It’s pitching its new movie to the Christian community.

“How many of you came to see a good film?” Roger Elwood of Disney Productions asked a largely Christian audience of several hundred at a private screening last month in Burbank, California.

Also on the bill were evangelist Rex Humbard, gospel singer Doug Oldham, CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor emeritus Harold Lindsell, cult specialist Walter Martin, Ben Roth of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, and Cameron Wilson of World Literature Crusade. The program for the event was in church bulletin format. It featured biblical quotations and referred to the audience as a “congregation.” Ushers issued a two-page document explaining the theme of the movie (“1 John 2:16 is the theme of this film”) and offering interpretation of some of its “allegorical references”. The film in question was Disney’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, released nationally in late April. It is based on novelist Ray Bradbury’s taut, supernatural thriller of the same name, written in 1961.

If all of this seemed to be an unusual way to introduce a Hollywood film, even a Disney film, it was indeed. It is evident that Disney hopes it has the next Chariots of Fire. That film, distributed by Warner Brothers, was shown to Christian leaders around the country to generate interest before its national release. It was a box office success and was named best picture of the year for 1981. Disney is also leaning heavily on the evangelical community. The movie has been previewed in the Wheaton, Illinois, area, at First Baptist Church in Dallas, and at Philadelphia College of the Bible. Elwood, the Disney publicist, has been turning the previews into religious meetings, as evidenced by the program in Burbank. The film, however, does not seem to some to have as clear a Christian message as did Chariots of Fire. It does have a couple of gory scenes, and a genuinely frightening one in which a swarm of spiders invade a boy’s bedroom (a full review of the movie is on page 71).

The story is best described as a highly symbolic fantasy-horror tale, centering on two boys in a small Illinois town. One October, a mysterious carnival rolls in, managed by an enigmatic figure named Mr. Dark, whose “House of Temptation” offers unwary citizens the gratification of their deepest desires but deceives them about the consequences. A good-versus-evil battle ensues. Jason Robards plays the father of Will Holloway, one of the boys. Jack Clayton (The Great Gatsby, The Innocents) is the director.

Before the film began, Rex Humbard spoke on the importance of the family. Doug Oldham sang some numbers and commented that what he had seen of the picture had “scared him half to death.” Harold Lindsell talked briefly about the reality of evil and how Satan is the enemy of believers in Christ. Ray Bradbury, who wrote the screenplay from his own novel, was present but did not take part in the opening ceremonies.

In the discussion that followed, Walter Martin defended the allegorical approach by alluding to the biblical book of Esther, which makes no mention of God. Ray Bradbury took the stage and explained that he had based his literary career on the belief that good triumphs over evil. Harold Lindsell said privately he thought the film was “artistically well done,” but expressed some concern that the allegorical C. S. Lewis style “is less appreciated by some in the evangelical world.”

Something Wicked was not originally slated for strong promotion in religious markets. This is the brainchild of Roger Elwood, who has been with Disney since January and describes himself as a fundamentalist. In an interview, he stated that there are different kinds of “Christian” films: those that are expressly evangelistic, such as the Billy Graham films; and those that have no direct biblical content, but are “wholesome,” family films with moral values. Elwood sees Something Wicked This Way Comes as falling between these two categories. It is, he said, “a pre-evangelism film,” that “does not have John 3:16 recited every five minutes.”

Elwood affirmed that he “doesn’t care” if the high-profile pitch to Christian audiences hurts the film in the general market where “Ray Bradbury will be emphasized” in the promotion.

Certain scenes, Elwood said, had been cut in deference to potentially squeamish Christian viewers. These included an episode (prominent in the novel) where Mr. Dark denounces the Bible and one where the witch embraces one of the boys in a manner that might be considered bordering on erotic. Acknowledging that the picture still contains some pretty graphic violence, including a beheading, Elwood explained that it was not “violence without purpose.” Elwood also agreed that Something Wicked is indeed a horror film, but differs from the recent rash of Hollywood movies of the same genre in that it shows, “that evil is not omnipotent.”

Elwood, in a stance similar to that of television crusader Donald Wildmon, expressed hope that audiences, by supporting this film, would “send a message to Hollywood.”

LLOYD BILLINGSLEYin Burbank

The Ncc Takes It On The Chin One More Time

First Reader’s Digest and then “60 Minutes” ignited controversy with reports that the National Council of Churches (NCC) supports left-wing political causes abroad. Now, the NCC is faced with fresh documentation that has sparks flying even closer to home.

The new investigation, published in two April issues of the weekly United Methodist Reporter (UMR) and its sister newspaper, the National Christian Reporter, examines the earlier criticisms with an evenhanded thoroughness that has won praise from both the council and its critics.

UMR editors sifted through NCC press releases, literature, and resolutions from the past five years and concluded that “the ‘leftist tilt’ of which the NCC has so often been accused” is “undeniably real.”

Unlike the previous mass media reports, UMR shifts the emphasis away from tales of church offerings that might be financing Third World guerrilla movements. Instead, it concentrates on what it sees as the real problem: “inconsistent and one-sided statements and staff actions.” The paper found a four-to-one tilt in favor of the Left.

For instance, the NCC has recommended cutting off U.S. economic development assistance to Latin American countries led by right-wing dictators, while advocating assistance for equally repressive Communist regimes such as the government of Vietnam. The paper reported that the NCC has been falsely accused of misusing church offering money to “buy guns” or contribute directly to Marxist revolutions.

The series of ten news articles and two editorials is particularly significant, coming from a well-respected voice of moderation published independently of the United Methodist Church. Associate editor and administrator Dan Louis said 11,000 requests for reprints have flooded in, and all but a handful of letters from readers have been “affirmative and supportive.”

The newspaper also commands attention from the NCC because the Methodists are the largest member denomination, supplying 40 percent of the denominational money the council receives.

NCC officials have not denied specifics in the report, but have some misgivings about the method used. NCC news service director Harriet Ziegler objected to UMR’s systematic perusal of NCC’s printed materials, saying, “I don’t think you can weigh published positions on human rights like pounds of potatoes.”

Other NCC officials told UMR that many of their human-rights efforts are kept confidential, so a false picture emerges when only public documents are considered. Other rationales offered by the NCC for a perceived leftward tilt include a long-standing commitment to critique U.S. foreign policy, especially in countries where missionaries have been most active; and a belief that left-wing repressive systems would be unresponsive to criticism anyway and require “quiet diplomacy instead.”

The newspaper’s investigation identified NCC’s internal structure as its primary source of imbalance, pointing out that most of its actions arise out of committees operating autonomously. The committees are staffed by people from denominational agencies who have particular expertise in an area of concern, such as human rights. UMR reporters found few active lines of accountability between these committees and the governing board.

They characterized the council as “a loose confederation of almost-independent organizations” and said, “This produces the worst of two worlds: the image of a powerful, centralized organization which is credited or blamed for all that is done under the NCC banner, and the reality of some 50 separate subunits each doing largely as it sees fit.”

NCC spokesmen say the lines of accountability go instead to NCC’s 32 member denominations, and they insist that NCC positions reflect priorities set by those churches. Among the most controversial aspects of the council is its linkage with independent advocacy groups.

One of these, the Interreligious Task Force on El Salvador, actively supported Marxists in that country, and did so from a rent-free NCC office, using NCC stationery. However, NCC claims to be officially nonpartisan toward foreign governments.

Claire Randall, NCC’s general secretary, explained that linkages forged in the past came at the mandate of a previous governing board, which restructured the NCC in 1972. Randall said, “We tried to be responsive, believing that was God’s call to us,” to help Christians living under repressive right-wing governments supported by the United States. But, she concedes, “maybe we overresponded. We have pulled back. It is much less a major part of our identity and work” than in the 1970s.

Randall said structural concerns about consistency and accountability at NCC are nothing new. To address these areas, the NCC in 1978 and 1979 sent “listening teams” around the country and formed a Presidential Panel on Future Missions and Resources in early 1982.

Randall views the UMR reports as a valuable addition to discussions that began shortly after she became the NCC’s chief executive in 1974. Since the investigation is not seen as an attack on the council, no formal reply is expected. “We keep evaluating ourselves and renewing ourselves” regardless of whether the council is attracting popular press attention, Randall said. “We’re not quite as helpless as we are painted.”

One of the NCC’s most vocal critics is the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), a two-year-old Washington group composed mainly of conservative United Methodists and chaired by Edmund Robb, a Methodist evangelist. IRD’s board also includes Catholic author Michael Novak, evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry, and Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus.

The organization’s director, Penn Kemble, hailed the UMR report as evidence that his group’s viewpoint is “gaining a hearing in the mainstream of church life.” Airing the issue publicly offers an unprecedented chance for revitalization in the church, Kemble said, as well as an opportunity for the NCC to be responsive to its constituents. “They would get a tremendous response from their congregations if they would address the problem honestly,” he said.

Battle-weary from its bouts with IRD, Reader’s Digest, and “60 Minutes,” the NCC welcomes the UMR scrutiny, despite its criticisms, as an authentic grassroots signal of directions it needs to consider taking. Randall said NCC will examine the newspaper’s recommendations—along with any others that come to light—and “give them all serious consideration.”

BETH SPRING

Lawsuits Against Bill Gothard’S Organization Are Dismissed

Two lawsuits filed last year against Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts have been dismissed by federal courts in Chicago, A separate judge ruled on each.

The suits were brought by a group of former institute employees. One of the suits dealt with the allegedly unfair manner in which employees were treated. The other challenged the way in which money was spent. The lawyer for the plaintiffs said the matter is ended, and no appeals will be made.

Meanwhile, the institute reports substantial increases in attendance and donations. Some 40,000 pastors are expected to attend 21 one-day pastors’ seminars Gothard is conducting this year. About 30,000 came last year. Attendance at the first 11 seminars this year has been 20,000.

Last year, attendance at Gothard’s regular, week-long seminars for lay people totaled 330,000, and the institute expects that figure to rise by about one-third this year.

And Now, Live From Asbury Seminary …

Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, inaugurated its fourth president, David McKenna, on April 16, in a ceremony dressed in all the pomp that befits such occasions. The day also featured a high-tech attraction the seminary hopes will change the course of continuing seminary education.

The inauguration ceremony was carried live via satellite to 31 sites across the country, where it was viewed by clergy and laymen in the middle of a one-day seminar. To receive a unit of continuing education credit, students were required to view morning and afternoon lectures, also beamed live by satellite from Asbury and read sections of two text books. They also had to write a synopsis of the course, which was titled “Empowering Clergy and Laity for the Ministry.”

The seminary is eagerly awaiting reports from the 31 sites indicating how well the event was received. First reports are that the participants were positive.

Corrie Ten Boom Dies At Age 91

The earthly pilgrimage of one of God’s most courageous children ended on April 15 with the death of Cornelia Arnolda Johanna ten Boom, known to countless thousands as “Corrie.” She died at her Placentia, California, home on her ninety-first birthday.

She is best known as the author of The Hiding Place, which told of her persecution at the hands of Nazis. The book sold more than a million copies, and the film of the same title has been seen by an estimated 15 million people. Corrie toured more than 60 countries with her message that “there is no pit so deep that Jesus is not deeper still.” She grew up in Haarlem, Holland, in a family deeply rooted in the Christian faith. She became a Christian at age five; in her youth and middle age she led church services for retarded children and was active in youth work at her church.

In 1918, Corrie became the first licensed woman watchmaker in Holland. The ten Boom family had owned the watch shop in Haarlem for more than 100 years, and Corrie thought she would carry on the tradition.

But during her fiftieth year, her life was suddenly interrupted as a result of the occupation of Holland by Nazis during World War II. The ten Boom family became a part of the underground movement to shield Jews in Holland from Nazi persecution. But they were discovered, and Corrie, a sister, her brother, and their father were imprisoned at a German concentration camp in Ravensbruck. Ten days later, Corrie’s 84-year-old father died. The bond between Corrie and her sister Betsie solidified. They shared a dream to tell the world of the joy and pain of their suffering for Christ.

But Betsie became one of the 96,000 women who perished at Ravensbruck, leaving the dream in the faithful hands of her sister. Because of a clerical error, Corrie was released from Ravensbruck just before thousands went to the gas chambers. She spent the rest of her life guarding the dream and guiding it to fruition.

Soon after World War II ended, she helped to turn what had been a concentration camp in Darmstadt, Germany, into a home for refugees and war victims.

Altogether, Corrie wrote 18 books with total worldwide sales of more than 6 million. But in 1977, it was evident she had a weak heart. She underwent surgery for a pacemaker, and suffered a stroke in 1978, which limited her ability to speak and write. In spite of this, she completed her last book, This Day Is the Lord’s.

The work she began will continue for a long time. A home she founded in the late 1940s for war victims operates today as a rehabilitation center for the physically and mentally handicapped. Already, the board of her ministry, Christians, Incorporated, has started a fund to continue the support Corrie had provided for eight overseas missionaries.

Part of the dream she shared with her sister was to tell the world “that when the worst happens in the life of a child of God, the best remains.” For Corrie ten Boom, the best has finally come. She has arrived at her final and most joyful hiding place.

Antiabortionists In Florida Can Keep Picketing

Christian antiabortion protesters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were awarded a favorable judgment after an abortion clinic lost its suit to keep protestors from picketing the clinic and witnessing to clients.

Broward County Circuit Judge Robert C. Abel, Jr., guaranteed picketers from the antiabortion group Omega the right to picket the A-Aastra Birth Control Information Center in Fort Lauder-dale, to carry controversial signs against abortion, and to counsel with women entering the clinic.

The trial was Florida’s first test case involving an abortion clinic and protesters. Picketing started at A-Aastra 10 months ago, after which the clinic sued Omega. The clinic owners claimed the demonstrations were affecting business by endangering patients’ health and causing tension and anxiety in the doctors performing the abortions.

The trial, in late March, drew packed courtrooms and TV cameras. Among the witnesses called by Omega’s attorney Tom Bush was a pastor who testified that Christians, by nature of their beliefs, were required to speak out against abortion.

Financial Trouble Besets Popular California Pastor

Gifted preachers whose messages and abilities attract thousands of people and great amounts of money sometimes get themselves into difficulty when they try to manage and spend large sums.

Such is the case with Ralph Wilkerson, pastor of the 10,000-member Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California. In 1980, to avoid possible bankruptcy, the church property was sold for $4.3 million to a Canadian businessman and then leased back to the congregation. The results of an audit done in connection with that transaction have come to light in the Los Angeles Times, and the disclosures raise questions for a minister of the gospel. The article said that the Anaheim police department is investigating the church for possible fraud. While acknowledging that money was spent unwisely, allegations of fraudulent use of money are firmly denied by knowledgeable church members. Wilkerson himself is saying nothing in public in his own behalf, and neither are church officers.

Among the disclosures from the audit, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, are these:

• Between 1975 and 1978, Wilkerson received $237,384 in nonpayroll payments from the church, including $55,000 from the church building fund. This was in addition to salary and fringe benefits of $110,000 annually.

• Wilkerson and his family made 29 trips to foreign countries during the same period at church expense.

• The church paid American Express card charges of more than $62,000 for jewelry, shoes, clothing, and the like, for Wilkerson, family members, and the church pilot.

• About $3 million was deposited and withdrawn from 120 church bank accounts, with no record of where the money went.

• A $1.5 million building trust fund was spent on church bills and private loans.

Attendance has remained strong at the church, and a number of well-known ministers have rallied behind Wilkerson during the last few troubled months. They include Robert Schuller, Kenneth Copeland, and Jim Bakker, all of whom have appeared at the church, and James Robison, who is scheduled to appear.

Just last month the church congregation repurchased its property, and church officers are instituting a new, tough management plan, which takes Wilkerson completely out of handling finances. His only role will be to preach and function as a pastor. The management plan, called “Save Our Church,” calls for all debts to be paid off in two years.

Catholics Begin An Evangelism Magazine

The renewal movement in some parts of the Catholic church has spawned great interest in the Bible and in conservative Protestant notions of one’s personal relationship with Christ. Now, a new magazine is being published that crosses another gap between Protestant and Catholic expressions of faith—that of personal witnessing.

The Catholic Evangelist, a bimonthly published in Boca Raton, Florida, is billed as the only national Catholic magazine published by laypersons without church subsidies.

The magazine is aimed not only at active Catholics but also at church dropouts, estimated at 15 million Americans. The Evangelist also contains articles for the 80 million people who profess no religious affiliation.

The publisher and business manager is William Glass, a printshop owner who became a believer in Jesus Christ at a 1979 meeting of Christian businessmen.

The editor is Susan Blum, a convert from Presbyterianism and a lay leader in the archdiocese of Miami. She holds a master’s degree in pastoral ministry from Biscayne College, a Miami-based school run by the Augustinian fathers.

An informal, “over the coffee cup” approach to the gospel is a prime goal, said Blum. “There are a lot of good Protestant magazines like this one, but none for Catholics,” she said. “For a lot of people, ‘Catholic evangelist’ is a contradiction in terms.

“Many Catholics have grown up in the church without making a public commitment to Jesus Christ,” she added. “So one of our main jobs is to lead them into a stronger relationship with God, to strengthen their faith.”

The magazine has the endorsement of Miami Archbishop Edward A. McCarthy, a national pioneer in the Catholic lay renewal movement. He became honorary board chairman for the publication and wrote a half-page article for the first issue.

Topics in the first issue would look familiar in a Protestant magazine: how to be “saved,” how to read the Bible, how to pray, and personal stories of faith. There is also a study guide outline of the magazine’s entire contents, as an aid to discussion groups.

The cover bears a striking mélange of faces, including those of popes, Mahatma Gandhi, and John and Robert Kennedy; from a distance, they all merge into the thorn-crowned head of Jesus.

The Evangelist issue ventures into potentially hostile territory with two other features. One is a fictional letter from a “fallen-away Catholic,” voicing her confusion and resentment over church practices.

The other touchy article is a forum column for inactive Catholics, tellingly titled, “I Was Raised Catholic But …”

Funding for the magazine began with $10,000 in seed money from 10 donors, with some free advertising in the newsletter of Father Alvin Illig, head of evangelization for the U.S. Catholic bishops. Glass donates office space, and he and Blum work as volunteers.

Stacks of the Evangelist are being placed in area Christian bookstores, and samples are being mailed to out-of-town stores. Plans are for the magazine to grow to 20,000 subscribers within three years.

JAMES D. DAVIS

The Siberian Christians Finally Leave Their Refuge In Moscow

The people at the Christian Legal Society office in Oak Park, Illinois, knew something was up on Friday, April 8, when they received a call from Washington asking if they could procure $27,000 for fees and exit visas for 29 members of the Russian Vashchenko and Chmykhalov families—and could they get the money to Washington in 48 hours? Six members of the two families were still living in the American embassy in Moscow after nearly five years there, protesting the Soviet refusal to allow them to emigrate. But now the stand-off was ending.

A variety of Christian individuals and organizations had been collecting money to finance the emigration, but all of it had not yet come in when the call came to Oak Park. Personal loans were hurriedly arranged, and Lynn Buzzard, executive director of the society, boarded a plane for Washington with the check.

The following Tuesday the six Soviet Pentecostalists left the embassy to return to their Siberian home in Chernogorsk, thus ending one of the more remarkable displays of protest against religious repression the Soviet Union has seen.

The stalemate began to unravel rather abruptly earlier in the week when the Soviet government allowed one of the protesters, 32-year-old Lidia Vashchenko, to leave the country. She had been with the other six in the embassy until a hunger strike forced her hospitalization a year ago. When she recovered, she returned to her home in Chernogorsk and formally applied for emigration.

The Soviet government’s position all along had been that the Pentecostalists should leave the embassy and apply for visas. When Lidia did that, and her application was honored, the other six were convinced to leave their refuge and do likewise. Until then, they had been determined to remain in the embassy until their emigration was assured. None of the six have guarantees that they will get out.

After the release of Lidia, an organization known as the “Siberian Seven Working Group” was organized, with a branch in Israel, where Lidia is now, and a branch in the United States. The group hopes to raise a total of $200,000 to finance the orderly exiting and relocation of all 29 members of the families (15 Vashchenkos and 14 Chmykhalovs) when and if they are released. It is likely that the Vashchenkos will settle in Israel. The destination of the Chmykhalovs is uncertain.

Buzzard, who has been to the Soviet Union twice in the last two years to try to advance the cause of the families, is personally confident they will all be permitted to leave eventually, and he said others working to free them are also confident.

Lidia boarded a plane in Moscow on April 6 for her trip to Vienna. Her brother John and sister Vera accompanied her to the airport, and she left with them her only Russian Bible. The first person to welcome her to the West was Danny Smith of the London-based campaign to free the seven. He had been asked by the U.S. embassy in Moscow to get aboard the first plane to Vienna. He did, and was joined by Michael Rowe of Keston College, England, who had been in constant contact with the families in the embassy. Jane Drake from SAVE (Society for the Vashchenko/Chmykhalov Emigration), based in Alabama, and Ray Barnett, director of Friends in the West, a Seattle group, were also quickly on the scene.

After several days of frenetic behind-the-scenes activity, the Israelis were persuaded on Friday, April 8, to open their embassy after hours to issue Lidia a visa to enter Israel. She flew to Tel Aviv and faced a large news media turnout. She said, “I am happy to be in Israel. This is a dream come true for me. It is also the fulfillment of my family’s 20-year prayer. I would once again like to thank all those people, organizations, and governments that have made my emigration possible. I am looking forward to being united with my family.

One of the first things she did in Israel was to write a letter to Prime Minister Menachem Begin to thank him for his help. She went on to Tiberias, where many of her helpers, mainly from the United States, began arriving to celebrate her victory.

One of Lidia’s constant companions in Israel is Pirkko Huuhtanen, who is with a Finnish organization working for the release of the seven. Huuhtanen said Lidia was greatly surprised to find that other Christian emigrants from Russia have locked themselves away in the West. Lidia does not plan to do that.

Upon hearing that the rest of the seven had left the embassy in Moscow, Lidia asked for prayers from all Christians that their emigration would come soon, and she asked that letters be sent to the Soviet government petitioning the release. A reporter asked her what she thought her family would want to do if they were allowed into Israel. She thought for a moment and said with a slight smile, “Eight of my brothers and sisters have been waiting to be baptized in the Jordan River.”

There was no shortage of speculation among Lidia’s supporters about why the Soviets chose this particular time to release her. Some of them thought the Soviets do not want to be criticized on the issue of religious freedom during the upcoming World Council of Churches assembly in Vancouver this summer.

Lidia was also asked if her five-year ordeal in the embassy had increased her faith in God. She replied: “We have a hymn in Russian which says, ‘the greater the sorrow, the closer is God.’ ”

TOM MINNERY with DAN WOODINGin Tel Aviv

Martin Marty Says Christianity Is Tilting Toward The Baptists

World Christianity is becoming increasingly “Baptistificated” according to one of America’s best known church historians. Martin Marty told an audience of Baylor University religion faculty and Southwestern Seminary theological faculty that the Baptist form of Christianity, which emphasizes persuasion and decision, is gaining popularity over the “Catholic” form of nurture, which says “Christian children spring from the loins of Christian parents.”

Marty, professor of the history of modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, delivered two addresses at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, as part of the seminary’s seventy-fifth anniversary observance. He is associate editor of the Christian Century, editor of the newsletter, Context, and coeditor of Church History.

Marty said Baptist strength comes from leaning on God, which is why he was so bemused by the Southern Baptist Convention’s passage last summer of a resolution affirming a constitutional amendment supporting school prayer. “Southern Baptists’ school prayer resolution leads us away from the power of God to the power of government to dictate the circumstances in which we work.”

Baptist tradition is typed as the “church of the disinherited,” he said. It is a creation of “people people” and “folk folk” who had the “unimpaired imagination” and “vehement force of need” to show where the power in society was missing the sources of need. Real power comes through weakness, he said, because “God works on us when he sees our power gone. Even our strongest institutions are so frail.” “The power of being an outsider meant you had no resource to fall on except the divine resource,” Marty said. Early Baptists did not have the burden of keeping the culture going. Baptists no longer are outsiders in most of America’s southland. They have become the religion of the culture in the areas of their strength.

BAPTIST PRESS

North American Scene

The Justice Department has dropped its investigation into the fund-raising tactics of Jim Bakker’s PTL organization. It had inherited the case from the Federal Communications Commission last December. A spokesman for the department said, “There was not enough evidence to show a violation of the federal criminal statutes, or that it will be a prosecutable case.”

Most editors of both national and diocesan Catholic publications are at odds with official church teaching on issues such as priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, and artificial birth control. The poll was conducted by the Catholic Communications Network in conjunction with the National Catholic Register. Most respondents oppose military aid in Latin America, feel that the Pope does not adequately understand the needs of the American church, and declare the use of nuclear weapons to be inherently immoral.

Southern Baptists are beginning to regret choosing Pittsburgh as the site of their 1983 convention, scheduled for mid June. Many of the 15,000 people expected to attend may have trouble finding a place to stay. Since 1978, when the Baptists made tentative housing arrangements, two hotels have shut down. Also, the U.S. Open Golf Tournament, scheduled for the same week, is posing a problem for Baptists seeking housing close to the steel city.

The nuclear arms freeze movement has become one of Jerry Falwell’s concerns. A war against the “freezeniks” is the basis for his most recent fund-raising drive. Falwell believes that “if the United States gives in to the freezeniks,” “we will someday find ourselves under Communist rule.” Falwell’s Moral Majority is working to establish a political action committee, which hopes to raise between $2 million and $4 million in the next two years to support President Reagan and conservative Senators Jesse Helms and Roger Jepsen, among others.

The News World newspaper, founded six years ago by Sun Myung Moon, has put out its final issue. But the same staff continues publishing in the same offices under a new name—the New York Tribune. Besides the name, the design of the paper is different. It carries a commentary section that its editors hope will be an alternative to that of the New York Times. The Tribune has the same typeface and layout as the Washington Times, a Unification Church-owned daily in Washington, D.C., with a circulation of about 120,000. Many New Yorkers avoided buying the News World because it is perceived as a propaganda organ of Moon’s church. But editors deny that the name change was to blur that association.

World Scene

Extensive flooding damage in Ecuador this spring on the Pacific side of the Andes mountains has led to new evangelical cooperative effort. The Ecuadorian Evangelical Fellowship was joined by Alfalit, HCJB, MAP International, Mission Aviation Fellowship, and World Vision in forming an Evangelical Relief Committee to coordinate relief efforts with the government and to channel funds and supplies.

Does church growth stall when conflict destabilizes a country? Several congregations in El Salvador have gone from one to three Sunday morning services during the civil-strife era of the last three years. Salvadorian churches with a CAM International origin report that their growth in baptized members has exceeded 120 percent over the last decade.

The British Methodist Church has decided it is useless to appeal a 1980 ruling by the country’s Board of Charities commissioners prohibiting grants to the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism. The commission ruled that fighting racism and promoting racial equality are incompatible with the charter of the denomination’s overseas division, which identifies its aims as promoting Christianity and helping establish churches overseas.

The editor of an evangelical journal within the Church of England has been fired. The March action signals deeper turmoil among “low-church” Anglicans over “liberalism in theology” and “Romanizing tendencies.” The Church Society, one of four evangelical groupings within the diverse state church, dismissed Peter Williams from the editorship of the Churchman, a respected quarterly that has been published for more than a century. The society wants the Churchman to articulate a conservative position, while the publication’s board champions a forum approach to topics such as biblical inerrancy, and women in ministry.

Deaths

C. Stacey Woods, 72, vice-president of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, of which he was a founding member and the first general secretary; also, founding executive director of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, U.S.A.; April 10, in Lausanne, Switzerland, following successive strokes.

John D. Needham, 65, national commander of the Salvation Army; April 13, in Montclair, New Jersey, after a brief illness.

The death of ‘Baby Doe’ in Bloomington galvanizes the Reagan White House.

In April 1982, the death of “Baby Doe” in Bloomington, Indiana, made headlines nationwide. The newborn, with Down’s syndrome and correctable physical deformities, was starved to death after his parents and doctor decided his life was not worth sustaining. While he did not count for much in the eyes of his family, “Baby Doe” single-handedly riveted public attention on a hospital practice that is kept well hidden from view. The practice is ridding parents of unwanted handicapped babies by deliberately withholding food or treatment.

In Washington, the Reagan administration has responded to the uproar by establishing a hot line at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The hot line number was to have been posted at the 6,800 hospitals that receive federal money, along with a warning that “discriminatory failure to feed and care for handicapped infants in this facility is prohibited by federal law.” The measure took effect March 22, but three weeks later, a federal judge in Washington struck it down. He said the rule was “arbitrary and capricious” in increasing the government’s power to police hospital nurseries.

Proponents of the new regulation see it as a long-overdue enforcement of a section of a civil rights law, which since 1973 has stated that no person should be denied “benefits” solely because he or she is handicapped. Disabled citizens’ groups and right-to-life organizations say the rule sends a necessary message to health-care providers that life—despite its apparent “quality”—is to be protected. Hospital administrator Gordon B. Avery, commenting on how this may affect hospitals, wrote in a Washington Post column that “this is capital punishment for the institution, amounting to bankruptcy.”

Besides fearing economic retribution, most pediatricians are highly critical of what they see as a needless intrusion into their medical practice. At the American Academy of Pediatrics, Harry Jennison said, “To have issues that involve life and death handled bureaucratically by Big Brother is ludicrous.”

Successful hospital treatment for babies who surely would have died in the past is increasingly commonplace. Recently, the youngest premature baby ever to survive pulled through in San Diego six weeks before she should have been “viable,” according to popular legal and medical definitions.

Because of this, pediatricians are shouldering new burdens of responsibility for considering “quality of life” and the allocation of costly medical resources—questions that may seriously complicate their mandate simply to protect and preserve life. U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who supports the HHS regulation, acknowledged at a Senate hearing last month that the rule might make life a little more difficult for the average pediatrician, but Koop, a pediatric surgeon, sees it as an essential deterrent. He hopes it will force the issue among doctors, causing them to clarify their thinking and begin viewing these cases as clear life-or-death choices with relatively few “gray areas” of doubt.

Koop testified at the hearing that “it is very important to note that we do not intend to fruitlessly prolong the process of dying. Rather, we seek to guarantee that infants who would live, given ordinary care, will not be denied the usual opportunity for life by someone who judges that their lives are not worth living.”

Physician George A. Little, speaking for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which filed suit against HHS, said the warning signs and the hot line number will generate a distrust of physicians and “trigger confusion in the minds of parents” by implying that violations are commonplace. Little questioned whether nonmedical HHS investigators are qualified to decide which treatments are “appropriate.” Part of the problem, Little said, is that HHS “has not produced any direct evidence of inappropriate treatment of severely ill newborns.” He called the HHS action “a completely untried procedure to remedy a situation which it cannot define.”

Proponents of the rule say the burden of proof weighs more heavily on the medical community to show that the rule is not needed. They cite medical journal accounts, such as a 1973 report from two Yale University doctors, who said 14 percent of the infant deaths in their hospital over a two-year period resulted from deliberate neglect. Surveys of pediatric surgeons conclude that most of them would not correct physical problems in Down’s syndrome children. Koop said he has received more than 20 calls in recent months from nurses who face disciplinary action for opposing doctors’ orders to deny treatment or food.

Instead of government intervention, pediatricians advocate ethical review committees inside hospitals to provide well-rounded assessments in hard cases. At present, according to a presidential commission survey, fewer than 5 percent of the nation’s hospitals have such procedures. Ethicists are scrambling to stay apace of advances in technology and treatment. A recent presidential commission report, entitled “Deciding to Forgo Life-sustaining Treatment” says “society should adopt a very restrictive standard” because even “babies whose lives are doomed to be brief are owed whatever relief of suffering and enhancement of life can be provided.” The report sharply criticized the parents, doctors, and judges responsible for Baby Doe’s death. It does not endorse the HHS regulation, which it said may lead to excessive intervention by the government.

There seems to be some evidence of a lack of interest and expertise among pediatricians concerning handicapped children. A task force of pediatric education experts assessed medical school training in the areas of handicaps and medical ethics. Their conclusion: “grossly inadequate.”

Parents also have extremely limited contact with severely handicapped children, so stereotypes abound. Ann-Marie, a nursing supervisor, who asked that her last name be withheld, gave birth to a Down’s syndrome infant five years ago and was plunged immediately into emotional turmoil. “It’s very hard,” she says. “You don’t think you can cope with it.” Choosing to withhold treatment appears to be an easy way out, Ann-Marie says, “because the normal first reaction is ‘get rid of it!’ ”

But she and her husband Scott instructed their doctors to proceed with life-saving surgery on their infant Jill—who had a physical deformity identical to that of “Baby Doe.” In Jill’s case, however, the hospital would not have collaborated with a parental decision to withhold treatment. If the parents had decided to “get rid” of Jill, they would have had to take her home to die.

The initial surgery corrected Jill’s intestinal obstruction, but more serious physical troubles cropped up, causing her heart to fail over and over. Again, the parents faced a decision, but by that time they had seen “there was something in this kid that was salvageable,” Ann-Marie recalls. Today, Jill is moderately retarded, attends a special school, and looks forward eagerly to dance-movement class each week. She is “a bundle of energy,” her mother says, and she readily recognizes colors and numbers. Strong support from their Episcopal church as well as group meetings with parents of other Down’s children have eased some of the inevitable strain on the parents and their two normal children.

“When I look at Jill and see how much she enjoys her life,” Ann-Marie reflects, “I’d hate to think of being the one who caused her to miss out.”

A Boston News Report Strikes A Nerve

Groups championing the rights of handicapped infants have found an unlikely ally within the ranks of the usually skeptical secular news media. Boston’s CBS affiliate, WNEV-TV, produced a four-part news report, “Death in the Nursery,” documenting cases of infants being deliberately neglected in hospitals due to their handicaps and presumed low “quality of life.”

The show’s influence has spread far beyond Boston, where it has aired three times due to popular demand. President Ronald Reagan and members of the White House staff viewed it via closed-circuit television in their offices. Excerpts have been shown at Senate hearings and press conferences on the issue.

Carlton Sherwood, a Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter who developed the story, recently moved to WNEV from Gannett News Service in Washington.

In the report, William Taeusch, head neonatologist at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, admits that an infant with Down’s syndrome is less likely to be treated for physical defects than a child without Down’s. The show knocks the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for allegedly winking at previous reports of neglected infants.

Doctors and parents are portrayed in conflict. In one case, the mother of a Down’s syndrome child says her doctor told her the boy would never know his name, walk or talk. He advised her to institutionalize the baby and tell her family and friends he was stillborn. She was outraged and took the child home. Today the boy, Jason Kingsley, is a star of “Sesame Street.”

A Connecticut couple featured in the series has adopted 11 severely handicapped children. Reagan, reportedly deeply moved by their story, telephoned the family and spoke with many of the children after he saw the film. He invited the whole family to the White House for a 45-minute visit with him in April.

Sherwood said he believes a “conspiracy of silence” about the practice of withholding care pervades the medical community as well as news media who know about the situation.

‘You stare at faces, hoping against hope to find people who you know did not survive.’

Walter Berger came to Washington to remember. He was scarcely past adolescence when the Hungarian army occupied his native Czechoslovakia, wresting him from his family into forced labor. When the soldiers no longer found him useful, Berger was marched off to a concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria. His parents hid in the forest for six weeks before being captured and killed in Auschwitz.

A few weeks before World War II ceased, Berger, gaunt and weary at age 21, was again on the march to another camp. “I remember it was in the spring. I know it was the spring because the farmers had planted potatoes, and we dug them up and ate them. We would eat anything. We went past an army camp and there were bones lying there that the dogs had left, and we even chewed on those.” Berger’s brother was shot to death two days before liberation.

Stories, names, and memories—memories so searingly painful that after 40 years they still trigger sudden eruptions of tears—were the substance of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Coinciding with the annual Days of Remembrance, the gathering drew more than 15,000 survivors and their families to Washington in mid-April.

They have not only survived, but prospered. Today, Berger is president of his own real estate firm in Brooklyn. One of his daughters married a physician; the other, a financial planner. On the surface, these immigrants blend easily into the fabric of America. But beneath the sleeves of their Hathaway shirts and Ultrasuede blazers, the ones who came to Washington displayed without shame the numbers tattooed into their flesh by their captors. Haltingly at first, then in a torrent of words, they swapped stories about the ones left behind, the ones who did not make it to America or Israel or Western Europe.

They carried, wore, and taped to every available inch of wall space signs pleading for information about family members lost during the war. For people whose lives were once shattered, restoring a sense of continuity and preserving memories for their children is an all-consuming compulsion, Berger said, “You stare at faces, hoping against hope to find people who you know did not survive.”

This was the first time American Jewish survivors had gathered to mark their shared tragedy. Two years ago, survivors who were dispersed around the world met in Jerusalem, and the possibility of another gathering in Copenhagen is under consideration. Benjamin Meed, president of the American Gathering, explained the new momentum for public testimony: “The days are growing shorter for the survivors. Each week brings news of the death of yet another one of our number. Soon, we—the witnesses—will all be gone.”

During the gathering, plans for a Holocaust museum in Washington to preserve the memories permanently were announced. Presenting the keys to a federal building situated near the Washington Monument, Vice President George Bush told the survivors the museum “represents a promise you have kept—a burden entrusted to you by all those ravaged by the Holocaust—to remember. This was the last hope of rescue they sought, and you have not failed them.”

Elie Wiesel, Jewish author and chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, invoked the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and said, “Names—above all, names. It would take more than a lifetime to recite all those names. We shall house names in our museum.”

Wiesel articulated the mixed emotions of gratitude and frustration shared by the survivors. Gratitude for the defeat of the Germans, the open arms of most Americans, and national recognition was clouded by a sentiment one rabbi said “has been building up in our hearts for years.”

Wiesel asked, to sustained cheering, “Why did the armies come so late? Why didn’t they bomb the railroads that carried Jews to extermination centers?” Why, he added, is it so popular today to criticize Israel?

Florence Lipsky of Hyattsville, Maryland, believes the gathering was most significant because “it showed the world that the U.S. leadership knows it happened” and has pledged to keep the memory alive. Lipsky’s own indelible memories of persecution reach back only to last November, not to the 1940s.

Her house of worship, Shaare Tefila congregation in Silver Spring, Maryland, was disfigured by an organized hate group. With a tremor in her voice, she recalled the shock of seeing red swastikas, slogans—“Death to the Jude”—and Nazi symbols emblazoned on the temple walls. Heartened by overwhelming community support in the aftermath, Lipsky and her fellow congregants bravely cleaned up and put the incident behind them. But it served as an ominous reminder that human wickedness is not a thing of the past.

BETH SPRING AND MARY RIESER

Arguments over church-state separation don’t often arise in this part of the body.

The weekend before Chicago’s April 12 mayoral election, a coalition of black clergymen sponsored a prayer breakfast and laid hands on Harold Washington. They prayed, “Gracious God our Father, we thank you for the special dispensation manifested in the candidacy of Harold Washington.”

When white fundamentalists entered the political arena in the late 1970s they were breaking new ground. But in the black church, religion and political struggle have long been fused. Distinguishing the two is inconceivable. Political rallies for Washington, often held in black churches, frequently turned into hand-clapping, gospel-singing worship services. Chicago is not unique. In Philadelphia, the black church was prominent in this month’s primary election campaign of Wilson Goode, a black Baptist deacon running against a white, Frank Rizzo. The pattern was evident in Andrew Young’s victory in Atlanta. In Los Angeles, it was Tom Bradley’s pastor who “discovered” him and became his campaign manager. At a time when many white churches across the land are nervously encountering political action through issues such as abortion and school prayer, a closer look at the experience of the black brethren is timely.

In Chicago, the Democratic candidate is an automatic winner—except when the Democratic candidate is black. An exceedingly ugly campaign made it clear that elements of the Chicago electorate are still virulently racist, even though Washington’s past tax problems also hobbled him as a candidate. He beat Republican Bernard Epton by just four percentage points, and parishioners of the 252 black ministers throughout the city who endorsed Washington believe his mayoral victory, the first for a black in Chicago, was an answer to prayer. The rallying of the black religious community around Washington was not a knee-jerk reaction. Washington ran for mayor once before, and church response was lukewarm. That was in 1977, before Reaganomics, and before incumbent Jane Byrne’s policies insulted black sensitivities.

Washington has publicly acknowledged that without the help of the black church, his victory would have been doubtful. Last fall the congressman declared that he would not run unless 50,000 new black voters were registered. That was all the black church needed to hear. “If you’re not registered, you’re not saved,” became the jocular slogan. It implied, according to Pastor Claude Wyatt of the Vernon Park Church of God, that registering to vote was a serious moral and Christian obligation, although the slogan was not meant literally. Preachers sermonized on the topic. Wyatt himself had a mobile registration van parked outside his church on Sunday mornings. Several ministers became official election registrars and registered congregants right in their churches.

By the time Washington announced his candidacy in mid-December, nearly 140,000 new black voters had registered, almost three times the number Washington asked for. Washington asked Wyatt and Harry Gibson, pastor of the Saint Mark United Methodist Church, to join the campaign’s steering committee. Jesse Cotton, an African Methodist Episcopal pastor who convened the pre-election prayer breakfast, was named to Washington’s finance committee.

The goal of Washington’s election, said Cotton, became more than just a campaign. “It became a movement unlike anything we’ve ever seen in Chicago,” he said.

Choir members and ushers commonly sported “Washington for Mayor” buttons. Cotton’s church held all-night prayer vigils. Washington made personal appearances in more than 100 churches. Church members distributed leaflets describing proper voting procedures. Churches lent their buses to transport black voters on election day. The result: 97 percent of the black vote was cast for Washington. (Overall, 81 percent of the electorate turned out—a record in Chicago.)

Nationwide, there were more than 5,000 elected black politicians at all levels in 1982, up from 500 in 1964. If Goode goes on to become mayor in Philadelphia, four of the nation’s six largest cities will have black mayors. Practically everywhere, say students of black history, black churches have been an important part of the picture, a fact overlooked in the secular press reports of political campaigns.

Politics, meaning the ways by which people translate what they believe into public policy, is woven through black church history. When the first slaves were brought to America in the 1660s, they were considered fair game because they were not Christians. Ironically, it would be the black church that would become the nerve center of liberation.

The leaders of the early slave revolts were, in almost all cases, deeply religious men who found in the Bible justification for insurrection. Gabriel Prosser meditated on the Old Testament and led a slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia. He was caught and hanged. Denmark Vessey buttressed his abolitionist arguments with passages from Exodus. Nat Turner prayed fiercely at the plow.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, generally regarded as the oldest black denomination, was born out of protest. It sprang from the Free African Society Fellowship, which was formed by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones shortly after they were pulled from their knees while praying at a white church in Philadelphia in 1787. Black churches along the Mason-Dixon Line commonly provided sanctuary for slaves who escaped via Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad. Tubman herself was an extremely religious woman.

Black historian Gayraud Wilmore regards the independent church movement among blacks in the north as the first black freedom movement. Such a movement could thrive under the guise of the legitimate desire of blacks to have their own place of worship.

In the South of the early 1800s, according to historian Eugene Genovese, slavemasters began to use Christianity to quiet slaves. Slaves were prohibited legally from learning to read and write. But oral instruction in the Christian faith was permitted, even encouraged. The goal, Genovese suggests, was to pacify slaves and make their lot bearable for them.

Thus, the church became the only institution blacks owned and operated. Even the black family was not sacred, since spouses and children were often sold away from their families. Some preachers married blacks with the standard injunction, “until death or distance do you part.” Of course, the black church was harassed by slavemasters. Meetings were sometimes, by necessity, held secretly. But the church was a refuge, the only gathering where slaves could exercise their human dignity.

Quite naturally, the influence of the church spread beyond the spiritual. It spilled into social and political realms as well, and it never became the pacifier that slave owners hoped. Slaves used funerals and religious feasts to plan revolts. Sunday became the favorite day for insurrection.

Since the church was the sole institution blacks controlled, black leaders naturally became the preachers. Historian Genovese observes that “the natural leaders … felt the call to preach and knew that preaching was their road to prestige, power, and deepest service within the black community.” Such power made black preachers potentially dangerous to slave owners. Consequently, the preacher’s role demanded discretion. He had to walk a tightrope between obeying his master and maintaining the loyalty of his enslaved brethren.

Walking that tightrope kept black leaders, with exceptions such as Nat Turner, from politicizing their roles. After the Civil War, preachers began to develop political leadership. But that, writes Genovese, “had to be a long and painful process, which did not run its course until the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1950s.”

The process began with the Emancipation, but for blacks, emancipation was only a proclamation, not a reality. They enjoyed mild political success, including substantial representation in the legislatures of several southern states during Reconstruction. But then the Ku Klux Klan arose, and the advances were strangled, if not always by violence then by poll taxes and devious pre-election literacy tests.

So the church remained, by necessity, the focal point of the black community. Their political leaders continued to be their preachers. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his message of peace in black pulpits throughout the nation long before the news media discovered him. As one black minister put it: “Had there been no black church, there would not have been a King.”

The furnace of slavery and prolonged degradation forged a theology inseparable from the history of the black church. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, for example, was not easy for slaves to endorse. Genovese records an anecdote that poignantly illustrates why. An old slave gravedigger, accompanied by a young helper, asked a white stranger a question:

“Can you ‘splain how it happened in the fust place, that the white folks got the start of the black folks, so as to make dem slaves and do all de work?”

The young helper, fearing the white man’s wrath, broke in: “Uncle Pete, it’s no use talking. It’s fo’ordained. The Bible tells you that. The Lord fo’ordained the Nigger to work, and the white man to boss.”

“Dat’s so,” replied the old man.

“Dat’s so. But if dat’s so, then God’s no fair man!”

But black theology has worked from the opposite conviction, the conviction that God is an eminently “fair man” and is deeply distressed by racism and oppression. “Liberation theology” is a phrase of recent vintage. The actual theology of liberation, though, is at least as old as the pre-Civil War spiritual intoning, “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, and why not every man?”

The Old Testament story of the Exodus figures prominently in the thought of the most famous black theologians, such as James Cone. Though not as radical as Cone, some black leaders also departed from a strictly orthodox stance. The most notable of these is Martin Luther King, Jr. In an interview with the now-defunct National Observer, King rejected the idea of original sin. Jesus was divine in the sense that “he was one with God in purpose.” King considered the Virgin Birth a mythological story. He did take Christ’s teachings on love literally, and his speeches were laden with biblical motifs.

Black theologians and ministers insist that theology never be removed from the struggle of day-to-day living. It must be what black evangelical Clarence Hilliard calls a “theology of relevance. It’s not abstract. It’s the biblical model of theology, not the Greek.”

Most black laypersons, according to Hilliard, accept the classical elements of Christian faith. They deeply believe in a personal experience with Christ and that the “Bible is the Word of God from cover to cover.” Black evangelical theologian Ronald Potter confirms that most black Christians are evangelical if by that “one means adherence to orthodox Christian doctrine.”

Some black denominations publish thoroughly conservative statements of faith. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, for instance, forthrightly affirms the Trinity, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and an Augustinian view of free will. But black Christians tend to focus on the living of Christian doctrine more than its formulation. Thus one black minister reports that in his 33 years of ministry, he has never witnessed a dispute about “conservative” or “liberal” theology.

That does not mean, however, that black theologians are blind to the danger of subjectivism. “In fleeing from the lion we seek to make certain that we do not fall into the arms of the subjective bear,” writes William Bentley of the National Black Evangelical Association. Bentley and other black evangelicals are eager to construct a theology that takes into account the tragic experience of blacks in America. Is this the harbinger of an inevitable slide into liberalism or neo-orthodoxy? It is not, Bentley says. “The fact of the matter is, neo-orthodoxy is as white as is evangelical theology.”

Unlike white conservatives and liberals, blacks have not exercised significant power in key American institutions such as government and business. Their power has rested in their church alone. Their theology is more wholistic, embracing all of life, and less willing to break it into parts.

Most white preachers would recoil at endorsing a specific candidate from the pulpit. But in Chicago, hundreds of black ministers endorsed Harold Washington. The church was a necessary vehicle, in that city and others, for the election of a black candidate.

The nation’s tragic history of black oppression prevents the simple answer of telling blacks to embrace larger society’s view of life in clearly separated compartments, with religion uninvolved in government. As Pastor Wyatt puts it, “There is a higher law; whether we serve the system or whether we serve the Savior. The system has not worked for people in general. The church deals with the needs of people. And anytime the needs are not met, we have to step across the system.” To the already boiling pot of controversy between church and state, add another ingredient: the black church.

Candid views from the popular evangelist who is at home in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S.

Luis Palau brings a Latin gusto to mass evangelism that captivates crowds around the world. The 48-year-old, Argentinian-born evangelist has been preaching crusades in Spanish for nearly 20 years, and in English for nearly 10. He has been invited to lead a “Mission to London” beginning in October and extending to the summer of 1984. Palau was recently interviewed by CHRISTIANITY TODAY staff.

What kind of support from national leaders have you received in your crusades?

In Guatemala, we had no say [about presidential participation]. It happens that it was okay. The president was deliberately not listed on the program, though the organizers had a strong suspicion he’d be coming. He showed up in a car caravan; they all expected a helicopter.

In some situations, we could have had a president on the platform, but didn’t think it wise for the body of Christ in that country. Some presidents were eager to be on the platform and we had to pointedly not invite them.

The president of Paraguay couldn’t have given more help, more freedom, than in the two visits we’ve made. In fact, his wife and some of his children came to the meetings. It was a great time for the gospel in Paraguay.

In Uruguay, the president sent his top secret-security person to the meetings because they were suspicious of us. They had recently expelled many Protestants from the country, who, according to them, were hiding weapons in churches. But at the airport as I left, the second in security told me, “Look, regrets from the top officials. We’ve been following you all along, we’ve been listening. We appreciate what you had to say and we apologize that you weren’t received at the top level. But we thought you Protestants were involved in all sorts of antigovernment activities.”

Tell us about your recent meetings in Guatemala City.

Since 1962, when I was there for the first time, I have felt that Guatemala would someday provide the greatest crowd in our ministry because of the acceptance I’ve received there. I dreamed of drawing a crowd of 50,000 to one stadium in one day. I still vividly remember loneliness from my childhood days; little Brethren assemblies of 12 people, 7 of them my own family. So to have half a million come together in Latin America in our generation, with the president, his wife, and part of his cabinet—it was a moving answer beyond our boldest prayers. Some of our team members stood there weeping.

Why such a surge of people now? Has President Ephrain Ríos Montt been a catalyst to bring this about?

It runs far deeper. This was in the making long before Ríos Montt came surprisingly to power. According to church-growth statistics, 11 percent of Guatemalans professed to be born again seven years ago; 16 percent four years ago; 22 percent now: a dramatic, geometric growth.

It was the one-hundredth anniversary of an evangelical presence in the country. I was invited because of the friendship of Presbyterian leaders, and several years ago we put it on the calendar. Only the Lord could have put an evangelical president in power that very year.

How did you reach out to the people of all Guatemala?

This crusade was not typical. There were decisions, but it was more a celebration than an out-and-out campaign. From the believers’ standpoint it was called “Gratitude ’82.”

The celebrations were meticulously planned, and the enthusiasm for them was enormous. They brought people from all over the country; eight columns converged on that center; one enormous column of some 40,000 people came from the western side of Guatemala. They got up at midnight, and came in buses and trains that the government made available. All the buses in the town of Quezaltenango were commandeered—paid for, but commandeered—for the big day. I believe three networks covered the final day, so most of the TV audience was tuned in, plus 15 or so radio stations. It was a grand time of saturation.

How much control does President Ríos Montt have of the army?

To turn a nation around as he has, knowing Latin Americans and how independent we are, that has got to be the helping hand of God. Generally, it appears, he’s given the right instructions, urging the people to do the right thing, and putting it on the basis of righteousness. In his first weeks in office he said, “I will not lie, I do not cheat, and I do not abuse my powers.” Last fall he went on national television and told the nation that he was requiring all public officials to take a similar oath or resign. He put it in the context of the Ten Commandments. This effort to create an atmosphere of righteousness is tremendously commendable; to think that a man would have the courage to do such a thing!

Does Ríos Montt speak so evangelically regarding government that it might turn others off? Will it prove detrimental?

I feel the same concern you do. He increasingly realizes that he is the president of all Guatemalans, and that 75 percent of them profess to be other than evangelical Christians. He’s beginning to visit other churches, Catholic churches and churches of all denominations, visiting by surprise, to show that he’s the president of all the people.

Ríos Montt lets everybody know where he stands from personal conviction. He feels that men took the office of president away from him. They say a fraudulent vote count deprived him of the presidency in 1974. He expected his party to nominate him in this last election. When it didn’t, he concluded that he would never become president. So now that the Lord has put him there, he has a compulsion to let everybody know that.

It’s great to have a Christian president as a model. When asked casually about Ríos Montt by a team of journalists we took with us last November, taxi drivers, maids, and others said something like this: “He is an evangelical, I am a Catholic, but he is the best thing that’s happened to us.” The hand of God appears to be on him. But we would love to see a reformation that runs deeper than one passing president.

Could you spell out what you mean by that?

I’m convinced of the truth of what George McGovern says, that change comes from the bottom up. You can exert influence from the top, but true change will come if and as masses are converted and change their lifestyles. The pressure forces the leaders to adjust to the masses rather than, as we often mistakenly think, the conversion of a president causes the whole country to follow.

There are many people in that nation with the education and the background to make Guatemala the first Reformed nation in Latin America. By a Reformed nation I mean one in which the gospel penetrates business, education, the military, and the government, and in which Christian ethics is the dominant force. That’s what I’m praying for: that the grassroots will live Christianly, that the nation will feel it, and that it will become a model for the continent.

How do you perceive the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Guatemala?

It appears to me to be quite broadminded. There’s a demonic rumor going around that there’s an evangelical-Catholic religious war going on in Guatemala. At my press conference, somebody asked me about that and I became incensed and turned on my Latinmost emotion for effect. The next day someone went and asked the auxiliary archbishop. The headlines appeared on the front pages the following day: “Archbishop says, ‘Ridiculous; there’s no religious war going on.’ ” I was pleased to see such a forceful, generous response.

Are you aware of the National Council of Churches report that associated Ríos Montt with massacres in the villages?

There’s no doubt that before Ríos Montt there was wanton killing going on; probably there is some still. I have a team of 48 people and I can’t control everything they do; I suppose if you are running a country of several million you can’t control everything. But I have read that even his political enemies say there’s a definite trend of respect for human rights that constitutes an absolute turnaround, and that his personal honesty is beyond reproach.

A journalist from our team, a Washington, D.C., correspondent, and a U.S. Senator’s aide asked the Guatemalan authorities if they could inspect three villages where there had been reports of atrocities. They heard conflicting accounts on the alleged massacres. However, in all three villages the government of Ríos Montt had successfully won back the confidence of the people through a program of rebuilding their villages, food distribution, establishment of schools and health care, and a unique civil defense program.

The feeling of those traveling with us to the crusade was that Ríos Montt was indeed trying to avoid civilian deaths and win back the population to the government’s side.

The World and National Council of Churches have their bias. I’ve seen it over the years in the statements they have made about Wycliffe Bible Translators, Billy Graham, and others.

What trend do you see throughout Latin America from an evangelical point of view?

I am encouraged by what I see. There is a small but disturbing percentage of liberation theology people among the evangelicals, and some who are even to their left. But generally speaking the body is maturing, there is continuing growth in terms of conversions, and an internationally minded leadership is developing that is stronger, more gifted, more mature, more respected by Latin Americans. Theologians are being developed in Latin America, some trained abroad but born on the continent, who can really think.

I think liberation theology is a menace in the sense that it creates a consciousness that we must do something about righteousness and poverty, but leads people in a disturbing direction. It’s held by a minority, but it can begin to have the effect of taking people away from the fundamentals.

What has been the source of liberation theology in Protestant circles?

Basically it’s been disseminated by the faculty and graduates of two seminaries. The Methodist seminary in Buenos Aires got into trouble with revolution, and the Latin American Biblical Seminary in San José, Costa Rica, taught it and spread it. The broad evangelical majority and pastors and denominational leaders do not go along.

What are the basic issues in the tug-of-war with liberation theology in Latin America?

The head-on collisions within evangelicalism and between evangelicalism and liberation theology are in three foundational areas: sin, redemption, and regeneration.

Basically liberation theology says that sin is in the institutions and in the structures. We grant that institutions need changing but ask if the essence of evil comes from the structures or from the people in them. We say that sin is from the heart of man.

Redemption, for the liberation theologian, is found in revolution: change the structures of the institutions and you will eliminate the sin that oppresses and you will have a free society. Whereas we say that redemption is spiritual; it was done on the cross; it comes by the work of Christ.

As for regeneration, basically, the idea of liberation theology is that the new man will emerge when institutions and structures are liberated from sin. We affirm that rebirth comes through Jesus Christ, and that individual, internal change will eventually change structures and institutions, bringing as much freedom and justice as a fallen world will allow. Your position on sin, therefore, strongly influences your position on revolution and change in a country.

If institutional change isn’t the answer for social ills, what is?

As I look at Scripture, church history, and the history of this century, I see no hope for institutional change that both lifts the masses out of poverty and maintains freedom. Suppose the economics of a Marxist system were superior. Would that be reason enough to justify such a revolution? Eliminating gross poverty at the expense of freedom is not a worthwhile tradeoff. I believe the change must come from the conversions of millions whose lifestyles then become Christian lifestyles; such a reformation and reconstruction is what will lift people up.

In some areas of Latin America up to 70 percent of the population is illegitimate. Those are United Nations statistics. If evangelical Christianity took hold, Christian families would multiply and a great respect for the family as an entity would develop. There are enough natural resources in Latin America so that these nations should not be in dire poverty. It isn’t the Sahara Desert!

If we could eliminate infidelity and immorality in Latin America we could cut poverty by half in one generation. Men earn a salary and they could manage financially if they practiced Christian prudence—even in Bolivia where a miner has to support a family on $100 a month. If a man gives up immorality with women, gives up getting drunk and all the waste (such as getting rolled over and having his money taken) that goes with it, and stops gambling, right there he is salvaging a big chunk of his salary.

In Latin America, of the millions that have been converted, until lately only a handful were middle or upper class when they were converted. The vast middle class now emerging was converted poor and rose through industry, honesty, and justice to the educated, reasonable lifestyle that is commonly called the middle class. I think that’s the biblical answer. When people charge that Christianity is a middle-class religion, I don’t see that as so damning. Do we want them still to be in misery?

Certainly some of the structures and institutions are repressive, but it is the lifestyle of the millions that will make the difference. Then Christians can penetrate the structures to be salt and light.

The only other options are unacceptable: the status quo or violent revolution, which does not lead to freedom for the gospel or dignity for the individual.

How should evangelicals be addressing the questions of poverty and oppression?

The beauty of the gospel is how the leadership, even without the background, can adapt by the grace of the Holy Spirit. We were not taught well enough, and we’re all catching up. I think what the vast majority needs to do is to truly switch—and we are switching—from the “stay out of politics; it’s absolutely dirty and impossible to touch” mentality we were brought up in, to one of “let’s get our young people involved in journalism, in politics, in the broadcasting media, in sports” and in all the influential circles considered completely worldly in the past. Everything was worldly except making a living and being faithful at church.

But as you begin to analyze these situations for yourself, you decide this is ridiculous. That isn’t even the way it is in North America. These missionaries come from countries where there are Christian, or at least Christian-influenced, people in government, and therefore they are enjoying the benefits of freedom. They just accepted what they picked up in Bible school, and they come down sincerely and say, “Just rejoice.” That may have been fair enough in the early days when any other response would have brought horrible persecution, but times have changed.

We must get involved, even at the risk of making mistakes and coming under attack. I think we are seeing some of that developing in Latin America, and that’s encouraging.

What needs to be done to give this trend a nudge?

One well-known theologian asked me, “What is needed in Latin America in terms of theology?”

And I answered, “Tell us how to biblically handle politics.”

He said, “Oh, leave me out of that.”

I said, “Look, in Central America the young fellows have to do theology for themselves on the run. They suddenly find themselves thrown into a revolution.” Sometimes it’s a conviction that dawns when someone is asked, “How about it?” with a gun to his head and to his sister’s head. He’s got to make a quick choice, and says, “It’s really wonderful; we believe in change.” Nobody prepared them to know how a Christian should operate when invited to join the military or the guerrillas. Suddenly they’ve got a theological problem, and a survival problem.

How do you view the situation in Nicaragua?

You hear both sides. We really need to pray, because it is easy to be confused and use biblical terminology, yet be an unconscious victim of the other oppression. After 50 years, the imperialism was so obvious. Fear is subtle in the moment of change. When you pray for people, think of the subtle pressures that nobody talks about, but that you can feel: If I make a wrong move, either I or my sister or daughter will bear the consequences. It’s terrifying.

I was raised in Argentina where if you wanted to survive you knew which subject just to ignore for the moment. You rationalized that God would bring about a change, and often he has. I have no easy answers.

Do you feel it is part of your role to be a prophetic voice to leadership?

I feel that the Lord has not called me to a public denunciation. I don’t see it as cowardice, either. I have spoken in private, with the Lord’s guidance as the opportunity arose, with several top leaders, including presidents. Take a verse such as Proverbs 11:26: “He that with-holdeth corn, the people shall curse him.” I’ve used that as a takeoff in private. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you want to write a press release about.

I distinguish, as Ephesians 4 does, between an evangelist and a prophet. It is not my role to meddle in the prophetic. I recently spoke to a gathering of evangelists in England, and I made some off-the-cuff comments on the church and the bomb, while sitting with a writer. She interviewed me for an hour. The writeup zeroed in on three sentences—all of them correct, but taken out of context. So I came over as an extreme use-the-bomb type. The next time they ask me I’ll say, “Look, if you want to talk in private, I have a lot of opinions, just like my wife does, but my political opinions are not the views of the entire body of Christ.”

The World Council-sponsored CLAI [the Latin American Council of Churches] inauguration meetings held recently drew some Pentecostal involvement. What do you think this means for the future of the evangelically sponsored CONELA?

I believe in CONELA [the Confraternity of Evangelicals in Latin America]. To my mind it is the more broadly evangelical as I perceive evangelicalism to be, and the more representative of the true feelings of 99 percent of the evangelicals of Latin America. Some of them don’t know all the theological currents that go into these international events, the differences between CONELA and CLAI—particularly in the areas of liberation theology, strength or weakness in the view of Scripture, and the attitude toward out-and-out, good old evangelism. So without passing judgment, I would think that might be a reason why some Pentecostals participated.

The exciting thing about CONELA is what sharp, godly leadership the Lord has raised up in Latin America. I was impressed to see these absolutely Latin fellows hammering out doctrinal issues in committee meetings with true wisdom. CONELA is proving its maturity through the solid people who are leading it.

You have shored up CONELA in its beginning. Do you see that as part of your contribution to the church in Latin America?

Yes. I think a mass evangelist has the responsibility and privilege of encouraging those movements we as a team feel need a boost. At the call of many of the leaders, we intervened. They felt I would be a good catalyst, signaling to people that this is centered, balanced evangelicalism, that they can trust the theology behind CONELA. We were more than willing. And we also felt we should put in personnel and some support to help get the thing rolling. There are many people involved. I don’t want to take the credit; and more and more we’re going to fade into the background. But I am proud to have been there from the beginning, making this bit of a contribution to keeping evangelicalism on course.

How do you prepare for a crusade in Latin America?

We usually start 18 months ahead of time in order to embed the crusade deeply in the local church. We meet with ministers to bring spiritual cleansing and awakening within the leadership, to give church-growth vision and goals, and to try to set up church-growth plans along with crusade evangelism.

After the organizational structure begins to take place, we move in to bring awakening to the believers—at least a measure of cleansing and teaching on the indwelling Christ and the fullness of the Spirit among the Christians. Then comes the training period, then the mobilization. We keep before them the goal of reaching everyone, from the president to the humblest, poorest person in the country. We include an emphasis on evangelism of children and young people, trying to penetrate the whole spectrum of society.

Your series of meetings at the University of Wisconsin in Madison did not draw the response you get in Latin America. What does this tell you about American openness to the gospel?

It wasn’t disappointing in terms of the numbers professing Christ in relation to attendance. I was the invited guest speaker, not the organizer. The students who organized the meetings deliberately kept a low profile, which is not the way to touch a large university. Therefore attendance was lower than I would have wished. To get the attention of 40,000 students, you’ve got to make a lot of noise, really shake it up. Next time I think we’d be more involved in the publicity. But it doesn’t discourage me about the U.S. In fact, I would like to do more.

Do you see a difference of methodology in evangelism in Latin America and in North America?

Yes, there is a difference and I’m still trying to understand it more fully. I’ve been in the United States off and on now for over 23 years, but I spend most of each year traveling around the world and I’ve never focused my attention completely on the American situation. Now I am doing that more as invitations to speak in America and hold crusades continue to increase.

For the most part, my messages are pretty much the same no matter where I am preaching in the world. We add local anecdotes, but I don’t change my approach too much.

Methodologically, we try to adapt to the local culture. We’ve been in San Diego and Bellingham, Washington. We’re going to Modesto, California; and now Chicago and Dallas look like possibilities. I think what we are developing is this: In comparison to Latin America, we’ll stage more in-the-vicinity-of-the-city campaigns before we come to the big united effort. Touch the suburban areas, touch the inner-city neighborhoods in depth. This is what we’re doing in London: nine campaigns this fall, then one united campaign next summer in a football stadium.

What challenge do you have for the church?

My burden now—besides the Latin area, which is always on my heart—is twofold: for America and Europe.

In America I see a transition. The generation that took us out of World War II and the liberal-fundamentalist debate has written one of the greatest chapters in the history of the church. It delivered evangelicals from a strident, anti-intellectual image. It went for a two-pronged approach with both intellectualism and activism, bringing evangelicalism into God-honoring prominence and respectability in the proper sense. Its leadership outdistanced the liberal camp that appeared so overwhelming to our fathers.

But now that generation is beginning to go on to glory. It is handing over the baton to the next generation and saying, “What are you going to do with what we, by God’s grace, did?” And that’s where we need to resolve, “By his grace, we’ll pick up from there, keep it going, and if possible, better it in areas.”

My challenge to the States would be: Let’s not be an accepting, passive generation. The tendency is for the first generation to be vibrant and active, and for the second to become passive. We hardly realize what happened to us. We’re having a great time; we’ve got all these publications, radio programs, youth movements, campaigns. The third generation degenerates theologically and ethically, going all the way back to questioning the fundamentals; and practically giving up on evangelism, church growth, and solid theology.

I see myself in the middle, as one of those picking up the baton. And I discern a trend toward fragmentation in the U.S. So how can we evangelicals maintain the sense of unity, respect, and support for one another that our fathers and grandfathers passed on to us? We’ve got to pick that up, enhance it, and not allow fragmentation to set in.

What are your goals for your service to the church?

Pray that the Lord will lead us. I feel we’re going to have campaigns in the States; invitations are coming from big cities like Chicago, Dallas, and Birmingham, Alabama. We want to be used of God for effective, God-honoring, large crusades, which I think help to preserve that evangelical unity.

In England, there seems to be a fire brewing under the surface among the young people and now within the leadership. Six or seven years ago when I went there for the first time, they cited 4 percent attendance in church; now, last year, there is 11 percent adult church attendance. Church attendance is not the greatest barometer, but it does speak of something. The campaigns coming up for us in London and for Dr. [Billy] Graham, in the five other major cities of Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Norwich, could bring a new awakening to England. Because I was converted through British missionaries and went to British boarding schools, I dream of being used of the Lord to bring blessing back there, to pay my debt, so to speak. I would ask for prayer for revival in the British Isles as much as in the United States.

Last october the National Council of Churches’ Washington office sent out a memo that amounted to an ecclesiastical storm warning. It told interested church leaders that there might well be “some uncomfortable moments” ahead for “the NCC and the member communions.” Three media events were listed as possible high-pressure systems on the ecumenical weather map: William Buckley interviewing NCC President Bishop James Armstrong on the topic “Are the churches too political?” on his “Firing Line” program, a forthcoming Reader’s Digest article by Rael Jean Isaac, and a “60 Minutes” program.

The NCC memo expressed amazement at the “ferocity” of some attacks on the “mainline denominations.” By now the thunderbolts have come and gone. Many local churches seem scarcely to have felt the campaign being waged against them. But some denominational establishments have definitely been put on the defensive. Their communication offices have been hard at work trying to neutralize any negative effects from the recent publicity about ecumenical ventures into radical politics.

Are NCC-related denominations being dragged into a Marxist-Leninist plot by their leaders? I have personally worked with several hundred church bureaucrats, particularly those located at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City. Never have I caught any of them reading either Marx or Lenin. They usually return to their suburban homes in Ridgewood, Princeton, and Montclair, New Jersey, carrying briefcases heavily loaded with interoffice memos and “position papers.” With a bit of luck they might squeeze the New York Times and Newsweek (or Time) magazine, plus a religious periodical into their regular reading fare. There are, of course, the usual exceptions that confirm the rule.

Yet, it seems to me that the critics are not just whistling in the darkness of their own suspicious imaginings. It is demonstrable that the memos, position papers, and speeches of certain ecclesiastical decision makers are marked by an ideological orientation that has influenced the direction taken by the ecumenical movement. I would not say that these people have undergone a conversion to Marxist-Leninist dogma. Rather, it seems to me, they have been seduced by revolutionary slogans and rhetoric (somewhat pompously passed off as “Marxist analysis”) that eventually are translated into more-or-less symbolic gestures of sympathy, particularly through the distribution of funds.

Interestingly, a large percentage of mainline church executives come from conservative/evangelical backgrounds in environments where traditional American values and structures rarely were questioned in a radical way. In the denominational and ecumenical establishments, on the other hand, people who reject widely held assumptions in American society, because they see them as contributing to some of the worst injustices manifested in our socio-economic order, have set the tone in recent years. This frequently leads to a stance of radical critique, that in some cases can be interpreted as a biblical-prophetic passion out of touch with its roots.

Grabbing What Is In The Air

Where does one turn after recognizing the oppressive features in one’s own social order? And how does one deal with the feelings of guilt produced by the numerous ways one must participate in such a society? Instead of reaching into the evangelical heritage of radical social criticism (à la John Wesley, let us say, who has been referred to as a Christian socialist), the tendency has been to grab what was in the air.

And what has been in the air in recent years? Some of the most passionate voices in our cultural life have enunciated a Third World anti-imperialist rhetoric, inherited from the radical sixties with its priority agenda of support for wars of national liberation. This rhetoric was indeed influenced by a Neo-Marxism that (like the old Marxism) appealed to certain Western liberal intellectual circles—despite the warnings of Russian intellectuals such as Sakharo and Solzhenitsyn who have tried the product and tasted its bitter fruits.

When church establishments try to speak a prophetic word, a series of “handy texts” from the Bible are usually retained. But, as anyone knows who has suffered through the drab “United Nations English” in which many official ecclesiastical pronouncements are cast, the fire of the biblical message is gone. The handiest of all handy texts in recent years has been Luke 4:18, with its announcement of good news to the poor, release of the captives, and liberty for the oppressed. It is therefore not surprising to find this text used as the cornerstone of the NCC’s response to the January 1983 Reader’s Digest article, “Do you know where your church offerings go?” But even the most powerful Scripture passages begin to sound like slogans when regularly appended in pro forma fashion to the pronouncements of various solemn church assemblies.

I agree that not all criticism leveled at the NCC and WCC is fair and balanced, but I would also claim that some of the unfairness is invited, even cultivated. We insiders are well aware that revolutionary rhetoric is not representative of many ecumenical programs nor of the views of most delegates to ecumenical assemblies. But it seems clear to me that people who must depend on official releases and who listen to some of the recent high-visibility ecumenical spokespersons could hardly come to conclusions different from those reached in the writings of critics. The more sensational bits of information reported in the communications media are precisely the emphases that some members of mainline officialdom have been trying very hard to sell.

The New Romanticists

Ideological bias tends to produce a certain disorientation of perspective. For example, the good old U.S.A. is certainly not the same as the good news of the gospel. But when the U.S. is constantly portrayed in the worst possible light (the Weather Underground spoke of “exorcizing Devil America”), while the faults of so-called revolutionary movements are passed over or their alleged achievements glorified, this inevitably creates the impression that one is dealing with people who are incurably romantic about revolution and quite naïve about tyranny on the Left. At times passionate talk about liberation in general seems curiously combined with indifference about freedom in specific situations.

Also, Christians enamored of “Marxist analysis” as a tool of liberation in most cases appear totally oblivious to the fact that Marx’s political-economic analysis became blended with a biological evolutionism that led him to talk with utter contempt about black people and various ethnic groups he deemed racially inferior. It is hard to understand why Christians, and “Third World” Christians in particular, are so eager to proclaim such a person the prophet of a new and just social order.

Finally, there is a tendency to portray revolutionaries as by that very fact beneficent agents of change (even when their revolution takes the form of terrorism against unarmed civilians) while their opponents are automatically described as ruthless, murderous fascists. Such one-sidedness hardly enhances one’s credibility.

The Feel From The Airport

When this kind of thinking penetrates the world of theological education, there is virtually no limit to the mindlessness it produces. During the year I served as a lecturer at a theological seminary, one of our senior students found himself on a plane hijacked to Cuba. He wrote a glowing report about the experience, entitled (what else?) “To Cuba with Love.” He described his six-hour stay at the Havana airport as an almost ecstatic thrill. He assured readers that “the atmosphere was saturated with a spirit of joy and celebration,” and admonished possible elect ones who might face a similar experience to “try to feel and hear the rhythms of love and struggle for a new social order.” New York Times religion editor Kenneth Briggs, who during a visit to Cuba ventured beyond the confines of the Havana airport, told a story (issue of April 19, 1981) of a less heavenly reality, especially for professing Christians.

Not only does ideology tend to distort perspectives, it also endangers dialogue; and this strikes at the heart of ecumenism. When it comes to certain crucial and controversial issues, be it the Middle East or the Moral Majority agenda, there is a definite tendency to avoid any form of conversation. While we advertise our desire to engage in dialogue with persons of other faiths and ideologies as well as people of no faith, we tend to write off as beyond hope cobelievers with a different perspective. It is true, of course, that quite a few fundamentalists are strict isolationists, as were many Roman Catholics not so long ago. But the ecumenical movement will cease to be a movement and will increasingly take on the characteristics of a tired and defensive establishment if it abandons the restless search for open doors and possible meeting grounds.

Party-line thinking that leads to politicized processes (“by all means don’t break rank or we’ll be forced to fight you!”) are in my opinion a betrayal of, as well as a basic threat to, conciliar ecumenism today. The NCC Office on News and Information is doing what it does best: sending out voluminous packets defending every action that has come under attack and providing people with information on where to send their protests against recent media presentations. But surely there must be church leaders out there who know that a strategy of just blaming the critics is neither going to work nor worthy of a Christian movement. Any movement that tries that hard to save its life through defensive polemics will lose it.

During my years as a church bureaucrat I became convinced that if the conciliar movement were to suffer a period of decline, it would be due mostly to people with suicidal tendencies on the inside (the triumph of their slogans is much more important to them than the survival of the organization they serve), and very little to attacks from people on the outside. The latter, delighted to quote some of the more extreme and mindless statements that all bureaucracies produce, are not the real problem, even though at times they may give us problems. In short, the NCC—if it is to experience the radical renewal it has urged upon so many others—needs the courage to take an honest and critical look at itself.

Part Three:

“But what can i do?” many evangelicals are asking. They sense that while God uses government to help the poor, he especially wants to work for his glory through those who are motivated by a commitment to Christ.

The three routes the church has traveled successfully in the past are evangelism, social service, and social action (reform). Those who wish to get started find it best in today’s climate to begin with social service. Here are some guidelines and some models.

Getting Priorities Straight

Bill Leslie is pastor of an urban church that has found many ways to touch the poorer areas of Chicago. From over 20 years’ experience he says, “Seek a learning experience, not just a giving experience.” Specifically, “Aim at relationships, not just at providing dollars. Try to connect people with people.”

How can we do this? Leslie points out, “We have ‘Short Terms Abroad’; how about ‘Short Terms in the City’? A suburban family could locate a church in the low-income area that would cooperate, and start spending Sundays in their services, worshiping, learning, and getting acquainted. During the week it could continue at its suburban church. Its goal would be to worship and relate to people in the city church on Sunday, and then, during the week, to share with the suburban church what it was learning.”

Leslie says that 40 percent of the children in the public schools of Chicago come from families on welfare. They do not see either mother or father going to work each day. They need to become acquainted with families where that goes on, and a relationship between an urban and a suburban church could bring it about.

He thinks a suburban church might start a once-a-month discussion group, perhaps called “Conversations on the City.” It could invite resource people to speak to it, or visit various places in the city.

One service Leslie’s LaSalle Street Church supplies is called “Bridging,” a ministry to unwed mothers that could use the help of suburban people. About 45 percent of the children born in Chicago last year were born to unwed mothers, Leslie states.

A single woman had been raped, and was pregnant. Her family and friends, however, treated her as if she had chosen to have sex outside marriage. She couldn’t very well wear a sign saying, “I was raped!” so she experienced slow rejection. Her boss told her, “You get an abortion, or you get another job!” Though that is illegal, it is not uncommon.

Bridging provided her with clothes and furniture for the baby, and with leads to a new job.

Angela DiCenzo, the executive director of this organization less than two years old, says, “We go to court, too. A three-year-old was raped by her baby sitter, so we saw that her mother had legal counsel and medical help—and we joined her in her suffering too.”

DiCenzo has observed that if the unwed mother goes to a church, she may be cut off. Repentance does not count with many churches, that in effect insist that she continue to wear sackcloth and ashes, even when God has forgiven her. If she has a good voice, for instance, she may not be permitted to sing in the choir. Knowing of such a possibility, an unwed mother may keep her situation secret, compounding her problems.

DiCenzo tells of one woman, however, who found acceptance in a church she started attending, even before she believed. When illness forced her into a hospital, the members of the church brought her son to see her each night. They also found out that the boy had a sleeping disorder that had kept her from getting a good night’s sleep in two years, bringing her close to a breakdown. They put their heads together and, among other solutions, took her son one night each month so she could get some rest. With such a model in mind, Bridging tries to help churches learn the biblical response to the unwed mother.

“We try to mother the mother so she can mother the child.” DiCenzo says. “Many women in early pregnancy, unsure of whether to carry the child to term, are referred to us by professionals. These women don’t want to talk with another professional counselor. They prefer another woman who has been through what they are facing. They want to hear the truth of what it is like to be a single parent—the pain and the joy.”

Being a friend takes many forms. Often Bridging assists the new mother when she first returns from the hospital. Volunteer women from various churches clean her house, do her laundry, help her organize, and shop for her groceries. Often the best help is simply to listen as she sorts out the issues of single parenting. Women share and pray with her when she asks for spiritual nurturing.

A Bridging program about to start is called “Kids’ Night Out Club.” Members of various churches, suburban and urban, will put on an evening of art, music, and drama, plus loving care, to relieve single mothers so they can be free for one night each week. The workers, mostly men, have the goal of letting relationships develop. They give a sense of true fatherliness to children who, having no father, have a hard time understanding that God can be their heavenly Father. In return for this free three hours of child care, the mother will contribute one hour somewhere in Bridging’s ministry.

People Touching People

Suburban Western Springs Baptist Church has found many ways to relate to churches in poor urban areas. Pastor Arthur Brown is quick to point out, however, that members of his church do not see themselves at level 100, paternally ministering to city churches beneath them at level 30. “We work together to meet each other’s needs,” he says.

How can a white suburban church help a church in a poor area? “That’s not the question to ask,” he says. “Don’t say, ‘We want to help.’ That calls up the ways of the Western missionary blessing the natives with his supposedly superior skills. We are not to offer ourselves as generals willing to lead the poor into successful living.”

Summarizing their relationships with various churches Brown says, “They help us, we help them. They teach us, we teach them. We are often blind to their needs, and to our needs. The goal is not to give, but both to give and receive. Christ ministers to each through the other.”

Tough Questions Answered

A suburban middle-class white with genuine interest in relating to people in the poorer areas of a city might ask some serious questions. Scott Reed gives his answers.

Is it dangerous to come into the inner city?

At some places, sometimes, yes, but not invariably or inevitably. I was held up twice 20 years ago, but I have never been hurt, even going in and out of Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes at night. (These are high-rise housing developments in Chicago.)

How does one relate to the poor or afflicted or handicapped?

Just be genuine. There must be more to your ministry than a sense of duty; there must be compassion for people that is real enough to be felt by others. Perhaps most important, listen sincerely. Finally, do not assume that pat answers built on assumptions common to the suburbs will meet all the complex needs you find. Sometimes you cannot solve anything at all; you can only determine that the person has money for shelter and food. (Read “The Making of a Minister,” CT, Sept. 17, 1982.) Then just be a friend who cares. Often that alone gives life meaning to otherwise outcast people. You may find you have helped others get a new start.

Can a person minister spiritually in the inner city?

One can only learn by experience how to broach the subject of spiritual things. Do not impose advice appropriate only to the suburbs. Don’t preach; do share the gospel. Do pray whenever you are permitted. Don’t ask, “May / pray for you?” Do ask, “Will you accept prayer?” The poor will often suspect your motives, thinking, “Why on earth is he [she] here talking to me?” for they have seen so many cons, and suspect something “phony” about everyone. When they are convinced that you are for real, and that your Christianity is too, they will be more interested in listening to expressions of your faith.

Will you be despised for your presence in a poor community or for your race?

By some, probably. Consider it a small thing. People can easily forget their anti-middle class or racial suspicions when they are receiving real service and help. But if a resentful attitude comes from many, consider this a message. Do you think you are better than they? If you do, it will come through.

What if you don’t feel superior, but they think you do?

It’s a discomfort to be endured when it happens, and it should become a matter of prayer that you might find favor in their sight. In simplest terms, you may deal effectively with the poor if your love is genuine, if you don’t come on like the great white savior, and if you have just a few skills that do some good or bring happiness to someone’s life.

How To Get Started

“First, get related to the leaders of a church in a minority area,” Brown suggests. “Take them to dinner. Talk. Listen. Say, ‘I’d like to receive from you, if you’d be kind enough to give to me.’ Make it clear that this is a complementary relationship, where the suburban Christians know they need the help of the urban Christians.”

Out of this may come interaction, but only if there are two ingredients: time and compassion. Pity, a poor substitute for compassion, can kill the relationship. Pity stands outside the wall and tosses help over the top. “Pity,” Brown says, “answers to something in me, when I see needs. But compassion answers to something in the needy person. Perhaps what he needs is not money so much as an arm around his shoulder that says, ‘You are important to me.’ ”

If we admit our own needs. Brown thinks, a relationship of trust can develop. We can become friends in Christ. In time we can discover ways we can work together. “Something beautiful can come of that,” he exclaims.

“For instance, we have learned much about worship from urban churches,” Brown says. “Our styles are different. And we call on them for prayer and help when we are in trouble.”

But the key to all this is to listen, to learn, to seek a reciprocal relationship, to be responsive to teaching. In time, fellowship may emerge.

Adopt-A-Block

One Ministries, in Washington, D.C., is exploring another way to link Christian churches in the suburbs and the ghetto. As John Staggers, director of the work, describes it, the church is society’s best source of help. In his area there are 3,500 churches; his goal is to link a minority city church with a suburban one to serve one block near the inner-city church. At the start, two white ministers, Richard Halverson, then of Fourth Presbyterian Church, and Louis Evans, Jr., of National Presbyterian Church, were brought into fellowship with two blacks, Henry Gregory of Shiloh Baptist Church and Samuel Hines of Third Street Church of God.

In “Stage 1,” an urban and a suburban church are chosen, and the two ministers meet to talk and pray. Then lay coordinators from the two churches get together. This then expands to include interested members of both churches.

Next they set up a work day in the ghetto near the city church, and people from both churches—say, National Presbyterian and Third Street Church of God—gather in their grubbies. They spend the first hour in devotions, studying the biblical mandate to serve one another. Then comes a half-hour orientation to the community. Finally they split into teams. If a home is to be painted or a roof repaired, enough teams are assigned to complete the job in four hours. After this all teams assemble for an hour of debriefing on what they have learned. Then those of the community they served plus the teams from the two churches sit down to a fellowship meal.

The devotional time at the beginning of the day is designed to refine motives. “You aren’t coming into the city to paint houses and kill cockroaches for the nobodies,” Staggers tells them. “You must do what you do as a form of worship to Jesus Christ.” Isaiah 58:6–9 speaks of such social service as clothing the naked, and adds, “Then your light will break forth like the dawn, … and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer” (NIV). Likewise in Matthew 25 Christ says that if believers serve “the least of these,” they do it “unto me.”

“You get liberated!” Staggers exclaims. “And this is one way we can care for one another. People come from the suburbs with all sorts of fears about the ghetto, and find that Christ is alive in the ghetto people, too. Myths and stereotypes fade away as the people of the two churches worship, eat, and work together.”

In “Stage 2,” as the workdays progress, the two churches form task forces to find the needs in the block served, and to discover what agencies and other groups address these needs. Then two families, one from each church, join forces to adopt a family on the block for a long-term relationship. As that family has problems, the two Christian families go to an appropriate task force for help. A teen-ager might be arrested, and the families would visit him in jail and see that he received sensible legal aid.

Staggers says with a grin, “The church represents the largest unemployment agency in the country. The question is, How can churches take their gifts and on a couple of nights a week use them in serving the Lord?”

The federal government is retreating somewhat, and many in the religious sector would help if they knew how. The adopt-a-block program spells out a way to help through building relationships between people as a form of worship to Christ.

Conclusion

Part One of this article ended with the dejected Willa slumped over a kitchen table, worried about bills, the future of her children, and the pressure of her friends to abort her now-dead husband’s child.

Part Two showed how poverty and rejection create a destructive atmosphere in which children can grow up hating themselves and others. We also saw that especially government (but also the church) can provide medical, educational, and financial help to young mothers and their children in the ghetto.

In Part Three we saw ways churches can tap their God-given resources, especially relational ones, to join the poor in their sorrow—and joy—and both receive from them and give to them. We suggest that to start, a suburban Christian or church should contact a wise evangelical pastor who ministers among the urban poor, and follow his advice.

Compassion need not lead us on a guilt trip. It is God who loves the poor. He seeks to work through his people in the ghetto, and outside, to nurture men, women, and children in need.

So as we feel drawn to identify with people, we are carried along by God’s purposes, and stimulated by his pure motives. Not all are called to a direct ministry involving the poor. Scripture directs us only to receive the will of God joyfully, and do it to please him.

But as Isaiah says, “If you … satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire with good things, … and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not” (58:10–11).

And perhaps Willa will hear a knock at her door, and open it to people God has sent to stand with her.

Part Two:

Willa slumped over the table, besieged: Peter whimpering, Tommy crooning, the baby-to-come awaiting.

And in the ceiling an ominous hole, head-sized.

A room full of poverty and desperation with the hint of violence confronts us. We feel with Willa as she fights the easy answer of a fast, cheap, legal abortion.

Our compassion for her (and thousands like her) moves us to help. And we sense that a stand against abortion has consequences, especially for the poor, that call for special action. What is involved?

To gain some practical answers, CT sent Deputy Editor Paul Fromer to an evangelical Christian who 25 years ago, as a young college graduate, left the comforts most of us take for granted, and immersed himself in the world of the urban poor. Life on Chicago’s South Side was the making of Scott Reed as God taught him to love the people there.

He merged with the people, felt with them, witnessed to Christ, helped converts become employable, located them jobs, advised them in marriage, expanded a mission into a church, and for their children set up a Christian school. Here are his thoughts, as told to Paul Fromer:

When i first moved to an impoverished section of chicago, my mind was jammed with misunderstandings. I was a good example of Josh Billings’s wry comment, “It is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” I knew a lot that wasn’t so. But to help, I had to understand. As a Christian from a small town I had to do some hard thinking to learn enough about the ghetto to relate to it.

To gain understanding, we will first look at the implications for the city of a major interest we all have, prolife legislation. I think a realistic picture of urban life will emerge to help us see what place we can have in relating to poor people of all races there.

I base my prolife views on the belief that that heartbeat belongs to a human being, with rights to birth and life. And I believe no one should be deprived of life without due process of law. So I hate what abortion-on-demand does to a helpless child, and to the mother and perhaps the father, too.

This raises a critical question, though. What, by contrast, will be the effects of a prolife alternative? Clearly it will affect the child by guaranteeing him birth. But what then? The person who wants to relate to the poor needs to think through what the prolife position means to those who probably do not celebrate life very much, but rather endure it, or even hate it. Francis Schaeffer and Everett Koop have written, “Merely to say [to a married or unmarried woman], ‘You must not have an abortion,’ without being ready to involve ourselves in the problem—is another way of being inhuman” (Whatever Happened to the Human Race?). We must prepare to deal with the consequences of our commitment.

If right-to-life legislation passes, thousands of babies will annually be born who otherwise would have been aborted. How many? The National Center for Health Statistics has estimated that there are about 1.25 million abortions in the U.S. annually.

Someone may point out here that if abortion becomes hard, women will be more careful to avoid conception by using the pill or an IUD. This is possibly true, but the difference, in the inner city at least, will not be great. Desperate people become ground down till they are possessed by a feeling of enervation that in time becomes a dreadful passivity. Life is so hopeless that they almost do not care anymore. It might be a bit hard for someone who has not lived in the inner city to identify with that stage of sorrow, but it is there. Because of it, I do not expect contraceptives to have much effect on that group of the 1.25 million babies who will be born to the urban poor. Surely we are talking about several hundred thousand children annually.

What kind of life will they face? Part One of this article strikes a responsive chord in me. It describes people like those I have lived among for years, and I feel for them, as you do. Do you recall that the previous tenant of Janey’s apartment was a woman who hated her son? The father, a “no-gooder,” had left, and the mother periodically took out her frustration on her son. Once she dunked him in a tub of boiling water, and another time may have smashed him into the ceiling, leaving a head-sized hole.

Some will say she should have saved herself and her child a good deal of grief by aborting. I cannot agree. But neither can I sit by and see the excruciating pains of the city made all the worse by the arrival of many more thousands of unwanted children.

Of course, the gospel will change the attitudes and situation of some who will not be able to abort. Motives are touched by the Lord, so that genuine Christians among the poor may react differently from their neighbors. I often hear them say, “I’m only making it because of the Lord.” I wish the number being reached were greater.

But we really are looking at several hundred thousand new babies each year who would otherwise have been aborted, and whose mothers are unmotivated by the gospel. How will these children fare?

If we look at the situation with high optimism, we can assume that they will all be born in a hospital, not in some squalid room before being abandoned in shopping bags or garbage cans.

Further, suppose that half those born will be left at the hospital. Some of these will be adopted, but the rest must go to orphanages and foster homes. Here in Chicago foster homes have revolving doors: the children are often passed from one unsatisfactory place to another, and they bear in their personalities the marks of such a life.

For the moment we must pass on to the other group of children—those whom the mothers take home. Some will be accepted in love, but others will face at least two problems: poverty and rejection.

Poverty

In Part One we saw how Willa resisted an abortion because she wanted to keep the baby. Poverty will be her big enemy, even with public aid.

Some might object that people are poor because they are lazy, and that the welfare system only rewards them. But if we think biblically, we see, as R. C. Sproul has noted (CT, March 5, 1982, p. 94), not one but four reasons for poverty. One, it is true, is laziness. “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—and poverty will come on you like a bandit” (Prov. 6:10–11, NIV).

But the other reasons are quite different. Some are poor because of disease, famine, or catastrophe; the fall of Samaria brought poverty to righteous and wicked alike. Others are poor because of exploitation, as Amos declares. Finally, some are poor by choice, pursuing low-income vocations; John the Baptist illustrates this group.

Clearly, the reasons for poverty are varied, though the main emphasis in Scripture falls on exploitation. We should not overemphasize laziness as the main cause, blaming the poor for being poor, and therefore resisting efforts to help them. Why was Willa facing poverty?

Most of the children we are considering will be financially destitute, even if social services remain at their present level. Some mothers will work if they can find jobs and inexpensive child care, but many more will have to try to live on inadequate income provided by public aid. (In Chicago, a welfare family considers an additional child not a financial boon but a financial burden.) Some mothers will continue in poverty; others will add to their public aid checks with income from live-in boyfriends; still others will reject both poverty and public aid pittances and turn instead to more socially destructive ways to support themselves.

Rejection

Part One referred to an unknown child who formerly lived in the apartment, and whose mother did not want him. He represents a large number of children in the inner urban area whose lives are tortured by rejection.

Just think. Some of the mothers are children themselves, not yet capable of mature motherhood; their children may grow up thinking of them as sisters until they learn differently. Too many children will be shuffled from one family member to another. Some will be hated because they are a burden. Others will be hated because the father—a rapist, a relative, or a short-term lover—is hated.

We must think of the children who are abused, or even killed, by mothers who are incapable of ever accepting them. We must also think about those children who grow to adulthood and reject themselves throughout their lives because they have always felt rejected. Many, angry at being born, will hate themselves, and God, when they learn that they are the children of rape or incest. I wish such problems did not exist, but I confess I have seen them all too often.

We can see that unwanted babies born to mothers who are poor or economically marginal are faced with the double deprivation of poverty and rejection.

Antisocial Behavior

Studies show that poverty does not in itself lead a young person to a life of crime or other antisocial acts, though it helps. But if that person’s family rejects him, he begins to reject himself, hate himself, and hate society; this leads to antisocial behavior.

If a person senses he is unwanted—rejected!—he faces a most debilitating force. It distorts his personality. Every pastor who has counseled someone with this rejection syndrome knows what I mean. In the poorer parts of the city, however, the young do not hold on until they find a pastor-counselor or psychiatrist. They take out their rejection on society, and they start early. This will be the pattern of many unwanted children.

Mothers, too, face problems. Consider the mental agonies of pregnant women who, resenting the ban on aborting their fetus, still do not want the baby, and may even hate it. Feeling guilty about their hostility and their inability to change their attitudes, they may turn to alcohol or narcotics to numb their misery, thereby creating a desperate environment sometimes characterized by depravity or insanity. In such an atmosphere child abuse comes easily. And the future children of these mothers may well be born with serious defects.

It is difficult for us to empathize beyond our experience, but some readers who have passed through bitter sorrows may be able to grasp what it means to be miserable and wretched every hour of every day, as the meaning of life merges with death. I am sorry to say that this is likely to be the “life” into which children are often born in poor urban areas.

Quality Of Life

We can sum up the situation as a set of alternatives:

1. We could teach young people abstinence. But that is a gospel task, not likely of broad success across the spectrum of people involved.

2. We could provide contraceptive information and devices. But this is already being done, with only mild success in the inner city. More important, many Christians oppose such widespread distribution on moral grounds. Others, depressed by an environment infected by decades of poverty and rejection, fatalistically say, “Who cares?” They are not noted for using the pill. While programs to implement these first two alternatives are being carried out at present, the problem arises with the 1.25 million women annually who, in spite of them, still abort.

3. We could support abortion. But, believing this is the moral equivalent of murder, we reject it.

We see, therefore, that unwanted children will be born, and that those born to the poor will suffer a double setback of poverty and rejection; here we must face consequences of our position. This leaves us with two options:

4. Either we take care of these children after they become rejected, abused, antagonistic, and perhaps criminals, or,

5. We take care of the mother and children so as to prevent this kind of result.

Tersely stated, the approaches of abstinence, pill, and abortion are seriously flawed as widespread social answers; many unwanted children will be born if the prolife law passes. We can deal with them as they self-destruct, or we can deal with them before this occurs. Which will it be?

We are now in a better position to consider how to help mothers and children among the urban poor. Moved by compassion and conscience to demand that every woman carry her baby to birth, we find ourselves also urged by the same motives to help that woman and child find life of some quality. We say that the aborter rejects the child, but if we were indifferent to the kind of life the child would be forced into, in some sense we too would be rejecting him. We want to join right-to-birth with right-to-life, meaning quality-of-life.

As Schaeffer and Koop say, “There is no universal formula, but we must recognize that saying that abortion is wrong immediately confronts us with a challenge to be willing to share in the consequences which our advice brings. For Christians who adhere to the truths of the Bible, the importance of doing what it teaches is imperative. We are to be compassionate about people’s needs. Christian love and humanness mean … giving up part of our own personal peace and affluence to share in the results that morally correct solutions produce. It is vital that we put first not economics or efficiency charts or plans, but being people—real flesh and blood people.”

Valuable Government Aid

We have used the prolife amendment as a case study to give us a more understanding heart toward life among the urban poor. Now we must broaden our view beyond the children who will be born if national legislation passes, to all children born, even under present law, in such a climate of poverty.

What kind of help do they and their mothers need, and what is our place in seeing that they get it?

Because the nation at large benefits from any help offered here, it is fair to say that not only compassionate Christians acting as church members, but also all citizens, can play a part. The help offered can come, justifiably, from both government and private programs, and, in fact, must, because the needs are greater than we can envision the present-day church immediately handling. Tax dollars can be wisely spent to employ suitable social service workers and to finance vital programs. And Christians can give from their over-tithes to provide money for a distinctive mix of evangelistic and social programs.

Let’s look first at the rudimentary needs of mothers and their children that either government or Christian groups might offer. Then we can look at some surprising and special ways Christians can help.

The basic needs either can help meet are medical, educational, and nutritional. First, medically, mothers must have adequate nutrition to produce a properly formed and adequately intelligent child; they also need prenatal and postnatal clinics conveniently located and offering nutritional guidance, psychological counseling, and child-care classes. I question whether the present system of clinics is adequate, and I know many are understaffed. In human terms, this means that if prenatal tests show a mother has diabetes, she may not be notified in time to get help before the baby is born. This could result in a child handicapped from birth.

Nutrition is more important than once thought. Ten-thirteenths of the brain cells of a child are normally developed in the first five months of gestation. But if the baby is born small, and if his brain cells have developed too slowly, he can suffer his whole life from an injured nervous system. Studies show that because of low birth weight he may be blind, deaf, or retarded. The current government program to help, WIC (for “Women, Infants and Children”), is short of funds, and only half the needy, eligible women are getting the service. Yet a study has shown that one dollar spent here saves three dollars on the remedial programs otherwise necessary.

Educationally we can see that a very young mother is more likely to think of her child as a doll than a baby. And whatever “wisdom of the ages” was once passed from mother to daughter has pretty well dried up in present poor urban areas. (The average age of girls in one prenatal clinic is 15.) A young mother may have no idea of the importance of nutrition, for instance, and needs to be taught by a special program. Suburbanites who consider themselves better informed still buy books by the armload on marriage and parenting; the needs of those less fortunate are clearly immense.

Another aspect of education concerns counseling. Many badly need help with postpartum depression. Some who would have chosen to abort might best be encouraged to leave their baby at the hospital if, for instance, they cannot control their resentment toward the baby.

Other help is best centered not in the clinic but in a local board of education. School-age girls need to continue their education, and the community could provide it, along with vocational training for mothers who have difficulty with regular studies.

I have seen a dynamic evil relationship between patterns of poverty from generation to generation, and the lack of education from generation to generation. That cycle can be broken if a workable framework is provided, and if the mothers themselves can be brought to cooperate with it.

Financial help must supplement medical and educational help. We already have a welfare system, but it is such a patchwork of local, state, and federal plans that it is hard to use. It needs overhaul. Also, it would help to give financial incentive to those women in the medical and educational programs since their desire to cooperate is essential. I also wish we could provide social workers in such number that case loads would allow them to visit in the homes and neighborhoods of their clients, as they once did, rather than be merely office workers.

RODNEY CLAPP

A composite sketch drawn from interviews.

Part One:

On gray days like this, Willa hated naked winter trees. As she walked home from the bus stop, she kept staring at the trees. They were so different on sunny days, when the bare limbs poking upward made her think of fingers tickling the tummies of clouds. But today stagnant fog blocked the clouds from sight.

To Willa, the atmosphere was suffocating. It was hard to move in. That was winter, especially on these gray days. She thought back to that morning as she had prepared to go to work. You didn’t just rush out into the open air, free and careless. You put on coat and boots and scarf (like strapping on protective armor), then you went out and the cold wind slapped your face, the dirty slush slowed your step. Winter days could remind you that life is hard, and the universe is not about to lend a helping hand. On these days the naked trees reminded Willa of skeletal fingers. Fingers of death.

But she was home. If you want—if you have—to call it that, she thought. Heaven knows she hated to be living back in the projects. She paused at the foot of her building and stared up. Twelve stories, Willa counted, the place had 12 stories. Then she laughed. It had 12 floors, that kind of stories: But how many hundreds of human stories could those walls tell? What about there, on the second floor, where pillows were stuffed in a broken window—Could the walls speak of a bloody family fight, a wife shoved through glass? She looked higher and saw two other windows framed by black scorches. What awful stories of fire could those walls tell, what screams of man, woman, and child had they heard?

Or could the walls tell stories like her mama used to tell, of a building she had lived in. That one was so full of demented human souls they called it Noah’s Ark—“had every kind of weird person there ever was,” Mama had said. Homosexuals unashamedly coupled behind half-open doors, not caring if anyone watched. The owner of the building was supposed to be a minister and ran a bar downstairs. Once Mama went to get her sister out of the bar and cornered the minister-bartender. “You’re bad,” she told him. “You’re so bad you are going to hell, and bust it wide open.” Willa smiled at the memory. She looked at the dull sky once more, then went inside.

It was not better. At least outside there was some light. Inside, too many bulbs were burned out. She debated about waiting for an elevator, wondering if one was working today. She pushed the button anyway, feeling relief at the sound of a car descending. She was not up to climbing four flights of stairs.

The elevator doors grated open. Willa stepped in, leaned against the back wall and looked across the lobby out the project door. Children were playing. Their light, true laughter struck her as it had many times before. It differed from adult laughter, which was tired and transparent, with nothing behind it. Her granddaddy, a man with a poetic bent, had said a child’s laugh hangs from a rainbow, but an old man’s laugh scrapes the bottom of the barrel. That had never made sense to Willa until she was 16 and already mothering two children. Now she was 21 and awaiting the birth of a third child.

The doors of the elevator closed and it lurched upward. For a moment, she closed her eyes and imagined she was on an elevator straight to heaven. But the stench of urine assailed her nostrils and suffocated her dream. She opened her eyes. The fluorescent light flickered on and off, its pallid green glow revealing scraps of newspapers, some ant-covered cookies, a tangled pile of coat hangers, and, on the walls, violent graffiti.

The elevator stopped on the third floor. A tall man, with a thin nose and long forehead, shifted his feet. Dear God, she thought for a moment, it’s Aaron. “Hey, sorry,” he spoke. “I need one goin’ down.” The voice was high and squeaky; Aaron’s was a rich baritone (how she would love to hear him sing again). The car jerked to life and she fell back against the wall. Of course it was not Aaron, she sighed. It never would be Aaron.

Sweet Aaron. Mama had thought he’d never count for much. But Aaron dreamed like Willa, and he hated the ghetto like Willa. Aaron got a construction job and worked hard. Then he came home and watched the kids while Willa went to secretarial school. By the time Willa was finished with school Aaron was a trusted member of his crew and got his hours arranged so he could be at home while Willa was at work. Within two years they were looking at homes outside the ghetto, kissing the poor life good-bye and beginning to laugh the way kids do. They were faced with a high mortgage they could handle only if both worked, but they accepted that and escaped the ghetto.

Two months had passed since the girder dropped on Aaron. Since she was little, Willa’s family had called her strong-spirited. Yet too many times in the past eight weeks she had wondered if the girder killed something besides her husband.

Willa knocked on Janey’s door and heard Tommy shriek joyfully, “Mama’s back!” Janey opened the door. She had flighty eyes that never landed long on one spot. But she had been Willa’s friend for years, and friends know at a glance when they are needed. Janey squeezed Willa’s hand. “Come in and have some coffee before you take the boys and go home.”

Seated at the table, Janey lighted a cigarette and pushed across a cup of coffee. Her eyes shot at Willa through smoke and coffee steam, then bounced to a corner of the room. “Hard day?” she asked.

They did not have to talk at length. Janey knew. She knew Willa had moved back to the projects after Aaron’s accident only because there was no place else to go. She knew day-care rates had risen, so that Willa could no longer afford to send her kids there while she was at work. And she knew that Willa was pregnant with her third child.

On this day, Willa had visited the welfare office. She had more bad news. Willa had mentioned that her brother was lending her $50 a month to get by. The case-worker had promptly decided to cut $50 from her check. “Shoot, gal,” Janey said, only this time her eyes stayed on the corner. “You’re too honest.”

“Yes,” said Willa, and she gulped a bitter mouthful. It was already lukewarm. She followed Janey’s line of sight to the far corner of the room. All Willa could see was blue paint peeling off cement blocks, and a hole in the ceiling. A cockroach started from the hole, then darted back in. “What is that hole, Janey?”

“Don’t know,” said Janey. She sucked a deep breath on the cigarette. “Don’t know. But I know the woman who lived here before us. She hated one of the kids—had him from a no-gooder, you know, and the poor thing always reminded her of his daddy. She used to lock him in the closet. Once she put him in a tub of boiling water. Lately, I been worryin’ maybe that kid’s head put that hole up there.”

Now Willa was fascinated by the hole, but she caught herself and looked away. Tommy and Peter were on a throw rug in front of the television. It was a game show. Willa used to love game shows: buzzers and bells going off, cars and mink coats given away like candy. She started to tell the boys to get off the cold floor, but stopped. They were on the throw rug. Even kids would not lie around on bare concrete in winter.

“Willa, I don’t want to say this …”

“Then, don’t, woman,” Willa said sharply. She knew what was coming.

“But you got to get an abortion, girl, before it’s too late.”

Willa spoke slowly and emphasized each word. “I do not want an abortion. I will not get an abortion.”

The children sensed the change in tone of the conversation and were looking away from the game show. Their mother saw them. It made no difference. For everything they heard, they had heard worse, and if they had not heard it they would understand too soon.

“Willa, you’re going to lose your job if you have this child.”

“They might give me leave.”

“And if they do, what are you going to do with the baby once it’s born? I’ve got my own affairs. You know I can’t keep your babies forever. How are you going to stay home with a new baby and work at the same time? How?”

“I do not want an abortion, Janey.”

“Got to feed three children, got to clothe three children.”

“Can’t you see, this is Aaron’s child,” Willa screamed.

The mention of their father’s name upset the children. The five-year-old would whimper. Tommy’s reaction was different. He would start humming or singing some blues song his father had taught him. “Sometimes 1 get a great notion to jump in the river and drown,” he might sing. That did not bother Willa, because she knew six-year-olds sang those songs for the same reason grownups did: to keep from jumping in the river. But now Tommy was singing the one song she absolutely could not abide, that horrible thing about the fear that “Jesus Christ died for nothin’ I suppose, and old songs never last too long on broken radios.”

Peter was whimpering. Tommy was singing. Smoke filled the apartment. Buzzers and bells were going off on television. And in Willa’s head. She crossed her arms on the table, put her head on them, and closed her eyes. She thought she felt the baby move, but that couldn’t be—it was too early.

It was there, though. It was alive and warm inside her. The walls to her womb were not cement block. There was no disabled radiator spilling cold there, no couch with springs erupting from it. Willa was doing a lot of wishing these days. At that moment she wished the baby could stay inside her forever, safe and content.