NEWS

They got 14 years in jail for smuggling drugs; they say they didn’t do it (sort of); Colson can’t help them.

Charles Colson is accustomed to dealing with hardened criminals through the organization he heads, Prison Fellowship (PF). Now, however, he has embarked on a concerted campaign to free two American women tourists in their sixties who have been sentenced to 14 years in an Australian prison on a drug-smuggling conviction. The women say they were framed. The case of the “drug grannies” is becoming something of a sensation in Australia.

Convicted in 1978, Vera Hays and Florice Bessire claim they were framed by a nephew who continues to elude worldwide police searches. Both women came to personal faith in Christ while behind bars, and say that a visit and correspondence from PF director Colson have helped sustain them.

Now, because of their deteriorating health, Prison Fellowship has stepped up its efforts to bring them home. “We are seeking their release on compassionate grounds, based on their physical condition,” PF’S David Eno explained. “We’re trying to encourage people to write, because if Christians don’t get organized, we’ll probably see one of them die in jail.”

Bessire, 65, and Hays, 63, have received wide press attention in Australia, where public opinion has remained divided. The Australian press has tagged them “drug grannies,” a term of mixed affection and contempt, though neither is actually a grandmother.

Their troubles began when Vera Hays’s nephew, Vernon Todd, offered the pair an expense-paid trip around the world. He invited them to fly to Stuttgart, West Germany, pick up a Land Rover, drive it to Bombay, India, and then have it shipped to Australia, where he then lived.

Bessire and Hays were thrilled at the prospect of round-the-world sightseeing, so they locked up their mobile home in LaPine, Oregon, and set out. On the last leg of their journey, they took delivery of the camper van in Australia and began touring the country, on their way to Todd’s home. But police discovered 1.9 tons of concealed hashish riding along with the two tourists.

Worth $1.5 million, it was the biggest single hashish haul the Australian police ever netted. The women concede that Todd told them the Land Rover held a small quantity of marijuana, but that he falsely assured them it was legal in Australia. They were arrested, tried, and sentenced to 14 years in prison; Todd fled the country.

Legally, their situation seems intractable because both women pleaded guilty at their trial after allegedly being assured of deportation to the United States. Instead, they landed in a maximum-security prison, where Hays recalled being “mixed in with criminals of all sorts.” After the U.S. State Department intervened 19 months later, they were transferred to a different facility where they get outdoor exercise and wear civilian clothes.

But their ironclad sentences make them ineligible for parole, and Australian law makes no provision for swapping prisoners with the United States, thus further efforts have proven futile.

Prison Fellowship does not address the question of whether the two women are guilty or innocent, Eno said, because “many big questions remain.” But PF’S overriding concern is the poor health of the aging “grannies.”

Hays is blind in one eye from an infection that followed a cataract operation in prison. She suffers from hypertension, headaches, and a painful deterioration of the spine. Her remaining eye also has developed cataracts. The older lady, Bessire, says her worst moments are “when I see Vera suffering.” Bessire herself contends with chronic arthritis and has had a series of minor infections since being imprisoned.

Despite their physical trials, the two say their new-found faith in God is a source of constant strength. “My communication lines with God were down, but since I’ve landed in this predicament I have realized what had happened to me,” Bessire recounted in an interview with Australian journalist Sandi Logan. “Prison is one place you really sit down and take stock of yourself, and realize your shortcomings, and there were many. God has forgiven me and even in here I can find peace and glory in our Lord.”

Hays said she was consumed with bitterness and hatred toward her nephew after being jailed. “I had to stop that. I had to turn to God and pray to God to stop my hating and to turn it to love and forgiveness.” Hays also prayed for a sign that the Lord was listening. She is sure it arrived in the form of a visit from Mrs. Charles Thornley, active with Gideons International in Australia. The Thornleys visited the two women every Sunday and eventually led Hays to Christ.

Since then, fellowship provided by PF/Australia volunteers and others have bolstered the pair’s spirits and enabled them to minister as well. Hays said, “We have helped a lot of young girls who we have taken under our wing and set on the right track.”

In a letter to PF International’s vice-president, Kathryn Grant, Bessire and Hays wrote, “The times have been very trying, but we know our Lord is omnipresent, and no matter where we are, his hand never leaves ours. Our faith is food for the soul, and we will never go hungry.”

Their ardent wish is to return home, but only the Australian government can grant a release. Colson has repeatedly appealed to authorities to “temper justice with mercy.”

BETH SPRING

Tough legislation starts to move as a few Christians lobby hard.

Drunk driving accidents claim 26,000 lives each year in the United States—the highest rate per citizen in the world. Until recently, that statistic has remained a neglected fact of life, raising only sporadic concern after a specific tragedy.

But over the past two years, clusters of citizens, often led by the families of crash victims, have demanded tougher laws and more enforcement muscle. In several states, citizens have had encouraging results. After long neglect, Washington is astir about the problem. Congressional legislation is beginning to move, and a presidential commission has been formed.

Perhaps surprisingly, the religious community has been slow to speak. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) is determined to reverse that stance. Without endorsing a return to Prohibition, NAE has addressed the issue for more than a year through its Washington Insight newsletters. The organization has been cited favorably by advocates of drunk-driving reform for its effectiveness in generating public awareness.

Evangelicals drink far less than the population at large, according to pollster George Gallup, who has found that two-thirds of them are teetotalers. He has said that “in no other area could the churches of America be of greater help than in dealing head-on with the crisis problems of drinking.”

NAE officials agree, and they have vigorously supported action on several fronts. In Congress, legislation introduced by Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) and Rep. Michael Barnes (D-Md.) would require states to enact a baseline set of laws against drunk driving. Hearings are expected in early spring.

Pell began paying attention when two of his staff members were killed by drank drivers in separate accidents. The bills (S-671 and HR-2488) would, he said, “create certainty that even a first offense will bring down real and unpleasant sanctions,” including:

• At least 10 days of community service for a first offense, and 10 days in jail for people convicted two or more times within five years.

• Restriction of licenses for first-time offenders to essential or work-related travel, and issuance of special, identifiable marker plates.

• A requirement for states to identify repeat offenders and require judges to determine if an offender needs treatment for alcoholism.

A spokesman for the senator praised NAE, saying Insight items have “generated a tremendous amount of mail.” NAE also lobbied hard for President Reagan’s new task force on drunk driving, which will publicize the problem and urge governors to make accident prevention a top priority.

Prevention at the state and local levels is the most important, yet it is often hamstrung due to politics. William Plymat, executive director of the American Council on Alcohol Problems, explains that “police are often reluctant to arrest drinking drivers because they feel the courts will not do justice to the cases. In most states, we have inadequate laws which are vague and indefinite. Often charges are reduced to reckless driving. Often bail is set at a low figure and the driver is back on the street, quickly drinking and driving again.”

Local citizen movements to turn the tide have produced two major organizations, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) and Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID). In Maryland, MADD directors Tom and Dorothy Sexton lost a teen-aged son who was returning from a fishing trip in July 1980. He was riding in a car that was smashed head-on by a drunk with over twice the amount of alcohol in his blood that is necessary for qualification as legal drunkenness. The Sexton boy was killed instantly. The drunk driver received a $200 fine and two years’ probation.

Tom Sexton, deeply angered by the court’s leniency, said, “It takes local involvement. Fear of arrest by local police has a tremendous impact—that’s what is needed.” Due to change in citizen attitudes, a Maryland judge recently meted out a sentence of five years in prison for a drunk driver charged with manslaughter.

The Sexton’s local MADD chapter has organized lobbying efforts on behalf of establishment of county task forces, alcohol awareness programs, and counseling help to bereaved families on their rights in criminal proceedings. Another important function is court monitoring to determine which judges are excessively lenient and to bring it to the attention of the news media.

Most people who are stopped or arrested for driving while drunk are hard drinkers, not social drinkers or wine-with-dinner advocates. Instead, fully 60 percent have severe alcohol dependencies, according to the National Association of Alcoholism Counselors.

In most states, a person is legally drunk when the blood alcohol concentration registers one-tenth of 1 percent. To reach that level, a 160-pound man would have to consume five drinks in the course of an hour. And the average person arrested is at twice the legal limit, says John Moulden, drunk-driving program specialist at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Richard Cizik, a researcher for NAE, hopes to see compassionate evangelical involvement, because drunk driving is “a needless form of violence,” he said. “It’s as unfortunate as national crime statistics, and it is preventable. Christians need to demonstrate the value of life based on clearly discernible principles.”

For starters, he suggests a church group could address the issue by educating teen-agers and supporting community efforts. Cizik also says Christians should not hesitate to participate in court monitoring, petitioning, and letter writing to hold enforcement officials accountable for their actions.

For guidance in establishing a local task force, a manual commissioned by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is available free of charge from Sandy Golden, 21 Quince Mill Court, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20760. It is entitled “How to Save Lives and Reduce Injuries: A Citizen Activist Guide to Effectively Fight Drunk Driving.” Information also can be obtained from Tom Sexton, 3113 Tinder Place, Bowie, Maryland 20715.

Tragedies Often Are The Sparks That Ignite Action Against Drunks

Christmas Eve 1981 is a night seared into pastor Loren Gisselbeck’s memory, and his throat tightens as he describes it. Just before a holiday program at his United Methodist church in rural Westminster, Maryland, Gisselbeck answered his phone and learned that two children and three grandchildren of his education director were dead following a car crash caused by an intoxicated driver.

The education director, Martha Proctor, had planned and organized the special Christmas Eve program, “Journey to Bethlehem.” But as it was performed that evening, she lay in a hospital with a skull fracture. Her daughter suffered multiple bone fractures and a lacerated liver. Two sons, 23 and 14, were dead, along with her baby grandchildren, ages 3, 2, and one month.

Gisselbeck hurried from his church to spend the evening with Martha’s husband, Richard, a former missionary. The pastor returned in time for his 11 P.M. service, and as he quietly broke the news, he heard “just one big gasp” from his congregation of 500.

“I knew we had to do something,” he said, so he called a community meeting. The mid-January gathering attracted more than 200 people, including state legislators, prosecutors, county commissioners, state police, and representatives from locally active groups, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). They established a local task force, patterned after successful efforts in two other Maryland counties and manned by a cross section of people who work with drunk drivers and their victims.

The duties of the task force are clear-cut:

• Document how the county handles drunk drivers from arrest through prosecution.

• Identify flaws in the system and determine how to correct them.

• Monitor courtroom decisions to see which judges are lenient and which are strict.

• Obtain wide news media coverage of drunk-driving offenses.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., a similar effort began two years ago after a head-on, drunk-driving crash paralyzed infant Laura Lamb for life. Now “we have some of the finest law enforcement in the nation and some of the toughest prosecution, with a 95 percent conviction rate,” says Sandy Golden. He is a volunteer activist who abandoned his television journalism career after the Lamb incident in order to devote full time to anti-drunk-driving work. He said the efforts have succeeded in spite of lax laws.

One response to citizen lobbying efforts in Montgomery County is a series of police roadblocks on weekends, instilling, according to Golden, “a general fear of arrest.” Though the strategy has been condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union, most drivers who are stopped at the roadblocks for a brief sobriety check profusely thank the policemen on duty. There is no discrimination; everyone is stopped. Consistent news coverage throughout the state and in neighboring Washington, D.C., also has heightened public awareness.

Elsewhere, similar tragedies, which seem to be a prerequisite of lasting reform, have also sparked citizen initiatives. California officials reported a 43 percent drop in traffic deaths over the New Year’s holiday this year because of a new package of laws requiring a 48-hour jail sentence except for minor first offenses. In those cases, a judge could substitute a fine, a 90-day license suspension, and require attendance at a drinking drivers’ school. In addition, a mandatory minimum fine of $375 for each conviction is in effect, with $20 of that placed in a victims’ indemnity fund.

Similar treatment awaits drunk drivers in Maine, following a tough set of laws passed last fall. In Minnesota, authorities may suspend a driver’s license without a hearing upon arrest for intoxication.

According to John Moulden of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, New York passed some of the most significant legislation last year. Mandated jail sentences of 7 to 180 days and fines ranging between $200 and $500 are in effect for proven repeat offenders, who cause a major portion of all alcohol-related traffic incidents. Moulden praised New York officials for recognizing that “it’s not just a one-shot crackdown on New Year’s Eve. What the issue needs is applied effort.”

The Proctor family tragedy in Maryland spurred Gisselbeck to apply his efforts against drunk driving, yet his attitude is compassionate, not vindictive.

“I have another member, a 19-year-old,” he explains, “going on trial for drunk-driving homicide. I called on him in the hospital after he killed a girl. From the standpoint of what this does to people, whether they are victims or perpetrators, we’ve got to be concerned.”

Black Evangelist Named To Civil Rights Commission

B. Sam Hart of Philadelphia, 50-year-old black evangelist and radio station owner, was named a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission last month by President Reagan.

Hart said he was first sounded out by White House staff members about accepting the chairmanship of the five-member commission to replace 76-year-old Arthur S. Flemming, a liberal Republican and vigorous civil rights advocate, who was fired by Reagan in November. But Hart explained the long hours required by the job “would have taken me away from my ministry.” He explained, “I serve the Lord first, my country second.”

The president has since nominated for the commission chairmanship Clarence M. Pendleton, 51, black conservative Republican from San Diego, who has opposed busing to promote school integration, expressed skepticism about the value of affirmative action, and has taken the stand that he feels free enterprise is the best cure for economic hardship among blacks.

It is widely known in government circles that administration officials have become annoyed by the commission’s advocacy of a strong federal role in school desegregation, affirmative action to open more jobs to minorities and women, and denials of tax exemption to schools that allegedly discrimate against blacks.

The Reagan administration has been reversing earlier government positions in all these areas and evoked criticism from the commission, which advises the President and Congress on civil rights policy and monitors the enforcement of civil rights laws.

Hart’s appointment drew fire from liberal black activists, who complained that he had never been involved in the civil rights movement. The opposition was so intense that both senators from Pennsylvania, Republicans John Heinz and Arlen Specter, asked that ratification procedures be held up.

Hart was born in Harlem in 1931 but grew up in Jamaica, where his father, Arthur, served as a Plymouth Brethren missionary. Settling in Philadelphia, Sam taught retarded children in the public school system before resigning in 1968 to devote himself full-time to the gospel ministry.

In 1977 Hart was able to obtain a low interest loan of $176,000 through the Pennsylvania Minority Business Development Authority to build WYIS, an AM radio station in suburban Phoenixville. WYIS broadcasts black gospel music, Bible instruction, and call-in talk shows. Hart describes his widely syndicated “Grand Old Gospel Hour” as “the largest black-produced evangelistic program in the world.” The sponsoring organization for his multifaceted ministry also has started 12 churches on the East Coast, 5 in the Philadelphia area.

NEWS

They are smart, and they work hard to be accepted, but they clearly teach heresy.

Everybody has seen a Moonie. They are those strange-looking, apparently mindless people selling flowers at airports. They are led by a mysterious Korean who has probably brainwashed them. They are bizarre and alien—not at all like “normal people.”

At least that is the idea. But the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church has now been in America for 23 years, the first missionary having arrived in 1959. “Moonie” became a household term in the early seventies when a network TV news team visited a Unification Church commune and found alarming things happening to the sons and daughters of Americans.

In what could be called a legitimacy blitzkrieg, the Moonies are launching a multi-pronged, sophisticated campaign to become accepted in America. Biblical Christianity, already arrayed against dozens of cults and competing philosophies, faces a newly formidable foe. The Moonies are vying for their place in the sun.

Many are no longer (if they ever were) distant-eyed automatons, robbed of individual personality or intelligence. Instead, Moonies include bright, amiable men and women who, for those who want only to deal with them simplistically, are disconcertingly “normal.”

Special Report

Mose Durst, president of the Unification Church in America, dismisses charges of brainwashing and profiteering. He admits the Unification Church has done “stupid” things. But that, he maintains, was due to the youth of the movement and Moon’s desire to spread his message rapidly. Durst has a pervasive sense of humor, and he observes that Moonies are becoming more established in society. “We used to sell flowers; now we’re the proprietors of flower shops. We used to solicit at airports; now we own the planes,” he says.

But that is an exaggeration. Some members own businesses, tithing up to half their income. None of the businesses are nationally known, Durst says. Ex-Moon Incorporated, a body of disenchanted former Moonies, lists 69 businesses owned by Moonies in 13 states. These include jewelry stores, health food stores, and travel agencies. A church-related company in Korea is the world’s largest exporter of ginseng tea.

The cult, says Durst, hopes more Moonies will settle into the middle-class establishment so they can get off the streets. Street soliciting is “not the way to win hearts,” he admits. “It’s a bad image, not a practical way of making friends.” The Unificationists hope to end all such soliciting within two or three years.

Moon’s church no longer shuns the news media. “We used to ignore it or be sarcastic,” Durst says. Now they ignore what they view as unfair reporting, and welcome journalists. The Moonies do not want to be outcasts any longer.

In many cases, their moves for legitimacy are above-board and overt, and apparently flow naturally from Moon’s ideology. In other cases, they use subtlety. Durst claims the organization wants to identify itself openly. Fund raisers, for example, are supposed to wear plastic cards identifying them as members of the Unification Church. Those who do not are disobedient to church orders “Would that we had as much control over people as the media think we do,” Durst comments sardonically.

The most-publicized legitimation tactic is probably the Moonie professional conferences. Most are organized under the auspices of the church’s New Ecumenical Research Association (New ERA). The Moonies have convened with evangelicals, scientists, lawyers, and journalists.

Moon’s theology foresees a day when science and religion will be unified, and so there have been 10 annual conferences on the “unity of the sciences.” Scientists from such institutions as the Sorbonne, Oxford, Southern Methodist University, Harvard, and Yale have attended the conferences. The conferences are often held in such exotic locations as the Bahamas, and participants’ transportation is paid, Durst says. Altogether, the Moonies spend $3 to $4 million yearly on such gatherings.

The conference programs forthrightly list Sun Myung Moon as a member of the organizing board and note that participation denotes “neither acceptance nor endorsement of the tenets and activities of the Unification Church.”

The Moonies have established a charitable agency, Project Volunteer, which recently distributed 87,000 pounds of government surplus cheese to needy people. Their publishing house, Rose of Sharon Press, now boasts 24 circulating titles. One, The Social Impact of New Religious Movements, is used in college sociology courses to present a sympathetic view of cult development (what the Moonies prefer to call “new religions”).

A Moonie film production company spent a whopping $46 million on the movie Inchon, starring Laurence Olivier, Jacqueline Bisset, and Ben Gazzara. (By comparison, Hollywood’s hottest film last summer—Raiders of the Lost Ark—cost $20 million.) The movie recounts Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Korean story. It premiered in Washington, D.C., last May, but not to rave reviews. One film critic rated it a negative 13 “on a scale of 1 to 10.” The Moonies are negotiating to show the film throughout America.

The Unification Church helps publish the News World Daily News, a New York newspaper with 70,000 circulation, and more than 10 other newsletters or magazines. It has about 15 politically involved groups, from the Communist Research Group to World Freedom Institute. The church sponsors (or helps sponsor) a track team, a ballet company, a theatrical group, and 19 other cultural or social organizations.

The Moonies’ primary college campus recruiting force is the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP). It is expanding with chapters at Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Chicago. (CARP-sponsored rallies support Ronald Reagan’s stance on El Salvador.) There is also a high school recruiting arm, known as the High School Association for the Research of Principles. Six rock bands seek to attract converts, touring under names like the Blue Tuna Band and ironically, Front Group.

In upstate New York, near Barrytown, the Moonies have now solidly established the Unification Theological Seminary. About 150 students attend classes presented by Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and even Greek Orthodox clergymen. Professing evangelical Richard Quebedeaux has had his evangelical commitment called into question over his activities with the Moonies. He is listed among faculty in the seminary’s 1980–81 catalog.

Most students are in their early thirties, and they are open to a variety of theological influences. Four took a course last summer from evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry at New College (Berkeley, California). The books of Teilhard de Chardin are popular on campus, as are Quebedeaux’s and those of the controversial Catholic, Hans Küng. The comfortable seminary library now houses 25,000 volumes and regularly receives about 400 periodicals.

Oddly, only 1 of the 15 teachers at the seminary is a Unificationist. She is Young Oon Kim, a disciple of Moon for 27 years, and the original Moonie missionary to America. Kim has a Master of Theology degree from Toronto University, although her doctorate is in education. Her book, Unification Theology, “rephrases” Moon’s Divine Principle in “theological terms,” Kim says. (Moon has a degree in electronic engineering but no formal training in theology. When asked what it is like, as a person trained in theology, to study the theology of an untrained theologian, one student shot back, “It’s like reading Acts.”)

Kim’s book, coded the “red book” by students because of the cover’s color, indicates her wide reading. Any one page may include footnotes from Barth, Aquinas, or a church father. The Moonie theology and ideology make its adherents impossible to pigeonhole. They accept a literal interpretation of the creation story, insisting on the historical existence of Adam and Eve. But they reject the inerrancy of the Bible as a whole and, says Kim, consider fundamentalist spirituality “shallow.” Evangelicals, Kim believes, should “deliberately learn from liberal theology and bring fundamentalist spiritual fervor into liberal camps. Bring about the reconciliation of these two great camps so you can be the great force to fight evil.”

The Moonies, says Kim, acknowledge the supernatural. Satan is real. Some Moonies speak in tongues, experience ecstatic visions, and hear voices. It is not unusual to witness visible spirits, Kim says, or to notice an odor of perfume when a good spirit is near. Despite the thoroughgoing belief in the supernatural, Moonies are also friendly to generally liberal process theology. Compared to orthodox Christianity, Unification theology is clearly heretical. As Kim notes in her book, Moonies doubt the “total sufficiency of Jesus’ atoning death on the cross.” In essence, Christ saved mankind spirtually, but it remains in need of physical redemption by the marriage and family-bearing of an ideal man and woman. The man is to be from Korea. Although it is not an explicitly stated doctrine, many Moonies believe the new messiah is Sun Myung Moon.

It is significant that the controlling theme of Moon’s Divine Principle is not derived from the Bible, but from the Taoist Book of Changes. Moon sees reality as a series of polarities: positive and negative, man and woman, in and out, and so on. Because of this, the savior must be matched with a woman—salvation, too, must follow the theme of polarities. As James Sire puts it in his Scripture Twisting (IVP, 1980), “the Bible, despite constant references to it, is really tangential to Divine Principle. All the intellectual framework comes from other sources—Eastern thought, modern science, and Moon’s own fertile imagination.”

The Moonies’ high esteem of marriage grants them more ground for legitimacy in American society. Although Moral Majority constituents would disagree with the Moonies on much, the Unificationists’ high view of the family, staunch anticommunism, and strong pro-Americanism might appeal to Jerry Falwell and friends. Such points may make for bridges from the Moonies to surprising places on the American landscape.

Moonie seminarians are quite able to articulate their beliefs and will obviously be in the vanguard of the Unification Church’s efforts to become accepted in the next generation. About 40 Unificationists are now working for their doctorates at Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and other divinity schools. In many cases, the Unification Church pays their tuition. The first crop of Moonies will graduate from these seminaries within two years, and can be expected to provide an increasingly refined apologetic for Unification theology.

In spite of all that, however, the Moonies may only be dog paddling to stay afloat, and not swimming forward. The huge amount of money and energy the Unification Church expends does not appear to attract a significant number of new members. After about 20 years, there are 30,000 Moonies in America, by their own estimate. That’s many more than the 2,501 members Jehovah’s Witnesses had drawn after 20 years of existence, but only half of the 60,000 who followed Mormonism after its first 20 years. In addition, observers believe there may be only three to four thousand committed Moonies, and that there may be as many ex-Moonies (25,000) as present members of the organization.

Hard work has never proved a barrier to the followers of Sun Myung Moon. They have invested stupendous amounts of time and labor to gain (and keep) one recruit. In the process, however, they have extended their influence far beyond their own numbers. As The American Baptist for January put it, the Moonies seem to have “put down sufficient rootage in the pluralistic garden of American religious life to be a serious contender for a permanent place.” That permanent place is not likely to be at the airport selling carnations.

This special report was written by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S assistant news editor, Rodney Clapp, who spoke with cult experts, and visited Moonie headquarters in New York City, and their seminary in Barrytown, New York.

A Plea For More Deprogramming

Distraught parents may already think members of cults suffer from mental illness—but do they suffer from a new kind of mental illness never known before?

That is the conclusion of two researchers writing in the January issue of Science Digest. The researchers, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, call the “new” emotional disturbance “information disease.”

The Digest story ends with a strong plea for stepped up “deprogramming” of members of offbeat religious groups.

Conway and Siegelman contended that cults depend on the use and abuse of deceptive and distorted language, artful suggestion, emotional experience, and physical exhaustion and isolation to enslave members intellectually.

The researchers mailed 1600 surveys to former members of cults and received 400 completed surveys. (They deleted surveys of persons with emotional problems before their cult involvement.) Those surveys showed high percentages of the former cultists suffering from nightmares, amnesia, hallucinations, violent outbursts, and suicidal tendencies. More than 52 percent of former members reported the alarming experience of “floating” in and out of altered states of consciousness.

Conway and Siegelman discovered that it took former Scientologists the longest average time (25 months) to recover from negative effects. Some ex-Scientologists are said never to recover. “The only thing I got out of this scam was deep suicidal depression coinciding with the fear of death within five years after separation,” one former member wrote. “We were told that 90 percent of all ‘refund cases’ eventually commit suicide.”

The researchers also contended that the amount of time spent in a cult apparently corresponds with the severity of emotional damage. But most of the damage appears to occur within the first six months, they said. They concluded that Scientology and Hare Krishna inflict the most harm on members. Those two groups and the Unification Church were even in reports of physical deprivation.

Conway and Siegelman (the authors of a 1978 book on cultic conversion, Snapping) concluded their article by pleading for acceptance of deprogramming. They called it a “lifesaving intervention.” Deprogrammed cultists are said to recover faster than former members who were not deprogrammed.

Deprogramming is not finding much support in the conventional religious community. The National Council of Churches has criticized the practice. Lynn Buzzard, executive director of the Christian Legal Society, notes that “anticult bills” (once proposed in nine states) “would legalize deprogramming on a very wide basis. We need to remember that any machinery set up to deal with cults can be used someday against ourselves. After all, Christians were the cult of the first century.”

Deprogrammers, called “faith-breakers” by cult members, have concentrated not only on cultic groups, but have also abducted Roman Catholics and Baptists. Ted Patrick, the best-known deprogrammer, was indicted in Ohio last October on charges of abduction, assault, and sexual misconduct. He was attempting to deprogram an alleged lesbian. Patrick was paid earlier to deprogram a 35-year-old woman from her liberal politics.

I have been confronted during 15 years of ministry in California, Europe, and New England with many evangelicals who either have come out of cults or are attracted to a cult. In all of my conversations with such people, the central issue has never focused on cultic doctrine. Usually, doctrine was an after-the-fact issue. What, then, makes our people in the evangelical community vulnerable to cults?

A close examination of every major cult today, with the exception of Eastern cults, reveals that many began in an evangelical church or with a leader from an evangelical background. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (Moonies), was raised in a missionary Presbyterian home. Jim Jones, founder of the People’s Temple, accepted Christ in a Nazarene church and was pastor of an interdenominational charismatic church and a Disciples of Christ church. Moses David, founder of the Children of God, came out of a Christian and Missionary Alliance background. Victor Paul Wierwille, founder of The Way, was an evangelical, and a Reformed pastor. Many of the older, more established cults had evangelical roots, including Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

What is common to these churches and church leaders who have been led to cultism?

First, they all started by describing themselves as in opposition to their local church or denomination, or to the church at large. They had discovered the ideal church. The foundation was always begun with an identity by opposition.

Second, in these systems the pastor or leader was placed in a position beyond confrontation, coupled with a tight discipleship or shepherding approach to instruction.

Third, these groups placed a high emphasis on group sharing, testimonies, spirituality, devotions, and in some cases, Bible study.

Fourth, in these groups the leader had gained some new spiritual insight emphasizing the last days, healing, community, or spirituality.

Fifth, these groups placed a high value on community and caring.

Finally, all such groups slowly developed their own subcultural spiritual language.

Many evangelicals who are drawn to cults are not drawn because of beliefs or doctrine but because of similarities to Christianity that we value as marks of spirituality. The members of the People’s Temple never expected to end up in Jonestown, as Mel White so clearly illustrates in his movie Deceived. It is easy for us as churches and as individuals to write off these groups and try to remove by remote control our responsibility to face our own vulnerability to cultic deception. If you think you or your church are not vulnerable to these dynamics, you are the most vulnerable. In all my conversations with former cult members, and with those presently struggling with cultic leanings, I have found five similarities between cults and evangelical churches.

Defining Spirituality

We evangelicals place a high emphasis on our experience of Christ. So do the cults. We have a tendency to witness to our conversion rather than of Christ. We often view our conversion experience as the gospel; it is not. The gospel is that Jesus Christ entered human history, died, and rose from the dead. If you believe in him as Savior, you stand before God totally in the clear.

Our overemphasis on subjective experience has some of its roots in the reactions to rationalism, naturalism, and liberalism that infiltrated the Protestant church during the past century. Lacking an apologetic base, gospel verification soon became a matter of subjectivity. Often religious telecasts, Christian magazines, and Christian biographies confuse the gospel with a person’s experience of the gospel. As a consequence, our criteria for determining spirituality are often confused, subjected to the criteria of personal experience.

Recently we had a guest speaker on our campus whose content was profound, biblical, and challenging; but his delivery was slow, deliberate, and presented in a low-key voice. The students’ biggest complaint was that the speaker was not spiritual.

Several weeks later we had a guest speaker who was a master communicator. His content, however, contained little Scripture, and much of the message put down evangelicals, the middle class, suburban life, and Western culture. Little in the sermon was instructive in enabling and equipping the believers for service, ministry, and growth, or in facing sin and forgiveness. The sermon was punctuated with emotional, moving stories. At the end, the community gave a standing ovation.

Afterward, I asked the same students who had found the first speaker “unspiritual” what they thought of the second. Their overwhelming response was that the second man was very spiritual. Not one of them could remember the content, but they felt he must have been a man of God. “I felt God’s presence and I was challenged to commitment.” Such a reaction to a moving speaker is just one example of the dynamics prevailing in many of our churches. And we wonder why our people foolishly follow a pied piper to never-never land. The cults offer charismatic leaders who will move you spiritually—to commitment and often to tears.

All of this is complicated by the fact that we often define spirituality on the basis of devotions, quiet time, prayer, evangelism, and Bible study rather than holistically, as Scripture does. Scripture begins with Creation and climaxes with Christ redeeming all of life. Christians live total lives obediently before him—in families, jobs, mind development, prayer, evangelism, and relationships.

Evangelicals are easily manipulated by anything that hints at spirituality. There is a popular prefacing phrase that goes, “The Lord led me.” At first this sounds very spiritual. However, if you examine Scripture, you will find it is seldom used, except occasionally by false prophets or for deception. For example, Joshua was deceived by this type of spiritualizing (Josh. 9:8–9). Jacob deceived Isaac (Gen. 27:20) by using it. God does lead us, but these words are often overused and can become a tool to manipulate others or to avoid being responsible for the decisions God places before us. To misuse this phrase can easily border on taking God’s name in vain.

Last spring I received over 20 letters from pastors, evangelists, and leaders of musical groups who were “led of the Lord” to minister in New England during the first half of October—during the peak of the fall colors! Interestingly, God never seems to lead such ministries to New England in February.

All cultic leaders and churches that become cultic place a high emphasis on being “led by the Lord.” Misuse of this term can make us prey to cultic tendencies.

Evangelicals also tend to couple their definitions of spirituality with leanings toward legalism. This can make us frustrated with our churches, which never live up to the expectations of the ideal spiritual church. As a result, we are attracted to situations that promise or offer a more nearly perfect or spiritually ideal community. We often forget that perfect communities come at the expense of human freedom.

Expectations Of An Ideal Pastor

Evangelicals not only have concepts and expectations of an ideal church, but also of an ideal pastor. Cults offer both the ideal pastor and the ideal church.

While in Europe 10 years ago, I had contact with a youth missions organization based in Switzerland. Each team member, upon arrival, was given a victory sheet that told him he was never to question those in authority over him, and never to write home anything negative. But to deny sin and reality is certainly not the biblical model.

We seem to long for two major spiritual images in evangelical circles. One is the successful bionic pastor or missionary whose church markets him in a cassette ministry; usually he is good-looking. Unfortunately, bionic people are half machine. The other image is the inner-city-guitar-Levi model who rejects all middle-class trappings. Unfortunately for this model, the sixties were 20 years ago. The biographies and autobiographies of both these figures tell of success and of ideal images to be followed. Each “image of perfection” borders on idolatry and leads us to live under guilt because it places unrealistic expectations on us.

We compare ourselves to models presented on talk shows and in books, but we fail to discover our own creative gifts and abilities to serve God. Unlike Scripture, these people usually speak only of success and rescue stories.

Like members of cults, we have difficulty admitting our own sins because we want to be the ideal. I have worked in two pastorates, one evangelical and one liberal, on my journey toward a deeper spiritual commitment. The one thing that impresses me about the cultural differences between these movements is that when problems arise, liberals face them openly, admit their wrongs, and ask forgiveness. I find, however, that we evangelicals have a tendency to justify our behavior, spiritualize it, or to blame the church structure for our shortcomings. Our inability to deal with our own sins and weaknesses, coupled with our ideal models, makes us very vulnerable to cultic-type leaders who present an image of successful and sinless leadership.

Choice And Guidance

Both evangelical groups and cults place tremendous emphasis on guidance. Many cults emphasize group choice over personal choice, or urge choices aided by a leader or discipler. Many of the cults mentioned earlier began with a tight authority system of accountability. Although we can observe many exciting things happening in the area of discipleship in evangelical churches, there are dangers of abuse. Many current evangelical trends toward shepherding and discipling encourage people to allow a leader to make decisions for them.

Cultic leaders often build their systems for guidance and authority on Bible verses taken out of context. But many of our churches also emphasize one aspect of scriptural teaching and exclude the rest. The result is that some churches built on body life are lacking in worship; others built on discipleship may fail to allow for diversity. Furthermore, such practices can lay the framework for an identity by its opposition to the rest of the body of Christ. It moves out of the authority of the totality of Scripture. Almost every cult began with focus on one aspect of Scripture to the exclusion of the rest.

Group Sharing

Cult members and evangelicals both place a high emphasis on sharing. When sharing is elevated as a sign of spiritual maturity, however, we are vulnerable to a cultic group mentality. Sharing for the sake of sharing can easily lead to group manipulation, exploitation, and autocratic control. While we may have a tendency to equate spirituality with sharing of our deep personal concerns, so do most cults. Like evangelical groups, cults place a high emphasis on devotions, evangelism, self-denial, and prayer as outward signs of spirituality.

Authority Or Independence?

Many churches were established either as a reaction to liberalism or as a split from another church that did not emphasize what its members felt should be uniquely emphasized. Evangelicals do not often belong to churches with a tradition of authority; we tend to pride ourselves on our independence. But of whom are we independent—God, Christ, the rest of the body of Christ? Can the head say, “I have no need of the arm” (1 Cor. 12:12–20)?

Cults view themselves as independent, and it becomes easy to identify with a cult in an effort to oppose a church. As evangelicals, our own independent attitudes make it easy always to be looking for another community that promises something better or superior to the one in which we are at present.

Coupled with this independence is a confusion of unity and uniformity. We often long for uniformity—charismatic with charismatics, Baptist with Baptists, high church with high churches, free church with free churches. We seek out those who will reinforce our own likes and dislikes. The result is a blindness to the richness of diversify God offers us within the body of Christ, and a blindness to our own mental tendencies to write off other members of the body of Christ. We subtly remove, by remote control, our responsibility to “love one another” (John 13:35). Each cult offers both uniformity and identity by opposition.

Evangelicals are seldom drawn to cults because of beliefs or doctrines but because the cults offer something more: a heightened sense of spirituality, an ideal leader, group guidance, group sharing, and uniformity and identity.

If we think we are not vulnerable, we are most vulnerable.

Dr. Bussell is dean of the chapel at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. His article is adapted from one printed earlier in The Gordon (June 1981).

Many evangelicals are drawn to the cults, not because of beliefs or doctrine, but because of similar religious sensitivities.

Two recent books apply a strong dose of theological savvy in support of this controversial topic.

A theology of church growth by George Peters and an apology for church growth by Peter Wagner may well revive the church growth movement that was so prominent in the 1970s. A decade ago, this movement swept like a tidal wave from the mission fields into North America. A plethora of church growth books quickly appeared on the subject and its guru, Donald McGavran, retired. “Kingdom theologies” and sociopolitical action slowly nudged church growth out of its former prominence. Except for the committed, it appeared that the movement would quietly slip from evangelical vocabulary much as Evangelism-in-Depth and body life did.

But this is not so. George Peters has written a sound theological study of church growth centered on the Book of Acts. He establishes that church growth is not merely a fad of nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicalism, but rather an expression characteristic of the very roots of Christianity. Church growth should be the concern of every generation because it is biblically normative. He has revived the legitimacy of vibrant church growth.

In writing A Theology of Church Growth (Harper & Row, 1981), Peters has drawn upon exacting academic preparation, wide reading in German as well as in English, and decades of theological discipline as a seminary professor. Extensive world travel has further enhanced the perspective his own cross-cultural missionary experience has contributed. The overview of his published A Biblical Theology of Missions (Moody Press, 1972) has given him a balanced perspective that theologians, missiologists, or behavioral scientists often seem to lack

Peters begins by asserting that the Book of Acts is the primary textbook in world evangelism and church growth. In Acts 1:8 the Master has given “His principle directives for this great building program: these directives are gradually unfolded” (p. 16). Peters believes that wherever Acts 1:8 was faithfully discharged, the Holy Spirit enabled a church to be born, and then formed it. He recognizes that church growth takes place in society, yet he ascribes the ultimate cause of church growth to the Holy Spirit.

In Acts, numerical growth is a fact. Nevertheless, quantitative growth can be deceptive for “it may be no more than the mushrooming of a mechanically induced, psychological or social movement, a numerical count, an agglomeration of individuals or groups, an increase of body without the development of muscle and vital organs” (p. 23). Peters gives no comfort in his book to subbiblical views of church growth, whether in politicized ecclesiastical history or in our own day of manipulative behavioral sciences.

Peters concedes that the Bible is not a book about church growth, but about preaching the gospel. The goal is evangelization, but he considers ecclesiocentricity foreign to the Bible. He comes down hard on some of us when he says, “This is an age when church planting, church growth, church expansion, and church multiplication have become evangelical obsessions, when sociology and anthropology have become more dominant in missiology than the Bible and theology, when technology and methodology are better known than the divine moving of the Holy Spirit” (p. 45). All will not agree with Peters, but they will be stimulated to serious reflection on the mission of the church and its relationship to the Spirit and to the kingdom.

The relationship of the kingdom to the church and to the local church is carefully analyzed, for it has become one of the recently revived issues the pastor and missionary must confront. How much time and money should be dedicated to the kingdom’s sociopolitical responsibilities, and how much to evangelism, church planting, and church growth? Peters’s sober treatment of biblical texts leads him to support the present as the church age, but the present age also includes a limited unfolding of the kingdom. His well-organized presentation seems to be a preview of the revived kingdom-church debate that formerly raged in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy early in this century.

As pastors see themselves in “the ends of the earth” rather than in “Jerusalem,” they will also profit by what many tend to dismiss as missionary concerns. This is especially true of what Peters calls areas or parishes of “high potentiality.” This is his unique way of addressing the receptivity to the gospel of a neighborhood, a people, an ethnic grouping, or even a nation overseas. Peters’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit in this age leads him to an almost unbridled optimism concerning the ultimate receptivity to the gospel of people everywhere. Many missiologists appear to depend upon social or political upheavals to initiate readiness for religious change. While Peters recognizes a possible relationship with “high potentiality,” he focuses upon the spiritually whitened harvest fields, which “are not the same as psychological and social moods and circumstances.” High potentiality can be turned into evangelistic results only “by the presence of Christians and/or the Word of God.” The Holy Spirit brings readiness, he says, but it is the Christian’s responsibility to labor.

No less important in this discussion is Peters’s treatment of the Holy Spirit and the way in which he relates to all of humanity. How does he work in general history, in Israel, and in the church? Basic to Peters’s understanding of these relationships is the Heilsgeschichtliche theological principle: because of the Spirit working in history, the world is not a madhouse, but an arena—a battlefield between the forces of light and darkness—where the final outcome is assured. At the Parousia, the return of Christ, Satan will be destroyed, and Christ’s victory will liberate the world from exploitation, oppression, and religious bondage.

Upon these theological foundations, and because the church is God’s church, Peters moves into church growth as God’s primary means to reach the world. Four pillars comprise the remaining substantive chapters relating to the growth of the church. The first pillar considers the fitness of the church as a qualitative community (Acts 1–5). Pillar two examines the need for an “adequate and serviceable” church structure for growth (Acts 6–7). The third pillar involves several chapters concerning the multiple functions of the church both “inwardly” and “outwardly” (Acts 8–12). Here, his 13 principles of church growth become the heart of his study. Pillar four concludes with the focus of the church upon world evangelization (Acts 13–28).

This book contains a wealth of serious theological reflection accompanied by abundant biblical texts. It will, in all likelihood, become required reading for church growth pastors as well as pastoral and missionary-oriented students.

Peter wagner has likewise studied the major critiques that have confronted the church growth movement over the past decade. His is a mature treatment of contemporary issues that he skillfully simplifies by drawing upon his experience in classroom and communications. Church Growth and the Whole Gospel attempts to enter into serious discussion with detractors of the church growth movement, and brings up to date Donald McGavran’s Understanding Church Growth of a decade ago. This book clearly establishes Wagner as McGavran’s successor and the leader of the contemporary church growth movement.

Church Growth and the Whole Gospel could be subtitled “How My Mind Has Changed” or “A Contemporary Apologetic for the Church Growth Movement.” It contains a subtle but distinct reaffirmation of Donald McGavran’s basic principles in a popular, yet developed perspective. A reader’s enthusiasm for the book grows as he enters into the substance of Wagner’s argument.

Evangelicals are newly interested in the kingdom—probably stimulated by the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of Melbourne 1980. Wagner begins his study of the acute issues confronting every minister and missionary by carefully reflecting on the kingdom. He observes that “kingdom theology” in its various forms sustains the social or horizontal dimension of the gospel among many evangelicals.

He goes on to add a much-needed stress on the “cultural mandate” of Genesis 1:28 in which the first recorded command was given to mankind: creation was to be treated as God himself would treat it. On the twin bases of the kingdom and the cultural mandate, Wagner concludes, “No one can be a kingdom person without loving one’s neighbor. No Christian can please God without fulfilling the cultural mandate” (pp. 12–13).

Wagner points out the dangers of “selective obedience.” He finds that some read the Scripture with “sociopolitical eyes” only, and then neglect the miraculous and supernatural signs of the kingdom represented by the healing and exorcisms of Jesus recorded in the Gospels (Luke 7:21–22). Others read the Scriptures without giving due attention to the present manifestation of the kingdom in anticipation of its literal fulfillment.

From the vantage point of the kingdom and cultural mandate, Wagner examines objections raised to the church growth movement. One major objection considered asserts that God wants his kingdom to grow; it is nowhere stated in Scripture that God wants his church to grow, for this is an ecclesiocentric, not a Christ-centered, idea. All church growth, Wagner recognizes, is not necessarily kingdom growth—because of the tares—but church growth is a penultimate task while kingdom growth is the ultimate task.

Wagner moves briskly and helpfully from priorities influencing the financial support of missions to sociopolitical change, from discipling to ethical awareness, from homogeneity to racism, from the United Presbyterian Church to Jerry Falwell of Moral Majority, from Jim Wallis of Sojourners to smoking as a social issue. Wagner investigates deep truths in popular terms, making them available and interesting to layman as well as pastor. Though many will disagree on some details, as I do, all will agree he has done a good job in confronting contemporary issues. He has interacted with both evangelical and nonevangelical critics of the church growth movement, and has renewed its biblical credibility.

If Peters and Wagner keep it up, the church growth movement will challenge believers not only in this generation, but also in the next.

Arthur P. Johnston is professor of world mission at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He is author of The Battle for World Evangelism (Tyndale, 1978).

They splashed and they flopped, those aspiring wind surfers. Day after day we chronicled their struggles. It looked simple enough: a surfboard, a detachable sail with a length of rope tied to it, water, wind, and, of course, instruction.

But how they flopped! First the sail would go flat in the water, with the surfer going splash under the water on the other side, or making a quick jump to avoid being clobbered by the mast. Then would come the struggle to get aboard again, the balancing act, the careful pulling of the sail back to position—then plop! It all had to be done over again.

Last year we discovered a few surfers who had more or less mastered the art. They skimmed about with surprising skill even on rough days. One had so much confidence that he even sailed with his jacket on, maneuvering his craft skillfully wherever he wished it to go. I kept hoping he would flop just once, but he had learned well.

He was, we discovered, the instructor.

We watched surfers go to the aid of a fallen surfer, heard them shouting encouragement to one another. And when the instructor spoke, they listened, and tried carefully to do what he said. Wind surfing is a challenge, a skill to be mastered. It is a practice in unending patience and dogged determination.

Like wind surfing, the Christian life is simple but not easy. And we are not born into God’s family fully grown, although at times we treat baby Christians as if they should have been.

We who are older in the Christian walk, and those who through experience have earned the status of instructor, should be quick to encourage, quick to help the one who has fallen. We who have not yet mastered the art of Christian living need to keep carefully studying our Book of Instructions, listening attentively when our Instructor speaks, and promptly following his instructions.

Alexander Whyte of Edinburgh once said: “The perseverance of the saints consists in ever new beginnings.”

Says theologian Oden, “… finally students got through to me. They want nothing less than … the faith of the apostles …”

Roman catholic scholar James Hitchock says: “Extrapolating from present trends” it is not unlikely that “by the beginning of the 21st century most of what are presently considered the mainline Protestant denominations in America (Episcopal, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Methodist, along with some branches of Baptists and the Lutherans) will either have ceased to exist or ceased to claim any distinctively Christian character for themselves.”

• James I. McCord, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, acknowledges that “the mainline churches are hurting at the denominational level.”

• Dennis Oliver, a Presbyterian Church of Canada specialist in church growth, said recently that for the first time in Canadian church history, the evangelical option is a bona fide choice for those in and out of the church, and poses a threat to the “mainline.”

• Richard G. Hutcheson, Jr., formerly chairperson of the Office of Review and Evaluation of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, sometimes called the denomination’s “official watchdog,” says in Mainline Churches and the Evangelicals, a book recently published by John Knox Press:

“These have not been the best of times for mainline Protestantism. Steadily declining membership, radically slashed denominational budgets, shrinking agency staffs, waning influence on a secularized society—this has been the picture in every one of the Protestant denominations usually labeled mainline. Sunday school enrollments have plummeted since the flourishing fifties. Youth programs are moribund. The average age of members has climbed steeply. Churches are polarized internally, and a widely noted gap has developed between clergy and laity. An even greater gap—alienation, in fact—has developed between social activist, denominational agency bureaucrats and many of the people in the pews.”

Not all would accept this dismal portrayal, but everyone admits these are hard times. It is all the more significant that the people making these statements are not enemies of mainline denominations, but are writing from within, hoping to reverse the trend. That is what makes Hutcheson’s book so important. As an insider, he candidly discusses the problem, analyzes it, and suggests a possible solution.

The Trouble Within

Just what is the problem? Simply put, mainline Protestantism is in a serious state of disarray, and the bottom seems to be falling out. Hutcheson expands on this, identifying six crisis points. All indicate continuing disintegration of the mainline unless something is done.

1. The Youth Vacuum. During the sixties when protest was “in,” the liberal establishmentarians seemed to have it all their way. “Today they find a newer generation of young people—success-oriented, non-protesting, with traditional values—baffling and unsettling. Now all we have is a lingering image of the sixties, the middle-aged clergyman with long graying hair, guitar, and denim jacket striving desperately to ‘relate’ to youth.”

And where did all the young folks go? “Primarily to Young Life or Youth for Christ; to Campus Crusade, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, or to the Sunday evening programs of a nearby Southern Baptist church. Or nowhere.” Times have, in fact, changed. The latest Who’s Who Among American High School Students showed a sharp swing back to traditional values. Eighty-six percent belonged to organized religion; three-quarters said religion was important in their lives and 67 percent chose their religious beliefs after independent personal investigation.

The Princeton Religion Research Center reported evangelical gains “often at the expense of mainline churches,” with a high percentage of teen-agers claiming a “born-again” experience. Thirty-three percent of Protestant teen-agers and 20 percent of Catholics said they were involved in Bible study groups. Almost all of this goes on outside the mainline churches. The young people “are finding their meaning structure elsewhere.”

Thomas C. Oden, a United Methodist seminary professor, says: “The sons and daughters of modernity are rediscovering the neglected beauty of classical Christian teaching.… They have had a bellyful of the hyped claims of modern therapies and political messianism to make things right. They are fascinated—and often passionately moved—by the primitive language of the apostolic tradition and the church fathers, undiluted by our contemporary efforts to soften it.… Finally my students got through to me. They do not want to hear a watered-down modern reinterpretation. They want nothing less than the substance of the faith of the apostles and martyrs.”

2. The Parachurch Organizations. They have become the second home for mainline evangelicals and probably will continue to be. Martin Marty has suggested that movements rather than denominations are the true center of loyalty today and that they are likely to remain so throughout the eighties. Hutcheson says pointedly: “At present, they [the parachurch organizations] meet needs that mainline evangelicals do not find met in their own denominational structures. Though the liberal-ecumenical establishment finds the idea of a pocketbook vote distasteful, the massive pocketbook vote which has poured millions into the Billy Graham organization, Campus Crusade, World Vision, and the 700 Club—while denominational mission funding melts away—must be saying something. To continue to tell evangelicals that if they are loyal Methodists or Episcopalians they must give their money to fight multinational corporations in developing countries and institutional racism at home, and that they must do this because majorities of General Conferences have voted to support such activities, is futile. The outflow of money into parachurch organizations supporting evangelical causes is not slowing down. By every sign it is accelerating.”

3. Crisis in Overseas Missions. The shift from “missions” as evangelism to “mission” as a broad category of churchly activities—including the support of revolution when necessary—has created unprecedented crisis within the mainline. The number of mainline missionaries started skidding and continues to fall to this day. Dean Kelley, in Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, notes that between 1958 and 1971 the six major Protestant denominations lost 31 percent of their overseas missionaries. The Department of Overseas Mission of the National Council of Churches (NCC-DOM) says that between 1969 and 1975, the total number of missionaries it represents dropped from 8,000 to 5,010. During that same six-year period, the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (EFMA) had an increase of 15 percent, from 6,500 to 7,500. Hutcheson observes:

“Financial comparisons are even more striking. While overseas mission funds contributed through NCC-DOM decreased in that period from $145 million to $125 million (down 13 percent), funds contributed through the other two associations, EFMA and IFMA [Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association], increased by 135 percent, from $95 million to $225 million. When the agencies not affiliated with either EFMA or IFMA are taken into consideration, total overseas mission income, when adjusted for inflation, increased in this six-year period from $317 million to $404 million. The number of missionaries increased from 34,460 to 36,950. The ‘decline in overseas mission,’ then, is not a decline at all, but is rather a shift from mainline dominance to evangelical and parachurch dominance.”

4. The Charismatic Renewal. During the sixties and seventies, the impact of the charismatic revival spread throughout the denominations. In 1966, the Presbyterian Charismatic Commission was founded. In 1972, a Lutheran Conference on the Holy Spirit was held. The Episcopal Charismatic Fellowship was begun in 1973, and by 1979 more than 2,000 Episcopal priests, nearly 25 percent of all priests, were members. In 1977, the United Church of Christ Charismatic Fellowship was organized.

All this works mainly as a cross current to the liberal establishment, and in close concert with evangelical theology. That their people seek fellowship in other terms is clearly an indictment of the mainline and its failure to meet their specifically spiritual needs.

5. The Membership Crisis. Every mainline denomination has been losing members steadily for at least the last 15 years. In 1978, the Gallup organization and the NCC sponsored a research project to study the unchurched. The following year a major study, Understanding Church Growth and Decline, 1950–1978, was published. Among the many valuable things that emerged was confirmation of the basic fact that the mainline was in serious trouble. But among the conservatives, things were different: they are growing.

“From an overall denominational standpoint the contrast is obvious. Membership trends in major denominations generally regarded as conservative, such as Assemblies of God (1965–75 growth rate, 37.3 percent); the Church of the Nazarene (28.4 percent); the Seventh-day Adventist Church (35.9 percent); and the largest of the Protestant denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention (18.2 percent) have been in sharp contrast with the declining numbers of the mainline denominations.”

6. Fragmentation of Denominational Life. Hutcheson summarizes this strikingly:

“This fiscal, organizational, and experiential evidence of disintegration has been mounting rapidly. So has plain talk. More and more reports have come to denominational headquarters reflecting the disinterest of the local church. As I have traveled around the church, I have heard with increasing frequency what the Charlotte group was saying, and colleagues in other denominations report the same thing. ‘Folks around here are not interested in what’s going on at headquarters. They just don’t care any more.’ ”

They don’t care because the mainline churches apparently are not in touch with their people anymore.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Because the underlying reason for all these crises is the evangelical resurgence of the last two decades, the mainline churches must decide how to respond. Here Hutcheson makes a positive suggestion: “It is the thesis of this book that mainline churches—for their own sakes and the sake of the health of the Body—must recognize the challenge and rise to it in a positive and affirming way.”

Hell of a Choice

I have created hell

for the devil and his offspring,

saith the Lord,

not, oh man, for thine.

To thee I have granted

one fearful choice:

thou mayest have thy heaven

or Mine.

E. M. BROWN

He suggests a “planned pluralism” with the goal of establishing a new consensus of the middle that will include evangelicals in a meaningful way. This will require new strategies and attitudes, mainly on the part of mainline leadership, in recognition of new realities.

The fundamental shift from clergy to lay dominance now occurring makes adoption of new strategies and attitudes all the more urgent. Among these, according to Hutcheson, must be a willingness to allow pluralism in mission financing, an acceptance of different “internal consensus groups,” a more positive attitude toward charismatics, and a willingness on the part of all parties to foreswear the struggle for complete political control.

Will It Work?

Some are cautiously optimistic that a new consensus of the middle is possible. Princeton Seminary’s Diogenes Allen said in 1979: “There are signs that a middle ground or a central channel, as I prefer to call it, is being reconstituted in a new way today. This middle ground or central channel once set the pace for American Christianity.… It can be a channel in which diversity, instead of being a source of antagonism, can strengthen us and make us grateful for each other.”

Hutcheson would also like to be optimistic, and he outlines a strategy for implementing his goal. But serious questions arise to cast a rather long shadow on any easy solution, and Hutcheson is well aware of these.

First, Where is the middle to be located? Hutcheson is probably right in saying that unity will never come by trying to return to a nineteenth-century classic evangelicalism, a twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy, or a social-gospeling liberalism. But where do we go? Liberal theologian Robert A. Evans speaks of a “transforming middle” of social and cultural involvement, while evangelical scholar Richard F. Lovelace envisions a “live orthodoxy” characterized by applied biblical truth. To imagine that these are the same thing is to ignore the very real differences that exist between them; yet, both claim to be the middle.

Second, for some evangelicals, neither a planned pluralism nor a consensus of the middle is of much intrinsic worth if adopted simply for unity’s sake. Already existing, and cutting across denominational lines, is a doctrinal unity that includes belief, will, and action. These evangelicals wonder what denominational unity can add to that. One would like to find unity in essentials and liberty in nonessentials. For at least the last 50 years, however, the mainline has turned that around, insisting on unity in such nonessentials as church polity, finances, societal issues, and allowing liberty—some evangelicals would even say license—in essentials like the Virgin Birth or the bodily resurrection of Christ. Is the mainline willing to reverse this trend?

Third, some evangelicals are asking, “Why now?” Why this sudden interest in us when we have been ignored for so long? Without doubting the sincerity of many of those who want the evangelicals back, it still has a pragmatic look to it: the evangelicals are in the ascendency and the mainline is on the decline. Many evangelicals remain leery of the liberal establishmentarians, and not without reason. Hutcheson himself admits, with disarming honesty:

“The signs—at least at the mainline denominational level—are not encouraging. A power establishment which insists on only one model of mission and maintenance and which manipulates political processes and budgets to support that one model (this is how many evangelicals perceive what is happening in mainline churches with liberal-ecumenicals in control), encourages the battle option. I personally come out of the liberal-ecumenical ethos. My background, education, training, and experience have all been mainline liberal-ecumenical. By every instinct I respond to situations in liberal ways. Yet after six years of close, intensive observation in the heart of one mainline denominational bureaucracy, and with continual opportunities to observe others, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the evangelical perception is, on the whole, accurate.”

However, not all evangelicals have given up. In fact, large numbers have stayed within the mainline denominations and are willing to engage in discussion, with a view to working at an accommodation. But the ball is in the court of those who have been trying to push them out. If the liberal establishment will allow for genuine participation by committed evangelicals and will show its good faith in some substantive ways, then perhaps progress can be made.

Hutcheson wishes it so. He closes his book with this observation:

“Perhaps the most important thing the diverse elements in a pluralistic church can do is to pray together. In committee meetings, in congregational gatherings, in worship services, in leadership groups, in conferences and conventions, in ecumenical gatherings, the most effective single method of coping with diversity is to pray. Prayer for unity, prayer for understanding, prayer for a spirit of love, prayer for adversaries, prayer for dissenters, prayer for the particular congregation, prayer for the whole church—an atmosphere of continuing and earnest prayer places the responsibility for creating a constructive pluralism where it belongs. Regardless of options perceived, choices made, and human successes or failures, the church is God’s. Its future is in God’s hands.”

Hutcheson’s book is strong medicine and it will challenge anyone who reads it. Whether his answers are completely right or not is debatable, but he has started asking the right questions. That is certainly a step in the right direction.

Walter A. Elwell, professor of theology in Wheaton College Graduate School, is Christianity Today’s book editor.

A new breed of novel attempts to do better what the Bible has already done.

I seem to find another new novel about a biblical character, written by an evangelical Christian and published by a conservative Protestant house, every time I visit the book store.

There is, of course, nothing new about imaginative literature inspired by biblical narratives. But a number of recent novels, including, for example, Marjorie Holmes’s Two from Galilee (Revell, 1972) and Joyce Landorf’s I Came to Love You Late (Revell, 1977), seem to constitute a distinct and recognizable genre. Recent additions to the group would include Gini Andrews’s Esther (Zondervan, 1980), Lance Webb’s Onesimus (Thomas Nelson, 1980), Landorf’s Joseph (Revell, 1980), Lois Henderson’s Abigail and Ruth (Christian Herald, 1980, 1981), Bette Ross’s Song of Deborah (Revell, 1981), and Roberta Dorr’s Bathsheba (Chosen Books, 1981).

What are we to think of this remarkable outburst of supposedly Christian fiction? Can we be encouraged that recent defenses of imaginative literature from within the evangelical community have conclusively silenced perennial criticisms that fiction (being made up) is not true, that (providing no knowledge) it is not useful, that (serving as an escapist pastime) it is not edifying? Are evangelicals becoming a fiction-writing, fiction-publishing, fiction-reading community? Sales of several of these novels would suggest that is the case.

The phenomenon is worth considering, even if the literary merits are slim. Certainly the desire to bring alive the already vivid world of the Bible is a laudable intention, and the ability of good fiction to fashion a world both apprehensible to our senses and emotions and comprehensible to our minds makes it an apt vehicle for doing so. But fiction’s muse can be a hard taskmaster. One must suppose that a novelistic retelling of a biblical narrative will work best when it is spawned by a gifted and experienced novelist’s sense that “this story is a tale for our times,” not when a writer, perhaps experienced only in informative prose, has the idea that “the moral of this narrative is still relevant.”

Biblical narratives have prompted many great literary works other than Milton’s. Yet it is noteworthy that few great novelists have tried their hands at novelistic versions of Bible stories, perhaps because they recognize the risks involved in attempting to redo or outdo what the writers of the Scriptures are recognized as doing superlatively well.

It is interesting that most of these recent novels represent first efforts in fiction writing by authors known for nonfiction books generally of the “principles for living” variety. One wonders why they have taken up fiction and gone to biblical narratives for their sources. Why not write fiction about contemporary social, religious, and cultural milieus of which the writer has firsthand experience rather than as a novice taking on the daunting task of imaginatively recreating forms of thought, emotion, and language of ancient civilizations?

The judgment must be rendered, if not belabored, that much of this fiction is badly written. One frequently feels the writers have learned the basic rules for good fiction but lack the instinct. One writer understands the importance of activating the reader’s senses, but the generality of her appeal can be soporific: “Flies made a druzzing sound.… Donkeys brayed, camels grumbled, horses neighed.” Readers yawned.

More glaring are the faults of overwriting: gaudy metaphors with no consistent—or apparent—thematic relevance; passages of purple prose tossed like globs of tinsel on a Christmas tree, the labored efforts of essentially prosaic imaginations. Weaknesses of syntax and diction subvert one’s trust in the writer. But the anticlimactic flatness of an illustrative sentence from Joseph disturbs me less than Landorf’s resort to the banal language of psychobabble: “On the sad and grievious [sic] day that Rachel died in childbirth, Sherah found that her own acute suffering had added some maturity to her life and that, if she was to continue to grow, she had to be willing to change some of her attitudes.”

It may seem discourteous to suggest that the fictional imagination of many of these authors is more compatible with that of writers of pulp novels and daytime television than those who wrote the biblical narratives. While appearing to redeem, the packaging of their novels certainly appeals frequently to the conventions of pulp romance fiction. The promises of an “absorbing narrative of adventure and romance,” “a sweeping drama of danger, intrigue, and love,” “an exciting tale of passion, intrigue, and suspense” (not to mention the sensuously romanticized women pictured on several of the jackets) are designed to attract readers who expect fiction to provide escape and promote fantasized daydreaming.

Coupled with promises of “recreating Old Testament times and customs,” of making “the taste and smell of Biblical Palestine come alive again,” of making “the claims, the miracles and the teachings of Jesus stand before you,” the implicit apologetic for these novels seems clear: “For you folks who like to escape with a good romantic thriller but feel guilty about it, here is a novel that combines intrigue with information, and will actually help your spiritual life and Bible study.” In other words, the jacket advertising saws off the branch on which the novels stand by catering to a distrust or misuse of fiction, and debases the fiction inside by appealing to debased literary taste.

Advertisements aside, we may still ask whether this turn to biblical historical fiction indicates a recognition of the validity of fiction in general. What assumptions about fiction, about the Bible itself, lie behind these novels? What sort of apologetic for fiction do they imply?

One may suppose the authors not only to have thought that biblical narratives have proven moral and spiritual value, but also that biblical historical novels would be easier to write, since so much is given: main characters, basic plot, essential themes, setting. Such a modest invasion of fiction, using, as Gini Andrews says, the “facts” of the biblical account as “pegs on which to hang my story,” betrays, perhaps, a certain notion of fiction as embellishment. Add descriptive detail here, a minor character there, an added or amplified episode: anyone might be able to do it, given sufficient “research.”

Indeed, these authors’ “credentials” are established less by proven fictional talents than by their research into ancient Mideast and Israelite culture. Andrews includes a bibliography of her research. The details and background of Webb’s Onesimus are “authentic,” the jacket assures us, because he “spent nineteen years researching early Christian history and tradition.” (Once during his travels in Asia Minor, Webb even “employed a taxi and hired a Turkish ranger as guide” in order “to gain a local perspective.”) A blurb on the jacket of Landorf’s I Came to Love You Late states that “Joyce’s extensive research has resulted in a faithful re-creation of the people, the culture, the surroundings and the attitudes that existed in Israel in the time of Jesus.”

The implications are that the criteria for writing a good novel are much the same as those for writing nonfiction. Fiction is given the guise of cultural history recast for popular consumption. The reader may feel justified in reading these novels because he will be accurately informed about “everyday life in Bible times.” One may trust Andrews’s portrayal of Esther because she has read Pirhiya Beck’s “Note on the Reconstruction of the Achaemenid Robe” in Iranica Antiqua. But of course, all the research in the world guarantees neither the ability to create a plot and believable characters nor the mastery of language and metaphor that marks the gifted writer of fiction.

Another way these novels authorize themselves is by claiming, as Andrews says, to be “scrupulously faithful to the biblical account.” Such claims serve, I suppose, as an imprimatur for Protestant evangelical and fundamentalist readers, assuring them that the writer shares their high view of Scripture and has not been tampering with the text. But what exactly is denoted by such intended faithfulness is not entirely clear.

It could mean, as Andrews seems to suggest, a faithfulness to the episodes and their chronology in the biblical source, “using these ‘facts’ as pegs.” But to suppose that remaining “true to the biblical account” involves mainly “facts” and chronology, and that such faithfulness constitutes a chief responsibility of the novelist, betrays an inadequate notion of how a novel works—indeed, of how the Bible itself works. It implies that the Bible is in a nonnarrative form, even a “bare bones narrative.” Andrews describes the Book of Esther this way, and then embellishes or translates it into narrative form.

Fiction involves plot, and plot is more than chronology. It is the purposeful shape of an action, which guides the writer in decisions about episode, characterization, imagery, and detail. The writer’s “faithfulness” to a plot allows the reader to apprehend that plot, and the theme embodied in it, by asking at every point in the narrative, “What is this detail of setting, action, or imagery doing here?”

In the Bible, historiography in the modern sense is always subordinated to plot. The power of the biblical narratives (as Robert Alter demonstrates in his recent book, The Art of Biblical Narrative) lies largely in their deft and sophisticated use of principles of selection, which unite every element in the text—lies, that is, in their sense of (God’s) plot. The Book of Esther, for example, exhibits a narrative density and decorum in which everything is designed to create a heroine whose bold faithfulness can inspire an audience tempted to lose their identity in dispersion.

Among Andrews’s embellishments of the Esther story is an account of Xerxes’ Greek campaign. This addition is defended “because Herodotus and other Greek historians give us the only extrabiblical sources of Xerxes’ life and character.… Since they concentrate mainly on the war, it seemed necessary to include this.” Isn’t Andrews’s “scrupulous faithfulness” to history rather than to the biblical narrative, which, with a shrewder sense of story, chose to leave out an episode irrelevant to the purpose of the plot? What principle of selection leads Ross to make Deborah strikingly beautiful and her husband ruggedly handsome? She is remaining “faithful” less to the biblical account than to the conventions of romance.

These authors seem inadequately to understand that the responsibility they have taken upon themselves to be “faithful to the biblical account” involves not only concerns of chronology and culture, but also, and more important, narrative concerns such as the genre and plot of their sources. They betray a hermeneutic naïveté about how the meaning of a biblical story is part and parcel of the manner in which it is told.

PSALMIST

His songs

reach

as far as God,

until

the growing back

of cold nights

cannot hold him.

His lions

have wings,

purr

in contested places

like the crickets’

silver churr

when the last leaf

falls in silence

from the wall.

I’ve seen him

singing

to the daisies,

laughing out

the terrible news,

growing

like a lump

in all our pores.

FREDERICK ZYDEK

The conventions of romance, for instance, set immediately into play in a number of these novels, raise expectations in the reader that guide his reading in a radically different way than does, for example, the biblical story of the prophetess. A romantic novel about Deborah need not be bad fiction, although its edifying value may be rendered suspect, as must be its “faithfulness” to the biblical source. An aspect of the bad fiction of The Song of Deborah is the author’s inability through her language to differentiate, and therefore to portray convincingly, the potential conflict between Deborah’s love for Lapidoth and her love for God, between her romantic passion and her prophetic zeal. In other words, one’s experience in reading these novels is not only quantitatively different from reading the biblical narratives, owing to greater detail, but qualitatively different, owing to changes in genre, plot, and therefore theme.

Of course, we may grant the intention of these authors to be faithful to the biblical characterizations of their heroes and heroines. Yet it is difficult, for example, to imagine Ross’s prophetess, her “senses reeling” at the sight of the battlefield gore, “emotionless” after the Israelites’ victory, taking part in the triumphant “Song of Deborah” recorded in Judges 5, praising God for his just wrath and vengeance. It is not unreasonable to say that Deborah represents an ideal of contemporary evangelical piety and womanhood transported anachronistically back to the Israel of the Judges. Her language of familiarity with “Jehovah” imitates that of the modern evangelical’s converse with his personal Lord Jesus.

Indeed, praised on the jackets for their “faithful re-creations” of Bible times, these authors seem all the more culpable for their failure to embody convincingly the forms of thought and emotion of ancient cultures. Most of their characters think and feel like moderns. Worse might be said. The quality of emotion, the range of concerns the authors are able to manifest, parallel not even those of authentic contemporary religious life. They imitate rather the popular mass media and literary genres of commercial television, soap operas, and Gothic romances. All the details that supposedly authenticate the setting thinly veil the fact that, if translated from camels to cars, shekels or siglots to dollars and cents, these characters would fit comfortably, at best, into a sharing group, and at worst, into “Dallas.” More worrisome is the feeling one gets that these writers have not even sensed as an issue, let alone as a novelistic problem, the hermeneutic fact that different cultures have different forms of thought and expression.

To transpose modern people into olden times is not novelistically illegitimate, and to interpret biblical narratives in contemporary language may helpfully jolt us into a refreshed recognition of the Bible’s permanent contemporaneity. But deliberate anachronism is not the apparent purpose of our biblical novelists, whose stated intention is rather to recreate biblical characters in their historical settings.

To show the relevance of authentic religious issues of life—sin, guilt, repentance, forgiveness, faith, and doubt—to modern experience is always a worthwhile enterprise. It is one performed by such Christian novelists of contemporary life as Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Frederick Buechner, Thomas Keneally, Graham Greene, and others. This is the sort of “faithfulness to the biblical account” by which one can define and judge a Christian literary imagination at work. I am suggesting, however, that the opposite procedure is at work in many of the recent biblical historical novels. It is that of imposing modern forms of experience and alien generic forms on the biblical narratives. The risk is that the biblical stories will be cheapened by translating the archetypal religious concerns of their protagonists into irritating encounters with the banal idols of contemporary culture. The danger is that reading these novels will emasculate the power of God’s Word by stimulating, instead of subverting, our habitual tendency to interpret the Bible in terms of our own life, rather than vice versa.

Indeed, it is precisely the ability of good fiction to crack open such provinciality, to give us new perspectives on life, and to make us aware of insular “eyeglasses” that gives it a role to play in the Christian life. By helping us now and again to step back from habitual categories of interpreting experience, or the Bible, fiction can promote the process of sanctification whereby God’s Word remakes those categories on its own terms.

John E. Skillen is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Bible translator, theologian, patriot—a true Renaissance man.

Gonzalo báez-camargo fills half a column in the International Who’s Who. The most recent book by this 81-year-old Mexico City author, written under a favorite pen name, Pedro Gringoire, is a collection of published articles related to Israel—a reflection of his love for the land and people of the Bible. He is widely known in Latin America as a translations consultant with the United Bible Societies.

A true Renaissance man—essayist, dramatist, and archeologist, with interests in music and photography—the soft-spoken Báez-Camargo has carved a niche in both secular and religious worlds. He is a lifelong Methodist whom some might call Mexico’s “grand old man of evangelicalism,” but he is surprisingly little known outside the Spanish-speaking world.

While he deprecates his reputation as a polyglot, the prolific Báez-Camargo writes book reviews in French and Italian, converses and writes fluently in English, reads and translates Hebrew and New Testament Greek, and was elected in 1980 to the prestigious Mexican Academy of the Language. He also has written a weekly column for the Mexico City Daily Excelsior since 1929.

Báez-Camargo has participated actively in the life and history of his country. At 15 he joined the revolutionary army, was wounded, promoted to second lieutenant, and fought in a battle to retake Mexico City from forces of the so-called Convention.

Hanging on his office wall is a photo showing him as a member of the provisional committee that organized the founding of the World Council of Churches in 1948. He was also one of several Protestants invited to a private meeting with John Paul II during the Pope’s recent visit to Mexico.

Báez-Camargo grew up a third-generation Methodist in a nation that remains 90 percent Roman Catholic. His own family did not experience physical persecution, but knew strong social pressures. “For our services,” he recalls, “we had to have a policeman guarding the church, because people molested those who were entering and leaving.”

His father died of yellow fever when Gonzalo was four. His mother died when he was 11. Victoriano Báez, a Methodist pastor of modest means and a family of eight, adopted young Camargo. Himself a Bible translator, Báez encouraged Gonzalo (now Báez-Camargo) in his studies.

He graduated as a teacher at 17, and after work as an assistant pastor and vice-president of the Mexican Methodist Institute in Puebla, he moved to Mexico City to become secretary of the National Council of Evangelical Churches. Later posts included managing the Union Publishing House in Mexico City, and publishing a religious and philosophical thought journal.

Báez-camargo has held a variety of seminary and university teaching positions and taken a leading part in Methodist and world ecumenical affairs. This has drawn some fire from Mexican evangelicals. He does not blame them, and tells why: “The word ecumenical has become associated with unpleasant movements or persons. This came about as some people of the extreme left and liberation theology have infiltrated the ecumenical movement all the way down from the World Council of Churches. My heart has pain when I say so, because I had a very modest part in the organizing of the World Council, and worked to promote it.”

In fact, Báez-Camargo was a member in the 1950s and 1960s of several WCC committees, and later resigned in disfavor over what he saw as the WCC’s left-leaning tendency. He cited examples of recent WCC involvements. In Mexico it sponsors the Coordinating Committee of Ecumenical Projects, which participated with leftist and homosexual groups in a recent Mexico City march favoring revolution in El Salvador. He added that the committee, which gets funds from the Methodist Board of Global Ministries, is headed by a former Methodist pastor turned Communist politician.

He lamented the Sunday school materials recently published by the WCC-financed Evangelical Committee on Christian Education for Latin America. These are a series of short biographies of revolutionary leaders, including Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. “For me,” said Báez-Camargo, “that is too much.”

He regrets that Mexico lost nearly half its territory to the U.S.A. in the 1840s. Because of that and other involvements from the north, he explains, “if you scratch almost any Latin American, you will find some anti-U.S. feeling underneath.” North Americans need to counter this. “I hope CHRISTIANITY TODAY will encourage people to come to Mexico who are genuinely interested in the Mexican people and who want to understand the history … of Mexico.”

He is an active member of a Methodist church near the home of his younger son, with whom he lives (his wife Urania died 14 years ago). He also leads a weekly Bible study in the auditorium of the Bible Society of Mexico, attended by university students, Catholics, and a variety of Protestants.

Báez-Camargo’s personal encounter with Christ was not dramatic, like Paul’s, but more like Timothy’s or that of the pilgrims of Emmaus: “Christ had been with the pilgrims all the time, only they didn’t know that it was he until the moment of revelation.”

He remembers reading the story of the crucifixion one day during daily devotions: “Of course, I had read this many times before [as seminary graduate, former pastor, and product of a Christian home]. But on that occasion I realized that Christ died for me personally. That truth pressed down on my heart. I had been learning since Sunday school about Christ.… But it is different when you come to … say, Yes, I know what he did, but now I know what he did for me. Directly for me. As if he had my name in his notebook.”

At that point he laughed, as if at the incredible and incomprehensible simplicity of the divine act. The impression was that all his books, honors, and experiences would not stack up against that simple, life-changing experience.

An Interview With Gonzalo Báez-Camargo: Mexico’S Grand Old Man Of Evangelism

Time spent with 81-year-old writer and Bible-scholar Gonzalo Báez-Camargo is like an investment in a world-and-church-history course. He has insights gained from nearly seven decades as a writer on Mexico’s secular and religious scene. He played a formative role in the world ecumenical movement, and today is on the cutting edge of Bible translation work in the Spanish language. CHRISTIANITY TODAY correspondent and former staff news writer John Maust visited at length with Báez-Camargo in his suburban Mexico City home. His personable host discussed topics ranging from liberation theology to challenges of Bible translation. A portion of that conversation follows.

Why did you volunteer to fight in the revolutionary army in 1915? Was this out of Christian duty?

Well, frankly, I went just because the others went. I joined with a number of other students from the Mexican Methodist Institute in Puebla, which closed temporarily because of the revolution. When my brother and I wrote to my father, who was in Spain doing a translation of the New Testament from Greek to Spanish, he approved our decision to join. He said, “You stay with your general as long as you can.” But when the school reopened after about a year, we left the army.

Would you do it again?

I would hesitate very much to take up arms myself. But I wouldn’t condemn my brother in the faith who considers in conscience that he has to do it. I would say, let the church keep away from any kind of political commitment—that is, in the sense of partisan politics.

What was the Mexican church’s role and involvement during the years of revolution?

The Catholic church, which enjoyed many privileges under Díaz, opposed the revolution up until about 1927. The Protestant churches did not, as churches, make any commitment for or against.

But because our Protestant education was liberal (not in the theological sense), the majority of Protestants were prepared to appreciate the revolution’s programs for social, economic, and political change. Protestants were prepared to make a stand for the revolution, but as individuals. As far as I know, none of the laymen or pastors who joined the revolutionary army did so in the name of the churches or involved their respective churches in what they were doing. It was an individual option, and my emphasis has always been that.

What was the position of pastors in the pulpit?

My pastor at the Methodist church in Puebla, Alfonso Herrera, preached in a congregation having both sides: students enthusiastically supporting Carranza as well as militiamen supporting Huerta.

I am a witness that he took the pulpit and preached the gospel to all of us, with no respect to political ideas. From his pulpit he never spoke for or against the revolution or the government. He was calling people to repent, to accept Jesus Christ.

This is the point: when Caranza’s revolution triumphed in 1914, and his brother Jesús, a general, passed through Puebla with his army, Pastor Herrera returned his credentials to the Methodist church. He became a layman, and joined the army as a civilian—becoming General Jesús Carranza’s private secretary. Then what we had suspected became clear: all the time Pastor Herrera had been a member of a clandestine Puebla group promoting the revolution. The striking fact is that he never used his pulpit for propaganda against the government. And the Huerta government deserved preaching against; it was terrible. Herrera used the pulpit for what it was intended: preaching the gospel.

But can the church as a body get involved socially?

My understanding of evangelization is not confined to the proclamation of the gospel, but to assisting people to live the gospel in their families and in the community. It is part of the work of evangelization to organize people to do something for the community. But, mind you, first must come proclamation of the gospel.

People now say, “Let’s get back to the prophetic role.” But do they understand the “prophetic role”? The prophets denounced social evils, but always their central message was, Get back to the Lord. Repent.

So the prophetic role of Christian churches should be first of all a call to repentance and accepting Christ as Savior. The mistake occurs when Christians confine themselves to that experience—“How beautiful to be saved”—and do not look out into the world with all its problems.

How does all this tie in to your assessment of liberation theology?

The main problem in the world continues to be the unconverted heart as the root of all evil—individual and social. I ask my Christian fellows to part with all these ideas based on Marxism and historical materialism, which make social structures the root of evil. The structures won’t change unless the heart is changed, and changed only by God’s grace in Christ.

Some elements in liberation theology also indicate it is not so necessary to get down to personal conversion. They speak of conversion with a different meaning. It is not possible to convert the whole community unless you convert the persons who belong to that community.

Describe your approach to evangelism.

I’m not much of an advocate of mass evangelism. One of my professors in seminary told this story: If you have 50 bottles to be filled with water, you don’t take a bucket and dump it out hoping to fill them all. No, you grab the first bottle by the neck, and then you pour in water until it is filled. Then you go on to the next bottle.

Whenever I have the opportunity, I ask the churches, “What is your evangelism program for the whole year?” So many churches think of evangelism as a two- or three-week program, which requires bringing in someone from the States with a big name who draws crowds.

I always ask, “Are you training each member of your church to be a witness whenever an opportunity arises, to look for opportunities to share a personal experience of what Christ has done?”

Because of my statements, people say, “Mr. Báez-Camargo has no interest in the saving of souls.” No, to me, salvation is something that takes the whole of a person—body, mind, everything he is. I plead for more effective methods, in which the work goes on more continuously than through a special program or campaign.

What is an effective evangelistic method that you’ve discovered?

I tell Christians that at least they can distribute the Bible. I’ve seen where even one burned leaf of a Bible led people to Christ.

Years ago near Tampico, a colporteur selling Bibles was attacked by fanatics and his Bibles were destroyed. Some Indians, watching this, realized the problems started just because of the book. They picked up some of the pieces, and took them to a leader of their village, who recognized them as coming from the Bible. “When I was in the hospital, I was visited by a woman who gave me this book,” the leader said. The Indians got hold of a Bible then, and that was the beginning. The Indians thought if that book was worth fighting for, it must be worth something. I visited that village later on, and practically all were Christians.

What is the Mexican government’s position on religion?

Mexico is a “secular state,” in which it is illegal for churches to own property, operate schools, or be pastored by a foreigner, among other things. Religious radio broadcasting was banned some months ago. It seems to me that the restriction came from the extreme Left, rather than Catholics as some have charged, because some of the banned radio programs were Roman Catholic.

In my experience with certain ecumenical organizations, I have seen a takeover by the Left. I still have to answer to myself whether this was a deliberate plan by leftists to dominate and absorb, or whether the leaders just let it happen, weren’t aware of what was happening, or organized it.

What were those experiences?

A Lutheran pastor and I, for instance, founded the Ecumenical Center in Mexico City for the purpose of true ecumenism—promoting good relations between all the churches, including Roman Catholics. But he began bringing in people who were following a left, liberation theology line. I do not think it was a deliberate thing. I warned him, “Look out. I know those people.” But he insisted, and it got to the point that I decided to resign.

I was vice-president of the World Council of Christian Education, which merged with the World Council of Churches in 1966. I opposed the merger very strongly. Since the WCC is infiltrated by persons who have taken that left, liberation theology line, naturally they will subsidize persons and groups of similar persuasion. I was also vice-president for evangelism of the former International Missionary Council, which merged with the WCC in 1958. At the last meeting in Ghana, the council took the decision for merger against the advice of some of us. The leaders said it was a matter of finance—that there was no reason to be giving to three different ecumenical bodies. This argument did not sound very significant to some of us; after all, boards of missions could decide for themselves which ecumenical group to contribute to.

Still, you are a strong advocate of ecumenism. In what respect?

The Bible teaches that we are one in Christ. Christ himself, by his sacrifice, made us one in him. Ecumenism is an accomplished fact. Yet there is this tension: we have not learned to live as what we are—one in Christ. It’s like members of a family. No one in a family can say he does not belong to that family. But how many family members live as complete strangers to each other, or even as enemies? It’s a paradox.

What is the status of Protestant-Catholic relations in Mexico?

Cooperation, where it occurs, is mostly on an individual basis, not as a group. This kind of ecumenism is something that must be built from the bottom up. It is a work that has to be promoted among the individual believers, telling them it is a Bible doctrine that we are one in Christ.

Are Catholics turning more and more to the Bible in Latin America?

There is a biblical awakening among them. Both the United Bible Society and Living Bibles have issued a Bible with the Apocrypha for Roman Catholics. They consider that if Catholic circles are opening to the Bible, they should provide one that Catholics accept as the complete Bible. Many Protestant pastors have been using Catholic editions of the Bible—doctrinal notes and all—in their evangelistic work with Catholics.

What caused this interest in the Bible among Roman Catholics?

Vatican actions during the last century explains some of it. But I can also give you the answer one Roman Catholic leader gave to me: “When in our church the Bible was practically unknown except to priests and in Latin, you Protestants through the centuries were loyal to the Bible. We owe it to you that now there is a new interest.”

What do you say to those who deny the divine inspiration of Scripture?

I don’t think inspiration is something that can be rationally and intellectually proven. I cannot convince anyone otherwise who says the Bible is just another book. The only way is for Christians to share out of their experience what the Bible means in their lives. The ultimate evidence of the inspiration of Scripture is that you hear the voice of God in this Book as in no other book. Wesley’s sermons are very inspiring for me, for instance, but they do not speak to my heart as the Bible does.

Would you describe your view of the matter of continuing revelation?

The Bible was something for once and for all. It was a very special revelation. Once the Bible was finished, we had it as the norm and the authority. You can ask God for inspiration as you write a book, and God will inspire it. But you have to check it against the Bible.

How did Dios Habla Hoy, the popular Spanish equivalent of the Good News Bible, come about?

The New Testament, which took the name Dios Llega Al Hombre, was first published in 1966, and was primarily the work of Dr. William Wonderley. It was based on the textus receptus [received text], the traditional Greek text that was based on the very few manuscripts known in the sixteenth century. With the later discovery of such great manuscripts as the Sinaitic and Alexandrian, which go back to the fourth and fifth century, it was necessary to revise these Greek texts that had come to us mainly from Erasmus in the sixteenth century. These revised works, which we call the critical text, were used for the New Testament in the subsequent Dios Habla Hoy. As for the Old Testament, the team of translators considered especially the new light that came from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I was the exegetical consultant, and wrote the introductions to each book in Dios Habla Hoy, and now I am in charge of revisions for its second edition. My next project for UBS is writing the Old Testament portion of a study Bible, using the 1960 Reina Valera version.

So then, biblical translation is a continuing process, which depends a great deal on new materials that are discovered?

Yes. I already mentioned the importance of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You cannot take those scrolls as the final word as to the texts, but in many cases they throw considerable light on verses that have been a headache for translators.

Considering all your scholarly study of the Bible, how do you approach afresh your personal devotions?

I come to the Bible in two different ways. I come for my personal devotions, trying to hear what the Lord has to say to me. And in my approach as a translator, which is not what you may call a strictly devotional approach, I am searching for something else. In a way, the two are connected. Even if I approach the Bible on a work assignment, I’m conscious that in order to get what I’m looking for I need God’s help.

Yes, there is a danger for the seminarian or scholar to lose some of the devotional aspect. One has to keep the balance. In all matters of religion, it is possible to become so concerned about matters that belong to mere information, mere knowledge, that you miss the real meaning of the Bible as the Word of God.

You keep an incredibly busy schedule for a man of 81. What’s your secret?

To some extent, the secret of keeping myself working is working. My day lasts generally from 7 or 8 A.M. to 9 P.M., with breaks in between, of course. Naturally, I take some times for a little rest. I go over a magazine, or a book for review. To me, relaxation is just changing or varying the kind of work I’m doing.

Being active makes you feel very useful. It gives you the feeling that you have not been put aside. That feeling kills people. It’s an oppressive condition that shortens life.

I must rise now and speak against the current heresy known as sopholalia. This phenomenon occurs when the spirit of education moves upon certain ministers and causes them to speak in completely unintelligible thought. You can usually spot the moving of the spirit of education just after the sermon title has been announced.

A brother of my acquaintance recently preached on the Last Judgment. I began to sense at the beginning of his sermon that he had the gift of sopholalia, for he announced as his title, “The Inevitable Exposé.” Sure enough! I stroked valiantly through the molasses of his thick logic, at last conceding that he had the genuine gift. He smiled above my thin intelligence and moved on to complex levels of his marvelous gift. His thoughts were as high and mighty as the throne. The next Sunday he preached a sermon on the forgiving Father (which would have been a splendid title in itself). After he announced his tide to be “The Absolution of the Abba Almighty,” all doubt was erased. It was clear he had the haughty gift.

I had seen the gift early in my life when an evangelical minister I knew well preached a series of three on the Second Coming. They were named in turn: “The Impending Parousia,” “Armageddon and the Advent,” and “The Meaning of the Millennium in Modern Mideastern Missiology.” This remains the most classic example of the gift of sopholalia that I have ever witnessed.

To this day I have never seen a lay minister knowing only Halley’s Bible Handbook receive the anointing of the spirit of education. It is given generally to well-educated ministers with low self-esteem. And it comes frequently to those who have taken too little time to minister in arenas of human hurt or to walk the ghettos of destitution.

I never cease to probe among those who have the gift of sopholalia in an attempt to discover how the spirit of education first moved upon them. One young minister, winner of the Thomist Medal of Elevated Thinking, said he first felt the irrepressible Spiritus Inductus when he was having his Whitsunday devotional out of the Septuagint. A second minister, who was last year’s honoree at the Anno Domini Foundation Dinner, said he first discerned his feelings of high elation when he was writing a monograph on the “Post-Nicene Fathers and Then Soteriology.” The spirit, he said, moved so mightily on him that he wrote half his paper in Greek cursive before he realized dunamis was resting upon him.

But the most probable source of the widespread gift was admitted by the ever-honest Dr. Younghope, who says he finds sopholalia is inevitably the result of sniffing the newly inked signatures on upper-level degrees. Dr. Younghope, who is the widely known head of the American Council on Sopholalia, admitted in a symposium on the subject:

“Once I faced my own degrees—and they are numerous, indeed—I realized the sheer power at my disposal. I yielded my own mind to the Potens Mentoris Omnis and presto, Fiat nux.” It was a powerful and lofty statement. Who could have said it better?

Author Calvin Miller is pastor of the Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska.