Seminar leader Bill Gothard was back at the helm last month of his troubled Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts (IBYC). Gothard had stepped down temporarily as corporation president and from the five-member IBYC board of directors during an organizational crisis in July. But after three weeks, the board restored the IBYC founder to both former positions.

Gothard remained on a temporary leave of absence from administrative duties, according to board chairman Gustav Hemwall, an Oak Park, Illinois, medical doctor. Gothard was spending time in study and prayer, as well as developing new teaching material that would incorporate “lessons that have been learned” through the recent problems, said Hemwall. The seminars would continue by videotape, he said, while adding his belief that the IBYC “is now on the long road to recovery.”

For a number of veteran institute staff members and volunteer workers, however, Gothard’s restoration came prematurely. Several IBYC area committees had canceled upcoming seminars. A number of staff members had resigned: still unresolved, they said, are many alleged inconsistencies between Gothard’s teachings in his popular 32-hour, six-day seminars, and his own actions.

Additional staff members left the institute last month. Hemwall acknowledged that “some key people” had left, but said replacements had been found. Bill Wood, recently departed administrative director of the IBYC’s Oak Brook, Illinois, headquarters, listed in a telephone interview the names of 28 full-time workers who had left since the crisis began.

Aside from 10 persons involved in immorality, Wood said, at least 20 others had been dismissed or, like himself, had resigned in dissatisfaction over developments at the IBYC. These, he said, included the head of the nearly 50 area IBYC offices, the head of seminar registrations, several persons who administered the seminars, and others in management positions. As headquarters administrative director, Wood said he had been personally responsible for about 40 of 80 IBYC employees.

Going over the list of departed staff members, Wood commented that “most of the people leaving were ones who had to meet the public and represent Bill.” Because they believed Bill’s practices did not match his teachings, they felt they could not in good conscience do so, he asserted.

The institute’s problems began this summer, when it was disclosed that Steve Gothard—Bill’s brother and administrator of most daily IBYC operations—had been involved sexually with a number of IBYC staff secretaries (Aug. 8 issue, p. 46). While Bill Gothard himself was not involved, the four former IBYC executives who informed the board of the immorality in April complained that Bill had known about Steve’s sexual involvements since 1975 but had not informed the board as he had promised, and that he had not taken sufficient disciplinary action against Steve.

Citing his “closeness to the situation,” Gothard temporarily relinquished control of the IBYC in July. Steve and the women were dismissed, and William Gothard, Sr., who had administered IBYC finances, resigned from the board along with son Bill. Board chairman Hemwall stepped down temporarily so that Milwaukee attorney John McLario could be brought in to fill the administrative gap left by Gothard and—as Hemwall had stated in an earlier interview—because the IBYC “needed some legal help.”

McLario stayed three weeks before leaving. His brief tenure was “part of our original arrangement” and was intended to “tide over the emergency,” said Hemwall. Legal and staffing problems have “leveled off,” so that McLario could leave, he said, noting his own return as board chairman.

Staff members who left after or during McLario’s stint add another view. With Bill Gothard’s support, asserted Wood, who resigned, McLario had been brought in expressly to fire or encourage the resignations of staff members critical of Gothard.

What Kind of Confrontation?

The institute’s situation posed difficult questions for staff members and volunteer workers, many of whom had worked with Gothard for years: Should criticisms be aired only privately to Gothard, and not publicly, in order to protect and prolong a ministry reported to have benefited thousands of Christians?

Former institute associates told CHRISTIANITY TODAY they had confronted Gothard privately, but that in their eyes he showed insufficient inclination to change; they decided to discuss the institute’s problems publicly. In addition, they explained, the estimated 1.5 million (mostly young men and women, and as many as 40,000 pastors) who have attended the seminars since 1965 would never have the chance to confront Gothard privately.

The crucial issue to the former staff members relates to Gothard’s own teachings. For instance, Gothard teaches how to resolve conflicts scripturally, but “he resolves his by firing them,” asserted a departed executive.

One of the main planks in Gothard’s teaching is the necessity of obedience to persons and structures of authority, because these have been established by God. This created tensions for IBYC staff members: Should they be obedient to Gothard, their employer and authority figure, even when (as they said) he interfered in an unwarranted way in their personal affairs, such as in their choice of spouse? Former executive Wood fears that Gothard’s teachings are interpreted so that some staff and alumni become loyal to the extreme.

Two area committees—in San Diego and Los Angeles—had withdrawn their invitations to host scheduled Gothard seminars. The Los Angeles committee’s intent was to postpone the seminar until it felt Gothard’s “credibility was reestablished,” said coordinator Jim Keasling.

The board had told the Los Angeles committee that it was bringing its seminar anyway, and would appoint a new committee if necessary, Keasling said. The institute has a policy of holding seminars only in cities where it has been invited, he added.

Keasling, a landscape contractor who has worked with the Los Angeles committee since its formation in 1969, said he and his eight subcommittee chairmen had voted unanimously to cancel the scheduled October 6–11 seminar. Their regional director, Len Nair, who oversees IBYC area offices in several western states, told CHRISTIANITY TODAY the committee had his full support.

Since the committee’s decision, “my phone has been ringing off the hook with other area coordinators saying we are wrong,” Keasling said. Most of those had little information about the scope of the alleged problems involving Gothard, he asserted.

Keasling said he and several other area coordinators had spent five days with Gothard last month at the Oak Brook headquarters. The coordinators (who are volunteer workers) had concurred “that we all loved Bill Gothard,” he said. However, Keasling stated he still came away with questions regarding Gothard’s credibility and authority. Of Gothard’s treatment of staff members, Keasling expressed a primary concern that, “I don’t think that he sees the hurts or the heartfelt needs.…”

More than 200 active committee volunteers put on the Los Angeles seminars, and coordinator Keasling said a majority of them had stated they would not work if the seminar is held at the scheduled time.

Keasling’s committee leaders still voted to continue meeting as a group for fellowship. They recognized their action would be criticized: Los Angeles, with about 200,000 alumni in the area, is a center of institute support, he said. “I told them to be ready to face some angry people.”

In a letter, the board gave five reasons for holding the seminar even though the committee opposed it, said Keasling. These included the spiritual blessings of recent seminars, “clear direction from God,” and encouragement from Los Angeles pastors and other Christian leaders. “In effect,” he said, “They [the board] feel there is a mandate around the country that they should follow through.”

The Phoenix area committee canceled its scheduled September 15–20 seminar. The San Diego seminar, scheduled for September 29 to October 4, remained in doubt since the area committee had withdrawn its invitation. The more than 15 remaining seminars in 1980 were going on as planned.

Church-and-State in the Courts

Campus Access Upheld for Christian Student Groups

Christian student groups at public universities were affirmed last month in their right to use campus facilities for religious purposes. Specifically, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Kansas City, Missouri, reversed a lower court decision that had sustained a University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) policy barring recognized student groups from using university facilities and grounds for religious purposes.

The school had argued that the campus religious meetings would violate constitutional prohibitions against establishment of religion. But in writing the opinion of the three-judge panel, Circuit Court Judge Gerald W. Heaney concluded that the school’s denial placed an impermissible burden on students’ constitutional rights and “is not justified by a compelling state interest in avoiding an establishment of religion.”

Christian student groups applauded the ruling, and called the Missouri decision (Vincent v. Widmar) an affirmation of crucial freedoms. The UMKC case had generated considerable interest nationwide, since many believed it would set a legal precedent for similar cases (June 6 issue, p.44).

In 1977 a Christian student group at UMKC, Cornerstone (one of 90 recognized student groups at the school), had requested the continued use of a particular lecture hall for its Saturday night meetings. Responding to a school request for more information, the group had explained its weekly meetings included informal sharing, prayer, Bible study, and hymn singing. The meetings would be open to the public, and there would be no offerings or solicitation of funds. While Cornerstone meetings would differ from a traditional worship service, the group had acknowledged: “There is also no doubt that the undecided and uncommitted are encouraged and challenged to make a personal decision in favor of trusting in Jesus Christ both for salvation and for the power to live an abundant Christian life on earth.”

Following are excerpts from the August 4, 1980 decision, Vincent v. Widmar, filed in the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Kansas City, Missouri.

• “We cannot agree, however, that such a policy (allowing religious meetings) would have the primary effect of advancing religion. Rather, it would have the primary effect of advancing the University’s admittedly secular purpose—to develop students’ ‘social and cultural awareness as well as their intellectual curiousity.’ It would simply permit students to put their religious ideals and practices in competition with the ideas and practices of other groups, religious or secular. It would no more commit the University, its administration or its faculty to religious goals than they are now committed to the goals of the Students for a Democratic Society the Young Socialist Alliance, the Young Democrats or the Women’s Union.”

• “In contrast with a neutral policy, UMKC’s current regulation has the primary effect of inhibiting religion, an effect which violates the Establishment Clause just as does governmental advancement of religion.… The University’s policy singles out and stigmatizes certain religious activity and, in consequence, discredits religious groups.

“The University’s prohibition on worship and religious teaching also hopelessly entangles it in the delicate tasks of defining religion, determining whether a proposed event involves religious worship or teaching, and then monitoring events to ensure that no prohibited activity takes place.”

As a result, the university had concluded that Cornerstone’s meetings would violate its regulations prohibiting the use of university buildings or grounds for purposes of religious worship or religious teaching. The group was forced to meet in a building off campus; its later request to hold small group Bible studies on the university lawn also was denied.

Eleven Cornerstone members then had appealed the university’s decision—alleging violation of their rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and equal protection of law. However, in December 1979, U.S. District Court Judge William R. Collinson upheld the school’s policy. He said a policy allowing student religious meetings on campus would constitute an establishment of religion. He also refused to invoke on the students’ behalf the free exercise of religion clause, saying for that to happen the infringed practice must be one “of deep religious conviction.” Holding religious services in a university-owned building does not establish itself as a “matter of deep religious conviction,” he ruled.

Some observers blamed Collinson’s decision for establishing a precedent that led to a subsequent U.S. District Court decision, Dittman v. Western Washington, involving the rights of Christian student groups at Western Washington University in Bellingham. That decision in March upheld a school policy that restricts and regulates student groups’ use of campus facilities for religious meetings. Affected groups included Campus Crusade and Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, which are allowed no more than two religious meetings in campus facilities per academic quarter; they have challenged the ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, and a decision is not expected for at least several months.

Lynn Buzzard, executive director of the Christian Legal Society (CLS)—the Oak Park, Illinois-based agency involved heavily in both the Missouri and Washington cases—hailed the Missouri decision. However, he noted it did not speak to all the issues involved.

Construed narrowly, he said, the Missouri case states only that the university cannot prohibit campus religious groups from organizing and meeting. “The Washington decision agreed with that, but it also said we may regulate them (religious groups) in ways that we do not regulate other groups.”

Buzzard did believe the recent decision would “certainly help” in the Washington case. If Christian student groups won this second victory, he said, “I think the full panoply of rights that we [CLS] wanted to defend … will have been secured in at least those two judicial districts.” In that event, Buzzard said CLS might next focus its efforts in the same two jurisdictions on securing for high school students the same rights to use school facilities for religious purposes.

In its 25-page decision, the Eighth Circuit Court indicated the UMKC situation differed from one involving a high school group’s request for use of classrooms for prayer and Bible study—a hot issue in some parts of the country.

High school students require more supervision than college-age young adults, and “this supervision necessarily poses a greater risk of entangling governmental authority in religious issues,” the court ruled. Also, the court recognized that college students rely more on their campus as their total community: “They can expect from it a greater accommodation of their religious needs than high school students can from their schools.”

North American Scene

About 15,000 followers of Victor Paul Wierwille and his The Way International gathered last month for their “Rock of Ages ’80” in a field outside tiny New Knoxville, Ohio (near The Way’s headquarters). A visiting Chicago Sun-Times reporter described attenders’ intense devotion to Wierwille, 63, a self-described apostle of God whose scriptural interpretations form the group’s teachings: denial of the Trinity; tongues speaking and healings; and crucifixion of Christ on a Wednesday and his resurrection on a Saturday. The group has overseas missionaries and about 40,000 followers who tithe. Followers pay $200 each to take The Way’s 45-hour videotaped Power for Abundant Living course, and thousands more a year if they take training at the group’s campuses in Emporia, Kansas, and Rome City, Indiana, the Sun-Times reported. Critics accuse the group of mind control of recruits—often young, white, and with Christian backgrounds.

A suggestion that the United Methodist Church divide into two denominations livened up the recent annual meeting of the UMC’s evangelical caucus group, Good News. University of North Carolina professor Fred Brooks, a layman and former Good News board member, said in an address the UMC’s pluralistic system wasn’t working, and that a church must have theological unity to survive. He proposed a “loving division” into two bodies, “each unified by its own theological integrity.” Noting that Brooks spoke only for himself, Good News leaders indicated his idea caught them by surprise and that, practically speaking, it probably wouldn’t work. The movement has sought to bring renewal from within the UMC.

Planners are following through on the “Washington for Jesus” prayer rally, which drew more than 200,000 persons to the nation’s capital last April 29. Prior to a first meeting August 30 of the national planning committee, Campus Crusade president Bill Bright (a Washington program cochairman) described a consensus among rally sponsors for continuing evangelistic efforts. He said plans for 1981 and 1982 involve: an outreach in major U.S. cities, each of which will be preceded and followed by widespread prayer campaigns, and capped by a two-day activity involving one day of prayer and fasting and a mass rally and evangelistic outreach on the following day. Bright indicated the plan is to return to Washington, D.C., in 1982 for another national gathering.

Today’s convert to Roman Catholicism most often is a young woman influenced by her Catholic spouse, according to a recent study (based on 200 interviews with dropouts, returnees, and converts) by respected Catholic University sociologist Dean Hoge. Converts joined most often because their children were being raised as Catholics, and dropouts most often said loss of motivation to attend Mass was their reason for leaving. Hoge addressed the “Second Annual National Catholic Lay Celebration of Evangelization” last month in Washington, D.C. Headed by Alvin lllig of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Committee on Evangelization, the congress had a purpose of developing in all 18,600 U.S. parishes a core group of lay people to reach out to inactive Catholics and to those without a church.

Deaths

Vincent Brushwyler, 77, a founder and first general director of the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society (1944–64), and a former president of the Evangelical Foreign Mission Association; Aug. 16 in San Jose, California, after a long illness.

‘Common Identity’ Retained

Catholic Church Accepts Former Episcopal Clergy

The Vatican’s recent decision to admit certain U.S. Anglicans, or Episcopalians, into the Roman Catholic church startled members in both church bodies. Many particularly speculated about the part of the decision admitting married Episcopal priests, considering Pope John Paul II’s repeated stands in support of the Vatican’s position against marriage for priests.

However, insiders had inklings of the Vatican action long before the August 20 announcement by Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco, who is president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB).

“High church” Episcopalians were disturbed by their denomination’s approval in 1976 of women priests and in 1979 of a modernized liturgy. A number of them left their church, Some formed the Anglican Catholic Church, which, despite its own splits and disagreements, claims up to 20,000 members nationwide and now is making plans to establish its own seminary in Liberty, New York. A smaller, more traditionalist group formed the Los Angeles—based Pro-Diocese of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. This group, representing about 1,000 breakaways and more than 60 priests, wanted to reestablish Roman Catholic ties, severed since 1534 when King Henry VIII formed the Anglican church after the pope refused his request for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

Mainly, it was their appeal that prompted serious Vatican consideration of admitting U.S. Anglicans. During executive sessions of their general meetings in May 1978 and May 1980, the U.S. Catholic bishops had discussed the question. On both occasions, the bishops accepted the idea in principle, and said as much to Vatican officials. The final decision was made by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and got the Pope’s and then the NCCB’s approval.

The terms under which Episcopalians and their clergymen would be admitted to the Catholic church are still to be established, and would require the doctrinal congregation’s approval. However, the essential features of the plan are:

• Episcopalians would be admitted to Catholicism with a “common identity” under which they would retain some elements of their Anglican liturgy (meaning, perhaps, limited use of their Book of Common Prayer). The decision applies only to persons who fully accept and profess Roman Catholic doctrine, and who accept the authority of the pope and bishops.

• Although they can be received into Roman Catholic dioceses, some form of “common identity” also is possible. The use of elements of the Anglican liturgical tradition will be restricted to liturgical celebrations involving those persons.

• The ex-Episcopal priests will be evaluated on an individual basis by the doctrinal congregation: unmarried and widowed priests will not be allowed to marry, although those presently married will be allowed to remain wed. Married priests will not be eligible to become Roman Catholic bishops.

The decision provoked criticisms, plaudits, and confusion. Some Episcopal churchmen criticized the decision as “sheep-stealing” of dissidents. Certain ecumenists felt the decision would further polarize the two church bodies, but Quinn denied that was the intent.

Some conservative Roman Catholics wondered if allowing married Episcopalian priests was a first step toward reversing the Vatican’s stand on priestly celibacy—a move requested by some because of the shortage of priests. (Some Eastern Rite Catholic churches have married priests, but married U.S. priests are virtually unknown.) However, the Vatican said the decision in no way changed the church’s no-marriage stand for priests.

The World Council of Churches

The Russians Encounter a Feisty Central Committee

An attempt to endorse a document issued by its executive committee last February encountered stout resistance when the World Council of Churches Central Committee met this summer in Geneva, Switzerland. Among its statements, the document had called the Russian intervention in Afghanistan a threat to peace—a view subscribed to by the Russian Orthodox church member of the committee. The statement had been resented by the Soviet secular authorities, and in March the Russian Orthodox church had duly changed its mind.

Then, when the document came before the Central Committee, the two ranking Russian churchmen, Metropolitans Kirill and Juvenaly, wanted no endorsement of it. They blamed Western news media for distorting the issue. Based on past performance, one would have expected the Central Committee to back off, remembering its tacit policy of “let’s not be beastly to the Orthodox.” But feeling over Afghanistan ran so deep that a variety of speakers pressed the point. From the platform William Thompson, study unit moderator and stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., shifted from saying it was not necessary to endorse the earlier document to saying it was necessary not to endorse it.

But after what he acknowledged to be a “spirited and unfettered debate.” the Central Committee voted for a minor change of wording, but, in what some saw as a significant triumph for freedom of speech, retained the substance of the statement.

The 140-strong committee was more of one mind in opposing “the Israeli unilateral action of annexing East Jerusalem and uniting the city as its ‘eternal capital’ under its exclusive sovereignty.” The committee’s statement declared that “just as the future status of Jerusalem has been considered part of the destiny of the Jewish people, so it cannot be considered in isolation from the destiny of the Palestinian people, and should thus be determined within the general context of the settlement of the Middle East conflict in its totality.”

The committee renewed the mandate of the Program to Combat Racism (PCR) and heard that nearly $3.5 million had been dispensed by the special fund since 1970. During the controversy PCR provoked by the grant to guerrilla groups in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), it was claimed that support actually had increased, with some $650,000 currently available. The committee acknowledged that racism was not restricted to white racism.

During discussion of a statement on South Africa, there was a moving appeal from Donald Cragg, a South African Methodist observer: “Violence is violence whoever commits it. My church would like to see the withdrawal of grants from those who kill innocent people. We ask you to help the churches in South Africa to be the church. Help us become a community of health and hope in an area of mounting violence.” (His plea fell on deaf ears. Late last month the PCR announced a sharp increase in assistance to guerrilla groups in southern Africa to nearly half its total outlay of $750,000. The African National Congress in South Africa will receive $150,000—up from $25,000 last year—and the Southwest African People’s Organization in Namibia wll receive $200,000—up from $125,000 last year).

On the threat of nuclear war, a wrangle initiated by the Russians concerned whether the peace efforts of the USA measured up to those of the USSR, especially in view of the Americans’ August statement on limited nuclear war and President Carter’s unwillingness to ratify SALT II. One speaker pointed out that “the USA has not been involved in any expansionism, the Soviet Union has.” But the Russian assertion won approval after an exhaustive discussion.

It was decided that “Jesus Christ the Life of the World” should be the theme for the Sixth Assembly of the WCC, scheduled for Vancouver in 1983. Said the paper, “The assembly is to be seen as a gathering of Christians bringing their gifts and sharing their experiences as members of the body of Christ.”

There was a special reception to celebrate the eightieth birthday of W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, the WCC’s first general secretary; his career spanned three generations of ecumenists, beginning with John R. Mott. Said Potter of his Dutch predecessor, “He taught us to act within the church as loyal opposition, to keep our faith resilient, and to guard our prophetic task as watchmen.” In response, Visser ’t Hooft reminded the 400 people who gathered to honor him, “The future of the ecumenical movement depends on the rediscovery by every new generation that the movement does not belong to us, but to the Lord of the Church.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

The Edmonton Crusade

Graham Preaches Where West Is Still a Bit Wild

For Edmonton Christians the northern Alberta Billy Graham crusade was a long-awaited opportunity to penetrate their oil-rich western Canadian provinces significantly with the gospel.

The eight-day August crusade drew crowds of some 13,000 to 22,000 to the Northlands Coliseum in Alberta’s capital city of nearly 700,000. More than 4,500 inquirers registered their commitments to Jesus Christ.

While the crusade itself was important to the 20,000 Edmontonians who had volunteered for various roles, the Graham organization was looking at the wider ripple effect of the three crusade services televised for release in early September.

That crusade planners had switched the meeting location from the 42,000-seat Commonwealth Stadium to the 16,000-seat indoor Northlands Coliseum was a plus for television. The smaller enclosed site made for easier lighting and camera logistics. The change had been made, however, because surveys indicated that Edmonton lacks the backup surrounding population—usual to cities of its size—that would have overflowed an indoor facility.

For their part, Edmonton Christians plan to make full use of the telecasts. Crusade chairman John Hopkinson said 4,000 people would be available for telephone counseling when the series was aired there.

The Edmonton crusade—and its Calgary counterpart set for next August 23 to 30—fulfilled the long-time hope of Senator Ernest Manning, who was premier of Alberta for 25 years, beginning during the 1940s. The Edmonton event coincided with the seventy-fifth anniversary of Alberta becoming a Canadian province. Manning, well-known for his long-time radio ministry and keen evangelical faith, has played a key role in Alberta’s “Bible belt” reputation.

That reputation has become somewhat tarnished in recent years, however, with the effects of rapid growth spurred on by the fact that Alberta is Canada’s largest oil and natural gas producer. Edmonton’s population—currently 680,000—has increased by 10 times since 1940, and little letup is expected.

All is not well, however. Alberta Reports, a regional news magazine, notes Edmonton’s murder rate is twice that of Toronto, a city four times as large. Albertans consume five times as much alcohol as they did in 1947. They have racked up the second highest divorce rate in Canada, and their suicide incidence is alarmingly high.

In strongly endorsing the crusade, Edmonton Mayor Cec Purvis, a devout Mormon and former bishop of his church, noted that his city has one of the busiest prostitution strips in Canada. “The oil sands, with their megaprojects, are drawing thousands of young men. They come into the city for their fun—and that often involves prostitution or drugs. To say anything else would be to hide our heads in the sand. We put a lot of money into policing … but that is not enough.”

While allowing that he disagrees theologically with Billy Graham, Purvis likes the evangelist’s emphasis on the family and his call to personal commitment. On opening day, he went beyond the usual welcoming remarks expected of the mayor, affirming “the divinity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God” and adding, “I know Jesus lives and is the Christ.”

For his part, Billy Graham was careful to steer clear of situations that would convey any impression that he was taking a political stand. He told Edmonton Journal reporters that his political friendships in the past had caused people to believe he was endorsing candidates.

In an interview, Graham said he had a private lunch with Alberta Premier Lougheed and had been briefed on Alberta’s stances on energy and Canadian constitutional matters.

But Lougheed and Graham kept to their own corners during crusade week. While Lougheed had been a signer of the original invitation letter, he missed a precrusade civic luncheon and made no appearance at the crusade.

It is too early to tell whether the crusade changed the prostitution situation. But one male attender said he had made no commitment the first night because he was living with two women. He returned the next night to report he had severed the relationships—and then made his commitment to Jesus Christ the following evening. A number of oil field workers did find their way into the crusade inquiry area.

Crusade director Charles Riggs noted that the northern Alberta crusade had drawn a comparatively high number of volunteers. Counselor training drew twice as many as usual, he said. Riggs noted that Edmonton, as a fast-growth city with a “frontier” spirit, had all the ingredients for such volunteer activity. He said that while there are not a great many large churches, there are dozens of young, vigorous congregations. The crusade may be the beginning of significant growth for many such churches, he said.

During the interview, Graham indicated his messages in Canada are similar to those preached in other countries “because man’s heart is still the same.” The evangelist has preached in Toronto and Halifax, as well as in Edmonton, in recent months. He allowed that crusade support is not as high among mainstream Protestants in Canada as it is in England, Australia, or even in the United States.

The Edmonton crusade cost $360,000. By the time the last offering was taken, some $400,000 had been raised. The surplus was allocated to help with the Calgary crusade expenses and the telecast costs.

C. LLOYD MACKEY

World Scene

Evangelical radio programs in Mexico have been totally banned. In a late July directive issued to all broadcasters, the federal government’s Department of the Interior demanded immediate termination of “all programs or messages that directly or indirectly imply propaganda of a religious nature.” In recent years the government has increasingly opposed evangelical programs while permitting regular coverage of the Pope’s discourses and other programs promoting Roman Catholicism. A few evangelical programs—often paying premium rates for time—were still being aired from isolated stations throughout Mexico, but these have now been silenced. A. CHRISTIANITY TODAY correspondent in Mexico noted that this unequal treatment does not accord with that nation’s constitutional provision for total separation of church and state.

Brazil may severely curtail missionary residence there now that a controversial “foreigner’s law,” sponsored by the military government, is in effect. The law, which came into force last month despite resistance from opposition parties, empowers the government to expel anyone in an “irregular position,” including expatriates married to Brazilians. It also authorizes officials to decide arbitrarily who will be given permanent visas, to limit permanent visas to five years, and to confine expatriates to specific geographical areas. The legislation is thought to have been created as a regime weapon against political activists among the Roman Catholic clergy, more than half of whom are from abroad. But the law also could reduce the Protestant missionary force in Brazil—currently the largest in any country, with more than 2,000 North Americans serving there.

Hungarian teen-agers will soon be able to study the Bible in school. Some 80,000 secondary school students will be exposed to the Bible as a “profound” cultural work next semester. More students are to be added as the innovation is worked into the curriculum. The course—a unique development in Communist Eastern Europe—is the outcome of a delicate compromise worked out between party leaders and the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist churches. Under terms reported in the Education Ministry’s weekly journal, the church accepts that the Bible will be taught as literature rather than as the Christian “source of faith,” and the state refrains from mixing teaching of an atheistic outlook with literary presentation.

A Soviet court has sentenced Gleb Yakunin to five years of “strict regime” detention in a labor camp to be followed by five years of internal exile. Yakunin, a priest, was for 15 years the leading Orthodox religious rights activist in the Soviet Union (Dec. 21, 1979, issue, p. 44). Arrested last November, he was charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and sentenced in Moscow on August 28.

The vice-president of the unregistered Baptists in the Soviet Union was arrested last month. Pyotr Rumachik, 49, was apprehended in Dnepropetrovsk. In hiding since 1977, when he was released from his most recent prison term of four years—of a total time served of 11½ years—he had been performing his leadership role in the Council of Evangelical Baptist Churches.

Evangelicals are prospering in the Central African Republic under the successor to the despotic Jean-Bedel Bokassa, according to Paul S. White, the dean of the Bangui Evangelical School of Theology (BEST). He reports that President David Dacko, who ousted the self-styled Emperor Bokassa in a coup a year ago, is very open and helpful to Protestant Christians. A Roman Catholic himself, he hosts a Bible study and prayer meeting in his home each week. He has also given BEST additional property, granted it duty-free status to import building materials, and offered a $300,000 interest-free loan to accelerate the school’s building program, putting it a step ahead of inflation.

South African Prime Minister Pieter Botha and other officials met with a South Africa Council of Churches delegation last month for the first time. The SACC, led by black Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, has been a constant thorn in the side of the government because of its strident criticism of official apartheid (racial separation) policies. The government withdrew Tutu’s passport in March, and in May accused SACC of financing unrest in the country—a charge the body angrily denied. In the meeting, Tutu warned that there would never be peace while discriminatory laws remained in place. Botha said he was prepared to accept positive proposals to improve the lot of all South Africans, but reaffirmed government rejection of majority rule and warned that it was “well prepared to deal with confrontation.”

The patriarch of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church has denounced the American Coptic Association. In a statement issued last month, Pope Shenouda III declared the ACA viewpoint “completely contradictory” to that of his church, including its “loyalty towards its rulers.” The ACA, in pursuing its objective of exposing “the religious suppression and discrimination … against the Copts in Egypt,” has frequently criticized President Anwar Sadat for failing to protect the Christian community from Muslim extremists. In a May speech, Sadat accused the Coptic leadership of conspiring to blacken his name and that of Egyptian Muslims by appealing to American Christians. ACA president Shawky F. Karas maintains that Pope Shenouda is under virtual house arrest and was pressured to make the statement “for the safety of the church.” Shenouda’s health deteriorated recently. But when he arranged last spring to fly to London for medical tests, his passport was cancelled.

A crackdown on established missions in Iran appears to be under way. Last month the last six United Presbyterian Church missionaries in Iran returned to the U.S. after official warnings that their safety could no longer be guaranteed. British Anglican missionary Jean Waddell was arrested on August 6 and charged with spying and, at mid-month, medical missionary John Coleman and his wife—also Anglicans—were missing from their clinic in Yezd. All Catholic missioners have been summoned for interviews with government officials regarding residence permits, and Archbishop William Barden, an Irish-born Dominican, has been expelled.

The worst Hindu-Muslim conflict in eleven years raged in India last month. It began in the city of Moradabad when a crowd of Muslim worshipers attacked police for failing to drive away a pig—considered an unclean animal—from their prayer ground. The police retaliated, and at least 119 were killed before rioting subsided. By then, however, violence had spread to other cities in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Kashmir.

Tibet’s Drepung Buddhist Monastery has been authorized to accept its first monk novices since the anti-Chinese rebellion of 1959; 20 young men have been selected. The home monastery of the exiled Dalai Lama, Drepung at one time housed 10,000 monks, but now has only 170. Last month a five-man fact-finding team from the Dalai Lama was abruptly expelled from the region after a speech that touched off an impromptu demonstration, interpreted by local officials as “surreptitiously advocating Tibetan independence.”

Evangelical relief agencies have resumed distribution of rice and other supplies along the Thailand border with Cambodia (Kampuchea), disrupted by the Vietnamese military incursion in late June. But that distribution is tangled in politics. The incursion was clearly intended to put a stop to what the Vietnamese saw as the resupplying of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces by the agencies and the Thai authorities. The agencies responded with a decision to enforce more strictly their rule against feeding armed groups. This upset the Thai government, which threatened to withdraw the agencies’ right to use Thailand as a base for lifting food to Pnom Penh or Kompong Som. It suspects that food shipped there has often gone directly into Vietnamese-controlled warehouses for distribution to Heng Samrin forces, rather than to starving mothers and children. To make matters worse, United Nations officials are investigating allegations—belittled by evangelical relief spokesmen—that significant quantities of rice distributed in the Thai border camps were being smuggled out and resold.

It looked like the world’s largest “I Found It” campaign. But the significance of the August ’80 World Evangelization Crusade (WEC) in Seoul, Korea, ran deeper. It publicly signaled that the church in the Republic of Korea (South) has deliberately moved front being a missionary receiving church to a missionary sending one.

A three-point declaration—read on the final night of the crusade to a crowd estimated by crusade officials and news reporters at an unprecedented 3 million—committed the gathering to “place at God’s disposal the resources of the church of Jesus Christ in Korea, for world evangelization.”

The human resources of that church—which, while multiplying rapidly, has been rent by schisms in the last generation—are considerable when united. The crusade demonstrated that.

The shoulder-to-shoulder multitude was impressive by any measure. The Korean press calculated turnouts of 2 million or more on two of the four evening sessions preceding the record-breaking final one. But, massed as they were on the giant outdoor plaza on Yoido Island in the Han River where the rallies were held, there was no way to verify accurately the crowd estimates. (In the past, police estimates have been more modest than those of organizers and the press.)

They came by bus loads from nearby cities, such as Inchon, and from cities as far away as Pusan. They camped in some 3,000 tents skirting the outdoor, asphalt plaza; they sat on half-inch styrofoam mats or newspapers spread out on the tarmac. The frequent heavy, soaking rains did not quench the gusto of the singing or the fervency of the mass prayers. Five all-night prayer meetings continued until five o’clock A.M. with a nightly combined attendance estimated at 600,000. Some 5,000 non-Korean participants from 60 countries were swallowed up in the sea of Korean faces.

Such numbers of Protestant Christians would be impossible to assemble elsewhere in East Asia where Christians average less than 3 percent of the population. Only the Philippines, with its large Roman Catholic majority, outstrips Korea in the ratio of Christians to the general population. The Korean Protestant community came close to doubling its size during each of the three decades since 1940 (from 370,000 in 1940, to 600,000 in 1950, to 1.34 million in 1960, to 2.25 million in 1970). But it has more than tripled in the last decade, achieving 7 million at the end of 1979. Thus the Protestant population is approaching 20 percent of the national total—estimated at 38.2 million for mid-1980. These are distributed among some 18,000 churches with nearly 30,000 pastors and evangelists.

On the heels of a Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) “Here’s Life Korea” campaign, the August 11–15 ’80 World Evangelization Crusade left foreign observers wondering how much participation was promotion for Campus Crusade and how much was genuinely Korean church oriented. “I Found It” buttons were sold throughout the campaign and the same logo appeared on all WEC materials. Crusade chairman Joon Gon Kim tested the Here’s Life campaign a year ago in Taegu and chose to use the “I Found It” strategy in mid-July in Seoul to build up to, and heighten awareness of, the WEC. The second phase of the CCC campaign, “New Life in Christ. You Can Find It Too,” spilled over into the WEC. As for financing, however, sources reported that Campus Crusade had promised no funds toward the nearly $5 million cost of the WEC—and provided none.

Each evening the Korean Christians responded warmly to four or five messages in a row. Most lines of the message on the Second Coming of Christ by Peter Beyerhaus of Tübingen University in West Germany were punctuated with loud cries of “Amen.” Other speakers included Yonggi Cho, pastor of the 100,000-plus-member Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul; Philip Teng, president of the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong; James irwin, former Apollo 15 astronaut; and Bill Bright, Campus Crusade president.

The WEC was one in a series of public rallies organized since 1970 and expected to culminate in 1984 in celebration of the centennial of missions in Korea. The total Christianization movement was ignited in 1970 at the Soowom Conference, followed the next year by the Taejon Leadership Training Institute, the Billy Graham crusade in 1973, and the CCC Explo ’74. The WEC was itself an outgrowth of the 1977 Korean Evangelistic Rally. The WEC climaxed a one-year Christianization drive in key cities throughout the Republic, and kicked off a four-year plan toward out-and-out world evangelization. Nineteen Protestant denominations jointly sponsored the WEC meetings.

Some have wondered how a security-conscious government such as the current South Korea regime could approve of such mass gatherings. But the Christian movement in Korea is overwhelmingly nationalist and anti-Communist. Crusade chairman Kim himself was tortured by Communist cadres during the Korean conflict, and witnessed the killings of his wife and father in 1950. Three of the Republic’s first four presidents were Christian. The proportion of Christians in the armed forces—served by an aggressive chaplaincy corps—is much higher than in the general population.

R. A. Torrey, director of the Anglican Jesus Abbey in Kangweondo, and grandson of the associate of D. L. Moody of the same name, did call for national and individual repentance, speaking out strongly against abortion and for addressing the needs of the poor.

But the basic stress was on missions. Kim issued a call for 100,000 missionaries from Korea to serve in other countries by 1984—the centennial: a thousand missionaries for every year of Protestant Christianization effort in Korea. Ten thousand university students, along with 3,000 high school students, committed themselves to this goal. He called on the nation’s parents to give up their sons and daughters, releasing them to accelerate fulfillment of the Great Commission.

“The missionary may be either short- or long-term,” Kim said, explaining the envisioned inclusive effort to cause every believer, whatever his field of interest, to reach one and teach one. Part of the thrust involves sending teams of youth to enroll in universities in nations with little or no Christian witness, such as China and Japan.

There are already approximately 300 Korean missionaries abroad primarily serving Korean ethnic groups. The WEC shifted its missionary emphasis to a cross-cultural thrust, but not with a united voice. “Look at the early church,” insisted Kim; “they sent workers to evangelize Rome and other cultures before finishing the evangelization of their homeland.” On the same platform on the same evening, however, honorary chairman Han highlighted the unreached villages and the poor within Korea. “Evangelize Jerusalem first,” he said, “and then Judea—evangelize Korea first.”

Another point of disagreement during the crusade was higher education. Korea boasts some 10 Protestant colleges and universities, 40 Bible schools, and 70 seminaries. The educators urged advanced training. But Kim and Torrey called on “the unsophisticated and the unconceited, the humble” to go just as they are and not to get too “stuck up” to work among the masses.

The overwhelming impression imparted by the crusade was the power unleashed when a people is united. “Before the coming of the last days of our earth,” exhorted Kim, “surely it is possible that one people, just once, could be totally given to God so that all they have is at his disposal. I believe we are facing just this miraculous possibility,” he added.

The WEC itself served as a demonstration project. While they put foreign speakers in the prestigious Lotte Hotel, thousands of Korean Christians fasted weekly and gave rice or the cost of a day’s meals once a week for a year. Large banners across streets at pedestrian overhead crossings—paid for by individual churches—proclaimed “I Found It” in Korean and flashed the crusade emblem and church name. Some churches gave 1 percent of their budgets toward crusade expenses, according to Kim. “The widow’s mite” offerings came from villages where anyone, no matter how small his offering, could contribute through a post office or bank.

Some believers even gave blood for free transfusions for the poor; the blood supply in Seoul has been insufficient to meet the demands of its 8 million residents. As an act of Christian love in order to help overcome the shortage, the Christians also established the House of Blood Donations in July, donating an initial 3,000 pints of blood.

Nicaragua

The Nicaraguan Junta Reassures Evangelicals

“As long as Sandinismo exists in Nicaragua, Christianity will continue to exist,” affirmed Tomás Borge, revolutionary guerrilla commander and minister of the interior in Nicaragua’s governing junta. Sandinismo is the revolutionary movement that toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979 and now animates the leadership of the Central American country. Of its three founders, Borge (pronounced BORE-hay) alone survives.

“In Nicaragua we don’t see Sandinismo and Christianity as being contradictory factors,” he went on. “You have heard us say, ‘Sandinismo today, Sandinismo yesterday, Sandinismo forever!’ Let me add, ‘Jesus Christ today, Jesus Christ yesterday, Jesus Christ forever!’ ”

Borge’s statements came at an unprecedented July 31 gathering of the local chapter of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International at Managua’s Intercontinental Hotel, attended by four of the five members of the ruling junta (the fifth was out of the country), members of the state council, Roman Catholic Archbishop Obando y Bravo, other bishops, Protestant clergy, local businessmen, members of the diplomatic corps, and visitors from other countries.

“Nicaragua’s doors are open to everyone who comes with love and with his Christian faith,” said Borge. Then, turning to the special speaker of the evening, former U.S. astronaut Charles Duke, he commented: “I believe Nicaragua gave you a better welcome than you got on the moon!”

After Duke presented his Christian testimony, an evangelistic invitation was given and there were numerous responses. All attenders then received a gift of a Bible.

Local television gave the event full coverage. One Managua newspaper featured it with front-page headlines and photos.

In an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent Paul Cole, Borge, who now heads the armed forces, said he has forgiven the National Guard soldiers of Somoza who castrated him, killed his wife, and forced him to watch while 17 men gang-raped, and then killed, his daughter.

Fidel Castro, who was in Nicaragua on the first anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution, called a conference of Nicaraguan Catholic and Protestant leaders at which he reportedly expressed his regrets that in Cuba’s revolution, church-and-state relations had not been as cordial as they have been in Nicaragua.

Despite recent fears that the Nicaraguan revolution would be taking a Cuban-style Communistic direction, the governing junta appears to be demonstrating a desire to gain broad popular support among both Roman Catholics and Protestants.

Nicaragua’s 21-year-old evangelical radio station, YNOL, continues to broadcast freely and recently has been joined by another radio voice, the more Pentecostal-oriented Radio Maravilla (“Miracle Radio”).

The current countrywide literacy campaign aimed at teaching half the nation’s population to read and write, while heavily staffed by Cubans, has also involved Nicaraguan Christian young people. Evangelicals working in rural areas report some conversions; Catholic slogans exhort every literacy teacher to be “an evangelist.”

Borge challenged FGBMFI leaders to provide a Bible for each new reader and to develop Christian rehabilitation programs for Nicaragua’s 7,000 prisoners—mostly former members of Somoza’s national guard.

The Managua banquet was organized at the request of Borge. He had attended a similar event in Costa Rica a few months ago, and then had approached Demos Shakarian, FGBMFI founder-president, and Jonás González, who has been organizing chapters in several Latin American countries.

PAUL E. PRETIZ

The National Affairs Briefing

Evangelicals Give Reagan a ‘Non-partisan’ Stump

Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took his campaign to heat-choked Dallas late last month where he met with an emerging group of power brokers in American politics—conservative evangelical Christians. “I know you can’t endorse me,” the former California governor told a gathering of nearly 15,000 evangelical and fundamentalist pastors. “but I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”

What the preachers are doing, in their words, is raising up an army of Christian soldiers in an effort to restore America to righteousness and world respect. Now, instead of relying solely on the power of prayer, the conservative evangelicals are turning to the power of the polling booth, organizing an ambitious program to elect “promorality” candidates to public office.

“It is time to crawl out from under the pews and stop looking through the stained glass windows.” said Texas television evangelist James Robison, who brought the preachers to Dallas for a two-day National Affairs Briefing and strategy session. “If we ever get our act together, the politicians won’t have a stage to play on. We can turn to God or bring down the curtain. We can sound the charge or play ‘Taps.’ ”

The briefing was sponsored by the Roundtable, part of a growing network of right-wing religious lobbying groups, and its organizers assured the crowd that the meeting was not partisan. But speaker after speaker railed against the policies and performance of the Carter administration, and when it was over it was plain that Reagan had the hearts and the votes, if not the formal endorsement, of the new religious right.

He was the only one of the three major presidential candidates to accept Roundtable’s invitation to speak to the briefing, and he was introduced to the crowd by D. James Kennedy of Fort Lauderdale’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church as “a man who understands the signs of the times and our nation’s great traditional principles. Our hope is in God and the promises of his Word. Here is a man who believes that Word, who trusts in the living God and his Son Jesus Christ.”

During a press conference prior to his speech to the pastors, the Republican nominee urged that the biblical story of creation be taught in the nation’s public schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution, a theory he said is increasingly discredited by scientists. He criticized the “increasing tendency of the state interfering with religion.” And he said that abortion is clearly “the taking of a human life.”

Still, Reagan appears uncomfortable discussing the implications of his personal religious faith, and when asked if he were a “born-again Christian,” the one-time actor hesitated briefly and then replied that he was—in the sense that he had once submitted to “voluntary baptism.”

Reagan, who said he would be “proud and happy” to gain the votes of conservative Christians, noted that the evangelical right had become disillusioned with President Carter, a “born-again” Southern Baptist, because “he wore his religion on his sleeve and used it more than it used him.”

But the marriage of Reagan to the bedrock conservative evangelicals may have its rocky moments, too. He is, for example, divorced (and remarried)—and the children from both marriages have set less than a pristine example for the nation’s youth. And, when Reagan reluctantly made public his 1979 income tax return recently, it was disclosed that he donated less than 1 percent of his adjusted gross income to charitable and religious causes, a level of stewardship far short of the 10 percent tithe held as the ideal by many evangelicals who support him.

But much of that is likely to be forgiven so long as Reagan continues to preach the political gospel of the religious right. At a private session with about a dozen evangelical leaders in Dallas, Reagan reportedly vowed to appoint “godly men” to positions in his administration. “I believe the government ought to do the will of God,” Reagan reportedly said.

The emergence of the evangelical right on the American political landscape has been orchestrated largely by television preachers: Robison, Christian Broadcasting Network president M. G. “Pat” Robertson, and Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Virginia. They have already raised millions of dollars to finance political lobbies that speak out against such causes as abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, civil rights for homosexuals, and government intervention in the affairs of parochial schools. The causes they favor include prayer and Bible reading in public schools, a stronger military posture, and preservation of the free enterprise system.

The goal of the umbrella movement of religious lobbies, including Falwell’s Moral Majority and Christian Voice, is identifying and registering before the fall election some 10 million evangelical, promorality voters. Moral Majority claims to have registered 3 million such voters since the 1978 election. They are focusing more on defeating liberal incumbents than in promoting the challengers. The religious lobbyists in Dallas most often cited 2 Chronicles 7:14 and Proverbs 29:2 as scriptural mandates for Christians’ involvement in the political process.

The National Affairs Briefing was the first major gathering of all of the factions in the movement, and it drew pastors from 41 states. Evangelical leaders who addressed the crowd: Bailey Smith, a Del City, Oklahoma, pastor and current president of the Southern Baptist Convention (who revealed after the meeting that President Carter’s liaison to the religious community. Bob Maddox, had attempted to talk him out of participating in the briefing); Adrian Rogers of Memphis, Tennessee, immediate past president of the Southern Baptist Convention; W. A. Criswell, pulpit warrior of Dallas’s 20,000-member First Baptist Church; Paige Patterson, director of the Criswell Center for Biblical Studies in Dallas; and E. V. Hill, pastor of the Mount Zion Baptist Church in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

Among those in the audience were Nelson Bunker Hunt, the Dallas oil billionaire and silver speculator who is best known in this crowd for his close relationship with Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, T. Cullen Davis, a wealthy Texas industrialist who reported a born-again experience under Robison’s tutelage soon after his acquittal this year in a sensational murder-for-hire trial, and at least one member of the Adolph Coors family, the beer brewers from Colorado, who contribute lavishly to right-wing causes.

The burst of evangelical activism comes at a time when the Protestant left appears to be largely disinterested in politics. And it comes on the heels of a directive from Pope John Paul II urging Roman Catholic priests and religious to abandon their political interests in favor of the sacramental and churchly functions of their vocation.

BRUCE BUURSMA

Target: Sexual Immorality

‘Clean Up TV’ Campaign Aims at Sponsors’ Products

Even if television sex and violence gives them a headache, thousands of Christian viewers might not be taking Anacin come October 1. That’s the intended starting date of a unique consumer boycott aimed at elimination of morally objectionable material from TV programs.

About 500,000 persons in 6,000 Churches of Christ congregations were participating last month in a “Clean Up Television” campaign. This represents about one-third of all churches identifying with the loosely affiliated group (without national staff or headquarters) of about 3 million churchmen.

The campaign began as an idea of pastor John M. Hurt and his Joelton, Tennessee, Church of Christ with its approximately 350 attenders. Apparently they have tuned in to the concerns of a number of conservative churchmen. Super-church and TV preacher Jerry Falwell has indicated he will promote the campaign, said Hurt. The Free Will Baptists at their annual meeting supported the campaign, and a leading Southern Baptist official has done so privately, Hurt added.

Unlike other campaigns, which ask viewers to stop watching certain programs or networks as a form of protest, the “Clean Up Television” campaign has asked viewers to stop buying products from companies that most actively buy ads on programs deemed morally offensive. Targeted for the boycott if they did not stop purchasing ads on allegedly offensive programs were the Anacin-selling American Home Products, General Foods, and Warner-Lambert.

Hurt has said the “Clean Up Television” campaign involves no attempt at censorship, and that sponsors remain free to purchase ads on any program they see fit. In a letter to General Foods he said: “We are simply exercising our right not to allow sponsors to use our money to support material which we feel to be offensive. If others wish to see such immoral material, they should be willing to pay for it themselves by increasing their purchases of the products involved.”

“We’re not trying to take shows off the air,” said Hurt in an interview. “What we’re asking is that these shows be cleaned up. “The group wants the removal of scenes of adultery, sexual perversion, incest—generally, “any material that treats immorality in a joking or otherwise favorable light,” he said.

The campaign began when participating churches distributed surveys to their members: adults and teen-agers were asked to list the five programs they felt to be the most offensive and the five they considered best. From those responses, organizers arrived at a list of 10 most offensive programs. Leading the list of allegedly offensive network presentations were “Soap,” “Three’s Company,” “Dallas,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “Charlie’s Angels.” Judged the most offensive syndicated programs were “The Newlywed Game,” “The Dating Game,” and “Three’s a Crowd.”

Next, the organizers monitored those programs to determine which companies most actively sponsored them: these were American Home Products, General Foods, and the Warner-Lambert Corporation. The companies were advised that unless their sponsorship of those programs ceased, the boycott of their products would begin.

Vice-president of marketing services F. Kent Mitchell responded in a July 2 letter to Hurt that General Foods has had a long-standing commitment to advertising only on programs it regards to be in good taste.

He said the company reviews each individual prime-time program or episode prior to air time, and that programs not meeting the company’s standards of propriety are rejected for ad placement. He also said GF ceased advertising on “The Newlywed Game” and on “The Dating Game” a year ago “because these programs had deteriorated below our standards of good taste.”

When they joined the campaign, participants said they would sign pledges not to buy the three companies’ products should the boycott prove necessary. After visits last month with representatives of each company, campaign organizers decided to go ahead with a boycott of General Foods products including Kool-Aid, Jello, and Gaines Dog Food, and of American Home Products including Jiffy Pop, Dristan, and other wares.

The boycott will be more effective than a petition or a protest letter, Hurt asserted, and he believed participants would conscientiously support it: “Once they sign that kind of a pledge, most decent religious people are not going to violate it.”

In an interview late last month, Hurt said General Foods officials had been generally sympathetic, and he hoped they would reconsider. Warner-Lambert (Certs, Listerine, Dentyne Gum, etc.) requested, and got, an additional 30 days to review its sponsorship of the allegedly offensive programs: Hurt stated the company was an early leader in the fight against violence on TV, and he said last month it was looking into the possible “revision of [its] policy on immorality” as well. Only American Home Products had shown little sympathy for the campaign’s concerns, said Hurt.

(General Foods also made a “dishonor roll” of advertisers, that was compiled by another media watchdog group, the Tupelo, Mississippi-based National Federation for Decency. A recent NFD study, conducted by more than 500 volunteers who monitored 742 hours of programming, named General Foods as the most active sponsor of programs with non-Christian values, with American Home Products rated fifth on the list of ten. Warner-Lambert was not named.)

Hurt believes companies are misled if they think a program’s high ratings mean they are “giving people what they want.” He said the public may oppose scenes of immorality that are embedded in a story line, but not enough to stop watching the program, which they generally like. As an example, Hurt said that “Dallas” could “be considered a popular show for everybody” if certain offensive portions were taken out.

He said many viewers by necessity follow the “LOP Theory”—watching the least objectionable program. One can’t expect an improvement in TV content by asking people to turn off their sets, Hurt said: they won’t. Television has become more than an entertainment medium, he said, and is almost “as much a part of the basic environment as the electric light.”

Personalia

A physician and surgeon, Robert L. Foster, has been elected international director of the Africa Evangelical Fellowship. In order to head the missionary sending and church planting agency, which works mostly in southern Africa countries, Foster will leave the staff of a Swiss Evangelical Mission hospital in central Angola—the only mission-operated hospital left in the country. He succeeds Arthur Deane, an Australian who is finishing his six-year term as head of AEF, which has a total organizational staff of about 260, mostly from the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain.

J. Rodman Williams resigned last month as president of Melodyland School of Theology in Anaheim, California. Williams, who will devote himself to writing and remain as a full-time faculty member, has been at the charismatic school since it opened in 1973 as an extension of pastor Ralph Wilkerson’s Melodyland Christian Center (church). Executive vice-president Ray McMurtry was named interim administrator at the school, which is recovering from disagreements in 1978 over the church-school relationship, causing eight (all but one) full-time faculty members to leave.

WHCF hearings sound the need to reaffirm the family unit.

Free-lance writer Nancy Barcus of Waco, Texas, attended the White House Conference on Families meeting in Los Angeles earlier this summer—the last of three national WHCF sessions. She discusses that meeting, and interprets the contribution of the WHCF to the Christian’s understanding of today’s American family.

The american family is heading into the 1980s; but what direction will it take? What are the family’s problems? And how, if at all, should the government get involved to help?

President Jimmy Carter’s White House Conference on Families has drawn perhaps the government’s most comprehensive profile of the American family. The WHCF spanned months of public testimony at local and state levels and comprised 10,000 pages of written transcript in which every type of family stress gained representation.

The final reports taken from that testimony reflect American families in need. But the testimony also reflects a commitment that the family unit remain the cornerstone of American society.

The three national conferences in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles this summer gained wide publicity—especially with regard to squabbles by special interest groups. However, the preceding seven regional conferences and state-wide conferences in 48 of the 50 states laid the research groundwork. For perhaps the first time, government put itself in the role of listener to family woes as family members told where they hurt and where insensitive government policies have failed them.

While these hearings consumed hours of time, with input on every conceivable topic affecting the family, they received practically no coverage in the news media. But without them, the three national conferences would have been meaningless.

A 117-member national task force hoped later this month to finish the final WHCF report, which will summarize the recommendations of the three national meetings and make suggestions for government policies on the family.

The task force voted during its two-day meeting last month to include in the final report a statement adopted by the Minneapolis conference defining the family as “two or more persons related by blood, heterosexual marriage, adoption or extended families.” This “profamily” definition was not adopted at Baltimore or Los Angeles.

The task force report will rank, according to percentage of approval, the recommendations from the three national meetings. Getting most support (at least 92 percent approval of the delegates) were requests for: family-oriented personnel policies allowing flexible job schedules, drug and alcohol abuse prevention, elimination of the “marriage tax” penalty on two-income familes, and tax policies to support care for aging and handicapped persons.

Americans concerned about the family, and Christians in particular with their great personal investment in family values, will lose a great deal if they do not gain access to conference testimony to where the family stands today. The news media often portrayed only the political grandstanding and the most controversial issues.

The main value of the conference probably will lie in the written documents that come out of it. A look at those collected so far suggests that will be the case.

The American family, say the testimonies, is intact but under pressure. Its most predominant form is the nuclear family. This pattern—husband, wife and children—comprises 81 percent of all American families. While it is still the major form, the nuclear family has become smaller due to a declining birthrate.

At the same time, 19 percent of all families include only one parent; nine out of ten times this parent is a mother, though a few are now headed by a father who is college educated and holds a managerial or professional job. Families headed by a mother have an income of only about one-third that of two-parent families. Half of all black families follow this pattern, compared to 15 percent of white families.

The number of single-parent families has doubled since 1960, and so has the resulting number of children in foster care. Unfortunately, the statistics do not reflect reasons for this: whether those families that did not separate in 1960 had a healthy family life or whether many had stayed together merely because of the social stigma against divorce.

At present, two in five marriages end in divorce. Balancing that is evidence showing that most children under age 18 spend a significant portion of their time in two-parent families, owing to remarriage. Divorced persons still seem supportive of the pattern of family life, preferring a new family unit to the isolation following family breakup.

Certainly those support systems that undergirded families have thinned out, with Americans moving frequently, and usually in metropolitan areas. Military families especially experience the stress of displacement, according to testimony. Fewer families live near relatives and friends who might help alleviate their pain and provide stability.

In some situations, families seem to be drawing together in extended family patterns—a good sign, conclude the conference reports. Families still want to take care of their own, say WHCF witnesses, rather than have agencies do it for them: more than 30 percent of elderly persons live in extended family households, 3 percent of those in three-generation households. Conference delegates asked for tax benefits and public assistance to encourage such family arrangements and despaired of laws that make it more feasible financially to place elderly relatives in nursing homes.

Families also prefer adopting or raising their own relatives, rather than letting the state award them to strangers; however, the government now pays strangers but not relatives, so that many cannot afford the cost of another child. The cost of raising a child to age 18 in a middle-class home is estimated at more than $34,000 ($64,000, including college). Subsidies are, of course, far less than those amounts. But families who want to take care of their own would like impersonal laws changed to help them.

At the public sessions there was wide sympathy for these requests. In fact, conservatives and liberals alike heralded solutions that would preserve family privacy and autonomy. The only fears stemming from the extended family concept were that the term might be understood as including colonies of unrelated persons with cultic or homosexual tendencies. But at least 90 percent of the participants preferred the traditional blood-kinship-adoption pattern, speculated conference advisers who themselves held to those sympathies.

In fact, participants nationwide reflected such commitment to family structure that when asked what pattern they would choose if they had another choice, they pointed to a traditional family with children, with its closeness and support. Ninety-one percent said they would have children again. (This figure included 95 percent of all mothers, working or not.)

While most American families seem as committed as ever to the ideals of the traditional family, they are willing to speak out regarding areas where they need help. At the regional and state hearings specific concerns voiced most often during testimony were: government insensitivity to the way laws affect families, the strain of poverty and unemployment in an era of inflation, the child-care needs of mothers who must enter the work force, and the dark side of family life—violence among family members. Finally, they spoke out in large numbers about the ignorance and inexperience of young people now undertaking marriage and child rearing in a stress-filled society.

For most of those expressing pain, the question of government influence on families was not “to be or not to be,” since government already affects families through tax laws, unemployment benefits, social security, and public assistance to the poor. Rather, the question was how to redirect government influence for the good of the family.

Singled out for censure was the “marriage penalty tax,” which taxes two persons with two incomes at a higher rate if they marry than if they remain single. At the national conferences delegates voted the issue a top priority status. They also complained that public assistance laws reward broken families and penalize intact two-parent families who are poor. Said one delegate, “My father works at the hospital and when he and my mother were together they could not support each other. When they had their children they had to separate,” so they could receive public assistance to survive at the poverty level.

Homemakers also asked for the government’s legal recognition of their economic contribution to the family, as a way to avoid the poverty that often comes with widowhood: as economic dependents, they must pay huge inheritance taxes at the death of a husband. Farming families said they were especially hard-hit by inheritance taxes that prevented the family farm from passing to the next generation. Homemakers asked for an arrangement to make them eligible for shared or split social security benefits based on the husband’s salary, even if he had divorced her after several years of her contributing services to him.

The hearings established that many families are hurting badly economically. Many middle-class Americans may be out of touch with the kinds of statistics presented. The median U.S. family income in 1978 was $17,640, and the poverty line for a family of four was $7,410. Of families officially below the poverty line, 16 million whites and 8 million blacks qualify. Blacks are twice as likely to be jobless in times of high unemployment.

For those adults who had completed only 10 years of schooling the average annual income was $4,000 to $5,000, while high school graduates received double that at $9,000 to $10,000. One year of college again doubled the income potential. Education and poverty are indelibly related, yet those who fail to complete high school have a long history of family stress, making them unable to assimilate an education.

Income division between men and women also showed unusual disparity. Men earn a median $15,700, while women earn $9,350 for a year-round, full-time job. Women who are heads of families often need public assistance because of this imbalance. White families earn a median $18,000, while the median figure for black families is $10,800, and for Hispanics, $12,500. In times of inflation, these salaries for a family are very low.

The elderly poor earn just half of what younger Americans take in. While 19 percent of the elderly poor are men, 81 percent are women. The median income for elderly men is $3,400 and for women, $2,900; for couples it is $8,000. For most aged, the immediate family is the chief source of care during illness, again suggesting the family as the primary support system. Yet in order to receive medical benefits, families often are forced to commit elderly relatives to health care facilities.

This cycle of poverty and inflation seems to have spurred greater violence within many families. Statistics indicate family violence occurs more often among low-income, urban families in which the husband is sporadically unemployed and the number of children (adding economic pressure) is four or more. Interestingly, these are often families with no religious affiliation, and as such are a target for Christian service and evangelism.

The number of reported cases of child abuse totals 400,000 to 600,000 annually, but an estimated 1 million incidents actually occur. One expert believes more children die from abuse injuries than from all the common childhood diseases. Children under age 3 are most vulnerable, and 50 percent of reported cases involve children under 7. Abuses included physical attack, sexual and emotional harm, and neglect.

An estimated 1.6 million women are beaten by their husbands every year—one out of six wives, and generally in a pattern of repeated abuse.

Another unexpected form of abuse is now gaining attention. Researchers think that children under age 18 in 1 out of 10 American families hit, beat, stab, or shoot their parents. Six percent of all murders involve children who kill their parents. Experts also fear that many adults abuse their elderly parents, but statistics have not been gathered in that area.

These problems led many at the family hearings to ask for help in counseling, protecting, and sheltering victims of family breakdown.

Family advocates, though, returned again and again to the need for moral principles. They noted that 40 percent of Americans say they turn to their clergy in time of need. Some asked for a “rejection of secular humanism,” or a “return to the morality of the Bible and God’s law.” Many sought revision of TV programming to reflect positive values of traditional family living and to erase harmful sex-ploitation from the TV screen. Children watch TV an average five hours per day, they noted, causing some to insist child care was better than the TV babysitter.

All the testimony coming out of the WHCF indicates that the American family still holds its head high. As in the poetic epithet, the family is “bloodied, but unbowed.” The traditions of love, trust, loyalty, and communication are too deeply rooted to be deterred by even the most pressing social challenges. That is the impression the delegates to the conferences wrote into their hours of public testimony. Legislators will have to step carefully. Families are not ready to relinquish their autonomy in making personal decisions, even while they plead for lawmakers to be sensitive to their problems.

But the government surely will take notice that the final resolutions from each national conference conspicuously included the words “local,” “community,” “private,” and “parental involvement” in all such recommendations. However, conferees did give high priority to a call for court counseling in family disputes, prior to litigation. They asked, too, for government help with substance abuse (drugs, alcohol) that triggers family violence.

There was little suggestion that conferees wanted government to solve their problems. Most sought the freedom to help themselves. That was the impetus for proposals assisting women in the work force, especially single women responsible for children. It does no good, they insisted, to say child care is the homemaker’s job. “Unfortunately, we are not all white. We do not all live in a family with a husband and a father and a little house with four children,” said one. Those working mothers prefer quality home care by family members, but if they can’t get it, they want assurance their children are safe. Yet many white middle-class participants regard day-care centers with suspicion, even though 72 percent of the mothers who use the 18,300 day-care centers nationwide earn $15,000 or less and spend 10 percent of that on child care, a situation they feel powerless to change.

These mothers insist they are not antifamily. When polled, they said they would have children again, if given the choice. Their commitment to their children, they say, causes them to ask for family-sensitive employment practices, including flex time (starting work earlier and ending earlier in the day), compressed time (working only four days at longer stints), job pairing (where a couple shares one job), and task contracting (where job completion, not hours per day, is the criterion for pay). These women also say their hours with their children are quality time, if they can get the proper household help. They testify that their children learn responsibility by assisting in the operation of the household.

Those Christians who testified and who voted so adamantly for local and private rather than government solutions to family problems, have been challenged to step forward and back up those victories with full support of community services. It is one thing to have convictions about local autonomy in family matters. It is another to back those convictions with action.

Theology For Everyman

What the Bible Teaches About the Church, by John Balchin; What the Bible Teaches About What Jesus Did, by F. F. Bruce; What the Bible Teaches About Jesus, by Geoffrey Grogan; What the Bible Teaches About the Holy Spirit, by John Peck (Tyndale House, 1979, $3.95 pb), are reviewed by Dr. W. Wilson Benton, Jr., pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Cleveland, Mississippi.

Permit a very loose translation: “Of the making of many series of theological books for laymen there is no end.” In light of the series before us, this can be a positive reaction—despite the overabundance of such material.

Geoffrey Grogan, principal of the Bible Training Institute, Glasgow, Scotland, addresses the matter of Christ’s person in 12 thoughtfully arranged chapters in What the Bible Teaches About Jesus. After briefly surveying the biblical material, Grogan focuses on the key aspects of Christology: preexistence, hypostatic union, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and return of the Savior. But don’t be misled: the material is not presented in a stiff, theological textbook style. There is freshness and feeling in the unfolding of ancient but not archaic doctrines. He handles intricate items with dexterity and simplicity, and does not oversimplify the issues. Of particular interest is Grogan’s lucid analysis of the death experience and explanation of Christ’s entrance into it.

F. F. Bruce, professor emeritus, University of Manchester, England, writes on the work of Christ in What the Bible Teaches About What Jesus Did. Bruce determines to answer four questions concerning the incarnate Son of God: (1) What did he do? (2) What is he doing now? (3) What is he going to do? (4) What is he said to have done in his earlier existence?

In answering the first question Bruce produces as concise and cohesive a statement of Christ’s earthly ministry as can be found. This is not an abbreviated harmony, but a unique treatment based on Christ’s first recorded statement, “I must be about my father’s business.” This, according to Bruce, sums up Christ’s public ministry. Interwoven in the theme, but not obscuring it, are helpful interpretive comments about various events, statements, and relationships.

The miracles are presented not, as some have suggested, as seals on the document guaranteeing its genuineness, but as elements of the text itself. “They were as much a part of the message of the kingdom as the teaching was.” Jesus advanced his claim of deity principally by identifying himself with the powerful God of the Old Testament.

In answering questions two and three Bruce depends primarily upon the writings of Paul and John, and systematizes the expected features of Christ’s present reign and personal return. Points common to evangelical eschatology are discussed, but details of particular millennial schemes are omitted. The fourth question receives only minimal attention.

John Peck, lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament theology at Suffolk College, England, “ignores many of the disputes” and simply explains the basic ideas in What the Bible Teaches About the Holy Spirit. Concerned for the reader to get “the main weight of the Bible’s own language” and “the overall impact of the Bible’s words,” he has seasoned his writing with ample doses of scriptural quotations and references.

With the person and work of the Spirit as theme, Peck looks at his personality, power, gifts, and influence. Chapter titles indicate the content: “The Spirit,” “Spirit and the Word,” “Fellowship of the Spirit,” “Spirit of Proclamation,” “Spirit of Grace,” “Spirit of God.” There is nothing fancy here, simply straightforward, uncluttered presentation of scriptural facts about the third person of the Trinity.

Peck refuses to become embroiled in the charismatic conflict, but he nonetheless offers two helpful appendixes. One explains the terms used in debating the subject, and one covers the gifts of the Spirit. “Charismatics tend to claim rather uncritically that they know, for instance, what a ‘word of knowledge’ is: theologians tend to claim, rather loftily I think, that nobody knows!” The rejection of both extremes indicates the tentative but helpful nature of his comments.

John Balchin, lecturer in theology and New Testament studies at London Bible College, examines What the Bible Teaches About the Church.

You name it—Balchin discusses it: the early church, the modern church; the visible church, the invisible church; apostles and apostolic succession; clergy and laity; denominational unity and diversity; church members and church officers; church nurture and church discipline (“quality control”); the church’s worship; the church’s mission; the church’s sacraments; the church’s relationship to the world; the New Testament figures for the church. If at first you don’t succeed in finding a topic you’re looking for, try again—it’s there!

And some subjects may be there that you would not expect to find. How about baptism for the dead or a strong call for the exercise of excommunication? The issue of women’s role in the church is met head-on: “Scripture never understands women as men with a different shape!” One marvels that so much material is surveyed within an effective structure and simple style.

Believing that the story of the church is still incomplete, yet confident that the promises and predictions for it will be fulfilled, Balchin challenges the church to cast off a depression born of doubt, and labor with a new zeal born of grace, to be the people of God.

This is an excellent series of books.

Introducing Barth

Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, by Karl Barth (Eerdmans, 1979, 206 pp., $5.95 pb), and An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth, by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 1979, 253 pp., $7.95 pb), are reviewed by Donald W. Dayton, librarian and assistant professor of historical theology, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, Illinois.

The growing interest among evangelicals in the theology of Karl Barth is confirmed by the fact that Eerdmans has issued simultaneously these two “introductions” to his thought. The first is actually a reprint of the translation of the final 17 lectures of Barth’s academic career. The first five were also given at Princeton and the University of Chicago during his only visit to the United States in 1962. Intended for a more popular audience, these lectures are a distillation of his thought in four statements each about the “place” of theology, the theological existence, the “threat” to theology, and theological work. For Barth, “the qualifying attribute ‘evangelical’ recalls both the New Testament and at the same time the Reformation of the sixteenth century” (p. 5).

Serious readers of Barth, however, must tackle the unfinished Church Dogmatics even if they are intimidated by the 13 thick volumes published by the time of Barth’s death in 1968. Even experienced explorers of this exhilarating terrain require a map or a guide. Such is Geoffrey Bromiley of Fuller Theological Seminary, major translator of the Dogmatics. Few persons in this world can claim to have read the whole of the Dogmatics, but Bromiley has done so several times and is thus uniquely prepared to provide this tool.

Barth is often interpreted through caricature or from partial reading. Bromiley hopes by this book to encourage more responsible interpretation and critique, and it is thus a largely objective summary. His own critical comments are reserved almost entirely for a final short chapter. There, while praising Barth for the “greatness and power” of his “authentic theology” and suggesting that “nowhere has the Scriptural centrality of Christ found more convincing exposition,” Bromiley registers concern about Barth’s view of evil, his universalistic tendencies, and so forth. But such criticisms are minor; the basic intention of the book—admirably achieved—is to provide access to the Church Dogmatics so that readers may come to their own conclusions.

This Is My Body

The Lord’s Supper, by Martin Chemnitz, translated by J. A. O. Preus (Concordia, 1979, 302 pp., $10.95), is reviewed by Mark Noll, associate professor of church history, Wheaton College and Graduate School.

People who are interested in the history of Protestantism as well as those concerned about observance of the Lord’s Supper today owe a debt of gratitude to J.A.O. Preus, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, for providing this translation of an important sixteenth-century theological study.

Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586), sometimes called “the second Martin,” wrote The Lord’s Supper to defend the Lutheran view of Communion against Roman Catholic, Anabaptist, and particularly Reformed convictions on the subject. With Luther before him, Chemnitz insisted that Christ meant the words of the last supper, “This is my Body,” to be taken literally. Reformed theologians like Calvin, who spoke of a “spiritual eating” in the supper, did not go far enough. Chemnitz insisted that Christ’s statement must be given “the simple, proper, natural, sure, and common meaning of the words” if believers were to receive the benefits that come from the Lord’s Supper. Chemnitz’s argument provides the historically minded with an excellent view of how later Lutherans maintained positions that Luther had hammered out in the early days of the Reformation.

It also shows, however, that changes were taking place in Lutheran theology. Chemnitz repeatedly emphasizes that the words of institution are “the words of the last will and testament of the very Son of God.” Although Luther had also fully explored the testamentary character of the Lord’s Supper, he had placed equal or greater stress on the fact that Communion constituted “a promise of the forgiveness of sins made to us by God.”

Interesting as the book is historically, it may be even more valuable for all who want to bring biblical teaching on the Lord’s Supper to life in our churches today. Those who desire a healthy scriptural faith must respect Chemnitz’s detailed study of the relevant texts, his careful reasoning, and his judicious use of patristic authorities.

Will the book convince non-Lutherans to abandon their beliefs that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial celebration with mere bread and wine or a sacramental feast with spiritual eating only? Probably not—for opinions on the Lord’s Supper are too closely intertwined with other convictions. Still, this book forces all Protestants to ask themselves serious questions.

The book, ironically, raises questions for Lutherans. Is the division of Protestantism as important as the maintainance of Luther’s traditional view? (Some Protestants who see the Lord’s Supper in strictly memorial or spiritual terms could in fact agree with everything that Chemnitz wrote in his 10-page section on the value of the Lord’s Supper.) The book also raises the question of why Lutherans are not as eager to press the literal meaning of the texts on the issue of baptism as they are on the issue of the Lord’s Supper.

In sum, although this book is not the last word historically or doctrinally, its careful study of a topic sadly neglected in evangelical circles makes it a valuable work.

Recent Children’S Books

Recent children’s books are reviewed by Mary K. Bechtel, Library Learning Center teacher, Hawthorne School, Wheaton, Illinois.

The value of books in the lives and development of children cannot be overstated. They are as basic to the maturing mind and imagination as good food, fresh air, and sunshine.

Books can be an antidote to the harmful influences of television. They can help lay the groundwork for Christian character, perfect a child’s thinking processes, provide insights beyond the narrow range of his own environment, and help him recognize his own unique place in God’s plan.

To assist parents and other adults who want to select those books that will help most during childhood, such sources as Gladys Hunt’s Honey for a Child’s Heart (Zondervan) or John and Kay Lindskoog’s How to Grow a Young Reader (David C. Cook) may be consulted. Both secular and religious titles are suggested.

Series books have proven value to interest readers. Elizabeth Gail and the Mystery at the Johnson Farm (Tyndale) by Hilda Stahl is the first book in the story of a welfare child who is fortunate enough to be placed with the Johnsons following a series of discouraging foster homes. Determined never to let herself love anyone again, her behavior is a trial to her new family; but love eventually prevails amidst temper tantrums and unkindness. Elizabeth and the Secret Box and Elizabeth and the Teddy Bear Mystery continue the reader’s acquaintance with the Johnson family.

The Secret in the Hills (Chariot, David C. Cook) is set in the coal fields of Wales where Andy goes to live with relatives he has never seen after the death of his only surviving parent. His grandmother proves to be a lovable and amusing friend and the family is kind. But it is Tag, the blind pony from the mines, to which he is most drawn. Christian truths are interjected unobtrusively. Alaskan Smoke Eater (Back to the Bible), from a series of “Tyler Tales,” was first written as a drama and featured on the “Back to the Bible” youth broadcast. It is the most “tract-like” of the books mentioned, and consists of two interwoven stories: one about Sally, a new Christian and daughter of an alcoholic mother; and Roy, a strong believer, who finds his faith tested during a fire-fighting stint in Alaska.

Robbie, of Robbie and the Stolen Minibike (Creation House) by VaDonna Jean Leaf, is a junior high rebel whose father has abandoned him and whose mother is dead. He is sent to live with a crippled grandfather in a small Iowa town. There, confronted by the love and patient understanding of this old man and the influence of church friends, he is able to withstand the miseries of school and eventually to start to overcome deep-rooted habits of theft and meanness as he discovers new perspectives in Jesus Christ.

The Crooked Gate (Chariot, David C. Cook) by Marilyn Cram Donahue was the winner of Cook’s 1978–79 Children’s Book Contest. In this book, 13-year old Cass and her two rather pesky young brothers are sent to spend the summer with Aunt Mathilda. The strange but wise old lady, whose unique house stands on a cliff overhanging the ocean, has a talent for straightening out self-centered teen-agers that is unparalleled.

Turning to an earlier era, Margaret Epp shares with us Sarah and the Mystery of the Hidden Boy (Victor Books). It is the fourth book in the Prairie Adventures series for 8- to 12-year-olds, and portrays such old-fashioned values as hard work and responsibility, which are rewarded by warm family relationships, love, and good times. More Stories from Grandma’s Attic (Chariot, David C. Cook) by Arleta Richardson contains charming vignettes of a day gone by.

The Taming of Cheetah (Victor Books) by Lee Roddy is another story about a granddad, whose wisdom is a steady and comforting influence in this story about the taming of a horse. My Friend Krow (Chariot, David C. Cook) by Fiona Satow also tells of the taming of a wild horse. When boy and girl twins in England’s Lake District slide down a treacherous precipice on a dare, the girl is killed. Nick, her brother, is left alone with a mother who cannot forgive him. He finds some comfort by taming a wild black pony, and makes new friends. He and his mother are finally able to forgive one another because of their newfound faith.

Ride the West Wind (Chariot, David C. Cook) by Barbara Chamberlain continues a fictionalized account of seventeenth-century English Quakers whose story was begun in The Prisoner’s Sword. Aboard a ship, The Welcome, they endure one of the worst crossings to the New World, beset by illness and death. The faith of the believers was a witness to all.

A series of “story devotions” for boys by a young writer who remembers what it was like is Growing Up Isn’t Easy, Lord, (Augsburg) by Stephen Sorenson. Short prayers and Bible verses skillfully provide the punch line.

Questions and answers about evolution are interestingly presented in Dry Bones … and Other Fossils (Creation Life) by Gary E. Parker. This oversized paperback (with black-and-white illustrations just begging to be crayon colored) takes the reader fossil hunting with a paleontologist and his family of four children. Clear and concise explanations from the creationist viewpoint not only give answers, but arouse curiosity. Approaching science in nature, John Calvin Reid tells Secrets from Field and Forest (Tyndale) with selected Scripture references that are useful for devotions with young children.

One Spring Day (Judson Press) by Shigeko Yano was first published in Japan. The delicate watercolor illustrations in this hardcover book are a joy to behold, and the words, reminiscent of haiku, speak of faith in God who, though not visible, is clearly seen with the eyes of faith.

The ears of faith led young Manuelita to hear The Song of Guadalupana (Our Sunday Visitor). Author Drew Bacigalupa tells of a retarded Mexican boy whose fancy is found to be fact and whose prayers are answered. It is beautifully illustrated by Jeannie Pear.

Yet another adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is Christian’s Journey (Abingdon), retold by Rhoda Couldridge. The illustrations, by the author’s young daughter Anna, contribute much to the charm of this colorful hardback edition.

Several Bible story books should be noted. Picture Stories from the Bible: The Old Testament in Full-color Comic Strip Form (Scarf Press) is a hardback reissue of a 30-year-old publication depicting major Bible stories. “Little People’s Paperbacks” (Seabury) are 20 in number, published over a period of about 16 years. Written by Gerard A. Pottebaum and illustrated by Robert Strobridge, each small book is artistically unique with lovely torn-paper artwork and colorful format. Some titles have been changed, including God Made the World, The Story of Christmas, The Loving Father, and The Great Harvest. Another series of small paperbacks is Zondervan’s “Follow the Leader” series, published jointly with Scripture Union. The Frightened Fishermen and The Kind Captain are humorously told by David Lewis and well illustrated by Alan Perry. The latest in Broadman’s Biblearn Series, containing 23 titles, is Apostles, Jesus’ Special Helpers. Questions follow each chapter.

Finally, there is Barnaby Frost (Tyndale) by Laurel Lee. It is a picture-book parable, illustrating the truth of John 15:5 on the vine and the branches. Barnaby Frost was peddling his bicycle down a highway crowded with trucks. When he turned off on a narrow road, it split open at his feet. Out of the crevice grew a vine that encircled him, then led him to glorious delights in the land of the vine. When he returned to the main highway, he was “pulling a flower-spangled banner. It was the glory and power of the vine.” Traffic slowed and cars “no longer considered only themselves in their race for position.” Beautifully illustrated by Dennis Adler and in a nicely designed format, here is a book that even adults could ponder.

Is guiding the application of parishioners’ gifts a dimension of your church counseling?

Churches have long been in the counseling business, but career counseling is a recent ministry. What’s more, few pastors feel competent to do it—yet they find many problems that people bring to them are job related. Pastoral counseling training, however, is short in the area of career counseling.

Many church young people make no career plans; they believe God will direct them and they really have nothing to do with choosing a career. Many of these young—sometimes not-so-young—people believe they have been called to serve God and so have vague plans to go into the ministry. Though their skills and gifts may not be along these lines, to them, God’s call means the ministry.

Others separate entirely their Christian commitment from their work and choose careers that may be in conflict with their religious values. Such people often find it difficult to reconcile their values and their work, and end up very dissatisfied with their jobs.

Some Christians believe the so-called Puritan work ethic teaches that working diligently is next to godliness, and that the more disagreeable the work, the greater one’s reward in heaven. There are even those within the church who believe that since God will take care of them, they need not work. They go through life living on welfare, or on donations from parents or susceptible relatives and friends. It is thus clear that the church is a legitimate place for career counseling of both youth and older adults.

Washington, D.C.’s Fourth Presbyterian Church illustrates how a church can provide this needed service. After forming a vocation committee to look at members’ needs and make recommendations, a Career Day was planned and publicized. Instead of a typical career day in which different vocations are introduced, the program presented representative points of view in a panel discussion of the relationship between careers and Christian service. There were four panelists in the first session: the pastor, a lawyer who also has a youth ministry at the church, another layperson active in the church, and myself. (Churches often have competent persons within their ranks who can serve on such a panel; or they can call counselor education programs to discover Christians willing to lead a group.)

I described how people of all ages need to go through the process of learning about themselves, expanding their career awareness, and learning how to make decisions about careers and develop their job-seeking skills—all in keeping with their Christian values. I also posed what is a dilemma for many Christians: How can they serve God and also effectively engage in a secular career?

This dilemma was confirmed by 150 participants who attended the workshop. That God’s call could be to any career in line with a person’s natural (God-given) gifts was stressed. A person can be “called” to several different careers in a lifetime as skills, experiences, and values change. In fact, when a position is abolished, or a person loses a job, God could be calling that individual to move into something else. Tension between a job and one’s interests and/or values could even be interpreted as God urging a person to reassess his vocation or profession.

The enthusiasm and concern generated by this one-day workshop led to the formation of a 15-hour career counseling session—five 3-hour sessions. (Although a 15-hour course is ideal, churches interested in providing something similar may want to start with a shorter course.)

The age of persons in our group ranged from 16 to 55. The wider the age range, the more dynamic the group will be. Thirty-six people took part in all five sessions, and entrance into the group had to be closed to keep it from getting too large. This group was divided into support groups of five persons each.

The support group is essential. Each member acts as placement counselor for each other group member, and all gather information about one other as they share values, interests, and aspirations. They look for jobs for each other, searching want ads, newspaper articles, personnel notices, and so on, and place these in a separate envelope for each person. A sheet of paper is used for each member to jot down ideas gathered as the results of activities are shared. This data sheet becomes longer and more detailed as the classes progress. “Job opportunities” are not revealed until the last meeting.

When the group has been established, members introduce themselves, giving their names, their fantasy occupations when they were small, what they are presently doing, what they would really like to do when they “grow up.” Group members include these statements on the individual “personal data sheets” to assist them as “placement officers” providing career options for group members.

Critical to the success of a group is its leader. He or she should be someone who is dynamic and possesses group leadership skills. Preferably, the leader should have been through the process personally. Coleaders are also effective, especially a male-female combination.

The elements necessary for a complete course should contain the following:

Self-awareness. This should include interests, aptitudes, skills, and values. Activities that are more effective than tests exist to help get at these factors.

Career Awareness. Information-seeking skills must be developed: where to get information and how to determine its accuracy.

Job-Seeking Skills. It is necessary to know how to market skills once they have been identified. As part of this exercise, group members role play an employment interview and other group members point out ways in which they could be more effective.

To maintain the group’s Christian atmosphere, prayer is offered at the beginning and the end of each evening. It is important for each member to pray for every other member of his small group during the week, that their skills and interests will be revealed to them.

Small groups are advised to continue to meet following the five-week session, to pray for one another, and to continue to provide job leads. Follow-up shows that considerable communication continues between group members after the workshop has ended. Future workshops are being arranged because enthusiasm is so great.

Career counseling is an exciting new opportunity for churches. Christians are concerned with the important issues of “God’s call” and its relationship to a “secular career.” Such concern is related not only to the young person beginning a career search, but also to Christians at age 30, or 40, or 50, or 60. Also evident are concerns about retirement and how one can continue to do God’s work. These felt needs can lead pastors, youth counselors, and concerned lay men and women to join efforts in offering valuable technical and spiritual counsel to church members. This is one way to get the process started.

Darryl Laramore is supervisor of guidance and alternatives for Montgomery County Public Schools in Rockville, Maryland.

Man gropes for a glimpse of metaphysical combat that Scripture has already outlined in blinding relief.

As i drove away from the theater my six-year-old daughter, Kelly, asked, “Daddy, is the Force Jesus?” We had just seen the second George Lucas space epic, The Empire Strikes Back. I had gone to decide whether or not the Star Wars sequel merited a metaphysical checkup in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. My daughter’s question rendered the issue rhetorical.

The fabric of this galactic odyssey is woven from what Lucas calls the ultimate search. He explains that, “On a theoretical/philosophical level the ultimate search is still the most fascinating search, what is it all about—why are we here and how big is it and where does it go—what is God and all that?” But dressing up this good guys-bad guys series as a philosophical heavyweight would encumber it with a seriousness it doesn’t deserve. It’s not that these films are undeserving in any critical sense. Lucas first of all means to reinspire today’s youth with the spirit of fun and adventure he portrayed in his first moneymaker, American Graffiti. “The sort of [childhood] heritage we built up since the war,” says Lucas, “had been wiped out in the sixties and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore. Now you just sort of sat there and got stoned.”

So Lucas, who has said, “I don’t like to come out with a big sign and say this is significant,” doesn’t take the Star Wars serial seriously in the same way Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was meant to be taken.

Nevertheless, comparison of the messages, the anthropological content of these films, may reflect some subtle shifts in the popular culture over the two intervening decades. Like Kubrick, Lucas focuses his cinematographic sights on the inner man, though what comes up on the screen is decidedly more brilliant than the lifeless pastels of 2001. Kubrick’s space travelers are insipid, humorless, lacking imagination. They respond with boredom to the vast magnitude and beauty of the cosmos that surrounds them. The 9000 computer, HAL, shows more “human” emotion than the human technocrats it serves. Man is sent on his evolutionary journey unmoved and unaware. He comes off as an empty, soulless creature.

Lucas, by contrast, immerses man in the epic struggle with “the force” of good and evil. John Wayne-type battle satanic villains. They engage “gods” (the Force) in the struggle to remain free—to choose good over evil, to remain noble, heroic, responsible.

Lucas then, when he again infuses man with nobility and pits him against the dark side, reflects a sociotheological shift away from Kubrick’s evolved soulless intelligence and back to the mystical faith elements scientists themselves may feel compelled to reclaim.

The Force, Lucas’s faith element in Star Wars, comes into clearer focus in The Empire. The Empire draws more power from the Force than did the first film. The Force identifies a metaphysical dimension in Lucas’s universe, a power to be used for good or evil. If man’s “faith” is sufficient he can accomplish extraordinary feats by drawing “on its power.”

We learn most about the Force as we see the sage-like elf, Yoda, tutoring Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi knight, the space-age embodiment of virtue and courage, the Force-filled life. Yoda warns Luke, “If you once start down the dark side [of the Force] it will forever determine your destiny.” Luke’s temptations by archvillain Darth Vader to join forces with the dark side provide moments of high suspense that play out the metaphysical and moral significance of the film and add a level of moral drama to the swirling pace of physical danger. (Violence in this film has a tempered make-believe quality since most of those “killed” are android warriors, agents of the dark side. Rarely are men shown dying, and even then, it is usually the bad guys who fall victim to their leader, Darth Vader.)

Yoda tells us and Luke that good will triumph in the end. Lucas describes his romantic vision for the film as “a sort of wholesome, honest vision about the way you want the world to be.” While Luke trains under Yoda’s tutelage, elsewhere in the galaxies the satanic spirit-like emperor summons the treacherous Darth Vader and tells him that there is a great disturbance in the Force, a phenomenon apparently generated as Luke Skywalker bites into a portion of the metaphysical pie. Faith is a fundamental prerequisite to partaking of the power of the Force. Yoda tells Luke “there is no trying, only do … the Force’s energy surrounds us. It’s between you and me, it’s in the rock, it’s everywhere.” Through the Force he will see things in the future, friends from the past long since gone. When Luke fails to appropriate enough mental power to raise his space fighter from the ooze in which it is mired Yoda tells him, “You don’t believe—that is why you fail.” Luke learns in an unnerving moment that the enemy to be feared and fought most is the enemy within himself.

Through his training Luke begins to “tune in” to the Force and, in mystical fashion, he senses that his compatriots in the interstellar rebellion are in danger. Against Yoda’s advice he cuts short his training to go to their rescue. Yoda warns him, “You feel the Force but you cannot control it,” which, in Star Wars exegesis reads, “You still lack sufficient spiritual maturity to engage the Force to battle against evil.” Those qualities of maturity, we learn from Yoda, are: looking to the present instead of always thinking future, having a spirit of peace, patience, and steadfastness.

Obe Ben Kenobi, the Jedi knight slain by Vader in the first episode, whose spirit returns in the second, laments to Yoda that matters are worse now that Luke knows so much more but has left before finishing the course. At points such as this Christians can set the analogies off within a biblical frame.

These films flirt with spiritual truth, which is an emotional trap for any devout Christian. But the broad picture is an eclectic montage taken from many “good” sources. As with my daughter, they can start discussions with spiritually sensitive individuals.

No, Kelly, the Force is not Jesus. Nor can it be likened to a personal God who seeks us out. But he, like the Force, is the one Source and Creator of all power in the universe. Beginning with Satan (the dark side), we have all misdirected that power for which we will one day be accountable. Some of us, by his love and grace, will be standing in the shadow of the Cross. Lucas suggests no sense of the substitutionary motif nor any other allowance for wrong moral choices. Neither does he see the necessity to satisfy a righteous God—the only definition of what is good and just. Lucas, like other good people, assumes and understands virtue and honor without knowing why.

For the characters in Star Wars, belief, as a factor of faith, is belief and confidence in oneself. The Force is a god of resource status, though the often-used expression, “May the Force be with you,” has a semantic ring of encouragement that is theologically confused.

Like Kubrick, Lucas senses that there is an unknown, mystical dimension—something beyond human intelligence—but Kubrick sends man uninspired through the cosmos, with survival the primary benefit.

With Lucas and his Star Wars series the book is not yet closed. The Force confronts man with choices and moves him to act. It is fun, romantic, exhilarating. Lucas says the choices we make in everyday life matter. It remains for the Christian to say why.

Many scholars assume that social ethics suffers when evangelism is emphasized.

Early in this century “the great reversal” separated fundamentalists from modernists and split Christian groups that emphasized evangelism from those that stressed social concern. Many scholars thus assume that social ethics suffers in evangelicalism, today’s fundamentalist “mainstream.” They argue that emphasis upon proclamation of the gospel rather than social action lacks concern for people’s material and social needs.

The CHRISTIANITY TODAY-Gallup Poll survey of noninstitutionalized civilian adults clarifies many aspects of the relationships between religious and social attitudes and corrects popular myths about evangelicals. Some findings related to social ethics are highlighted here; the details will be discussed in future articles.

The Ten Commandments

Although 84 percent of American adults think the Ten Commandments are valid for today, only two-fifths can name at least half; one-fourth can name no more than two. About half of the frequent churchgoers, Bible readers, tithers, and evangelicals are able to name five or more. But more important is applying and living up to them in contemporary circumstances.

Christians are divided over the meaning or current application of several commandments. For example, do warfare, capital punishment, and abortion violate “Thou shalt not kill”? Only one, abortion, was surveyed. Thirteen percent of the public believe abortion is acceptable under any circumstances; 19 percent believe it is always unacceptable; and 62 percent hold it to be acceptable only under certain circumstances. Evangelicals are more conservative, with 5, 31, and 64 percent, respectively.

Perspectives about adultery are similar. Eighty-three percent of the public believe it is wrong to have sexual relations with someone other than one’s marriage partner; 11 percent believe it is not. Over 95 percent of frequent Bible readers, tithers, and evangelicals believe such conduct is wrong. Two-fifths of the public and one-tenth of the evangelicals believe it is not wrong for a couple to have sexual relations before marriage.

Ethical-Moral Standards

Evangelicals do not differ significantly from the general public when it comes to discrepancy between ideals and conduct. Just over half believe they can live up to their standards, while one-fifth of them and one-sixth of the public try to do so, but find it hard.

In people’s minds, implicit standards vary with differences in religious and ideological values. People whose legalistic orientations include numerous rules and regulations for living have different conduct and guilt feelings than persons who stress some “universal principle” like love. Yet both groups may feel equally about success or failure in conforming to their ideals. There is much relative judgment over what is meant by living up to one’s own standards. Values modified by seared or warped consciences, self-deception, and culturally distorted ideas of right and wrong often contrast sharply with the Bible’s transcendent norms.

Social Concern

The survey addresses several aspects of the “divided house of Protestantism” (Dean Hoge), “the great reversal” (Timothy Smith and David Moberg), and the “two-party system” (Martin Marty), which have separated much of American Christendom into an individualistic “private” camp with evangelistic goals, and a “public” one with a social reform mission.

Given a list of five priorities, one-fourth of the public, but half of the evangelicals, said that for Christians, the top one should be to help win the world for Jesus Christ. “Concentrate on the spiritual growth of one’s family and self” was placed first by 37 percent of the public and 27 percent of the evangelicals. More evangelicals (14 percent) than the public (9 percent) put “help strengthen the church” first. Only two items—“Join groups and support causes that will improve the entire community” and “Take part in efforts to influence … legislation on important issues”—relate to social concern. For evangelicals, these were in the lowest positions for both first and second priority.

At the same time, over two-thirds of the evangelicals, but only 36 percent of the public, believe that it is very important for religious organizations to make public statements about the will of God in ethical-moral matters. Three-fifths of the evangelicals (44 percent of the public) think it is “very” or “fairly” important for them to make public statements about political-economic matters, and three-fifths of the evangelicals (41 percent of the public) believe they should lobby by trying to persuade senators and representatives to enact legislation they would like to see become law.

Like others, evangelicals almost unanimously believe society has an obligation to see that basic needs of children, the handicapped, and elderly are met, and two-thirds believe a combination of governmental and voluntary services should meet those needs. They have a stronger sense of obligation to help the poor than does the general public, and more of them implement their belief. They also reveal a higher level of consciousness about the energy crisis and are more aware of what they can do about it personally.

Church Support

Evangelicals attend church and contribute their money to religious organizations much more often than the general public; 13 percent only attend three times a month or less, compared to 60 percent of the public. Over half (16 percent of the public) contribute a tithe—10 percent or more of their income—to their church or other religious organizations, and only 6 percent (32 percent of the public) are not church members. About half of them speak at least weekly about their religious beliefs to people who are not members of their own faith.

Also, through volunteer services, evangelicals are stronger supporters than others of their church. Over four-fifths, twice as many as the general public, do volunteer work for churches or other religious organizations. Those who do, also contribute more hours to such efforts than volunteers from the population at large.

Surprisingly, one-tenth of the evangelicals and one-fourth of the public who are volunteers did not specify what types of activity they engage in. Perhaps they could not fit them into the eight types listed; if more had been mentioned, greater participation might have been reported. Not included, for example, are activities like sewing circles, kitchen work, representing church or faith in legislative hearings and lobbying, aiding church-related or community service agencies, and volunteering in social welfare programs.

Ninety percent of the evangelical church members (77 percent of the public) felt that their church provides enough opportunity for them to use their own abilities and talents in performing volunteer work. Could it be that the one-fifth of the evangelicals (58 percent of the public) who perform no volunteer services are victims of narrow interpretations and constricted opportunities to use gifts the Holy Spirit has given to all members of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12)? Is it not possible that churches that involve only a few members in their work suffer because they acknowledge only some spiritual gifts, while ignoring the others?

Personal Needs and Problems

Of eight personal needs listed, two-thirds of the evangelicals and one-fifth of the public chose “salvation—closeness to God” as most important. “Physical well being—health” was more important to the public (25 percent); it was in second place among evangelicals. “Love and affection” was third for both groups.

When evangelicals have a problem, they are more likely than others to turn to the clergy for help. For problems that involve alcohol or drugs the public is more likely to turn to a volunteer community organization; both groups are inclined to turn first to the clergy on spiritual or religious matters. Otherwise, the groups are similar, drawing most upon immediate family members.

Many will be surprised to learn that 23 percent of the orthodox/conversionalists, 30 percent of the conversionalists, and 33 percent of the orthodox use alcoholic beverages, compared to 66 percent of the public. Of users, 17 to 25 percent of the evangelicals and 35 percent of the public think they sometimes drink more than they should. This is difficult to interpret; definitions are so subjective. For some the line is at intoxication, but for others it may be any drinking.

Sometimes it is alleged that more people reared by teetotaling parents become alcoholics. If most adults were reared by total abstainers—once the majority of the population—aggregate statistics are misleading. The survey throws no light on this, but liquor has been “a cause of trouble” in the family among those who use alcoholic beverages for 16 percent of the evangelicals and 19 percent of the public. But “trouble” may range all the way from arguments about abstinence to severe problems of alcoholism.

Religious Radio and Television

Only 12 percent of the public, but 28 percent of the evangelicals, spend two hours or more per week watching religious television. Favorite programs are those of Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, followed by the PTL Club and local church programs.

Similarly, evangelicals spend more time listening to religious radio programs; 24 percent listen for two or more hours a week compared to only 8 percent of the public.

Members of the public who watch or listen to religious television and radio tend to be “more religious” in beliefs and actions than others. However, most of the differences are not statistically significant. They may result chiefly because of the reasons certain types of people, especially evangelicals (who are included in the public), choose to hear or watch such programs, rather than from the programs’ influence upon viewers.

The Backbone of the Church

The survey clearly indicates that the one-fifth of the population who are evangelicals constitute a significant core of loyal supporters of the institutional church. They also have an active social concern, even though they give evangelism higher priority.

Women consistently are “more religious” than men. They are more apt to be church members, participants in church activities, believers in traditional Christian doctrines, conservative in their perspectives on issues of personal morality, and donors of volunteer services.

Similarly, the oldest age category (50 and above) are on most measures Christianity’s strongest supporters. Young adults (ages 18–29) exhibit somewhat lower levels of Christian belief, much lower participation in volunteer services and church attendance, and considerably less adherence to traditional morality than the other two age groups. Except in interpretation of sexual morality, I doubt that this reflects a historical “secularizing” trend by which major changes will occur as this generation moves into middle and mature adulthood; more likely, there is a tendency of cohorts of people to become “more religious” with the aging process.

Comparisons By Major Groups

It is interesting to note that, according to the CHRISTIANITY TODAY-Gallup Poll of U.S clergymen, it is the younger ones (18–29) who are found to be more traditional or theologically conservative than the older ones. This is a significant difference compared to the population as a whole. Not only in doctrine but also in personal habits, the younger clergy are more conservative. For example, young clergy persons are less likely to use alcohol than are their elders, a pattern that differs sharply from the pattern among the general public.

These findings are similar to those of other surveys and confirm the validity of this survey as a representative cross section of American adults. Possibly one of the most significant findings is that people who read the Bible frequently (at least once per day) and those who are tithers exhibit higher levels of religiosity on almost every indicator than other people (see table). They also have higher levels of social concern, and they donate more time in volunteer services.

Personal piety is not an enemy of social concern!

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

People often assume that feelings of love and concern must come before they act in a caring way.

“Our church has been growing quickly—maybe too quickly. We are reaching the community, seeing an increase in worshipers, and expanding our programs. But sometimes we don’t know what to do with people once they enter our building. How can we be a caring congregation?”

In the last few years, I have often heard such comments. In North America and overseas there are churches where the pastor is an effective preacher, the congregation has a successful evangelistic outreach, and the ministry appears to be booming—but church members find it difficult to meet the personal needs of a large number of people who are lonely, confused, spiritually hungry, and personally hurting. These members are concerned about caring.

In the Great Commission, Jesus gave a succinct mandate involving two responsibilities for the church: evangelism and education. Traditionally, we have assumed that evangelism is to be followed by Christian teaching that must include Bible knowledge, biblical principles for Christian living, and biblically based doctrines about God, authority, salvation, prayer, and similar issues. Sometimes however, the church has forgotten that Jesus also taught about marriage, parent-child interactions, poverty, race relations, and freedom for both men and women. He also taught about personal issues such as sex, fear, loneliness, and doubt. If we are to teach all that Christ taught, therefore, we must give more than instruction in doctrine—crucial as this is. We must also show people how to get along better with God, with others, and with themselves. We must teach them how to be caring as Jesus was caring.

The Bible gives no indication that this work of caring should be left to overburdened pastors and a few especially dedicated lay people. Rather, the New Testament uses the Greek word translated “one another” 58 times, usually in the form of exhortations. We are instructed, for example, to love one another, be devoted to one another, accept one another, admonish one another, serve one another, bear one another’s burdens, encourage one another, and even care for one another. That every member in the church should have a caring concern for others is a clear teaching of Scripture.

What Is Caring?

To care involves showing a deep concern about another person. Caring involves loving someone as we love ourselves. It is more than liking, comforting, showing sympathy, or having an interest in what happens to another person. Caring involves a concern that spills over into loving, compassionate acts.

Caring is trying to understand another person. When we care we seek to know the other person’s needs, resources, and ability to cope. We try to see things from the other person’s perspective before we try to offer specific help.

Caring is showing respect for another person. It does not involve giving rigid advice, criticizing, or talking about someone in a manner that approaches gossip. Instead, caring involves willingness to bear burdens. It looks for ways to help the other person grow, even if such growth means that in time our help may no longer be needed.

Caring means that one is willing to take risks. It is not easy to care for another person. When we care for people we risk being misunderstood, rebuffed, criticized, and even harmed physically. For the Christian, however, failure to take these risks is to ignore Bible passages (especially in the Book of James) that emphasize that faith in Jesus Christ must lead to works of compassion.

Caring involves us in being willing to accept help. Jesus once said that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:25). I wonder if he would also agree that it is easier to give than to receive. In our culture we like to solve problems on our own and are reluctant to accept help. Caring, however, involves at least two persons: the one who needs and accepts care as well as the one who sees a need and gives the care. If we are serious about bearing one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and about caring for one another, then we must be willing both to reach out and care, and to accept with gratitude the caring that other people bestow upon us.

What Characterizes Christian Carers?

While all Christians have a responsibility to care, research and our own reflection tell us that some people are more effective carers than others. As we search the Scriptures and contemporary psychological literature, we find some characteristics that we can develop and that we should include in any portrait of a caring person.

1. Love. Practical, compassionate, sensitive, patient, giving love is critical if effective caring is to occur. Such love, which originates with God the Father, should characterize every follower of Christ (1 John 4:7, 11).

Love is a rock-bottom requirement for any kind of effective caring. In its purest form, it comes to those who have committed themselves to Jesus Christ and are willing to let God’s Holy Spirit so control them that love becomes characteristic of their whole lives. Too often, it seems, people assume that loving feelings must come before they can act in a caring way. Frequently, however, the reverse is true: feelings of love and concern come only after we have begun to do loving deeds.

In no place should this love be more clearly expressed than in the church. The local body of believers should be a community where spirit-filled Christians are encouraged to love one another in acts of kindness without condemning or criticizing.

2. Patience. This implies sticking with a person or situation even when no change seems to be taking place. Like love, patience comes from God. It is listed as a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22); it does not come quickly, and often it develops in the midst of difficulties (James 1:2–5).

The patient, caring person stays with the one in need, giving him or her time to grow and the opportunity to think without feeling pressured to act or to make decisions quickly. The caring person does not look for fast change in the life of another but patiently meets needs and expects healing to come in due time. If we are to be caring church leaders we must learn to be patient with ourselves and with each other.

3. Openness. Many adults deny or stifle their emotions, are unable to express feelings, and sometimes even conclude that to be spiritual is to be always smiling and “on top of the world.”

But real life is not like that. If people are to be helped they must be encouraged to recognize their feelings, even negative ones.

How can this be done? One way is for caring persons to demonstrate openness in their own words and behavior. Caring people should try to see their own strengths and weaknesses, seek to develop a genuine concern for others, and show a willingness to accept others regardless of their beliefs, behavior, words, or attitudes. True, honest, open, mutual burden bearing involves walking alongside one another, encouraging, supporting, correcting, teaching, and gently confronting one another. Such honest sharing is an important characteristic of healthy caring.

4. Hope. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to care for someone if you could not offer hope? Hope brings comfort and at least temporary relief from suffering. It mobilizes our energy and enables us to keep on going even in the midst of difficulties.

Christian hope does not encourage people to deny the reality of their situations, to slip into inactivity, or to engage in perpetual wishful thinking. Christian hope rejoices in God’s sovereign wisdom, accepts the fact that God’s timing and ways of doing things are perfect, seeks for God’s leading, learns to say, “Father, Thy will be done,” and accepts the fact that God’s ways are not always our own. We do not think like this easily, especially when we are under pressure. But true hope assumes that some future event or some person will ease our present problems, and caring people point others to God who is our true and certain hope.

5. Flexibility. We find it difficult if not impossible to care for people if we are rigid, unwilling to change, resistant to growth, or inclined to fit people into neat little categories. True caring involves acceptance of others, a desire for growth, flexibility, and a willingness both to change and to learn.

6. Humility. Nobody is helped by someone who is not really involved and who looks down on others from a “holier than thou” perspective. The person who cares is not pretentious, but sincerely humble, willing to learn, reluctant to impinge on the privacy of others, and in no way inclined to present a “look what I’m doing for you” attitude.

Caring is a growing experience. Few persons have all these traits in abundance, but this does not give us reason to wait for such traits to develop before we start caring. As we care, these traits develop, and as they develop we become more able to care. Christians must be encouraged to reach out to others in acts of compassion and concern, trusting God to help us develop the attributes that will in turn make us more caring and compassionate members of the body of Christ.

How Do Christians Grow?

Whom do you know who really cares? If you ponder this perhaps you will think of some effective professional helpers or the godly directors of large relief organizations. In addition, however, you may think of unsung heroes—sensitive people who quietly pray, encourage others, unselfishly give their time and money, and provide seemingly endless tangible, practical assistance when others are in need. Corrie ten Boom’s family provided such caring, without any dream that The Hiding Place would someday make them famous. Thousands of people are like the ten Booms—risking their security and experiencing inconvenience because Jesus told them to care.

Of course, Jesus himself clearly is the best model of a caring person. His personality, knowledge, and skills all enabled him to assist others effectively.

Unfortunately, when we attempt to analyze the caring Jesus showed, we unconsciously—or deliberately—view Christ’s ministry in a way that reinforces our personal views of how people should be helped. The directive, confrontational counselor, for example, recognizes that Jesus confronted people at times. The nondirective “client-centered” counselor is especially struck by the instances where Christ was not directive. And the noncounselor concludes that Jesus showed care by preaching and personal evangelism.

Surely it is more accurate to say that Jesus used a variety of caring techniques depending on the situation, the nature of the person he spoke with, and the specific problem. At times he listened to people carefully and without giving much outward direction. On other occasions he talked decisively. He encouraged and he supported. But he also confronted and challenged. He accepted people who were sinful and needy, but he also demanded repentance, obedience, and action.

Books on counseling list techniques for helping those in need. They state, for example, that the caring person should learn to listen attentively, attempt to understand the problem from the other person’s perspective, give encouragement, and gently confront the other person when there appears to be inconsistency or sin. At times we pray with one another or read Scripture passages together. Often a person needs practical assistance like money, food, housing, or help in finding a job.

In the last decade, an exciting development in the evangelical church has been the development of “peer counseling” programs. Working on the assumption that caring can be most effective when the carers have some skill in relating to needy people, a number of churches have developed classes and training seminars in people helping and lay counseling. A recent informal survey revealed that over 20 evangelically oriented training programs currently exist for use by church leaders who want to train members of the body of Christ in the practice of caring.

No church is likely to become a caring body, however, unless caring is modeled and encouraged by church leaders. The church is more than a building where people come to be entertained, to be stimulated intellectually, or to be soothed spiritually. The local body of Christ is to be a caring community where people observe others who care, are told about specific needs inside and outside the congregation, are given opportunity to participate, and are stimulated to show compassion and caring as they hear the Word of God preached.

Consider, for example, one large church in Illinois. The pastor is a sensitive man of God who radiates compassion and frequently mentions caring in sermons. The church bulletin and pulpit announcements not only emphasize individual needs, but state how and where people can “sign up” to provide meals, transportation, and other practical assistance. When a few church members recently sponsored a family from Southeast Asia, the whole congregation was alerted to ways they could help—donations of clothing, money, instruction in English, baby-sitting, and transportation. During an annual blood drive members donated blood in the church on Sunday afternoon. The congregation has started a peer counseling program and a host of Bible study support groups that stimulate caring and spiritual growth. The church has an active “social concerns committee” and emphasizes giving to missions and world relief organizations. Perhaps hundreds of churches have similar programs that encourage caring by stressing compassion from the pulpit and involving individuals in acts of care and practical people helping.

What Is a Caring Church?

We are surrounded by needy people. Loneliness, emptiness, family breakdowns, poverty, prejudice, violence, and a host of other problems make life difficult for millions. The church has responded to these needs in a variety of ways. Sometimes it has become actively involved in social action almost to the exclusion of spiritual ministry to those in need. At other times it has virtually forgotten community needs on the assumption that preaching the gospel is the only responsibility we have toward needy people.

Jesus both preached the gospel and ministered in practical acts of compassion. Surely the church must do the same. We must present the Word of God and reach out to care. We must acknowledge that the gospel involves both words and an active involvement in the lives of needy people in our own neighborhoods and in the world beyond.

In a book on caring, Chester Custer once painted a picture of the caring church. The following portrait is adapted from Custer’s list:

1. The caring church consists of believers in Jesus Christ who submit to his lordship and seek to live and worship in accord with the biblical teaching. Caring church members are concerned about evangelizing, establishing disciples, and equipping believers so that they in turn can serve one another, present the gospel to others, and reach out in compassion to the community at home and abroad.

2. The leadership of a caring church, including the pastor, consists of people who are seeking to grow as men and women of God and who show genuine warmth and concern for others. Such interest in persons is expressed through listening, encouraging, supporting, and guiding—all of which take place in an atmosphere of understanding and empathy.

3. Worship services develop a climate that is both Christ centered and concerned with the needs of the worshipers. A real effort is made to make people sense that they are welcome and a part of the worshiping community. The truths of the Scripture and the real needs of people in the congregation are kept in mind when speakers prepare and deliver sermons or when they teach. Opportunities are provided to state prayer requests and to express personal needs and concerns.

4. A program exists that enables members of the body to bear one another’s burdens and minister to one another. It permits the pastor and lay Christians to engage in a cooperative, mutually supportive ministry. They reach out to those who have recently moved to the community, to those who are ill or in special distress, to those without families, to the lonely, to the home-bound, and to those in institutions. Individuals and groups in church attempt to discover and meet the needs of people in the congregation and community.

5. Groups meeting for prayer, Bible study, or action outreach provide opportunities to share personal problems and feelings in an atmosphere of acceptance and Christian love.

6. Sunday school teachers who know about Christian education are also trained in the principles of interpersonal relationships. They learn how the theological and experiential dimensions of faith go together and they are able to show students how Jesus Christ can meet one’s daily needs. They have personal concern for students and follow up absentees.

7. The church has a deep concern for Christian missions and a desire to bring the gospel to people in the local community and in other parts of the world. Members are concerned both for the saving (evangelistic) and for the social (compassionate) aspects of the gospel. They show a practical concern for the needs of mankind but also emphasize the loving message of salvation through faith in Christ.

8. The church provides opportunities for stewardship and service so people can express their Christian commitment in tangible ways.

9. The church attempts to fill leadership positions with people whose lives and words show that they are maturing disciples of Christ who also are concerned about caring.

In 1 Peter 2:5 the church is described as a building that consists of living stones and holy priests who offer up spiritual sacrifices to God. Of course, a brick by itself is pretty useless. It is of maximum value only when it is combined with other bricks to produce a building. Individual Christians are like that. We find our true place as Christians when we are in a body, integrated together with other believers to form a solid, spiritual house.

But we must remember that believers are also priests. A priest is someone who has access to God, who brings others to God, and who offers spiritual sacrifices. We Christians no longer offer sacrifices of animal blood. Instead, we are to offer our own bodies and selves as living and holy sacrifices (Rom. 12:1). It pleases God when we verbally “offer up a sacrifice of praise” (Heb. 13:15). It also pleases him when we offer a sacrifice of doing good and sharing. With such sacrifices God is well pleased (Heb. 13:16). This is what he wants in his church—a body of believers who in word and action say, “We care.”

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.