To gain a current assessment of how and why nondenominational evangelical seminaries are attracting students from the major denominations, CHRISTIANITY TODAY invited presidents of such seminaries to respond to this question: “Why are young people coming to you instead of to their own denominational seminaries?” Following are their replies.

Fuller

The steady stream of men and women from larger denominations coming to Fuller and other evangelical seminaries says something about them and us. What this trend says about the students is that their choice is deliberate. They make their decisions on academic, theological, and spiritual grounds, as well as ecclesiastical. They do not drift; they march to seminary.

Odds are high that they have been influenced by alumni or friends of these seminaries. Whatever shaped their call was part of a pattern of conversion or renewal influenced by people who believe in our evangelical schools. The arena for this is often an exciting congregation where the authority of the Scripture, the power of the Spirit, the joy of the gospel, and the lordship of Christ are celebrated. More often than not their pastors nudge young people toward seminaries that foster such celebration.

Parachurch structures deserve mention along with congregations. Young Life, Youth for Christ, Inter-Varsity, and Campus Crusade have had life-changing impact on thousands of students. Their staff members have recognized that most evangelical seminaries are more open to and supportive of their ministries than are denominational institutions, which tend to focus on denominationally based expressions of Christian service.

Today’s students may bring to seminary bits of antiestablishment suspicion, akin to, though not as strong as, what their older brothers and sisters brought in the sixties. At the same time, many want to serve the denominations that nurtured them. They seem to be looking for a way to combine training in evangelical theology and spiritual formation with denominational acceptance.

What there is about us as seminaries that encourages the trends in attendance is harder to state without sounding insufferably arrogant or engaging in odious comparisons. Among the factors listed by people who come to Fuller are the faculty’s reputation, a conservative yet open theological stance, a truly ecumenical approach (70 denominations represented), careful church manship that includes specific preparation for service in most denominations, an appreciation of students and faculty with charismatic experience, a readiness to include women in any of our programs, a curricular diversity and flexibility made possible both by our size and by the presence of Schools of Psychology and World Mission, and an opportunity to test theological education before making a final decision by enrolling in extension classes in several western states.

One response to all that has happened in the enlarged influence of our seminaries is overwhelming gratitude to the Lord. But alongside that, I, at least, feel some sense of anxiety—anxiety for denominations that are chary of students studying in places not under their jurisdiction. For the sake of those denominations as well as for our sake, I hope that chariness does not result in embargoes against evangelical schools. Their churches, in my judgment, will be better served if candidates for ministry are evaluated on their personal qualifications rather than by the seal on their diplomas.

Finally, I am anxious lest success make us complacent. At this juncture in history, God seems to be using these seminaries as agents of renewal in his church. This can continue only if we ourselves are eager for renewal—and on God’s terms.

DAVID ALLEN HUBBARD

President

Fuller Theological Seminary

Trinity

Richard hutcheson has touched a raw nerve of evangelicalism—students from the historic denominations and their growing enrollment in evangelical seminaries. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School has nearly 50 denominations represented in its student body.

But why should a student choose an independent evangelical seminary, with its generally higher tuition and significantly less scholarship aid, than his own denominational seminary? A number of reasons might be cited.

First, the student’s college years may have produced a cleavage between him (or her) and his church. Maybe he was influenced spiritually or brought to renewed commitment through a parachurch campus ministry or an evangelical church other than one belonging to his own denomination. This produces less loyalty to his “birth church” and makes it easier for him to think of other seminaries as options.

Second, seminary enrollment often comes as a result of personal recommendations. The modeling of influential persons extends to the choice of seminary. This reason is often given for seminary choice. The parachurch ministries, in turn, are fed by the same independent evangelical schools and the cycle continues.

A third reason is the growing desire by college and university students for a conservative theological education. Contributing to this is the plethora of books written by conservative seminary faculty on the popular level. Students tend to be attracted through this writing.

A fourth but less calculated reason is seminary size. Few of the traditional denominational seminaries can offer the large faculty and selection of courses that are available at places like Fuller, Gordon, and Trinity.

The problem does not end with seminary enrollment. Placement may be increasingly difficult, if not impossible, unless students spend a year in the denominational seminary. While this seems reasonable, a growing number of students are opting out of their “birth” denominations. In so doing they are calculating the risks. This trend has two effects: (1) it widens the gulf between the historic denominational system and the evangelical seminaries, and (2) it provides an increased flow of dedicated, committed seminarians into the evangelical churches outside those denominations.

KENNETH M. MEYER

President

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Westminster

Students have chosen to come to Westminster rather than to major denominational seminaries because they want to study biblical Christianity with scholars who are committed to the authority of Scripture. They want to study with teachers who put themselves under the Word of God and do not set themselves as critics above it.

One gifted young man who came to Westminster after a year at a liberal denominational seminary told me that he had once carried a pile of textbooks by evangelical scholars into the office of his former school’s dean and asked why these books were never referred to in class. The answer was that they did not represent the theological position of the seminary.

That student found a different situation at Westminster. Conservative texts were assigned. The lectures presented evangelical scholarship with conviction. But the tradition of liberal scholarship was examined and readings in liberal theology were assigned, with the result that he felt he was getting a broader understanding of the history of theology at a conservative seminary than at the liberal school. The brilliance and earnestness of contemporary theological scholarship in liberal seminaries cannot compensate for the eroding effects of unbelief in rejecting biblical teaching where it cannot be squared with humanistic assumptions.

Westminster has also gained students because of a resurgence of appreciation and understanding for classical Reformed theology. Many of our students come because they already rejoice in the doctrine of God’s sovereign grace and appreciate Westminster’s creedal commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith.

EDWARD P. CLOWNEY

President

Westminster Theological Seminary

Dallas

Dallas Theological Seminary was founded in 1924 to offer a new type of theological curriculum designed to prepare its students to be expository preachers and teachers. Enrollment reached 400 in 1970. It has grown rapidly since then to a current enrollment of 1,500. Two-thirds of the students come from denominational churches. Their express reason for enrolling at Dallas Seminary is threefold: (1) the quality of faculty (currently numbering 64); (2) their desire for training in expository preaching and teaching; and (3) their desire for a biblical curriculum based on conservative theology.

Most students enroll not because they are prejudiced against denominational seminaries but because they desire a superior program of study based on biblical revelation. More than 50 denominations are represented in the student body.

JOHN F. WALVOORD

President

Dallas Theological Seminary

Gordon-Conwell

Robert dvorak, director of student recruitment, indicates that much of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s success in attracting mainline students stems from the rather explicit way in which the seminary has embraced the plethora of evangelical movements and organizations beyond mainline Protestantism. At the same time, it has repeatedly asserted support for the authentic and essential mission of the denominations. Gordon-Conwell has nurtured both expressions of Christian commitment. The seminary staff has cultivated leadership directed both ways and provided a linkage between them. This comes, on the one hand, through institutional interactions with each, and on the other hand, through the natural processes of collegiality at the student level as individuals train, study, and live together in a common setting.

Students coming from the various youth movements find many others who have traveled similar routes. Also, they discover faculty and administrators who have keen appreciation for the organizations and movements that have been their recent spiritual environments. However, very soon those same students learn of the deep commitments that school personnel have for ministry in the denominations. The Gordon-Conwell faculty has stressed in a number of ways a strong orientation to ecclesiastical bodies and by no means with diminished enthusiasm for the mainline churches. Hence, there is on the campus a true integration of interests in what the evangelical youth movements have so spectacularly achieved in livening the faith of the student generation and, simultaneously, in an enduring concern to seize opportunities for ministry in the larger body of Christ represented in traditional settings.

David Wells, professor of historical and systematic theology, provides another perspective that helps to answer the question. Schools like Gordon-Conwell are attractive because students perceive that denominations appear to be irrelevant. American religion can be equated less with denominational life now than at any time for at least two centuries. The reason for this has less to do with changes in Christian faith than with changes in our society. It is not possible any more to line up denominations with distinctions of language, ethnicity, social class, and economic status. Knowing how to conjugate your denominational differences is an art that requires considerable skill if it is to be learned. Young people see no compelling reason why it should be learned, and therefore, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary—which by its very nature downplays denominational differences—looks very appealing.

Gordon-Conwell offers a “Basis of Faith” that is soundly classical—an authoritative content and message of the faith. Students are attracted to Gordon-Conwell because they see that inside the seminary we are really working theologically. Gordon-Conwell and its curriculum have everything to do with “the faith of the apostles and martyrs.”

ROBERT E. COOLEY

President

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

Parachurch youth ministries are gathering them up where mainline denominations began dropping them a decade ago.

The dinner party included some of the cream of the leadership of a major Protestant denomination. Present with their spouses were two professors from a nearby seminary, three denominational executives, and the president of a church-related liberal arts college.

Most were Democrats. They were appropriately committed to massive governmental programs to solve social problems, and to church involvement in the process. They were concerned about world hunger. They shared an intellectual commitment to a simpler lifestyle (“Live simply that others may simply live”) and had somewhat guilty consciences about their own affluence. They deplored the exploitation of Third World countries by multinational corporations, and generally approved various liberation theologies. They were scornful of conservatives in the denomination who accused the World Council of Churches of fostering Marxist movements.

They deplored the “narrowness” of the group of evangelicals now in control of the Student Christian Association on the college president’s campus, and the lack of interest in religion on the part of the majority of students. They shared the frustration of the seminary professors at having to cope with the increasing conservatism of each incoming class, and laughed as one of them jested that they seemed to be training the future leadership of the Orthodox Presbyterians and the Conservative Baptists.

Then the hostess got a telephone call from her teen-aged son, who was attending a meeting of Young Life. The conversation turned to Young Life, and the fine young man who headed up the program in the local high school. The host couple had two children involved, and they were delighted with what was happening. Another couple, one of the seminary professors and his wife, reported that their two sons were also deeply involved in Young Life in another high school in the city. They, too, were pleased about it; the wife wondered with pardonable pride how many mothers had sent two sons off to summer football camp, both with their Bibles packed on top of their sleeping bags.

One of the denominational executives began to talk about the absence of any kind of solid content at the parish youth fellowship his kids attended; it seemed to be largely recreational. Another deplored his inability to get his kids to participate in his congregation’s youth program at all, although he admitted it was so inconsequential and poorly attended that he couldn’t blame them. He recalled the significance of his own church youth group experience when he was growing up, the familiarity with the Bible that came out of his Sunday school attendance, and the spiritual intensity of his adolescent religious experience. He frankly—and sadly—saw nothing in the parish where he and his family were involved that could provide anything similar for his own children. And he wished his kids would join Young Life!

Major Denominational Youth Programs: The Sixties

These dinner party guests were leading establishmentarians. Nothing could more vividly portray the youth dilemma in the churches of the so-called mainline denominations than their conversation. Where have all the young folks gone? Mainly to Young Life, or Youth for Christ, or Campus Crusade, or Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, or the Sunday evening program of a nearby Southern Baptist church. Or else nowhere. Mainline Protestant parish youth programs, with some notable exceptions, are moribund. Mainline campus ministries play to empty halls. Mainline denominational youth ministry bureaucrats, by and large, are still hooked on the greening of America.

This is our heritage from the sixties. Nowhere in American society did the youth countercultural values of that decade receive a more sympathetic hearing than in mainline churches. And for understandable reasons. The idealism, the activist involvement, the commitment to radical change—all these the mainline groups applauded. We marched alongside the counterculture in the civil-rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. We had a common cause. Draft card burnings nearly always featured a William Sloan Coffin or Dan Berrigan right up in front of the TV cameras. Youth was the “cutting edge.” Innumerable religious retreats plumbed the theological profundity of Beatles’ songs (especially “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the tunes of which can still bring on an attack of acute nostalgia for anyone who, like me, was working with young adults during that period).

Many of today’s mainline denominational executives cut their teeth on the counterculture. Radical protest was the norm of their formative years. Today they find a newer generation of young people to be baffling and unsettling, success oriented, nonprotesting, traditional in values.

Another major influence on their own spiritual formation was the human relations movement, which also reached its peak in the sixties and early seventies. Its groupiness, its “touchy-feely” games, its self-discovery and self-affirmation, its simulation and trust-building exercises were the “methodologies” of the period. The fact that they were all methodology and no theology seemed irrelevant at the time. It was a compliment in human relations circles to be called “process oriented,” an insult to be known as “content oriented.”

Major Denominational Youth Work Today

The above picture may be overdrawn, but it is accurate enough to have affected significantly the current shape of youth work in these mainline denominations. The counterculture is dead, except as the context for denominational youth programs. Campus ministry, especially, has provided it with a last bastion. Mainline campus ministries are often isolated from parish life and accountable only to ecumenical bureaucracies far removed from and independent of either the university administration or the people in the pew. Yet they are still trying to fan the embers of radical protest. And local church youth groups are all too often still playing the trust games or engaging in “value clarification.” Church members, by and large, do not understand what is wrong with youth programs in their congregations, and they are not sure what should be done to fill the vacuum. But they know a vacuum exists, and they want something done about it. No concern is higher on their agenda, as they press church hierarchies for action.

Whatever the answer for mainline churches may be, many young people have not waited for their parents, or the young associate ministers who run the programs in their parishes, or their denominational bureaucracies to find out. Vast numbers of them have found theft own answer outside the mainline churches, in the evangelical, nondenominational youth movements.

Evangelical Youth Movements

Most of the major evangelical youth movements antedate the sixties, but their greatest impact on mainline young people has come since the sixties. Bible study is their stock in trade. They work through young, dedicated, full-time staff workers, who are often required to raise theft own salaries. And in contrast to moribund denominational youth programs, these movements are flourishing.

At the high school level, the largest is Youth for Christ. It operates campus-oriented evangelistic teen clubs at well over a thousand American high schools. Young Life is also a high school (and sometimes junior high) movement, with something over a thousand clubs. In addition, it operates weekend and summer camps. It has recently added an urban Young Life operation for inner-city teen-agers, mostly black, with an emphasis on justice and jobs as well as on its usual spiritual concerns.

Campus Crusade is by far the largest and most aggressive of the evangelical youth organizations. It is probably the most conspicuous Christian organization on college and university campuses, and it has branched out into a number of other specialized youth and young adult ministries. It has a high school branch, and an extensive ministry to young adults in the American armed forces all over the world.

Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship has chapters on over 800 American campuses. They are student-controlled, although IVCF does have staff personnel. Its style of evangelism is lower key and considerably less aggressive than that of Campus Crusade, and its lifestyle expectations are less legalistic. Inter-Varsity is well known for its Urbana (University of Illinois) missionary conventions. Urbana ’79 undertook to motivate at least a thousand young people a year to enter overseas missionary service for the next five years. The majority attending were from mainline churches, the largest single group being United Presbyterians with 1,104 delegates.

Another predominantly youth-oriented organization is the Navigators, which originated as a movement among enlisted men in the navy during World War II. In recent years Navigators has expanded its ministry beyond the armed forces to other young adult communities, primarily college campuses. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes is an organization of athletes and coaches banded together to influence young people. It sponsors high school “Huddles” and college “Fellowships.” Coaches’ clinics, rallies, and banquets are all widely used in a ministry aimed at personal evangelism.

Although these are the best known, they are by no means the only evangelical youth and young adult movements. Collectively, the independent evangelical youth organizations are by far the most significant and influential Christian youth movement in contemporary American society. Theft influence, however, is reinforced from other sources.

Christian Academies And Colleges

My young teen-aged daughter reported recently that she “can’t stand” the superiority of one girl in her Sunday school class, whose one-upmanship consists of frequent reminders in class discussion, “Of course, I go to a Christian school.” The Christian academies found in most cities are almost without exception evangelical in orientation, and frequently they represent the fundamentalist wing of evangelicalism. At the end of the seventies, between 700 and 800 new private Christian elementary schools or high schools were being launched each year. More than five-and-a-half million students are currently enrolled in private elementary and secondary schools, two-thirds of them in Christian schools.

What is widely perceived as a decline in the public school system with its emphasis on social goals, the “professionalization” of the educational establishment, the succession of educational fads (“progressive schools,” “whole-child” and “child-centered” emphases, “existential” education, “open classrooms”), the demise of discipline, and the widely documented decline in standard achievement and SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, all have led many to seek alternatives. The traditional upper-class private schools are largely for the rich. The Christian academies, which frequently have higher academic standards than public schools, have provided the only real alternative for the not-so-rich, including many liberals from mainline groups.

The evangelical colleges provide a continuation of the same educational influences at a higher level. They are unlike the Christian academies, to which many children are sent for reasons unrelated to evangelical orientation by parents seeking discipline and academic emphasis; the evangelical colleges are usually chosen explicitly for their religious stance. Parents distrusting the secular scientific world view, and the absence of constraint in the student environment of secular universities and the liberal mainline denominational colleges, have chosen evangelical colleges for their children. Young people of evangelical convictions have chosen them for themselves.

Attitudes And Trends

Reports from nondenominational evangelical youth organizations, Christian academies, and evangelical colleges are not the only source of data on what is happening to young people of mainline churches. The Princeton Religious Research Center, which bases its reports of religious trends on polls conducted by the Gallup organization, reports that the evangelical movement is strong among the nation’s youth. Evangelical gains, “often at the expense of mainline churches,” according to the center, are evidenced by the high percentage of teen-agers (44 percent of those identifying themselves as Protestants and 22 percent of the Catholics) who say they have had a “born again” experience.

Similar evidence came from a Religious News Service tum-of-the-decade report on increasing interest in religion among college students in the second half of the seventies. The RNS survey saw the trend as conservative, pointing to such indications as the growing popularity of religion courses, with the addition of such courses and of departments of religion by responsive administrations, increasing attendance at religious assemblies, and growing willingness to voice religious opinions in class.

The report noted the popularity of informal Bible reading or study groups in dormitories. Military chaplains have also observed a striking increase in such Bible study groups in barracks, camps, and ships. The Princeton Religious Research Center reported that 33 percent of Protestant teen-agers and 20 percent of the Catholics say they are involved in Bible study groups.

The Princeton Center sees one of the characteristics of youth in the dawning eighties to be a return to traditional values. Except for marked differences on certain social issues (acceptance of the use of marijuana, and sexual freedom), the study found remarkably little difference between the attitudes of teen-agers and college students on one hand, and those of older Americans on the other. This shows a marked swing toward traditional values.

These findings were further confirmed by a 1979–80 survey of students listed in Who’s Who Among American High School Students. It identified a decidedly conservative trend among high school leaders. Though religion has always played a significant role in the lives of this particular group, a striking 86 percent in this survey said they belonged to organized religion, up sharply from 70 percent in the 1969–70 poll 10 years earlier. Three-quarters said religion was an important part of their lives, and 67 percent claimed to have chosen their religious beliefs after independent personal investigation.

What are young people looking for? All too often the liberal mainline establishment envisions them as seeking channels for idealism, for protest, for action aimed at bringing about social change. The youth counterculture of the sixties and early seventies, Christian and secular, was indeed seeking such channels. But it is questionable if even then a significant number of young people were seeking such channels to express a distinctively Christian idealism. Today’s social activists in the mainline church establishment are, by and large, responding to a Christian dynamic. Their meaning structure is a deep faith, acquired often in a more conservative church environment in their youth. But the generation they have produced in mainline churches, where attention is fixed on social change, lacks that rooting in a deep faith. Members of this generation are finding the meaning structure the seek in the evangelical youth movements, the evangelical colleges, and in a turn toward traditional values and conservative religion.

All these reflect the theological stance of evangelical Christianity. Thomas C. Oden, a mainline seminary faculty member who refers to himself as a reformed liberal, speaks of “postmodern orthodoxy.” He 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.”

Significance is generally ascribed to trends among young people in terms of what they foreshadow for the adults of tomorrow. A fairly clear picture seems to be emerging. Many of our youth have left us. They no longer see the church as a meaningful part of their lives. But a significant part of those still with us are young evangelicals. In 1979 the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. began for the first time to record the results of a straw vote of the Youth Advisory participants alongside the official action of the commissioners. On a surprisingly large number of issues with an identifiable “conservative” and “liberal” side, the youth vote has been more conservative than that of the adults. Some of these evangelical young people are being shaped in our own congregations, particularly those congregations that make up the evangelical wing of the mainline denominations. But many are finding their meaning structure elsewhere.

Youth for Christ, Inter-Varsity, Christian academies, and nondenominational evangelical colleges are all now playing a part in shaping the new generation in the mainline churches.

Nowhere is the future leadership of the church more clearly foreshadowed than in the seminaries. It was the seminaries of the fifties, sixties, and seventies that nourished today’s leaders on a diet that progressed from Barth to Bonhoeffer to Bishop Robinson and Harvey Cox to Gustavo Gutierrez. If denominational seminaries seemed too confining to earlier generations, the more adventurous went off to interdenominational Yale, Harvard, Union, Chicago, or perhaps to Berkeley. Now the more adventurous are forsaking denominational seminaries to go in the opposite direction. They are going to Fuller and Gordon-Conwell. The largest Presbyterian seminary in the world (in terms of the number of Presbyterian candidates for the ministry enrolled) is Princeton. But the second largest is Fuller. And third is Gordon-Conwell.

Further, there is evidence that students in the mainline denominational seminaries are coming from conservative backgrounds. Those seminarians whose sense of calling has been nourished in their home churches are coming from the evangelically oriented mainline congregations.

A 1979 study of candidates for the ministry within my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., showed that 44 percent of all candidates came from just 82 congregations—2 percent of the PCUS congregations, with 10 percent of the membership—and that most of these were known as conservative congregations. Student bodies are more and more evangelical. The seminary professor quoted earlier as saying his seminary was training the future leadership of the Orthodox Presbyterians and Conservative Baptists was dead wrong; it is training the evangelical future leadership of his own mainline denomination.

There are some indications that mainline denominations may be getting the message, and that a genuine renewal of youth work may be developing. The early eighties have seen a spontaneous movement among many mainline groups in the direction of the recovery of a pattern of an earlier day with the reemergence of youth councils, youth rallies in local areas, and a growing call for denominational resources with Christian content, rather than just methodology. Whether a real recovery of mainline youth programs is on the horizon remains to be seen, but early signs are encouraging.

Meanwhile, however, the wave of the future is already upon us. Where have all the young folks gone? They’re over at Young Life, studying their Bibles.

Harold John Ockenga’s distinguished career as a pastor, educator, administrator, and author has spanned more than half a century since his graduation from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1930. Upon completion of 25 years as chairman of the board of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Dr. Ockenga reflected on some of his noteworthy experiences.

For 33 years he occupied the pulpit of Boston’s famed Park Street Church. His preaching and his leadership restored the church’s dynamic and brought new life to the cause of evangelicalism in New England. While there he set the pattern for world missions involvement that many churches have followed since. In the field of education, he was the first president of Fuller Theological Seminary and served in that capacity for 11 years. Most recently he was president of Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His major contribution to the cause of evangelicalism in the U.S. and around the world came through his pioneering efforts on behalf of the National Association of Evangelicals and the World Evangelical Fellowship. The author of 14 books, he is retired and lives with his wife Audrey in Hamilton, Massachusetts. He will be 77 on his next birthday, but continues active in speaking and writing.

You started your pastorate at Park Street Church in 1936. How did you build up your congregation?

I put my hardest work on the Wednesday night message, because fewer people came to that service. I put my next hardest work on the Sunday night sermons because it’s harder for people to get out Sunday night, so you’ve got to have something interesting. I put the least work on my Sunday morning sermon, because I would get those people anyway. Incidentally, I got this idea from Dr. Withrow, who was pastor there years ago.

Did it work?

Yes. Things began to grow when I preached a series of Sunday evening sermons on “Our Protestant Heritage.” I took a number of different men—Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Zwingli, Cromwell, William of Orange. What I didn’t know then was that there were a lot of Orangemen [Irish Protestants] in New England. They must have gotten wind of what I was doing. They began filling up the church Sunday nights. From then on I had the evening congregation for whatever I preached. The morning congregation did seem to come in the evening.

You started the Boston Evening School of the Bible, too, didn’t you?

It ran for 25 years. There I taught something I had been working on for my sermons, so I could handle it without preparation.

But you still had to give four messages a week?

Yes, and then I added a fifth, the one on television on Thursday morning.

How did you find time?

I blocked out the whole week in half-hour segments, either for studying, or calling, or interviewing, or whatever. I worked hard and things began to grow. But then I got into trouble. We had no amplification system at that time and I began forcing my voice. I ripped a blood vessel in my vocal cords and was out for five months. But we turned the corner, and gradually got up to 2,400 members. It was a gradual, hard job. I used to wonder if I would ever have the crowds they had at Tremont Temple [a prominent downtown Boston church]. On Sunday night I’d look up and see 300 or 400 people and know that over there they had 2,400. I wondered what in the world was going on. But I worked and worked and worked, and finally it came. We had overflow congregations in the morning and were full at night.

Some people say that to do a really good sermon you have to work 20 hours on it. How did you do all the studying required for your sermons?

I did a lot of reading. I’d read on the subway going to church and home. I’d read at night. I’d even read some in my office. I had certain times for each thing I did. I always kept Mondays free, if I could; sometimes I visited people in the hospital on Monday. On Tuesday I started getting my topics ready for Sunday, if I didn’t have them in advance—which I usually did. I’d get those topics ready, get the material ready for the church bulletin, and that sort of thing. Then I would work for my Sunday evening sermon. That was the last thing I would unload, so I did it first. I’d work on that until late afternoon, and then go calling.

Wednesday morning I’d start on the Sunday evening sermon again and pretty much finish it up. At noon I’d go to the Rotary Club, and on Wednesday afternoon I had interviews. Wednesday night I’d have some meeting of the church, or be out somewhere.

Thursday morning I would start on my Sunday morning sermon. In the afternoon I’d go calling. Because our midweek meeting was Friday night, I would put everything aside on Friday morning and work on that topic until I got through. Then I’d do organizational work.

On Saturday morning I would go back to the Sunday morning sermon and work on it until I got done. I never worked at home. I always went to my office and I stayed there until I was finished with the morning sermon. Because I had to unload that first I put it in last, making it the freshest in my mind.

Sunday afternoon we would go home, have dinner, and a nap. Then I would get up and work on my Sunday evening sermon to get it in mind. I wrote out my sermons and memorized them, and always preached without notes.

Tell us about your reading.

I try to read a book a week, something I have done for years. Everywhere I go I take books. I have long-term reading, where you can go through a whole book, like on a plane trip to California. And I have short-term reading, when you have 15 or 20 minutes, like standing in the subway. I read at night. On Monday I’d go off somewhere, or I’d stay at home and read or work outside.

Over the years, what books have been crucial building blocks, or just something special to you?

Someone asked me to list the 12 most important books I had read. This is my list: What Is Christian Civilization?, by John Daley; Crisis of Our Age, by Pitirim Sorokin; What Is Christianity?, by Herbert Butterfield; What Is Faith, by J. Gresham Machen; Therefore Stand, by Wilbur M. Smith; The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell; How to Be Born Again, by Billy Graham; Fire in the Fireplace, by Charles Hummel; On Human Understanding, by John Locke; The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx; and The World and the West, by Arnold Toynbee.

Do you agree that preaching is the basis of the pastor’s authority?

One hundred percent. You can’t stand and converse with people from the pulpit; you’ll lose them. If you have a strong pulpit ministry, you’re going to have a strong church, no matter if everything else is lacking. If you have a strong counseling church without a strong pulpit, you’ll have a weak church. Preaching has got to be there, or people are not going to come. It has to be enlightening, interesting, and challenging. Conversational preaching is a mistake. You’ve got to develop certain points, like a syllogism. You have to develop something people can follow, an outline with alliteration. When you get through, people can say, “That’s what he said about this and that’s what he said about that.”

Is there too much of an emphasis today on the pastor as a teacher rather than as a preacher?

The pastor-teacher is the essence of the pastor-preacher. A man can’t preach two or three times a week without teaching. He has to have content. One fellow once told me, “I never thought content would be the attractive power of the pulpit until I went to hear you. The thing that brought me back always was the content.” I preached through books of Scripture. This was not running comment—I preached: 30 or 40 sermons on a book of Scripture. The people would come back; they would want to hear the next one and the next one. We didn’t have any advertising. It was preaching that filled the church.

What really distinguishes the preacher from the teacher?

I’ll tell how I learned the difference. When I was in college, I preached one whole summer as part of an evangelistic team. Later I was asked to preach again in one of those churches. In the meantime, I’d had a religious experience, so I took the Scripture and illustrated it by that experience and applied it to the people. When I got through, one of the members of the team came to me and said, “That’s the first message I’ve ever heard you give.” The difference is, you’re pouring out your soul to get something across. You must have urgency. You want to move people so they will act and respond.

You mentioned strong counseling ministry without a strong preaching ministry. Some pastors are spending 20 to 30 hours a week counseling. Is this a good trend for the church or not?

It’s a cop-out from able, dedicated preaching. Pastors are glad to do it because they don’t have to prepare for it. They don’t have to do anything but sit and listen to people, and then give them their best advice. In some cases their advice may not be good, because they’re not trained well enough. I never got any counseling from anybody in my life; maybe one or two cases, but that’s all.

You did no counseling as a pastor?

I always had a counseling period. Wednesday afternoons when people could come and interview me were always full. But I’d go home tired and unsatisfied with the whole thing. It’s dirtying to listen to these things. I just don’t think that is what the Lord wants us to do. If your preaching is biblical, people will get the same ideas you give in counseling. You might as well handle a thousand people as one or ten. Counseling takes time. You can’t do that and preach.

How did you handle the growing pains at Park Street Church?

What discouraged me the most was that the New Englanders thought differently than people elsewhere. In the Midwest, South, or West, if a preacher has an idea and he wants to put it across, he can put it across. I’d have to suggest it, and suggest it. Then I’d have to let it sit for four or five years until somebody else thought it was his idea and he advanced it. Then we would be able to do it.

Do you recall any really hot controversies?

We used to keep quite a large sum in reserve for emergencies—like bringing missionaries home, or to use if the church burned down. It was $300,000 or $400,000. We were supporting 145 missionaries. Well, one of my men got the idea we ought to spend everything. We had a knock-down, drag-out fight one night in the board of deacons. I told them that as long as I was pastor, I was going to have the say as to where we spent our money. He finally came around, but it wasn’t easy.

Another time two of our trustees were at loggerheads over our investment policy. So I got the trustees together one night and said, “Look, men, we’re having a lot of blessing in this church. It would be easy to lose it all if you start fighting. Now, either you can tell the board that you’re sorry you have put these things in one another’s way, or you can both leave. One or the other, but we’re not going on with this anymore.”

One fellow got up like a gentleman and said, “I apologize to you. I’ll not insist on my way any longer.” The other fellow sat there, glum as an ox, and finally he said, “Well, I’m not going to change.” He left and never came back.

How did you develop your interest in missions?

When I was a student at Princeton, I volunteered to be a missionary. I was planning to go to China. One day Clarence Macartney and some other prominent preachers got hold of me and said, “Look, we’re not going to be able to do anything for missions if we don’t hold some of these churches in this country. You ought to take a church here, build it up, and raise money for missions.”

That’s what I did, first with Macartney at First Presbyterian, Pittsburgh, then at Point Breeze, and then at Park Street. I tried to put missions first at the time. The first year I was at Park Street we had $2,200 for missions. We soon changed that. Missions were first in our interest—in our giving, and everything else. We did it by voluntary giving. We never raised any money with chicken pot pie suppers.

You’ve raised a lot of money in your time. What insights do you have about money management in the local church?

The pastor should sit on the board of trustees, not as a member, but just as he should sit on the board of deacons, or elders. He ought to know where everything goes. He has to raise the money, therefore he ought to be able to see where it goes. He ought to be able to agree with where people want it to go. But if it is raised for one thing, don’t take it from that for something else.

He ought to have a good bit to say about the final disposition of funds. I didn’t do that directly; I did it through the boards. I sat on every board that spent a dime, because I didn’t want the money to go to the wrong place. It was too hard to raise.

While you were pastor at Park Street Church you were also president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. How did you handle both responsibilities?

I commuted a great deal and used the telephone a lot. I guess I went back and forth 200 times. I used my assistant, Harold Lindsell, a lot. He executed what I determined as policy—with the trustees, of course.

You were also president of the National Association of Evangelicals for a while and chairman of CHRISTIANITY TODAY for 25 years.

I have always been very busy, but there is a secret to that. You can do things okay if you keep a prayer list. I’ve kept one for 41 years and I have everything on that list. When I go over it, I’m reminded by the Lord if I haven’t tried to solve a problem; I’m very alert to that situation. If I have enemies I’m praying for, something may come to my mind that I can do about that.

Everything goes on that prayer list: faculty, evangelism, family. I write a very brief summary of what the petition is, and I number it and date it. When it’s answered, I write across it “answered.” As I pray, I don’t look at those, I just go to the next one. Some have been answered in the negative—not very many, but some of them. I just put crosses right across those, and I know immediately that they have been denied. This keeps a person alert to his responsibilities.

For instance, if I had a problem at Fuller, I put it on the prayer list. When I would go over the list I was reminded of that problem. I either prayed about it or did something about it that needed to be done. That was a way to keep alert to administrative activities so I could run Fuller, the NAE, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and my church.

This gives you a tremendous release from tension. When do you find time to pray?

That’s right—I never worry about it. I pray every morning. First I do my exercises, then shave and bathe, then pray until my wife has breakfast ready. I pick up where I left off on my prayer list and go on through the whole thing. I’ve had this prayer habit from the time I went to college.

Speaking of your college experience, it’s been said that you are the heir of a blend of Reformed and Wesleyan traditions. Is that how you would describe yourself?

There’s some truth to that. I went to Taylor University from a large Methodist church in Chicago. There I came under the influence of the holiness club. I felt I needed another, or deeper, Christian experience. Things weren’t going well on the evangelistic team. I was going to quit preaching, but one of the fellows told me I was the trouble.

One Sunday morning one of them preached on Acts 1:8, “You will have power, after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you,” a sermon I’d heard him preach before. He gave the invitation and nobody responded. As we came to the last stanza, it was as if somebody spoke to me out of the blue, “You want that bliss …” I went forward and it has made the difference in my life. I recognized that I needed a different quality of experience through the Holy Spirit, which I didn’t have at that time. I told the Lord I wanted it.

I found out that there is a higher standard than just being a believer. There is such a thing as being filled with the Holy Spirit for a purpose. The Lord does that.

So, I got the Wesleyan emphasis at Taylor. I rejected sanctification in the sense of being without sin. I left Taylor and went to Princeton. Then I went to Westminster and more or less absorbed the Reformed and Presbyterian viewpoint. But I think there is a lot of the Methodist in me when it comes to preaching.

Your pastoral ministry was also an interesting blend of a large major denomination and a smaller one. How do you compare the two?

I started pastoring a Methodist church in the summer resort town of Avalon, New Jersey, during my last year at Princeton. The people wanted me but the bishop told them I had gone to the wrong seminary; it wasn’t Methodist. In the meantime, Clarence Macartney had invited me to be his assistant at First Presbyterian, Pittsburgh. But I stayed in the Methodist church for a year until the annual conference. Out of the blue, Macartney wrote me again. I decided to test the people at Avalon over the summer. That’s when everybody makes money, but they don’t go to church. The summer went by and I didn’t see any of my faithful people until September. So I decided to accept Macartney’s offer.

I joined Chambers Wiley Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, was licensed by the Philadelphia presbytery, and then transferred to the presbytery of Pittsburgh. I became a Congregationalist the minute I went to Park Street Church. I was installed by the Congregational Church. I held standing in both denominations. The Pittsburgh presbytery had me laboring outside the bonds of the presbytery and the Suffolk West Association (Congregational) accepted me as a member of their association.

Didn’t you subsequently leave both denominations?

The Los Angeles presbytery didn’t want Fuller seminary there. Half of our students came from local Presbyterian churches, and in ten years we would have controlled that presbytery and several others if they would have given us the green light. They asked my presbytery to enjoin me from laboring out there. I was told I could fight it, and probably win, but the seminary would have been launched in a controversy, so I didn’t.

When the Congregational Church merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church (to form the United Church of Christ), they allowed those who didn’t come in—many churches like Park Street didn’t—to have their names published in the annual minutes. I still have my name there, although I am not a member of the United Church of Christ.

A Pulpit Primer

While serving as Dr. Ockenga’s student assistant at Park Street Church in 1937, I made my way to his tower study after a Sunday morning worship service. Intrigued by his sermon content and flawless delivery, I asked, “Dr. Ockenga, could you take time to explain to me your method of sermon preparation and delivery?” Without hesitation, while he showered and dressed, he launched into a homiletical lecture and study that surpassed all the college, seminary, and graduate speech courses I ever had.

It revolutionized my own preaching style. It challenged me to prayerful subject selection, thorough biblical research and preparation, careful word-for-word manuscript writing, detailed and comprehensive sermon outlining, memorization of the sermon outline, and utter dependence upon the Holy Spirit for preaching without notes.

Little did I realize that this impromptu lecture by one of America’s greatest pulpiteers was God’s crash course preparing me for Dr. Ockenga’s brief illness. In a few months (as a young theolog) I was preaching in his strategic Boston pulpit. It also became my model for over 40 years of teaching and preaching.

JOHN A. HUFFMAN, SR.

Dr. Ockenga’s First Assistant

Park Street Church

Should a young candidate for the ministry start in one of the major, liberally oriented denominations, or in a smaller evangelical body?

It depends on the individual and his background. If he’s a member of a smaller denomination, he’s got to consider the cost. On the other hand, if he’s a member of a big denomination, United Presbyterian or Methodist, he should stay there, preach, and bear his testimony, unless he’s hindered and limited by the denomination. If it becomes an issue of doctrine or principle, then he has to leave.

How can one prepare for ministry in a mainstream denomination?

Get your evangelical theological training first. Go to an evangelical seminary first, so you have the answers to the problems liberals raise. If you go to a liberal seminary first, and they raise the problems and you have no answers, you’re set adrift. Get your positive answers first and you can judge what you would like to do.

You can always go from a big denomination to a little one, but you can’t go from a little one to a big one. They raise too many questions. They press too hard on you. They have their own students trained in their own seminaries and they want them to have the jobs.

What do you think about the church growth movement?

It’s almost a fetish. I used the good things in the church growth movement before there was a movement. Some of the ideas are good. Get the head of a family converted first and the family probably will come. Get the leader of a group and you probably will get the people. But I don’t like some of the viewpoints, especially the one about making converts all of one class [homogeneous unit principle]. Supposedly, if they were all of one kind, your church could grow much more rapidly than by having converts of diverse backgrounds. Obviously, such churches will grow faster. People are much more at home in a group like that. But that’s not what the church should be. The New Testament church at Antioch, for example, had wealthy and poor people, educated and uneducated, blacks and whites. The church should cut across these things, so people feel at home in other than their own culture or class.

Take Park Street Church. We always had some wealthy people; not many. We had a great many poor people, a great many blue collar workers. Our deacons and trustees represented all classes of people. The wealthy ones didn’t look down on the others. The middle-class people didn’t demand that we put people from their group in office.

You were instrumental in the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals, were you not?

In 1936, J. Elwyn Wright conceived the idea of a national organization. He said that if we didn’t do this, we’d be frozen out by the Federal [later National] Council of Churches. I wasn’t quite convinced, but I went to the first meeting in Saint Louis. We met for a week, about 150 or 175 men. Wright asked me to give the keynote address (published in Great Speeches that Affected America). I told them we had to get together, to stand together. We had to do it in radio broadcasting, or we would be put off the air. The Federal Council was drawing up a broadcasting code of ethics. We had to do it in the military, or we wouldn’t have any chaplains. The impetus for NAE came from the fact that the fellows all felt they were being cut down.

At that time Carl McIntire demanded that we state categorically in our constitution that we were opposed to the Federal Council, and that our purpose was to hinder their work. It wasn’t the right thing to do, because we would have started on a negative rather than a positive basis. McIntire forced a vote on the issue and lost, but he pulled out 25 or 30 fellows with him and later they formed the American Council of Christian Churches. We went ahead and laid down our basic principles and formed the NAE.

They made me president—because I made the speech, I guess. The church permitted me to make three major trips across the country to speak in churches about the NAE and what we were going to do. Finally, in 1943, we met for a solid week in Chicago for our constitutional convention. We had a great time. I remember Bishop Leslie Marsden of the Free Methodists saying as we were leaving, “America’s revival is breaking.”

How did things go between you and McIntire?

You should know that Carl was in my wedding party, but when I refused to join the Independent Board for Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, he was so disgusted that he returned the gift I had given him, a couple of book ends of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Anyway, when he started his American Council it became very confusing for churches, schools, missions boards, and denominations. Rather than get into the scrap, many of them decided not to join either NAE or the ACCC.

But the ACCC did a very bad thing. They would home in on an individual, publish the reports in McIntire’s Christian Beacon, and undermine his work. They cut into his invitations. They went after Donald Barnhouse, after me, after somebody else. They began to whittle us down, one by one, who were the leaders of NAE. As a result, some of them dropped out. It was unfortunate that we had the ACCC and NAE division.

What dangers do you foresee for evangelicals now?

One of them is fragmentation. It looks like it might be over the question of inerrancy of Scripture. That could be a divisive thing when it comes to the future of NAE. However, I think that denominationally we’ve almost had all of the fragmentation we’re going to have. If NAE stays with a positive emphasis, it can have a great influence in the churches.

With These Friends, Who Needs Enemies?

I want to issue a warning to all young college and seminary graduates: when you have been out of school 15 or 20 years, you will face a problem that defies any solution. If you will come with me to my kitchen table, and sit down with me and my wife, you will understand whereof I speak. We have before us the appeal letters that arrived in our humble mailbox the previous month. We are deciding whether or not any of them deserves our support.

“Well!” she exclaims. “Phil Freeman is now director of Gospel Witness to Inner-city Elevator Operators. I didn’t know that!” “Better send them a gift,” I reply. “Phil helped me get through Greek exegesis. Say, look at this letter! Sylvia Hohenstopher is now working with Hem of His Garment Ministries.”

Let’s send them a gift,” advises my wife. “Sylvia worked in the sweet shop at Bible school and always gave me lots of ice cream and syrup. Now, here is a real problem: do we want to support POPUS?

“What’s POPUS?” I innocently ask.

“Protect Our Pets in the U.S. Don’t you remember that rubber albatross that came last month? We were supposed to wear it around our necks an hour each day to remind us to be kind to dumb animals. A fellow named Mike Simonson runs POPUS.” “Mike Simonson!” I explode. “I wouldn’t send him a used postage stamp! He lived next to me in the dorm and played country music on his stereo all night.”

“But aren’t we supposed to do good to those who have abused us?” asks my wife, suddenly getting spiritual. “After all, he did send us a rubber albatross.”

“Oh, send him 10 dollars. It’s for the good of the pets anyway.”

So on we go, through the pile of letters and return envelopes. It is amazing how many of our friends and former classmates have risen to places of leadership. Imagine, those youngsters managing ministries with huge budgets! We can’t support all of them, of course; so what are we to do?

I should have made more enemies when I was in seminary.

EUTYCHUS X

Three Cheers, Eutychus X!

I do believe Eutychus X’s column has been consistently the best anonymous satire written in a major evangelical periodical in this decade [see Sept. 18, p. 8]. Seriously, thanks for the many laughs! Keep ’em coming!

MR. and MRS. STEVEN J. COLE

Cedarpines Park, Calif.

The “Party Line”

The fine reporting of James Hefly, “Former Southern Baptist Sunday School Board Officer Wins Settlement” [Oct. 2], is much appreciated. Some of us long ago realized that Baptist Press coverage of events within our convention is biased and we must look elsewhere for coverage of anything of a controversial nature: that which would be contrary to the “party line,” or show up any of our higher echelon denominational servants in a less than favorable light.

REV. WORTH C. GRANT

Temple Baptist Church

Washington, D.C.

Challenge To All

Harold Lindsell’s article, “The Major Denominations Are Jumping Ship” [Sept. 18], is a challenge to us all. His restricted use of the term “missionary” is somewhat offset by Mooneyham’s article that follows. In feeling unworthy of the title, vast numbers of fine evangelicals have gone into the fields afar without daring to witness. There are a vast number of potential witnesses—tourists, businessmen, teachers, students, servicemen—who have thus been cut off from the source of vision and outreach. I speak from long experience in several of these categories—carrying the gospel to many parts of the world.

The American Scripture Gift Mission and other agencies can provide literature in most languages. In our own country there are several hundred thousand foreign leaders, students, diplomats, business people, and others who are also being largely neglected by Christians. Through the postal service and prayerful imagination one can become a true foreign missionary without leaving the home town.

HARVEY L. SPERRY

Retired Army Chaplain

Greenwood, S.C.

This article rightly points out that mainline denominations have retrenched from previous numbers of overseas mission workers. In the case of my own denomination (United Presbyterian), part of that retrenchment has been for economic reasons (loss of members nationwide, inflation, reduced giving to the national church). But another factor, glossed over by Dr. Lindsell, is that our efforts in many parts of the world have finally borne fruit, and indigenous churches are taking over more and more of the responsibilities in their areas of the world.

This has led to a major shift in strategy for Presbyterians, at least, from sending missionaries from here to “there” to assisting Christians in their own areas with specific areas of need and expertise. We even have overseas churches sending us missionaries to assist our work here in the United States! I’d like to suggest that for United Presbyterians, at least, it would be more fair to use the image of turning the helm over to our brothers and sisters in Christ in their own lands than that of jumping ship.

REV. STEVEN R. FLEMING

United Presbyterian Church

Shippensburg, Pa.

I am well aware that the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) has in the recent past retreated from the missionary zeal it once had. This is an unfortunate accident. At the same time, I am saddened that Dr. Lindsell would generalize to say, “It is apparent that declines in both missionary outreach abroad and evangelism at home can be attributed, in part, to the infiltration of theological liberalism.” In this same text, Dr. Lindsell states this to be part of the reason for the declines in the LCA.

I found this article insensitive to the many growing conservative churches like ours. Simply put, don’t generalize. In Christ, we are all one.

REV. DONALD P. EDWARDS

Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church

McAlisterville, Pa.

Complex Organization

In that my name appeared in “A Wolf Appears at the Door of Ralph Winter’s Mission Center” [Sept. 18], I felt I should state my reason for coming to the center and the William Carey International University.

I did not come to the university for security reasons. The future, as recorded in the CT article is shaky, risky. But that situation is part of the challenge to my faith, creativity, and commitment. After all, if an examination of church history is made, there are not many movements we acclaim as “hinge of history” events that did not start in weakness and predictable failure. Strange to say, the Baptist leaders said William Carey was a scatterbrain when he proposed to the ministers at Nottingham in 1792 that they should “Expect great things from God and attempt great things for God.”

VIRGIL A. OLSON

President-elect

William Carey International University

A periodical with CT’s history and perspective should be careful to give thorough and accurate coverage of a project like the U.S. Center for World Mission (USCWM). The USCWM is a complex yet bone-thin organization with a remarkable outreach and influence. Those of us who have followed the center since its earliest days know this grand effort is not Dr. Winter’s, but God’s. The project has always moved ahead step by step as God has led, a fact that reflects the attitudes of daily dependence upon God among the USCWM staff. It is a testimony to God’s faithfulness that against human odds the center has come to be what it is today. The devotion of the USCWM staff is a model for Christians everywhere. These people, all volunteers, have a God-inspired vision that cannot be discredited. God has set into motion something new, yet as old as God’s promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed. Through this instrument of research, education, information, facilitation, and encouragement on a worldwide scale, God is seeking to plant a gospel witness in every forgotten culture.

MATTHEW and ALICE BALDWIN

Malvern, Pa.

Bias-Filled Bias

Your editorial, “Bias Beyond Understanding” [Sept. 18], has a certain irony to it. It is full of its own bias. You are angered by this history professor who “pronounced sentence on Christians who do not abide by his personal version of Christ’s principles.” Yet you do the same. You equate “true Christian principles” with fundamentalism and creationism. This is your privilege. You vigorously attack so-called liberal Christians without any attempt at being fair or impartial. This, too, is your privilege. But you cannot, at the same time, “expect fair, impartial coverage” from those to whom you refuse to give it.

REV. ROBERT LARIVIERE

Worcester, Mass.

Profound Appreciation

Just a note to express profound appreciation on behalf of all involved in the European initiative to free the Siberian Seven, and for your recent coverage of their plight [“After Three Years: Glimmers of Movement in ‘Siberian Seven’ Impasse,” Sept. 18]. Your splendid coverage will be a great boost to the worldwide effort and enormous encouragement to the Vashchenko and Chmykhalov families.

We are becoming increasingly convinced that only a miracle will break the international deadlock that holds them trapped. At the same time, their situation demands the prayer and energy of all their Christian brothers and sisters who enjoy the freedom to worship.

PETER MEADOWS

Committee to Free the Siberian Seven

London, England

For some time I’ve been deeply concerned about the plight of Soviet Christians and so was very gratified to read Kent Hill’s report.

ROGER W. MING

Ithaca, N.Y.

Irresponsible Position

That “teetotalers” are the ones who “try to take their moral responsibility seriously” and that total abstinence is “the only truly responsible position” [“A Sickness Too Common to Cure?” Sept. 18], is to those who feel they are able to use beverage alcohol with biblical moderation an unfair statement. Essentially, you have said that such people do not take moral responsibility seriously and have taken a truly irresponsible position. The editorial appears to resemble the Pharisaical practice of “fencing the law.”

The real issue here is not really my “right” to drink beverage alcohol, but the lordship of Christ over the believer’s conscience. Christ alone, through the Scriptures, rules the believer’s conscience. If we begin to adopt the attitude that we will forbid and abandon whichever of God’s good gifts the world abuses, where will we stop?

ROBERT E. LYNN

Philadelphia, Pa.

I am truly surprised at your paragraph that quotes the Christian Science Monitor, stating you agree with the position that abstinence is the only responsible position a Christian can take. To say abstinence is the only position to take on this issue is to assume subtly that alcohol is in and of itself evil. That is what the Christian Science position would be.

Alcoholism is a severe problem in our land. It is one more symptom of man’s rebellion against God, a rebellion that will continue at a fevered pitch as the end times draw near. The church must work, preach, and live the gospel of Jesus Christ. The alcoholic, the rapist, the murderer, the Christian who cheats on his income tax … are all sinners. Indeed, we all need the only hope of the grace of Jesus. Our mandate as Christians is to lay down our lives to help this problem of alcoholism.

MRS. JOHN PESKE

Vista, Ca.

Disease Theory

I was disappointed in Russ Pulliam’s article, “Alcoholism: Sin or Sickness?” [Sept. 18]. The debate about whether alcoholism is a sin or sickness (disease) is purely academic in nature and has little to offer the reader. Alcoholism characterized as a disease is a functional definition, meaning it works! The disease theory short-circuits imaginary guilt about things beyond the alcoholic’s control, but does not relieve him/her from the personal responsibility, with God’s help, to recover.

REV. BILL BRANHAM

First United Presbyterian Church

Reinbeck, Iowa

I am a Christian convert and a priest of the Episcopal church who stalled this year in the same parish church (18 years) as a recovered alcoholic. I underwent treatment in a medical center for the disease of alcoholism and, by the grace of God, have experienced my second basic conversion and newness of life.

Understanding alcoholism as a disease is one of the most important, urgent tasks of education in the field today. Utter misunderstanding of the disease concept and acceptance of the myth that the concept is not a scientific achievement, along with other myths held by so-called experts, sets back the clock and is an obstacle to the hope of recovery through treatment for alcoholics who are still suffering.

REV. EDWARD E. MURPHY

Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church

Merced, Calif.

Too Long Tongue-Tied

This letter is to commend your very excellent articles on the issue of beverage alcohol. This is a subject on which the mainline churches have all too long been tongue-tied, and usually by their silence have gone along with surrender to the traffic in liquor. We are helpless on this issue only because we have been content to be helpless.

Your dealing with the alcohol issue sets a pace that should prove an inspiration to preachers who have contracted lockjaw on this subject, and cause more of us to speak out clearly. The limited influence of the churches in this matter is related to the limited performance in our pulpits. This is the point at which we should make prompt and effective improvement.

ELMER L. BROOKS

Hutchinson, Kans.

Inaccuracies

Your article, “Members Send a Message by Electing a New Bishop” [Sept. 18], was flawed by several inaccuracies and incredible statements.

The newsletters mentioned in the article as being mailed to all U.S. Pentecostal Holiness pastors came from my local church and were edited by me. The newsletters never once questioned Synan’s motives or character. They dealt with an issue and the consequences of Synan’s position on and involvement with this issue.

Your statement, “Following what was assumed to be Williams’s lead, newsletters were sent …,” there was no lead by Williams or anyone else. We acted exclusively upon the proding of our own consciences and hearts and what we understood as our scriptural duty.

REV. HUEY A. MILLS

Trinity Pentecostal Holiness Church

Lancaster, S.C.

Letters are welcome. Only a selection can be published. Since all are subject to condensation, those of 100 to 150 words are preferred. Address letters to Eutychus and His Kin,CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60187.

Harold John Ockenga has stood tall among evangelical leaders for nearly half a century. I first learned of him when he was elected president of the newly formed National Association of Evangelicals. One of the secrets of Ockenga’s success as a pastor and church leader was his thorough preparation for everything he did. He prepared his sermons from the Greek text and has continued to study his Greek Testament throughout his ministry. As a student worker in Harvard Divinity School library, I noted that Dr. Ockenga always checked more books out of the library than any other area pastor—or even faculty member or student (except one). Read our interview with Harold John Ockenga for insight into the mind and heart of one of the greatest evangelical leaders of our generation.

This issue we add three contributing editors to the CHRISTIANITY TODAY masthead. Canadian Baptist Clark Pinnock is professor of systematic theology at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario. An able writer and communicator, Dr. Pinnock first became known through his vigorous defense of the authority of the Bible. Since then, he has published widely in the area of apologetics and systematic theology. Presbyterian R. C. Sproul heads the Ligonier Valley Study Center near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He guides the starting programs of students who visit the study center and carries on a wide ministry in teaching history of Christian doctrine, systematic theology, and apologetics through his tapes and lectures. Missouri Lutheran David Scaer is professor of systematic theology at Concordia Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is much in demand as a preacher and as a lecturer at pastors’ conferences. All three are excellent scholars who also have warm hearts and a deep commitment to the pastoral ministry and the cause of missions and evangelism. Through their writings we trust that our Current Religious Thought column will prove more valuable than ever to Christian leaders. They seek to keep the busy pastor and lay church leader informed about the world of Christian scholarship.