Even words about God and Christian truth have been deflated over time.

Icannot turn on the radio these days without hearing about inflation. But it is the opposite problem that plagues writers: the currency of words suffers from centuries of relentless deflation. If you study etymology even casually, the phenomenon stands out, a virtually universal trend of words leaking away meaning over time. They retrogress, never progress.

Take silly. Nobody wants to be called silly—it means fatuous, ridiculous. Ironically, the original Anglo-Saxon word meant one who was happy, blessed with good fortune. Similarly, the word idiot started out as a respectable derivative of a Greek word that described a private person who was peculiar in a proper sense, not conforming to those around him or her. Eventually, idiots became so peculiar (another deflated word) that today no one wants to be one.

Or consider sincere, a near transliteration of the Latin phrase sin cera, “without wax.” Sculptors coined this word, for a deft sculptor of marble used wax to patch over unsightly gouges or scratches in his finished work of art. A flawless, honest work that needed no such makeup was called sincere, without wax. Nowadays fledgling salesmen take courses in how to be sincere. Sincerity has become a kind of image, a learned habit that bears no relation to what is actually going on in the salesman’s insecure, doubting interior.

Word deflation presents formidable problems to theologians, writers, pastors, and all who rely on words to express content about God and Christian truth. Theological words have lost as much air as any. Why have 70 new versions of the Bible sprung up in this century? Good old King James words simply have not held up well in our deflated language.

Pity, for example, once meant mercy, or clemency. Deriving from the same root as “piety,” it meant someone who had pity mimicked God by compassionately reaching out to help one less fortunate. Eventually the emphasis shifted from the pietistic giver to the object of pity, who was seen as weak or inferior. A parallel deterioration occurred in charity. When King James translators pondered the concept of agape love so eloquently expressed in 1 Corinthians 13, they naturally turned to this word that conveyed the highest form of love. Alas, charity soon went the way of pity.

I have a favorite deflated word: cretin. Medically, cretinism describes a grotesque condition of thyroid deficiency characterized by stunted growth, deformity, goiter, scurfy skin, and, commonly, idiocy. Gradually, the word came to include “anyone with a marked mental deficiency.” And this outright slander devolved from the Latin word Christianus. The etymology business can hit close to home.

The few remaining hallowed words get dirtied up today in common usage. Listen to how love is used in rock music, and write me a letter if you can detect any similarity between what those lyrics describe and what I read about in 1 Corinthians 13. Redemption has survived, but mainly in the form of an S & H green stamp center. Modern culture even seizes a term like born again and commandeers it for used cars, perfumes, and football teams.

Sadly, Christians do not do well at devising new words to capture the leaking meanings. We look mostly to psychologists for our neologisms, so we hear ceaselessly about our “friendship” or “personal relationship” with God, a conception that, as C. S. Lewis points out in The Four Loves, least accurately describes the truth of the Creator-creature encounter.

A few words have kept their shine, though, and may last a few more decades. One word has suffused its meaning into so many areas it would be hard to kill off without a struggle. A profound theological word has been unashamedly borrowed by all segments of society: it is grace.

Many people still “say grace” before meals, presumably acknowledging that daily bread is a gift from God. Similarly, we are grateful when something good happens, gratified when feeling pleased, congratulated when successful. A pianist encounters grace notes, which good pianists learn to play gracefully. The few remaining dukes and duchesses in civilization (and archbishops) hear the word with regularity: “Your grace,” people address them.

My favorite extant use of the root word grace occurs in a foreign phrase: persona non grata. A person unwelcomed and unaccepted, in a nation or at a party, is a persona non grata, literally, a person without grace. Whenever I hear those six mellifluous syllables I think of a passage from I Peter. The apostle is reaching for words to impress upon his readers the magnitude of their calling. “You are a chosen people,” he says, “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praise of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” And then, “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (2:9–10). From persona non grata to redeemed believer grateful for undeserved grace. If those rich concepts still endure, maybe there’s hope for the English language yet.

PHILIP YANCEY¹Mr. Yancey, a widely read author, is editorial director of Campus Life magazine.

Such pessimism about human nature should make it an unpopular film.

“All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.”

—Pink Floyd The Wall

“… I’ll push against it with my back … with every ounce of strength / have, but the wall will stay, like in a nightmare.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Wall”

Pink floyd the wall is a stream-of-depraved-consciousness film that explodes from the screen, assaulting the viewer with the nihilistic nightmares of one of the most influential composers in rock music.

Released last fall, the film is based on the 1979 double-disc album by the British rock foursome Pink Floyd. It was written by the band’s leader and bassist, Roger Waters. His thesis is that life is full of bricks. When piled on top of one another in the course of living, these bricks form a wall that keeps man from finding a happy or meaningful existence.

Rolling Stone magazine called the album a “four-sided scream of alienation” that “took interpersonal pessimism and cultural despair—and a morbid preoccupation with madness that has haunted Pink Floyd for nearly 15 years—to astonishing extremes.”

As befits a movie about alienation, there is no dialogue. Instead, the album becomes the soundtrack for a mind-boggling and gut-wrenching series of none-too-subtle images of absurdity, insanity, and death. Director Alan Parker, who recently devoted his formidable cinematic talents to the portrayal of the dissolution of a marriage in Shoot the Moon, here graphically portrays the dissolution of a mind.

The mind in question is that of Pink, the film’s antihero, and a character based on Waters. Although he is a rich and famous rock star, Pink can find no release from three “bricks.”

The first is Pink’s father, who, like Waters’s, dies fighting in World War II while Pink is a baby. He never recovers from this loss, is haunted by gruesome nightmares, and cannot face a world that honors the spirit of war in its violence, public celebrations, and war movies. His father’s death places Pink totally in the hands of his sadomasochistic mother who is eulogized in the song, “Mother”: “Mama’s gonna make all your nightmares come true / Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you.”

The second “brick” is school, where troubled teachers trouble children, and where Pink is singled out for ridicule because “he fancies himself a poet.” While the album’s biggest hit swells in the background (“We don’t need no education”), school-children are shown falling into a vat and being ground into hamburger.

The final “brick” is heterosexual love, which is less reliable than lust. Pink’s marriage falls apart, as did Waters’s, and he sings, “Day after day, love turns grey / Like the skin of a dying man.”

The bricks are now in place and the camera provides the mortar, applying scenes of war and carnage, loneliness, street violence, maggots, impersonal sex, a dead rat, rape, and crawling flesh. Where the camera alone cannot capture Waters’s horrific vision, animation steps in: a dove becomes a hawk, which becomes a warplane destroying the earth (a la T. S. Eliot); warplanes become crosses, which gush blood into a gutter; flowers representing genitalia parry until the female violently devours the male; and black-booted hammers march en masse.

In a final animated segment, Pink is brought before a Kafkaesque tribunal that accuses him of “showing feelings of an almost human nature.” In fact, the film is so misanthropic and myopic that it allows Pink no humanity; it is so violently antihuman that it allows no room for real compassion. Such pessimism about human nature should make it an unpopular film.

Wrong. Large segments of the youth market apparently jump at the chance to spend their money to be told all is not well. As I write this, the film is the fourth-best box-office success for the week. The recorded version was the best-selling album of 1980 and has sold an estimated 12 million copies. The band’s 1973 ode to despair, Dark Side of the Moon, is still in the Billboard top 200 album list after eight years, a Billboard record.

Nor is Pink Floyd alone in the vinyl wasteland. As rock music increasingly moves from the beach blanket and the dance floor to the marketplace of ideas, nihilism’s big lie (God is dead; life is absurd) is big business.

As this is written, the nation’s number-one single is “Jack and Dianne,” John Cougar’s musical tale of two American kids, with the catchy chorus: “Oh yeah, life goes on / Long after the thrill of living is gone.” A hoard of similar hopeless hits would include: “When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s around,” by the Police; “Running on Empty,” by Jackson Browne; “Had Enough,” by the Who; “Livin’ on the Fault Line,” by the Doobie Brothers; and “Dust in the Wind,” by Kansas. Bob Geldof, who plays Pink in The Wall, is the lead singer for The Boom-town Rats, who had a hit with “I Don’t Like Mondays,” based on the true story of a teen-aged girl who shot down some of her schoolmates.

The church’s response to rock’s godless effusion has itself often been godless, showing God’s hatred for sin but not his love for sinners. After rock singer Ozzie Osbourne bit the head off a bat during a performance, a writer in the Moral Majority Report inaccurately and maliciously wrote, “Fortunately, he contracted rabies so I guess some good came out of it.” A Baptist preacher from Florida evoked Joseph McCarthy, saying he had statistics showing that “of 1,000 girls who became pregnant out of wedlock, 986 committed fornication while rock music was being played.” Some foes hold album bonfires, while others speak of backward masking, said to be an insidious wile of the Devil whereby he captures the souls of those who listen to their rock records played in reverse.

Absent is the approach of the apostle Paul, who reasoned with skeptics and, as Milton pointed out, “thought it no defilement to insert into Holy Scripture the sentences of three Greek poets.” Absent is the desire expressed by Peter, that his readers should always be prepared to explain their hope. Absent is the attitude Francis Schaeffer displayed in his booklet “Art and the Bible.” Looking at Giacometti’s sculpture portraying man’s alienation, Schaeffer said, “I can understand what he is saying and I cry.”

Some walls are so thick that only God’s love can break them down.

STEVE RABEY¹Mr. Rabey is a free-lance writer living in Dayton, Ohio.

Why does the Board of Global Ministries praise socialism and fund the defense of a political officeholder?

The United Methodist Church’s Board of Global Ministries (BOGM) is no stranger to controversy. It is the missions arm of the church, and it is the largest and most affluent of all Methodist agencies. In 1981 its budget was close to $70 million.

It was also in 1981 that the BOGM’S women’s and world divisions captured headlines for helping to organize a conference held to support the Southwest Africa People’s Organization, which is known to be armed by the Soviet Union and supports violence as the answer to Namibia’s quest for independence. In the spring of 1982, the world division granted $30,000 to the Institute on Economics and Social Research in Nicaragua, an organization connected to that country’s leftist Sandinista regime.

In the most distant past, the BOGM has disseminated controversial literature favorably portraying Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China. Now, two new issues have fanned the flames. They concern an economics book published by the women’s division, and financial support for a Mississippi mayor accused of conspiring to commit murder.

The book, An Economic Primer, is a collection of 12 essays written by seven authors. Its stated purpose is “to assist United Methodist women in understanding economic development in the world.” But the result of the 41-page publication, according to two influential professors from United Methodist-related universities, is strongly anticapitalistic. Most criticism of the primer has been directed at essays written by Phillip Harvey of the State University of New York and Morley Nkosi of Hofstra University. After learning of complaints about the primer in workshops sponsored by the United Methodist Women, the denominational newspaper asked Gustav Papanek of Boston University and Martin Bronenbrenner of Duke University to review the book.

Papanek, a specialist in the economies of Third World nations, lauded the book’s purpose, but stated that it is “singularly lacking in facts” and that “much of the writing is [in polemical style] like the worst of chamber of commerce propaganda.” “Naturally,” Papanek said, “the capitalist reality falls far short of the socialist ideal. [But] you should compare ideals with ideals.…” Bishop Finis A. Crutchfield, president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, says the primer is “heavily weighted against the capitalist system,” that it is “not carefully documented,” and that it “leads one to conclusions that are extremely leftist.”

However, Barbara Weaver, executive secretary for development education in the women’s division, denies the primer is being used to advocate socialism. “The purpose of the primer,” she says, “is to be a discussion starter. It is one of a variety of materials we use in our workshops. Both dominant economic systems of the world have serious problems. We’re only beginning to raise questions and to talk about economics.” Bishop Crutchfield criticized only the primer, which he has read carefully, and not the workshops, with which he is not familiar. He said, “I feel only that the women’s division has an obligation to uphold free enterprise as favorably as it has upheld socialism.”

In almost all cases, the concern about the BOGM has been sparked by perceived leftist tendencies. Ira Gallaway, senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Peoria, Illinois, has addressed some of the BOGM’S problems in his recent book, Drifted Astray (Abingdon Press, 1982). Gallaway said, “The Board of Global Ministries has contributed to a number of organizations in Third World countries, organizations which lean toward the totalitarian collective impulse, embracing it as the only solution to helping the poor and oppressed.”

Recently, the BOGM became entangled in the Mississippi murder case. In late November, the board’s assistant general secretary, John Jordan, and two staff members were suspended, then reassigned following a dispute over their providing Methodist money for the defense of Eddie Carthan, the former mayor of Tchula, Mississippi. Carthan was acquitted of conspiring to murder a political opponent, but remains in jail for assaulting an officer.

The three staff members worked for the United Methodist Voluntary Services. The organization is run by the BOGM, and it provided $3,000 to a legal defense fund for Carthan and $8,000 to the United League of Holmes County, an antiracism group that backed Carthan.

Carthan was viewed symbolically by BOGM officials as a victim of racism and political repression. Jordan sent an accusatory telegram to the sheriff of Holmes County. Officials in New York were embarrassed upon their discovery that the sheriff is black. The three were suspended because they did not consult local Methodist authorities before acting. Randolph Nugent, chief executive of the BOGM, said their actions created a “grave situation with serious consequences.”

James R. Robb, associate editor of Good News magazine, a publication of an evangelical caucus of United Methodists, believes the United Methodist church structure easily lends itself to internal disputes. Robb believes middle-level personnel have too much autonomy, partly because they can hold their positions indefinitely and thus, become more familiar with church operations than do board members, whose tenure is limited to eight years.

Mass Palau Rally Caps Guatemala Centennial Year

Church historian Virgil Zapata, head of Guatemala’s Instituto Evangelica America Latina, said he believes the crowd that flocked to Guatemala City on November 28 to hear evangelist Luis Palau was the second largest ever to hear an evangelical preacher and certainly the largest ever in Central America. Crowd estimates, from various sources, ranged from 350,000 to 700,000. Billy Graham preached to 1.1 million people in Seoul, Korea, in 1973.

More than 3,000 Guatemalans reported having made Christian commitments during Palau’s eight-day campaign. Palau told listeners that the people of Guatemala would enjoy greater liberty in the future as they find freedom in Christ. He stressed that Guatemalans must apply the teachings of Christ to their individual, family, and national lives.

Palau was invited to Guatemala by the nation’s 120 Protestant denominations. His campaign climaxed a year-long evangelical celebration that recognized the one hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Protestant missionaries in Guatemala. According to a Wycliffe missionary, church growth in Guatemala has far exceeded the available church space. Today, more than 22 percent of Guatemala’s five-and-a-half million people claim to be evangelical, including its most notable Pentecostal, General Jose Efraín Ríos Montt, the country’s president.

At the final crusade meeting, Ríos Montt followed Palau to the microphone and said that “a nation finds its grandeur in fulfilling the Word of God.… Violence and subversion will not change the world; only God who is sitting on the throne of the heavens can bring change. Armies and swords are not God’s means for bringing change, since God brings peaceful change by the work of the Holy Spirit.” The president then prayed that God would look upon the nation with eyes of love so that a new Guatemala might be built through peace.

Ríos Montt became president on March 23, 1982. Since then, several church groups and organizations, including Amnesty International, have blamed his government for the massacre of thousands of the country’s indigenous Indians. Ríos Montt and Guatemalan government officials have consistently accused leftist guerrillas of the violence. Some journalists have charged there has been a widespread misinformation campaign to discredit Ríos Montt and his intended reforms. The conflict has broadened to include evangelical-Catholic friction.

Palau’s campaign received more media coverage than any of his previous 95 crusades dating back to 1966. Each of his messages was broadcast live on 14 radio stations, including one in El Salvador.

Palau believes Guatemala will be the first “reformed” nation in Latin America. “By reformed,” he says, “I mean a nation where it is obvious that the doctrines of the gospel have brought about a social and political transformation.”

Contact With Evangelical Church In North Vietnam Restored After 28 Years

For the first time since 1954, when Vietnam was split, mainstream evangelicals in the United States have met with the modest evangelical church in northern Vietnam. The contact was made by Reg Reimer, Asia director for World Relief Corporation of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Reimer traveled to Vietnam in November mainly to assess the damage done in the country’s Nigh Tinh Province by Typhoon Nancy a month earlier. During his first meeting with the Vietnamese organization that coordinates foreign assistance, Reimer requested a meeting with evangelical church leaders in the north. Four days later, he met with two pastors from Hanoi’s largest evangelical church.

The evangelical church in southern Vietnam has more than 200,000 adherents, but the church in the north is tiny. Reimer believes that even such meager estimates by the pastors of 40 churches serving 10.000 people are exaggerated. Reimer also noted that the congregations were receiving an ample supply of Bibles from both East and West Germany.

Reimer speaks the Vietnamese language fluently and was accompanied on his trip by a representative of Church World Service of the World Council of Churches, which maintained strong ties with the church in Vietnam, even during the war years. One of the pastors Reimer met expressed regret that evangelicals had not done the same. The pastor wanted to “put the past behind,” and he encouraged evangelicals to take the same active political stance that the National Council of Churches has taken relative to United States policy on Vietnam.

The board of directors of World Relief has approved Reimer’s recommendation that the agency send $25,000 worth of aid in the form of food, clothing and other items to Vietnam. Only 70 lives were lost to the typhoon, but 150,000 metric tons of rice, a mental hospital, a library, and a medical training school were among other losses.

World Relief prefers to work with a counterpart organization or with the church in the country receiving aid, rather than with the government. But in this case, the government organization handling the assistance has been deemed reputable. “The Vietnamese distinguish between America’s government and its people,” Reimer said. “We can do the same. We’re not interested in their government, but we care a lot about their people.”

Parliamentary Ministers?

The Church of England General Synod has decided that clergymen of the national church should be free to become Members of Parliament like other citizens and has asked the British government to introduce the appropriate legislation. The vote by which the motion was carried in the synod (181 to 147), however, reflected the grave misgivings felt by some about this proposed break with tradition. A well-known evangelical, O. R. Johnston of Oxford, considered that the pastoral vocation was “totally incompatible with party allegiance and discipline,” and that clergymen who were aspiring parliamentarians should (as at present) renounce the exercise of their orders. Bishop Stanley Booth-Clibborn, supporting the motion, said that while the church should not carry a party label, a particular clergyman might do so.

It is now up to Parliament to rescind the 1801 Clergy Disqualification Act. Such legislation would have far-reaching consequences theologically and politically. It would also necessarily involve the position of clergy of the Church of Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church of Ireland, all of whom are at present similarly debarred from the House of Commons.

World Scene

The Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) held its formal inaugural assembly in November at Huampani, Peru. The more than 300 participants represented 85 member denominations, 23 observer denominations, and other groups, CLAI elected a 16-member governing body headed by Argentine Methodist Bishop Federico Pagura. Brazilian Gerson Meyer is the secretary general. An invited representative of the Latin American Roman Catholic Bishops (CELAM) failed to appear.

A last-ditch attempt by conservative evangelicals to regain control of the Latin American Biblical Seminary in San José, Costa Rica, has failed. In an October business session that lasted into the early morning hours, moves by Christian businessmen to elect conservative Costa Rican evangelicals to its board were defeated. The dominant liberal faction easily secured the appointment of its man, Bolivian Methodist Anibal Guzman, as rector, replacing fellow liberal Carmelo Alvarez of Puerto Rico. The seminary is part of the Latin American Evangelical Community (CLAME), evolved from the ministry of the Latin America Mission. The CLAME general assembly, which meets this month, will issue a report on the seminary. But if it does not recommend expulsion, the seminary is expected to withdraw voluntarily.

UFM International has received a signed contract from Brazilian authorities for performing education and health work among several tribal groups in Brazil’s rain-forest interior. The contract with the Brazilian National Indian Foundation insures a continuing witness to the Kayapo, Canela, and Guajajara Indians.

A Northern Ireland Roman Catholic priest has called on clergymen to throw themselves into the line of fire, if need be, to try to halt the escalating communal violence. “Victory,” said Denis Faul, known as the IRA priest, “would be when a Catholic priest would risk, or indeed give, his life to save a Protestant man from being murdered by paramilitaries masquerading in the name of the Catholic population.”

A Norwegian regional court has reversed the ruling of a local court in the controversial case of Lutheran Pastor Børre Knudsen. Knudsen protested Norway’s abortion law by refusing to perform the “state” part of his duties, such as conducting marriages and maintaining the church register, and by returning his government salary (CT, April 9, p. 58). The lower court vindicated Knudsen, but the regional court deprived him of his post as a parish pastor. Knudsen’s attorney said the ruling establishes that the state “has the right to oust a pastor who preaches the Word of God in accordance with the bishops’ interpretation.” Knudsen is appealing to Norway’s supreme court.

The World Council of Churches has transferred funds from other programs to the Program to Combat Racism in spite of repeated assurances to the contrary, a West German source charges. Rolf Scheffbuch, spokesman for a discussion group in the Würtemberg Synod of the (Lutheran) Protestant Church in Germany (EKD), disclosed in November that German church tax funds contributed to the wcc budget had been transferred from the departments of world mission, evangelism, and development to the Program to Combat Rascism’s special fund used to support liberation movements. This runs counter to assurances made by the WCC Executive Committee at Jamaica in 1979 that the Program to Combat Racism would be financed solely by funds designated for it. The EKD is the largest contributor to the WCC, at an annual rate of close to $1 million.

The pastor of an unregistered Pentecostal congregation in the Soviet Union has been sentenced to five years of hard labor and two years of exile. Pyotr Golikov, 55, was sentenced after a three-day November trial in Rostov, where his church is located. Golikov was active in the campaign of Pentecostals to emigrate from the USSR and has disseminated documentation on their persecution. He was charged with “organizing group activity that disturbs public order” (leading worship) and with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”

Dutch Christians organized a campaign to win freedom for the “Siberian Seven” last month. Their letter writing and telephoning campaign is targeted to political leaders Yuri Andropov and Ronald Reagan and evangelist Billy Graham. Meanwhile, part of the “Seven,” the Vashchenko family, won approval for a visit to the U.S. embassy in Moscow of nine children and one in-law. The embassy, however, would allow only two to visit at a time, a condition the four Vashchenkos inside the embassy rejected.

Black Africa’s least evangelized country is cautiously inviting back some missionaries. In the mid-1960s, Guinea rejected membership in the “French Commonwealth” and turned toward the Eastern bloc. At the time, all missionaries were expelled except for eight with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (which had made more progress than others in Africanizing its work). Since then, Guinea, whose population is 75 percent Muslim, has edged back toward political neutrality. This fall it invited the Philafrican Mission of France to enter and work in the area of leprosy and other communicable diseases.

Pressures on the church in Ethiopia have certainly not damped down response to the gospel in the capital, Addis Ababa. The SIM International-related Meserete Hiywet Church reports 670 professions of faith in four months. Attendance at a nightly Bible study has had to be limited because of inadequate classroom space. And classes for new believers and for training new deacons are full.

Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios, “first among equals” in the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy, has left Istanbul for unspecified medical treatment in Switzerland, and has cancelled all contacts.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has given assurances that Coptic Pope Shenouda III will be released soon. He was responding to questions in November by a group of visiting American Catholic journalists. He said he is “looking for a decent way” to do this without triggering renewed violence between Muslim and Coptic extremists. Shenouda was stripped of his powers and banished to internal exile in September 1981 by President Anwar Sadat after Shenouda had canceled Easter celebrations nationwide the previous year to protest inadequate government protection for the Coptic Orthodox Christians in clashes. Last April, 32 out of 45 Coptic bishops signed a petition calling for Shenouda’s release, saying he poses no security threat. Eight who did not sign are still detained. Mubarak is still wary of the outspoken primate and told the journalists, “We warned Shenouda several times to slow down, not to create problems.”

A second Protestant seminary was opened in China in November with 50 students in the first class. The new school, the Northeastern Theological Seminary, is located in Shenyang, a suburb of Peking. Earlier, a seminary was established at Shanghai for China’s breakaway Catholic church. It opened with 36 students.

Lutherans are considering establishment of a new radio station to beam into China. Meeting in Hong Kong in November, an exploratory working party indicated a desire for programming that is supportive of the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement church. This, it said, would provide a moderate alternative to the broadcasts of Trans World Radio and Far East Broadcasting Company, which now account for more than 90 percent of religious broadcasts to the mainland.

A new president’s broom sweeps out complacency.

During a period of seven months in 1981, nine faculty members of Luther Rice College and Seminary—virtually the entire administration—left the school after a number of disagreements with its president and founder, Robert Witty (CT, Dec. 11, 1981, p. 49). The main issue was whether Witty was moving fast enough to bring academic integrity to the unaccredited school. The faculty members said he was not. Witty said he was. The school, in Jacksonville, Florida, is Southern Baptist in orientation, but is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. It offers off-campus degree courses.

When the blowup occurred, Witty had already announced that he would be stepping aside. Last spring a new president took over, and today Luther Rice is moving ahead quickly.

The new president is Gene Williams, who received a Th.D. in homiletics in 1955 from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. Williams has been a Southern Baptist evangelist who led 770 revivals, and he taught evangelism at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist Seminary from 1972 through 1976. Williams was hired because of his wide contacts, conservative theology, evangelism experience, commitment to academic excellence, and noninvolvement in Southern Baptist wrangles. “Some of the regents asked me if I would be involved in denominational politics,” Williams recalls. “I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘Good.’ ” Williams took over last May. Witty, who started the school in 1962, was named chancellor, with no administrative duties.

One of the new president’s first tasks was to find new professors. Past practice had been, with few exceptions, to hire Rice alumni. Williams has hired five new men with doctorates from accredited institutions, and is looking for more. Among the five is the new dean of undergraduate studies, Nevin S. Alwine (Ed. D., University of Northern Colorado), who came from Liberty Baptist Seminary. Dean of graduate studies Harold McNabb (Ed.D., New Orleans Seminary), a former classmate of Williams, was among the teachers who stayed after the 1981 walkout.

Williams says two of the nine who left now want to return, but cannot be accepted unless they are actively working on an accredited doctorate. Faculty members without accredited doctorates who did not leave and were inherited by Williams are also being required to pursue one.

After less than a year as president, Williams can point to seven of ten full-time teaching faculty who now have accredited doctorates. Williams doesn’t intend to stop until every faculty member has an earned, respected doctorate.

Williams also brought in a professional librarian, registrar, and director of admissions. Next to be hired is a director of development. Williams wants to increase gifts (tuition, at $40 an hour, does not meet the current million-dollar annual budget) and build a strong endowment.

Admission procedures have also been tightened. A new student may begin work on the basis of a preliminary application, as is true in many schools, but cannot be formally admitted until credits are provided from an acceptable school. The admission of students without enough credits for college work was a sore point under Witty’s administration.

The school is looking toward eventual accreditation by the Assocation of Theological Schools (ATS), the American Association of Bible Colleges, and the regional secular accrediting body, the Southern Association. ATS, the only recognized agency for accrediting theological education, is at the top of the list. Williams says, “We have a long way yet to go. We need to make more progress with our faculty, library, endowment, and work with external [nonresident] students.”

Luther Rice claims an enrollment of 1,900, and all but 200 are off campus, including 400 taking Luther Rice courses in 62 foreign countries. The resident enrollment is about twice that of last year. Luther Rice faculty member Paul Enns, whom Williams calls “our foremost scholar” [author of commentaries on Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, and at present preparing the Ezekiel volume in the Zondervan Bible Study Commentary series], thinks the imbalance between resident and nonresident students is making accreditation difficult. “If we were only a resident school, we could soon complete the requirements. The ATS can’t compare our external program with anything.” Enns is assistant dean of graduate studies and professor of Bible. He was one of the faculty who stayed on during the troubles of 1981.

The school wants to increase “interfaces” with nonresident students. At present, communication is by correspondence, telephone, and tape cassettes, with faculty members holding periodic tutorials in large cities. Williams thinks videocassettes will help, especially in grading sermon delivery.

Wayne Upton, director of international studies and another New Orleans graduate, says the foreign outreach has grown from students in 16 countries to 62 in six years. “We graduated 5 in 1976 and 64 in 1982.” Most foreign students, he says, are “key pastors in their areas, who attended only Bible schools and cannot leave to attend accredited schools in their own countries.” Overseas enrollment includes a number of U.S. missionaries who are upgrading their education to satisfy new laws in nations where they serve.

The typical Luther Rice student in the U.S., according to Dean McNabb, is “age 35 with a wife, three kids, and a pastorate. He lives too far to commute and can’t resign to attend a regular Bible college or seminary. Because of this we are not in competition with standard seminaries.”

The highest Luther Rice degree now offered is the D.Min., with about 100 enrolled. The M.Div. (84 hours) and the M.M. (40 hours) are also offered on the graduate level with the B.A. or equivalent required for admission. A B.A. in Biblical Studies (120 hours) is provided. Special modules for those with degrees are available in preaching, education, counseling, missions, music, evangelism, church growth, biblical theology, and biblical languages. The school stopped offering Th.D. and Ph.D. degrees several years ago; that practice brought charges that the school was a degree mill.

JAMES HEFLEY

Grady Lee Nutt, 47, ordained Southern Baptist minister known to millions as the cornpone “prime minister of humor” on the television show “Hee Haw”; November 23, in Cullman, Alabama, in a plane crash.

Nikolai Khrapov, 68, outspoken Russian Baptist evangelist who spent almost 26 years in Soviet prisons for his religious activities; in November at Mangyshlakskaya Prison, USSR, of a heart attack.

William Childs Robinson, 85, professor emeritus of Columbia Theological Seminary, author of seven books and numerous articles; November 23, of natural causes.

William Murray Rebuts Atheist Mother’S Stand

An atheist loves his fellowman instead of a God.… He seeks to know himself and his fellowman rather than to know God. An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.… He believes that we cannot rely on God, channel action into prayer, or hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter.…

(Taken from a statement written by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, included in a petition that was among the initial legal steps taken to have prayer removed from the public schools.)

At age 63, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, one of Christianity’s most passionate antagonists, is as active as ever. In a New Orleans, Louisiana, district court, she is fighting to have the slogan “In God We Trust” removed from U.S. currency. She is advocating the removal of all references to Christianity from textbooks in a Colorado school district. In this case, she has even challenged statements discouraging drug abuse, claiming they spring from Christian doctrine. The list goes on.

One of O’Hair’s sweetest moments came when the Supreme Court decided in 1963 to ban mandatory prayer from public schools. The plaintiff of record in that landmark case was O’Hair’s son, William J. Murray III, who was only 14 when the court proceedings began.

O’Hair has not changed much since 1963. But her son has.

He became a Christian in 1980, culminating a three-year search for God, which was triggered by a growing awareness of the emptiness of the atheism he had embraced since childhood.

In his first book, My Life Without God (Thomas Nelson, 1982), Murray candidly describes life with his mother, recounts the events surrounding the 1963 high court decision, and tells the story of his journey through atheism. Murray, 36, spares few of the details of his tragic youth. He remembers his mother attacking his grandfather (her father) with a butcher knife, and cursing God during a lightning storm, daring God to strike her dead. Murray remembers his mother smashing his precious collection of model airplanes. He describes his involvement in the historic court case in terms of his constant efforts to gain his mother’s approval, and in terms of his mother’s reckless rage.

“Sometimes I view my mother not as an atheist,” Murray said, “but as someone who’s having an argument with God.” In his book, he briefly addresses the little he knows of his mother’s own tragic youth. Murray remembers that his mother was never able to hold a job because of her volatile personality and radically Communist political persuasions. After being denied citizenship by the Soviet Union, according to Murray, O’Hair sought revenge, and the first thing she found was the issue of prayer in public schools. “I honestly believe,” said Murray, “that prayer was removed from public schools because the Soviet Union rejected my mother.”

Anticipating legal action by his mother, Murray has spent hundreds of hours videotaping statements testifying to the book’s accuracy. Murray was aided by O’Hair’s brother, who is also leaning away from atheism. The author boldly proclaims his is “the most documented autobiography in the history of literature.”

His efforts were wrought with great personal struggle. After all, Madalyn O’Hair was and is his mother. “But,” Murray said, “my feelings were not as important as the truth about how and why prayer was taken out of schools. Also, I wanted people to understand what happens inside an atheist home.”

In My Life Without God, Murray is equally candid about his own past, including his dealings in drugs and alcohol, his broken marriages, and an extramarital affair. In a telephone interview, Murray said the major criticism of his book, which has sold more than 55,000 copies, is that it is “too honest.” Murray said, “The book is blatantly honest because I’ve read too many watered-down Christian testimonies and I want people to know what living in sin is really like.” Murray adds, “I believe the book offers hope for those who can identify with my struggle.”

In another effort to help others, Murray has established the William J. Murray Faith Foundation, a referral service based in Dallas, Texas. His organization receives calls and letters and seeks to provide counseling for people with spiritual needs, especially those who have atheistic backgrounds.

As for Madalyn O’Hair: “I pray daily for her deliverance,” Murray said. He continues to write to her, seeking to communicate his faith. But so far, there has been no response.

RANDALL FRAME

North American Scene

The Department of Health and Human Services has separated abortion activities from all family-planning services financed by the federal government. According to the Public Health Service Act, no federal funds may be used for “programs where abortion is a method of family planning.” The new guidelines also prohibit family-planning and abortion clinics from sharing office space, personnel, publications, stationery, and medical equipment or supplies.

Everett Sileven, a Nebraska pastor and the director of the Faith Christian School, is back in jail. Sileven, who refuses to have teachers at his school certified by the state, had been released to ask the legislature to consider changing the law on teacher certification for church schools. But after a special session in November ended without addressing the issue, Sileven returned to jail to complete a four-month sentence.

Pornographic materials have begun to disappear from the newsracks of stores in Mesa, Arizona. Many local shopkeepers have voluntarily removed the materials from their establishments at the urging of the Mesa Decency Coalition, which conducted a “public awareness” campaign. According to an article in the National Decency Reporter, the coalition takes no credit for removal of the magazines, but is interested only in making the community aware of the problems presented by pornography. Revco, Smitty’s, Scaggs Drugs, Thrifty Drugs, and two of Mesa’s three Safeway stores were among the businesses to discontinue pornographic magazines.

Several national churches have jointly filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Sun Myung Moon, the Korean-born leader of the Unification Church. Moon is seeking the reversal of a court decision in which he was found guilty on charges involving his alleged personal use of church money. Among church organizations filing the brief were the National Council of Churches, the United Presbyterian Church, the American Baptist Churches, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. According to a press release of the Unification Church, other groups supporting Moon included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Christian Legal Society. In the document, friends stress that their actions were motivated not by “sympathy for the defendant,” but by concern for religious liberty.

Sixteen conservative evangelical Lutheran pastors have strongly criticized the recent statement of the Minnesota Council of Churches supporting homosexuals. David A. Barnhart, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church of Minnehaha Falls, said the statement violates everything he understands the Bible to say about homosexuality. “There is a definite, organized movement here,” Barnhart said. “And it has an agenda. It includes the ordination of homosexuals into the ministry. And it would involve marriage of persons of the same gender.”

The 40-member Episcopal church executive council has denounced a planned video arcade game called “Custer’s Revenge,” which depicts a naked male ravishing an Indian woman. The council passed a resolution condemning the game as “prurient, lascivious and pornographic.”

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have voiced support for expanded dialogues with women and for a study aimed at locating historical precedents for the ordination of female deacons. Bishop Michael F. McAuliffe, chairman of an ad hoc committee on the role of women in society and the church, told his colleagues at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that “there are persuasive, convincing reasons for actions at this time.”

Spencer W. Kimball, president of the Mormon Church, has announced a reorganization in the church’s First Presidency, the church’s highest governing body. The announcement came after the death of N. Eldon Tanner, a counselor to four church presidents. A church spokesman said the 87-year-old Kimball named Marion G. Romney first counselor and Gordon B. Hinckley second counselor in the three-member body.

Cartoon violence increased last spring by 20 percent to a level of 36 violent acts per hour, according to the National Coalition on Television Violence. In a recent newsletter, the coalition noted that 60 percent of the violent Saturday-morning programs are sponsored by five companies—General Mills, McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, General Foods, and Mattel Toys.

An internationally known theologian at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has come under fire from Arkansas Baptists who are demanding that he be dismissed. Dale Moody, a 67-year-old senior professor of theology, teaches that it is possible for Christians to lose their salvation, a position at variance with that held by many Southern Baptists. Representatives of the seminary say Moody can be dismissed only by a two-thirds vote of the trustees at their annual meeting in April. Moody received a Ph.D. from Oxford University and has studied with such theological heavyweights as Emil Brunner and Karl Barth.

The Thompson Chain Reference Bible, New International Version, will be released in the fall of 1983. The publication will result from a joint effort of the B. B. Kirkbride Bible Company, publishers of the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, and Zondervan Bible Publishers, which produced the bestselling New International Version.

New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean has vetoed a bill requiring New Jersey public schools to provide a mandatory moment of silence at the beginning of each school day. Kean said that public school teachers in New Jersey have the right to order a moment of silence as part of ordinary classroom procedures and that he preferred to “leave it to the discretion of … teachers to decide if students need time for contemplation.…”

Personalia

George G. Hunter III has been appointed dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of Evangelism and World Missions, scheduled to open this fall. Hunter serves on the United Methodist Board of Discipleship as assistant general secretary for evangelism.

After serving for 17 years as secretary for the Evangelical Missionary Alliance in Britain, Ernest Oliver has retired. Oliver received a standing ovation at the end of EMA’S annual conference.

World Vision International has named German missionary Fritz Urschitz the recipient of the third annual Robert W. Pierce Award for Christian Service. The award recognized Urschitz’s pioneer work among the stone-age Niksek people in Papua New Guinea. Urschitz has served for 19 years as a missionary from the Liebenzell Mission of Germany. He will receive $20,000 and a commemorative medallion.

David G. Schmiel has accepted appointment as president of Concordia College in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Schmiel has been dean of instruction at Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis for almost two years. Concordia College is one of 16 colleges and seminaries owned and operated by The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Floyd Thatcher has announced his retirement as vice-president, editorial director for Word Books in Waco, Texas. Thatcher, who spent 34 years in religious publishing, will still serve part-time as Word’s editor-in-chief.

Internationally known writer, lecturer, broadcaster, and one-time Communist party member Malcolm Muggeridge, has been received into the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 79. Muggeridge’s journey from atheism to Christianity has been widely publicized, but until now, he has always refused to identify himself with any particular denomination, and has never gone to church. Now he plans to attend Mass every Sunday.

Attending an Assemblies of God worship service can be like going to a football game.

Church watchers may have suspected as much, but two new statistical studies make it clear: the fastest-growing denomination in America is the Assemblies of God (AG).

In a report the size of a suburban telephone book, a new analysis (CT, Oct. 22, p. 64) shows at least one Assembly of God church in 79 percent of U.S. counties—more coverage than anyone except the United Methodists and the Catholics. The national total (at 1980 census time) of 1.6 million adherents puts this Pentecostal denomination in twelfth place, right behind the American Baptists and ahead of the Churches of Christ.

Meanwhile, the annual Moody Monthly/International Christian Education Association study turned up some even more dramatic figures: six out of the ten fastest-growing Sunday schools in the nation belong to Assemblies. Almost half (24) of the 50 state winners turned out to be AG.

The denomination that spawned Teen Challenge founder David Wilkerson and Korean superchurch pastor Paul Yonggi Cho is home to a variety of other achievers: Reagan aide Herb Ellingwood, TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart, Gordon-Conwell Seminary president Robert Cooley, Interior Secretary James Watt, PTL Club hosts Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Missouri attorney general John Ashcroft. Musicians with Assemblies roots range from the Blackwood Brothers Quartet to Dallas Holm, John Hall, Evie Tornquist Karlsson (who once lost an AG national teen talent contest), Dino Kartsonakis, and New York Metropolitan Opera singer Dale Deusing. Neither their working-class heritage nor their controversial beliefs—speaking in tongues as one evidence of the Spirit’s infilling, divine healing, worship that includes charismatic manifestations—seem to have slowed the pace of the Assemblies of God.

In fact, they may have helped. “Their worship is a very powerful element in their growth,” says Carl F. George, director of the Charles E. Fuller Institute. “It may be informal, but it carries a higher-voltage focus on the presence of God.” Assemblies of God general superintendent Thomas F. Zimmerman agrees. “The first thing that strikes a visitor walking into an Assemblies church is the aliveness,” he says. “People sense that something is moving here; there’s more than lip service, ritual. Throughout the years, we’ve always been called ‘emotional,’ but that isn’t all bad. People want a suitable expression of their internal devotion.”

Thus, attending an Assembly of God worship service is a little like going to a football game—it is a case of suspense within parameters. A general structure has been laid down, but within those guidelines, it is wait-and-see-what happens. Those in charge are adjusting their plans minute by minute to the flow (a favorite Assemblies word) of the meeting.

Newcomers on Sunday morning are often perplexed to open a bulletin and find no order of service. That is intentional. Says Karl Strader, senior pastor of First Assembly in Lakeland, Florida, “The staff and I have a definite order in our minds when we go onto the platform, but we don’t publish it. What we want most is to lead the congregation in praise—the Psalms say God inhabits the praise of his people. The Spirit is drawn almost like a magnet to a praising people, and he quickens them—not just in the resurrection someday, but now. If we’re bound to an agenda, the moving of the Spirit is hindered.” The soft-spoken Strader, who earned two degrees at Bob Jones University before becoming a Pentecostal, came to Lakeland 17 years ago to a congregation of 325. Today, the average Sunday attendance is 3,700.

Tongues speaking, followed by interpretation, is not done to complete a written liturgy. It is done, Pentecostals believe, to move along under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Music is often the lubricant of such worship, and it is not all up-tempo. In recent years Assemblies of God churches have tempered exuberance with moments of stillness; the quiet refrain “Alleluia” was born in a Teen Challenge prayer meeting.

This has made things more hospitable for incoming charismatics from the mainline churches. There is no question that the Assemblies of God have reaped a windfall from both the Jesus movement of the early 1970s and the wider charismatic renewal. “The truth is, we were leveling off in the late fifties,” says Richard Champion, managing editor of the Pentecostal Evangel, the AG, weekly. “Then the Spirit began planting ‘our’ theology and experience in all sorts of unlikely places. If it had happened first among the Nazarenes and the Baptists, we might have been more threatened. As it was, it happened in the National Council groups and the Catholics, and we mainly watched in amazement.”

Superintendent Zimmerman, who is glad to be called a charismatic but dislikes the label classical Pentecostal (“too mildewed”), says, “The Assemblies have been available to give ballast to some of the excesses. Many charismatics, in their first burst of excitement, wanted to kick the institutional habit altogether and be free. Now they’ve lived to see the need for roots and church organization. Some of the exaggerations that cropped up had been faced by us years ago, and we were able to help them see that the Spirit and the Word always agree.”

The Assemblies’ growth, however, is more than a matter of house churches and prayer groups coming in from the cold. Evangelism and church planting continue to be important items on nearly everyone’s agenda. Zimmerman believes the denominational self-study in the mid—1960s was crucial. “We were 50 years old as a movement then,” he recalls, “and a sampling of our constituency revealed some creeping ambiguity about our reason for being.” The result was the 1968 Council on Evangelism in Saint Louis, which declared a three-pronged mission: worship to the Lord, maturation for the saints, and outreach to the world. We then asked whether we were putting our human and financial resources in these three areas. These have been our guiding goals ever since.”

The subsequent success stories are impressive indeed. Between 1971 and 1981, scores of congregations grew at a blistering rate: Springfield, Illinois—from 950 to 5,200 on Sunday morning; San Jose, California—660 to 3,600; New Orleans, Louisiana—335 to 2,400; Joplin, Missouri—95 to 2,450.

Outside observers notice that the Assemblies have not soured on Sunday school. Whereas in many churches the classrooms are only half as full as the sanctuary, AG Sunday school attendance often matches and sometimes even exceeds morning worship. In the denomination’s five largest situations, Sunday school is running at 100 percent, 190 percent, 146 per cent, 96 percent and 116 percent of church attendance respectively.

“They’ve grown because they intended to grow,” says Elmer Towns, dean of Liberty Baptist Seminary, Lynchburg, Virginia, and long-time compiler of Sunday school statistics. “They talk about growth from top to bottom. And they haven’t been afraid to learn from others. They’ve brought me to Springfield [national headquarters in Missouri] three different times to lecture; they’ve reprinted Southern Baptist training materials. Tommy Barnett, who’s built their second-largest Sunday school out in Phoenix, openly admits he learned busing from independent Baptists.”

Carl George adds, “They have a lean system that still rewards achievers. Assemblies of God pastors are not expected to be intellectuals, giving carefully balanced presentations every time they open their mouths. Instead, they must be enthusiastic and warm, vigorous, with strong social leadership skills.” That sometimes makes fellow clergy nervous in their presence, but it apparently meets the average American on comfortable ground.

The Assemblies of God are strongest in the Pacific states—the highest concentration’ is, surprisingly, in Alaska, where 5.3 percent of churchgoers are AG. Next come Oregon (4.9 percent) and Washington (4.7 percent), followed by Arkansas, Oklahoma, then Montana, Nevada, Missouri, Idaho, Colorado, California, and Florida. In other words, the denomination tilts west.

General secretary Joseph Flower (a distant cousin of Zimmerman) points to a sociological explanation. “When people move, they are more open to new things, new associations.” AG growth consultant David Torgerson says, “Churches grow best in populations that change. Outgoing congregations flourish there. Maybe that explains why First Assembly in Fairbanks is the largest church in town.”

Evangelism in the Pentecostal church has changed drastically since early in the century, when the movement began to grow. “In the early days,” says Flower, son of one of the founding fathers, “every church had revival meetings that sometimes lasted for weeks. Now they don’t usually run more than three or four nights. Some churches have formal home visitation programs, but the bigger mode of contact is media. CBN and PTL have generated tremendous interest and inquiries. Some churches have more than doubled as a result.”

Assemblies of God church planting is less a matter of master planning than of individual burden and district encouragement. “Nobody sits down in Springfield and says, ‘Let’s start another church in Roanoke,’ ” explains Torgerson. “The fellowship is much too autonomous for that. All we do is fan the flame of the Great Commission. It’s up to the districts to decide where, who, and when.”

What happens is basically entrepreneurial. A would-be pioneer—usually young—steps forward and claims a divine leading to start a congregation in his area. If the district officials agree, they endorse the enterprise, help find a meeting place, often collateralize the mortgage at building time, and provide published materials free for six months. Salary subsidies average three years, with a descending scale.

When the new church chooses a name, it may not include “Assembly of God.” Denominational flag waving has slacked in recent years, with 8 of the 13 largest congregations (according to Sunday school totals) calling themselves things like Calvary Temple, Willamette Christian Center, Calvary Community Church, and Crossroads Cathedral. That sometimes confuses listeners to “Revivaltime” (aired on 541 stations) when they try to follow the sign-off suggestion to “go to the Assembly of God church near you,” but it also removes a barrier to many who dislike partisan labels.

Once they arrive, they are likely to hear simple, fervent, Bible-centered preaching. “God’s Word, the Bible, is our final rule of faith and practice,” says Zimmerman, in reply to occasional criticisms that Pentecostals are ruled by experience. “We stand unashamedly on that premise. The Holy Spirit will never take us beyond or outside the bounds of Scripture.”

Visitors are frequently referred to Scripture to decipher ecstatic happenings during worship. Robert Schmidgall, whose Naperville, Illinois, congregation has grown from zero to 1,900 in 15 years, is one Assemblies pastor who uses almost a stock explanation after prophecy or tongues with interpretation: “Just a word for those who might not understand—1 Corinthians 12–14 tells us about several special gifts the Holy Spirit has given to edify the church, and what you just heard was an example of one of them. If you have further questions, we’d be glad to talk with you afterward.”

Far from being embarrassed, most Assemblies of God people are eager for evidence of the supernatural. “Miracles are God’s advertising,” says Dave Sumrall, missionary pastor in Manila. (The Assemblies are five times as large overseas as in the U.S.) Stories of healing and other divine interventions pepper AG conversation, sometimes verified by doctors, sometimes not. Both valid miracles and wishful thinking succeed in piquing the interest of outsiders.

Sometimes the desire for health and well-being goes to questionable limits, as in the “positive confession” teaching of independent author/speakers Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, among others. They teach that God responds primarily to our faith, especially when it is verbalized; thus, affluence and health are available to all sincere Christians who will declare that they have it. The teaching is something of a siren song to Assemblies laity, despite a 1980 general presbytery warning against “statements which make it appear that man is sovereign and God is the servant.” AG theologian Gordon Fee, New Testament scholar at Gordon-Conwell, was more blunt in a 1979 Evangel article when he called this teaching an “alien gospel.” Said Fee: “In the new order brought about by Jesus, wealth is an irrelevancy.”

Throughout the ranks, there is an intense desire to stay on course, to keep the momentum rolling, and not to put too many kettles on the denominational stove. “As church bodies age, they take on more and more good things,” says Zimmerman, “and they diffuse their energy.”

What lies ahead for the fastest-growing denomination in the nation? A changing of the guard, for one thing. Thomas Zimmerman will be 73 when his current term expires at the end of 1985. He is widely praised by such leaders as Billy Melvin, executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals, who calls him a gifted administrator. “He has been committed to making the Assemblies part of the evangelical mainstream, and he’s pulled it off.” Zimmerman, as head of NAE’S largest member denomination, served a term as NAE president.

It remains to be seen whether the Assemblies network of ten colleges and a graduate school can survive the chill winds of rising costs and student aid cutbacks. Valley Forge Christian College outside Philadelphia faces the stiffest gale. Only one of the schools escaped an enrollment decline this past fall. Further erosion could affect the future supply of ministerial leadership.

At the grassroots level, the greatest challenge is to indoctrinate the new wave of members. “A weakness of our current growth spiral,” says David Torgerson, “is too much rejoicing over the attendance, the cash flow, and the people at the altar without enough grounding in the Scriptures. We have to train more regarding the full significance of the work of the Holy Spirit.” As Carl George sees it, “The Assemblies have not had to be responsible for the Christian formation of many of their newcomers. But they will in the future.”

Such a problem is, of course, entirely welcomed by the denomination’s 24,000 credentialed ministers. The veterans among them are glad to be done with the isolation of the past, when many Christians considered them a cult. The current upsurge is explained in part by the fact that since 1970, many non-Pentecostals have adopted the policy of 1 Corinthians 14:39—“Forbid not to speak with tongues.” Meanwhile, the Assemblies of God seem to have rediscovered the next verse: “Let all things be done decently and in order.” The combination of those two adjustments has unleashed a growth curve that shows no signs of leveling off.

DEAN MERRILL

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

Two anxieties dominate most of our lives. We are anxious in the face of our unchangeable past; we long to recreate segments of our private histories, but we are stuck with them. We are anxious in the face of our unpredictable futures; we long to control our destinies, but we cannot bring them under our management. Thus, two basic longings, lying at the root of most others, are frustrated: we cannot alter a painful past or control a threatening future.

God offers two answers to our deepest anxieties. He is a forgiving God who recreates our pasts by forgiving them. He is a promising God who controls our future by making and keeping promises. By forgiving us, he changes our past. By promising, he secures our future.

By his grace we participate in his power to change the past and control the future. We, too, can forgive, and must forgive. We, too, can make a promise and keep it. Indeed, by sharing these two divine powers, we become most powerfully human and most wonderfully free.

Toward the end of her almost epochal book, The Human Condition (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt turns finally to these two neglected powers of the human spirit, concluding that only when we act after the fashion of the biblical Lord can we overcome our darkest forebodings. There is, she says, only one remedy for the inevitability of history: forgiveness. And in the next chapter she says there is only one way to overcome the unpredictabilities of the future: to make promises and keep the promises we make.

These two powers of the human spirit are, I believe, two things necessary to keep life human. If we lose the art of forgiving, and if we lose the power of promising, we will let life become brutish. To the extent that we let these divine gifts atrophy, we will forfeit the right to be called children of God.

I want to take a close look at how we practice these human shares in God’s powers. In the next issue I plan to poke about in the mystery of the making and the keeping of promises. Here I shall look into the human act of forgiving—not God’s forgiving so much as our own, and not being forgiven so much as the act of forgiving.

The only remedy for the inevitability of history, says Arendt, is forgiveness. She means that in the natural course of things we are stuck with our past and its effects on us. We may learn from our history, but we cannot escape it. We may forget our history, but we cannot undo it. We may be doomed to repeat our history, but we cannot change it. Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness.

Taking Arendt seriously, we have sound reason for revisiting this human potential. But Jesus, far earlier, urges a still more compelling reason, not merely for thinking about but for praying for the power of forgiving. In words that some resentful demon in me would rather ignore, Jesus tells us that if we do not forgive our fellows, we should not expect God to forgive us (Mark 11:25). Here is even more reason, then, to try to rescue forgiving from the cluster of clichés that often obscure the outrageously free and the offensively gracious act by which one human being forgives another.

What Do We Do When We Forgive?

I see three stages in every act of forgiving: suffering, spiritual surgery, and starting over. The first stage, suffering, creates the conditions that require forgiveness. At the second stage we do the essential business of forgiveness; the forgiver performs spiritual surgery in his own memory. We complete the action and bring it to its climax at the third stage, when the forgiver starts over in a new relationship with the forgiven person.

Suffering. No one really forgives unless he has been hurt. We turn the miracle into a cheap indulgence when we pretend to forgive people who have never hurt us. I do not mean that you can forgive only scoundrels who laid a hand on you. You can be hurt when you suffer at the hands of people you love. But unless you are hurt, speak of something other than forgiving.

But not every hurt needs to be forgiven. There are some hurts that we can swallow, shrug off, and chalk up to the risks of being earthen vessels in a crowded world. We should not try to forgive when all we need is simply a little spiritual generosity. Consider the following hurts:

Annoyances. People annoy us by being late for appointments, by telling boring stories at dinner, and by cutting in front of us at the checkout stand.

Defeats. Some people succeed when we fail; they get promotions when we are ignored; they get the glittering prizes we want; they always seem to be there ahead of us—and to make things worse, these people who beat us are our friends.

Slights. People we want to notice us ignore us; professors we adored forget our names two years after graduation; pastors we love never invite us into their special circle; and the boss does not even invite us to his daughter’s wedding.

These are all hurts, but they are not the kind that need forgiving. Such bits and pieces of suffering require tolerance, magnanimity, indulgence, humility—but not forgiving!

The kinds of hurts that need forgiving are both deep and moral. They are deep because they slice the fiber that holds us together in a human relationship. They are moral because they are wrongful, unfair, intolerable. We cannot indulge them or ignore them; we cannot shrug them off. We cannot just chalk them up to the human condition. The sorts of hurts that need forgiving are the ones that tend, in the nature of the case, to build a wall between the wrongdoer and the person he wrongfully hurts.

There are two kinds of hurts that must be answered with the miracle of forgiving. They are acts of disloyalty and acts of betrayal. Maybe there are hurts that need forgiveness that do not fit these categories, but most do.

What is a disloyal act? A person is disloyal if he treats you as a stranger when, in fact, he belongs to you as a friend or partner. Each of us is bound to some special others by the invisible fibers of loyalty. The bonding tells us who we are: we are who we are, most deeply, because of the people we belong to. This is why disloyalty is so serious. When someone who belongs to us treats us like a stranger, he digs a ditch, and he builds a wall between the two of us. And in doing so he assaults our very identity. Words like “abandon,” or “forsake,” or “let down” come to mind:

• A husband has an affair with his wife’s friend.

• A partner who promised to come through with a loan reneges at the last moment when he can make a better profit with his money elsewhere.

• A friend who promised to recommend you for promotion lets you down when he discovers you are out of favor with the boss.

• Your father fails to show up when you are given a coveted award.

• Your neighbor spurns you when you, a Jew, need a place to hide from the Gestapo.

These examples all have the same painful feature: someone who belongs to you by some spoken or unspoken promise treats you like a stranger.

Turn the screw a little tighter, and disloyalty becomes betrayal. As disloyalty makes strangers of people who belong to each other, betrayal turns them into enemies. We are disloyal when we let people down. We betray them when we cut them in pieces.

• Peter was disloyal when he denied he ever knew the Lord.

• Judas betrayed Jesus when he turned him over to his enemies.

• You betray me when you take a secret I trusted with you and reveal it to someone who is likely to use it against me.

• You betray me when you promise to be my friend but whisper my secret shame to a gossiper.

• You betray me when you are my brother but you put me down in front of significant people before whom 1 have no defense.

• A son betrays his father when he tells the police commissar that the father prayed for the defeat of communism.

These examples all have the same painful feature: someone who is committed to be on your side turns against you as an enemy.

Here are moral wrongs, wrongs people do out of evil intent, wrongs that cannot be tolerated. They are the wrongs that face us with the crisis of forgiveness. We should not flatten forgiveness to fit just any painful moment. The moment of forgiving comes when someone who ought to be with you forsakes you, when someone who ought to be for you turns against you.

Spiritual surgery. The second stage of forgiving involves the hurt person’s inner response to the one who wronged him. Though it happens in the mind and heart of the forgiver, it may not even be felt by the person he forgives—at least not immediately. Here the forgiver performs spiritual surgery within his or her own memory.

When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You disengage that person from his hurtful act. You recreate him. At one moment you identify him inerradicably as the person who did you wrong. The next moment you change that identity. He is remade in your memory.

You think of him now not as the person who hurt you, but as a person who needs you. You feel him now not as the person who alienated you, but as the person who belongs to you. Once you branded him as a person powerful in evil, but now you see him as a person weak in his needs. You recreated your past by recreating the person whose wrong made your past painful.

You do not change him, out there, in his being. What he did sticks to what he is. His wrong is glued to him. But when you recreate him in your own memory, there, within you, he has been altered by spiritual surgery.

God does it this way, too. He releases us from sin as a mother washes dirt from a child’s face, or as a person takes a burden off your back, lays it on a goat, and sends the goat scampering into the wilderness. The Bible’s metaphors point to a surgery within God’s memory of what we are.

Sometimes this stage is as far as we can go. Sometimes we need to forgive people who are dead and gone. Sometimes we need to forgive people who do not want our forgiveness. Sometimes our forgiving has to end with what happens in the spiritual surgery of our memories.

Starting over. The miracle of forgiveness is completed when two alienated people start over again. A man holds out his hand to an alienated daughter and says, “I want to be your father again.” A woman holds out her hand and says, “I want to be your wife again.” Or, “I want to be your friend again, your partner again. Let us be reconciled; let us belong together again.”

Reconciliation is the personal reunion of people who were alienated but belong together. It is the beginning of a new journey together. We must begin where we are, not at an ideal place for reunion. We do not understand what happened. Loose ends are untied. Nasty questions are unanswered. The future is uncertain; we have more hurts and more forgiving ahead of us. But we start over where we are.

If we keep the wonder of forgiving in our minds, we will not confuse this miracle with lesser gestures that pass as forgiveness. There are a few acts that may look like forgiving but which are, in fact, very different from that miracle of forgiving.

Forgiving is not forgetting. We forget things willy-nilly. We forget some hurts because they were too trivial to remember. We forget other hurts because they were too terrible to remember. All we need to forget is a bad memory or a compulsion to suppress. We do the miracle when we remember and then forgive.

Forgiving is not excusing. We excuse people when we understand that they are not to blame for the wrong they did us. When you understand that I have a Y where an X is supposed to be in my genetic code, you will not judge me. When you know that I got to be the way I am because I was walloped into neuroses by a wacky mother, you will not blame me. You will say: What he did was foul, but he is not to blame. This is not forgiving. Forgiving happens only when we refuse to excuse. We forgive only when we blame beforehand.

Forgiving is not smoothing things over. Some people make careers out of smoothing things over. Mothers shush us and smother our conflicts. They keep the lid on our suffering so we cannot forgive. Managers earn fat salaries by smoothing things over, manipulating people into working together even when they hate each other. Mothers and managers are the great over-smoothers of the world. They prevent forgiving because they stifle hurt. Forgiving happens only when we first admit our hurt and scream our hate.

In the creative violence of love, you reach into the unchangeable past and cut away the wrong from the person who wronged you, you erase the hurt in the archives of your heart. When you pull it off, you do the one thing, the only thing, that can remedy the inevitability of painful history. The grace to do it is from God. The decision to do it is our own.

Why Forgive?

To the guilty, forgiveness comes as amazing grace. To the offended, forgiving may sound like outrageous injustice. A straight-line moral sense tells most people that the guilty ought to pay their dues. Forgiving is for suckers. Forgiveness is a gyp.

Take Simon Wiesenthal’s story, for instance. Wiesenthal was a prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Poland. One day he was assigned to clean out rubbish from a barn the Germans had improvised into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Toward evening a nurse took Wiesenthal by the hand and led him to a young SS trooper, his face bandaged with puss-soaked rags, eyes tucked behind the gauze. He was perhaps 21 years old. He grabbed Wiesenthal’s hand and clutched it. He said that he had to talk to a Jew; he could not die before he had confessed the sins he had committed against helpless Jews, and he had to be forgiven by a Jew before he died. So he told Wiesenthal a horrible tale of how his battalion had gunned down Jews, parents and children, who were trying to escape from a house set afire by the SS troopers.

Wiesenthal listened to the dying man’s whole story, first the story of his innocent youth, and then the story of his participation in evil. At the end, Wiesenthal jerked his hand away and walked out of the barn. No word was spoken, no forgiveness was given. Wiesenthal would not, could not, forgive. But he was not sure he did right.

He ended his story, The Sunflower (Shocken, 1976), with a question: “What would you have done?” Thirty-two eminent persons, mostly Jewish, contributed their answers to his hard question. Most said Wiesenthal was right: he should not have forgiven the SS trooper; it would not have been fair. Why should a man who gave his will to the doing of monumental evil expect a quick word of forgiveness on his deathbed? What right had Wiesenthal to forgive the man for evil he had done to other Jews? If Wiesenthal forgave the soldier, he would be saying that the Holocaust was not so evil. “Let the SS trooper go to hell,” said one respondent.

Many of us feel the same way when we are unfairly hurt in far less horrible ways. Sometimes our hate is the only ace we have left in our deck. Our contempt is our only weapon. Our plan to get even is our only consolation. Why should we forgive?

Why indeed? I do not think we should urge people to forgive unless we consider the superhuman task we ask of them. To get a hint of the gospel’s revolution of forgiveness we need to get inside the moral skin of a righteous Pharisee with a clear eye for how wrongs really ought to be settled—according to natural, straight-lined fairness.

What is the answer to the unfairness of forgiving? It can only be that forgiving is, after all, a better way to fairness.

First, forgiving creates a new possibility of fairness by releasing us from the unfair past. A moment of unfair wrong has been done; it is in the inevitable past. If we choose, we can stick with that past. And we can multiply its wrongness. If we do not forgive, our only recourse is revenge. But revenge glues us to the past. And it dooms us to repeat it.

Revenge never evens the score, for alienated people never keep score of wrongs by the same mathematics. Enemies never agree on the score because each feels the wounds he receives differently from the wounds he gives. How may Beiruts can ever equal a Holocaust? How many of her put-downs equal his slaps in the face? We cannot get even; this is the inner fatality of all revenge.

Forgiving takes us off the escalator of revenge so that both of us can stop the chain of incremented wrongs. We start over. We start over as if the wrongdoer had not hurt us at all. But we start over to begin a new and fairer relationship. We will probably fail again. And we will need to forgive again. The doorway to justice closes time and time again. And forgiveness remains the only way to open the door.

Second, forgiveness brings fairness to the forgiver. It is the hurting person who most feels the burden of unfairness; but he only condemns himself to more unfairness if he refuses to forgive.

Is it fair to be stuck to a painful past? Is it fair to be walloped again and again by the old unfair hurt? Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind. It hooks you into its instant replays. And each time it replays, you feel the clap of pain again. Is this fair?

Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory. Forgiving sets you free. Forgiving is the only way to stop the cycle of unfair pain turning in your memory.

Why forgive? Forgiving is the only way back to fairness. “Let the SS trooper go to bell,” is the word of someone condemned to suffer again and again the unfair pain of the past. To what end?

How Do We Forgive?

I must say something about how we forgive—but I cannot; I do not know how. Charles Williams said that pardon, like love, is ours only for fun; essentially we cannot do it. Maybe we cannot. But we do it anyway—sometimes! Like fumbling amateurs, to be sure, but we do it. Here are three things I have noticed about how people forgive:

They forgive slowly. There are instant forgivers, I suppose, but not many. We should not count on power to forgive bad hurts very quickly.

C. S. Lewis had a monster for a teacher when he was a boy. He hated that academic sadist most of his life. But a few months before the end, he wrote to his American friend: “Dear Mary … Do you know, only a few weeks ago, I realized suddenly that I had at last forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I had been trying to do it for years.” Essentially, we cannot; but evenutally we do. God takes his time with a lot of things. Why should we not take ours with a hard miracle like forgiving?

They forgive communally. Can anyone forgive alone? I do not think I can. I need people who hurt as I hurt, and who hate as I hate. I need persons who are struggling as hard as I need to struggle before I come through forgivingly. I know only socialized forgiving. It is fine if you can do it all by yourself; but if you are hooked into your videotape of past pain, seek a fellowship of slow forgivers. They may help.

They forgive as they are forgiven. When it comes down to it, anyone who forgives can hardly tell the difference between feeling forgiven and doing the forgiving. We are such a mixture of sinners and sinned against, we cannot forgive people who offend us without feeling that we are being set free ourselves.

I haven’t found a better example of this truth than Corrie Ten Boom. She was stuck for the war years in a concentration camp, humiliated and degraded, especially in the delousing shower where the women were ogled by the leering guards. But she made it through that hell. And eventually she felt she had, by grace, forgiven even those fiends who guarded the shower stalls.

So she preached forgiveness, for individuals, for all of Europe. She preached it in Bloemendaal, in the United States, and, one Sunday, in Munich. After the sermon, greeting people, she saw a man come toward her, hand outstretched: “Ja, Fräulein, it is wonderful that Jesus forgives us all our sins, just as you say.” She remembered his face; it was the leering, lecherous, mocking face of an SS guard of the shower stall.

Her hand froze at her side. She could not forgive. She thought she had forgiven all. But she could not forgive when she met a guard, standing in the solid flesh in front of her. Ashamed, horrified at herself, she prayed: “Lord, forgive me, I cannot forgive.” And as she prayed she felt forgiven, accepted, in spite of her shabby performance as a famous forgiver.

Her hand was suddenly unfrozen. The ice of hate melted. Her hand went out. She forgave as she felt forgiven. And I suspect she would not be able to sort out the difference.

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last! Freed by the only remedy for the inevitability of our history.

To forgive is to put down your 50-pound pack after a 10-mile climb up a mountain.

To forgive is to fall into a chair after a 15-mile marathon.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

To forgive is to reach back into your hurting past and recreate it in your memory so that you can begin again.

To forgive is to dance to the beat of God’s forgiving heart. It is to ride the crest of love’s strongest wave.

Our only escape from history’s cruel unfairness, our only passage to the future’s creative possibilities, is the miracle of forgiving.

The Christlike life is a life like Christ, who come to minister as a servant.

As the cross is the sign of submission, so the towel is the sign of service. When Jesus gathered his disciples for the Last Supper they were having trouble over who was the greatest. This was no new issue for them. “And an argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest” (Luke 9:46). Whenever there is trouble over who is the greatest there is trouble over who is the least. That is the crux of the matter for us, isn’t it? Most of us know we will never be the greatest; just don’t let us be the least.

Gathered at the Passover feast the disciples were keenly aware that someone needed to wash the others’ feet. The problem was that the only people who washed feet were the least. So there they sat, feet caked with dirt. It was such a sore point that they were not even going to talk about it. No one wanted to be considered the least. Then Jesus took a towel and a basin and so redefined greatness.

Having lived out servanthood before them, he called them to the way of service: “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (John 13:14–15). In some ways we would prefer to hear Jesus’ call to deny father and mother, houses and land for the sake of the gospel, than his word to wash feet. Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service we are banished to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial.

In the discipline of service there is also great liberty. Service enables us to say “No!” to the world’s games of promotion and authority. It abolishes our need (and desire) for a “pecking order.” That phrase is so telling, so revealing. How like chickens we are! In the chicken pen there is no peace until it is clear who is the greatest and who is the least and who is at which rung everywhere in between. A group of people cannot be together for very long until the “pecking order” is clearly established. We can see it so easily in such things as where people sit, how they walk in relation to each other, who always gives way when two people are talking at the same time, who stands back when a job needs to be done and who steps forward. (Depending on the job it may be a sign of mastery or a sign of servitude.) These things are written on the face of human society.

We must clearly understand the radical nature of what Jesus taught on this matter. He was not just reversing the “pecking order,” as many suppose. He was abolishing it. The authority of which he spoke was not an authority to manipulate and control. It was an authority of function, not status.

Jesus declared, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you.” He totally and completely rejected the pecking-order systems of his day. How then was it to be among them? “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant … even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve” (Matt. 20:25–28). Therefore the spiritual authority of which Jesus spoke was an authority not found in a position or title but in a towel.

Yes … But

A natural and understandable hesitancy accompanies any serious discussion of service. The hesitancy is good since it is wise to count the cost before plunging headlong into any discipline. We experience a fear that comes out something like this: “If I do that, people will take advantage of me; they will walk all over me.”

Right here we must see the difference between choosing to serve and choosing to be a servant. When we choose to serve we are still in charge. We decide whom we will serve and when we will serve. And if we are in charge we will worry a great deal about anyone’s stepping on us, that is, taking charge over us.

But when we choose to be a servant we give up the right to be in charge. There is a great freedom in this. If we voluntarily choose to be taken advantage of, then we cannot be manipulated. When we choose to be a servant we surrender the right to decide who and when we will serve. We become available and vulnerable.

Consider the perspective of a slave. A slave sees all of life from the viewpoint of slavery. He does not see himself as possessing the same rights as free men and women. Please understand me, when this slavery is involuntary it is cruel and dehumanizing. When the slavery is freely chosen, however, everything is changed. Voluntary servitude is a great joy.

The imagery of slavery may be difficult for us, but it was no trouble to the apostle Paul. He boasted frequently of his slavery to Christ, making lavish use of the first-century concept of the “love slave” (that is, the slave who out of love has freely chosen to remain a slave). We do our best to soften Paul’s language by translating the word “slave” as “servant.” But whatever word we decide to use, let’s be certain that we understand that Paul meant he had freely given up his rights.

Therefore the fear that we will be taken advantage of and stepped on is justified. That is exactly what may happen. But who can hurt someone who has freely chosen to be stepped on? Thomas à Kempis (The Imitation of Christ) instructed us to be “so subject … that all men may go over thee and tread upon thee as upon mire of the street.”

We find those words hard to deal with today. We fear that such an attitude will lead irrevocably down the path of excessive asceticism and self-mortification. In the church we are only now emerging from a “worm theology” that terribly devalued human ability and potential. Does service lead back to that? No, certainly not. No doubt it is a danger we must always guard against. But we must also watch for the enemy in the opposite direction. As Bonhoeffer said (The Cost of Discipleship, Macmillan, 1963), “If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh … we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ.”

Service In The Marketplace

Service is not a list of things that we do, though in it we discover things to do. It is not a code of ethics but a way of living. To do specific acts of service is not the same thing as living in the discipline of service. It is one thing to act like a servant; it is quite another to be a servant. As in all the disciplines, it is possible to master the mechanics of service without experiencing the discipline.

To stress the inward nature of service, however, is not enough. Service to be service must take form and shape in the world in which we live. Therefore we must seek to perceive what service may look like in the marketplace of our daily lives.

At the outset there is the service of hiddenness. Even public leaders can cultivate tasks of service that remain generally unknown. If all of our serving is before others we will be shallow people indeed. Listen to the spiritual direction of Jeremy Taylor: “Love to be concealed, and little esteemed: be content to want [lack] praise, never be troubled when thou art slighted or undervalued …” (Fellowship of the Saints, Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1957). Hiddenness is a rebuke to the flesh and can deal a fatal blow to pride.

At first thought it would seem that hidden service is only for the sake of the individual served. Such is not the case. Hidden anonymous ministries affect even people who know nothing of them. They sense a deeper love and compassion among people, though they cannot account for the feeling. If a secret service is done on their behalf they are inspired to deeper devotion, for they know that the well of service is far deeper than they can see. It is a ministry that can frequently be engaged in by all people. It sends ripples of joy and celebration in any community of people.

There is the service of small things. Like Dorcas, we find ways to make “coats and garments for the widows” (Acts 9:39).

The following is a true story. As I was in the frantic throes of writing my doctoral dissertation I received a phone call from a friend. His wife had taken the car and he wondered if I could take him on a number of errands. Trapped, I consented, inwardly cursing my luck. As I ran out the door I grabbed Bonhoeffer’s Life Together (Harper & Row, 1976), thinking that I might have an opportunity to read in it. Through each errand I inwardly fretted and fumed at the loss of precious time. Finally, at a supermarket, the final stop, I waved my friend on saying I would wait in the car. I picked up my book, opened it to the marker and read these words: “The second service that one should perform for another in a Christian community is that of active helpfulness. This means, initially, simple assistance in trifling, external matters. There is a multitude of these things wherever people live together. Nobody is too good for the meanest service. One who worries about the loss of time that such petty, outward acts of helpfulness entail is usually taking the importance of his own career too solemnly.”

Service that flows out of our inward person is life, and joy, and peace.

Francis de Sales says that the great virtues and the small fidelities are like sugar and salt. Sugar may have a more exquisite taste but its use is less frequent. Salt is found everywhere. The great virtues are a rare occurrence; the ministry of small things is a daily service. Large tasks require great sacrifice for a moment; small things require constant sacrifice. “The small occasions … return every moment.… If we want to be faithful to these small things, nature never has time to breathe, and we must die to all our inclinations. We should a hundred times rather make some great sacrifices to God, however violent and painful, on condition that we be freed with liberty to follow our tastes and habits in every little detail” (François Fénelon, Christian Perfection, Bethany Fellowship, 1975).

In the realm of the spirit we soon discover that the real issues are to be found in the tiny insignificant corners of life. Our constant infatuation with the “big deal” has blinded us to this fact. The service of small things will put us at odds with our sloth and idleness. We will come to see small things as the central issues. Fenelon said: “It is not elevation of the spirit to feel contempt for small things. It is, on the contrary, because of too narrow points of view that we consider as little what has such far-reaching consequences.”

There is the service of guarding the reputation of others. Or as Bernard of Clairvaux put it, the service of “charity.” How necessary this is if we are to be saved from backbiting and gossip. The apostle Paul taught us to “speak evil of no one” (Titus 3:2). We may clothe our backbiting in all the religious respectability we want but it will remain a deadly poison. There is a discipline in holding one’s tongue that can work wonders in our inward person.

Nor should we be a party to the slanderous talk of others. We have a rule on the pastoral team of our church that our people have come to appreciate. We refuse to allow any member of the congregation to speak disparagingly of one pastor to another pastor. Gently but firmly we ask them to go directly to the offending pastor. Eventually people understand that we simply will not allow them to talk to us about pastor so-and-so. This rule, held to by our entire team, has had beneficial results.

Bernard warned us that the spiteful tongue “strikes a deadly blow at charity in all who hear him speak and, so far as it can, destroys root and branch, not only in the immediate hearers but also in all others to whom the slander, flying from lip to lip, is afterwards repeated” (St. Bernard on the Song of Songs, A. R. Mowbray, 1952). Guarding the reputation of others is a deep and lasting service.

There is the service of being served. When Jesus began to wash the feet of those he loved, Peter refused. He would never let his Master stoop to such a menial service on his behalf. It sounds like a statement of humility; in reality, it was an act of veiled pride. Jesus’ service was an affront to Peter’s concept of authority. If Peter had been the master he would not have washed feet!

It is an act of submission and service to allow others to serve us. It recognizes their “kingdom authority” over us. We graciously receive the service rendered, never feeling we must repay it. Those who out of pride refuse to be served are failing to submit to the divinely appointed leadership in the kingdom of God.

There is the service of common courtesy. Such deeds of compassion have fallen on hard times in our day. But we who are of the light must never despise the rituals of relationship that are in every culture. It is one of the few ways left in modern society of acknowledging the value of one another. As Paul counseled Titus, we are “to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all men” (Titus 3:2).

Missionaries understand the value of courtesy. They would not dare to come blundering into some village demanding to be heard without first going through the appropriate rituals of introduction and acquaintanceship. Yet we feel we can violate these rituals in our own culture and still be received and heard. And we wonder why no one will listen.

“But they are so meaningless, so hypocritical,” we complain. That is a myth. They are extremely meaningful and not in the least hypocritical. Once we get over our egocentric arrogance about the fact that people don’t really want to know how we are when they say “How are you?” we can see that it is just an American way of acknowledging our presence. We can wave and acknowledge their presence too without feeling the need to give a prognosis on our latest headache. Words of “thank you” and “yes, please,” letters of appreciation and R.S.V.P. responses are all services of courtesy. The specific acts will vary from culture to culture but the purpose is always the same: to acknowledge others and affirm their worth. The service of courtesy is sorely needed in our increasingly computerized and depersonalized society.

There is the service of hospitality. Peter urges us to “practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another” (1 Peter 4:9). Paul does the same and even makes it one of the requirements for the office of bishop (Rom. 12:13; 1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:8). There is a desperate need today for homes that can be open to one another. The old idea of the guest house has been made obsolete by the proliferation of modern motels and restaurants, but we may seriously question whether the change is an advance. I have walked through the Spanish missions of California and marveled at the gracious and adequate provision that was made for visitors. Perhaps it is the modern, shiny, depersonalized motels that should be obsolete.

I know of a couple who have sought to make the ministry of hospitality a priority in their lives. In any given month they may have as many as 70 individuals come to their home. It is a service to which they believe God has called them. Perhaps most of us cannot do that much, but we can do something. We can begin somewhere.

Sometimes we limit ourselves because we make hospitality too complicated. I remember an occasion where the hostess was scurrying around with this and that, sincerely wanting to make everyone feel comfortable. My friend startled us all (and put everyone at ease) by saying, “Helen, I don’t want any coffee, I don’t want any tea, I don’t want any cookies, I don’t want a napkin, I just want to visit. Won’t you sit down and talk with us!” Just a chance to be together and share—that is the stuff of hospitality.

There is the service of listening. “The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together). We need so desperately the help that can come through listening to one another. We do not need to be trained psychoanalysts to be trained listeners. The most important requirements are compassion and patience.

We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening for we become more anxious to give the answer than to hear. An impatient half-listening is an affront to the person sharing.

To listen to others quiets and disciplines the mind to listen to God. It creates an inward working upon the heart that transforms the affections, even the priorities, of the life. When we have grown dull in listening to God we would do well to listen to others in silence and see if we do not hear God. “Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together).

There is the service of bearing the burdens of each other. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). The “law of Christ” is the law of love, the “royal law” as James called it (James. 2:8). Love is most perfectly fulfilled when we bear the hurts and sufferings of each other, weeping with those who weep.

If we care we will learn to bear their sorrows. I say “learn” because this, too, is a discipline to be mastered. Most of us too easily assume that all we need to do is decide to bear the burdens of others and we can do it. Then we try it for a time and soon the joy of life has left and we are heavy with the sorrows of others. It does not need to be so. We can learn to uphold the burdens of others without ourselves being destroyed by them. Jesus, who bore the burdens of the whole world, could say, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). Can we learn to lift the sorrows and pains of others into the tender arms of Jesus so that our burden is lighter? Of course we can. But it takes some practice, so rather than dashing out to bear the burdens of the whole world, let’s begin more humbly. Begin in some small corner somewhere and learn. Jesus will be your teacher.

Finally, there is the service of sharing the Word of Life with one another. The Poustinias that were established by Catherine Doherty had a rule: those who went into the deserts of silence and solitude did so for others. Any word that they received from God they were to bring back and share with others. This is a gracious service to be rendered, for no individual can hear all that God wants to say. We are dependent upon one another to receive the full counsel of God. The smallest member can bring us a word—we dare not despise the service. We must not draw back from this service for it is desperately needed today.

Service that is motivated by duty breathes death. Service that flows out of our inward person is life, and joy, and peace. The risen Christ beckons us to the ministry of the towel. Perhaps you would like to begin by experimenting with a prayer that a number of us have used. Start the day by praying, “Lord Jesus, I would so appreciate it if you would bring me someone today whom I can serve.”

“Only Edward is lost to a religious group in India,” read the letter, “gone for three-and-a-half years. Do you know anyone there who could reach him? We haven’t heard in eight months. Except for the deep pain of his loss, my life is wonderful now.… It’s been an unbelievable experience but the pain is pushed down.” The letter was from a dear friend who has suffered incredibly. Yet I’m sure it is the loss of this one son that has caused the deepest hurt.

Soon after reading that I watched a young author being interviewed on TV about a book she has written on missing children. I was shocked to learn that children seven years old and above are considered accountable by the law. The 13-to 14-year-olds are most certainly accountable. If they are missing it is generally assumed they have run away. Not only is there often little help from the police, nor any central clearing house for tracking the lost, but the parents themselves are frequently suspect: did they do away with the children? In any case, concern and hurt over missing children are all too often combined with feelings of guilt. One can more easily handle death and gradually learn to accept it, but not this.

And then I recalled 1954. We were in London for three months’ mission in the old Harringay Arena in dreary north London. A friend had offered to give me a round-trip ticket back to the U.S. so that in the middle of that period I could return home to break the long separation from the children. When the first two months of the mission were completed, however, Bill felt he needed me and urged me to stay. Watching God work in lives was a tremendous privilege, but underneath was a growing longing to see the children. I couldn’t bear to look at their pictures on the dresser, and when bedtime came with little more than a quick, “Dear God, please bless each one,” I would dive into bed and try to fall asleep.

My letters home must have betrayed how I felt, because in one of her letters Mother told of the children’s prayer: “Dear God, please bless Mommy and help her not to be so homesick for us.” They were quite happy and content. It was I who was miserable.

But it taught me a lesson I have never forgotten. I thought about it when I read the letter from my young friend. I thought about it when I watched that interview on television. When we are away from God, he misses us far more than we miss him.

Most Christians approach evangelism with great apprehension because they don’t know how to get into the gospel with their friends. They don’t know what to say, and they don’t know what to do when their friends reject the message.

Search Ministries is a national, trans-denominational ministry that helps Christians provide their unbelieving friends with a comfortable, natural opportunity to think through their beliefs. There are 20 full-time staff across the country and many more volunteers conducting a four-faceted ministry.

The first is the seminar ministry, of which two are offered. In the friendship evangelism seminar, participants discover via lecture, role play, discussion, worksheets, and multimedia presentations how to reach their friends with the message of Jesus Christ naturally. They learn the importance of friendships with non-Christians, for friendship is the language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

The second seminar deals with apologetics. Participants are taught how to turn the common objections into opportunities to share the good news about Christ. The seminar concentrates on developing skills—not just what one says in answering objections, but more important, how he says it.

The second facet of Search is the home discussion series, putting principles learned in the seminars into a practical format. The standard series begins with three weeks of preparing the Christian core group in the essentials of prayer, love, and friendship evangelism.

These meetings are followed by four weekly one-hour discussions that take place informally, in a living room. There, unbelieving friends, invited for an open discussion of religion, may ask any question they have about God and life, with the promise that Christianity’s answer will be shared. Because the atmosphere is casual and relaxed, barriers topple and seekers are lovingly exposed to the claims of Jesus. Although some will come to know Christ during those four weeks, the series is not an end in itself. Rather it is designed as a catalyst to trigger later conversations with friends about Christ.

Once the subject of Christianity has been broached during the series, it is much easier in the months following to engage in a conversation concerning Christ. Friends may have to hear the good news more than once from caring believers before they warm up to the message.

The third and fourth facets of Search’s thrust are discipleship training and leadership training. Search is committed to helping integrate the new believer into the Christian community, and to preparing lay people to lead the discussion series. Its goal is to equip others to do the work of lifestyle evangelism and discipleship rather than to do the work for them.

Let the beauty of Christ attract unbelieving friends and neighbors through you.

Just what is evangelism? Some think it is only what Billy Graham does, and the pastor doesn’t do. Others believe it is a mugging mission out into foreign territory. Others see it as fishing in a stained-glass aquarium where the big fisherman casts his lure over the pulpit to catch the unsaved fish.

God’s evangelistic strategy is beauty. Evangelism starts with the beauty of God, and it also involves a beautiful bride, the church. God desires that through our lives the world will see his beauty.

But confusion reigns over how to define beauty. For example, some prefer blondes, some brunettes; we disagree on the subjective definition of beauty. But for an objective definition, the Bible has some striking ideas. Isaiah said, “You will see the king in his beauty” (33:17). Elsewhere Scripture speaks about the “beauty of holiness.” Anything that is truly beautiful ultimately reflects the beauty of God himself; he is the standard.

In Ezekiel 16 we read that God poured out his beauty on his bride, Israel, to make her beautiful: “Your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because of the splendor I had given you” (v. 14, NIV). So beauty is the possession and expression of the very nature of God. Anything beautiful expresses something of the integrity, symmetry, order, and orderliness of God himself.

What God did for Israel as his bride he is doing for you and me as members of the bride of Christ, the church. A passage like Ezekiel 16 provides a fine description of the building process by which God instills the qualities of his own character into our lives.

Israel is described here as a baby thrown out on the rubbish heap (v. 4), despised on the day she was born. That is what redemption is all about: God takes us from the rubbish and makes us royalty. That miracle of redemption begins a process that, for the church, will continue until the day of Jesus Christ as we become his workmanship. Beauty can be perceived in the midst of our incompleteness and brokenness as the Spirit of God begins to weave in us a tapestry formed from the strands of his character. His very presence becomes seen in us with increasing clarity.

Of Israel God says, “I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew up and developed and became the most beautiful of jewels.… I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments. I adorned you with jewelry. You advanced to royalty. And your fame spread to all the nations on account of your beauty.”

Critical Clue

There is God’s evangelistic strategy in a nutshell: He desires to build into you and me the beauty of his own character, and then put us on display. God wants us to recognize that his chief means of communication is a man or woman whose life is open to the non-Christian community.

Unfortunately, the average Christian has no non-Christian friends, and tragically, the non-Christian has no Christian friends. But when men and women have an opportunity to get close enough to you and me to observe something of the beauty of Christ being formed in us, then, in the midst of our imperfections, they can see hope, beauty, the fruit of the Spirit, and they become interested.

Beauty was to mark the life of Israel as a people: the way they loved one another and supported one another. It involved their institutions, the way they did business, and their relationships within family units and tribes, and also with surrounding nations.

So it is with us. When an individual, a family, or a corporate body of believers is moving together toward wholeness (holiness), a credible lifestyle emerges, and the potential for effective witness increases dramatically. Because this is true, evangelism is a way of living beautifully, and of opening one’s web of relationships to the nonbeliever.

We can compare this beauty to music. Many evangelistic training programs concentrate on the words, the tools—the bridge, or the “four spiritual laws.” Few teach us how to play the music: that beauty of character God wants to suffuse through our lives. People need to hear this music; then they will respond to the words. And they need to hear it before they hear the words.

Basically, evangelism is less something we do—a project—than something we are. I don’t want to be anyone’s project; neither does your neighbor. It is worth your time to build a relationship with that neighbor—even if he never trusts the Lord. After all, he is made in the image of God. At least let him hear the music of the gospel.

Who Can Communicate?

Aristotle pointed out three features of a good communicator that help us see what is involved in this beauty, this music. They are ethos, pathos, and logia: an ethical nature, a caring nature, and a message. If we possess the beauty of integrity (a good reputation), and if we feel for people so that we are learning to care about their hurts, we are playing the music of the gospel. As you and I make ourselves slaves to others, they will hear the music. This involves practical actions—like noticing your neighbor teetering on a ladder, and going to help him fix his eaves. It means unplugging his toilet, taking meals to his sick wife, and picking up the mail when he is away.

If we are playing the Lord’s music, in serving our neighbors we will not be looking down, but up. They will know the difference. Paul was among the Thessalonians in this way because they “had become dear to us.” I suspect this attitude explains why 80 percent of new converts I have heard of have had a Christian friend.

When others see we are people of integrity who care, they may be interested in what we have to say. Sometimes we look down on them because we dislike the way they live. In doing this we effectively cut them off. But Paul notes in 2 Corinthians 4:4, “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers.” So should we not regard them less as enemies than victims? We all have to do battle with the invisible world. We must not be put off by the effect of these forces on our neighbors.

Church Strategy

It is helpful to ask three questions as we consider the strategy of evangelism: (1) What kind of people does the church want to deploy into the world? (2) What kind of church produces that kind of people? (3) What kind of leadership team makes that kind of church possible?

We would agree, would we not, that we want to deploy people who have the fruit of the Spirit? They must be learning to receive love, joy, and peace from the Lord.

How do we answer the question of what kind of church produces such people? The question arises because the evangelistic potential of a person is directly related to the health of the community with which he associates. In Acts 2:47, for example, we see that the Lord was adding daily to the church such as were being saved. We learn from the preceding verses what kind of church God was working through to achieve such a remarkably effective evangelistic mission.

First, the church emphasized instruction: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.” Doctrine and Bible study were treasured among them. Second, the church believed in fellowship: rather than isolating themselves, the people came together to use their gifts. Third, the church engaged in worship: education and fellowship were rooted in personal touch with God. The people declared his worth (the meaning of “worship”). Fourth, the church specialized in serving others. People supported one another and reached out in love to their neighbors. And last, they played the music; they found opportunity to say the words.

What kind of leadership team made that kind of church possible? The answer is a team that is a mini-body, a proper behavioral model for the church. If the team members have no desire to learn and worship, or if they lack unity and hope, the church is not likely to have these qualities either. God does not put healthy babies in defective incubators.

According to the New Testament, to lead means to model. Effective church leaders are to lead “intentionally”—they are to consciously follow the guidelines God gives them. As Paul says, “Set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12).

If we merge the qualities we find in the three New Testament passages about the leadership team (the elders or governing board), we discover 20 traits. These include being above reproach, temperate, able to teach, not lovers of money, hospitable (1 Tim. 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–10; 1 Pet. 5:2). What would it would be like to live next door to someone like this?

Hospitality

Note especially the word “hospitable.” The Greek term literally means “a lover of strangers.” Now, we often invite fellow Christians over to eat or talk, but are they the strangers of this passage? Is it not more realistic to understand the term as characterizing church leaders who invite their non-Christian neighbors over so they can get acquainted?

My wife and I met a variety of people in an apartment house where we lived while I was attending seminary. There were students, homosexuals, prostitutes, mechanics, divorcees, and singles. We determined to befriend and influence them for Christ. On various occasions I had to break up fights; beer bottles were thrown through our bedroom window at night; our lives were threatened. In spite of this, we spent many hours with these people. They often ate with us, bringing their beer cans and ashtrays. We tried to take one couple out to dinner each week. Our home circle was an open circle and they came, they laughed, they cried, they listened, they watched, they talked, and some believed. They heard the music and asked about the words. Authenticity is the key. When we come to grips with this, evangelism becomes not a project but a lifestyle of beauty.

I estimate that 95 percent of those in the pastorate today have no non-Christian friends. What model of evangelism do they provide their people? Jesus said that “everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). We must pray for our pastors. The demand on them is severe. They need God’s help to be models of, for instance, hospitality.

To Witness Or To Separate?

But there is another basic question: Can we mix it up with the non-Christian community and still avoid the appearance of evil?

I believe the greatest barriers to effective evangelism are cultural, not theological. Few non-Christians have a theological axe to grind. Paul’s famous statement about being “all things to all men that by all means I might win some” (1 Cor. 9:22) means at least this: “If I’m going to take seriously the responsibility of reaching other people, I need to understand where they are coming from, and enter into their mindset. I need to become a naturalized citizen of their world.”

There will, of course, be a tension between penetrating the community and restricting an activity because of the weaker Christian brother. (Here we must first distinguish the needs of the genuine weaker brother from the demands of the “professional weaker brother” who uses the argument for separation to achieve isolation.) I believe one of the church’s failures is that we have disengaged too much. At any rate, Scripture suggests that the diversity of conduct of equally zealous believers will be striking (1 Cor. 9:22 and Rom. 14).

If we are to be in contact, we will clearly be involved in issues of separation. We must distinguish between the world system we are weeding out of our lives, and the non-Christian who lives in that world as a victim of the Enemy.

It is helpful to think of a culture as our acquired way of coping. I see four possible responses to culture. First, rejection. Here we retire into our fortress, raise the drawbridge, and leave the world to its own devices. But we are called to penetrate, not to withdraw. An ambassador penetrates, using relationships as the means through which his message flows. We must, however, maintain a radical difference from the world and be a holy people. We must separate ourselves from influences we cannot cope with at our present stage of maturity.

The second response is the opposite: immersion. Christians immersed in the culture emphasize radical identification, but they fail to maintain radical difference. They become indistinguishable from the world, and ineffective in evangelism.

“Split adaptation” describes a third reaction to culture, and is a blend of the first two. Here a Christian goes to church on Sunday, adopting separation as a pattern. But during the week he follows non-Christian policies in such matters as business ethics.

I believe the proper biblical response to culture is the fourth approach, critical participation. We are dual citizens of heaven and earth. God has involved us in a redemptive mission that has cultural implications. We maintain a radical difference, but are not socially segregated. We are to strike a balance between radical difference and radical participation.

Our radical difference is supposed to be holiness, not legalism; only holiness makes radical participation with non-Christians a legitimate option. God expects us to communicate, but without contamination.

Neighbors

We are called to love our neighbor—but what does that mean? According to the parable of the Good Samaritan, a neighbor is someone we can help. In fact, “neighbor” means “to be nearby.” So the Christian neighbor must develop the capacity to draw near.

This is more likely to happen if we see that evangelism is a process, not a project. It begins with cultivation—an approach to the heart; then there is seed planting—an appeal to the mind; finally there is harvesting—an appeal to the will.

Different people may be used at different points in the eight stages that lead to salvation. But suppose in your life you influence 100 people to take the first step of moving from a negative to a positive attitude toward the gospel. That gives you a significant part in God’s enterprise of evangelism. Yet I am sure that if your neighbors hear the music, some of them will ask you about the words, and now and then one will become a Christian.

To be radically different is to be like Christ. If we become like Christ and then move out to identify with the world, we have discovered the key to evangelism.

I have heard of a realty firm that divided their city into “farms” of 500 families each. A realtor was responsible to make contact with each home in his farm once a month by phone, letter, or personal visit. It took at least six contacts for a homeowner to remember the realtor, but if the agent maintained that pattern for 18 months, he would receive 80 percent of the listings for that area. If a realtor can show interest from merely a financial motive, surely we, in the same way, can show interest in our neighbors out of eternal motives.

In fact, I suggest that each of us choose a “five-family farm” and seek to become well acquainted with the people in it.

Here are some concrete steps to take:

1. Visualize the Spirit of God hovering over your neighborhood. As he prepares hearts, may he not lead you to them? As you jog or drive through your neighborhood, don’t just see houses and lawns, but people. Think people, and pray, “Lord, you know who is ready to respond. Lead me to that person.”

2. Extend social relationships. Open your home and family to families in your neighborhood. Some will click with you.

3. Build friendships. Be hospitable by using your home. Have people over to try your recipe for homemade ice cream, or your special barbeque sauce on hamburgers. (A formal dinner is probably not a good idea.)

4. Use common interests like tennis, stamp collecting, birdwatching, sewing, or reading followed by discussion of the books.

5. Capitalize on special events and holidays. One fall I borrowed my dad’s cider press, and neighbors brought over apples. We had a fine time making cider in the garage—and came to know people in the process. Another time we joined two other families to sponsor a Christmas party for our neighborhood. At some point we gathered in the living room and all shared an account of our most memorable Christmas. This bound us together.

Be sensitive to people’s needs. If you hope to be involved in the lives of people, you’ll be there when they want to talk about their pressures. Often it is costly—being with a wife whose husband has just left her, night after night, caring, crying. Often you won’t say anything; you will just be there. There seems to be a correlation between the people we serve and those we win for Christ (1 Cor. 9:22).

Finally, be alert for appropriate harvest vehicles—home Bible studies, concerts, businessmen’s breakfasts, Christian athletes giving their testimonies. (Ask yourself what would interest your neighbor.)

In all of this, be a seed planter. There will be opportunities in your friendships to communicate bits and pieces of the gospel, and some of your personal testimony. Remember, you are a living epistle. A neighbor once asked my wife, “What’s it like to live with a holy man?” My wife set her straight on that—but it was clear that people were listening, watching, thinking.

But avoid the mistake of backing up the evangelical dump truck and dropping the whole load on a neighbor who shows the slightest glimmer of interest. An effective seed planter drops a seed—and then listens well to see if he is given permission to go further. If he isn’t, he should stop.

Words As Well As Music

After a neighbor has seen that you are a person of integrity, and that you care about him, a time will come when, having heard the music, he will be ready to ask about the reason for the hope that is in you. Then you must be prepared to share the words.

First determine how ready he is: what do you know of his pilgrimage? What has been his response to germinal ideas? Has he drawn close to you, trusting you? Ask some questions, such as, “Bill, where are you in your spiritual pilgrimage?” If he seems prepared, you might then say, “Sometime I’d like to share with you some principles for getting to know God.” Then you shut up and listen. If you get a negative response, stop your questioning and cultivate the relationship further. But if he says, “I’d like to talk them over with you sometime,” you can ask, “When would be a good time?”

If he backs off, you should back off, for you have gone further than his comfort zone will allow at that point. Listen for clues. When he is ready, get together to share the gospel. If he responds well, ask if there is any reason why he couldn’t receive Christ right then.

So we see that we must first cultivate (by establishing relationships), then plant seeds, then harvest. Or, to change the figure of speech, neighbors must first hear the music by becoming aware of the beauty of God forming in our lives. In time some will want to hear the words to that music.

If we keep in mind that evangelism is a process guided by the Holy Spirit, we are likely to find that God will use us to help our friends meet the Author of both the words and the music.