Three of my friends who happened to be pastors got into a discussion, about retirement. Tom, who was 29, briefly and bluntly blurted out his position: “I don’t have to give a single thought to retirement until I’m 65—maybe even 70—because of new laws. Man, my retirement is a long way off.”

Dick, who was 55, said, “Oh, I think about retirement occasionally, but I’ve got lots of time. I have so much to do in First Church—it’s a large congregation. I’ll just keep on going as long as the good Lord lets me.”

Then there was Harry, 64. He commented, “I’ve certainly been doing a great deal of planning in the last six months because I never thought much about retirement before. I have always thought I had nothing to consider. Now I’m changing my mind. I do, of course, want to retire when I am 65; I have put in 39 good years for the Lord Jesus Christ and his church. I want and need a change of pace. Maybe I can find part-time pastoral work.”

Which one of the three is right? The answer is that there is no one right answer. Many things must be considered. As a starter, here are a half-dozen things to consider concerning retirement.

1. Do not wait too long to retire; in other words, stop on time. I know several pastors who waited too long.

Sam, who waited to complete 40 years in one congregation, is now 70, in poor physical condition, and he has difficulty seeing and hearing.

Pete served a congregation whose constitution required that he retire after the age of 70 unless he received a one-year-term call by vote of the congregation. He received the call for several years, but when he lost the last time, he was greatly disappointed.

Paul, who should have retired several years earlier when poor health overtook him, did not want to retire until a certain birthday.

Nelson said he would “continue as long as the Lord gives me strength.” This is surely a pious phrase that seems pure gold, but it is open to question.

2. Various people should be consulted right along. Except in independent congregations, you should consult the proper executive of your church denomination, according to your confidence in him. I was helped greatly by my own synod president, who secured a part-time position for me upon my retirement. He was my bishop in the best sense, and I have thanked him. You should also discuss the matter with your board’s pastoral relations committee.

3. What will you live on? How will you live? How are you fixed financially for retirement? No matter how trusting in the Lord you are, you must make financial plans.

Think of Christian stewardship. Some retired pastors have even higher income after retirement than before because of pension, social security, and part-time work.

Think of life insurance. It may be best to drop your term insurance because you already have had the protection. Payments on whole life policies will be less each year because of dividends. Such policies may be changed to paid-up insurance or extended insurance good for a certain period. It may be best to surrender whole life insurance and invest the proceeds.

Since medical costs usually represent a large portion of retirement costs, sign up for both parts of Medicare three months before age 65. You should bridge the gaps in Medicare coverage through supplementary insurance or your church’s pension fund.

4. Where should you live in retirement? If you do not own a home, are you going to buy a house or a condominium, or will you rent a house or an apartment? Increasing numbers of ministers own their own homes. If you go on living in the same place, the question arises of your relationship to the congregation from which you have retired—often as pastor emeritus without remuneration. You want to have the best of relationships with the new, younger pastor, and you should do nothing in that congregation without consulting him. Of course, if you have a part-time position in the congregation as, for example, visitation pastor, you will know what to do.

Some ministers have retired to warmer climates or to places where they have formerly lived and served, or even to their birthplaces. But be warned in advance that no one of these plans is necessarily the best solution.

5. Plan what you are going to do with your time when you retire. Most pastors have hobbies. The range is wide, from mechanical interests to research in history, philosophy, and theology. Some pastors and their wives travel extensively in retirement.

Many want to do part-time work, either in the church or elsewhere. Some denominational executives recommend that retirees find part-time work. There are other retirees who do not want to do anything—even to preach an occasional sermon. One pastor emphasized that while he had never been asked to preach after retiring, he really did not want to preach. For one thing, he was in poor health. Certainly those who wish to be free of all responsibilities should not be criticized. They have given themselves in full-time service for the Lord Jesus Christ and if they want no further responsibilities, they are entitled to that privilege.

6. Consider the wide opportunities open to you in retirement. It is best to keep your contacts with coworkers in the church by attending local pastoral meetings as in the past, annual meetings and national denominational meetings that may be of interest, especially if they are nearby. It is unfortunate that some retired ministers drop out of everything.

It is also good to keep up contacts with secular, educational, and cultural activities. For example, when I retired I moved to Buffalo, New York, where I have had several part-time positions as visitation pastor, supply preacher, and interim pastor. In Buffalo, there is a full range of activities. My wife and I attend many events, especially those in which we have had a long-time interest.

Finally, keep up your contacts with ministers, lay people, relatives, and friends, both those who are already retired and those who are not retired, in order to get well-rounded viewpoints. Read books, magazines, and newspapers, including columns on retirement. Be a volunteer in various organizations. You can serve in many different ways in your community. If you conducted Christian services in hospitals or nursing homes before retirement, continue to do so. Think of leisure, tours, trips, and visits.

Maybe, in retirement, you can do even more than you did before.

HOWARD A. KUHNLE¹Mr. Kuhnle serves part-time as visitation pastor for Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Buffalo, New York. He also preaches often in area churches and is currently interim pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Seneca, New York.

Born into a family of Jewish shopkeepers in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941, Robert Allen Zimmerman was destined through his music to play an important role in the course of American history. While Robert Zimmerman is not a household word, his professional name, Bob Dylan, surely is. To review Dylan’s poetry/music chronologically is to follow his generation’s reaction against shallow materialism and its desperate race to discover joy. It is also to chart one man’s quest for meaning in life.

Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, a small, iron-mining town, in a period when individualism was subordinated to “the group.” Early influences on his thought were the Old Testament’s concern for the oppressed, John Steinbeck’s novels, and the songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, “folk singers” whose message songs denounced American materialism and dramatized the plight of the poor—the inequitable distribution of abundant national resources. Dylan left Hibbing in 1959 to attend the University of Minnesota. Apparently it was not a happy time, and more and more he began to write poems and to sing. Shortly before Christmas 1960, 21-year-old Dylan fled the Midwest and “like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles A. Lindbergh, young Minnesotans of an earlier era, Dylan was off to seek a place in the pantheon of American heroes.”

He went to New York City, and in Greenwich Village developed a style lacking the polish and calculation of such big-name folk performers as Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio. Robert Shelton, a New York Times music editor, first heard him in September 1961 at a Greenwich Village club and predicted he would become “America’s greatest troubadour if he doesn’t explode.” In the beginning, he often sang traditional folk songs, but two early compositions offered powerful suggestions of what was to come: the moving “Death of Emmett Till,” an anguished denunciation of a racial murder in Mississippi in 1955, and an antinuclear statement, “I Will Not Go Underground.” He was perfectly armed for the times in which he found himself.

A Brown University student expressed it well in the December 1965 New York Times Magazine: “We’re concerned with things like the threat of nuclear war, the civil-rights movement, and the spreading blight of dishonesty, conformism and hypocrisy in the U.S.… and Bob Dylan is the only American writer dealing with these subjects in a way that makes sense to us.”

Sounding like an inspired Jeremiah, Dylan early on pointed at man’s inhumanity to man and the disrespect Americans held for God’s creation. In perhaps his most famous and most recorded song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan cried out against racial prejudice, war, and hatred. He continued an antinuclear theme on the same album, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, with the remarkable song about nuclear disaster and human suffering: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

In 1963 Dylan also made his major concert debut at New York’s Town Hall. America’s mood was clearly changing and questions were being raised that demanded and deserved answers. And Dylan was leading the way.

In early 1964, Dylan presented adynamic album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, containing some of his best and most biting criticism. The title cut from that album captured the youth mood precisely, and his satirical justification of war (“With God on Our Side”) anticipated the rise of the antiwar movement over Vietnam in a concise review of American history. This was an intense follow-up to his “Masters of War,” in which he denounced war profiteers who made money at the cost of young men’s lives. The lyrics conclude: “Even Jesus would never forgive what you do.” Judgments and punishment would follow, for “All the money you made / Will never buy back your soul.”

Without aspiring to lead, Dylan was in the vanguard of a developing counterculture. By the time we, his contemporaries, were discovering the politics of protest, he was moving musically and lyrically beyond us in new directions. Musically, he turned in 1965 to electric rock and roll, an abrupt change that almost single-handedly gave birth to “folk rock.” Lyrically, his work grappled with tough concepts like guilt and freedom. He still attacked the power structure in song-poems like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “Like A Rolling Stone,” but he spoke less to public issues, voicing instead a growing individual, private agony. Also to the fore came a developing preoccupation with religious imagery and themes.

In “Gates of Eden” (1965), Dylan contrasts life as it was meant to be (“There are no sins inside the Gates of Eden”) to the world as he saw it (“Sick … hungry … tired … torn”). In “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” he preached, castigating a shallow society’s games: “Human gods make everything from toy guns that spark / To flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark / Not much is really sacred.” Or, again in 1965, in retelling the Abraham-Isaac story, Abraham questions God, who replies: “You can do what you want, Abe, but / The next time you see me coming you’d better run.” Dylan’s theme rings clear and true: only through obedience to God can man achieve peace.

A July 1966 motorcycle accident removed Dylan from the public eye for 18 months. That accident came just after President Lyndon Johnson’s manipulation of the U.S. Senate to secure the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, upon which he legitimized the great build-up of American forces in Vietnam. The number of American soldiers in Vietnam escalated into the hundreds of thousands, and the monetary cost shot up to $20 billion by 1967. American cities were aflame, and American colleges were beginning to explode in protest of the war.

When he surfaced again, it was as a Dylan with a heightened sense of his Jewishness. It was also a Dylan who repudiated drugs, a staple of the counterculture he had helped spawn. In 1968, returning to simple guitar and softer music, Dylan released his John Wesley Harding album. What is surprising in it is evidence of a profound reading of the New Testament, especially in “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” clearly patterned after the parables of Jesus. He describes man’s search for wealth and his sensual lust, which bring only death; Frankie Lee denies that eternity exists. But Dylan moralizes: “Don’t go mistaking Paradise for that home across the road.” He was again accused of selling out, of abandoning his role as public conscience. But in retrospect, he can again be viewed as leading his generation.

In the middle and late sixties, Dylan was beginning to write that man is ultimately accountable for his sin—free to choose to obey or disobey God’s divine directive—that man will be judged. In 1971, in a powerful poem-song “Sign on the Cross,” it is evident that his religious pilgrimage has progressed. He is now haunted by and grappling with the meaning of Jesus Christ. In 1970 he had written the beautiful, exceptional modern psalm, “Father of Night.” But clearly in “Sign on the Cross” he has a different concern. He says the sign on Jesus’ cross can never be forgotten: He suggests that man cannot escape that symbol and what it means.

Jewish author Stephen Pickering described Dylan in 1974–5 as “a post-Holocaust Jewish voice, searching for and rediscovering the manifestations of God.… [His] poetry centers upon God, upon Heaven … upon the … Jewish Messianic tradition. His sense of impending apocalypse (the dialectical struggle between darkness and light) burns into the … heart. In his moral anger … Bob Dylan is a Jewish voice aware of the struggle which can tear apart the heart: what one ought to do as opposed to what one wants to do.”

Pickering’s analysis was perceptive, and in 1979 rumors of Dylan’s conversion to Christianity swept through rock publications. There had been others earlier, but this was Dylan, who had scaled the pinnacle of the rock world. “Surely not.” said the veterans of the 1960s movement. “That’s Pat Boone’s style, not Dylan’s.”

But the answer was simple and affirmative in late 1979 with the release of his album Slow Train Coming. “Jesus Rock” music flooded the market in the late 1970s, much of it rightly characterized as trite. But Slow Train was not trite: it was the “old” Bob Dylan once again focusing his remarkable talents on the decadence of America’s materialistic culture in prophetic fashion. But as critic Sharon Gallagher put it. “Now there’s a framework and direction for that anger with a new element of hope.”

It is not just that Dylan has come out of his experiences changed; that comes through clearly in his lyrics. This album is also exceptional in terms of its musical quality. One secular reviewer said, “I don’t know what’s happened to Dylan or what it means, but it’s good.” In 1980, he issued another overtly Christian album. Saved, which was favorably reviewed in both secular and Christian publications. Even the reviewer in Rolling Slone, while criticizing the lyrics, argued that Saved displayed the energy of the “old” Dylan.

There are cynics—I have heard them. Christians and non-Christians—who argue that Dylan’s conversion is based on the dollar sign, that he is simply cashing in on the trendy evangelical movement in America. Such an analysis seems to me unsatisfactory; Dylan’s concern for justice has been consistent throughout his career. Christianity is simply a logical extension of his long-term themes. In most cases, Charles Colson’s for example, ethics follow conversion; in Dylan’s life it was just the reverse.

Time, of course, may tell. But Dylan, whose work is even now finding its rightful place in anthologies of modern American poetry, has a ready-made audience—those of us who grew up with him and listened as he articulated the problems and inequities of our society; those of us who for the first time really felt the wrongness of racial prejudice, of nuclear war, of material decadence through his writing. How will we respond to the “new” Bob Dylan?

CHARLES J. BUSSEY¹Dr. Bussey is associate professor of history at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

In the 1970s, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s controversy over the historicity of certain biblical accounts was prominent in the press. Just when things were getting back to normal, a new controversy over objective justification has broken out.

The terms objective and subjective justification are rarely used outside Missouri Synod circles and few others are aware of what they mean. The terms refer not to two justifications, but to only one act viewed from divine and human perspectives. Objective justification is that one-time judicial and forensic act of God by which he pronounces, declares, and regards all men as righteous in his sight. The doctrine was never intended to teach that all men, even unbelievers, are in themselves righteous. This pronouncement of justification of all men is founded in Christ’s universal atonement by his death for all sins, and in his resurrection. The doctrine is thus also known as universal justification.

God has put away his wrath in the atoning death of Christ and views all men in Christ’s resurrection as acceptable to him. Objective indicates that it is God’s act alone, which he accomplished in and through Christ, and is prior to faith. Universal is used because all men are embraced. Objective justification is no mere theological abstraction, but the overarching reality that gives substance to the gospel preaching.

Parallel to objective justification is God’s universal condemnation of the world in Adam and because of him. Though “objective condemnation” is not used, all men are condemned because they have sinned in Adam even though they have not individually and personally committed sins. Objective justification follows the universal condemnation of the world as the new overarching reality in God’s sight. As in Adam all have sinned, so in Christ all have been justified. Adam took the initiative in bringing sins to all, but in Christ God brought justification to all. As God looked upon all men as present in Adam and condemned them for his sin, so God looks now upon all men as assumed into Christ and regards them as righteous.

Objective justification is essential to the proclamation of the gospel since in it the preacher declares to the believer and unbeliever alike something God has already done, not something he intends to do. Justification of the world is accomplished reality and forms the actual content of the preached message. The preaching of Christ, as the atonement for sins is itself the preaching of justification.

Subjective justification refers to the personal reception by faith of the proclamation that in Christ all sins are forgiven. It is only the other side of the same coin. What is viewed as accomplished by God is in time apprehended by faith. God’s justification of the world in Christ becomes a reality within the individual by faith. But faith cannot be looked upon as a cause or a thing; its value rests in that it grasps the forgiveness God has procured in Christ. It must be understood in the process of justification as sole receptivity.

Objective justification is only a restatement of the two great Reformation principles: sola gratia, salvation by grace alone, which means that in Christ God has accomplished everything necessary for all men’s salvation; and sola fide, by faith alone, which reinforces sola gratia by denying to man any part in salvation and refers to the passive condition in which man receives God’s benefits. Where these principles are not kept in proper perspective, the very content of the church’s message is changed so that sermons about faith and the Christian life replace the proclamation of God’s act in Christ.

Some see real dangers in the concept of objective justification, or at least with the terminology. The objection that the phrase itself is not found in Scripture cannot be taken too seriously, since much important dogmatic terminology (Trinity, one substance, inerrancy) is not taken directly from the Bible.

A more important objection is that objective justification implies or leads to universalism. Just as atonement and justification should not be confused, so should justification and salvation also be kept distinct. Justification refers to God’s prior view of the world as a result of Christ’s universal atonement for sin. Salvation is an eschatologically oriented doctrine in that it refers to how God will view the world on the Last Day.

Still another objection to objective justification is that while Scripture indeed distinguishes between those who are good and just from those who are bad and unjust, objective justification is said to ignore this distinction. But the gospel—the preaching of atonement and justification—actually brings to men caught in the dilemma of their own awareness of sin the way God now views the world in Christ. Scriptures are clearly eschatological that inform us of God’s good pleasure over those who have accepted the gospel and his displeasure over those who have in fact rejected his universal atonement and justification. Objective justification is misapplied if the eschatological distinction between believers and unbelievers is eradicated.

Without objective justification, justification deteriorates from a theocentric act to an anthropocentric one. Though justification actualizes itself by faith within time in each generation, it remains an act perfectly accomplished by God in Christ. It gives justification “objective” and “universal” dimensions. Christ appears before the Father for atonement as not only one man, but as the representative man who has assumed all humanity into himself. This justification is objective because it happens prior to human knowledge or cooperation, and it is universal since it embraces all men.

The doctrine is also not without consequences for the church’s preaching obligations. Unless justification is prior to faith—but without ever denying that it actualizes itself in faith—the gospel is no longer indicative in describing an already existing condition of God’s contentment with the world, but it becomes a conditional offering of terms that must first be fulfilled before and in order for the sinner to be justified. Conditional justification, even if it is dependent on faith, is no longer an act that God universally accomplished for all men in Christ; it degenerates into separate happenings occurring in the life of each individual believer. The theocentric or Christocentric view of justification is lost to an anthropocentric one. The gospel is not what God has done in Christ but what God intends to do within the believer. Sanctification has replaced justification as the content of the gospel.

The doctrine of objective justification intends to preserve the concept that the question of salvation must be answered in Christ, not in the believer. It does not allow it ever to be answered by an introspective gaze into faith, but insists that all concerns be resolved by God’s act of justification in Christ outside of man.

The last volley in this controversy has not been fired, especially with extra heat to be provided by a July church convention. Some light may be shed if the controversy gives the church an opportunity to reevaluate and appreciate what this doctrine intends to teach.

DAVID P. SCAER¹Dr. Scaer is associate professor of systematic theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Editor at large J. D. Douglas again reports from Africa.

It was Saturday evening, and the Lake Victoria Hotel was crammed with Ugandans celebrating the second anniversary of liberation from Idi Amin. The clerk was apologetic: all accommodations were taken. Those who had come to dance were staying overnight because guerrillas in the surrounding countryside made it dangerous to be out during the hours of darkness.

There was no alternative. My Australian colleague and I, glad to be out of the drizzling rain, settled down to sit the night away in the only space available: two chairs in a corner of the bar.

We had arrived two hours earlier at Entebbe on one of the national airline’s irregular flights from Dar-es-Salaam. So desperate is the fuel situation that the plane overflew an intermediate stop in Tanzania. We were four hours late. The handful of passengers was hurried through immigration and customs formalities; officials wanted to get home before dark.

Our own unexpected arrival worried them, for it was impossible to get to Kampala (over 20 miles away) that night. They advised us to head for the hotel, four miles away. We managed to get the solitary cab driver outside the terminal building to agree to take us to the hotel for only a couple of dollars. But the hotel was a different matter. A meager portion of chicken, potato, and spinach, a little watery cordial, and the cost of a room available after midnight left us nothing for breakfast out of $130 we had dutifully changed at the airport.

There was something bizarre about celebrations in a country whose economy is in ruins through sheer mismanagement. Inflation is running at 100 percent (but, pointed out a resourceful evangelist, “the wages of sin are still the same”). On the black market, five gallons of gasoline will bring over $500. Transport is a major problem for daily living and for relief work. Two pounds of meat—when it is available—takes almost the whole of a laborer’s monthly wage. Industrial output is down to about 15 percent of capacity. Rarely does a Ugandan home currently have running water.

Roadblocks abound; even during the short ride from the airport we had encountered two of them. I stopped counting after 30 as we traveled several hundred miles in the following few days. Many of the posts are manned by Tanzanians who came two years ago as liberators and remained as peacekeepers. They are due for withdrawal in July. This is just as well, for their welcome has worn thin. Poorly and fitfully paid (their own homeland is in the economic doldrums), many react by seeing wayfarers as fair game. Not all the brigandage in this unquiet land is unofficial.

We had our baggage opened in the middle of the road, close interest expressed in certain possessions, and the vaguely menacing suggestion made that we might be there for a very long time. This broad hint ignored, our white faces evidently deterred them from pursuing this line of thought.

At other checkpoints were Ugandan soldiers, their indiscipline apparent in the way they often harassed, assaulted, and robbed their fellow countrymen. The police, on the other hand, we found consistently polite.

In Kampala, a seared and scarred city, gunfire is heard most nights, and is variously attributed to jumpy soldiers, police firing on looters, and bandits. Political killings are common: one of the government members of Parliament, a professor of psychiatry, was killed while we were there.

The military often exact terrible retribution on innocent and guilty alike. We passed Namanve Forest where the bodies of many of Amin’s victims were formerly dumped.

It seems certain now that the recent elections were rigged, and that well-meaning international observers did not pry into irregularities on the grounds that to consolidate President Milton Obote’s position would be the lesser evil, and would avert greater bloodshed. This may prove to have been a shortsighted view. The political situation is deteriorating further, questions are asked about how far Obote is really in control, and bleak prophecies are made about what will happen when the 10,000 Tanzanians pull out.

It seems clear that the bedeviling factor in Uganda is tribalism (a vital issue also in neighboring Kenya and in Zimbabwe). This was unexpectedly highlighted by a government minister who spoke at the enthronement of the new bishop of North Kigezi the day after we arrived.

“Some of us talk unity,” he told the 30,000-strong congregation that included, four of his ministerial colleagues, “but we act tribally.” Astonishingly, after concluding his remarks, he led the vast assembly in a revival hymn. The choir was directed by a former member of Parliament, defeated by the same minister in the elections.

However shaky the state of the republic, the Christian witness in Uganda has emerged from past and present tribulations resilient and unquenchable. Bishop Festo Kivengere tells of an incident in the Kampala cathedral just after Archbishop Janani Luwum was slain in 1977. Some women were arranging flowers for the memorial service when another bishop came in looking depressed. One of the ladies took his hand. “Dear Bishop,” she said, “we are not worried. All of this, you know, has just put us 50 times forward!”

The traditional message of revival in Uganda has not changed. That revival did not start originally with any great evangelist or missionary, but with ordinary people who had accepted Christ. The extent of lay participation in the evangelistic outreach, moreover, has been impressive. Out of it has come also a profound social concern very relevant to a society which over the last tragic decade has known thousands of new widows and orphans.

I heard one Ugandan young woman concerned with relief work pray, “Lord, help us to be kind to those we are trying to help.” We kept coming across Christians who were working and ministering faithfully in isolated places, oblivious of physical danger and primitive conditions.

In Kabale, the southwestern Uganda town which is the center of Bishop Kivengere’s diocese, I talked with James Katarikawe, Anglican clergyman and the African Enterprise team leader in Uganda. “During Amin’s regime,” he said, referring to the years 1971–79, “many Ugandans suffered spiritually because they were affected by hardship and torture as well as by shortage of essential commodities. We felt that Uganda needed spiritual as well as physical rehabilitation, and that this should start with pastors and their wives.”

Conferences were arranged for them, approved by the archbishop and bishops of the Church of Uganda (Anglicans, who number nearly four million, are by far the largest Protestant body in the country). Since then, 13 of the 18 dioceses have been covered in 16 months. Remarkable scenes have been reported from these meetings; in some cases, pastors and their wives have stood up before their bishop and professed conversion.

“In one town, after a pastors’ conference,” recounted Katarikawe, “we decided to go to a nearby market to share our testimony with the people. We started talking to them, telling them about the love of God through Jesus Christ, and what that had meant to us. As a result, 12 young men who were just loitering there accepted the Lord. Pastors in the area have since told us that the new converts are remaining faithful.”

That was one of our enduring impressions as we cleared the last roadblock and drove into Kenya. Whether giving thanks for the life and death of a beloved leader, or celebrating the liberation of souls from a greater tyranny than Amin’s, or simply coping joyfully with the daily privations of Uganda 1981, these believers regard it all as taking them “50 times forward.”

Native Americans of hemisphere are drawn to Oklahoma event.

Three Pueblo Indian women of the Jemez tribe had just sung “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.” To them, the song’s lyrics meant a lot: people in their northern New Mexico tribe of 2,000 take advantage of, and poke fun at, the tribe’s handful of Christians, said the women.

“Though people call me a holy roller. I won’t turn back, I won’t turn back,” went a final verse.

Afterwards, Indian evangelist Thomas Claus dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. “It’s just like I’m living in a dream to see all this meeting come to pass,” he said from the speaker’s podium.

Claus, a full-blooded Mohawk, spent most of the previous two years organizing last month’s “Sonrise ’81,” The first-ever inter-American congress of Christian Indian leaders called attention to the need for indigenous Indian leaders and churches. The Jemez women and other delegates reminded listeners that Indian Christians form a minority among their own people.

While certain tribes and Indian groups have growing churches, by and large Native Americans remain a sizable mission field. Only about 2 percent of the 20 million Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts in the Western hemisphere are evangelical Christians, asserted planners of Sonrise ’81. They estimate that 500 of the 1,200 tribes lack an indigenous, evangelical church.

A trained, motivated leadership could turn things around, Indian evangelicals believe. “I’d like to see every Indian church have an Indian pastor,” said Claus. “We need more Indian Bible institutes and colleges.”

Seeking to build and stimulate this leadership, about 300 invited Native American leaders came to last month’s congress held on the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman. Most represented North American tribes known perhaps to many Anglos only from late-night cowboy movies—Shoshone, Osage, Ojibway, Tuscarora, and Choctaw, among others. But congress planners also spent about half of their $50,000 budget for transportation of 40 or so Central and South American Indians who attended: Cakchiquel of Guatemala. Misquito of Nicaragua, Quechuas of Peru, and others. In all, more than 60 tribes and 10 nations were represented. Many showed off their native dress in a congress-ending parade and rally in which World Vision’s Stanley Mooneyham, Theodore Epp of “Back to the Bible,” and Oklahoma Governor George Nigh were honored with conferral of Indian names.

The history of Sonrise goes back several years. As the invited delegate representing North American Indians at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, Claus remembers, “I felt all alone. Of the 3,000 delegates, I was the only Indian.”

Feeling convicted about developing Native American leaders. Claus spent all one night walking and praying in the empty streets of Lausanne. That morning, he says, God called him to lead such a cause. A year later he organized a Conference on Indian Evangelism and Leadership in Albuquerque, New Mexico. About 25 Indian leaders attended the meeting, held in conjunction with a Billy Graham crusade. Claus and Graham became friends in the 1950s when both were Youth for Christ staff members—Graham, the YFC vice-president, and Claus, a member of a family gospel singing team.

From the Albuquerque meeting emerged the consensus for a new organization that would develop a stronger Indian church. The projected organization emerged in the form of CHIEF (Christian Hope Indian Evangelical Fellowship), and headed by Claus. CHIEF has family and women’s ministries among Indians, and it sponsored last month’s five-day Sonrise congress.

Denominations and small, independent mission agencies have plowed plenty of personnel and energy into Indian missions over the years. But often results were slim, as apparently some “white men” created their own problems by forcing Western structures upon the Indians. Sonrise delegates recalled mission-run schools on the reservations in which children were punished for speaking their native tongue.

“There resulted instances when Indians asked, ‘Does becoming a Christian mean I have to give up my language?’ ” said Ed Young of Gospel Recordings. The Los Angeles-based group sends out “field recordists” who, with the help of an interpreter, record in the local dialect a simple evangelistic or discipleship message, and then makes those tapes available to the locals through missionaries and national believers (Young said 150 to 170 Indian languages are still spoken in the U.S.)

Among the Navajo—the largest tribe in the U.S., with a population of 175,000—church growth is spiraling. Workers say such growth is the best example of what happens when the Indians themselves take leadership and form indigenous churches.

In 1950, after more than 50 years of missionary work, only about 35 Navajo congregations existed. Since then, 308 new churches have been planted, 200 with Navajo pastors, said Thomas Dolaghan of Navajo Gospel Mission. He describes the turnabout in The Navajos Are Coming to Jesus (William Carey Library, 1978).

Dolaghan lists several reasons for the growth, but most have to do with the Navajos being able (and allowed by missionaries) to adopt much of their culture to Christianity, and to develop their own leaders and churches. Churches were built from the Navajos’ emphasis on the extended family, or “kinship evangelism.” New Navajo Christians were encouraged to remain in their family groups (camps), and to witness to relatives. Many “house” churches grew, with the average size of most Navajo congregations today about 35.

Dologhan says the Navajo encountered many of the problems shared by other Indians: alcoholism—“I performed 25 burials in one year, and 21 were alcohol related”; lack of self-worth—“We teach there is no greater personhood than being a son of the living God”; and many social needs—“God has the power to meet those needs.”

Anglo workers can play an important role, but they must be sensitive and patient, Sonrise ’81 attenders said in interviews. Frustrated workers who leave after a year only hurt the credibility of others.

White evangelicals can help with their dollars by financing seminary and college scholarships for Christian young people, said Russell Begaye, who directs the Southern Baptist work in 430 Indian congregations in the U.S. He and others discussed the need for Indian studies programs at evangelical seminaries, theological education by extension, and for establishment of a seminary for Native Americans.

Besides attending the many seminars and workshops, attenders had a daily Bible hour with pastor John MacArthur of Panorama City, California. Nightly preaching services and musical programs from various tribes seemed planned to recharge the leaders spiritually so they could charge up their people back home.

Mostly because of economics, the conference cut back from a previously announced nine days to five. And a hoped-for attendance of 800 to 1,200 did not materialize. Claus had sent information packets to most denominations in the U.S., but few sent representatives.

Still, Claus believed the goals of forming new fellowship and strategies were met. Offshoot meetings are already planned: the Latin Americans formed a planning committee for a future regional conference, as did Indians from the upper Midwest and Canada.

Indians Work At Sorting Out Their Culture And Religion

“There’s one thing I don’t like about the government schools,” muttered a Minnesota Chippewa, “They teach Columbus Day. How can you discover a place if people are already living there?”

Despite the many language and cultural differences between Native American tribes in the U.S., there remains a sense of common identity and pride. Indian evangelist Thomas Claus said, “There’s no Indian culture per se, but we feel a kinship.”

(Some Sonrise ’81 attenders preferred the terms Native American, or tribal or indigenous peoples, while others felt comfortable with “Indian.” Most pointed out, however, that the latter term is not accurate, the tribes not coming from India.)

The 1980 U.S. census showed that the population of Native Americans topped one million for the first time. Aleuts, Eskimos, and Indians combine for a 1.4 million grouping, or about .6 percent of the U.S. population.

Most Indians continue to live on trust areas and reservations, which are located in more than 30 states. There they have certain economic advantages—no state or property taxes, and housing and food subsidies.

Jobs, however, are scarce on the reservation, and unemployment is high. An estimated 60 percent are unemployed on the huge, 25,000-acre Navajo reservation touching parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, according a missionary there. For that reason, more Indians are moving to the cities. Estimates range as high as 10,000 to 15,000 Indians in Minneapolis; 20,000 in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and 25,000 in Chicago.

Only now are mission groups and many Indian Christians realizing the need for Indian urban ministry. The Southern Baptists, for instance, opened their first Indian church in Chicago this month. Claudio Iglesias, pastor of an SBC church and a native Kuna Indian of Panama, helps lead the interdenominational but government-funded Indian Urban Center located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The center staff helps Indians find jobs and housing.

On call 24 hours a day as a police chaplain, Iglesias says he counsels Indians—perhaps feeling lonely, and cut off from cultural ties—who are strung out on drugs and alcohol.

Generally, traditional Indian religion views life holistically, with little distinction made between the secular and the religious. Traditionalist Indians believe in a creator-God, but attach significance to spiritism, the harmony of nature, and interpret all of life through their religion.

Evangelists to traditionalists shouldn’t attack the old beliefs, cautioned James O. Buswell III of William Carey International University, who did doctoral study on the religious practices of the Seminoles. Evangelists should witness in love, letting the Holy Spirit do the work, but also providing a Christian philosophy of the harvest, healing, the earth, lightning—“anything that the old religion emphasized,” he said.

Indian Christians are upset by the influence of the Native American Church, a group using the hallucinogenic drug peyote in worship. Many Indians attest to a fear of the spirit world because of personal experiences with the occult.

Navajo Herman William describes leading to Christ a man who became afraid after owls began talking to him. Williams attests to a ministry to medicine men, and says several became Christians and are leaders in Christian and Missionary Alliance churches he pastors. Exorcisms and a renouncing of fetishes often are involved, he says.

Many Indian Christians are torn over which cultural practices can be retained within their Christianity. For instance, festivals that once had religious meaning are now regarded mostly as a time to have fun. Can a Christian participate?

Chippewa Craig Smith, who will head a Sonrise regional conference next year in Minneapolis, hopes time will be devoted to this issue. Probably the biggest question facing many Indian Christians is, What is cultural and what is religious?

Historic church-lodge rivalry behind Italian government’s fall.

How could membership in a Masonic Order possibly have led to the downfall last month of the Italian government?

Christian Democrat Premier Arnaldo Forlani’s government resigned as three of its cabinet ministers were linked to the secret Propaganda Due (P-2) lodge. The biggest military shakeup there since World War II was also touched off by the P-2 scandal, and hundreds of prominent Italians stood to lose their jobs.

Alleged blackmail and criminal activities were involved, but much of the controversy arose from the fact that the cabinet ministers, 30 members of Parliament, military officials, diplomats, judges, and other influential figures belonged to a secret society outlawed by the Italian constitution.

The dramatic turn of events puzzled Americans, but was much less mystifying to Italians, whose history is full of rivalry between the Roman Catholic church and the Freemasons.

Freemasonry did carry political overtones in early U.S. history. About one-third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—were members.

Today, however, the Freemasons in North America are known by such names as the Shriners and the Orders of DeMolay and Rainbow, and are regarded merely as fraternal and charitable organizations. This overlooks the fact that they are quasi-religious in character and form the largest worldwide secret society. In recent decades they have not been perceived as sinister, even though their occasional anti-Catholicism and reluctance to recognize lodges of black Masons brought some adverse publicity.

But Italian history is littered with actions of Freemasons who, in their campaign for a strong, unified secular state, rocked the Catholic boat.

When the first Italian lodge was founded in Florence in 1733, the pope was the temporal ruler of much of central modern-day Italy. Beginning with Pope Clement XII in 1738, the Catholic church, under threat of excommunication, forbade Catholics from becoming Masons. Eight later popes repeated his condemnation of the secret fraternity, including Pius IX, who attacked the organization in an encyclical in 1869—just before Garibaldi, a Masonic grand master, wrested Rome from him in 1870.

Eventually, however. Freemasonry softened its anticlericalism, and the church began to reciprocate.

In spite of the denial, by 1971 the Italian press began to publicize three lengthy articles published in Civilta Cattolica, by Jesuit priest Giovanni Caprile. Caprile appeared to suggest that it is possible to be a “good” Mason and at the same time a “good” Catholic. There were no denials from the Holy See. The thought seemed to fit the mood of Pope Paul VI, who was making every effort to propagate the “Catholic conscience” among “all men of good will” (Ecclesiam suam).

In July 1974, the head of the Sacred Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, Cardinal Franjo Seper, replied, with papal approval, to a letter from the president of the American Episcopacy, Cardinal John J. Krol: “Only those Catholics enrolled in associations that truly conspire against the Church” are henceforth to be excommunicated. (It said nothing about those that conspire against civil government—a significant omission, in hindsight.)

Meant to remain secret, the letter was almost immediately published in the American Catholic Star Herald. An avalanche of inquiries arrived in Rome asking the significance of Seper’s letter. Nothing negative was heard from Vatican circles; the hunt for Masonic demons appeared to be over.

Italian Catholics began to affiliate with Masonry as never before. Masonic enrollment doubled. By 1975 more than 100 Masons were members of the Italian Parliament. Most of these belong to the anticlerical lay parties, but even some of the most important personalities in the Catholic-endorsed Christian Democrat party are associated with the Masons.

Masonic grand master Lino Salvini and official representatives of the Vatican met often. Salvini has claimed that some 30 Christian Democrat members of Parliament are also members of the Masonic Order. The Jesuits have been at the forefront of the rapprochement, but even Bishop Alberto Ablondi, president of the Italian Episcopacy Commission on Ecumenism, attended one of the dialogue sessions.

When Pope Paul VI died, the Rivista Massonica lauded him, saying: “This is the first time a pope has died who was not in a state of hostility with the Masons.”

Not all Catholics were pleased with the truce. Ultraconservative Bishop Marcel Lefebvre and other right-wing Catholics openly accused Paul VI of being “a Lutheran sympathizer and a Mason.” Inside the Vatican, anti-Masonic poison spread, due to the heavy financial losses suffered at the hands of their chief financier, Michele Sindona. An avowed Mason, as Vatican financial affairs front man, Sindona led the Vatican down a path of speculation that ended in his conviction in New York City on charges of bank fraud, and in millions of dollars of losses for the Vatican.

With Pope John Paul II, the winds changed dramatically. One move after another has marked him with traditionalist tendencies, and his conventional hostility to the Freemasons was affirmed by recent developments.

In March, Italian investigators seized materials from the home and office of Licio Gelli, the founder and grand master of Propaganda Due, an illegal secret lodge. P-2 is distinct from the reported 526 lodges of the 20,000-member Grand Orient Masonic grouping. Italy’s law against secret organizations did not figure to affect the Grand Orient, since its membership lists were presumed to be available to the authorities on request. However, the P-2 list found in the raid had been kept truly secret, thus exposing its members to prosecution.

In the mid-1970s, Italy’s left-wing press began asserting that P-2, with about 1,700 members, was tied to a “hidden center of power,” presumably Fascist in nature. This may prove true. A parliamentary committee investigating the scandal has charged that the lodge was involved in a plot to set up an authoritarian government in Italy. Magistrates are also investigating probable P-2 links to the faked 1979 kidnaping of Sindona from New York, and other criminal acts.

Learning of the undercover investigation, the Vatican quickly responded. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inserted a 24-line announcement on the second page of a March issue of the Vatican’s semiofficial daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano:

“The present canonical discipline,” it stated, “remains in full force and has not been modified in any way; consequently, neither the excommunication nor the other penalties have been abrogated.”

With the rumored investigation, that sent shock waves throughout Italian society. And it positioned the Catholic church for the public breaking of the scandal last month, allowing the news to vindicate John Paul’s tougher stance toward the Masonic Orders.

Pauline priest Rosario Esposito, leading Catholic authority on the Masons in Italy, says he agrees with the canonical order issued in March, but doubts that the last word has been said. He expects the soon-to-be issued revision of the Code of Canon Law (a process under way since Vatican II in 1962) to provide that.

“If the church accepts to dialogue with the Marxists, I don’t see how it can possibly refuse to do the same with the Masons,” Esposito says. He added, “Whoever seeks to discredit and cloud the rapport between the church and Masonry, attempting to return to a preconciliar position, is commiting a grave error that will put the church in very serious difficulty.”

Liberal U.S. Catholics reacted to the Pope’s clampdown bitterly. “Rome knows best.” Commented Peter Hebblethwaite, the National Catholic Reporter Vatican affairs writer, “No change. We are back to square one.”

ROYAL L. PECK

Operation Mobilization

Logos Docks At Shanghai, Displays Books In Peking

Correspondent David Adeney accompanied the ship Logos on its visit to Shanghai, China. His report:

Operation Mobilization’s ship Logos, with 133 people representing 25 nations, sailed up the Huangpu River on April 27, and berthed at the Shanghai Passenger Terminal. During the three-day journey from Hong Kong, much time was spent in orientation and prayer in preparation for 15 days in China. We realized as soon as we arrived that the Chinese authorities were uncertain how to deal with a ship that is so different from any other that has visited China. This was evident when swarms of customs officials boarded the ship. They went everywhere, asking questions, taking pictures, and inquiring into the work of the ship’s company.

On our first day in Shanghai, 10 officials flew down from Peking, and, together with 40 from Shanghai, came to a reception on the Logos. They were shown pictures of the Logos in other ports and listened to a description of its activities, and songs by the ship’s choir. In concluding remarks, the director, Allan Adams, stated our desire to learn through our visit to China. At the same time, he emphasized that as a company of people, we were committed to seeking to follow the teaching of the Bible. The officials toured the ship after the reception, and visited the book exhibition. The authorities would not allow visitors to board the Logos, so there was no public book exhibition in Shanghai.

The Chinese government had only given permission for a week-long book exhibition to be held in the National Art Gallery in Peking. This exhibition of mainly secular books also contained two Bibles, the illustrated New Bible Dictionary, and about 30 titles related to Christian issues. Between 700 and 1,000 young people attended the exhibition each day and spent hours reading the books, including some of the Christian writings. The books were displayed under various topics on shelves along the walls and people could exchange their ID card for a book, which they would then read at one of the tables in the center of the hall. There were no opportunities to buy books.

During the Shanghai stay, tour groups from the ship visited Hangchow (Hangchou). Soochow (Su-chou), and places around the city. We had prepared a leaflet in both English and Chinese describing the character of the Logos and giving a short Christian greeting. The groups took these illustrated leaflets off the ship and used them as conversation starters with people they met in the parks or on the tours. They found the people extremely friendly, and many enjoyed meaningful conversations with Chinese young people. The authorities in Peking, however, felt the leaflet was too religious to be distributed at the book exhibition, and substituted a more general one describing the ship that did not include the Christian message.

On the two Sundays, members of the Logos attended seven different churches—all of them packed. Some of the ship’s company met with Christians in their homes. Chinese Christians said they prayed for the ship and spoke of the encouragement its coming had brought them. They especially appreciated news of the “prayer chain,” which was maintained throughout the visit.

The response of officials to the ship’s visit appeared to be positive. A tour guide, for instance, remarked about the simple and chaste lifestyle on board—in contrast to other ships he had observed. Government functionaries gave a farewell banquet to the heads of departments on board ship and expressed the hope that the Logos would return to China.

Guatemala Conference

Seminary Event Sparks World Missions Thrust

Ninety-nine years ago Presbyterian missionary J. C. Hill arrived in Guatemala, invited by liberal President Justo Rufino Barrios to establish the first permanent Protestant work in the country. Since that auspicious beginning, the evangelical church, preparing now to celebrate its centennial in 1982, has grown from a persecuted handful to a respected, sizable minority. Estimates put the evangelical community at between 15 and 20 percent of the population, or well over one million Christians.

Throughout its history, the church in Guatemala and in the rest of Central America has been strongly evangelistic. Evangelists and colporteurs hiked through the hills, reaching remote villages. In some cases, churches have extended their outreach to neighboring countries.

But despite their strength, evangelicals in Central America compare poorly with countries like India and South Korea when it comes to the organization and support of Third World missions. So there was special significance in the “First Conference on the World-Wide Mission of the Church.” held in Guatemala City last month.

Sponsored by the Central American Theological Seminary, the conference drew some 300 participants. Including the students and speakers, 22 countries were represented. Evening sessions, open to the public, drew crowds of up to a thousand.

Ronald Blue, chairman of the missions department at Dallas Theological Seminary and a former missionary in Central America and Spain, presented the biblical basis of missions to the group. The program also included workshops on specific topics, and reports on unreached areas of the world. But perhaps the greatest challenge came from Theodore Williams of India, executive secretary of the missions commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship, and Wade Coggins, executive director of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and interim general secretary of WEF, who reported on the development of Third World missions in other areas.

“God doesn’t manufacture his plan in one country and then export it all over the world,” said Williams. He urged that local groups be free to develop sending agencies along their own patterns. He also noted that in India, support for their missionaries does not usually come from the wealthy but from those who give out of the little they have.

Prince Ntintili, a black South African studying at Dallas Seminary, cautioned participants against trying to duplicate traditional Western agencies. “Christians in Africa think that to be a missionary you have to have a lot of money and a lot of degrees since that is the pattern they have seen,” he said. But he also noted that there are over five thousand Africans serving as missionaries on their own continent.

On the final day of the conference, the participants approved the “Declaration of Guatelama,” a statement in which they confessed that after “almost a century of evangelical presence … we have done very little for the world mission of the church,” and pledged themselves to be informed, to pray, and “to seek immediately the Lord’s direction as to the steps necessary in order to form missionary societies or other appropriate national organizations, in the Central American area.”

The reaction of both pastors and students to the conference was enthusiastic. One student from Bolivia commented, “I always thought of missionaries only as white people. Now I realize God can use anyone.”

A pastor from El Salvador said, “God has given us so much fruit that we shouldn’t worry if he takes one or two people from each congregation to be missionaries.”

One concrete result of the conference will be the addition of a missions curriculum to the seminary’s courses, said Emilio Antonio Nunez, president of the organizing committee for the conference and head of the seminary’s graduate program.

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

Scotland

The Kirk Is Immovable On Military Deterrent

In recent years, commissioners to the Church of Scotland General Assembly in Edinburgh witnessed groups and placards outside the hall, protesting against some past or anticipated apostasy. This year a sizable body of dissidents gathered to give a hostile reception to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she arrived on a visit to the Kirk’s supreme court.

That court was later to take up the matter of unilateral nuclear disarmament, a position sought by an influential and growing lobby. It had the support for the first time of the powerful church and nation committee, which saw such disarmament as “the expression of Christian witness most consonant with the gospel of the nuclear age.”

David Whiteford disagreed, arguing that we should keep the deterrent which “has cost us no lives so far, just money.” He made a telling comparison with pacifist tendencies apparent in the assembly some years before World War II.

Former moderator George Reid condemned the opposition’s arguments as “totally unchristian.” He scoffed at the thought of keeping faith with NATO, to which should be rendered the things that are NATO’s. He implied that the other side had not properly understood the Gospels.

After the debate and some procedural confusion, they took a vote in which some two-thirds of the 1,250 members participated. To the surprise of many, the establishment had backed a loser. By nearly 200 votes, the house opted for the deterrent.

The assembly was more of one mind in expressing concern about the teaching of religious education in schools. A curious anomaly was pointed out by another exmoderator, Andrew Herron: the national church was often denied facilities in Scottish schools that were available to schools run by the Roman Catholic minority. Representations to the Secretary of State for Scotland, said Herron, had been given “the soft answer that turneth away deputations.” It was agreed that Kirk sessions should be urged to press for adequate provision of religious education in their local schools.

The assembly handled a theological point over baptism uneasily. Three ministers appealed the decision of two lower courts to take no action against a minister who had gone through a form of believer’s baptism at the hands of an independent evangelist in Caithness. Donald Riach had regarded it as confirming his baptism as an infant. The assembly deferred the issue by setting up a five-man commission of inquiry. Basically the problem is whether baptism is to be regarded as of “the substance of the faith.” In 1976 the assembly censured an elder for undergoing a second baptism.

J. D. DOUGLAS

World Scene

Ecuador has asked the Summer Institute of Linguistics to phase out its operations there over the next 12 months. Last month’s decision was ratified by President Jaime Roldós Aquilera shortly before his May 24 death in a plane crash. His successor, Oswaldo Huturado Larrea, is not expected to reverse the action. The SIL, Wycliffe Bible Translators’ alter ego, had completed translation of the New Testament into three Ecuadorian languages. Translations in four other languages are in process; completion of all would require another five years or so.

Latin American Jesuits have been instructed not to use Marxist analysis as a foundation for their theologies of social justice. In a letter written last December, but made public only last month, Pedro Arrupe, superior general of the Society of Jesus, balanced that by rejecting anticommunism as a means of concealing injustice: “Although Marxist [economic] analysis does not directly imply acceptance of Marxist philosophy as a whole … it implies in fact a concept of human history which contradicts the Christian view of man and society and leads to strategies which threaten Christian values and attitudes.” The letter was reportedly issued after careful scrutiny by the Vatican.

A British member of Parliament has asked for a government inquiry into the Salvation Army, after the screening of a documentary program on the country’s independent television network. Among the charges in the program: food and clothing given to the Army were sold to its clients; men were turned away because they could not meet the nightly accommodation charges; physical violence was employed by staff; and misleading advertising was used that conceals the fact that only 14 percent of money raised through appeals goes to social service. Producer Ken Jones adduced many of his charges after having visited 27 hostels in the guise of a vagrant with inadequate funds.

Scandinavians from a broad theological spectrum met last month for a post-Melbourne/Pattaya consultation. The meeting, held in Oslo, was arranged by Kjell Ove Nilsson of the Nordic Ecumenical Institute, a participant at both world conferences. Danes, Swedes, and Finns joined Norwegians in searching for insights that could be applied to the Scandinavian situation (and to Scandinavian missions). At first, professors at liberal universities, lecturers from conservative free faculties, and others tended to lose themselves in theological arguments. But when they turned their attention to practical issues, a positive spirit soon prevailed. Among other speakers, Knud Sørenson, head of the Danish Mission Society, focused attention on the inroads in Scandinavia of new religious movements with Hindu origins.

Rome police have stopped street preaching by Protestants for the first time there in 17 years. On the advice of higher authorities, the police in April issued an order restraining 27 North Americans from holding an open-air service. The “Centurions,” sponsored by Christ’s Mission of Hackensack, New Jersey, are a church planting team collaborating with three Rome evangelical churches in establishing a church in an area of Rome where none now exists. Team director Dennis Eenigenburg said, “We are not going to accept this ruling without a fight.” The right to preach openly in Italy extends to foreigners, and was established in a 1964 legal ruling.

Auditors of the South Africa Council of Churches accounts have declined to give a “clean” report for the ecumenical organization’s 1980 accounts. They cited “serious” shortcomings, including the failure of former employees to repay housing loans on their departure several years ago, and various payments unsupported by adequate documentation.

Bibles, placed in Israeli hotels by the Gideons, have been removed and destroyed, according to CT’s correspondent there. Also, he reports, an orthodox Jewish group, whose identity is so far unknown, has been making the rounds of the country’s kibbutzim, gathering for burning Bibles containing the New Testament, and replacing them with copies of the Torah (Old Testament).

Nepal’s first Bible school was opened last month in Kathmandu. The Nepal Bible Institute principal, Ramesh Khatry, is a graduate of India’s Union Biblical Seminary. Mariano Di Gangi, Canadian chairman of BMMF International, gave the inaugural address. He was in Nepal to attend the worker’s conference of the United Mission to Nepal, which has almost 300 members in the Himalayan kingdom.

A technical assistance agency has decided to allow workers to return to Afghanistan. At its April meeting in New Delhi, the International Assistance Mission (IAM) board of managers agreed to the request of several staff members to return to Kabul. Last February, after the murder of staffers Erik and Eeva Barendsen (CT, February 20, p. 52), the IAM decided to withdraw all personnel. The mission has provided aid in Afghanistan since 1964 under a protocol agreement with the government for technical and training assistance in physical rehabilitation. Work has been done with visually handicapped, but plans are for orthopedic and postmedical rehabilitation as well.

Seed for planting in Cambodia (Kampuchea) was barely delivered before the monsoon rains. Reg Reimer. World Relief director for Southeast Asia, says. The seed rice is essential to assure the country does not slip back into famine. Although WR was ready to start as early as mid-February, its cooperative project with UNICEF was held up by the attempted coup and hijacking in Thailand, and by bureaucratic delays in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. By the time WR finally got the go-ahead in mid-May, delivery of 1,300 metric tons of rice along the Thailand-Cambodia border was complicated. Voice of America broadcasts alerted farmers of delivery dates, and WR spent $80,000 for plastic tarps to distribute with the seed—to prevent its sprouting in the bags on the return oxcart journeys. Border distribution should be complete by the end of June. Another 2,500 metric tons sent by sea to the port of Phnom Penh should be delivered by mid-July.

A shipment of Bibles and hymnals has been delivered to the Protestant churches of Vietnam. The Asia Pacific regional office of the United Bible Societies (UBS) in Hong Kong received confirmation that 20,000 Bibles and 20,000 hymnals had arrived in Haiphong harbor aboard a Russian freighter. Printing of the Bibles was financed by the Federation of Protestant Churches in East Germany after a 1980 visit to the German Democratic Republic by Buy Noanh Thu, vice-chairman of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Vietnam, alerted it to the need. The Bibles were printed in East Asia about a year ago. The UBS, which arranged their shipment, had to wait for months to secure space on a Vietnam-bound ship. The Bibles and hymnals were finally stowed in the hold of the Sinegorsk in March.

But avoidance of other issues miffs some conservatives.

Hoping to end a two-year-old theological controversy, commissioners to the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (UPCUSA) General Assembly adopted a statement saying Jesus was both fully God and fully man. Their stand, approved by all but two commissioners, quickly met with the approval of the minister who sparked the controversy. “It sounds good to me,” said Mansfield Kaseman from his home in Rockville, Maryland.

The northern-based UPCUSA met concurrently in Houston with the southern branch, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (PCUS). They are the nation’s two largest Presbyterian bodies, and their assemblies are annual.

Two years ago Kaseman gave an unusual answer to the Presbyterians’ installation-ordination question, “Is Jesus God?” His reply: “No, God is God.” Conservative members of the UPCUSA branded Kaseman a heretic, and his case was carried through six church tribunals, which left his status as a minister intact. Kaseman declined traveling to Houston for the final round in the battle. He said he has been misquoted and misrepresented so often in the debate that he would just as soon stay home and tend to his flock at the United Church of Rockville.

The UPCUSA’s William P. Thompson, who was reelected without opposition to a fourth five-year term as stated clerk, pointed out to the assembly that Kaseman was no longer the issue at the general assembly, since the church’s judicial council had ruled the issue was one for a local presbytery to decide. He said the action on the deity question had merely rightly restated past UPCUSA doctrine.

The UPCUSA commissioners adopted the following statement on the deity of Christ:

“We believe that God came to redeem this world of lost children, and to open the way to eternal life, through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This Jesus who is one with us in our common humanity is one with God as the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. Therefore, we confess that Jesus is one person, truly God and truly human. This mystery of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, which can be experienced and proclaimed, but never fully explained, is what ties Christians together in a common faith and life across the centuries.”

In reacting to the statement, Kaseman said, “What was confusing and seemed to be inconsistent to me was the notion of Jesus being God. I’ve said before that I, too, can talk of Jesus being one with God, of God being in Christ reconciling the world to himself. This statement puts into contemporary language the thrusts of the creeds and the tradition of the church throughout history.” Kaseman said he could affirm the statement without reservation.

The Presbyterians declined to go on record on three other theological issues raised in the Kaseman controversy: whether Jesus’ life was sinless, whether his death was for atonement of sins, and whether his resurrection was physical or just spiritual.

Moderator Robert M. Davidson took the unusual step of warning reporters present not to misconstrue the vote as necessarily meaning members of the UPCUSA reject belief in these three doctrines.

Davidson, elected moderator by the UPCUSA, is a liberal, and pastors the West Park Presbyterian Church in New York City. The PCUS elected a middle-of-the-road lay-woman as its moderator. She is Dorothy Barnard, wife of a Saint Louis shoe supply firm owner.

The Rejected Amendment

Most of the debate on the Jesus-as-God issue centered on an amendment to add three words to the statement: “sinless” before the word life, “atoning” before the word death, and “bodily” before the word resurrection. The proposed statement as amended read: “We believe that God came to redeem this world of lost children, and to open the way to eternal life, through the birth, sinless life, atoning death and bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.” After nearly 45 minutes of debate, the amendment was defeated by a margin of about 2 to 1.

Throughout the debate, speakers urged the Presbyterians to take a strong stand on the humanity and deity of Jesus without diverting attention to the other issues. Some said Presbyterians should have the freedom to accept or reject the theological positions on Christ’s sinless life, atoning death, and bodily resurrection.

The controversial amendment was proposed by a group called Concerned United Presbyterians. One of its leaders, John H. Gerstner, a retired professor of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, had threatened schism over the so-called Kaseman controversy. Gerstner said Kaseman’s answer was symbolic of the leftward drift in the denomination. Because of Kaseman and others like him and the UPCUSA’s refusal to reject Kaseman and the others, the UPCUSA had become “apostate,” Gerstner charged.

Prior to the meeting in Houston. Gerstner called for a walk-out on the last day of the general assembly unless the denomination took a strong stand on the humanity and deity of Jesus and stated that Jesus’ life was sinless, his death for atonement, and his resurrection bodily. Later, he amended that stand and called for a rump session in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this month to discuss the general assembly’s actions and to plan strategy.

Gerstner, who had served as counsel in the case against Kaseman, appeared mostly satisfied with the general assembly’s actions. In a letter to James Gittings, Presbyterian editor and his former student Gerstner (quoted by the UPCUSA news service), Gerstner said the assembly had partially repudiated the apostasy “which I felt the UPCUSA through the Permanent Judicial Commission committed January 26, 1981 [by approving Kaseman].”

He vowed to do everything in his power “to persuade other concerned United Presbyterian members to withdraw the charge of apostasy.” He expressed hope that he could in good conscience remain within the denomination.

Already some 66 of 8,832 UPCUSA congregations and some 12 of the Southern church’s 4,159 congregations have indicated plans to leave or have left their denominations over doctrinal, property ownership, or other issues. Many conservative former UPCUSA congregations joined the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, formally organized earlier this spring.

As expected, the United Presbyterians formally adopted legislation making constitutionally specific that local church property is held in trust by the denomination as a whole. Last year’s general assembly had approved the measure, and the required majority approval of the presbyteries (the second and last step for the measure’s formal adoption) came during the past year by a whopping 143-to-4 vote.

The Southern Presbyterians essentially are a year behind their Northern counterparts in shutting the door to congregations hoping to leave with their property. The recent PCUS assembly approved wording making explicit the denomination’s claim to local church property, and PCUS presbyteries will vote on the measure in the coming year.

The UPCUSA commissioners later decided to clarify their actions on rejecting the amendment on sinless life, atoning death, and bodily resurrection. Their statement, adopted the next day, read:

“The 193rd General Assembly chooses to restrict itself to the issues of the person of Christ. It seeks to encourage exploration of other theological concepts, such as the atonement, bodily resurrection, and the sinless life of Christ, as these and other truths are embodied in Confessions of our church.”

Some observers noted that amid the debate no one tried to insert the word “virgin” in front of references to Jesus’ birth.

Another group of conservatives in the church, Presbyterians United for Biblical Concern, hailed the stand on the deity and humanity of Jesus. “The affirmation is necessary first as witness to the watching world, and only then in response to questions raised inside the UPCUSA,” the group said. “The central Christological issue of our times is precisely the identity between the man Jesus and the Christ of faith. This expression interprets the Presbyterian ordination vows clearly to include identification that ‘Jesus is one person, truly God and truly human.’ ”

Richard Lovelace, theological consultant for the biblical concerns group, said the most important doctrinal aspect of the general assembly’s meeting was its action on question number 3 of the church’s ordination-installation question, which deals with the church’s confessions. Previously, the question asked only if an ordinand or installee would “be instructed by” or “led by” the confessions. The new question says, “Do you sincerely affirm the confessions of our church to be authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture, by the Holy Spirit, leads you to believe and do, and will you continue to be instructed and led by them as you lead the people of God?”

Reunion of the nation’s two largest Presbyterian denominations, split during the Civil War, was the key underlying issue throughout the eight days of meetings in late May. At adjournment, reunion was no more certain than when the meetings began. The two Presbyterian churches are gearing up for votes in the next 13 to 24 months on the proposal. Three votes will be required to implement reunion: at the annual assemblies of both denominations in June 1982; by each of the local presbyteries in February 1983; and a final vote at the two general assemblies in June of 1983.

LOUIS MOORE

The Christian School Defenders

Legal Defense Camps Are Locked In Battle Of Memos

A rift is deepening between two well-known law firms, both specializing in the defense of fundamentalist Christian schools, and both frequently finding themselves in hot water with government authorities. The issue is significant because Christian schools are proliferating.

Earl Little, an officer in the Christian Law Association (CLA), recently mailed out a sheaf of papers attacking the legal arguments used by William Ball, a noted constitutional lawyer who has won several landmark victories for Christian schools. Ball responded with his own 18-page memorandum, saying, in so many words, that the CLA does not know what it is talking about.

The CLA, based in Cleveland, is run by fundamentalist David Gibbs, a skilled lawyer who is, nonetheless, not held in universally high esteem by other Christian constitutional lawyers. Some of them believe he has a wrong view of the law and takes on far more cases than he can adequately prepare (CT, April 10, p. 48).

Gibbs, Little, and others in the CLA believe that Christian education is commanded by God, and therefore Christian schools must be as free from government jurisdiction as churches are. Consequently, CLA lawyers usually don’t use one of the legal principles established by the U.S. Supreme Court to protect religious institutions against the government. That principle is “excessive entanglement.” It means that it is unconstitutional for government to excessively entangle itself with religion by too many restrictions on religious institutions.

But according to Little, if one says excessive entanglement is wrong, that presumes some entanglement is permissible. In papers Little said he circulated to influential Christian educators, he criticized in detail Ball’s use of the excessive entanglement doctrine.

In his reply, Ball wrote that the “CLA is a million miles off base in what it says about entanglement. Make that a trillion.” Little does not understand the law because he is not a lawyer, Ball wrote. (Little is a Texas pastor.) When one argues against excessive entanglement, he is not arguing for entanglement, but against it, Ball wrote. He believes the state does have certain “extremely limited” authority in education.

Ball recently won a victory in Texas when a state court ruled that a widely known fundamentalist pastor named Lester Roloff did not need to get a license to operate his children’s homes, because they were part of his church.

Little said he nearly fainted when Roloff acknowledged during the trial that it was permissible for the state to license a cafeteria at his church. “If they can take one license, why not the other license?” asked Little.

In his reply, Ball blasted the CLA for saying that church organizations should not accept such licenses:

“It is absurd, chaotic, dead wrong, to say that a church may not accept [for example] the certificate of a local fire marshal that its school building is a safe place for children to be assembled. But the fire regulations must be reasonable. Pastor Little does not like that term, ‘reasonable.’ He says it gives the state full power to call anything ‘reasonable’ that it wants to. This is an excellent illustration of what happens when someone who is untrained in the law starts giving advice on the law: we never argue that it is the STATE which shall determine what is reasonable; rather, we put on good, common sense engineer’s testimony.… [Little] would paint the picture of Christian churches as completely irresponsible to their fellow men, absolutely outside the laws of our society.”

Little suggests that the basic problem with Ball is his Roman Catholicism with its history of almost limitless entanglement with government.

Yearbook of Churches Survey

Mormons Register Gain, Ecumenical Churches, Drop

The Mormon church gained 114,000 new members in 1979 for a 4.4 percent increase, leading all major American religious groups, according to the just-released 1981 issue of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. The Mormons grew to 2.7 million members.

Total membership in U.S. churches was practically unchanged from 1978, and many of the so-called mainline Protestant denominations continued to shrink. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, grew 1.4 percent, to 13.4 million members. Among smaller Protestant denominations, the conservative churches also reported growth.

The Yearbook contains a study by Loyde H. Hartley, dean of the Lancaster Theological Seminary. It shows that congregations in the 400 to 800 range had a harder time staying ahead financially than did smaller or larger churches. He studied 50 churches, most of them mainline Protestant. Hartley said the money problems these churches faced in the seventies will grow worse in the eighties. “Already many of the sample congregations appear to be facing a more serious economic decline than their leaders admit,” he said.

Personalia

The Buddhist Churches in America for the first time named an American-born bishop to head the 82-year-old, 100,000-member denomination. Bishop Haruo Seigan Yamaoka. 47, is a Fresno, California, native and holder of a black belt in karate. He graduated from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

Waldron Scott, formerly general secretary of the World Evangelical Fellowship, will become president of the American Leprosy Mission in September. The agency, which has its headquarters in Bloomfield, New Jersey, primarily provides medical help and supplies to victims of leprosy.

Bread for the World

Agency Lobbies Government On Behalf Of The Hungry

About everyone agrees that world hunger is a serious problem. Learning of starving Somalis, refugee camp Cambodians, and other hungry peoples, evangelical Christians have donated millions of dollars to various relief agencies.

The New York City-based Bread for the World encourages church-supported relief operations. But the self-described “Christian citizens’ movement” believes a more effective approach is to influence government policies. That thinking prompted the introduction of its so-called hunger and global security bill, a multipronged measure now being considered in both houses of Congress.

Among other things, the bill would establish measures insuring that foreign aid actually reaches the needy, and that the recipient government follows through with “self-help” programs for those peoples.

The bill was introduced in the House of Representatives by Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) and Benjamin Gilman (R-N.Y.), and was to be introduced in a slightly modified form earlier this month in the Senate by Mark Hatfield (R-Oreg.), a BFW board member and long-time hunger activist.

Hatfield legislative aide Rick Rolf said the bill is being well received, both by conservatives, who sometimes oppose foreign aid as “global welfarism,” and by progressives, who oppose any cutbacks in assistance to underdeveloped nations.

BFW leaders say Christians have a biblical responsibility to feed the hungry, and that U.S. Christians ought to be good “stewards” of their opportunity to participate in the governmental process.

Hunger and poverty are chief causes of U.S. and world unrest, says BFW, so that U.S. and the world’s security are threatened if the hungry are not fed. This logic is central to BFW, and particularly explains its hunger and global security bill.

Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor Arthur Simon, 41, organized BFW in the early 1970s. He became concerned about the hunger problem while pasturing Trinity Lutheran Church on Manhattan’s lower east side.

Simon then began meeting with a dozen or so interested Protestant and Catholic church leaders in New York City. Out of those meetings emerged the idea and reality of BFW. A first membership drive in 1974 netted 3,000 members, and numbers have since grown to the present 37,000.

Leaders decided they would combat hunger in the public policy, or legislative, sector. “Part of our idea from the start was to be consciously and explicitly Christian and not to deviate from that,” added Simon.

BFW estimates that 455 million people in the world are permanently hungry—that is, not getting enough calories or protein to make possible a normal, active life.

The group hasn’t grabbed the publicity of either New Right or left-wing church groups. However, its track record shows results. The group drafted, then mobilized public support for congressionally approved “right-to-food” resolutions, which acknowledged the right of everyone to a nutritionally adequate diet. The interfaith group also pushed legislation for a U.S. grain reserve program, prodding Congress toward establishing two such reserves.

A Mixed Feedbag?

Simon and others say some religious conservatives dismiss BFW as “liberal.” These critics note that former World Council of Churches general secretary Eugene Carson Blake was BFW’s first board president, and that its current president is Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit.

Of this kind of criticism, long-time BFW supporter Frank Gaebelein, headmaster emeritus of the Stony Brook School and former coeditor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, comments:

“I often walk on the trails along the Potomac River,” said the Arlington. Virginia, resident. “Let’s say I meet another hiker and we start talking. Suddenly, there is a cry from the river where a man has overturned in his canoe. I don’t stop and ask my friend what he believes about the Second Coming or Scripture. No, I ask him to go with me and help.”

A number of prominent evangelicals are sprinkled among the mainstream and secular-oriented board members. These include Seattle Pacific University president David L. McKenna, Mennonite educator Myron Augsburger, and evangelist Tom Skinner. Another board member, Evangelicals for Social Action president Ron Sider, has just written a biblical study of hunger for BFW.

Gaebelein and others have said they respect BFW for its accurate and objective information on world hunger. The group provides background papers on hunger issues, and keeps its members informed on upcoming congressional action on hunger-related issues and on the voting records of congressman on hunger issues. Simon’s book, Bread for the World, won a national religion book award in 1976, and is regarded by many as definitive on the subject of global poverty.

BFW has two arms: a tax-exempt educational fund, and a non-tax-exempt lobbying arm. It has members in every congressional district, and workers who organize and inform them, BFW’s full-time staff of 30 includes teams of issues analysts in both New York City and Wasington, D.C.

The group enlists support from local churches (although it has only individuals as members), which join its “covenant” program. These churches hold an annual “offering of letters”—usually at Thanksgiving—when parishioners are asked to fill the plate with letters to their congressmen on a key hunger issue. This year it is the hunger and global security bill.

BFW tries to keep things simple on a relatively small $900,000 annual budget, and the sparse office furnishings bear that out. Staff members are paid according to need, not rank, so that the average per-person salary of $12,500 is small, especially by New York City standards.

BFW tries to correct what it believes are popular misconceptions about aid to the hungry. For instance, many criticize abuses of the food stamp program, but BFW statistics show that only 12 percent of the people who receive food stamps could work but don’t, and that fraud is about 4 percent, BFW acknowledges that, yes, the U.S. does give more foreign aid dollars than anyone else. This aid, however, constitutes about one-fifth of 1 percent of the gross national product. This “tithe” puts the U.S. sixteenth in a list of 17 major donor nations.

The hunger and global security bill’s parts will be considered in various congressional committees. The bill works from the premise that the U.S. would make hunger the focus of its relationships with the developing countries during this decade. Its features include:

• Foreign aid: proposed additional funding to private groups doing health work in poor countries; measures insuring that food sold to foreign governments on easy terms under the Food for Peace Title I program would go primarily to the needy, and setting verifiable “self-help” measures for the poor; and requirements that multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, provide that a certain proportion of lending benefit people whose incomes are at or below the subsistence level.

• World food security: proposal that any food financing would benefit primarily those in the most need; that U.S. negotiations with other grain-exporting countries for the establishment of emergency grain reserves would complement those in the U.S.; and prohibition of grain embargoes in cases where people would go hungry.

• Trade reforms: proposed modifications in the General System of Preferences, five-year-old legislation granting duty-free status on selected imports from developing countries. These measures would help the least-developed developing countries rather than those advancing.

Do Congressmen react differently to overtures from a “Christian” lobbyist group than a secular one? Not really, says issues analyst Paul Nelson of BFW’s Washington office, while noting that certain Christian congressmen probably have more affinity for BFW. What does make congressmen receptive to visits from BFW lobbyists is if they have already been contacted back home by grassroots BFW members, he says.

JOHN MAUST

North American Scene

The Reagan administration earlier this month pledged its support for tuition tax credits for students attending private schools and colleges. A bill introduced by Senate taxation subcommittee chairmen Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Robert Packwood (R-Oreg.) would allow a 50 percent tax credit for private school tuition and fees, with a maximum of $250 the first year and $500 after that. (Unlike a deduction, a tax credit is a direct subtraction from taxes due.) Still, some Capitol Hill officials doubted chances for the bill’s passage. A coalition of education and civil-rights groups recently formed to oppose the tax credits, and American Civil Liberties Union activists argue it is an unconstitutional advancement of religion.

Anti-Semitic feelings in the U.S. diminished in recent years, although pockets of prejudice remain, a recent survey showed. Of the 1,200 people interviewed by the Yankelovich, Skelly, and White research firm, 9 percent held “highly anti-Semitic” views. This compared to 19 percent in a similar study in 1964. Problem areas still remain, since about half of the blacks interviewed held anti-Semitic views.

Continuing tensions between Vietnamese and American fishermen on the Gulf coast are being addressed by Texas church leaders. The Texas Council of Churches and Catholic groups are sponsoring programs and promoting dialogue to ease tensions aroused when increased numbers of Vietnamese refugees began entering Gulf coast fishing areas. The peace efforts are intended to overshadow activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which was planning anti-Vietnamese rallies.

The nation’s first all-Muslim community is being built near Abiquiu, New Mexico. The projected 600-member settlement (mostly American converts) has as goal “perpetration” of the Islamic faith, partially through radio and TV stations. At an estimated cost of $10 million over a 7-to-10-year period, the project will include a seven-domed mosque and a boarding school. Funds are reported to be coming from private Saudi Arabian sources. President of the project. Dar al-Islam (“House of Islam”), is Nooridin (formerly Steve) Durkee.

Several church leaders in Rhode Island spoke for a total ban on obscenity on cable TV during public hearings there last month. Public utilities administrator Edward F. Burke, the state’s regulator of cable systems, already had ruled that cable connections must have a “parental guidance” device—a locking switch to prevent children from tuning to some channels. Cable TV obscenity is figured to become a big issue in many areas of the U.S. in the coming decade.

What’s Coming In CT

In the next several issues CHRISTIANITY TODAY will feature:

• CT’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue features an interview with Billy Graham and articles by former editors Carl Henry and Harold Lindsell. Time magazine’s religion editor, Richard Ostling, a former CT news editor, surveys the top stories in religion over the last quarter-century. U.S. Senate Chaplain Richard Halverson writes about “the economy” of the Holy Spirit in today’s churches.

• Other writers look at the years since 1956 for trends in missions, the pastorate, the local church, women’s roles, the arts, and Pentecostalism.

• Eutychus I, Ed Clowney, returns for a repeat performance.

Where principles are masked as propaganda

The nomination of noted evangelical C. Everett Koop to be U.S. Surgeon General has revealed what I like to call “the myth of neutrality” in this nation’s news reporting. Rather than being neutral, many influential publishers and broadcasters adhere to a strongly liberal consensus.

To support this contention, we must begin with the film series. Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, which featured Koop and theologian Francis Schaeffer as narrators (CT. Aug. 17, 1979, and Jan. 23, 1981). Before the televised version was aired in Washington, word got around that the program would have major exposure in the D.C. area. There was an immediate, shrill reaction from proabortionists. They tried in every way possible to stop the telecast of the film, which takes the opposing abortion position. Letters were sent to the proabortionists’ mailing lists, urging people to bombard Channel 7 with calls and letters demanding that the program not be shown, and the film was castigated as “propaganda.” Even the ethics of Channel 7 were questioned because of the station’s willingness to show the program. One letter also said the main objection to the show was that the prochoice (i.e., for abortion) side did not have programming to match Whatever Happened to the Human Race? This, in fact, seemed to be the chief objection.

In spite of the attempt to block the program, it was aired. The headline on Judy Mann’s review in the Washington Post summed up her point of view: “No Matter How Moving, Show Still Propaganda.” The review—basically a parroting of letters from the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights and other proabortion organizations, and restatement of their objections—began. “Score a resounding ten points on the emotional Richter scale for the anti-abortion forces that have produced a film called. Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” Mann took Channel 7 to task for showing a film that “is propaganda masquerading as public affairs programming.”

The second chapter in this story began a few weeks later with Koop’s appointment by the Reagan administration to the position of deputy assistant secretary for health and human services, with a view to his becoming U.S. Surgeon General (CT, Jan. 2 and Mar. 13, 1981).

The Post described Koop as “a leading anti-abortionist” in an article headlined, “Abortion Foes Gain Key Federal Post.” He was dismissed with this description: “A fundamentalist Christian with a Lincolnesque beard, Koop has been a board member of at least two anti-abortion groups—the National Right to Life Committee and the Americans United for Life—and is the narrator of a controversial anti-abortion film. Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” Other newspapers picked up the Post story. To them Koop’s chief accomplishment seems to have been his activity on behalf of the unborn. The Post and others seemingly were unable to bring themselves to mention his outstanding medical and administrative credentials accumulated over a lifetime as a pioneer in children’s surgery and as an internationally recognized figure in the pediatric field.

Eventually. Time magazine ran an article entitled, “Thunderings from the Right,” and referred to Koop as a doctor who had “made his name in the ’70s separating Siamese twins.” The writer referred to the fact that Koop had appeared in an antiabortion “presentation,” Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, and let it go at that.

The story ultimately came to the attention of television network news. NBC prepared a special report for its weekend news edition on Sunday. March 15. The program featured Koop as a recent Reagan appointee and only referred to him as someone who had “appeared in a prolife propaganda film.” NBC mentioned neither the name of the film, nor anything about it, nor any of Koop’s credentials. It simply borrowed from the Post article the idea that he was somehow involved in “propaganda.”

The French government recently awarded Koop their Legion d’Honeur for his contribution to pediatric surgery. He has had the longest tenure as a surgeon-in-chief in any major U.S. hospital. He has pioneered and administered countless Third World medical relief efforts, and he has been the honored guest of nations. Yet this country’s news media seem interested in him only insofar as they can ignore his credentials and belittle and snipe at him for being a physician strongly against abortion. A Boston Globe editorial went so far as to ignore his medical credentials altogether and to refer to Koop only as a “clinician … with tunnel vision.”

It is intriguing how small the world is when it comes to who decides what attitude shall taken by a major purveyor of the news. Once that attitude is set by, let’s say, people at the Washington Post and their proabortion friends, there is little chance that the tone taken by the other major news companies will be any different. This happens for at least two reasons: (1) human laziness, which finds it easier to pick up a story slant than to investigate its merits on a fresh, and individual basis, and (2) the rather liberal consensus that the major news organizations (New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, and the TV networks) often seem to hold in common.

There appears to be little diversity of opinion or approach when it comes to a news story that manifests a different social or philosophical point of view. Basically, there is only one opinion expressed. This is not control of the press as formal as, for instance, that of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, we at least have a philosophically controlled press, not dominated by a KGB looking over its shoulder, but by a liberal consensus. The Soviet press dispatches those whom it dislikes with such epitaphs as “antisocial” or “counter-revolutionary.” The U.S. TV and press journalists often use the same shallow, glib technique with their own negative code words, such as “fundamentalist,” “prolife,” “conservative,” and “right wing,” and such positive code words as “pragmatic,” “moderate,” and “pluralistic.”

Never in the news stories mentioned were Koop’s credentials examined from the point of view of whether or not he could do a good job for the country. Whatever Happened to the Human Race? was never reviewed objectively. Those who saw the NBC report remain uninformed as to what the “propaganda film” was saying—or even about who, what, and where Koop was. Were these newspapers and TV networks less interested in good journalism than in using their power to move people in the “pluralistic” direction they favor?

Like Aesop’s Fables, there is a moral to the tale. It is that the “tolerant liberal press” in this country, when reporting on opposing views—at least on the question of abortion—moves slightly to the right of Attila the Hun insofar as any real objectivity goes.

In the first Post article by Mann, several rhetorical questions were asked, such as, “Where does he get his money?” “Who are these people, anyway?” I suspected at the time that the writer did not really want to know the answers. (Who’s Who in America has most of the relevant information she seemed unable to find.) I did, however, write a long personal letter, giving detailed answers to the questions. The full text of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? in book form was enclosed, and I invited further inquiries. I never received a reply.

God’s good is not the good things we usually envision, of comfort, health, affluence, fame and success—especially success.

“He’s too good to succeed as a politician.”

“She’s too good to understand a man like that.”

Goodness has fallen into disrepute. Calling a person good may be no compliment if we mean that he or she is incompetent, naive, inexperienced, unable to live in the real world.

We Christians have problems, then, when we read the New Testament, because Jesus said we should be good. He said a good man, out of good treasure, generated good actions. Was he putting a premium on otherworldliness or untried innocence?

Fortunately, he didn’t just call us to be good; he repeatedly described goodness as well (see, for instance, Matt. 5:43ff, and Luke 6:27ff.). Negatively, he defined goodness as a refusal to repay hate with hate. He defined it also as forbearance and forgiveness, a nonretaliating passivity that absorbs evil instead of multiplying it by repetition. Jesus further defined goodness as a positive concern, even for enemies, that issues in self-sacrificing action: a dogged determination to give and to help. It is a nonmanipulative, nonexploiting love that asks for nothing in return—in fact, expects nothing in return. Goodness is redemptive love lived out undramatically in the whole range of everyday relationships.

So it follows that goodness is really Christomorphic: to be good is to be like Jesus. To be good is to reduplicate, however imperfectly, Christ’s lifestyle as incarnate love. Romans 8:28 is a key test in any biblical study of goodness: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

What is the good Paul has in mind when he affirms it as God’s goal for his people? Obviously, not the good we usually envision, of comfort, health, affluence, tranquility, fame, longevity, friendship, and success—especially success. Undeniably good as these may be, they are not the good Paul has in mind. He states God’s concept in verse 29, which ought never be severed from verse 28: “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” God’s goal for his people is conformity to the model of personhood that Jesus lived out. God directs his saving activity toward having a family of brothers and sisters like Jesus. Goodness is to follow Christ’s lifestyle in the present world, and sustained by the assurance of ultimate Christlikeness in the future world.

Conformity to the model of personhood Jesus lived out—that is Scripture’s unique concept of goodness.

This conformity, however, is not primarily eschatological, true only after death. Rather, we are to attain it here and now. 1 John 4:17 rules out any ambiguity: “Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world.” We are to be like Jesus now. We are to be like Jesus here. We are to press tenaciously toward the goal.

Suppose this becomes our controlling ideal and functional dynamic. How will it affect our behavior? It will motivate us to struggle to do good as Scripture defines goodness and as Jesus embodied it. Peter told Cornelius, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil: for God was with him” (Acts 10:38).

I see six elements in this. If like Jesus we go about doing good, we will carry on a ministry of healing, teaching, feeding, exorcism, liberation, and prayer.

First, we will carry on a ministry of healing. We will be concerned about sick bodies, minds, spirits, marriages, families, churches, communities, institutions, and sick nations. This means that within the limits of our powers and with no messianic pretensions, we will be prayerfully concerned about healing.

Second, if like Jesus we go about doing good, we will carry on a ministry of teaching. We will share the truth of the gospel, to be sure. We will do that primarily and incessantly. But we will also fight illiteracy, ignorance, prejudice, falsehood, irrationality, and blind traditionalism, and do it in the confidence that all truth is God’s truth. Within the limits of our powers and with no messianic pretensions, we will be prayerfully concerned about teaching.

Further, we will carry on a ministry of feeding. We will remember that as he looked at hungry people he was moved with compassion and fed them. To his disciples he said, “Give them to eat.” We will remember that in his vision of judgment he declares, “I was hungry and ye fed me not.” In season and out, while sharing the Bread of Life, we will not be so absorbed with empty souls that we ignore empty stomachs. Within the limits of our powers and with no messianic pretensions, we will be prayerfully concerned about feeding.

And we will carry on a ministry of exorcism. We will be aware that reality has a dimension that science and skepticism as a rule treat as myth. We will be aware of evil forces which, in ways that baffle our reflection and research, try to destroy life. Sometimes exorcism as a literal expulsion of demonic beings may be necessary, though few of us, perhaps, will have the calling and enablement to meet this challenge. More often, we will be called on to expel from our churches, our societies, and relationships influences that block human fulfillment—those dark, elusive, intangible, anonymous, insidious forces; those -isms and -ologies of militarism, mammonism, racism, sexism, collectivism, traditionalism, and fascism, which seek to frustrate the redemptive purposes of God’s grace. Within the limits of our powers, and with no messianic pretensions, we will be prayerfully concerned about exorcism.

Also, we will carry on a ministry of liberation. We will be gripped by the implications of his kingdom manifesto in Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Deliverance to the captives; liberty for the bruised; freedom spiritually, emotionally, and, we may hope, politically—this will be the objective we hold steadily in view. We will often reflect on our Lord’s affirmations in John 8:32 and 36: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.… If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” Within the limits of our prayers and with no messianic pretensions, we will be prayerfully concerned about liberation.

Finally and foundationally, if like Jesus we go about doing good, we will carry on a ministry of prayer. Whether he was healing, teaching, feeding, exorcising, or liberating, Jesus ministered under the anointing of the Holy Spirit; his human nature was God enabled with supernatural effectiveness. How can we hope to do the same without the power of the Spirit who “God enables” us to minister despite our frustrating finitude and crippling sinfulness?

Our lord once cautioned his disciples after an exorcism, “This kind cometh not out except by prayer and fasting.” Another time he said, “I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:23, NIV). We must remember what Jesus teaches about the primacy of prayer.

Further, we must never forget our Lord’s practice of prayer, the secret of his God enablement. In the Gospels we read again and again that he prayed. Sometimes he spent all night. Sometimes he rose at daybreak and went out to a desert place. Continually, but particularly in hours of decision and crisis, he prayed. Without the God enablement that comes only through prayer, we will be ineffectual do-gooders rather than Spirit-anointed disciples. Only a ministry energized and decontaminated by prayer will do good as Jesus did, reduplicating his lifestyle of incarnate love.

Cults

Two filmstrip offerings that every church should acquire are produced by Personal Freedom Outreach (Box 26062, St. Louis, Mo. 63136). They mark an impressive new approach to dealing with cults.

Mormonism: The Christian View is a carefully researched, engrossing presentation of Mormonism’s history, doctrines, claims to authority, failed prophecies, evolution, and missionary methods. The major contradictions within these categories are made more glaring with photographs of primary documents. A concluding segment outlines how to witness to Mormons.

The filmstrip is greatly strengthened by use of photographs of Mormon places and parchments, and the doubtful history of Joseph Smith and later leaders.

The gently persuasive narrative rings with knowledgeable conviction, and reminds the viewer that redemption resides in Christ. The producer might well have avoided opening with unnecessarily sinister music, and closing with cheerfully triumphant music.

Of course, it is impossible to include everything in such an ambitious program. The section on failed prophecies emphasizes that the temple to be built at “Zion” in Independence, Missouri, in the first generation of Mormons, overlooks the fact that the land on which this temple is to be built is now owned by splinter groups—vitiating to some extent the reason.

This fascinating production is well done, and tasteful; Wesley P. Walters, researcher and narrator, is to be commended. The absence of adequate script and additional program notes reduces the total usefulness, however.

A similar format surveys the Jehovah’s Witnesses: The Christian View, but the cult as a target is not so thoroughly shot down. Though the history of Jehovah’s Witnesses reveals a number of inconsistencies, their effort to be diligent, albeit misguided, interpreters of the Bible is harder to handle, as this filmstrip shows.

The linking theme between these two audiovisuals is the failure of prophecies; the record of Jehovah’s Witnesses is dismal indeed. However, the exploration of where Jehovah’s Witnesses go wrong is not focused as adequately as it was for the Mormons. It seems, to this reviewer, that the best linkage between these cults would be two different anatomies of unbelief—personified by the charlatan (Joseph Smith), and the denier (Charles Taze Russell)—whose true convergence is universalism. Jehovah’s Witnesses are profound legalists, and it is lamentable that this appraisal of them omits the word “grace,” especially in light of recent disruptions in high levels of the Watchtower Society where it appears grace is a discovery among some, leading to their ouster. Nevertheless, this is an invaluable presentation, and contains excellent photos of primary documents and relevant quotes.

Personal Freedom Outreach has begun a remarkable series, and should reach a wide audience. Newer cults, such as The Way, will receive future attention. I hope there will also be programs on Eastern cults and consciousness cults like Eckankar. If future programs continue to the high level of these first two, they should find many uses.

Recent Biblical Materials

Journey into Light: The Old Testament, from Our Sunday Visitor (200 Noll Plaza, Huntington, Ind. 46750), is a good, ten-part series that covers the major stories and themes of the Old Testament, along with the literary vehicles of the Bible. An understated subtheme is that the Old Testament is the preparatory history for the coming of the Messiah.

These filmstrips, each running close to 15 minutes, are uniformly well drawn and narrated, with occasional maps and additional information. The text is faithful to the Bible’s message. There are, however, some brief modern conclusions that some viewers might not appreciate. For instance, the two Genesis Creation stories allegedly represent two different traditions; Isaiah probably wrote only the first 39 chapters of his book. The last filmstrip includes I and II Maccabees, and associates these writings with Daniel, both being apocalyptic literature. (Maccabees is the only Apocryphal material discussed.) Overall, this is a good Old Testament introduction, especially for junior high and confirmation classes.

Beautifully done are Old Testament character studies by Ikonographics (Box 4454, Louisville, Ky. 40204). Each of these eight stories is divided into three parts. The first part is the story (Abraham, David, Ruth, Jonah, Deborah, Moses, Jeremiah, and Joseph), well told by several voices, attractive drawings, and effective background sounds. The second part briefly teaches biblical terms and concepts. The third part ends with moving prayers and litanies based on all that has preceded. Designed for children up to junior high level, this series also moves the adult viewer, especially the closing prayers that use contemporary photos to transcend the division between the Bible’s past and today.

Unlike any other renderings of New Testament parables on still-life celluloid are the aura mime versions of The Prodigal Daughter (yes, and plausible) and The Sower and the Seed. Produced by St. Anthony Messenger Press (1615 Republic, Cincinnati, Ohio 45210), they feature the Fountain Square Fools, mostly creative, talented students at Cincinnati’s Xavier University.

Older high schoolers and adults will benefit most from these photographs of mime scenes, in the stream of a growing movement—clowning for Christ.

A secular folktale, The Stonecutter, a Japanese story, is also included in the series.

Audible accompaniments for all these filmstrips are on cassette.

DALE SANDERS¹Mr. Sanders is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Wrangell, Alaska.

Current issues tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth of the viewer, so evangelical filmmakers have elected to market them as the fillings in celluloid pastries. The recipe has been fairly simple: mix several universal types of persons together with a current, middle-class issue, simmer for 72 minutes over a low flame of emotional response, sprinkle with comic relief, coat with gospel presentation, and serve in a crowded sanctuary.

At best, the rationale for dealing with issues is the desire to win eternal souls to Christ; at worst, it is the desire to sell films. Films have seldom been created to address issues simply because Christians should be concerned with those issues. But although that day has not arrived, several recent releases may have moved a few steps in that direction.

ASSIGNMENT: LIFE ABORTION: A FACTUAL DISCUSSION

“Did the United States Supreme Court settle the abortion issue for all time (Rowe v. Wade, 1973) or open the door for the real thinking to begin?” So concludes the New Liberty Enterprises film, Assignment: Life ($84 rental; 1980).

The question sets the tone for this 50-minute film, which depicts a California-based journalist investigating the abortion issue. Though cloked in objectivity, the movie thoughtfully presents a volume of prolife data with a minimum of emotional overkill.

Such issues as a woman’s right to her own body, legality versus morality, the (fetal) age at which the product of conception becomes a person, and what constitutes the taking of life are discussed in a documentary format.

Diverse personalities, such as Edward Allred, a soft-spoken, professionalappearing medical doctor who owns and operates abortion clinics in California, and Dr. Bernard Nathanson, formerly operator of the world’s largest abortion clinic and author of the antiabortion book, Aborting America, are interviewed by the journalist. Also featured are Cardinal Timothy Morning of Los Angeles, evangelical author James Dobson, Congressmen William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.) and Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), and John Wilke, articulate author of Handbook on Abortion.

Assignment: Life is distinctly Main Street, U.S.A. Even minority representatives appear to have decidedly middle-class value systems. But related problems of the prolife position—such as overpopulation and starvation in a world of limited capacity to support an ever-expanding population—are never discussed.

While not exploitative, the film takes the viewer inside an operating room to view an abortion. The sequence is brief and tastefully presented as the reporter in the story forces herself (and the audience) to face the physical side of the issue. The suggestion at the beginning of the film that portions might be unsuitable for younger viewers might well be extended to include the suggestion that the film should be thoroughly discussed following its viewing.

ENERGY USAGE IN CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE

To whom would you attribute the following quote: “We are living in a day when wasting energy is as much an act of violence against the poor as refusing to feed the hungry”? Surprisingly enough, those are not the words of Ben Patterson or John Alexander or Stanley Mooneyham. They come from Moody Bible Institute president George Sweeting in the Moody Institute of Science film, Energy in a Twilight World (35 minutes; $39 rental), concluding an excellent and provocative documentary on energy in a world of dwindling resources. Though the most socially relevant film in the Sermons from Science series, Sweeting does not conclude it without offering the gospel and a Christian world view as part of the solution for spaceship Earth.

Energy is not overly dramatized or spiritualized. It is a well-written, vividly photographed, and crisply edited presentation of man’s journey in a spaceship with limited supplies. While the focus is on the 3½-million-square-mile compartment called the United States of America—which will use more electricity for air conditioning this summer than 800 million Chinese will use for everything all year—the film is not a guilt trip berating the American way of life. It is a straightforward presentation of facts. Sweeting’s solution is a call for conservation based upon concern for our fellow man and conversion in order to transform the inner man.

LISTENING TO THE STOMACH GROWL

“Hunger is the most severe and complicated problem our world faces,” suggests World Relief in a new series of six filmstrips, The World: A Global Community. That is what one would expect from the social concern branch of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Bring on the guilt feelings! Call for the ushers with oversized offering plates. Empty the refrigerator: listen for the semipious sounds of a growling evangelical stomach. But somehow, responses to feelings of guilt, appeals for finances, and calls for a simple lifestyle rarely materialize.

World presents a low-key, factual perspective on world hunger that could easily be used as the basis for discussion in a Sunday school class, youth retreat, study group, or even a public school classroom. The accompanying “Participant’s Guide” gives the discussion leader a variety of tools to use in clarifying the issues in viewers’ minds.

The first four filmstrips address popular myths about world hunger, major causes of hunger, a blueprint for a well-fed world, and the role of the U.S. government. The fifth uses a fascinating simulation game to allow the viewer to feel the frustration of poverty, while the last filmstrip ties the series together with a suggested course of action.

“NOT READY FOR THE CLASSROOM PLAYERS” PRESENT …

Discipline in the classroom is one of the major problems faced by educators both inside and outside the church. “How do you take charge without being oppressive?” is the issue stated simply by James Dobson in his new 45-minute film, Discipline in the Christian Classroom (Word Films, $57 rental; 1980).

Actually, Discipline is two films in one. After a brief introduction, Dobson is interviewed by Dave Bell in a talk show format, focusing on classroom discipline problems illustrated in humorous vignettes by the “Not Ready for the Classroom Players.” This portion of the film, aimed at the professional teacher, contrasts the vacillating figure of “Miss Peace,” a teacher who needs to be liked by her class, and the controlled “Miss Justice,” who establishes mastery of her class on the first day of school. The dialogue concerns how a teacher can exert loving leadership but avoid strife.

The second film within Discipline deals with the Sunday school learning hour. “Actually,” states Dobson, “the Sunday school violates all the laws of learning,” After a brief and exaggerated explanation of the statement, Dobson, associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, provides a number of helpful suggestions for the Sunday school teacher.

Like his Focus on the Family series, this film is carried along by Dobson’s wit and personality. While educators might wish Dobson had gone into greater depth in dealing with problems, the practitioner will walk away with a sense of insight and encouragement. A “Film Discussion Guide,” available from Word, may help individual viewers to increase their retention and integrate the thoughts into their classes. Discipline also will be an excellent tool for training new teachers and motivating continuing teachers anew.

MARK H. SENTER III¹Mr. Senter is pastor of Christian education at Wheaton Bible Church, Wheaton, Illinois.