WALTER WANGERIN, JR.¹Walter Wangerin, Jr., is a writer living in Evansville, Indiana. He was formerly pastor of that city’s Grace Lutheran Church. Wangerin’s latest book is The Orphean Passages (Harper & Row, 1986).

Talitha, duravisti! Talitha, thou hast endured, and thou art lovely: pulchra es, pulcherrima.

Child, you are nearly a woman after all. Tomorrow, the last of my four children, you will speak publicly your independent faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. No one will help you nor speak for you. You do this thing.

The days of your independence are at hand. But in the days of your childhood you did finally become my daughter, and you are, and you shall ever be—my daughter.

In one sense, the legal and divine sense, you were my daughter the moment we adopted you in an Indianapolis courtroom. That was binding from the beginning, and no one could snatch you out of our hands; we clung to you as tightly as any mother clings to her children in a crowd, fiercely, protectingly, proudly, cutting a way for you through senseless humanity, making a space for you to dwell in safely. You were ours from adoption, and we were yours by loving commitment.

But in another sense, the relational sense, I had to earn my fatherhood and win your daughterhood, while you endured the fumbling efforts and grew to trust me, then to love me, after all. These things could not be enforced by an adoption decree: “The child shall hereby adore her father heart to heart, or he shall have the right to bring suit against her, requiring affection by the power of the state—” Surely no parent is so juvenile as to presume love, or so mean-minded as to command it. Surely—?

Well, this parent never had the opportunity with you, Talitha, to be presumptive. You blew my illusions at the start.

I remember—

I remember seeing you for the first time in a private room of the agency’s office building. You lay face up and sleeping in a crib, eight months old, a huge head in the shape of a light bulb, perfectly round and smooth with black-hair scribbles on the top, a wondrous forehead, a miniature mouth, a little body utterly relaxed. Everyone smiled and whispered. I had a bit of a catch in my heart: no one there knew you, yet, except that you were lovely; and you would know no one there when you awoke. The baby was the stranger. She was sleeping. Whisper, people; respect her rest and her oblivion.

I remember leaning quietly into the crib, the better to see you, bringing my face very close to yours and smelling the milky innocence of baby’s breath. You whistled a little, because you breathed through your mouth.

Suddenly, inches from me, two enormous, deep brown eyes flew open, instantly awake. They tried for just a second to focus on my great head—and when they did, they flooded with panic and you, Talitha, began to scream. I pulled back immediately, but your eyes were fixed on me, and your little mouth had stretched to the size of terror, and you produced a truly expressive noise, like locomotive wheels locked and scraping railroad tracks. When I reached to comfort you, you only shrieked the louder. And stare you never-so-pleadingly about the room, you could not find one familiar face to assure you that everything was all right. My heart flew out to you. Your crying didn’t quit—not till Mom picked you up, and you clutched her neck, trembling.

Oh, but you looked warily upon me after that. When I drew too close, the shadow of fear fell across your face. No, I could not presume your love. I could not command your trust. I was the father of the baby; but the baby’s heart was kept from me, the baby’s heart suspected me. Beauty cannot love the beast in the beginning. I was the father, but you were not the daughter. Oh, Talitha! Such hard exercises we put you through so early on.

I remember—

I remember loving dearly the parchment color of your skin, but keeping myself from touching it. It was your mother whose touch you desired. And the size of your dark eyes took my breath away. And your infrequent giggle, coming from another room, blessed me like the rain: you could be happy! You had it in you to laugh. But once, you threw yourself away from a naked touch with the toilet, and wailed as though cold porcelain had been burning metal. I could neither ease you nor see into your secret past to understand why cold and heat could be confused or what your fears were.

But I remember—

I remember finally finding the key nearly a year later. It was eyebrows, your eyebrows and mine. When we sat at dinner, gazing at one another from a safe distance, I discovered that when I wiggled my eyebrows you wiggled yours in return.

Bingo! It was like asking a question and getting an answer, no words passing between. Oh, I wiggled my eyebrows after that till my forehead ached. I twisted them a thousand ways, and you answered. I told jokes with my eyebrows. I commented on the meal and the day with my eyebrows. I asked “How are you?” with my eyebrows, silently, silently. We held voluble conversations with nothing but eyebrows. And in the end, with my eyebrows I said, “I love you.”

And you answered, “I know.”

But it was with your willing kiss, when that began between us, that you said, “I love you too, Daddy.” My daughter from the beginning, you became my daughter indeed.

Cheap love, cheaply given and lightly received, cracks in the crisis; it isn’t built to bear the weight. But expensive love, slowly, carefully sold and dearly bought, is built like the oak: the crisis cannot blow it down. This is our love, Talitha.

Child, tomorrow you move toward womanhood; and I, who have carried you often since we learned our eyebrow-Latin, will begin to cease to carry you at all. I will only watch: watch with joy your initiation into adulthood; watch with some sorrow your departure from my bosom.

It’s a happy crisis, but a crisis nonetheless, when children leave childhood and then inevitably the home. It changes both the children and the parents—for how much of parenthood (which was so long my identity) is left? And the question troubles us: How much love will continue hereafter? Should I, should I continue to cling? Should I, keeping my old values and worth intact, cling? No, I shan’t, and I won’t. Because you, dear Talitha, have endured: duravisti! And because our love was dearly won, it will last this crisis, too, of your entering independence. I let you go. Something of you will never leave me.

How hard the waiting is, while we wait for love, loving without returns. But how durable is that love when finally it comes! And what beauty, Talitha pulcherrima, you will shed on the whole world now. Daughter, daughter mine—go in peace.

THOMAS BECKNELL¹Thomas Becknell is assistant professor of English at Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota. He holds the Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Iowa.

“Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered …, and I am standing alone in rebellion and growing very careless.”

Emily Dickinson wrote those words as a resolute teenager in the midst of a great revival in the midnineteenth century. One by one, her father, her family, and her friends publicly answered the call of Christ. Yet Emily resisted as revival after revival swept over Amherst, Massachusetts.

It was not from indifference that she held out so deliberately. Barely 15, she confided to her friend Abiah Root, “There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world never can fill. I am far from being thoughtless upon the subject of religion. I continually hear Christ saying to me Daughter give me thine heart.… I hope the golden opportunity is not far hence when my heart will willingly yield itself to Christ.”

When Emily Dickinson died, 100 years ago, few knew the intensity of her lifelong struggle to yield her heart to Christ. Fewer still would have guessed that this demure and reclusive woman—who in her later years took to wearing only white—would come to be recognized as one of America’s most brilliant poets.

We usually celebrate the birth of famous people. With Emily Dickinson, however, it is more appropriate to celebrate the centennial of her death. It was, in a peculiar sort of way, a birth, for hundreds of startling unpublished poems were discovered tucked away in her bureau and in secret nooks.

Nothing like them had ever been seen; they seemed to be the raw stuff of poetry—“poetry plucked up by the roots,” as one editor put it, “with earth, stones and dew adhering.” The meters are rough, the rhymes askew, but the images and the words are penetrating and direct. “I like a look of Agony,” begins one poem, “Because I know it’s true.” Seldom pretty, her poems are frank and painfully stark.

Reflecting upon the death of Emily Dickinson leads us to consider the risks of Christian faith. Some of her most familiar poems are themselves contemplations on the imagined moment of her death: “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” and “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” Many of these poems portray the process of dying, and the imagined pain of those left behind. Others call into question the assurances of Christian faith:

Dying! Dying in the night!

Won’t somebody bring the light

So I can see which way to go

Into the everlasting snow?

And “Jesus!” Where is Jesus gone?

They said that Jesus—always came—

Perhaps he doesn’t know the House—

This way, Jesus, Let him pass!

Death, in her words, was an “uncertain certainty”—that moment when life’s greatest certainty and uncertainty meet. Coming to terms with death is one way of coming to terms with Christ: “The Test of Love—is Death—/ Our Lord—‘so loved’—it saith—”

The sort of “Love” that impels belief did not come easily to Dickinson. Her “faith,” she said, “doubts as fervently as it believes.” Neither a theologian nor a philosopher, this poet understood “faith” and “doubt” imaginatively. Perhaps more of us ought to reflect as she did upon death as a focal point where belief and doubt vigorously converge.

Emily Dickinson was born within the long shadow of New England’s Puritan tradition, and she inherited its spirit of self-examination.

But New England, in the midnineteenth century, was a culture in transition. Emerson’s teaching of self-reliance was displacing the legacy of Jonathan Edwards. It was a time, poet and critic Allen Tate tells us, in which the bank was displacing the church as the ordering center of the community. But in Amherst, Edward Dickinson, the college treasurer and Emily’s father, still kept the Sabbath by going to church.

Through the influences of the church, Emily’s young imagination first developed. Vivid images from Scripture, impassioned sermons, and the sonorous hymns of Isaac Watts all gave shape and rhythm to her poems.

Sometime in her early twenties, Emily Dickinson stopped going to church, but her search for spiritual truth continued.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—

I keep it, staying at Home—

With a Bobolink for a Chorister—

And an Orchard, for a Dome—

God preaches, a noted Clergyman—

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—

I’m going, all along.

The truth is, however, that Emily Dickinson seldom wrote about “getting to Heaven” with such buoyancy and optimism. The anticipation of future joys seemed merely to sharpen the anguish of this life.

Within a few years of attending Mount Holyoke—where again she resisted the call of Christ—Emily Dickinson withdrew altogether from the social world of Amherst. Stories of her eccentricities abound: of her gingerbread cakes let down from her window to children below, and of her eerie reception of guests from behind a screen. Speculations about her motives are just as abundant. But these biographical curiosities are less important than seeing that she lived life deliberately, devoting herself wholly to a life of the imagination. “To live is so startling,” she explained, “It leaves little room for other occupations.”

Precisely that attitude, informing both her life and her work, makes her seem much more a voice of the modern age than a poet of the romantic era. Dickinson’s question was not how to die—“the merest Greek could that.” Rather, her question was how to live in the face of certain death.

’Tis not that Dying hurts us so—

’Tis Living—hurts us more—

But Dying—is a different way—

A Kind behind the Door—

The Southern Custom—of the Bird—

That ere the Frosts are due—

Accepts a better Latitude—

We—are the Birds—that stay.

The Shiverers round Farmers’ doors—

For whose reluctant Crumb—

We stipulate—till pitying Snows

Persuade our Feathers Home.

Such images appeal to all who have found themselves shivering in their own internal winter. The cold, the freezing, the scalding drop of anguish—these intensify our consciousness of living. “A Wounded Deer—leaps highest,” she noted.

Yet Dickinson remained too much a Calvinist to be mere existentialist—hence the spiritual complexity of her poems. Her fascination with death reveals at once a concern for salvation beyond and a search for meaning in this present world. The questions of one incessantly gnawed at the claims of the other.

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond—

Invisible, as Music—

But positive, as Sound—

It beckons, and it baffles—

Philosophy—don’t know—

And through a Riddle, at the last—

Sagacity, must go—

To guess it, puzzles scholars—

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown—

Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—

Blushes, if any see—

Plucks at a twig of Evidence—

And asks a Vane, the way—

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—

Strong Hallelujahs roll—

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul—

Thundering hallelujahs, and the nibbling tooth of doubt. This is the dynamic tension in her work. It is the risk of faith itself. It is the gnawing possibility that this world really is conclusion; that death leads not to eternity, but only to extinction; that God’s averted face may never be seen.

I know that He exists.

Somewhere—in Silence—

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes.

’Tis an instant’s play.

’Tis a fond Ambush—

Just to make Bliss Earn her own surprise!

But—should the play

Prove piercing earnest—

Should the glee—glaze—

In Death’s—stiff—stare—

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest—

Have crawled too far!

Should God’s playful silence prove to be serious, it would indeed be a joke carried too far! Such are the hazards of affirming “I know that He exists.” To see how much is at stake, then, is to see the courage Dickinson projects through that affirmation.

Dickinson’s theological questions were blown to a white heat during the Civil War. For many American writers in the nineteenth century, the consequences of the Civil War were as devastating as the effects of the Holocaust have been upon the modern consciousness. Death on such a scale had not been imagined.

More than half of Dickinson’s poems were written during these four bloody, divisive years. Penetrating and haunting poems, most of them fumble for a sign of God’s presence behind the awful blankness of death: “I’ve seen a Dying Eye / Run round and round a Room—/ In search of Something—/ … And then—be soldered down / Without disclosing what it be / ’Twere blessed to have seen—”

These soldered-down eyes stare at us from poem after poem. Do we dare turn away our own gaze from those “nailed eyelids”?

Shortly before the Civil War, Emily Dickinson penned a poem especially helpful for understanding her vision. “Success is counted sweetest,” it suggests, “by those who ne’er succeed.” Then, illustrating the paradox:

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag today

Can tell the definition

So clear of Victory

As he defeated—dying—

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

The one who best understands “victory” is the one experiencing “defeat.” It is the blind who most clearly know what it is to see; the lost, to be found; the doubter, to believe: “ ’Tis Beggars—Banquets can define—/’Tis Parching—vitalizes Wine—/ ‘Faith’ bleats—to understand!”

Certainty never came to Emily Dickinson. Throughout her later poems we find a pervasive tone of resignation.

But as with Peter before her, repeated denials invite the fierce gaze of Christ. Near the end of her life, she wrote: “To be willing the Kingdom of Heaven should invade our own requires years of sorrow.” Christ, the Man of Sorrows, the one acquainted with grief, persistently invaded her consciousness. His suffering, his cry of sabachthani, his death—justified hers. It was not she answering the call of Christ, but Christ answering her anguished cry. Her posture never would be one of “standing up” for the Savior, but merely a stooping, eyes bent to the earth:

Perhaps you think me stooping

I’m not ashamed of that

Christ—stooped until He touched the Grave—

We can begin to see why, in her later years, poetry itself seemed more and more like a sacrament: “Your thoughts don’t have words every day / They come a single time / Like signal esoteric sips / Of the communion Wine.”

These poems of Emily Dickinson, rare distillations of truth, clarify the necessity for faith, the bridge between certainty and uncertainty:

Faith—is the Pierless Bridge

Supporting what We see

Unto the Scene that We do not—

Too slender for the eye

It bears the Soul as bold

As it were rocked in Steel

With Arms of Steel at either side—

It joins—behind the Veil

To what, could We presume

The Bridge would cease to be

To Our far, vacillating Feet

A first Necessity.

California s latest “boom church” has power encounters with sin and sickness.

TIM STAFFORD

If the word church brings you images of steepled buildings nestled in quiet neighborhoods, you are not up to speed with the megachurches of Southern California, where freeway access and acres of parking are imperative.

In 15 minutes on the freeway, churchgoers can move between Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, Chuck Swindoll’s First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel (the original Jesus People church), and John Wimber’s Vineyard. These startlingly different churches draw from a potential audience of millions. Southern California has become a laboratory for entrepreneurial church innovation. It is the electronic church on terra firma.

The Vineyard, the latest “boom church” in Orange County, worships in a gigantic warehouse in an Anaheim industrial area, the kind peculiar to the Sun Belt, with wide, eerily quiet tree-lined streets, and large, flat buildings floating in a sea of parking lots. From the Vineyard’s parking lot, you can clearly see the peak of Disneyland’s Matterhorn. And inside, the Vineyard looks like the setup for a trade exposition—a network of girders over a vast, featureless, carpeted rectangle, with a stage at one end.

A casual, white, middle-class, youthful crowd fills this room twice every Sunday. They come excited, expecting to see healings, to experience the supernatural at work. They also come to worship: A typical service devotes 45 minutes to nonstop singing. (Wimber, a jazz and rock-and-roll musician before his conversion, plays keyboard. He has written many of the praise songs.)

Vineyard fever has spread beyond Anaheim. People come from all over Southern California, indeed from all over the world, to hear John Wimber teach and to experience Sunday worship services. He is leading a new movement, the Signs and Wonders movement. And well over 100 other “Vineyards” have sprung up across the country.

Excitement

The excitement is largely that generated by all Pentecostalism: ecstatic worship, healings, exorcisms, speaking in tongues, prophecies, and “words of knowledge.” Yet the Signs and Wonders movement is distinctive, with its own theology, its own terminology, its own music, its own style. It is breaking into churches that have never felt the full force of the charismatic movement.

Wimber is best known for his emphasis on healing, but his concerns neither start nor stop there. He does not offer toned-down stuff: he sees adultery printed on faces, relishes Third World stories of people returning Lazarus-like from the dead, and says he has prayed for thousands to speak in tongues with only one who failed to do so.

On occasion, he makes harsh assessments of the noncharismatic church. But the label “fiery Pentecostal” would never do him justice. The rotund Wimber speaks in an offhand, unrehearsed manner—a lovable teddy bear. He is also a thoughtful, original Bible expositor. He communicates to educated evangelicals. His style—cool, humorous, fatherly—is exactly pitched to baby boomers. It is a style redolent of Ronald Reagan: an awfully nice neighbor leaning over the back fence, presenting what used to be considered extreme without sounding mean or pushy.

Is this a deceptive façade? John Wimber, like most pastors of large churches, knows show biz. But is he power hungry? Money hungry? Manipulative? On the contrary, even his critics credit him with sincerity and genuine compassion. He is also, they find, a great deal more careful than some of his young followers. Criticisms center not on Wimber but on his message, which many consider divisive and off-center.

Power

The key word in John Wimber’s vocabulary is not healing, but power. He relies heavily on the late Fuller professor George Ladd’s theology of the New Testament, which emphasizes the kingdom of God as an invasive force, not only proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, but demonstrating its superior power over Satan’s kingdom through healings and exorcisms. Wimber’s essential message is “We can do what Jesus did.” In fact, he reads it as a command: We must do what Jesus did.

Traditionally, the church has emphasized the power of God in the proclamation of the gospel and in the moral improvement of Christian lives. Wimber says this is deficient; he scorns the practice of claiming the Spirit’s presence purely by faith. When the Holy Spirit moves in power, he says, you know without a doubt something supernatural has occurred.

Don Williams, a Presbyterian pastor who is an active leader in the Signs and Wonders movement, describes his ministry to drug addicts and prostitutes during the Jesus movement, before he had experienced the Spirit’s power: “I was taking people off the street and trying to heal them by having them read the Bible and pray. They were not getting free. They needed the power of the Spirit so they could live what their flesh didn’t want them to live.” Those in the Signs and Wonders movement believe that a purely cognitive approach falsely separates Jesus’ word from his work. Jesus’ work, as they read it, is a work of supernatural power against demons and sickness.

Wimber developed these ideas in association with Peter Wagner and other professors at Fuller’s School of World Mission. Neither Wimber nor Wagner was charismatic when they first met. Though Wimber had spoken in tongues as a young Christian, he taught that the charismatic gifts are “not for our time.” Frustrated as a pastor of a fast-growing evangelical Friends church, Wimber left to join Wagner in doing church-growth consultations for the Fuller Evangelistic Association.

Wagner, a small, goateed dynamo, cannot match Wimber’s platform charisma; but his seminary position, his wide reputation for American church-growth expertise, and his irenic point of view give him—and John Wimber with him—entree. Unlike Wimber, Wagner makes negative assessments about nobody. He has made a career out of finding what is good in growing churches, and affirming it—without asking many critical questions. This enables him to hold up as models of church life not only Wimber’s Vineyard, but Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, the entire Southern Baptist denomination, and just about any other church that is growing.

As a missionary in Bolivia, Wagner actively opposed Pentecostalism. But his research as a professor of missions forced him to recognize Pentecostalism as a driving force in much of church growth in the Third World. Largely through anthropologist Alan Tippett, he became aware of the “power encounter”—a contest between gods. (Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel is the classic example.) Missions history is replete with examples of missionaries who converted animistic tribes by, for instance, chopping down their ancestral grove and erecting a Christian shrine on the spot.

Wimber has broadened the concept of “power encounter” to any event where the kingdom of God confronts the kingdom of this world. The battle, he says, is marked by signs and wonders, particularly healings and exorcisms as in Jesus’ ministry.

A Revolutionary Promise

Power Evangelism, by John Wimber with Kevin Springer (Harper & Row, 1986, 224 pp.; $13.95, cloth). Reviewed by Clark H. Pinnock, McMaster Divinity College.

John Wimber has a vision for a restored church, a church in which people will again encounter a gospel of power accompanied by signs and wonders, as they did in the first century. He believes that God is ready to perform his mighty works again in our time, and that unbelievers will be bowled over as they were before.

His is a simple book full of personal illustrations, which make the meaning vivid and clear. Like Saint Paul, Wimber wants to see people’s faith resting not in the wisdom of words, but in the power and demonstration of the Spirit of God. He believes we should all be operating in the realm of the supernatural, and that we should expect daily to see God’s hand outstretched to save and to heal.

The idea is not new. We find it in Acts, and in the great ongoing Pentecostal movements of the twentieth century. But Wimber believes (and Peter Wagner agrees with him in the foreword) that a new wave of power is rolling in that could stimulate a quantum leap in world missionary outreach in the closing years of our century. Thus the book comes to us with a revolutionary promise attached.

The book is not written to develop a profound argument, and does not do so. It presents the simple message of the New Testament every Christian knows: In the beginning, God certified the truth of the gospel of the risen Lord with signs and wonders from the Holy Spirit. More than a simple truth claim calling for reflection, the message of salvation was a power encounter of the living God and the forces of darkness. Miracles of healing and guidance, therefore, served to accredit the gospel, and to overwhelm the evil powers.

Wimber does not believe God has ceased to be willing to validate his truth by supernatural means, and he has a wealth of experiences to back up his conviction. He hopes the book will open Christians up to the explosive power of their faith, and lure them into supernatural Christianity.

A large part of me responds enthusiastically to what Wimber describes and presents. I myself was filled with the Spirit through the charismatic renewal in New Orleans, and regard the Pentecostal revival as a mighty work of God. Furthermore, I received healing from a serious macular degeneracy in my only functioning eye in 1982 (having lost the other eye from retinal detachment much earlier). I know from personal experience that one such incident can be worth a bookshelf of academic apologetics for Christianity (including my own books).

So I am on board with what Wimber is saying. Jesus sent us out to preach and to heal, and we have refused to do more than just preach. No wonder we are relatively ineffective. We refuse to believe God in a whole area where he is pledged to answer the prayer of faith.

At the same time, however, there are dangers lurking close to the surface that have been visible in Pentecostal movements from the beginning and that are encountered in the New Testament itself: Fakery and manipulation are easy when one is operating in the realm of the supernatural. False claims are difficult to test, and evildoers can mask their actions by an appeal to the Spirit of God.

Furthermore, the masses are easily excited by charismania, by an overemphasis on the spectacular, to the detriment of the ongoing works of charity. A generation whipped up to a frenzy by high-tech show biz may well demand charismatic Christianity and be bored with anything else. But we must be careful not to tailor our presentation entirely to market requirements.

But having said that, we must return to the basic issue John Wimber asks us to consider. Should not Christians who claim to be following the New Testament be operating more in the power of God than we are now? Do we not serve a God who performs miracles, and displays his power among the nations?

Disillusionment

Working with Wagner as a church-growth consultant, Wimber had plenty of time to develop his ideas. For three years they flew all over America, consulting with hundreds of churches that said they wanted to grow—none of them Pentecostal or charismatic. Wagner claims he was totally unaware of Wimber’s growing disillusionment with the church. According to Wimber, “There was a lot of action that was called the work of the Holy Spirit, but it was nothing more than human effort in which the Holy Spirit was asked to tag along. I felt that it turned the stomach of God. It certainly did mine, and it wore me out.”

Wimber’s wife, who had become charismatic, started a prayer group that grew to 50 members. In 1977, at what he believed was very direct guidance from God, Wimber began to pastor it. He soon resigned his position as a church-growth consultant.

The church met in a high school gymnasium. Wimber began to preach from the Gospel of Luke, and was struck by the many healings and exorcisms Jesus did. Wimber offered repeated altar calls for healing, but the church prayed for months without seeing a single healing occur. It was a humiliating, gut-wrenching time when many people left the church in disgust. Yet Wimber would not give up. He believed that God would not let him. He was determined to see God heal people, and eventually—after ten months—he did. One young woman was healed in her home of a fever, and Wimber’s exultation knew no bounds. “We got one!” he yelled at the top of his lungs on the way to his car.

From there, the brief history of the Vineyard is a straight path. The church grew dramatically, and multiplied into what many would call a small denomination. Wimber began to receive invitations to speak all over the country, and then overseas, particularly in England.

Under Wagner’s auspices at Fuller Seminary, Wimber launched a course—MC510, known popularly as “Signs and Wonders.” It included an optional “laboratory” in divine healing, and was the most popular course at Fuller until it was canceled this year, due to theological and academic questions raised by faculty members. (See box: Cause for Concern.)

Healing

Praying for healing is undoubtedly the easiest part of John Wimber’s message for traditional believers to accept. All have a theoretical commitment to James’s instructions that the elders pray for those who are sick. But Wimber wants more than that. He wants supernatural power to be seen in the church. He expects that the power of the Spirit will be visible not only in compassionate prayer, but in miraculous healing. That is why, when Wimber prayed for healings over ten months and saw none, he was so devastated. The power of God was not being demonstrated.

Wimber respects and appreciates modern medicine—he points out that he would have lost some of his grandchildren if it were not for medicine. He also freely acknowledges that many he prays for are not healed, including British pastor David Watson, Wimber’s close friend, who died of cancer in 1984. Yet he focuses not on accepting God’s will, but on seeing God’s power.

Does the Vineyard see such power? The thousands who throng to it clearly believe they are reliving the days of the apostles. In his messages, Wimber relates spectacular healings he has witnessed in various locales. His book, Power Evangelism, summarizes the situation at his church: “The blind see; the lame walk; the deaf hear. Cancer is disappearing.”

Psychiatrist and Christian author John White has interviewed many at the Vineyard; and though he carefully points out that his evidence is strictly anecdotal, he believes there is plenty to convince a skeptic. For example, he has interviewed seven former homosexuals who saw a complete change of sexual orientation because of the healing prayers of the Vineyard.

One might get the impression, hearing Wimber publicly, that miraculous healing is as common as snow in Minnesota. But, in fact, Wimber says, because the Vineyard’s reputation draws sick people from all over, it might be sicker than an ordinary church. How many healings has he seen of the spectacular type in which a young Britisher’s withered hand began to grow slowly back to its normal size? “Very, very few,” he says.

It is not the number healed that matters to Wimber, though of course he loves bursts of miracles. His primary concern is the evident power of God. If one individual is healed, that confronts all who witness it with God’s miraculous presence in their midst.

Cause for Concern¹By Ben Patterson, pastor of the Irvine Presbyterian Church (Calif.) and a Christianity Today contributing editor.

“We haven’t had anything this disruptive on campus since I have been here—11 years.”

So says Fuller Theological Seminary faculty member Roberta Hestenes. She is referring to the now-defunct course MC510, taught by John Wimber and Peter Wagner, and better known as “Signs and Wonders” (CT, Feb. 21, 1986, p. 48).

While most of the theological faculty was critical of the course, the missions faculty was much more supportive. The course is likely to be revived in another form, but probably without John Wimber as the dominant figure.

Fuller has made a point of welcoming charismatics and Pentecostals. The seminary has courses that consider charismatic issues and faculty members who are ordained Pentecostals, and it also has a large minority of students who are charismatic.

Here are some of the faculty’s reasons for discontinuing the course and some of their concerns for the wider movement:

New secularism. Wimber’s strong emphasis on the miraculous, stressing that God is peculiarly present in this, as distinct from natural healings, borders dangerously on an unbiblical dualism. Another version of the old “God of the gaps” dichotomy is set up in which God is at work in the extraordinary and the supernatural—but not in the ordinary and the everyday.

Exclusivity. The so-called power encounter of signs and wonders was being claimed as the norm for truly biblical evangelism. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, judgment is that others have been and are doing the work of God in their own strength. Thus the great lights of the church—Augustine of Hippo, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley—seem pretty dim, for the Wimber brand of unction was absent from their ministries.

Christian magic. Faculty were concerned that the approach to the miraculous tended to be formulaic, especially in the “deliverance” ministries, in which persons supposedly oppressed by demonic powers are set free. Some of Wimber’s students stressed saying the right words or going through a list of demons’ names so as to find the specific one involved in the oppression. You go down the list until one name strikes home. This approach assumes an ipso facto God who can be coerced to do our bidding; if we do this, then he must do that.

Privatism. When the charismatic is pushed to the front of Christian experience, the ethical tends to take a back seat. It seems those most preoccupied with physical health and demonic realities tend to be the least interested in confronting these issues. But the ultimate goal of the Christian life is the fruit, not the gifts, of the Spirit. It is not that the Signs and Wonders people deny this; it is just that their emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit impedes the ripening of the fruit. Thus, while shattering moral questions face the church—racism, injustice, exploitation, world hunger, nuclear arms—its faith becomes private and narcissistic.

Failures. What do you do with the people who are not healed? This question was foremost in the minds of many of the faculty. Did Satan win one? If so, then Satan holds a commanding lead in the game, because the majority of people who are prayed for do not, in fact, get well physically. A subtle, but powerful, pressure therefore builds in the Signs and Wonders mentality to see miracles where there are none. Some faculty members were outraged at what they felt were wild, unsubstantiated reports of healings coming out of the meetings of MC510.

The controversies growing out of MC510 follow the same contours that have been there from the beginning of the Pentecostal movement in this country. What is new is the attempt of a relatively mainstream Christian institution like Fuller Seminary to incorporate a bit of primitive Pentecostalism. So far, the good folks at Fuller have fared about as well as could be expected.

Dispute

Few of Wimber’s critics deny the validity of healing, or doubt that it occurs through him. They simply assert that Wimber makes too much of it, putting it on a par with the proclamation of the Word of God. They also think Wimber is mistaken in believing that his gifts are available to any Christian; many see him as uniquely empowered for a healing ministry, but suggest that troubles begin when a raft of young followers insist on duplicating his success.

One Fuller professor suggests that the power of Wimber’s church is the excitement fueled by healing, not the renewal of hope for God’s coming kingdom: “It has established as its criteria evidences. It identifies Christ’s kingdom as that which overcomes sickness, overcomes evil. Where there is no overcoming of sickness, there is no kingdom. People are not coming to the Vineyard to be renewed in their hope for the future; they are coming for healing in the present.” The same professor speaks of “lottery Christianity” in which there must be a few big winners—spectacular healings—and many $10 winners—cured headaches—in order to attract a crowd. This is far from a theology of the Cross, he says.

Proponents of the Signs and Wonders movement vigorously dispute that assessment. Yet some see the danger. Signs and Wonders leader Don Williams talks about the possibility of making healing an end in itself: “Health is a preoccupation of our country. Does that mean health should be a preoccupation of our churches? Or is this a work of God? Luther said, what is the gospel today may be the law tomorrow.”

Knowledge

Typically, Wimber or one of his associates will say to a crowd, “God is telling me that someone here has a sore back. If you have that sore back, would you stand up and identify yourself so that we can pray for your healing?” This insight they call the “word of knowledge,” and it is just as significant to them as healing.

In Power Evangelism, Wimber describes the “divine appointment” as a key to effective evangelism: God gives a believer a message to be delivered to a particular person, and the astonishing, supernatural nature of the message often penetrates that person’s defenses. For instance, Wimber tells of seeing the word adultery printed on the face of a man he met on an airplane; then God gave him the name of the woman involved. The man was so shaken he was converted on the spot.

Hearing Wimber you may conclude that these messages are utterly outside normal human experience. But Wimber is talking about something close to the “inner impressions” that have long prompted people to say, “The Lord is leading me …” Wimber writes, “There is something very simple, almost childlike, about power evangelism. God gives impressions, and we act on them.” He believes that our post-Enlightenment Western world view makes us uniformly skeptical about God speaking to us through mental or visual impressions.

Some question whether Wimber is as expert in distinguishing the voice of the Spirit as he claims. Roberta Hestenes, a professor at Fuller, says she has heard Wimber claim virtual infallibility, but she knows of particular cases where his “word of the Lord” has been wrong.

Others are troubled by the authority the “word of the Lord” lends to a leader in front of a large group. Mel Roebeck, an Assemblies of God pastor who is the assistant dean of Fuller’s School of Theology, cites a comment made by Kenneth Hagin, a well-known charismatic leader: “Hagin says that in every city he travels to, a number of people will be waiting for him with a word of the Lord. But in all those years, Hagin says, only a few of those words have come true. That’s a devastating comment on the word of the Lord.”

Roebeck’s concern is for testing the message in the context of the whole church. Some worry that Wimber has no peers to hold him accountable; his church elders are all much younger than he.

Exorcism

After healing and words of knowledge, exorcism is an essential ingredient of the Signs and Wonders movement.

Don Williams says many pastors are blind to the chaos that has invaded our culture—“to the occult, to witchcraft, to the infiltration of Eastern religions, to what drugs are doing to a whole generation. They are living in a world that isn’t even our world. Since the sixties there has been a decisive shift not only in world view but in the experience of people. People on the street are in contact with personal evil every day.” To deal with such chaos on a strictly cognitive level is, he says, “just stupid.”

Controversy comes particularly with Wimber’s belief that Christians must sometimes be delivered from demons. There is no scriptural warrant for such a practice, some critics contend.

Wimber and his supporters respond that there is some evidence demonic powers can influence Christians—as Satan influenced Peter when he tried to convince Jesus to avoid the cross.

Says Williams, “The New Testament evidence is indefinite. On an experiential level, I have seen Christians delivered from demonic power, and the deliverance has absolutely changed their lives. I have seen alcoholics and cocaine addicts have the evil power expelled, and their compulsive addiction disappeared instantaneously.”

Normative?

Regent College theologian J. I. Packer asks, “In saying that ‘power evangelism’ is normative, do they realize they are saying that the evangelism of John Wesley, D. L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham is sub-biblical?”

Leaders of the Signs and Wonders movement understand this concern. Wimber, responding to his dispensationalist background, has catalogued miracles in the history of the church, to make clear that the so-called supernatural gifts have never disappeared. Indeed, the historical evidence is strong. But there is still a problem: While the Gospels and Acts are studded with the supernatural, accounts of the church since the second century are at best sporadically miraculous. Miracles could hardly be called the everyday experience of the Spirit.

Could it be, as some Pentecostals hold, that the remarkable spread of the Pentecostal movement throughout the world is a sign of the approaching end—a “latter rain” of the Spirit? Reformed theology, which has influenced John Wimber, would tend rather to stress the continuity of the kingdom through the ages. And so both John White and Don Williams, instead of emphasizing the newness of Signs and Wonders, emphasize the movement’s links to historical revivals—primarily Whitefield’s and Wesley’s, but also Luther’s, Francis of Assisi’s, and others.

This historical link opens up a broad range of the supernatural. Asked whether miraculous healings are normative, Williams responds, “The direct intervention of God in our lives is normative. There are different historical periods in which the work of the Holy Spirit differs. Most normative to the New Testament faith are the periods of great revival. In all these you find the outpourings of God’s Spirit, the regeneration of evangelism, and manifestations of demonic power.” Perhaps, speculates Williams, God is doing physical healings in our time as an accommodation to our health-oriented culture.

Seen this way, the underlying message of the Signs and Wonders movement to the evangelical church is “Get on your knees.” The Signs and Wonders movement would not merely add Pentecostal modes of ministry, but would attack a view of the church that has no expectation of God’s power above and beyond our technique. It would ask us to stop trying to manage God. It would ask us to take risks in order to experience an outpouring of the Spirit. Says John White, “The danger is not that you will be hooked up with something phony. The danger is that you will miss being with the movement of the Spirit.”

Dualism

More traditional evangelicals like J. I. Packer would urge the same dynamism but put the stress in a different place—partly because they see God’s supernatural power working mainly within natural processes rather than over and against them. Packer suggests that Wimber and his followers “are nearer to dualism than an old Calvinist like me. They think in terms of a practical dualism. ‘Satan is on the loose. Nevertheless it is the privilege of Christians to bind him.’ This is the way they believe we bring most honor to God and secure his benefit for our lives.

“I would honor God,” Packer continues, “by articulating the victory in another way. Christ enables us to be more than conquerors under pressure. We seek the strength to cope with divinely permitted circumstances. There are many of us for whom the role model is Joni Eareckson rather than John Wimber. We see the powers of the kingdom operating, but mainly in regeneration, sanctification, the Spirit as a comforter, the transformation of the inner life, rather than in physical miracles which just by happening prevent much of that other kingdom activity whereby people learn to live with their difficulties and glorify God.”

Signs and Wonders offers what the Pentecostal movement has offered generally, a challenge to experience, and not just talk about, God’s unmanageable presence. Its temptations are also those that have dogged Pentecostals—schism and spiritual elitism and supernatural showmanship eclipsing the gospel.

Bob Meye, dean of Fuller’s School of Theology, says the most disturbing aspect of the controversy at Fuller has been the tendency to identify the Holy Spirit with one person. He described his own upbringing in a Pentecostal family, where he agonized over his inability to speak in tongues. “It took me many years to realize that it doesn’t really matter. I have great respect and appreciation for the Christian heritage I received in the Pentecostal church. But overall, I would have to say that the Pentecostal church is no better, and no worse, than many other churches I have known. I would like to acknowledge that through all the centuries the church has been very flawed, and yet, at its best, it has been faithful to the Lord.”

Will the Signs and Wonders movement turn out to be, ultimately, just the latest trend from L.A.? Will it excite people for a few years, force incremental changes, and then fade into obscurity? Or will it turn out to be, as some expect, the source of a revolutionary revival? At this point, nobody can be sure.

However, one thing is sure: Signs and Wonders is part of a bigger Pentecostal movement that is changing the church worldwide. Noncharismatic evangelicals are trying to come to terms with this movement, and in a less dramatic way, the Pentecostal movement is trying to come to terms with the wider church.

Signs and Wonders, like its parent movement, carries a surge of evangelism, of praise, of expectation of the Spirit’s power. It reopens forgotten modes of ministry. John Wimber challenges the evangelical church not to live by its techniques and its programs, but by the Spirit—not to harden in its expectations of the way God ought to act, but to become open to the surprising works of God.

John Wimber challenges us not to box God in. His critics would bring the same challenge to him.

From the boardwalk you can see him, with his beard and dark curly hair, half-kneeling and half-lying on the mound of sand. He carefully shapes the sand—carving, patting, piling more on, scooping some away, spraying it down, standing back to survey, returning to make a change here or there. Gradually, a larger-than-life figure of Christ on the cross emerges. As a passerby on the boardwalk, you feel as though you have watched prayer become an art form.

For four years, Randy Hofman has been ministering in a unique way to thousands of tourists and locals who come to the beach resort of Ocean City, Maryland. The 33-year-old, who actually is an ordained minister, now has boardwalk vacationers for a congregation, a biblical scene sculpted in sand for a text. An expanse of beach is his peripatetic pulpit. Each evening during the summer season, you can walk out on the beach at Second Street and join the crowd of admiring onlookers.

Hofman’s ministry has evolved over the past 11 years. After studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, he came to Ocean City to do seascapes and landscapes. Instead, he began working with Marc Altamar, an artist who was then doing sand sculptures on the beach and religious chalk drawings on a concrete slab on the boardwalk. When Altamar moved to Florida, Randy took over as unofficial sand sculptor-in-chief for the resort town. (In daytimes, he works as a professional sign painter.)

Randy’s daily routine is a rigorous one. Every afternoon at about 4, he comes to Ocean City from his home in nearby Berlin. He gathers his hose and flat shovel from the shed loaned to him by a nearby hotel. His only other tool is a plastic crab knife (for the fine work).

The first project is to dig a huge pit so his figures can be at an angle, thus less exposed to wind, rain, and gravity. As he digs, he wets the sand, giving it the adherence he needs. By 6 P.M., he is usually ready to start sculpting.

Often Hofman chooses his theme just an hour before, selecting from among his repertoire of about a hundred biblical settings. His choice is not entirely due to artistic motivation or the moving of the Spirit. “Actually, it’s a pragmatic approach, according to what’s left over from the night before, what the pile lends itself to, whether I have help that night, how much energy I have,” Randy admits.

His favorite theme is the Crucifixion, the “center of our faith.” Yet the crowds seem to like the more grandiose scenes, such as the Last Supper. The larger scenes, with their magnitude of intricate detail, tax Hofman’s stamina.

The Last Supper, for instance, demands attention not only to composition (“It’s basically the Leonardo da Vinci composition of the table”), but to dozens of smaller matters. He gives Peter a bald head, and also identifies Judas and Matthew. “But the rest of the guys I make a cross section of humanity—a giant guy, a skinny guy, a fat guy, a happy guy, a tough, stern guy,” Hofman reports. Randy uses workers at the local hotel as his models of humanity.

“They usually turn out to be the best portraits of the disciples sitting at the table.”

Cast in marble, his figures might serve as a monument to Christian faith. Cast in sand, they are often destroyed by the elements before morning. Yet Randy sees a message even in their temporariness. His work is to glorify God and to bring hungry souls to salvation in Jesus, not to bring himself acclaim. Passersby may also be reminded of their own transience.

Hofman hopes they will understand that “today is the day of salvation. People get bugged that I don’t make the sculptures in more solid forms. That’s flattering, but I think the Lord has been gracious to me in allowing me to practice on sand.”

At 9 P.M., tired and covered with his artistic medium, Randy faces the gathered crowd. Now, leaning on his shovel, wandering from spot to spot, he preaches—this time a sermon with words. He wants his 15-minute sermon heard by all who come to hear him, whether out of curiosity or desire to praise God.

Randy’s initial ministry did not include the preaching. “I’m not by nature a public speaker. People think I’m very bold and courageous and dynamic out here. I used to worry about preaching, but now it’s like it was for the apostles: It comes in the hour I need to know. I quiet down and think just before I preach. The only thing I try to prepare is the opening line—something relevant to the evening’s theme—to get people’s attention.” Each sermon ends with a basic proclamation of salvation.

At 9:30, Randy’s informal sermon is over. He moves closer to the attentive group gathered on the boardwalk. Some have questions; some seek counsel; some just listen.

By midnight (on some nights it’s later), as the artist begins to put his tools away, the elements are already erasing his message in the sand.

By Sara Lewis, a free-lance writer living in Ocean City, Maryland.

There were two deacons in my boyhood church, Bee Taylor and Orva Jordan. The reason for only two was obvious—they were the only men active in the church. Others moved in and out of the church fabric, but Bee and Orva were the only “deacon material” who were willing to do the job.

That boyhood church of long ago was, in a word, small (although at the time it seemed more than big enough). Rarely did Sunday school attendance exceed 100; and more often than not it numbered only 70 or 80 of the “faithful.” Most of the attendees were hard-pressed culturally and economically, with many families, including my own, struggling to survive in post-Depression America.

Still, I owe that small, culturally and economically deprived church a debt of gratitude for giving me a basic foundation in Bible and Christian living, and ultimately directing me into the ministry. Despite its size (or lack thereof) and low visibility, it did its job.

Today, our high-visibility mentality too often obscures the significant impact of these low-visibility influences. And yet the fact of the matter is that there are more small churches in America than large churches. Anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of most denominations are “small church” (usually under 200 people). And when you have weeded out the deceased, nonresidents, and dropouts, most church rolls could probably be cut as much as 50 percent—all of which means that small churches are often much smaller than their membership rolls indicate.

My guess is that at least 60 percent of you reading this column carry the spiritual legacy of a small church. I would also guess the influence of your small church was disproportionally large for its size. Handicapped by lack of resources, small churches often rise to the challenge and leave big footprints behind them.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m for church growth. Stagnation and ingrown vision are never worthy goals. We are mandated to go and disciple, and therefore we must be in a growth mode.

But despite all our efforts to promote growth, there will always be the many small churches, quietly and in various degrees of effectiveness doing their job. Let me, therefore, draw upon my own small-church experience and suggest four reasons why these low-visibility ministries are so effective.

1. The church was there when I needed it: a small, flickering light, to be sure—but it was a light and it was there.

2. The two deacons, Bee and Orva—low-profile, ordinary men—were there, and they did the job other men would not do. And they kept on doing it when others would have quit. With them, a small band of the faithful cleaned the church, taught Sunday school, gathered funds, played the piano (which was usually out of tune), sang, wrapped Christmas candy, and performed a hundred other tasks in the name of Jesus.

3. A stream of faithful pastors, including the local village blacksmith, served faithfully despite starvation wages—encouraging, winning, praying, preaching, visiting, discipling. Not one of them ever wrote an article or a book, appeared on radio or TV, or attracted much attention beyond our church. But each left important footprints.

4. A family spirit prevailed, with prayer, faithfulness, persistence, and love outweighing human ingenuity and carefully crafted programs.

So, I pay tribute to my boyhood church, and to the tens of thousands of small churches just like it. I salute them all for a quiet but effective job well done.

V. GILBERT BEERS

Youth, Faith—And Baptism

I approached with great interest “The Mystery of Building Faith: How a Child Learns to Love God” [CT Institute, June 13]. I was disappointed: You did not include a traditional Lutheran point of view in the discussion. Not to include a conservative, confessional Lutheran is all the more amazing in that a Roman Catholic theologian was one of the conversational partners. On the surface there seemed to be little difference between his view and that of the evangelical position that sees the age of accountability as necessary for baptism. It becomes clear that Lutherans and evangelicals are operating with a different concept of faith. A more nearly complete point of view would have been reached if the Lutheran view would have been included. As one of my colleagues remarked, that concept of infant faith is unique to the Lutheran position.

Lutherans hold with evangelicals to the same firm convictions of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures. This common conviction makes it all the more necessary that Lutherans be allowed to engage in dialogue with evangelicals where their differences are contributions that could not be made by others.

DAVID P. SCAER

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Ind.

I noted the emphasis on the presence of the parents. However, a basic contradition gnaws away at my conscience. How can mission boards mandate or even encourage missionary parents to place their children in a school hundreds of miles from their home?

Is there any adequate justification for this practice that continues to tear apart the very fabric of the family unit you have so poignantly focused on as the role model for spiritual training?

There appears to be a contradiction when an evangelical expert states that “there is no substitute for the parent—a parent who not only lives with the child, but interacts with the child …” (Joy). Yet the message to missionary parents is that theirs is a godly sacrifice. Does a double standard exist?

MARJORIE ALFANO

Vincentown, N.J.

I understand darku not as a verb, “the way he should go,” but as a simple possessive noun, “his way” (Prov. 22:6). Simply put, “Train a child in his [own] way; even when he is old he will not turn from it.” Let a child have his way and even when he is grown up, he will be a spoiled brat.

Too many Christian parents have mistakenly taken the traditional King James rendering as a promise of God and let their teen and adult children stray without a word, hoping in that promise of restoration. Parents should pray for and plead with their children who have turned away from faith. Proverbs 22:6 is a warning for child rearing.

REV. MICHAEL J. IMPERIALE

First Presbyterian Church

Greenlawn, N.Y.

Job’S Journey Of Faith

Thank you for Philip Yancey’s insightful look at Job’s experience of the journey of faith [“When the Facts Don’t Add Up,” June 13]. I am grateful for his opening for me new vistas of the mind and love of God. Surely, it helps us to see that the reality of the Sacred Pages is a theology of the Cross, rather than of glory—until we reach that glory.

This one article is well worth the price of a year’s subscription.

REV. N. F. SPOMER

Christ Lutheran Church

Egan, Minn.

Yancey’s analysis of the Book of Job is one more demonstration of his insight into the issues of pain and faith. I would, however, come to the defense of Job’s friends on one score: As soon as they heard of their friend’s misfortune, they came and sat with him in silence for seven days and nights. Perhaps Job could have done without the insipid advice that followed this vigil. I wonder, though, if he would have forgone the close companionship his friends offered. (In fact, Job never dismissed his friends, only their counsel.)

And I wonder how often we offer the Jobs of our world our prayers rather than our presence. Job tells his friends, “If only you would be altogether silent! For you, that would be wisdom.” To come alongside the injured and share their sufferings in silence would, for many of us, be wisdom.

STEVE SWAYNE

Seattle Pacific University

Seattle, Wash.

In this life, so often filled with difficulties, one often comes to the conclusion, “Boy, could I write an article about the meaning of suffering after this experience is over,” only to open CT and find an article such as Philip Yancey’s on the meaning of Job’s suffering has said it so much better. It has been this way time and time again.

LESTER H. HOLLANS

Southern Free Enterprise Center

Birmingham, Ala.

Yancey’s Job article was excellent. His writing is cogent, his imagery lucid. Each paragraph pushed me to the next.

RICH KUBOW

Jackson, Miss.

Card Shuffling

For years I’ve read, enjoyed, and tried to support Christian magazines. But alas, their persistent annoyance in one area has almost driven me mad. It’s those insufferable “blow-in” cards.

You know what I mean: those little subscription cards they insist on sticking in the magazine even though the person holding the magazine obviously already has a magazine.

At first, I felt some sort of misguided responsibility to “save” the silly things. I would attempt to make them useful as bookmarks. I saved them in shoeboxes until I ran out of closet space. I tried to convince friends and family they were a novel collector’s item of the future.

The problem is that they all appear so—valuable. Coupons, savings vouchers, no-risk offers, certificates; soon I found myself tentatively opening hymnals, Bibles, commentaries, even closet doors, always expecting little cards to blow out.

I know I sound a little irrational or unstable. And I have been seeing a therapist. He’s encouraged me to use the cards for gift subscriptions to my friends, thus converting a source of frustration and hostility into a positive act that benefits others. So tomorrow I’m going to put my frustration to rest. I’m mailing in my 15 shoeboxes full of coupons from 1959 to provide gifts for all my friends—at over 93 percent off the current cover prices.

EUTYCHUS

The Mystique Of Celebrity Aid

Charles Colson [“We Aren’t the World,” June 13] provides Westerners, especially Christians, with some excellent food for thought concerning our malnourished view of helping starving people. He helpfully challenges the burgeoning mystique of celebrity aid, but he also points toward the fact that providing food for the starving people of the world is a complex and sensitive matter.

Giving people food in crisis situations and enabling them to more adequately feed themselves are acts that need to be done with careful thought, fervent prayer, and deep humility. Doing this only when an emergency hits the headlines is not enough. As someone said at the MCC [Mennonite Central Committee] discussion on food aid and development: When the media discover a famine, Christian aid agencies should already be preparing to move to other areas of still-invisible crises.

LARRY KEHLER

Conference of Mennonites in Canada

Winnipeg, Man., Canada

I believe Colson is completely off the mark when he compares musicians’ well-publicized efforts to biblical allusions to displaying one’s piety in public. But these musicians do not need public acknowledgement of their actions. They make their public displays very obvious for another, completely different, reason—which also has biblical parallels. If we are given a gift, do we hide it under a bushel? No; we put it on a stand so that all in the house will have a light to live by. Similarly, these musicians have been given a gift of tremendous media attention. They have taken this gift and put it on the pedestal so that the world can see the good they are doing and be moved to action.

Colson is correct in his assessment; yet it would do us good to give the performers the benefit of the doubt. The bottom line is this: It would behoove Colson to admit that these events are sincere, heartfelt efforts by their organizers to heighten consciousness and to spur action for the downtrodden.

STEVEN M. GANDT

Topsfield, Mass.

Money? Evil?

I was amazed that a journal as theologically sophisticated as CT would print a statement that “Money is evil” [“Reflections,” June 13]. Scripture states that “the love of money is the root of many evils,” but nowhere does it condemn money as evil. Affluence, whether of individuals or institutions, produces a need for extra vigilance. But so do the cares of the world or persecution and tribulation, legalism, youth, et cetera. Yaconelli’s approach reminds me of someone I heard who was going to do away with crime by abolishing money because money is the root of every evil. Wouldn’t it be nice if wickedness could be so easily abolished?

DAVID F. SIEMENS, PH.D.

Thousand Oaks, Calif.

No Disarmament

I must comment in response to Kenneth Kantzer’s “One Cheer for Carl Sagan” [Senior Editor, June 13]. Throughout Jesus’ teachings, or those of the other New Testament writers, I see no reference to disarmament, peace negotiations, or even any political action. Instead, I see Christians playing the part in society that they are uniquely prepared for, telling the lost about salvation. That is how we will preserve this planet or make political change!

STEVE HEESE

The Church in South Denver

Denver, Colo.

Timely Words On Alcoholism

The editorial “Tough Is Not Enough,” by Kenneth S. Kantzer [May 16], has come 40 years too late—but yet, at a most opportune time. As a Lutheran, I was raised to react to life that goes by me. Yes, we should punish this, yes, we should send this man to drunk-driving school, and yes, we should support MADD. Times are changing; the system doesn’t work. Kantzer is correct when he says, the “root answer: an abiding concern.”

RICHARD L. JENSEN

Mission Hills, Calif.

Kantzer’s editorial only grazes the surface. Drunk driving is merely part of a much deeper problem. For years, prosecuting attorneys have fumed because jurors would not convict drunken drivers. In today’s society, drinking is accepted as a normal life pattern. Beyond that, during the last decade, sales of retail liquor stores have increased almost $1 billion each year. Christians, one hundred million strong, must recognize and emphasize to others the heavy toll taken in lives by alcohol. This occurs not only in front of careening cars—but behind closed doors.

CHARLES W. JAMISON

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Kantzer states: “We need to be committed most fully to the current research into discovering a chemical pill to counteract the effects of alcohol on the human brain.” This is no more a solution to the problem of drunk driving than abortion is to the problem of unwanted pregnancy. What society really needs is self-controlled individuals who are disciplined enough to abstain from this potentially deadly drug that offers absolutely no good consequences.

PAMELA A. POULHUS

Mohopac, N.Y.

Heresy Hunters’ Paradise?

Your presentation on the New Age movement (May 16) makes us think—and sometimes this is a painful experience. Congregations are weary of the steady reminder that man is a miserable, hopeless, self-destructive sinner.

People hunger for a more spiritually uplifting message that awakens in them newborn thinking, that stimulates them to be twentieth-century practitioners of Christ’s more abundant life. In short, the great put-down has gone far enough.

Did we bring the New Age religious movement on ourselves? Is it all so bad? Christianity should be out front, ahead of the pack, not engaged in creating a heresy hunters’ atmosphere.

DR. JOHN CHRISCI

South Miami, Fla.

I read the Burrows article with great interest since I have spent the last several years studying the New Age movement. He states that Cumbey and Hunt are incorrect when they imply that “the NAM rejects Christianity and that it is intent on exterminating it.”

With my extensive study of the New Age movement, I can assure your readers that it is Cumbey who is correct, not Burrows. I can emphatically state that the NAM is very definitely planning to exterminate the Christians. Seeds of Peace, a New Age newsletter, states that “those who are attached or committed to a belief system [Christians] will also fall along with the system when it’s eventually shattered.”

DR. CATHY BURNS

Mount Carmel, Pa.From the Senior

Editorial healing. Change is a certainty of editorial life: rewrites, revisions, schedule shifts. When the August issue was first planned, the cover was to have emphasized a three-article series on the black church in America. Research and writing moved along smoothly until staff determined more time was needed. Editors and writers wanted to make sure the articles addressed more than needs that had been reported on a hundred times before.

All of this was fine and good, but it left us without an August cover story (and a deadline breathing down our necks)—until senior writer Tim Stafford submitted his piece on John Wimber and the healing ministry of California’s latest boom church, The Vineyard. After one reading, we knew our editorial problem was solved.

In typical Stafford style, “Testing the Wine” is more than a simple collection of facts and figures about a person and a movement: It is a personal look at what makes this controversial ministry tick—complete with sights, sounds, and the charismatic personality of John Wimber.

“Exorcisms. Physical healings. Resurrections. Frankly, I was skeptical,” Tim said, reviewing with us the makings of his third cover story for CT in two years (all, interestingly, featuring cover caricatures). But after spending some days with Wimber and others at their “Signs and Wonders” outpost, Tim felt he was able to look objectively at a ministry that is changing lives, but not without its outspoken critics.

As for that three-part series on the black church, it will appear in the September 19 issue.

Love letters in the sand. Just in time for the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer—sand evangelism. A look at the man who sculpts the Scriptures is the focus of this month’s Church in Action.

HAROLD SMITH, Managing Editor