienation common among U.S. Negroes:

“If I am a son of God, that puts me in the best family stock in the world.… I don’t have to break my neck for human dignity. I’ve already got it.… If you accept Jesus Christ, you belong to the In Crowd.…”

He plays down social insurgence in sermons because he feels that reform may take “sixty years” but that regeneration through Christ can help now.

Skinner has avoided civil rights demonstrations; but without them, he is convinced, “white evangelicals wouldn’t even be willing to consider” questions of racial justice.

What worries him about movements led by King and others is how long they can remain non-violent if they are populated by non-Christians. “Negroes can’t keep turning the other cheek, apart from Jesus Christ,” he believes. “Martin has a basic Christian philosophy, but he does not preach regeneration. It is all reformation by outward appearance.”

Whites tend to leave evangelism of Negroes to Negro churches, which is a “delusion” to Skinner, a second-generation clergyman in the giant, all-Negro National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc. (see following story). He is convinced that only a minority of Negro pastors are “born again and preach the Gospel.” He finds many are cynical and immoral, and are in the pulpit mainly for material gain.

Negro churchmen are full of fundamentalist clichés and “preach a conservative message,” Skinner says, “but to them the new birth is joining the church organization.” Growing up in his father’s church, Skinner knew of Christ only as a miraculous historical figure, not a contemporary reality, a “Person who should run my life.”

Many middle-class Negroes seek status by joining big, white denominational churches that are theologically liberal, and Skinner considers them equally unevangelized.

In response, white evangelicals “have broken their backs to take the Gospel to Africa, but they have made no effort to reach the black man blocks away who is nowhere near as primitive,” he says.

Skinner is impatient with “the orthodox hyper-Christian who has a half-dozen Bible verses for every social problem but won’t get involved. He says ‘you need Jesus Christ,’ but you don’t see that cat bring the Gospel to Harlem. If you tell an evangelical there are 40,000 drug addicts in Harlem and he says ‘Jesus is the answer,’ that’s his way of staying out of the situation.”

All this is a thick slice of candor from a struggling young free-lance evangelist who depends on these same Negro churchmen and white evangelicals for whatever financial support he can get. He says he keeps going on his wife’s salary as a high-school music teacher in New York.

Though outspoken, Skinner has created great interest among evangelicals who worry vaguely that they might be missing the boat. Symptomatically, an evangelical magazine this year made Skinner the first Negro to appear on its cover and told of his conversion and ministry, but left out his complaints about evangelicalism.

Skinner makes an articulate appeal for the new Negro evangelical. He studied four years at the mostly Negro Manhattan Bible Institute, then two years at Wagner College, New York City’s only Protestant liberal arts school. He might finish up a B.A. someday, but his schedule is always packed.

After attending the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, he will spend several weeks preaching in newly independent Guyana (see May 27 issue, page 48). In December he moves on to southside Philadelphia. But he is most concerned about his first thrust in the South, at Savannah, Georgia, next August. He hopes for both Negro and white church help. In 1968, he plans to tour Africa with evangelist Jack Wyrtzen.

Skinner can have a special chastening effect on white conservatives, but he also speaks with knowing intimacy to the Negro community. He believes the social descriptions of Malcolm X were “the honest truth,” although he disagreed with his presuppositions and solutions.

As a boy, Skinner was wide-open to anti-Christian persuasion from nationalists, since “the leading exponents of hate and bigotry were Bible-believing fundamentalists” and “I couldn’t reconcile Christianity with the kind of community Harlem was—mostly slums, addicts, prostitutes in the streets.… You could set your watch by the policeman who came around to collect a bribe.…” He thought the Bible was “a nice book for superstitious people, written by men and therefore subject to error.”

By age fourteen, Tom hated whites, and the twenty-seven notches on his knife handle marked how many bodies he had slashed as leader of the Harlem Lords. He led an exciting double life for two years by acting out the role of an ideal churchgoer active in youth work.

On Columbus Day in 1956, he was listening to a rock ‘n’ roll radio station and planning strategy for a multi-gang rumble that would have involved 3,000 youths. An unscheduled and still unknown preacher, bad grammar and all, interrupted the music. Although everything in his background was against it, Skinner was convicted of his sins and decided “to take Christ at his word” in John 6:37.

His neophyte faith was strengthened when the 129 other gang members didn’t maim or kill him the next night. He professed his new faith, announced he was quitting, and walked out untouched. One who later accepted Christ said “it was as if we were glued to our seats.”

It was hard to walk out, Skinner says, not only because of physical danger but because of group conformity. He thinks “any person at any social level is afraid of the group. The white evangelical knows he’s a dud on the race issue. But he just doesn’t have the backbone to do anything. He’s afraid of the gang.”

But he believes that just as Negroes have wrought revolutions in rock ‘n’ roll and jazz music and in the American attitude toward human rights, a forceful group of evangelical Negro nonconformists “could bring a spiritual awakening to all of America.”

Evangelicals from around the world prepared to make their way to Berlin this month for the ten-day World Congress on Evangelism beginning October 26. Some 1,200 delegates and observers are expected to be on hand. More than 100 editors and newsmen from throughout the globe have been accredited to the press room.

Evangelist Billy Graham, honorary chairman of the congress, is scheduled to bring a major address and to preside at several sessions. Graham will also hold a public evangelistic crusade in Berlin the week prior to the opening of the congress.

The flood of interest in the congress required a moratorium on delegate and observer invitations in mid-September, six weeks before the start of the meeting. Representatives from virtually all Protestant denominations will be on hand, and there will also be Roman Catholic and Jewish observers.

According to Gil A. Stricklin, director of information for the congress, participants will include representatives of what are probably the oldest and newest Christian churches in the world. Bishop Alexander Mar Theophilus of Adoor, Kerala, India, will attend from the “oldest” church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, said to have been founded by the Apostle Thomas in the first century. From what is believed to be the “newest” church, that of the Auca Indians in Ecuador, will come Gikita M. Komi and Yaeti K. Kimo, who participated in the slaying of five American missionaries in 1956 but have since been converted to the Christian faith.

Attendance at the congress is by invitation only. A key basis of selection was the degree of involvement in evangelism, and congress organizers have tried to ensure the widest possible representation. Invitations were extended to persons in 106 countries, including several in Communist lands whose availability is still uncertain. Priority was given to professional evangelists and to those in related teaching and administrative fields.

Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, which is sponsoring the congress as a tenth-anniversary project, says that “this is no stage-managed conference. No secret strategy has been drawn up for ratification by the delegates, no public declarations have been devised in advance, and there are no projections for the last-minute plotting of organizational maneuvers. The congress will be in the hands of the delegates.”

A special commemorative service is planned for Reformation Sunday, October 30. It is expected to have special significance because of the Berlin locale—near historic sites that the Reformation made famous 4½ centuries ago.

Computers For Christ

“Is it too much to believe,” asks World Vision President Bob Pierce, “that the tools now being used to put man on the moon could have their ultimate purpose in bringing the Gospel to every creature?”

Under a $25,000 grant from World Vision, a group of scientists and churchmen are studying the possibility of doing just that. Their eyes are on the applicability of PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique). PERT, originally developed for programming a U. S. missile project, has proved itself a valuable tool in numerous government, industry, and engineering tasks.

The prospects are spelled out in the special October issue of World Vision Magazine, built around the topic “New Tools for World Evangelism.”

Crusade In The Corral

In booming Calgary, the big cowboy capital of Canada, a rodeo stadium known as the Stampede Corral was put to sacred use for two weeks of evangelistic meetings with Leighton Ford. The crusade attracted clergy and laymen from virtually all denominations. Ford, 34-year-old associate of Billy Graham, urged them “to affirm again with courage and clarity and joy the great verities of our faith.”

While the touring Archbishop of Canterbury was telling newsmen in Calgary last month that he didn’t think the Graham type of evangelism was what was needed at present, a Roman Catholic priest was in his church offering prayer for the crusade. And the Anglican bishop of Calgary, the Rt. Rev. George R. Calvert, purple robes and all, was participating in a service at the corral.

The crusade opened under sunny skies with the temperature in the eighties. Some 8,000 persons turned out for the first meeting.

British Follow-Up

Evangelist Billy Graham conducted unprecedented follow-up meetings last month for some of the 42,000 inquirers from his London crusade in June. At Royal Albert Hall, London, more than 5,000 persons gathered on each of two nights to receive encouragement and guidance for their new lives. “The greatest weapon the Devil has in his arsenal is to get you discouraged,” said Graham.

An eight-day “All-Britain Television Crusade” is being planned for next summer, Graham told his audience. The crusade is to reach out from Earls Court Stadium to at least twenty-five closed-circuit television projectors with screens up to thirty feet wide.

After the follow-up meetings, Graham was admitted to the London Clinic for treatment of an infection that had been causing discomfort for about three weeks and had caused doctors to advise him to cancel a trip to Scotland. Statements from Graham’s aides indicate that the infection has been brought under control, and that “doctors feel certain that … after a few days of rest he can resume his normal schedule.”

The canceled Scotland trip was to have been a substitute for a “postponed” visit to Poland. Graham said the Polish government had denied his request for a visa “at this time.” “It would have been a great privilege to help them celebrate a thousand years of Christianity,” he said. “I hope we may be permitted to go at a later time.”

Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen’s legislative prayer crusade suffered a setback at the hands of the U. S. Senate last month. His move to amend the U. S. Constitution to provide especially for public-school prayer fell nine votes short of the two-thirds needed for passage, whereupon the colorful 70-year-old Republican vowed to renew his campaign in the Ninetieth Congress next year.

Also turned back by the Senate was a move by Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh to substitute for the Dirksen amendment a simple resolution expressing the sense of Congress in favor of voluntary public-school prayers. The Bayh resolution, which would have had no legislative effect, got only thirty-three votes. It needed merely a majority for passage. Dirksen forces opposed it.

The votes marked the first official tally of congressional sentiment on the U. S. Supreme Court rulings that barred public-school devotional exercises. Twenty-seven Republicans and twenty-two Democrats voted in favor of the Dirksen amendment. Thirty-four Democrats and three Republicans voted against it. Nearly all the Democrats supporting the measure were from the South. If it had passed the Senate, the amendment would still have needed approval of the House and three-fourths of the state legislatures.

How They Voted

Democrats for: Byrd (Va.), Byrd (W. Va), Church (Idaho), Eastland (Miss.), Ellender (La.), Hill (Ala.), Holland (Fla.), Jordan (N. C.), Lausche (Ohio), Long (La.), McClellan (Ark.), Montoya (N. M.), Pastore (R. I.), Randolph (W. Va.), Robertson (Va.), Russell (S. C.), Russell (Ga.), Smathers (Fla.), Sparkman (Ala.), Stennis (Miss.), Symington (Mo.), and Talmadge (Ga.).

Republicans for: Aiken (Vt.), Bennett (Utah), Boggs (Del.), Carlson (Kans.), Cooper (Ky.), Cotton (N. H.), Curtis (Neb.), Dirksen (Ill.), Dominick (Colo.), Fannin (Ariz.), Fong (Hawaii), Griffin (Mich.), Hickenlooper (Iowa), Hruska (Neb.), Miller (Iowa), Mundt (S. D.), Murphy (Calif.), Pearson (Kans.), Prouty (Vt.), Saltonstall (Mass.), Scott (Pa.), Simpson (Wyo.), Smith (Maine), Thurmond (S. C.), Tower (Texas), Williams (Del.), and Young (N. D.).

All others voting were opposed. Senators who did not vote but announced as paired for the amendment were McIntyre (N. H.) and Moss (Utah). Not voting paired against the amendment was Brewster (Md.) Not voting but on record as opposed to the bill were Bass (Tenn.), Gore (Tenn.), and Metcalf (Mont.). Not voting but endorsing the measure was Dodd (Conn.).

Polls have shown that Americans favor public-school devotional exercises by a wide majority. Most religious lobbyists in Washington, however, fought the Dirksen amendment on grounds that it would tamper with the concept of religious liberty guaranteed now by the Constitution.

Dirksen maintains that his intent is not to override the Supreme Court decisions but to clarify them. The text of his proposed amendment is as follows:

“Nothing contained in this Constitution shall prohibit the authority administering any school, school system, educational institution or other public building supported in whole or in part through the expenditure of public funds from providing for or permitting the voluntary participation by students or others in prayer. Nothing contained in this article shall authorize any such authority to prescribe the form or content of any prayer.”

The proposal differs from the Becker amendment proposed in 1964 primarily in that the latter also sought to protect Bible reading in public classrooms. The 1964 move never came to a vote, and its sponsor, Republican Representative Frank Becker of New York, did not run for re-election to Congress. Some observers feel that Dirksen took up the battle motivated by a personal conviction that prayer saved him from blindness during a serious eye illness nearly twenty years ago.

During debate on his proposal, Dirksen took a poke at the National Council of Churches and promptly drew a telegram of protest from council leaders. Dirksen called NCC leaders “social engineers (who) have been giving too much time to things like the recognition of China instead of to a little soul saving.” He also quoted documents critical of the council. The protest telegram noted this and called it a “regrettable” use by the Senator of his position “to disseminate erroneous and discredited charges.”

Dirksen says his drive for a prayer amendment next year will have the support of a national committee including evangelist Billy Graham and the noted clergyman-editor Daniel Poling.

Expanding A Campaign

Glenn L. Archer, America’s leading campaigner for church-state separation, is worried about repercussions of the Great Society. Archer charges that the first thousand days of the administration of President Johnson have produced a rash of violations of the separation principle. “Never have we had so many legal actions going or the need for so many more,” says the 60-year-old Archer, executive director of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Efforts to secularize the Church are aggravating the problem.

To combat the trend, Archer and POAU hope to expand their campaign from a nine-story “Religious Liberty Center” in Washington. Ground is to be broken during 1967, which will be POAU’s twentieth anniversary year. The milestone is also being marked with the release of Embattled Wall, a sprightly, privately published, 161-page history of the organization written by associate director C. Stanley Lowell.

POAU faces a possible showdown, meanwhile, with other religious interests in Washington. For a number of years the churches’ Washington watchdogs and lobbyists have met informally to share information. At one time POAU was initiating the exchange. A more secretive pool eventually developed that included churchmen from New York also intent on preserving religious liberty, and POAU representatives were eased out. The present so-called consortium settles little and wields little influence, but POAU wants in.

A major hurdle for POAU will be to overcome differences with representatives of the National Council of Churches and the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. The differences are partly due to competition for grass-roots support. Another element is that POAU takes stands on issues solely on the basis of whether the church-state separation principle is violated. The NCC and the Baptists have constituencies that oblige them to weigh countless other considerations.

The Disciples On Viet Nam

President Johnson’s denomination, the Christian Churches (Disciples), decided to hold his hand in sympathy over Viet Nam rather than pat him on the back in support. The President, invited to attend last month’s Dallas convention, didn’t even send greetings to the brethren from his Texas ranch 200 miles away.

Parliamentary wrangling consumed so much time (eighty minutes) that the Disciples never did discuss Viet Nam. They eventually rubber-stamped a steering committee’s substitute motion expressing divided opinions about America’s policy, sympathizing with the President in his “terrifying responsibility,” and urging more relief projects and study.

The committee sidelined a statement giving the President’s policy full support and rejected a past-deadline resolution from the Disciples’ growing neo-pacifist wing that deplored U. S. escalation of the war. The peace group won support for selective conscientious objection without military service. A last-minute resolution endorsed Pope Paul’s call for peace prayers.

Peace, Paul, And Mary

Pope Paul VI’s fourth encyclical, Christi Matri Rosarii, has implications not only for world peace, but also for ecumenics.

The letter, whose title translates “Rosaries to the Mother of Christ,” is about equally divided between an appeal for peace, regarded as the most urgent to come from his pen, and a reaffirmation of the Marian cult, an aspect of Roman Catholic doctrine repugnant to most Protestants.

The pontiff’s concern for peace and his personal devotion to Mary are known, but this is the first time they have been so prominently displayed together.

The encyclical opens with the admonition that “during the month of October prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary are to be said.” The Pope called for a “more persevering prayer” for peace “by the devout recitation of the Rosary.” The Rosary, he wrote, “is well suited to God’s people, acceptable to the Mother of God and powerful in obtaining gifts from heaven.”

In his discussion of the efficacy of prayers to Mary, the Pope recalled that “during the Second Vatican Council we gave our confirmation to a point of traditional doctrine when we gave her the title of Mother of the Church, a title acclaimed by the council Fathers and the Catholic world.” At the time that title was bestowed, Michael Novak, a liberal Catholic writer, called the move “offensive to other Christians and scandalous to Catholics.”

Public emphasis on Mariology has been deplored by many other liberal Roman Catholics and Protestant ecumenists. Even Augustin Cardinal Bea, president of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, has warned against “exaggerated” devotion to Mary. In official Roman Catholic theology, Mary is worthy of hyperdulia, or veneration above all the saints, while God alone is the object of latria, the highest worship and adoration. But the distinction is difficult to see in practice.

In his plea for peace, Pope Paul’s least veiled references were to Viet Nam. “We are threatened by a more extensive and more disastrous calamity that endangers the human family, even as a bloody and difficult war is raging, particularly in areas of East Asia.” He called for “all those responsible” to “strive to bring about those necessary conditions which will lead men to lay down their arms at last, before it becomes too late.… We cry to them in God’s name to stop.”

The cry was not for peace at any cost: “This peace must rest on justice and the liberty of mankind, and take into account the rights of individuals and communities.”

The letter also pointed to other social problems that “are potential material for the greatest possible tragedy.” “For instance there are the increasing race for the expansion of one’s nation, the excessive glorification of one’s race, the obsession for revolution, the segregations enforced on citizens, the iniquitous plotting, the murder of the innocent.”

Following the Pope’s lead, the National Council of Churches and other religious bodies called for a month of peace prayers. For instance, the Rev. Ben Mohr Herbster, president of the United Church of Christ, asked his 6,962 affiliated congregations to do “everything within our power to save the world from holocaust” and to “begin this effort with prayer.”

Near the end of last month, Pope Paul despatched Archbishop Sergio Pignedoli to Viet Nam. According to an early report from unnamed Vatican sources, the diplomat’s visit was to rally support from Roman Catholic clergy and laity for the Pope’s crusade of prayer and peace. At the Saigon airport, Archbishop Pignedoli said that he had come in connection with the Pope’s diplomatic peace campaign but that he was not “an ambassador of that message.”

Yet the veteran Vatican diplomat was met at the airport by South Viet Nam’s Foreign Minister Tran Van Do, and within forty-eight hours the archbishop had asked for a meeting with Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. The possibility of a visit to Hanoi by Archbishop Pignedoli was left open.

EDWARD H. PITTS

Communication And Christian Witness: Ten Top Books Of The Decade

The perennial problem of how to proclaim the Christian Gospel “loud and clear” to a world of men with a marked religious hearing loss has become a vital subject of discussion in the Church today. While the declining influence of the Christian faith in our day may be traced largely to the spiritual lethargy of indolent Christians, dilution of the biblical message, and mounting opposition from demonic, anti-Christian forces, it is also true that a part of the problem lies in the failure of many Christians to apply the principles of communication that lead to meaningful mental and spiritual relationships between persons. During the past decade, Christian scholars sensitive to this problem have produced many excellent volumes calculated to increase the effectiveness of Christian communication. Now many ministers and concerned laymen are also becoming aware of the communications gap and are seeking new and improved means of conveying the truth of Jesus Christ.

The Church has begun to rediscover the importance of using a diversity of communicative means—the visual arts, belles lettres, drama, and music; the mass media of the printed page, radio, television, and motion pictures; and, of course, the spoken word of persuasive discourse. Of all these, however, speech remains the clearest and most penetrating mode of communication for Christian witness. If evangelicals seriously desire to reach men for Christ with maximum effectiveness, they must consider the new understandings and insights in communication found in recent writings.

To encourage Christian spokesmen to this end, we are recommending our choice of the ten most significant books on communication and Christian witness published during the past ten years. They deal with different aspects of the communicative process—man, message, and methods—and were selected from scores of books suggested by thirty members of the Speech Association of America actively engaged in the study, practice, or teaching of religious speaking. While some of the volumes are directed primarily at preachers, all are useful for the majority of Christians intent on improving their communicative skills. These books are by no means all of the decade’s significant books in this area, but they do provide perceptive and stimulating views of current developments in Christian communication.

Reading for Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

• How to Give Away Your Faith, by Paul E. Little (Inter-Varsity, $3.50). A down-to-earth book on witnessing by an Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship leader who draws from his experience in ministering to college students and presents a biblically sound approach to personal evangelism.

• Not Me, God, by Sherwood Eliot Wirt (Harper & Row, $2.95). Imaginary conversations between a contemporary man and God that explode man’s pretensions and exhibit God’s grace in a penetrating way.

• Unger’s Bible Handbook, by Merrill F. Unger (Moody, $4.95). A treasury of biblical data—commentary, historical backgrounds, textual criticism, maps, charts, and outlines—that will aid every student of Scripture.

■ Message and Mission, by Eugene A. Nida (Harper & Brothers, 1960, 253 pp., $5). This book by the American Bible Society’s executive secretary for translations, combines recent findings of linguistic studies with cogent observations on how verbal symbols serve the purposes of divine-human communication. Using illustrations from a variety of cultures, Nida deals with the nature and structure of symbols and the dynamic processes and psychological relationships that Christian communicators in any setting need to know. Of special value is his final chapter on the theological basis of communication, where he considers the supernatural character of divine revelation and the principles and implications of a biblical view of communication.

■ The Miracle of Dialogue, by Reuel Howe (Seabury, 1963, 154 pp., $3.50). Howe makes an eloquent plea for the Church to enter into dialogue with the world and treat it as the place of its life and mission rather than as enemy territory. He analyzes the nature of dialogue, stresses its importance in life, dissects communication barriers, and calls people to be totally authentic, open, disciplined, and related to other persons and their environment. This book deserves thorough reading and rereading.

■ Design for Preaching, by Henry Grady Davis (Muhlenberg, 1958, 307 pp., $4.75). From the many useful texts on homiletics published during the past decade, we single out Davis’s work as the most creative and provocative. He views preaching as a great art of oral communication and, following the poetic simile of a sermon’s being like a tree, shows the interpenetration of form and substance in Christian communication. While Davis considers such usual homiletical topics as choice of subject, development of ideas, types of sermons, adaptation to audience, and style of structure and language, his fresh treatment marked by an artistic style and copious illustrations provides an exciting experience rarely gained from reading a text on homiletics. For help on sermon delivery, however, readers should look elsewhere.

■ The Communication of the Christian Faith, by Hendrik Kraemer (Westminster, 1956, 128 pp., $2.50). Published ten years ago, Kraemer’s small book remains a timely treatise on “transmitting the creative spark of the regenerating and converting word by witnessing to it.” He sees communication as the “lifeblood of the church” whose objective is not persuasion but conversion. His sections on communication in the history of the Christian Church and the influence of psychological, sociological, and cultural factors on communication tersely synthesize much important knowledge. Of less value, but nevertheless thought-provoking, are his chapters on the breakdown and restoration of communication in a secularized church and world.

■ Preaching and Biblical Theology, by Edmund P. Clowney (Eerdmans, 1961, 124 pp., $2.50). The central idea of this volume by the president of Westminster Theological Seminary is that authoritative and effective preaching must be based on biblical theology. Since content is crucial in communication, ministers and laymen would do well to prepare their messages with the realization that Scripture contains, not a mish-mash of various theologies, but a single, consistent theology progressively revealed by God in successive historical periods. Clowney recommends that the biblical-theological interpretation of a text deal first with its immediate theological setting and after that with its relation to God’s total revelatory plan, including its significance for today. He also offers sage advice on interpreting biblical symbolism.

■ Encounter with Spurgeon, by Helmut Thielicke (Fortress, 1963, 283 pp., $4.75). Concerned lest today’s men of the pulpit bypass the Victorian Baptist “prince among preachers,” the foremost German preacher of the day combines his own ideas of preaching with those of Spurgeon to produce a book that conveys ideas of contemporary and classic significance. Thielicke discusses the cheerfulness and worldliness of Spurgeon’s preaching as “he worked through the power of the Word which created its own hearers and changed souls.” He stresses Spurgeon’s insistence that the how of preaching is closely related to one’s spiritual existence. In addition to Thielicke’s extensive introductory essay, the volume contains helpful selections from Spurgeon’s “Lectures to My Students” and also two of his sermons.

■ The Urgency of Preaching, by Kyle Haselden (Harper & Row, 1963, 121 pp., $2.75). The barbed arrows of this theological journalist may sometimes go astray in his weekly editorials, but in this book the editor of the Christian Century and the Pulpit gives the shaft to the American pulpit and hits his target dead center. Lamenting the dearth of eager and confident preaching and decrying the fact that homiletics is “hidden away in most seminaries as though it were the black sheep of the theological family,” he places the blame on the minister’s loss of confidence in the urgency of the Gospel and the power of the spoken word. He insists on the priority of the spoken word as the form most suitable for an urgent message. He pleads for preaching of “Peril, Promise, and Alterant: the wrath of God, the love of God, the gift of God” in a way pertinent to the needs of people. Realizing that urgency will not characterize preaching until ministers recover an understanding of their calling, he discusses what the role of the minister is and what it is not. Haselden’s book is no how-to-do-it text; yet its stress on the urgency of preaching serves as a strong motivation for improved communication of the Christian faith.

■ Religious Television, What to Do and How to Do it, by Everett C. Parker (Harper & Brothers, 1961, 244 pp., $4). “Television affords one major opportunity,” says Parker, “for the church to abandon exclusiveness and to penetrate the surrounding life of the community and of the whole culture.” We recommend this specialized volume in the hope that it will challenge evangelicals to develop and promote greater use of television as a medium for presenting the Gospel. Parker’s book presents a sensible discussion of mass communication and the Christian faith, an analysis of the nature and types of TV audiences, and fascinating expositions of the numerous facets of program planning and production.

■ Effective Oral Interpretation for Religious Leaders, by Harold A. Brack (Prentice-Hall, 1964, 184 pp., $4.95). Reading aloud is an important phase of religious speaking for both clergymen and laymen and yet is often inadequately done. Brack’s text concentrates on practical help in literary analysis, in the use of voice, body, eyes, time, and text in oral reading, and in oral interpretation of Scripture, responsive readings, poetry, and various rituals.

■ The Preacher-Prophet in Mass Society, by Jesse Jai McNeil (Eerdmans, 1961, 116 pp., $2.50). The late Dr. McNeil, for many years a “preacher-prophet” in industrialized Detroit and professor of practical theology at California Baptist Seminary, writes convincingly and inspiringly of the demands and dilemmas the Christian faces as he witnesses to man in mass society. His chapter on communication with “mass-man” takes account of factors absolutely essential for understanding the plight of men in urban communities. Emphasizing the need for proclaiming the Word of God with imagination and conviction, McNeil argues that the minister should bring biblical insights to bear on community affairs as well as on the problems of individuals.

Readers of these ten books will find instruction and motivation for the task of communicating to others the truth of the God who has himself communicated with man in his incarnate and written word.

ROBERT L. CLEATH

The Uncomfortable Few

The Restless Church: A Response to ‘The Comfortable Pew,’ edited by William Kilbourn (Lippincott, 1966, 145 pp., $3.50, also paper, $1.95), is reviewed by Ian S. Rennie, minister, Fairview Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, British Columbia.

Early in 1965 Pierre Berton, perhaps the best-known journalist and commentator in Canada, was invited by the Department of Religious Education of the Anglican Church—the church he has stayed away from for twenty years—to give an intelligent outsider’s evaluation and criticism of the Church. From this invitation came The Comfortable Pew, which provoked an interest and debate far beyond the wildest dreams of Berton, the Anglican Church, or any Canadian, for that matter. It has been an international catalyst, and now, after more than a year of debate, sixteen significant responses have been drawn together by William Kilbourn, a leading young Canadian historian and active Anglican layman, in The Restless Church.

Kilbourn deserves great credit for his catholicity of choice. This is by no means just another volume beating the drum for the secularization of Christianity. While there naturally are essays favorable to Berton’s general position, there are several able and trenchant criticisms that are among the finest this reviewer has encountered in this debate.

Of those writers who sympathize with Berton, several offer practical suggestions about how the Church can communicate more effectively. One or two others, while engaging with the subject on the level of ideas, find themselves in such agreement that they really have little to add. One fresh note, however, is added by Lotte and Werner Pelz, who view the secularization of Christianity as the fulfillment of the authentic prophetic strain of the Bible, discarding the grave clothes of the priestly approach. Although the thesis is not new, it is presented with such a lyrical quality that one has the feeling of entering new dimensions.

But the most weighty contributions come from the critics. There are four major ones, the first being the widely known and respected lawyer William Stringfellow. He heads his article “The Case Against Christendom and The Case against Pierre Berton” and begins by giving a far more devastating critique of the Church than Berton. He presents the uncritical allegiance of Christians to nationalism, militarism, and capitalism. He scores the timidity of the Churches in dealing with nuclear war, the race issue, the technological revolution, and individual rights over against property rights. Many may be tempted to say that this is what we have heard hundreds of times before. But one cannot say that about Stringfellow. There are a strength, integrity, and biblical standpoint to his criticisms that drive one on the road to repentance. But then he comes to his estimate of Berton. Here, in two pithy pages, he shows that there has been no comprehension of the divine origin and sustenance of the Church’s life and no understanding of grace and Gospel. In Berton he sees only an ethical idealism that has no conscious relation to the great realities of sin and salvation.

The second serious critic is Professor Fairweather, of Trinity College, Toronto, who as a professional theologian does an excellent job of clearing up some of the caricatures that Berton and so many others seem to have assumed represent Christianity. Then he asserts the essential nature of these decaricatured conceptions of God, man, and Christ.

Next comes Peter Berger, who in his own inimitable style argues that Berton is really like those who occupy the comfortable pew: they are all perfectly comfortable in the highly secular worldview of today. “What would really be revolutionary,” he affirms, “would be to take seriously the beliefs of the New Testament, of the early Christian confessions, or of the sixteenth-century Reformers.”

The final critic is Emil Fackenheim, the eminent Jewish philosopher of Toronto. He begins by showing how the Jews have every natural sympathy with the secular liberalism that stems from the Enlightenment and that has done so much to give his own people freedom. But he also contends that the secular liberalism Berton advocates would rob the Church of God himself and reduce it to a willing tool in the hands of the secularists. Liberal secularism, because it has no true God, easily falls prey to false gods—even national socialism and the Third Reich.

In Fackenheim there is one element that seems to be lacking in nearly all of this debate—the personal knowledge of God. Everyone seems to assume that the Church is just another one of many organizations, and that Christianity is a matter of joining. If this is so, then why resist the movement of the Church into secularism. But if in the Church there is the knowledge of God—this makes everything different.

IAN S. RENNIE

Racial Crisis And The Gospel

Shall We Overcome?, by Howard O. Jones (Revell, 1966, 146 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, co-editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

In this small but potent book, the Rev. Howard O. Jones, an associate evangelist on Billy Graham’s team and the current president of the National Negro Evangelical Association, speaks plainly and forcefully about the spiritual aspects of the racial crisis in America.

As a Negro, Mr. Jones is deeply involved in the present civil rights struggle. He recognizes the justice of the Negro’s claim to full American citizenship and acceptance as a person. At the same time, he is deeply concerned about the state of the Negro churches in America. He sees the great need for revival in these churches and the neglect of clear preaching of the Gospel on the part of many Negro ministers.

Writing from within the situation, Mr. Jones is unsparing but compassionate in his appraisals. He confronts the white church, particularly the white evangelical church, with its failures in race relations. Out of his own experience in evangelistic work in Africa, he depicts the deplorable effect on the missionary enterprise of discrimination against Negroes. He also challenges the American Negro churches to send out their own missionaries and criticizes the reluctance of some missionary agencies to encourage the use of Negro missionaries.

For the complacent, this is and should be a disturbing book. There shine through its pages the conviction and compassion of a Christian leader dedicated to Christ and his Gospel, committed to the needs of his people, and courageous in proclaiming the truth as he honestly sees it.

The introduction by Billy Graham lends a note of urgency. “Howard Jones,” says Dr. Graham, “has helped broaden and deepen my understanding of the religious aspect involved in the civil rights struggle in America.… He preaches the Gospel as clearly and straight as any man—but he also implements it to the needs of the nation.”

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN

An R.S.V. Modified For Catholics

The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition, prepared by the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain, with a foreword by Richard Cardinal Cushing (Nelson, 1966, 1,262 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Bruce M. Metzger, George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.

This is a special edition of the RSV prepared by a committee of British Catholic scholars. It carries the imprimatur of Gordon Joseph Gray, Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and of Peter W. Bartholome, Bishop of St. Cloud, Minnesota.

In order to make the RSV acceptable to British Catholics it was thought necessary to introduce sixty-seven changes into the New Testament text. These modifications are listed in an appendix, and the one that occurs most often (eighteen times) is “brethren” for “brothers” (of Jesus). Apparently it was assumed that the archaic English “brethren” would be more in accord with the dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity. (Nevertheless, nothing could be done with “James the Lord’s brother” of Galatians 1:19.)

Another type of change is the introduction into the RSV text (from the RSV footnotes) of sixteen passages that are of doubtful or debatable textual authority, such as the ending of Mark’s Gospel (16:9–20), the second cup of Luke 22:20, and the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:52–8:12). Quite indefensibly, the Latin Vulgate rendering of Luke 1:28, “Hail, full of grace …,” is substituted for the Greek text, “Hail, O favored one.…”

In the Old Testament, books regarded as apocryphal by Protestants are distributed among the protocanonical books. Likewise the deuterocanonical additions to Esther and Daniel are introduced throughout the text of these books, differentiated from the basic Hebrew and Aramaic by being printed in italics.

Since every edition of the Bible approved for general usage by Catholics must, according to canon law, be furnished with comments or annotations, the British committee has provided a brief appendix to each Testament containing explanatory notes (twenty pages for the Old Testament, twelve pages for the New).

To prevent misunderstanding, it should be pointed out that this is a special edition of the RSV—indeed, the title page declares it to be a “Catholic Edition.” Though close to the text of the RSV, it is not the RSV unchanged. It is probably, however, the closest approximation to a “common Bible” for which the British Catholic Biblical Association could hope to receive an official imprimatur. That the American hierarchy is more liberal-minded is shown by the fact that the Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, published by the Oxford University Press, has received the imprimatur of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In the Oxford volume (which is not a special Catholic edition), the RSV text is reproduced without a single change in the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Apocryphal books (which are segregated after the New Testament). Fourteen brief annotations, suggested by an American committee of Catholic scholars and approved by the original annotators, have been introduced in the footnotes among the other annotations, all of which were prepared by Protestant scholars.

The existence of such editions—whether approximately or totally ecumenical—is a testimony to the general unanimity in technical matters among Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars. It is also a sign of a revival of interest among Roman Catholics in the Holy Scriptures. Such a revival, at a time when Sunday school curricula in mainline Protestant denominations are becoming less and less Bible-centered and when most Protestant seminaries require fewer and fewer courses in the Bible, is greatly to be welcomed by all who are concerned for the survival of classical Christianity.

BRUCE M. METZGER

Book Briefs

Appointment Congo, by Virginia Law (Rand McNally, 1966, 290 pp., $3.95). The inspiring story of the heroic life and death of missionary Burleigh A. Law in the war-torn Congo. Written by his wife. Heartily recommended.

The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, by J. W. Packer, and The Pastoral Letters, by Anthony Tyrrell Hanson (Cambridge, 1966, 233 and 126 pp., $3.50 and $3; also paper, $1.65 each). Brief treatment of background, problems, and text reflecting major findings of modern scholarship.

The Oswald Affair: An Examination of the Contradictions and Omissions of the Warren Report, by Léo Sauvage (World, 1966, 418 pp., $6.95). A Paris newspaper correspondent argues not too convincingly that it is “logically untenable, legally indefensible, and morally inadmissible” to declare Lee Oswald the assassin of President Kennedy.

One of the most difficult problems confronting the preacher is the selection of sermon subjects and themes for Sunday morning and Sunday evening, week after week, month after month. This problem may easily consume many hours that could profitably be used for study.

A number of years ago, as I sought the mind of the Lord in this matter, I found the answer for my own pulpit ministry. I started preaching in series and have continued ever since. For example, with the exception of special occasions like Palm Sunday and Easter, I preached every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening, and every Wednesday evening from the first Sunday in January, 1963, through the second Sunday in July, 1963, on the theme “What Baptists Believe.” In this series I dealt with what Baptists have historically believed and taught about the Bible, the plan of salvation, the Church, the ordinances, evangelism, the stewardship of money, the eternal security of the believer, and eschatology. This series not only was spiritually rewarding to me but was used by the Holy Spirit to stir a revival in our church.

More recently I preached a series of forty-two Sunday morning messages based on a study in depth of the Book of James. One of the intriguing aspects of this series was the way in which the messages as they came from the text were relevant to what was occurring in our country. For instance, on the Sunday morning following the infamous Watts riots in the Los Angeles area, the text for the sermon was James 4:1–3:

From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.

It seemed as if God himself had directed the timing of this sermon.

In this connection, I want to point out something I feel is profoundly important. Whenever I find myself with a group of my ministerial colleagues, someone will say, “We must make the message of the Bible relevant to our day.” This in my opinion is sheer nonsense. My task as a minister of the Gospel is not to make God’s Word relevant to our day. It is already relevant; the Almighty has seen to this. My responsibility is to study it, with the aid of the Holy Spirit seek to comprehend it, and then in the power of the Holy Spirit declare it. I find that when I do this, God takes care of the relevancy.

The method I use in preparing a sermon is fairly simple. After deciding on the text, I familiarize myself with all the details of it. This I do in four steps:

First, even though I am not a great Greek scholar, if the text is in the New Testament I make a careful examination of it in the original language, with the aid of a lexicon. Since Greek to a great extent is a picture language, I find this a most profitable intellectual exercise; from it I often gain invaluable spiritual insights not available from any other source.

Second, I read the text carefully in four or five modern translations.

Third, I consult the commentaries. For preaching I have discovered that those that deal with the material in a devotional manner are more helpful than those that present it technically; the value of the latter is that of making sure not too many liberties are taken in interpretation.

Fourth, I read sermons based on the text that other ministers have preached. My library is catalogued so that I can put my hands immediately upon anything I have in it, in periodicals and books, on any verse in the Bible.

After thoroughly familiarizing myself with the meaning of the text, I then begin to study it with a view to outlining it. I try to make the outline clear, concise, and comprehensive. I am convinced that a sermon so organized is much easier for the congregation to remember than one that is presented simply as a running commentary on the Scripture. Occasionally, however, I find a passage that does not lend itself to an outline; to try to superimpose one upon it does violence to the text. When this is so, at the very outset of the sermon I simply state this to the congregation and then deal with the passage either on a word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase basis. Ninety-eight per cent of the time, however, I am able to develop an outline that I definitely follow in presenting the message.

When the outline is complete, I begin to search for illustrations germane to the truths I am going to emphasize. For years I have been using the “Memory-O-Matic” system of filing. I have endeavored to keep it up-to-date, and I now have a secretary who does nothing but this. Usually I can go to this file and find far more material on any point than I can possible use.

When the outline is completed and the illustrations selected, I then begin to write the sermon in longhand. Unless I am going to publish it, I do not complete it in manuscript form; instead I make copious notes covering all the material I plan to use. My deadline each week for completing both the Sunday morning and the Sunday evening sermons in this form is late Thursday afternoon; very seldom do I fail to meet it.

Since I have a deep feeling that the preacher should deliver his sermons without any notes, I spend almost as much time on the oral preparation as I do on the written.

First, on Friday morning I go over my notes on both sermons in a quiet meditative manner five or six times, until I feel that I have saturated myself with the messages. I am not satisfied until I am convinced that the content of the sermons has actually become a part of me; for when I preach, I want to feel that I am sharing myself with the congregation.

Second, on Friday afternoon I preach both sermons aloud three or four times. This I do standing in front of a mirror, in order to make sure that I am not developing any facial contortions that will distract attention from what I am saying. In following this plan for more than a quarter of a century, I have found it necessary to correct myself innumerable times.

Third, on Saturday morning or afternoon I preach each of the messages aloud one more time. Sometimes, I actually go into the sanctuary and deliver the sermons to the empty pews. This is a very satisfying part of the preparation, perhaps because it gives me a special feeling for and sense of the services that are going to take place the next day.

Fourth, on Sunday morning after breakfast I quietly go over my notes for the morning sermon and then spend some time in prayer for the preaching ministry of that day. By doing this I am assured that when I go into the pulpit, I do not go alone; the One who said, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,” is by my side. On Sunday afternoon I follow the same plan for the evening message.

The Bible teaches in First Corinthians 1:21—and experience verifies the fact—that it pleases God by the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. In other words, the Almighty’s basic method of communicating the eternal truth of Scripture to man is through the pulpit. From the very inception of Christianity this has been true; it will continue to be true until the Lord returns.

As I examine the current church situations, I find two disturbing trends. First, far too few of our finest young men are dedicating themselves to the Christian ministry. Look magazine put it this way: “Only 1 per cent of our youth is preparing specifically for spiritual leadership of any kind; there are more bartenders than clergymen in the United States.” Second, many if not most of our present seminary students are avoiding the pulpit ministry. They are interested in counseling, teaching, Christian education, and the like, not preaching. While I should be the last person in the world to depreciate the importance of these jobs, I am sure that what we need more than anything else right now is an army of God-called men who are willing to pay the price of preparation and prayer that they may stand behind the pulpits of our churches week after week declaring without compromise the whole counsel of God. My prayer is that thousands of our choice youth throughout the entire world will hear the call of the Holy Spirit and volunteer for this army.—

HAROLD L. FICKETT, JR.,

First Baptist Church of Van Nuys,

Van Nuys, California.

“Have you been born again?”

The questioner was a woman missionary from Australia who was traveling through China. I had been a missionary for some years, and a certain resentment welled up inside me at the question. But I answered, “Yes.”

This woman asked the same question wherever she went, of pastors, elders, deacons, missionaries, and Chinese Christians alike. It often provoked the same resentment I felt.

A short time ago a Bible teacher and his wife from America worshipped in a large Pentecostal church in São Paulo, Brazil, one of sixty such churches in that city. The wife of this world-known teacher of the Word was asked, “Have you been born again?”

The visiting Americans were thrilled at the earnestness of these Christians and their putting of first things first. Such zeal and directness may well be part of the reason why Pentecostals in Chile and Brazil now outnumber all other Protestants there.

“Have you been born again?”

Why is it that the imperative of the new birth is hardly mentioned in church circles today? Can it be that “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God” (2 Cor. 4:4, RSV).

The necessity for the new birth—that is, for regeneration—lies in the very nature of unregenerate man. Jesus made it plain to Nicodemus that a Jew was of the seed of Abraham by natural birth but that only he who is born again of the Spirit of God is a son of God.

He told Nicodemus, and he tells us, that a man can neither “see” nor “enter” the Kingdom of God without this transformation of his nature; the Kingdom of God is that spiritual realm where God’s holy will is done in the hearts of men, now and for all eternity.

This transformation can never be achieved by man himself. Just as he is not responsible for his physical birth, so he cannot be the agent of his spiritual rebirth. A dead man cannot give himself life.

God alone has the power to bring spiritual rebirth. It is his Spirit that operates in the hearts of men to bring new life.

The new birth is a theme found in both the Old and New Testaments. Ezekiel suggests the idea when he speaks of God’s offering “a new heart and a new spirit” (18:31), and when he records the word of the Lord that came to him: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you” (36:26a).

In the New Testament we are admonished to “put off the old nature” and to “put on the new nature”—a work of the Spirit.

We read of being “begotten … unto a lively hope” (1 Pet. 1:3), of being “born anew” (1 Pet. 1:23), of being begotten “by the word of truth” (Jas. 1:18), of the “washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5), of the new birth as a “resurrection” (Rom. 6:1–11), of new Christians as being “babes in Christ” (1 Cor. 3:1, 2) and therefore needing the care a child needs (Heb. 5:12–14), of a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17 and Gal. 6:16).

In the new birth there is the mystery of a work of God in the human heart that makes us completely new and affects our tastes, habits, desires, appetites, judgments, opinions, hopes, and fears. This change takes place through the operation of God’s Holy Spirit on the center of our hearts and wills. It is evidenced when we have died to self and this world and have been born anew to obedience to God by the Spirit. This produces a new creature with new outlook, desires, and destination. It involves a change in citizenship from this dying world to the eternity of heaven itself. It is a passing from death to life, from servitude to Satan to freedom in Christ, from darkness to light—all through the mercy and power of God.

Our Lord makes it clear that birth into this world is of the flesh and that the rebirth is of the Spirit. Paul tells us the fleshly, or carnal, mind is at enmity with Christ (Rom. 8:7) and that reconciliation to God (being born again) is a work of the Spirit that changes us from enemies of God to sons.

A right relationship with Jesus Christ may come into being without money, rank, or education, but not without the new birth. He who is not born again remains alien to the divine family.

Perhaps the most obvious argument for Christianity is a changed life. No one should dismiss a religion that makes bad men good. The world takes a dim view of Christianity because so few of us give evidence of having been born again. Regeneration—the new birth—is a lost or neglected emphasis in preaching today, and as a result many church members show no signs of having been converted. An imperative is being ignored, and the very heart of the Gospel is being neglected.

The new birth is not superficial; it is a deep and complete change in our natures. It is more than reformation. It is more than an amendment. It transcends any moral change. It does not bring just an outward alteration of life; it brings a new life in Jesus Christ.

This does not mean that the born-again person becomes sinless. This side of heaven no one becomes perfect—that is, completely sanctified. But it does mean that the direction and the willful intent of life is in and toward Christ, not in and toward this world.

Jesus told Nicodemus that a man must be born again, that he must have a completely new start. He must be born again the second time, not of flesh but by the Spirit. And he must be born from above, from God.

Many yearn for this change but find themselves helpless. “I know it is necessary,” they say, “but I find it impossible.” At this point they are close to the Kingdom of God. Christ did not come to call the righteous to repentance but lost sinners. He requires of us only the faith and attitude of little children, a faith in him and not in ourselves.

The new birth proceeds out of our willingness to receive Christ and experience his redeeming and regenerating work of grace. It is characterized by our obedience to him. It is prompted by his love and our response in simple faith.

The new birth involves cleansing. It involves power—the mightiest power of all, that of the Holy Spirit. It wipes out the past with all its rottenness. It gives peace and assurance with which to live in a tormented, turbulent, and dying world, and it gives power that goes on over into God’s eternity.

Born again? Then we are content with God’s will, whatever that may be. We are citizens of his Kingdom. We are sons of God.

Have you been born again?

What they like and don’t like about CHRISTIANITY TODAY

As religious news editor of the New York Times, I see dozens of journals. Among the most significant is CHRISTIANITY TODAY because it is the expression of a viewpoint which, while certainly not unimportant in the total religious life of America, is nevertheless underrepresented in the church press. As you conclude your first decade I am happy to join those who are grateful to the founders of CHRISTIANITY TODAY for having moved in on the journalistic scene.

In an article for the New York Times Magazine, I recently had the occasion to refer to your review. The word I used to capsule a description of it would perhaps not altogether please some of your readers. The word was “sophisticated.” I meant it in the best sense: that is, I meant to say that CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a highly professional journal; it speaks in the idiom of the day while rejecting much of the thinking of the day, even the theological thinking; and while its religious stance and social outlook may be a minority view in academic circles—as I think its editors would not hesitate to acknowledge—still, it would be hard to imagine anyone, no matter how set against its conservative, evangelical tone, who would withhold his respect and admiration for the achievement it represents.

On the occasion of your tenth anniversary I would like to add my congratulations and those of my associates.

JOHN COGLEY

Religious News Editor

The New York Times

My feeling is that the magazine well fills a need in the field of Christian literature. When it was projected I thought it would be simply a rigidly conservative, if not fundamentalist, journal designed to flail away at the Christian Century and the liberal pagans. I have been very pleasantly surprised.

While not watering down its evangelical and conservative convictions, the magazine has brought an intelligence and cohesiveness to their presentation that I had sometimes felt was lacking.

I think its chief value has been in giving its readers a somewhat more extroverted point of view, plus a realization that while this wing of Christianity is fractured, yet it has an inner reason to pull together, and thus has developed an effective and an important witness.

For the coming ten years I believe it should develop further along this line, while examining always more openly and honestly other points of view. Cooperation depends upon understanding, and the latter upon knowledge.

DAN L. THRAPP

Religion Editor

The Los Angeles Times

In its ten years CHRISTIANITY TODAY has done a commendable job, with a number of things to its credit, and, like other publications, room for improvement. The news section is quite thorough and accurate, although perhaps at times a bit reflective of a viewpoint. The telescoped, capsule form of writing is good, and one can get a pretty good overall picture of what is going on in evangelical Christianity. The type style and design, use of white space, large margins, relationships of heads to each other and to the text is superior. The writing style in the news section is generally quite good. I imagine the magazine has filled quite a gap in the past ten years in furnishing a comprehensive yet readable digest of evangelical happenings, with more objectivity than other news efforts in the evangelical field in the past.

I like the cartoon particularly, whether it’s on the LSD drug or death of God or WCC. But I would like it more if the cartoonist would do the same terrific caricatures on Billy Graham and Carl Henry as he does with Blake and his imaginary Alpine hat.

While the reporting has been complete and good, it could be more in depth—that is, take some generally hot item in the news, conduct interviews in all camps, dissect the subject many ways, and thoroughly, and come up with feature-length and original articles that could run in the feature section of the magazine. Too often the average feature article is the opinion of one person—a professor in an ivory tower or a retired expert whose name is still known but whose subject matter has already moved somewhat beyond him.

In short, CHRISTIANITY TODAY should seek in the next ten years to bring the discipline, research, and other techniques of the journalist to its feature pages for a mixture of exclusiveness and importance along with excellence.

HILEY WARD

Religion Editor

The Detroit Free Press

Ten years ago a new publication in the field of religious magazines appeared, dedicated to the proposition that the Protestant conservative viewpoint in religion had something important and worthwhile to say.

When CHRISTIANITY TODAY first appeared it had most of the faults and few of the virtues solid magazines possess. In this respect the publication was not unusual, for new magazines must all go through a period of finding out how to do the job they wish to perform.

This is not an easy or simple thing to achieve. Beginners in any field must undergo the torturing mistakes newcomers face. Enthusiasm for an ideal is fine, but it must be buttressed by professional know-how to reach the general reader.

In its formative years CHRISTIANITY TODAY showed many signs of a somewhat amateurish approach. Its writing was not on the best professional plane, its coverage was too limited, its editorial outlook too provincial.

Through the years these defects have been gradually and successfully remedied. Retaining its fundamentally conservative viewpoint, CHRISTIANITY TODAYhas tremendously broadened its outlook by covering many of the national conventions of important religious denominations. Sending a succession of extremely competent reporters and writers to these meetings, the publication has steadily shown marked advancement in its understanding of how the different church bodies work and of their approach to various questions.

The variety of articles has also increased, with many subjects being presented that would earlier have been ignored. As a result, a more rounded and authoritative publication gradually came into being.

Under the stimulating guidance of Dr. Carl F. H. Henry and his able staff, CHRISTIANITY TODAY should improve even more in the years to come. It is to be hoped that its policy of staffing important meetings will continue, because that approach brings a firsthand knowledge and understanding otherwise impossible to obtain.

CASPAR NANNES

Religious News Editor

Washington [D. C.] Star

Congratulations on your upcoming anniversary. Your publication has come a long way in these ten years.… Do I detect a little less bias in the last year or so as compared to earlier editions, a little more of the “ecumenical” “be nice to each other” wind that is blowing in all directions?

Seriously, I, as a church reporter, peruse your magazine carefully, don’t always agree with everything, but have quoted from your pages often, always giving credit of course. I have used the material in a column that appears on Thursdays entitled “Our Churches.” I do want to commend you, specifically, on the stand you take frequently, both in articles and editorials, against the “new morality,” the lack of adherence to Christian ethics found too often in too many places.… Again, happy tenth anniversary.

ANN RUSSELL

Church Reporter

The Cincinnati Enquirer

Only ten years since CHRISTIANITY TODAY started? Seems like it’s been a fixture longer than that at the top of my reading list. Being a newspaper reporter and not a preacher, I must add that I am not a cover-to-cover reader, although I do take a look at everything in it. My interest both as a reporter and church layman is in developments in the churches, rather than in the involved theological discussions that interest clergymen.

Your news section has more widespread coverage than any of the many publications that cross my desk regularly. And you consistently have information about the smaller denominations that all of our other news services somehow miss. Particularly do I appreciate the absence of the official “denominational line” in most of your news stories.

BOB BELL, JR.

Church News Editor

Nashville Banner

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has done more in the last ten years to focus thinking on the positive strength of evangelicals than any other earthly agency. Yet it has kept a perspective in balance with the developing ecumenism of our time. This outstanding interdenominational magazine has taken up the slack which appeared with the decline of such interdenominational work as Christian Endeavor. It is high time for the Church to have a voice, a spokesman, an imparter of truth about the biblical doctrine of evangelicals. They are not nor should they be swallowed up in the relentless drive for unification of larger segments of believers.

While CHRISTIANITY TODAY has objectively yet faithfully helped to bring evangelicals across denominational lines into a unity of expression, it seems to me that its task ahead is to proclaim boldly and courageously the need for the Church to be the Church, to propose Christ as the answer to individual, social, and world problems. And then to endorse a faithful living-up to those principles and doctrines.

ROBERT W. SCHWARTZ

Religion Editor

The Pittsburgh Press

As one who also has been in the business of covering the affairs of religion for just ten years, it seems to me the greatest accomplishment in that time has been the caliber of people assigned to the work.

There was a time when the so-called “church editor” fell into one of three categories: (1) The office drunk who was banished in shame to the religion beat until he showed signs of sobriety; (2) the reluctant cub who was forced to suffer through this editorial purgatory until he was found deserving of a more respectable assignment; and (3) the preacher who hadn’t quite made it in the pulpit and thought he could do better on a typewriter.

By and large, the alert newspapers have eliminated these people in favor of proven reporters, and where this has been done, religion is taking its place alongside police, city hall, labor, the state capitol, and Washington as a major source of daily news.

The selling job that the churches still must do is at the management level. Reporters are beginning to see the potential in religion, and management must be convinced that here is where their best men must be assigned.

HAROLD SCHACHERN

Religion Writer

Detroit News

Taste and distaste in religious art

The Sound Of Muzak

In a way it is too bad that more Christians don’t read Esquire magazine. I find air trips or waiting periods in barber shops good opportunities for picking up a little outside reading—or maybe I should call it “off-side” reading. Across the years Esquire has changed considerably. However much it may jar you with some of the cartoons and a few far-out articles, I know of no place to turn for better reading on movies and books. Dwight Macdonald handles the movies, and that delightful writer Malcolm Muggeridge (former Punch editor, I think) writes about books.

In the August issue Muggeridge gives over his whole article to a review of Evelyn Waugh. You ought to read it. He is wise and witty and he is very satisfying; but specifically you ought to read it because of a wonderful comment he makes on Waugh’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church and on how the general loosening in the joints of the Roman Catholic Church since the time of John XXIII has given great distress to many Roman Catholics, especially to new converts like Waugh. Maybe the Roman Catholic Church will be like the “one hoss shay” (this, of course, originally referred to strict Calvinism): when one thing fell apart, it all fell apart.

It was Macdonald, however, who did for me what I needed to have done. He put his finger on The Sound of Music when I couldn’t do it myself. As you may recall, the whole picture is a delight from start to finish; and yet it made me uneasy about something. Who can fault Julie Andrews or cute children or beautiful scenery or gay music? And yet there it was again. The plot is built around “poor old Dad” and the wonderful little woman who can make everything come out right (to the sound of music, yet). Just to cap it all, those nuns outsmart the Nazis.

Once again, hurrah, women are too much for men. That has become a tried and true plot for our day, but it is strictly soap opera. Sic semper tyrannis.

EUTYCHUS II

Shocked And Humbled

I wish to thank CHRISTIANITY TODAY and Mr. Gordon Kelly for some of the most beautiful art it has been my privilege to behold (Sept. 2 issue). I turned from one to another, “tasting” each as I studied them. Then to the last of these treasures, and I was shocked! I was humbled, and even as I look at it now I have an indescribable feeling of longing.

J. JACKSON

Charleston, W. Va.

I do not know whether to weep, to rage, to feel sad or to be mad.…

I do not know who the museum director in New Jersey is that praises them, but I am quite certain that, let’s say, all museum people in Washington will agree with me that these works are completely below the level of acceptable art. They have nothing to do with Rembrandt—any comparison in that direction is only emphasizing that this Mr. Kelly, even if he is a real Christian, is not an artist that can be talked about seriously as an artist. If this is Christian art it would mean only that we Christians have no art, probably not even the mentality or will to have art at all.…

H. R. ROOKMAAKER

Professor of the History of Art

Free University

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

To my mind the reproductions of Gordon Kelly’s paintings were worth the price of the magazine and then some. You have done the Christian public a service in introducing the works of this man in this very effective way.

HUDSON T. ARMERDING

President

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

To me Kelly’s paintings are artistic, but they are not true to facts! To me these pictures, however good they may be, are like “hearsay” evidence in court. They are of no real value to Christianity, which is based on truth.…

WILLIAM HENRY BELT

Wakiman, Ohio

Thank you for the four paintings by Gordon Kelly, and for an excellent magazine.

THOMAS M. HUNTER

Coosada Baptist Church

Coosada, Ala.

“Whom do you say that I am?” A northern European.

GRETA J. LINDBERG

Ann Arbor, Mich.

I have framed two of them, and they are now hanging in my home where they can be a source of inspiration and beauty to myself and my friends.…

MIRIAM BURTSCHE

DeBary, Fla.

No wonder that, in an increasingly thoughtful age, many believe that “God is dead”! The concept of an anthropomorphic God is indeed dead. But this represents no recent demise. God-in-man’s-image-and-likeness never existed in the first place!…

ALLEN R. ROBERTSON

Captain, USAF

St. Louis, Mo.

Mr. and Mrs. Donald A. Hilsee and I … ask that you remove our names from your magazine mailing list.…

We were truly shocked when we saw … the “unholy” pictures in it—the product of man’s imagination—following in the footsteps of the Greek and Roman churches of adding such ugly imaginations to the pure Gospel of God.…

E. V. H. DEVLIN

Philadelphia, Pa.

Will you please inform me whether I can buy copies of the paintings by Gordon Kelly … and if so at what price.

Mrs. J. M. BAKER

Asheville, N. C.

• Reprints are available from:

Mr. Gordon Kelly

1443 North Meridian Street

Indianapolis, Indiana 46202 Cost: $1 for a folder of four or $1 each for framable copies.—ED.

The reproduction of these pictures is splendid and the article along with the news item should produce significant results.…

RICHARD WOLFF

Wheaton, Ill.

Praying For The Berlin Congress

We are continuing to pray that the Holy Spirit will make the World Congress on Evangelism God’s great event for our times. We pray this not only for the world and for the churches but also for our own church, and I pray God that this renewal may begin with me.

CONRAD M. THOMPSON

American Lutheran Church

Minneapolis, Minn.

We will be praying twice daily and I into late hours each night.

H. P. DUNLOP

Long Beach, Calif.

Our house will pray for you and the congress at each meal, and I will fast rather than take Friday dinner.

ROSS OWENS

Paramount, Calif.

$500 Mark

I send $6 for our family of six and prefer Boston environs for proposed institute.

MARTIN J. WYNGAARDEN

Emeritus, Calvin Seminary

Grand Rapids, Mich.

• With this one, gifts for the proposed Institute of Advanced Christian Studies—mostly individual dollar contributions—reach the $500 mark. If each of the 250,000 readers of this magazine were to respond, the project could be swiftly launched.—ED.

The Penny Or The Cake

Although I am commenting upon a previously published letter (Sept. 16 issue) and not upon a feature article, I nonetheless feel constrained to say that I wholeheartedly agree with the manner in which both Dr. Kantzer and Dr. Young defend the doctrine of biblical inerrancy (even though the defense is actually a reconstruction of the procedure set down by the inimitable professor of didactic and polemic theology, B. B. Warfield).

Warfield clearly perceived that a Christian has no more right to construct a doctrine of biblical authority out of deference to the (presumed) inductive difficulties in the Bible, than he has to construct a doctrine of salvation out of deference to the (actual) difficulties which arise whenever one tries to discover the hidden logic in such events as (a) the Son of God’s assumption of human nature or (b) the Son of God’s offering up of this human nature as a vicarious atonement for sin.

This means that whether we happen to like it or not, we are closed up to the teaching of the Bible for our information about all doctrines in the Christian faith, and this includes the doctrine of the Bible’s view of itself. We are free to reject the doctrine of the Bible’s view of itself, of course, but if we do so we are demolishing the procedure by which we determine the substance of any Christian doctrine. If we pick and choose what we prefer to believe, rather than what is biblically taught, we merely exhibit once again the logical (and existential) fallacy of trying to have our cake and our penny, too.

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL

Prof. of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, Calif.

Nyack Flack

We must take strong exception to your implication (“Rebel Spirit Jolts Church Colleges,” Sept. 2 issue) that Nyack’s faculty is “avant-garde” in the sense of being in revolt against traditional thought and behavior. The suggestion that we tend to the far-left extremity of the “rebel spirit” spectrum is both inaccurate and unjustified.

Nyack Missionary College must confront its share of the unsettledness and frustration that characterizes much of today’s campus population; moreover, we trust that our students will continue to engage in an honest and responsible quest for meaningful and purposeful living. Our desire as a faculty is to assist the student to relate this spirit of inquiry to the eternal absolutes of Scripture, the established tradition of evangelical Christianity, and the particular emphasis and ministry of The Christian and Missionary Alliance.

While today’s Christian student, as your article observes, may “require a type of faculty that provides more than spirituality and piety,” he certainly cannot afford to attend a Christian college whose faculty fails to demonstrate these indispensable qualities. To these essentials, we who teach at Nyack are pledged to give living testimony.

Nyack Missionary College

Nyack, N. Y.

Berlin Congress Hymn

The editor of the East German paper Die Kirche asked the question: “Is a new church hymn at all possible?” and then answered it himself as follows: “According to human estimation this question must be answered with a No. The possibility of the new hymn is directly connected with the question of faith.… When faith becomes weak, there is no ground on which a valid new hymn can grow.… The time for a new hymn can come only when we can again doubt less and believe more”.…

How pleased I am that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has been able to provide an affirmative “answer” to that editor’s question by publishing this wonderful World Congress hymn so full of faith and vision (July 8 issue).

GUSTAV G. TOBLER

Editor

Zeichen der Zeit

Mountain View, Calif.

Why Universalism?

I have been a missionary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, in Chile, for forty years, and have had close contact with universalism, as a couple of the churches placed under my care had been split by universalism a couple of years prior to my arrival on one field. I made a careful investigation as to the causes that led to that division and found that it was chiefly caused by the extreme preaching on the so-called theory of “everlasting conscious torment of all the lost for all the endless ages of eternity, or as long as God exists.” Such extreme preaching had driven some of the best and outstanding members to the other extreme concerning the destiny of the lost, or “universalism.” I have found that usually the real truth is to be found between two extreme positions. I have combated universalism all my life in its various forms, such as restorationism, second probationism, remedial punishment, purgatorial purification, and other false theories. But I am convinced that as long as the churches preach the above extreme idea, they will force others to the other extreme of universalism.

As a rule I have found that the churches are holding an unbiblical attitude regarding the final destiny of the lost. The Bible teaches in many places various degrees of punishment according to the responsibility and guilt of the individual.…

CHARLES B. LEFEURE

Chicago, Ill.

No Wonder They Stay Away

After sixty-some-odd years of reading the Bible and observing the results of the leaven of Christianity in the world about me, I am absolutely convinced that, even if it were a myth, Christianity still would be the greatest thing that ever came into this world which “God so loved” (John 3:16). It definitely is not a myth.…

Many theologians seem determined to make the Divine Word as difficult as possible for the laymen to understand. Some appear to tell their readers, or listeners, “Now, let’s pretend that you have never heard before what I am about to tell you.” Others speak or write in a manner that says, “I’ll mow you down with my erudition! I’ll bury you under a plethora of multisyllabled words!!!” If these guys are teaching young men to be pastors, or rather, have taught, it is no wonder that laymen and the unsaved stay away from church by the thousands, every Sunday.

THEODORE ASHLOCK

Liberal, Kan.

A Free Religious Press

Thank you for your thorough and detailed coverage of the Conference on Church and Society under the auspices of the World Council of Churches which met recently in Geneva (“Geneva: Brainstorming for Secular Revolution,” Aug. 19 issue). I also want to thank you for the fine editorial analysis of the conference. In this you have again demonstrated the value of a free and independent religious periodical.

As for the increasing number of extreme partisan political pronouncements made by many modern churchmen and theologians today, as well as the partisan political directives issued by their various church organizations, these may well be evaluated in the light of the RSV translation of Jeremiah 10:21, “For the shepherds are stupid, and do not inquire of the Lord; therefore they have not prospered, and all their flock is scattered.”

HENRY BAST

Bethany Reformed Church

Grand Rapids, Mich.

A Good Word

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a terrific magazine. It is most thought-provoking. Most of the ministers in our town read and enjoy it very much. I advertise it every chance that I get. May your circulation increase.

RALPH L. BRAMBLE

President

Warrensburg Association Of Churches

Warrensburg, N. Y.

The religious press faces unparalleled opportunities in a technological era

When Martin Luther evicted the Devil by casting an ink stand at the sinister invader, he established a remarkable precedent for religious journalism,” comments Carl F. H. Henry in Successful Church Publicity. How does the Protestant press fare in its battle against Satan in 1966? What has been happening in the decade since CHRISTIANITY TODAY entered the arena?

While there are many denominational publications, the number of independent Protestant magazines of wide influence is comparatively small. Among them are several journals of opinion.

In this category, CHRISTIANITY TODAY dominates the evangelical field and is a major force in the entire Christian world. Dale Francis, a Roman Catholic editor who regularly reads over one hundred Protestant magazines, comments: “CHRISTIANITY TODAY comes closer than any other general Protestant publication to representing the grassroots Protestant viewpoints.” The place of leadership this magazine has achieved is striking because it has been in existence for only ten years.

His, the magazine of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, is a lively monthly that discusses controversial issues with candor and courage. For seven successive years it has won the Evangelical Press Association award as Youth Magazine of the Year. It does an excellent job of using artwork and text to catch the attention of students on the go. Many continue to read His after graduation, and thus its public extends well beyond the college years.

Eternity is characterized by its venturesome design and approach. Somewhat less specialized intellectually than CHRISTIANITY TODAY, it also appeals to a thoughtful evangelical readership.

Decision, the organ of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, is a phenomenon of circulation growth. Cutting across denominational lines, in hundreds of thousands of homes it has opened windows upon an evangelical world heretofore unknown to many who formerly read only the denominational press. With its wide readership and its popular presentation of evangelism and Christian living, Decision is a strong voice that will grow in intensity in the decade ahead.

The Christian Century has long been the voice of Protestant liberalism. According to Dr. Robert Root, who teaches religious Journalism at Syracuse University, a significant change in the magazine during the decade has been the sharp revision of its view of Roman Catholicism. “Ten years ago,” says Root, “the Christian Century had a negative point of view. This has changed to one of positive ecumenical friendliness toward Roman Catholicism.” Although its circulation is small, the Century continues to be on often-quoted thought leader. However, I believe it is less imaginative than in the past and seems to be grasping for issues.

Christianity and Crisis, though small in circulation, is influential beyond its size in reflecting a neo-orthodox and socially liberal point of view.

The Protestant press includes many other fine publications, scores of poor ones, and a wasteland of mediocrity. Let us now survey some specific aspects of these publications as seen over the past decade.

Appearance

Ten years ago religious magazines were criticized for amateurishness of design resulting in drab grayness. Reading one’s denominational organ was viewed by many as an act of penance. In The Religious Press in America, Martin E. Marty suggests that a liturgy of a new order might ask: “And do you solemnly promise that you will faithfully and regularly read our church’s official paper?”—to which the response would be, “I do so solemnly promise, with the help of Almighty God.…”

But the decade has witnessed marked progress in the attractiveness of the Protestant press. There is more color. Paper, typography, printing, photography, and other technical aspects are strikingly improved. More offset printing has increased the use of pictures and encouraged better layout and artwork. Readability has been augmented by greater brevity, more white-space, and more subheads and other typographical devices.

An elder statesman of Christian journalism, Benjamin P. Browne, characterizes this progress over the past ten years as, “simply amazing … a new day.” But a periodical designer, Edmund C. Arnold, says: “The improvement in appearance has been only the inevitable outcome of the change of time. I don’t think that there has been enough, good enough, and studied enough change.… Spending money on talent to make sure copy is read is insurance, not extravagance.”

Employment of professional journalists and in-service technical training of staff personnel has increased. Marjorie Moore Armstrong, a former editor, whose husband is a senior editor of Reader’s Digest, comments: “Denominational weeklies and monthlies are being manned by younger, better trained men and women, chosen primarily for their aptitude for handling the written word and the published truth, rather than ‘superannuated preachers’ whom the denomination felt they could trust with the house organ or mouthpiece of the denomination.”

But the growing hospitality of Protestant magazines toward trained journalists is not without its negative side. Many feel it is dangerous for journalists who do not have theological training to be in positions where they judge the work of those who do.

Writing Quality

Motive, World Vision, Leader, United Evangelical Action, Home Missions, Latin America Evangelist, the Baptist Message of Louisiana, and hundreds of other religious publications now look better, are more widely circulated, have more technically competent staffers, and use sophisticated machinery. But is the writing in Protestant periodicals any better?

Writers, both staff and free-lance, are better paid and have more opportunities for improving their skills than ten years ago. There has been a decline in printed sermons and an increase in timely articles prepared specifically for the reader. And today the reader, more often than in 1956, is visualized not so much as the man in the pulpit but as the man in the pew. However, almost none of the writing is yet addressed to the uncommitted nominal Christian—the man in the easy chair.

Roland E. Wolseley, professor of journalism and chairman of the magazine department at Syracuse University, feels that the Protestant press has made less progress in writing than in other aspects of its work.

News Reporting

How has the Protestant press handled the news? The decade has been news-filled: Viet Nam, the racial revolution, Castro, the Berlin wall, space exploration, new nations, presidential elections, the Vatican Council, the Congo, the Consultation on Church Union, the New English Bible, the “new morality,” the death-of-God theologians. The news has begged for interpretation in the light of Christian principles.

Though the Protestant press has not yet learned the key importance of timeliness, it handles the news much better today than in 1956. Many critics say the coverage is still too parochial. Yet Christian editors are criticized as much for “meddling in secular issues” as damned for “preoccupation with denominational affairs.”

Having limited space in which to carry out its specifically assigned tasks, the Christian press must assume that its readers have access to the mass news-media. However, it has a responsibility to inform its readers about the issues behind news.

News editors are doing a better job of going out after the news than they did ten years ago. But far too little responsibility is felt toward the reader’s right to know. There is still too much rewriting of press releases with no effort to dig for facts. Significant meetings and conventions are often neglected. The Presbyterian Journal and CHRISTIANITY TODAY are often the only Protestant magazines covering the General Board meetings of the National Council of Churches.

This leads us to the whole matter of content. No one can say whether the content of Christian journalism is improving without some such qualification as, “from my particular point of view.…” For a theologically liberal, sociologically oriented Northeasterner, a conservative Oklahoma magazine filled with articles on salvation, alcoholism, anxiety, divorce, and other person-centered subjects would be irrelevant. On the other hand, the reader of the Oklahoma magazine may feel that it meets his needs exactly.

Since 1960, when the pace of significant religious events accelerated, the editorial pages of Protestant magazines have been increasingly filled with healthful debate, objective self-criticism, and intense question-asking. This is a good trend unless followed to the extreme of all problems and no solutions. A periodical that stands for nothing may condition its readers to fall for anything.

The contents of a particular magazine must be judged within the context of its sponsors’ purpose. No denomination or special-interest group is so swamped with money that it can afford to siphon some away from missions and other important programs to subsidize criticism of its basic beliefs. This does not mean that there is no room for divergent opinion on current issues within the declared policy of the group. Nor does it mean that there can be no persuasive editorial leadership.

In reporting more of the thought and action of other religious bodies, the Protestant press has contributed to increased understanding. Consider, for example, the growing dialogue between Protestants and Roman Catholics. The Vatican Council was extensively discussed by Protestants, and Catholics now cover major Protestant meetings.

The Protestant press is giving more attention to expanding its editorial outreach. There is less general discussion of “safe” moral issues and more specific encounter with “dangerous” issues that have yet to be decided. There is also more pro-and-con discussion of social action, government encroachment on the private sector, and controversial theological views.

The death-of-God movement, catapulted into national prominence by the secular press, has helped editors see the need for more theological substance in what they give their readers. The secular press may even have dealt with some of the major theological struggles more effectively than the religious press. Perhaps editors are realizing their neglect in giving adequate attention to the Christian ideology.

A decade ago the Protestant press was almost monastic. Content seemed largely introspective. Dr. John J. Hurt, a former newsman who now edits the Christian Index, says: “Ten years ago most of the general circulation magazines appealed primarily to ministers although 90 per cent of the subscribers were laymen.” But now more of the content is slanted toward laymen. There is still much of the “house organ” in the Protestant press, but less than there was in 1956.

Editorial Freedom

House organs tend to have little freedom, but what is the status of “freedom of the press” in Protestantism today? The management of nondenominational magazines, such as Christian Herald, Christian Life,CHRISTIANITY TODAY,Eternity, Christianity and Crisis, and the Christian Century has always had less potential pressure than the management of the denominational press. For example, a statement in Christianity and Crisis could make forty readers in Chicago boiling mad. They could retaliate only by canceling their subscriptions. But if a denominational organ should offend the same forty readers, and if one of them should be a key man in the power structure …! This possibility always haunts the denominational editors.

The executive secretary of the Associated Church Press, Alfred P. Klausler, compared the freedom of Protestant editors with that of their secular colleagues. Addressing a group of religious editors, he said: “You are freer because you have less binding commercial ties which might force you to compromise.”

A distinction must be drawn between the positions of independent and denominational editors. Speaking from the point of view of the denominational editor, Edwin H. Maynard of the Methodist Story said: “Editors are not independent entrepreneurs. I was not necessarily hired because of my viewpoints. The magazine is not in existence as my personal platform.”

Early in 1966 I studied significant factors in the circulation of denominational magazines. This study showed that the primary factor affecting circulation is the relationship of the periodical with a denomination. If this relationship is crucial, then the organ cannot speak out with an objective (much less a critical) voice. It is at this point that independent magazines serve a vital function.

In taking an overview of the Protestant press, one would think that its diversity is a distinct advantage. However, this is deceptive. Actually the average reader sees only a few publications. Thus the Protestant press is indeed an “invisible” press. Potential consumers have tunnel vision limiting their knowledge of periodicals other than those of their own denomination.

Protestant readers would benefit if they were all served as well as Southern Presbyterians. Presbyterian Survey is the official organ. It has a large circulation and presents the total denominational program. The Presbyterian Outlook, an independent, represents a liberal point of view. The right wing is represented by another independent, the Presbyterian Journal. With magazines speaking from three points of view, it is certain that all issues will be carefully scrutinized.

Texas Baptists, in order to divorce their state newspaper from the denominational hierarchy, long ago set up an independent board of directors for the Baptist Standard. When he feels it necessary, Editor E. S. James does not hestitate to take state denominational officials to task. The result is a religious paper of significant power.

Mechanical Improvements

Electronic data-processing has affected costs and circulation during the past decade. Decision’s phenomenal circulation increase (0 to 3,500,000 in five years) would have been impossible without computers. It cost Presbyterian Life, with its very large circulation, $120,000 to change its subscription system to meet ZIP Code requirements. The new electronic data-processing system will cost $100,000 a year more to operate than the old way. But there was no other, and definitely no less expensive, way to meet the Post Office standards. Members of the Southern Baptist Press Association have utilized their denomination’s computers. (In this decade, their twenty-nine publications were linked and also connected with other information sources by a teletype network.) This, then, has been a decade of mechanical progress for the Protestant press.

Circulation

What has happened to circulation since 1956? In its first year (1956) CHRISTIANITY TODAY had 40,000 paid subscribers. Ten years later its paid subscriptions are over 152,000. Marked growth has been reported by scores of publications. On the other hand, many magazines have declined in circulation. Some of this loss may be good—if it reflects vitality. Popularity is fine if it means vital interest resulting in greater influence for good. But it can be bad, if it means a loss of bite in dealing with issues.

Accurate figures for total circulation of the Protestant press are not available. Although circulation has generally gone up since 1956, it probably has not kept pace with the population increase.

The years 1956–1966 have witnessed new magazines resulting from mergers. The union of the Congregational Christian and the Evangelical and Reformed churches led to the United Church Herald. Four Lutheran branches now publish the Lutheran, and the Unitarian Universalists have their Register-Leader. Together represents Methodism’s effort to have one great popular voice. Entirely new magazines, such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY,Decision, Renewal, Church Administration, Spirit, and the Christian Athlete have appeared.

The decade has seen an extension of the Protestant press abroad. Mission boards sponsor publications in the developing nations. Scholarships for national Christians to study journalism are increasing. Evangelical Literature Overseas, a joint effort of many evangelical mission boards, is stepping up its flow of literature abroad every year. Organizations like the David C. Cook Foundation, Lit-Lit, the American Bible Society, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and Laubach Literacy, Inc., are encouraging widespread use of easily read Christian literature in the developing nations.

Progress since 1956 must be measured by the purposes for which Protestant magazines exist. These cannot be measured by the purposes of Time, the Saturday Evening Post, or The New York Times. Yet comparisons in appearance are inevitable. The man who puts down his Atlantic to pick up the Christian Century will desert both if the articles fail to interest him.

The Future

In summary, I should say there has indeed been progress in the Protestant press in the past decade. It has kept abreast of the overall “progress” of our culture, but certainly not far ahead. The pace of progress must quicken, if the Protestant press is to be a significant voice. Here are five suggestions.

First. The various independent and denominational publications should find a more satisfactory way of wedding journalistic expertise with theological depth. Men with a sound theological background should be taught how to write. Summer writers’ workshops and conferences can help. Since journalism is a more limited field than theology, editors and potential editors with a theological education should be sent to journalism schools. More programs like the master’s degree sequence in religious journalism at Syracuse University could be established.

Second. There should be a consolidation of some periodicals. Bigness has many economies—and rising costs plague most Protestant publishers. As Marty says in The Religious Press in America, “There are too many saying too little of consequence to too few.”

Third. Denominational leaders should provide their constituency with opportunities to hear divergent opinions from an independent voice within the denomination. There is often as much difference within denominations as there is between them. If the denominational press is to communicate truth, there must be a provision for free expression of opinion, and readers must have material for making up their minds.

Fourth. The publications should establish a clearinghouse for religious news, a service that would be ecumenical and international. The problems of information storage, retrieval, and distribution are so great, the opportunities of the press so large, and the communication crisis so extensive that the Protestant press cannot expect to accelerate its progress without access to the latest techniques of gathering and disseminating news and other data to the whole Christian world. The clearinghouse should not only provide information to religious publications but also channel religious news to the “outside.”

Fifth. There should be a grand experiment in the form of a general magazine representing the Christian point of view—a magazine out on the newsstands aimed at mainstream America. Practical difficulties may make such a high-level project difficult. But if Christian leadership of top stature could enlist adequate financial resources and secure the aid of someone like Henry Luce (born of missionary parents) to plan the strategy, the result could be the twentieth century’s biggest boost to the communication of the Christian Gospel.