NEWS

He takes it on the chin from the press. Is religious freedom relative?

Not in 30 years of public ministry has Billy Graham been the center of as much controversy as he was during his six-day visit to the Soviet Union last month. Graham was invited to Moscow to address a Kremlin-approved peace conference (see accompanying story), to speak at a Russian Orthodox church service, and to preach a sermon in Moscow’s only Baptist church.

From a religious point of view, the visit had genuine significance. It brought Russian Orthodox and Evangelical Christian-Baptist leaders together on a spiritual basis, and both sides learned they had much in common. Because of the evangelist’s close contacts with Orthodox leaders, they “accept him as a real servant of Christ,” observed Alexei Bychkov, general secretary of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. This is highly significant in light of any future visit of Graham to the Soviet Union, he explained. Already, a number of Orthodox leaders have invited Graham to preach in their churches if he is able to return for an extended preaching tour. He touched spiritually responsive chords among them. (No official figures are available, but Orthodox strength is estimated in the tens of millions, with about 7,000 churches still open.)

As for the Baptists, Graham’s preaching visit on Sunday, May 9, was “a great event in the history of our church,” commented Bychkov. Many Christians were inspired to witness more boldly for Christ, he added.

Such developments are notable in light of the government’s published policies of the past in which increased zeal among believers and spread of the faith are frowned on.

For years, Soviet Baptist leaders kept bumping into Graham at Baptist World Alliance and other meetings, where they expressed hope he could some day come and preach in their homeland. (He had visited the Moscow Baptist Church in 1959, but his tourist visa restricted him from speaking in a public meeting.)

After more than a year of negotiation and preparation, that day finally arrived May 9, a glorious Russian spring day. Graham was originally scheduled to speak at the 6 P.M. Sunday service, but for crowd-control reasons, he was shifted at almost the last minute to a special service at 8 A.M., when there is relatively little public transportation available. Attendance was only by pass, and the normally full overflow rooms at the church were closed. (Graham’s visit was unannounced in Moscow, but the news was carried into the country by a Voice of America broadcast.)

In all, nearly 1,000 people, many of them standing, were already in place when the evangelist entered the building, the only Baptist church in the city of 8 million. Church sources said about one-third of the people, including the choir members, were from the church, one-third were from out of town or news reporters and visiting foreigners from the conference on nuclear disarmament, and one-third were outsiders, including a number of security personnel. Western news people reported that officials were nervous over the possibility of disruptions by dissidents.

As the two-hour service wore on, hundreds of additional worshipers arrived, but they were kept behind barriers a block away, where they broke into hymns. Many had traveled hundreds of miles to hear Graham. Among them were ten teen-agers who had come by train from Tula, 100 miles south of Moscow. A 16-year-old told reporters they had come to hear Graham because “God speaks through his mouth.”

Inside the church, Alexei Bychkov introduced the evangelist. He asked how many had read Graham’s book Peace With God, and nearly half the hands in the auditorium shot up. (Some books are brought in from outside the country; others are hand copied or duplicated by other means. Through such methods, Graham’s writings are fairly well known among the estimated four million Protestants in the Soviet Union.)

Graham preached for nearly an hour on the healing of the paralytic man in John 5, likening it to conversion. He asked those who wanted to recommit their lives to Christ or receive him as Savior to raise their hands. Scores responded, prompting ripples of praise throughout the congregation.

As the evangelist headed for the door, late for his appearance at the Orthodox Cathedral of the Epiphany, the congregation sang “God Be with You till We Meet Again,” waving handkerchiefs at him. Some wept.

Well over 1,000 persons, including a number of young people, were on hand at the cathedral for a colorful two-hour service of liturgy and music centering on the Eucharist. Shifts of priests clad in golden robes and colorful headdresses moved about the platform, and from the balconies three choirs sang antiphonally. Then came nearly an hour of sermons and greetings. Graham delivered a condensed version of his John 5 sermon. Whenever his Orthodox interpreter slacked off, hundreds at the rear of the church cried, “Louder! Louder!”

Clearly, to Graham and his retinue, the trip was a success. But reports from Western newsmen covering his visit were painting a much different picture. Their accounts were sharply critical and noted that Graham was trying especially hard to avoid embarrassing his Soviet hosts by not criticizing the nation’s oppressive religious restrictions. News stories in U.S. papers suggested Graham was keeping silent in order to win permission to return to Russia with a full-scale crusade.

If that wasn’t bad enough, according to the press reports, Graham seemed to be going out of his way to provide grist for the Soviet propaganda mill. He was said to have told reporters at one press conference that he had seen no religious persecution in the Soviet Union, thereby implying that it wasn’t a severe problem. He was reported to have suggested that the Soviet churches are freer than the Anglican church, because the latter is a state church headed by the monarchy, whereas Soviet churches are “free.”

He was reported to have preached in the Baptist church that believers should obey authorities, according to Romans 13, thereby implying that Christians should not kick against religious intolerance. He was taken to task for preaching in a Baptist church full of KGB agents and other officially approved ticket holders, while the crowd of genuine believers could not get in.

The press implied that Graham had done wrong by not protesting when a young woman in the Baptist church was led off by police for opening a small banner that read “We have more than 150 prisoners for the work of the gospel.”

Graham’s activities, based on the news accounts, caused confusion and disappointment among some conservative churchmen. Edmund Robb, a United Methodist who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, said Graham had been “manipulated to give legitimacy to a conference controlled by the Soviet government.” Lynn Buzzard of the Christian Legal Society described the reported statements as “tragic” or at best “incredibly naïve.” Buzzard has been to Moscow twice recently in efforts to free the Siberian Six. “There’s something wrong when in order to preach the gospel you turn your back on those who live the gospel,” Buzzard said. Mark Azbel, a Soviet dissident who appeared with Robb on David Brinkley’s ABC television program, charged that Graham had betrayed religious people in Russia.

There were also some indications, however, that the hot reaction was deliberately one-sided. Moral Majority spokesman Cal Thomas was phoned by NBC radio and asked for a comment on Graham’s statements. When Thomas told the reporter he would be glad to speak but would not be critical of Graham, he was not interviewed. Theologian Carl Henry was contacted by an NBC newsman in New York and told that he could be on national news if he would criticize Graham. Henry declined to do so, even though he was troubled by Graham’s participation in the peace conference. Charles Colson, canny about press reports from his days in the Nixon administration, gave Graham the benefit of the doubt. “I admire a guy who takes risks.… I don’t think the jury is in yet,” he said. Colson added that he doesn’t put much faith in “fragmented reports from secular reporters.”

When Graham was on the Brinkley show, he was interviewed live by satellite relay from England, where he had just arrived from the Soviet Union, and he was largely unaware of the reaction against him building in the West. He wasn’t told ahead of time that Robb, Azbel, and others would be on the show to ambush him, and he was taken aback at the stridency of the remarks—without time to prepare a defense. This interview was picked up widely by U.S. newspapers, and it fanned the flames.

Graham and the people who accompanied him to Moscow were surprised at the reaction, since European newspapers were generally friendly. Their reports centered on Graham’s peace conference speech (see page 20), in which Graham said, “We should urge all governments to respect the rights of religious believers as outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

The statement that caused Graham the greatest problem when filtered through the news media reports was his reference to the status of religious freedom in Russia. He made this statement at a press conference and was responding to a question from television reporter Bruce Bowers of WSOC-TV, Charlotte, North Carolina, who was in Moscow. Bowers asked, “Before you arrived, Metropolitan Gregorius [of India] said that this conference dispels the myth that there is no religious freedom in the Soviet Union. Have you reached any conclusion on that subject?”

Here is Graham’s response, based on a tape recording of his remarks:

“That [religious freedom] is a relative term, I think, because in the various countries I go to around the world—some 50 in all—there are various kinds of restrictions or various kinds of laws and formulas. Here in the Soviet Union, you have many religions. You have Muslims, Buddhists, various branches of denominations, I think some 40 denominations here in various parts of the country. The country is so huge that it would be impossible for me to come to Moscow and in six days make any personal evaluation.

“There are differences, of course, between religion as it’s practiced here and, let’s say, in the United States, but that doesn’t mean there is no religious freedom. Because, just from my own point of view, not one single person has ever suggested what I put in the address I gave to the congress or the sermons I preached here, and I took the liberty, and maybe sometimes the presumption, of presenting the gospel as I know it to everybody I was with. I didn’t want to leave one single person without having presented what I believe to be the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I have not had anyone say ‘no,’ or ‘don’t tell me,’ or ‘say this,’ or ‘say that.’ So I have experienced total liberty in what I wanted to say. So, from my personal experience, I have had liberty.”

Bowers then asked, “Are you saying that you agree in effect with Metropolitan Gregorius?”

Graham replied, “Not necessarily. I’m just telling you that I don’t know all about it. I’ve only been to Moscow and I’ve had all these meetings, and I haven’t had a chance [to see everything]. But Saturday night, I went to three Orthodox churches. They were jammed to capacity on a Saturday night. You’d never get that in Charlotte, North Carolina [laugh]. On Sunday morning the same was true of the churches I went to, and it seemed to me that the churches that are open, of which there are thousands, seem to have liberty of worship services.”

Graham was also chastized for saying that Russian churches are freer than the Church of England. Here is his full response: “Thousands of churches [in the Soviet Union] are open. Now they may have different relationships [with the state] than, say, they have in Canada or Great Britain. And in Great Britain you have a state church and in other countries you have state churches. Here the church is not a state church. It is a ‘free’ church in the sense that it is not directly headed, as the church in England is headed, by the queen.”

Upon his return to the United States, Graham held a press conference in New York City to defend his statements, and then he was interviewed by CHRISTIANITY TODAY editors. Commenting in the interview on the news stories implying that Graham believed there was more church freedom in the Soviet Union than in Britain, he said, “Never in a million years have I said that.” He said he was using the “free church” term in its ecclesiastical sense (as in, for example, the Evangelical Free Church denomination), not its political sense. “That got so out of proportion I couldn’t believe it,” Graham said. “Of course, today, in an unofficial way, the [Soviet Union] has a great deal to say about the church and, I’m sure, about certain leaders in the church.”

In his New York press conference, Graham was asked about the value of preaching at the Baptist church, since there were so many security agents present. Graham replied that he hoped there were plenty of KGB agents present: “Those are the kinds of people I’ve been trying to reach for a long time” with the salvation message.

In the interview, Graham flatly denied what was most widely attributed as his main motive—a determination to say nothing that would harm his chances for a full-scale crusade in the Soviet Union.

Graham said that was not the reason he refused to speak strongly in public about Soviet religious persecution. He said he was there to spread the gospel of Christ wherever he could. He said he knew he might be used for propaganda purposes, but he said, “My propaganda is greater than their propaganda.” Graham said he met more top Soviet officials then he ever thought he would get to meet, and he said many of them had never before met a Western churchman, let alone an evangelical. To every one, he said he gave a witness of his faith. To only two officials, he said, did he even mention the possibility of conducting a crusade, since he believed it would be out of place to press for it. He estimates his chances of returning as only fifty-fifty.

Regarding the Baptist church service in which the woman was led away for holding up the banner, Graham said he couldn’t read the sign, and he didn’t understand fully what happened when the reporters accosted him about it. In his New York interview, he said, “What she didn’t know (or the press either, apparently) was that I had the names and addresses [of the 150 Christian prisoners] with me, and their pictures, too, and I gave them to the proper person [in the Soviet bureaucracy].” He acknowledged that his list might have been different from hers, because his had only 147 names on it. Graham said that if he had “shouted and screamed” in public and made his trip a big media event, he would have been able to accomplish very little, and certainly would not have been able to see the people whom he did see. He said that experts on Soviet affairs told him this was a proper course to take.

In the interview, Graham also responded to the reports about his preaching on Romans 13 and saying that Soviet Christians should obey their government. He said he was not preaching on Romans, but on John 5 in which Jesus is accused of breaking Jewish law by healing on the Sabbath. The sermon, Graham said, contains a reference to Romans 13, and he said he has preached that same sermon about five times before, during his New England crusade. The Romans 13 passage is such a natural part of the sermon that he used it in Moscow, but he said he believes he did not apply the Romans passage to Soviet Christians. Had he suspected that anyone would apply the Romans reference to the plight of Soviet believers, he never would have used it, he stated.

In the interview, Graham expanded on his relationship to the press and the pressures of being a public figure:

“There is something I have to think about, and all of us do. It’s that the time is drawing closer to when I cannot engage in this type of schedule, and all the pressures of being a public figure [Graham is 63]. I was talking to a newsman about it. He was saying, ‘The Pope is never exposed to what you’re exposed to. You stand naked before the press in every city.’ He said there’s no other public religious figure who has to face this all the time.” Later Graham added, “I’m so different from the rest of them. I’m not sheltered by a big denomination.”

He also said in the interview, “I feel that I’m not intellectually, spiritually, or physically capable of carrying this [responsibility] out to perfection. I walk scared all the time that I’ll do something that will bring disrepute to the Lord. It’s been many years that I’ve been doing this, and when issues like this come, I just keep asking the Lord to just ‘keep me in your will,’ and I find myself praying almost full-time.”

Graham said that in spite of all the ruckus over his Moscow trip, he has a feeling of serenity about it: “I determined that if I did not preach the gospel, that God might remove his hand from me. Now I know that all of this that has come is from the Lord, because I have the greatest sense of peace that I was in the will of the Lord.… There might have been one or two little things I would have changed, like that verse of Scripture … but I believe the whole thing was of God. Now, I do not see all of that at this moment, but I’ll see it in six months, or a year later, or maybe never in this life. But I believe I went in the will of God, and I feel it more strongly now than when I left here.”

Although Graham was roundly criticized for saying there was more religious freedom in the Soviet Union than he thought, he is not the only one expressing similar views. A New York Times article written from Moscow during Graham’s trip noted that the Soviet press frequently mentions the increasing numbers of young Russians who are turning up in churches.

Roy Bell, a Canadian member of the American Baptist church, and a vice president of the Baptist World Alliance, also visited the Soviet Union within recent weeks. He reported seeing “a large measure of freedom in which many Christians operate,” and he said the freedom depends on the strength of the local government bureaucracy. He said that conversions to Christianity, as well as baptisms, are taking place, at least in the registered Baptist churches he visited in Moscow, and in Tashkent in Soviet central Asia. The registered churches are those that cooperate with the government’s strict laws limiting the practice of religion in the Soviet Union. It is the unregistered congregations, which do not recognize the government’s control over religion, that find themselves in trouble.

Graham’s serenity in feeling he had done and said in Russia what he felt led to do and say seemed to be matched at home by the public response that began surfacing after initial press reports subsided. As he resumed the New England crusade, which he interrupted to make the Soviet trip (CT, May 21, p. 28), the crowds were once again large and responsive, and the mail coming into his Minneapolis headquarters was running in his favor.

American Churchmen Rewrite Some Soviet Propaganda

The peace conference wasn’t so peaceful.

One of the roles the Soviet government has assigned churches in the USSR is the propagation of Soviet views of peace. So it is no surprise when Soviet religious leaders announce the convening of peace conferences like the recent “World Conference of Religious Workers for Saving the Sacred Gift of Life from Nuclear Catastrophe” in Moscow. But it is a surprise when things don’t go according to the script. The script, in fact, was rewritten at the Moscow conference, thanks to the efforts of a trio of strong-willed American denominational leaders. The Soviet press suddenly fell strangely silent.

Some American participants privately described the alterations as a major defeat for the Soviet propaganda mill, and there is some concern among them over what repercussions might be felt by the sponsoring agency, the Russian Orthodox church.

The conference’s nearly 600 participants had come from all over the world. Among them were about 30 Americans, including four executive heads of denominations: William P. Thompson, United Presbyterian Church; Avery Post, United Church of Christ; David Preus, American Lutheran Church; and Arie Brouwer, Reformed Church in America.

Organizers had asked councils of churches and other groups for recommendations, but final selection of participants was made in Moscow.

A multipart, heavily pro-Soviet statement, earmarked for release in the name of the conference, but drawn up in advance in Moscow, was redrafted with much greater balance. The revision effort was spearheaded by Brouwer and Preus, with Post working the point in the background, getting key leaders from East and West together to agree on a compromise arrangement.

The original statement had been lavish in its praise of Soviet peace moves and critical of the U.S. Under the revision, both Moscow and Washington were urged to dismantle nuclear weapons before it is too late. The paper warned that mankind is “near the brink of total annihilation.” It called on the two superpowers to freeze production of nuclear arms and start scrapping a large part of their existing arsenals.

With the exception of evangelist Billy Graham’s address, many of the early speeches of the conference were blatantly pro-Soviet and anti-American. When it came time for Preus to serve a stint as conference chairman, he launched a defensive strike, warning that “this conference is in danger of becoming a political forum heavily tilted against the West, or the country that I represent.” He cautioned: “If we make of this conference mainly a series of charges and countercharges against West and East, we will go home with no great summons to the nations to rise above enmity and nuclear confrontation.”

Preus went on to plead with subsequent speakers to speak “out of religious conviction and to honor the principle of evenhandedness. Do not send any delegate home to be asked why he or she did not respond in anger to the charges made against his or her country.” Unity, he said, was needed in order to speak effectively to all nations.

Brouwer picked up the appeal in a major speech to the conference, departing from his prepared text to acknowledge that while the “primary focus of the American churches is on the policies of our own government, we of course lament the participation in the arms race by the Soviet Union and other countries.” Self-criticism, he said, does not “mean that we consider the U.S. to be unilaterally responsible for the problems of the world.”

Members of the drafting commission reportedly met amid fierce infighting until 3:30 A.M. on the day the conference was to receive and vote on the proposal.

The outcome seemed to stun some delegates, and the Soviet media failed to report the compromise agreement.

Another dispute involved Wim Bartels, international secretary of the Dutch-based Interchurch Peace Council, who was not permitted to deliver a speech that spoke favorably of the Polish trade union Solidarity, the East German peace movement, and the Charter 77 human rights group in Czechoslovakia. He walked out of the meeting after he was denied the floor.

Participants at the next Moscow peace conference may be selected more carefully than this year’s batch.

Regardless of whether social conscience is just now arriving for most evangelicals, it is nothing new to the Mennonites.

The Mennonite Central Committee, founded in 1920, is the granddaddy of American relief and development agencies, evangelical or otherwise. But more important, the MCC holds a reputation for progressive enlightenment among specialists in the field. Differences between the MCC and others can often be traced to the Mennonites’ greater experience. The leaders seem less taken with endless talk, and the constituency is more informed and involved.

To Edgar Stoesz, MCC associate executive secretary for overseas, the terminological gulf fixed between “relief” and “development” is not nearly so useful as it appears to be for other R and D leaders.

As Stoesz says, “The MCC sent wheat to Russia in 1920, and then tractors, plows, and seed to the Ukraine in 1921. People today would call the wheat ‘relief’ and the equipment ‘development’. In both cases our people were doing what they thought would help most.”

Stoesz adds, “Our people came upon their involvement in these matters rather easily because in many of those early projects they were aiding friends and relatives of Mennonites who had emigrated to the U.S. and Canada.” They learned to resettle on this same basis in the twenties when they helped friends and relatives to relocate in places like Paraguay after they left the Soviet countries following the 1917 revolution.

In 1982, the MCC will operate on a budget of $10 million in funds and another $5 million in material aid. It is currently active in 44 countries.

In no element of relief work is the Mennonite performance more noteworthy than in fund raising. Largely this is because the constituents are self-starters. While it is true that a denomination has fund-raising advantages, the degree to which the flow of funds is spontaneous is still remarkable.

The Mennonite Relief Sales are an excellent example. Approximately 20 of these sales occur annually across North America, generating a total of around $2 million. The largest sale is in Goshen, Indiana. Proceeds there ran to $297,000 last year.

The Mennonite sales are best known for their quilts, crafted by Mennonite women, and sold at auction for as much as $1,000 apiece. Food, antiques, and livestock are also on the long sale list.

Each sale quickly becomes an annual event, but in the beginning “they simply happen,” according to MCC officials at the Akron, Pennsylvania, headquarters. Material Aid director John Hostetler says, “We’re in the habit of leaving the sales alone. We just go out and pick up the check.”

The sales, however, are no more important than a second fund-raising effort among MCC supporters: the Mennonite stores. There are 72 in the U.S. and Canada, each run by a part-time, paid manager. Other store workers are volunteers. The merchandise falls into two categories: resale items, such as clothes or tools, and goods produced by workers in the countries in which the MCC works (this creates a market and source of income for MCC development projects).

The people of the MCC-affiliated churches know the potential of such activity, and they know the money is needed around the world. As a result, they are willing to put in the time and work required to make these projects successful.

Such grassroots motivation and effort mean that the MCC’s donors escape a lot of the confrontation with that ubiquitous naked child others face so often.

J. Alan Youngren is a consultant to evangelical organizations in marketing and developing. A resident of Downers Grove, Illinois, he is coauthor with Edward Hales of Your Money: Their Ministry (Eerdmans, 1981).

Relief agencies strive to give aid that will generate self-sufficiency, but that is not the way donors spell relief.

The Browns and the Smiths received the same letter today. It sent one family into despair and the other into praise. Why?

Each family sponsors a child in a program of a large, evangelical relief and development organization. Each had been contributing regularly toward the support of a particular child in the Third World. Now, says the letter, the project is finished. Contributions from these two families and thousands of others like them have been applied within the communities of the two children. Conditions have improved significantly, and the children’s families have become economically self-sufficient.

The Browns rejoice at the dinner table this evening. They look forward to channeling their support into the life of another hurting child.

But Mrs. Smith seethes: “This is the worst thing that’s happened to me since Mother died.” Then, with some bitterness, she says, “There are better places to put our money.”

Why is there a difference? And where are the good old days of sponsoring children when “your kid was your kid” for good? In those days, a few U.S. families became so close to their sponsored children that they ended up sending them through college.

Although the organizations practicing relief and development prefer the attitude of the Browns, they would concede that even the Browns may not be aware of the vast changes in thought about the wise handling of “relief” today.

Let us take a look at the world of relief (and now development) generally, and the revolution it has undergone.

Skyrocketing Interest In Relief

Although the donor may not be well informed about the latest thinking on relief, he has been involved in one aspect of change: growth. The number of donors has increased dramatically over the past decade; they are also giving more. Where traditional foreign mission organizations often face flattened revenue curves, relief and development people have steeply rising incomes, aided by widespread secular news reports of desperate conditions.

Traditional organizations have always put part of their effort into giving “a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name.” It was not until World War II, however, that the first significantly large organization devoted itself primarily to such work: the War Relief Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals, (today called the World Relief Corporation). Its purpose was to aid World War II refugees.

Two organizations developed out of the Korean War, becoming the first truly parachurch groups in the relief field. The first was World Vision, begun in 1950 by Bob Pierce, and now the largest evangelical relief and development agency: two-thirds of its approximately $130 million income comes from the U.S. The second, Compassion, was begun in Korea two years later.

Direct and immediate aid to children victimized by that war was Pierce’s primary burden. He had the donor’s heart and knew how to reach him effectively. He urged “sponsorship” or support of individual children in a one-on-one relationship—an approach that led to a high level of emotional involvement. This approach has remained essentially unaltered by the passing years. Confronting the donor with the plight of a lone child is still the main method fund raisers use for all parachurch relief activity in the U.S., whether or not the appeal is to sponsor a child directly.

Disaster relief is another sphere of activity. World Concern was founded by Crista ministry of Seattle to aid such victims.

But regardless of roots or special ministries, organizations practicing relief and development have become part of a unified community. The Association of Evangelical Relief and Development Organizations (AERDO) and its philosophical sibling, the Consortium of Evangelical Relief and Development Organizations (CERDO), have fostered this. They have urged a pollination that has speeded up a revolution in thinking. AERDO provides information and coordination among all relief and development member agencies. CERDO establishes program and project standards, and the development of sources to provide money for projects.

Functionally, they describe their work today as “relief, rehabilitation and development.” How child sponsorship and refugee work fits into this remains a matter of individual discretion, but this is the language of their calling that binds the community together and reveals the outlook that has led to revolution.

Why Relief Specialists Changed Their Minds

In the short time since 1970, relief organizations have established a new science, recorded a history, and presented a literature. The science is called “development.” The work that was centered in relief in 1970 is now dedicated to development.

What does this mean? Development is the science of encouraging economic and social progress that is self-sustaining. The credo of development carefully defines its three key terms:

Relief brings to an end the suffering and other effects of a disaster or crisis.

Rehabilitation returns the community to the stable circumstances prevailing before the crisis (a term used both for the entire field and for the final stages of activity).

Development (a term used not only for the science but also for the final stage in the process) enables the community to better itself and attain a new self-sufficiency.

The development credo says that relief, rehabilitation, and development are a progression. Workers should always move from one to the next. This is because relief, if prolonged, makes the recipient dependent on the practitioner. A sustained relief effort leads easily to the loss of a good reputation in the community of development specialists.

But what about the donor? He probably knows little of such thinking, but that has not undercut his morale. In terms of supporting the work, today’s relief and development donor is increasingly enthusiastic. The number of donors is continually growing. So, too, are the organizations doing this work, as the chart shows.

1USA only 2Fiscal year ends June 30 3Predominantly medical goods.

Those who perceived in all this a new evangelical social conscience have probably not gotten it quite right because of the implication that money is now being diverted away from traditional missions work. We understand the growth more correctly as the result of heavy secular news coverage of the plight of large groups of people, first in Southeast Asia and now in Africa. Of the 15 or 20 million refugees in the world today, half are children, half are in Africa. The plea for support is always much more effective when the organization wants to help in a situation already documented by news reports.

Donors: Duped Or Self-Deceived?

The donor’s situation is this: while he is functioning well in his role, he simply is not getting what he is giving for. Because development (cultivating the ability of victims to become self-sufficient) is better for the recipients than merely continuing relief, what the donor is getting for his dollar is actually better than what he thinks he is getting. But should he not be told how things have changed?

Although as a group they are certainly not guilty of conspiring to hide the true state of affairs, the practitioners apparently believe the answer to this question is No! Or at least, not immediately. They see the donor as someone who likes the paternalistic and one-to-one elements of relief and relief-oriented child support. They think he is unlikely to be as enthusiastic about development-oriented work as he is about relief, thus reflecting the old mentality.

From there the practitioners reason that if the donor knows what the workers know, he would not give so handsomely. It is as simple as that—and I believe they are right in their analysis of the donor’s reaction.

But we need to go a step further. It is not so much that the donor lacks information as that he is unwilling to hear. He clearly prefers the old way; he is emotionally attached to it. Even the Browns looked for a new child to sponsor.

To deal with this state of affairs, many groups have tried to reorient the donor to a wiser development mentality. These groups span the entire relief and development community, not just among evangelicals, because the problem is community wide. Through the Biden-Pell Amendment, Congress last year set aside $500,000 in the U.S. Foreign Aid Bill so that USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) could finance “development education” through voluntary relief and development agencies.

Three years ago World Vision announced a new program called Life Sharing Partners. Much more a vehicle for communicating development thinking than a change in procedure, this program asked donors to take part in “adopting an entire community,” which is something being increasingly done as the dictates of development science take hold. But donors did not take to Life Sharing Partners, so it was changed.

In its literature, Food for the Hungry refers with growing frequency to “every-child sponsorship.” But all the agencies continue to furnish donors with the names of individual children, and provide two-way communication between each sponsor and child. This is the heart of the traditional experience donors continue to crave.

Especially in churches, World Vision uses a half-hour film, A Way of Caring. While it makes clear the problems of prolonged relief and the benefits of development, that is certainly not the film’s dominant emphasis.

The agency undergoing the most dramatic change—largely related to the development revolution—is MAP International (formerly Medical Assistance Programs). In the past it focused on providing large quantities of medicines and medical supplies, mostly donated, to developing areas of the world. But then the revolution in the science of development forced MAP into radical change. New (1979) president Larry Dixon’s commitment to change, however, includes a commitment to candor, facing the fact that, so far, relief sells and development doesn’t. Over the next few years MAP will become more an international health organization, assisting work already in place. It will be less and less an off-loader of dependency-producing goods.

Dixon further intends that in an even shorter time, MAP’s fund raising will sink or swim on the donor’s growing acceptance of development work as a better use of his money.

The Hick At The County Fair

Many of those observing the relation between donors and relief-and-development agencies find a second area of concern in the “naked children” syndrome. Though relief and development is an area of ministry known for extensive cooperation and little sense of competition among agencies, the fund raisers nevertheless seem locked in combat to find the most heart-rending photos and film footage of malnourished and diseased children trapped in wretched circumstances.

Whether the message is for child sponsorship, refugee work, or hunger relief (the three strongest current appeals), the naked child has become a commonplace in magazine ads, mail appeals, and television specials.

Many criticize the whole process as manipulation of the donor. Others counter that it only makes sense to rely on the appeal that works: it supports more work, and makes dollars spent on fund raising more productive. “If the pictures bother you,” note agency leaders, “you ought to be there in person once. Then you’d know what it really is to be made uncomfortable.”

Despite the force of this retort, the criticism remains. It is not the naked-child appeal itself that offends but its numbing repetition. First, it is pressed into service for the majority of needs—whether for food, child sponsorship, or a well in the child’s village. Also, child sponsorship is categorized as part of development. In that case the donor can easily be left in his mentality of paternalism and prolonged relief. After all, nothing brings the problem up, so nothing calls his attention to the profound changes that have taken place in the way his money is used. His attention is still riveted to that child, and he is really thinking of nothing more than direct forms of relief. So the Browns look for a new child to sponsor.

Because of these procedures, the agencies can on one hand exercise great care in honoring designations of funds (as they have long done), and on the other hand still feel free to use the money for not only individual relief but also for a wide range of development projects of great help to the village and, indirectly, to the starving children.

But the donor will not stand indefinitely like the proverbial hick at the county fair, playing the shell and pea game, handing over his money but never catching on. It is important that he should know now. It would also be better for everyone if the burden of telling him were on someone other than the practitioners.

This writer volunteers.

Formerly special counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, Charles W. Colson is now president of Prison Fellowship in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Born Again and Life Sentence (Chosen, 1975, 1979).

Vivid memories of what my life was like in the midst of the greatest political unheaval in American history have flooded me in recent weeks. The news media have pursued me for comments, reflections, and observations almost as doggedly as they did for fresh news in the days of the unfolding drama.

It is—dubious though commemorating a burglary might seem—the tenth anniversary of what began as a bungled act of political espionage and ended in the unprecedented resignation and disgrace of a U.S. president and his men. But Watergate is more than an event. Few today could recount what happened, when, and to whom. Even fewer could explain why. Yet the term, a permanent addition to the American lexicon, is now used to embrace all manner of political chicanery and high-level misdeeds.

Most reporters of late are looking for fresh tidbits, heretofore undisclosed secrets—like whether Mr. Nixon was really drunk in the evenings as Henry Kissinger said someone told him. John Erlichman’s recently published memoirs, so full of anger and bitterness that I could barely labor through them, have spawned a host of new questions.

The human bunglings and failures of the “Watergate cover-up” add credibility to the biblical account of the Resurrection.

The folks I feel sorriest for in this enterprise are the serious historians. How will they ever manage to sort out all that happened? Since truth is usually stranger than fiction, facts in such an interwoven, intriguing event will probably never be unearthed.

The more thoughtful reporters have wanted to explore the deeper meanings of the constitutional crisis and the fall of the Nixon presidency. What caused it?

That is a good question. Watergate was a historical imperative, the explosion of pent-up frustration and anger in a nation seething with unrest, divided over an ugly war on a distant continent, and a head-to-head confrontation between the executive and legislative branches of government here at home. Something had to give. Watergate was like lancing a boil. It provided a release to the growing pressure of “the imperial presidency,” as Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary described it so well.

Most reporters ask whether or not it could happen again. The naïvete of that question is betrayed by the events of the last decade—government crises of near-Watergate proportions in India, Israel, and West Germany, and right here at home. While the Watergate villains were languishing in prison, some of their successors in power were accepting the lavish favors of a Korean businessman; others were prescribing narcotics with suspicious regularity; still others were accepting bribes from FBI agents dressed as Arab sheiks. Very few reporters seem to have the slightest understanding of the most fundamental truth of Judeo-Christian history: human nature has not changed since the Garden of Eden. Man is a sinner who will go right on sinning unless restrained by grace.

Virtually every reporter has asked me to describe the single most significant, lasting lesson of Watergate. To that ultimate question I have wanted—but have not quite dared—to reply, “Well, of course, it proves that Jesus actually was resurrected from the grave.” Even the most sympathetic reporter would take down the answer, shake his head, and walk away convinced that Colson’s born-again experience was, as one cynical columnist wrote about 10 years ago, something akin to a nervous breakdown.

But as I reflect on the events as they unfolded, what appears on the surface to be an unlikely connection becomes a fundamental truth that my Christian brothers and sisters will understand.

It was a humid Saturday, June 17, 1972. The President was in Florida. I took an infrequent afternoon off to be with my family around our swimming pool in suburban McLean, Virginia. The tranquility of the afternoon was disturbed only by a call on my special White House phone from John Ehrlichman. He asked if I knew the whereabouts of one Howard Hunt, a minor functionary I had recommended almost a year earlier for some investigative work on government leaks. Contrary to the volumes that have been written, that was the first inkling I had of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. (I am convinced Nixon knew nothing beforehand, nor did Ehrlichman, and probably not Haldeman.)

Though we subsequently learned from tapes that the President did attempt in the days immediately thereafter to detour the FBI investigation (the famous “smoking gun” tape that brought down the final curtain), he and most of the rest of us saw the whole Watergate affair at first as a political brouhaha. That meant that under the usual rules of political combat, our opponents would try to make the most of it while we would make the least of it. Though some underlings at the political committee had been caught trying to bug the Democratic headquarters—which was technically burglary under D.C. law—it wasn’t really anything to get too excited about. It certainly had gone on before, and was, I recall remarking at the time, like trying to steal the other team’s signals out of their huddle.

Nothing more seemed at stake than surviving the political brick throwing through the November election. After that, the caper would be forgotten, someone would get fined, and whoever had ordered the break-in (we honestly did not know) would apologize and forfeit any chance for a plum position in the second term. That would be it.

It was not until January 1973 that I had any real concerns. A law partner skilled in criminal law began warning me that the White House itself could be drawn into what might be criminal activity. From reading the memoirs of the others, only John Dean acknowledges any apprehension before that time. He also says he shared his concerns with no one. You may wonder how so many lawyers—Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Colson, Krogh, Dean, Nixon, to mention but a few—could have been so oblivious to what later became so obvious.

Well, first, by definition, a conspiracy is the sum total of a lot of bits and pieces; the individuals involved often see only their own bits and pieces.

Second, and most important—though it is a remarkable commentary on the American judicial system—the only exposure to criminal law that 98 percent of all lawyers have is one course in law school and an occasional criminal case assigned by a court, which is most often quickly settled out of court by plea bargain. The closest most lawyers come to the high drama of courtroom confrontation is watching Perry Mason on late-night television. Incredible though it sounds, my first experience with the obstruction of justice statutes was when I was prosecuted—and sent to prison—under them.

No one, with the possible exception of John Dean, even began to notice that a criminal cover-up was under way until the early weeks of 1973. The first serious discussion of criminal implications did not take place until March 21, the fateful day that John Dean first warned Mr. Nixon of the “cancer on the Presidency.” Thereafter, as we know from the tapes, the conversation got thick and heavy—talk of perjury, stonewalling, obstruction of justice—the kind of stuff that makes grown men get sweaty palms. As a matter of legal interpretation, the cover-up conspiracy dated back to June, but for all practical purposes it was not really recognized as such by the major participants until the following March 21.

Exactly one week later, John Dean contacted a criminal lawyer for advice about his own complicity, retaining him, as Dean put it in his memoirs with refreshing candor, to save his own skin. On April 8, Dean and his lawyer began negotiations with the federal prosecutors, attempting to bargain his testimony for immunity from prosecution.

Within days, Jeb Magruder followed. In fact, for a while the prosecutors couldn’t handle the procession of people who wanted to see them. My lawyers advised the U.S. attorney that I would be available to testify, but the original prosecutors believed I was not directly involved and didn’t bother to put me before the grand jury.

Dean’s meeting with the prosecutors signaled, for all practical purposes, the end of the cover-up. Once the criminal investigation of the White House had begun, the die was cast; it was only a matter of time before Mr. Nixon’s presidency would be ended.

So, though it is one of the least likely understood facts about Watergate, the serious cover-up—the part everyone knew or should have known was criminal—lasted successfully only weeks, perhaps a month or two by the most generous interpretation.

With the Presidency of the United States at stake, a small band of hand-picked loyalists, numbering no more than 10, could not contain a lie. It was not that the pressure was so great. Though at that point there had been serious moral failures, perjury committed, and hush money paid, the risk was dreadful embarrassment, or at worst maybe prison. On the other side of the scales was the concern to keep in office a man for whom 61 percent of the American people had just voted—a man most of us believed in so passionately that we had sacrificed much in serving him. Yet, even with the fate of the most powerful man in the world involved, the instinct for self-preservation was so overwhelming that one by one the conspirators deserted their compatriots. With the world’s power at stake, a cover-up was successful only for a matter of weeks.

What does all this have to do with the Resurrection? Simply this:

Modern criticism of historic Christology boils down to three propositions. First, the disciples and scribes were simply mistaken. Second, the 11 disciples merely repeated and perpetuated myths that have been continued without question until modern times. Third, there was a “Passover plot”; the 11 disciples spirited the body of Christ out of the tomb, disposed of it neatly and forever, and then to their dying breath maintained a conspiritorial silence.

There is little chance of logically defending the first option. A man being raised from the dead is, after all, a rather mind-boggling event—not the kind of thing people are likely to be vague or indecisive about. According to the Scriptures, Jesus appeared to 500 others, then personally and dramatically confronted one of their chief persecutors. His disciples were so staggered by his reappearance that one even wanted to finger the wound in his side as tangible proof. A simple error in perception is belied by the very nature of the event, the dogmatic assertions of all witnesses and subsequent history.

But could it have been a myth? The possibility is unlikely. It assumes the disciples all knew their faith was mythology. Paul, who had an intimate association with the original disciples, shatters the mythology theory when he urges that if Jesus were not actually resurrected, Christianity is a fraud. Nothing in his writings remotely suggests a mythological perspective—and people do not allow themselves to be beheaded for myths. On that basis, the myth theory is logically untenable.

To thus assail the deity of Christ on the historicity of the Resurrection, one ultimately has to conclude—though no one likes to come right out and say it in so many words—that there was a conspiracy of silence perpetrated by 11, maybe up to 500, men. To subscribe to this argument, one must be ready to believe that each disciple was willing to be ostracized by friends and family, live day by day under fear of death, face time in jail and prison, to be penniless, hungry, and beaten within an inch of his life, then ultimately to die without ever once renouncing that Jesus was Lord and had risen from the dead.

That is why the Watergate experience is so instructive. If John Dean was so panic stricken—not by the prospect of being beaten or executed, but by a prison term—one can only speculate about the emotions of the 11 disciples. They were powerless, abandoned by their leader, homeless in a conquered land, and yet clinging to this unbelievable and enormously offensive story that their leader had risen from the dead.

The Watergate cover-up reveals, I think, the true nature of man. In no one’s memoirs is there a suggestion that anyone went to the prosecutor out of such noble motives as putting the Constitution above the President, or bringing offenders to justice, or out of moral indignation. Instead, there are the pathetic recitations of the frailty of even those political zealots who achieve the pinnacle of power—who, left to their own devices, save their own necks, even at the cost of someone else’s.

Considering that, is it really plausible that the “myth” of the diety of Christ and his resurrection could have survived the violent persecution of the apostles, the scrutiny of the early church councils, the attempted purge of the first-century believers? Is it not likely that just one of the apostles would have renounced Christ before being beheaded or stoned? Is it not likely that some “smoking gun” document might have been produced, uncovering a “Passover plot”? Surely someone, in the light of the controversy that was created (which would make Watergate publicity look like a minor news story), would have made a deal with the authorities. Or is it not likely that someone would have come forward to say that an apostle confided in him before his death that it was all a plot to deceive the world for some terrible warped purpose—even for the noble motive of enshrining Christ’s teachings?

No, the fact is that man in his normal state can be made to renounce his beliefs just as readily as Peter renounced Jesus before the resurrection. But as the same Peter discovered after the resurrection, there is a power beyond man that causes us to forsake all—which cannot be renounced because it is the power of the Creator God of heaven and earth who revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

Nothing less than a witness so awesomely powerful as the resurrected Christ appearing to the 11 apostles and Paul could cause those men to maintain to their dying whispers that Jesus is Lord. Take it from one who was inside the Watergate web looking out, and who saw firsthand how vulnerable a cover-up is: a “Passover plot” or the perpetration of mythology is not only implausible, it is impossible. Watergate’s greatest lesson should be its testimony of the frailty of man. The inefficacy of a bungled burglary cover-up is indirectly a powerful witness to Christ’s resurrection from the dead.

Charles W. Colson is president of Prison Fellowship, Washington, D.C. He was special counsel to former President Richard Nixon, and is the author of Born Again and Life Sentence (Chosen, 1975, 1979).

The First Amendment was intended to protect the church from the state, not to insulate the state from moral and religious values.

The question of application of Judeo-Christian ethics to public policy has generated serious discussion as well as some shrill and sadly misinformed rhetoric over recent months. Moral Majority has been the most readily available target. For some, it has been shocking to be confronted with large, organized groups of Christians who lobby for or against particular political positions.

There is, in a sense, good reason for this reaction: for nearly a century, large groups within the evangelical church have been virtually trapped in a type of pietism that often excluded public involvement. Why, then, in a society that has traditionally reveled in democratic action, are we not rejoicing that these people have finally come out of their cultural cloister? I personally believe the debate is healthy for our nation. I see the resurgence of a viewpoint that calls for strong foundations in ethics as a sign of hope in a culture that seems to have forgotten its roots.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted to keep the federal government out of the business of the church. At the same time, they expected the church and its members to have influence in the development of this nation’s policies. They did not write the concept of absolute separation of the church from the state into the Constitution. And while not all members of the Continental Congress or the men who wrote the Constitution were practicing Christians, they lived within a framework of Christian principles, and they revered Christianity as a necessary undergirding for social structure. It was thus that Benjamin Franklin, a reknowned religious skeptic of his time, could make the following comment during the Constitutional Convention of 1787:

“We have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our understanding. In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible to danger, we had daily prayers in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered … do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs the affairs of men.

“And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this.”

John Adams made the following comment:

“Statesmen may play and speculate liberty, but it is religion and morality alone upon which freedom can securely stand. A patriot must be a religious man.”

The very concept of our representative form of government—the checks and balances system and the doctrine of enumerated powers—was founded upon the Christian belief that man is fallible and prone to wrongdoing. Thus, in order to ensure that no one man or group could attain and misuse excessive power, the federal government was limited.

The Constitution is not, nor was it intended to be, a religious creed. Christian theism, however, so permeated the minds of those who wrote it that the principles within it are “indubitably Christian,” as the English historian and renowned skeptic, H. G. Wells, put it.

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It appears that it was not the intention of the framers to keep Christian influence out of the state. Rather, they intended to prohibit the federal government from setting up a national church.

Thomas Jefferson, who was no lover of the church, said in his second inaugural address: “Religion is independent of the powers of the General Government and religious exercises should be left as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of the church or state authorities.”

In his book American Constitutional History, Edward S. Corwin interpreted Jefferson’s statement this way: “In short, the principal importance of the amendment lay in the separation which it effected between the respective jurisdictions of state and nation regarding religion, rather than in its bearing on the question of separation of church and state.”

The purpose therefore of the First Amendment was to keep the federal government out of religion. It provides freedom for religion, not the modern interpretation of absolute freedom from religion—which I believe is logically impossible.

The founding fathers lived in a time when the intellectuals readily admitted that the Christian religion, with its roots deeply embedded in Judaism, served as the source for many aspects of eighteenth-century criminal law, tort liability, the role of voluntary agencies and charities, the concepts of just defense of nations, and the definitions of basic human dignity and human rights. When the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, many of the states presumed that members of the churches, with Christianity’s wealth of ethics and tradition of involvement in policy formation, would work intimately with both local and state governing bodies.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “America is still the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men’s souls; and nothing better demonstrates how useful and natural it is to man, since the country where it now has the widest sway is both enlightened and the freest.”

Commenting further on those who attack Christian influence in America, he said: “Unbelievers in Europe attack Christians more as political than as religious enemies; they hate the faith as the opinion of a party much more than as a mistaken belief, and they reject the clergy less because they are the representatives of God than because they are the friends of authority.”

In many ways, modern America has taken up the banner that de Tocqueville found not only inappropriate, but lacking in credibility. It has concluded that the church must be neutralized, and so Christianity that informs and influences the state has become a political threat to the independence of the state, which has put itself in the place of God.

“How dare they dictate their moral convictions to all Americans!” is the battle cry of those opposed to Moral Majority and similar groups. But if we do not base our legal and political decisions upon Christian morals, upon what morals then are they to be based?

Every man, whether he recognizes it or not, lives by a code of ethics in his personal life—a code that necessarily affects society in general. The belief in man’s adequacy to rule his own affairs (which is secular humanism in a nutshell) is a pervasive world view today, and it has vast influence on public policy formation in both the U.S. and abroad. The issue of authority is the ultimate question in all codes of ethics, whether personal or social. If the codes by which nations live are not drawn from transcendent truths, then they are created arbitrarily, and their basis is pure power. And where human power is the basis for solving all social problems, then consolidation and centralization of that power is the presumed means to the solution.

Some elite groups of people want to press the mold of their power philosophies upon the U.S. and the entire world. It is because much of the opposition to these philosophies has lacked a solid core of transcendent truth that they have grown so pervasively. Those elitists, those secular humanists, have created their own view of the world and reality. I believe they are misguided and therefore dangerous.

A summary of beliefs of the secular humanist religion is described in its published manifestos. Its religious/ethical beliefs are extensive: humanism denies and rejects God, theism, deism, faith, prayer, all divine purpose or providence, all religions that “place God above human needs,” the existence of life after death, “traditional religious morality,” “national sovereignty,” and a “profit-motivated society.”

Humanism proclaims its own set of self-serving, unproved dogmas as replacement for the tenets of traditional religion. It asserts that the universe is “self-existing and not created.” It says man is the product of evolution and that the “joy of living” and the “satisfactions of life” are the supreme goal of man. Ethics come from “human experience,” not from God.

Humanism recognizes and accepts abortion, euthanasia, suicide, and all varieties of sexual exploration and immoral lifestyles. It works for the establishment of a “secular society,” a “socialized economic order,” world government, military disarmament, and population control by government.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, those who support secular humanism are attempting to make it the religion of American government. The conflict between two philosophical beliefs surfaces in specific issues. Those of us who are in elective public life are being asked to take a stand. For example:

• Creation/evolution. Do we teach only one or both theories in public schools?

• Homosexual lifestyle/practice. Should the nation’s laws recognize and encourage a tolerance of it?

• Permissiveness. Should we discipline children in public school and, as a last resort, use corporal punishment?

• Prayer in public schools. Should a school district have the authority to permit an opening prayer?

• Pornography. Are there any circumstances where society can deal with the dehumanizing of sexuality and its downgrading to the level of animals?

• Capital punishment. Are there any circumstances where society can impose the death penalty?

• Deficit spending. Does the continued practice of deficits—money supply expansion, debasement of the currency—reach the point of theft prohibited by the seventh commandment?

• Abortion. When does life begin? And after it has begun, is there any point before birth at which taking it should be prohibited?

The Jewish-Christian Scriptures contain moral principles, usually referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic. Where Scripture speaks on the issues described, the use of political power and influence to give them life is not the promotion of a religion, I believe, but rather a recognition of the heritage that has permitted our civilization to reach this point. Our political systems have legislated laws against murder, adultery, theft, perjury, and for parental control of children. No one can seriously suggest that the fact that these laws exist in the political system means the establishment of a state religion. These are principles that are basic to Western civilization. The Scriptures, which are the source of these moral ethical principles, contain other principles that, some believe, help people in civil authority to resolve those issues now being discussed in the political forum.

The first three commandments deal with the relationship between God and man. For the civil state to legislate compliance with any of these three would be to cross the line established and prohibited by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But at the same time, to suggest that individuals in political authority may not use the other commandments that deal with man’s social relationships in order to orient the compass of the secular state is to subject the direction of our political system to whatever wind may come along—including secular humanism, itself a religion, which is the major contestant on the current scene.

In the final analysis, no man or woman, whether a private citizen or an elected official, can escape the choice God gives to every human: Do we follow God or man?

Congressman William E. Dannemeyer serves in the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s thirty-ninth district. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Southern California District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

After 43 years, my brother and sisters and I were completing a pilgrimage to our old home in China. I asked for permission to call on two well-known, elderly Christians. The pair had served a combined total of 37 years in hard labor camps on account of their Christian faith.

When I went to visit them, though, they were out. On my way back to our hotel, disappointed, I was complaining to the Lord. I felt I needed to see these two—to learn of the all-sufficiency of our God and how he had met their need.

Suddenly, from nowhere, came these words: “Look to the Rock whence ye were hewn.”

I had not consciously memorized this Scripture. I did not even know where it was found. But God used it to remind me I was not to look to people but to him. He meets each individual according to his or her particular need, and according to his graciousness. Furthermore, he might not meet my need in just the same way he had met theirs. But he would meet it.

When later I did meet this dear couple I found them to be full of gratitude to God for his goodness and his faithfulness. There was no bitterness: they were loving and happy.

And I was doubly blessed: first in the missing, and then in the meeting.

Sonnet on Agape

“You are my friend if you obey my word.”

I hear and halt my will’s reluctant feet.

Am I required to sacrifice absurd,

trick lambs like Abraham, I whine: to treat

a sinner like a saint; to wield a sword

in sight of pride; to my small pain resign

my heart; nor feed resentment’s jowls. “But Lord,”

I quote, “I cast no pearls before a swine.”

Reproachful eyes, a bit amused, glance down

in swift rebuke: “And are you loved because

you’re lovely? Nail-pierced hands have placed a crown

upon your head and bound your wounds with gauze.

Condemned! you laid on me your wretched fate.

Condemned! made friend! my love you demonstrate.”

BEVERLY FIELDS

After a long winter, it is bursting through the political frost in many vibrant hues

To help our readers gain a better understanding of the current situation in China, CT invited David Adeney, one of the country’s most experienced and knowledgeable China hands, to comment on both the house churches and the recently opened city churches. Adeney represents the Pray for China Fellowship in Berkeley, California, a ministry of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. He was a missionary to mainland China from 1934 to 1950.

How are the house churches rooted in the soil of China?

They are indigenous, unattached to outside organizations. They have maintained their faith during the days of trial with no help from Christians in the West. They cannot be accused of association with Western imperialism. At the same time they are eager to have fellowship in prayer with Christians outside of China.

How did Chinese believers learn to get along without things we think are essential to church growth?

House meetings in China have had to distinguish between essentials and nonessentials. The church had to exist without buildings, set times of worship, and a paid minister. Most of the organizations that we in the West associate with the church are missing. The church must be flexible, adapting to local needs. During the difficult days of the Cultural Revolution, Christians met in different homes each week. It was difficult for authorities to pinpoint who the leaders were. Christians tried to meet in homes with back doors through which people could slip out quietly. The owner had to be a person of good reputation, not under suspicion by the authorities. Even when there was no regular meeting, the Christian families constituted a part of the church of the Lord Jesus in China.

Do you see any benefits arising from long years of persecution?

A doctor wrote to me, “I do not speak about suffering of the church, but of the purifying of the church.” Most of the leaders who are trusted today experienced total rejection and humiliation during the Cultural Revolution, yet they do not express antagonism. They love their country and are serving their fellow men. Another doctor, who spent many years in prison and labor camp, told me that while he was working in the fields pulling out stones and thorns, the Lord said to him, “What you are doing is a picture of my work in the church. Just as you are preparing the ground for the harvest, so I am preparing the church for revival.” Now, in the area where he lives, there has been a spiritual harvest, and there are far more believers than before the revolution. One small church that my wife and I knew 40 years ago had 300 baptisms during 1981.

What do the house churches do for leadership?

They rely on lay leadership. Many pastors and evangelists have been imprisoned for longer or shorter periods. Churches still are not allowed to support full-time workers. Pastoral ministry has been carried on by church members who work during the day and give their time in the evenings to the work of the Lord. A young man works on the railway and in his spare time studies the Scriptures and prepares Bible study materials for 70 or 80 young people who meet in a home. These materials are later duplicated and sent out to groups in the countryside. In some places, pastors recently released from prison are meeting with young people and training them to go out and teach groups of new believers.

Leadership usually emerges from the church prayer meetings. Those who are deeply burdened for the need of the church meet regularly for prayer, and the Holy Spirit guides in the designation of shepherds of the flock. Appointed by members of the church, the leaders are not responsible to any outside organization. They are self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating.

Have Christian women filled leadership roles?

There has been a great development of women’s ministry, and much of the teaching has been done by devoted women. In the past, pastors’ wives carried on the work of their imprisoned husbands. Recently a young woman sold her blood in order to buy paper on which to print Bible study materials. At the time of her marriage she had made a pact with her fiancé that their wedding gifts of money would be used to buy literature needed for building up the church. In a group of four Christian women factory workers, two use their evenings to make clothing for sale in order to obtain money for the church. The other two are engaged in writing and personal evangelism.

How have the believers helped each other?

There is real sharing of material goods. One young man told me he had become a Christian through the witness of friends in his town. There was no church meeting, but he said that whenever he was in need of teaching and encouragement he would go to one of the Christian families and they would help him. These families tithed their income in order to minister to those in need. That kind of help was especially important for the families of Christians who had been arrested since their dependents were often left without adequate provision for their support.

I have heard wonderful examples of God raising up teachers from among the people. A young farmer was converted through reading a Bible he had found in the home of an old woman. Concerned about the ignorance of new Christians, he determined to prepare a Bible-teaching manual. So, although his manuscript was destroyed several times over a period of years, he finally produced a manual that was duplicated and sent out to about 10,000 people. Later this young man took a copy to an old pastor he knew who had just been released from prison. The pastor and others who examined the book were deeply impressed by the way in which the young man had been taught by the Spirit of God. They sent him back to continue his teaching ministry.

We hear much about a shortage of Bibles in China. Is there a hunger for God’s Word?

House churches manifest a deep hunger for the Scriptures. I first met leaders from the house churches at an open service in a city. Sitting immediately behind me were two brothers and a sister. One of them immediately asked if I had any Bibles and then said they had traveled for two days in search of Bibles. Since then I have heard of Christians traveling hundreds of miles, representing thousands of new believers who have sent them to try to obtain copies of the Word of Life. Handwritten copies of Scripture portions are widely circulated. One young man started a “copy a chapter of the Bible a day movement” and hid the manuscripts in the vaults of the government bank where he worked.

Today the Bible is not an illegal book in China. The government has allowed the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) to print about 200,000 New Testaments and full Bibles, but only a very few copies reach the rural areas where thousands are still without the Scriptures. Most of the Bibles used in the country districts come from outside China, or have been produced from handwritten stencils. Although individuals traveling to China may take in one or two copies for friends, the government is opposed to the importation of large quantities of Bibles.

With a lack of theological training over 30 years, are the housechurches susceptible to false teachers?

Because of the lack of instruction and Christian literature during the past 30 years, it is easy for Christians to be led astray by false teachers. There have been some tragic incidents, such as the drowning of a man who kept on immersing himself at the time of his baptism because he thought he had to see a dove descending on him. In another area, believers were told not to believe in anything except the four Gospels. The most urgent need is for biblical materials and pastor-teachers who can lead new believers into the knowledge of the truth.

How do Christians witness and evangelize?

The most basic form of evangelism is through personal friendships in which the gospel is shared with relatives and neighbors. The testimony of answered prayer, especially in healing the sick, has led many to faith in Christ. In one of the large labor camps, a demented woman, whom no doctor or psychiatrist had been able to help, was placed in the same room with a Christian sister. As a result of the Christian’s loving care and prayer, the woman was completely healed. The whole camp realized that a living God had acted.

In one area where there were 4,000 Christians before the revolution, the number has now increased to 90,000 with a thousand meeting places. Christians in that province gave three reasons for the rapid increase: the faithful witness of Christians in the midst of suffering, the power of God seen in the healing of the sick, and the influence of Christian radio broadcasts from outside.

What dangers and divisions do the house churches face?

Church leaders are aware of the danger of division in their midst. One who had just received some helpful literature wrote, “With the appearance of different cults, we know that the teaching of Jesus is certainly true. There are false prophets, wolves in sheep’s clothing. As servants of the Lord, we should be watchful and share [insights from that literature] with brothers and sisters to help them distinguish truth from error.” A long history of accusations and betrayals in the past has created an atmosphere of suspicion in some churches. Leaders are afraid that their fellowship may be infiltrated by false brethren.

Some indigenous groups still feel that they alone represent the true church and therefore cannot associate with others. Among them are the followers of Witness Lee (the “local church”). Other groups have placed so much emphasis on miracles and healing that they have failed to realize the importance of having a faith that is truly grounded in the knowledge of Christ as he is revealed in the Scriptures.

Divisions also arise because some believe they should join the local committee set up by the TSPM; others believe such an attachment would involve compromise. Those who join the TSPM do so because they believe they can disciple others within the church and maintain a strong evangelical witness in it. They point out that some of the present leaders, who in the past persecuted Christians, themselves suffered during the Cultural Revolution and are now using more evangelical language. Even those who identify with the liberal section of the church in the West are careful in China to keep liberal theology in the background.

Those who join the TSPM are wary that, if they remain outside the movement, they will be accused of being opposed to the government. Bishop K. H. Ting, chairman of both the TSPM and the China Christian Council, has made it clear that Christians must identify not only with the culture but also with the political philosophy of the country.

“Love country” is placed ahead of “love church.” That emphasis creates a dilemma for many Christians. For conscientious reasons, therefore, they may refuse to join the TSPM, yet they do love their country, and are frilly prepared to serve in their communities and follow the government in all secular affairs. But they do not believe that the church should be involved in political activities. Remembering past history, they fear that once again the church might be used for indoctrination classes and accusation meetings. They also believe that pastors should be chosen by church members on the basis of spiritual qualifications rather than appointed and supported by a committee responsible to the Religious Affairs Bureau of the government.

How are the recently opened city churches faring?

Everywhere the church buildings are packed with people, sometimes sitting on the stairs and in the courtyard, even standing outside in the street. Some churches have three services on Sunday, with at least a thousand present at each one. Good numbers are present at meetings for prayer and Bible study.

In one city I was told that the church buildings could not hold all the Christians. Pastors may visit sick members of their congregations, but are not allowed to speak at meetings outside the church except in a house church that is registered with the local TSPM committee.

Several different types of people attend the services. Large numbers of Christians from pre-Cultural Revolution days are delighted to be able to worship in public again. Many of those who have become Christians during the past few years are also among the worshipers. They may have belonged to a house meeting before the church building was opened. In one city several large house churches have been asked to close and send their members to the newly opened church. The leader of one of those house churches said, “You will find that almost all those in the choir were formerly members of my church.”

At almost any service there will be young people who are not yet Christians but are curious to find out more about Christianity. In Hangzhou, about 200 were baptized last year. Many of them were young.

What is the quality of the preaching?

The catechism being studied is completely orthodox. There are, of course, variations in emphasis, since the members of the pastoral teams come from many different backgrounds. In one city a pastor preached on the unity of the church, strongly criticizing house churches for not cooperating with the China Christian Council.

What liturgy is being used?

In Beijing (Peking) the services are liturgical and more formal than at other places. We attended a Communion service where the Chinese pastor wore a black gown, and the choir had Western-type robes. The order of service, with printed prayers and responses, was similar to a liturgical service in many Chinese churches in other parts of the world. Hymns in the Beijing church hymnal were translations of well-known English hymns.

There are no Sunday schools in the open churches. Christians in Beijing are told that children under 18 should not receive religious instructions. Young people who attend the church are carefully watched and sometimes their presence in the services is reported to their school or work unit.

What should Western Christians learn from the present situation in China?

Western Christians, who have never experienced the suffering and trials through which our Chinese brothers and sisters have passed, cannot easily understand the church situation in China. God in his sovereign grace has chosen Chinese Christians and not missionaries from the West to fulfill his purpose in bringing the gospel to the one billion people in that immense country.

Yet we are called to learn from Chinese believers and to enter into the fellowship of prayer with them. We must be sensitive to ways in which we may respond to their request for help through radio and Christian literature. Whether they worship in one of the old church buildings, or meet with hundreds of other villagers under a bamboo mat roof in the courtyard of a country commune, or pray together in a small house fellowship, they are one with us in the family of God.

They closely resemble the diffuse New Testament church in the way they have survived, even thrived, in the vacillating political climate.

One of the most exciting developments in twentieth-century church history is taking place today in China. According to reports from firsthand observers, there is a movement today that is seeing Christians increasing by the thousands in house churches.

Although it is impossible to obtain precise statistics for China as a whole, staff and friends of the China Church Research Center traveling in recent months in 11 provinces have provided reliable information about this church-growth explosion. The research center estimates that there are between 25 and 50 million believers in house churches.

Take Henan Province, for example, which has 111 counties. Fifteen of these have an average of 100,000 believers each. One county had only 4,000 believers in 1948; now it has 160,000. There are a thousand meeting points scattered over 20 communes. Henan is a good example since missionaries had made little progress there before the Communists took over.

Many Western observers think house churches are a recent phenomenon in China, brought about by government changes in 1976. Actually, the roots of the current revival go much deeper. The movement is in fact an extension of an independent church movement that began in 1911 and a similar indigenous movement that grew out of the persecutions of 1922–7. These churches were free of foreign missionary control. Even before the Communist revolution in 1949, hundreds of thousands of Chinese Christians were associated with several thousand house meetings.

Several indigenous church movements grew during the 1920s. The True Jesus Church was organized in 1917 and began to spread in various provinces. By 1949 this charismatic movement had district associations in 17 provinces, with 525 preachers, 1,260 churches and meeting places, and 125,000 members.

In 1926 the Jesus Family was organized in Shandong. This group held common property and was organized as “families.” The members worked together to produce their own food and sell their produce or goods. They also conducted migration evangelism by going to west China in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1949 there were 400 families in 200 countries.

Watchman Nee’s group, the “Little Flock,” was organized in Shanghai in 1928 and spread quickly to various parts of China as well as to Taiwan. Hong Kong, and overseas.

Practically all of these independent and indigenous churches began from small prayer meetings that developed into regular worship services. They started with fellowship, prayer, and Bible study. Next came evangelistic work, and then some type of organization.

Christians were allowed to carry on their religious activities during the first few years of Communist control, but the government began to regulate them through the development of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). Practically all foreign missionaries were driven out of China by 1952, and by 1954, all Christian institutions—such as hospitals and schools—were taken over by the government. Most pastors were removed from their congregations, and except for Sunday services in the TSPM churches, normal church activities ceased.

From 1954 to 1958, under the leadership of the TSPM, congregations renounced their former ties with foreign missions. Accusation meetings against Chinese believers and pastors were also conducted, including such men as Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee, who refused to join the TSPM. Many were arrested for being “unpatriotic,” and were not released until the period of 1978–80.

In the name of union, the TSPM successfully reduced the number of churches to a bare minimum. In 1958, reportedly only 15 out of 200 churches in Shanghai still functioned; only 4 of 66 churches still operated in Beijing (Peking). In most other cities, only one or two churches remained open for public worship.

One report describes how the many Christian groups in one city were combined:

“There shall be unified worship for the city of Taiyuan and a ministerial staff of three or four. All real and moveable church property and all church funds shall be turned over to the Three-Self Patriotic committee. The administration of the church shall be in the hands of the Three-Self Patriotic committee. The hymns used in worship shall be unified and a committee shall choose and edit the hymns for use. All books used in the interpretation of the Bible shall be examined and judged, and those containing poisonous thoughts shall be rejected. Only teaching favoring union and socialism shall be used. There shall be no more preaching about the Last Day or about the vanity of the world. Belief and unbelief shall not be made an issue in determining marriage question” (from documents of the TSPM).

By 1958, aside from a few official TSPM churches, Protestant Christianity had become a lay phenomenon without pastors, organizations, buildings, or outside financial assistance. Furthermore, Christians lived in a state of constant fear of being questioned, watched, and imprisoned. Many “rice Christians” renounced their faith, and weak Christians fell.

But the faithful upheld one another through mutual encouragement. They united in informal clandestine prayer and fellowship meetings. For independent and indigenous groups, this transition was very natural. For others, however, who were accustomed to institutional church life, it was a traumatic time. Still, they gradually adapted themselves to the new form of house Christianity. One believer wrote in a letter: “We have received an order that not more than five can meet together. Thank God, Jesus said, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst,’ and two plus three equals five; we will still continue our little prayer group.”

Later, even small group meetings were illegal. Many believers caught attending house church meetings were arrested and sent to labor camp. Often they were betrayed by other Christians.

It was also in 1958 that Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, which was marked by a radical communization of agriculture. Villages were organized into communes, production battalions, and brigades. Rural church activities, which until then had enjoyed more freedom than their urban counterparts, were seriously disrupted.

Production schedules no longer permitted Christians to meet for Sunday services, and believers had to organize their meeting times according to their work hours. Village life became more and more politicized under the control of cadres, many of whom were sent to the countryside from the cities. Also, pastors in the cities in 1958 were grouped together into production units, and they continued to do labor until their recent rehabilitation.

From 1960 to 1962 China underwent a period of confusion and difficulty. The Greap Leap Forward proved to be a fiasco, and famine and drought were widespread. Relations with Russia deteriorated, and the Soviets withdrew their contracts and technical personnel. Under such circumstances, the government’s apparatus of control weakened, and controlling religious activities became a low priority. As a consequence, Christians in both cities and countryside enjoyed a period of relative freedom. In south Fujian, Christians even held public tent revival meetings during traditional festivals. House churches experienced the first season of growth during 1960–2.

From 1963 to 1966, however, the government began to conduct a Socialist Education Movement to reshape the people’s thinking. A part of this movement was the Atheist Education Campaign, which tried to persuade people to renounce religion and superstitious beliefs. The campaign brought a tightening of control, suppressing religious activities not sanctioned by the government. Meanwhile, the government’s religious policy began to harden, forcing house church activities to remain quiet.

The Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, and the entire country was in chaos. Religion was fiercely attacked. Christians from house churches and the TSPM alike were severely persecuted. Stories of harsh abuse are just beginning to surface: Christians in Xiamen were forced to kneel before a pile of burning Bibles; a former Bible woman was beaten to death inside a church in Beijing; some of the faithful were forced at gunpoint to recant then-faith.

Practically all Bibles and Christian literature were either confiscated or destroyed. Anyone who had past connections with missionaries or mission schools, or with overseas relatives, was attacked.

Although the violence of the Cultural Revolution had died down by 1969, the years that followed under the Gang of Four were marked by continued suppression of believers, and this continued until late 1978. The situation improved following Sino-American normalization in January 1979.

During the 10 years of hardship and suffering, the house churches were firmly established and prepared for massive expansion after 1979. Some continued to meet secretly in spite of the great suffering of many Christians, As one example, a Christian medical student whose grandmother had hidden her Bible in a flowerpot found that his professor, with whom he was staying, was a Christian. Each week the family met behind closed doors and windows to study the Scripture and pray together.

The sustained pressure made Christians reexamine their faith. It deepened the faith of many, while others who were weak in faith succumbed to physical or psychological pressure. Some even denied Christ. But the spiritually victorious ones became even bolder and more convinced of their faith. They continued to meet clandestinely, and developed more effective means of doing evangelistic work among friends and relatives.

When the worst years of the Cultural Revolution were past, the little groups in homes began to grow. Believers got up at midnight to have Bible study and break bread together. Those meetings were rooted in families and only very close friends could join them. By about 1971, some restrictions had been relaxed and in one city quite large groups were able to meet without government objection. That proved temporary, however; authorities cracked down, arrested the leaders, and the Christians were scattered. Still, instead of giving up, they continued to meet in small groups in the countryside. From time to time those meetings were also interrupted and Christians sent to camps for reeducation through labor.

On one occasion, after a long and fervent meeting, cadres who had infiltrated the group stood up and confessed that they had been sent to make arrests. But what they had heard had so impressed them that they wanted to follow Christ themselves. Many stories have been told of the ways the Lord protected his people.

After Mao’s death in September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four the following month, China changed significantly. These were years of uncertainty. The antireligious policy of the Gang of Four was not yet fully removed, and the more lenient pre-1966 policy was still to be restored. Oppression and toleration both operated, depending on the whim of the local cadres. But the confusion provided breathing space, enabling house churches to grow and even to experience revivals.

After Deng Xiaoping regained control in December 1978, China started on the road toward a liberal religious policy. The old policy of “freedom of religious belief” was restored, thereby removing from believers their state of guilt. House churches began to surface, first in the southern coastal regions, and later in interior China.

In March 1979, the party rehabilitated its United Front Work Department and restored the Religious Affairs Bureau. Religious organizations, such as TSPM, were restored by the summer of 1979, and the reappearance of the TSPM marked a new stage for house church development. On the one hand, public TSPM churches were opened in the cities, and it was further evidence of the government’s toleration of religion in Chinese society. On the other hand, it meant restoration of the control apparatus.

The years 1976–8 thus may be called years of transition for house churches: from a clandestine existence to one of semipublic expansion. It was also a transition from the old policy of oppression to a one of toleration. Since then, both open churches and house churches have grown rapidly.

TSPM officials claim over 200 open churches. House churches meanwhile have grown to include some 25 to 50 million believers. If there are 25 persons at each meeting point, that means there must be one to two million house churches.

There are the three main types of house church constituents today. During 1955–66, the house congregations were made up of people who refused to join the TSPM or worship in TSPM churches. From 1966 to 1976, however, they included pastors and believers who had attended TSPM churches. In addition, a new generation of believers who grew up during the Cultural Revolution has now joined the house churches, particularly in rural areas.

After the restoration of the TSPM in mid-1979, tension began to develop between it and the house churches. Leaders of house churches did not know whether the TSPM would begin to control them as it had during the 1950s and 1960s, or whether the government’s policy of toleration would provide adequate protection. Aware of this tension, the TSPM was anxious to recruit all Christians to the cause of the Four Modernizations. In October 1980, the TSPM issued a resolution in which the legality of house churches was recognized. This assurance was well received by house churches and served as a stimulus to further expansion in 1980 and 1981.

Since last summer, however, house churches have been restricted by the United Front Work Department, the Religious Affairs Bureau, and the TSPM. There are reports that the house churches have been told not to make independent contacts with believers and Christian groups from outside China, or to accept Bibles from them. They have also been told not to propagate the gospel to anyone under 18, and not to conduct faith healing. Also, believers are told to attend TSPM churches where they exist, rather than house churches.

The control has been effective in some cities, but in most rural situations, especially in distant or mountainous regions, house churches still enjoy their local autonomy. The TSPM simply cannot catch up with the rapid growth of the house churches.

It appears that the expansion of the house church movement has just begun. As long as China maintains her open-door policy for the sake of the Four Modernizations, Christian contacts will also remain open and the policy of limited toleration will have to be maintained. The house church has become a people’s movement, and an indigenous phenomenon, and it is therefore unlikely that any attempts at administrative control will be effective. On the contrary, the house church movement is beginning to transform the entire nation.

Jonathan Chao is director of the Chinese Church Research Center in Hong Kong.