The Problem of Progress

Recently I have had the privilege of closer contact with some of the “Jesus people” than I have had before. They have told me of their work in community houses, among bikies, the drug culture, drop-outs, and others. The experience has been both heart-warming and mind-stretching. It has been good to get to know a little of the work these unconventional Christians are doing. But to someone whose Christian experience has been as much wrapped up in the institutional church as mine, it is a bit deflating to find these young men and women so repelled by the church.

For them the institution is just too much to take. They are for Christ, there is no doubt about that. But they are more than a little hesitant about Christ’s church. Indeed, they wonder whether that is the way to put it, whether it is in fact Christ’s church or some manmade institution.

I guess it is good for people like me to be made to think. We so easily take the church for granted. We have always associated the living out of the Christian life with our fellowship with other Christians in the church. We have taken seriously the injunction not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. It has never occurred to us that this might refer to assemblies other than the church. Even now that we see a number of groups thinking differently, we find it hard to imagine that forsaking the church assembly is a tenable Christian position. But it is not easy to deny the genuineness of the Christian experience of many of these new-style believers.

I do not suggest that we should give serious consideration to abandoning the church. The place of the church in Scripture is so central that it is impossible for me at least to contemplate a churchless Christianity.

But this does not mean that the modern institutional church is fully the church in its New Testament sense. It is at least possible that the church has taken a wrong turn or two and that in these days it should be doing some considerable rethinking of its position.

The trouble is that times have a habit of changing and institutions always find it difficult to adapt to change. Particularly as we grow older, we all tend to be a bit conservative. And in institutions like churches, the older and more conservative members tend to have the determinative voice. Such groups change slowly.

This is not all bad. There is the accumulated experience of generations behind us, and the church must have learnt something during the centuries of its existence. The lessons of the past are not lightly to be discarded.

But it ought to be possible to retain a firm hold on the wisdom of the past without alienating the vigorous life of the present. After all, that is life. No organism can do without its past. But none can ignore its present either. The present is demanding and we can never retreat into the past.

The trouble is that institutions find change difficult whether they are weak or strong. When strong they have a momentum from their past that carries them along. They are in no great trouble. They have strong leaders who have long been accustomed to the way things are going. They see the established ways of doing things as the way they have built up their strength and tend to act in accordance with the motto, “When you’re on a good thing, stick to it!” It always seems to them unreasonable to change from ways that are a proven success to ways that may possibly lead to disaster. So they settle for the status quo.

But it is not much easier when institutions are weak. Then their leaders may well be weak themselves and unable to take the strong action needed. Even if they see the need for change and want to bring it about, they may find their organization such that they cannot do it. There will be resistance to change from all who think that this will mean the end of an already weakened institution.

So whether they are strong or weak, established institutions always tend to favor the old ways. It is never easy to face the challenges of the current generation.

This is not to say that change is impossible. It is taking place all the time. And if we are talking about the church we are talking about an institution that has made a series of successful adaptations to the changing generations through many centuries. When the church has survived so much and changed so often, it would be foolish to write off its potential in the present.

But we must appreciate that the present time is one of unusual difficulty for the church. It is threatened from outside. Atheistic Communism controls the lives and much of the thought patterns of a considerable proportion of mankind. Atheistic humanism is prominent in most of those communities where communism does not hold sway. There has been something of a revival in several of the ancient faiths. Some of the Eastern religions have invaded those Western communities in which the strength of Christianity lies. There can be no doubt as to the magnitude and the variety of the forces that oppose the church from outside.

But many feel that they are nothing to the foes within. Some versions of secular Christianity seem to have very little in common with what has always been taken to be the essence of the faith. There are those who urge such a concentration on social and political issues that the traditional Christian call for repentance and faith and personal piety is muted, if not altogether silent. Christianity for centuries has gathered much new strength from its missionary activity; now we are often told that we should sit down quietly with the men of other faiths and talk with them but not try to convert them. Adaptation to the present situation is not going to be easy.

But it is possible. There is a resilience in a right Christian faith, for it puts us in touch with none less than God himself. It is essential to Christianity that God has redeemed his people in Christ’s atoning death and triumphant resurrection. It is equally essential that God the Holy Spirit comes to live in the hearts of God’s people, giving them a strength and a wisdom not their own. They may not always use that strength and that wisdom. But it is there, available.

The “Jesus people” remind us that the great Christian verities still stand. I do not see their way as the answer to our problems. Their life-style is unlikely to make much appeal outside their own circle; it will probably never be adopted by more than a minority. But the “Jesus people” are a living witness to the truth that the Christian faith can be very relevant to modern, Western, rebellious youth. They challenge the church to become as relevant on the wider canvas as they are on their smaller one.

- More from Leon Morris

Cable TV: Churches on the Wire

Barrie Doyle

When leaders of Redwood Chapel Community Church in Castro Valley, California, began looking into television as a means of outreach, they found the way blocked. Time—both on a sustaining and on a paid basis—was unavailable on any San Francisco Bay area station, and the cost of owning and operating a commercial broadcast station was prohibitive.

Today, two years later, Redwood Chapel is on the air—or, more accurately, on the wire—via cable television. The church, which averages more than 1,000 for Sunday-morning services, now operates channel 12b on a local cable system. It provides up to five hours of live or taped programming daily; a “message board” giving telephone numbers for those needing counsel is telecast the rest of the time. Total initial investment: $40,000.

And the story is being repeated elsewhere. Already, churches and lay groups in Seattle, in Lubbock, Abilene, and El Paso, Texas, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in Peoria, Illinois, in New York City, and in other centers around the country are transmitting telecasts on their own cable channel outlets.

Cable television—known formally as Community Antenna Television (CATV)—brings television into homes by means of a coaxial cable similar to that used by the telephone company. Powerful antennas placed on high points of land or tall structures draw in the broadcast signals of weak or distant stations. These signals are strengthened and clarified before being transmitted to subscriber homes (advantages for subscribers: much clearer signals, particularly for color set owners, and a wider choice of programming because of the larger number of channels available). Other programs originate in the cable system studio itself, usually videotapes or films (whether produced locally or elsewhere), sometimes live telecasts. The cost to a subscriber averages from $5 to $15 per month depending on the system.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasting and has taken a strong interest in cable operations, several years ago decreed that cable systems with more than 3,500 subscribers must provide locally originated programs. That ruling was challenged in the courts, and the Supreme Court finally ruled that the FCC has authority to regulate content of cable programs. Authorities of some states believe cable systems should be regulated by public utilities bodies much as telephone and natural gas companies are, and not by the FCC. The issue of how much jurisdiction the FCC has is still being thrashed out between the FCC and cable operators; there may be further court battles.

Several communities are investigating cable TV as city-operated systems, others as privately owned but city-regulated systems. Milwaukee officials have drawn up an ordinance envisoning a 120-channel cable system—three times bigger than anything in operation—to be regulated by the city’s utilities commission.

Facilities offering twelve to twenty channels are common, and several offer forty channels. Some observers say the system of the future will be required to have at least twenty channels, several of them set aside specifically for local production, public-access (possibly free from fairness-doctrine regulations), educational, and governmental use.

The multi-channel feature means cable programming can be targeted for specific audiences much as radio programs are. This feature has given rise to the term “narrowcasting” to differentiate it from mass-audience-appeal “broadcasting.”

For churches, says Redwood Chapel’s pastor Sherman Williams, the narrowcasting aspect of cable plus the FCC local programming rule are key talking points with cable operators. Redwood won free use of channel 12b because it promised programming at no cost to the system operator while pointing out that such a channel would attract new subscribers. The free programming pleases operators, adds Neal Doty, Redwood’s associate pastor and telecommunications minister, because “it makes them look good in the eyes of government regulatory agencies and the public.”

In Lubbock, Texas, a group of businessmen who belong to various churches traded the use of an extensive mailing list of area church members for the use of a cable channel. The group, on the channel for more than eighteen months now, transmits up to thirty-five hours a week of Christian programs. More than 600 new subscribers signed up as a result—worth approximately $4,000 a month to the system owner. Spokesman Bryan Edwards of the lay group said their initial investment was only $5,000 for cameras and videotape recording equipment.

Redwood Chapel has a more sophisticated setup with nearly $100,000 worth of cameras and recording equipment. Doty heads a staff of one paid technician and fifteen volunteers. The fifteen were “intrigued” with the prospects of a TV ministry, said Williams, and took night courses in television at nearby colleges. They now serve as cameramen, floor directors, and audio technicians for the church’s programs.

Meeting production costs is a burden, say many of the Christian programmers, although the simplest programs can be produced for only the cost of a $15 thirty-minute reel of videotape (once the initial equipment investment has been made). Costs rise as program sophistication rises. Redwood budgets its television ministry as part of the total church budget while others pay for programming by advertising or depend on donations. Once a Christian market has been identified, said Doty, booksellers, publishers, recording companies, and others with a vested interest and products to sell find it relatively inexpensive advertising.

The shortage of quality productions and the absence of a central distribution system are impediments to the development of Christian cable television, the experts point out. A recent gathering of cable personnel in Dallas made its major priority the establishment of a distribution system. Lubbock’s Edwards was appointed chairman of the loosely-knit, nameless task force. The meeting, he said, was the first for the cable people, many of whom had been working independently for years.

But even if a cable channel is cleared for use by a Christian group, the equipment purchased, and funding found, the group should proceed carefully, stressed those interviewed. Scott Hessek of Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Portsmouth, Virginia, warned that the multi-channel facility of cable, while a blessing, can also provide tough competition for Christian programs. But “there’s a big ‘if’ involved,” he said. Christian cable will succeed, he said, “if worthwhile programming can be produced, if it is interesting, and if it is competitive with the other nineteen or so channels.” (CBN’s programs are picked up by more than 450 cable systems. It maintains a cable TV production and distribution center in Dallas.)

FourMost, a production and talent agency in Wheaton, Illinois, has formed a Christian cable television “network”; it supplies programming to an unspecified number of Christian groups on cable TV in six western and midwestern states, operates a film library, and offers a consulting service for those developing cable systems. Given innovative programs, says FourMost president Joe Musser, cable can become the most important communications medium in the country within the next ten years. Already, more than 6,000 cable systems are in existence, reaching 6.5 million homes, roughly 10 per cent of the potential. By 1980, experts say, 80 per cent of all American homes will have cable available. In Canada, most major cities have several cable systems available, many of them required to provide local programs to offset nation-wide network programs.

A good example of innovative, special-audience programming may be a Bible-study series produced by Redwood Chapel. Well-known teachers conduct the sessions, patterned after typical home Bible-study meetings and produced in a living-room setting in the studio. Members invite friends to their homes to view a program, then conduct a supplementary Bible study of their own after the show is over. In one studio session, Dallas Seminary’s Howard Hendricks led a study with four couples, two of the pairs non-Christians. One couple was later converted. Members report similar evangelistic impact in the related home meetings.

Any religious group that, like Redwood, wants its own channel had better hurry: the end is in sight. Most channels will be gone in five to ten years, say most of those interviewed. Edwards gives it even less time: “We’ve got to move now. In eighteen to twenty-four months no channel will be available.” Other groups are closing in, recognizing that cable is an inexpensive, direct method of reaching and influencing an audience. If churches and lay groups act now, the experts say, Christian cable TV may become as prolific as Christian FM radio—and much less expensive.

CHRISTIAN ‘TV GUIDE’

After several owners and a few fitful starts, a program guide listing only Christian radio and television broadcasts reappeared under new ownership in Chicago and seven other major cities last month.

Inspirational Radio/Television Program Guide (30W406 Roosevelt Road, West Chicago, Illinois 60185) is a bimonthly, slick, full-color, digest-sized publication. Editor Jerry Jenkins hopes it will appear monthly within a year so that specific program information can be given; currently only stations and program names are listed. It contains local program schedules, news, personality sketches, feature articles, and columns by well-known personalities. The fifty-cent magazine is distributed through bookstores and churches. More than 100,000 copies of the May–June issue were circulated.

Church And Stock: David, Incorporated

Last month two banks, Maryland National and Wells Fargo of San Francisco, decided to divest themselves of loans made to South Africa’s government. Pressure from various local church groups figured prominently in the bank’s decision, according to news sources.

Mainline denominational mission agencies are increasingly discussing—and acting on—corporate responsibility and “eco-justice.” An outgrowth of the new emphasis is the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a New York City-based non-profit corporation whose business is to confront the profit-making corporate giants. The center, formed last October by a merger of the Corporate Information Center and the Interfaith Committee on Social Responsibility, includes among its members such mainline Protestant denominations as the Lutheran Church in America, the American Baptist Churches in the U. S. A., three divisions of the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, and the United Church of Canada. Also, two Roman Catholic organizations, the Friars of the Atonement and the National Catholic Coalition for Responsible Investment, are members, as is the National Council of Churches and the Unitarian-Universalist Association.

Headed by Executive Director Frank White, the ICCR supervises task forces on such issues as corporate relationships to racial, social, economic, and political policies in southern Africa, Latin America, and the Philippines, and the dangers of strip mining in the United States (see February 1 issue, page 41). The center files resolutions with corporations, holds meetings with corporation managers, and conducts programs of education and serves as research resource for local church groups and schools. It also publishes newsletters to keep members informed on issues to be raised at stockholder meetings, as well as the results of each resolution.

Results at this year’s various stockholder meetings, according to the center, indicated progress in “sensitizing” corporations to their responsibility on social issues—a main task cited by center leaders. Among the companies confronted were Exxon, Mobil, Phillips Petroleum, Gulf Oil, and Ford Motor Company. In all, about fifty resolutions were filed.

As expected, most resolutions were defeated and did not receive enough proxy votes for reintroduction next year. Federal regulations require a 3 per cent vote to allow a proxy challenge to be considered a second time. Surprisingly, seven resolutions did get the percentage required for reintroduction. The Loretto Motherhouse, a Catholic group, received 5.16 per cent of the vote on its resolution that Bethlehem Steel Corporation release a report concerning its strip-mining activities in the Appalachians. The United Church of Christ challenge to Continental Oil (Conoco) netted more than 7 per cent of the proxy votes; the issue, racial discrimination in Namibia. (The same resolution a year ago got 5.4 per cent.) The UCC’s challenges to Conoco on domestic strip mining also received enough votes for reintroduction. Another resolution that will also be reintroduced next year concerns Newmont Mining Corporation’s activities in Namibia. The other two resolutions were filed by the Episcopal Church with Phillips Petroleum Company. One asked the corporation to disclose information on its activities in southern Africa, and received about a 5 per cent vote. The other, which got 7 per cent, asked the company to guard against illegal contributions to political campaigns (Phillips made an illegal contribution during the 1972 presidential campaign). Another Episcopal resolution on illegal political contributions won backing by management of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company and got 97 per cent of the stockholder vote, the first time a church resolution has won.

ICCR director White says most corporations such as Polaroid or Exxon react “positively” to churches’ resolutions. If a company agrees to supply information as requested in the resolutions, churches withdraw them. This year sixteen companies agreed to supply information on employment of women and racial minorities, on measures used to combat the energy crisis, and on strip-mining activities, which are considered harmful to the environment. Exxon Corporation, for example, sent some top executives to the Interfaith Center to hold a five-hour discussion on the company’s proposed strip-mining activities. Exxon, explains White, “takes seriously our concern.”

Comments from companies range from complete approval of investments pressure as a legitimate mission for the church to requests that churches just “preach the Bible,” says White. Spokesmen for denominations involved in investments maintain that they do preach the Bible when discussing corporate responsibility with company management. As one analyst explained, this is a twentieth-century version of David and Goliath, but “the slingshots and pebbles have been replaced by stock portfolios, persuasion, and public opinion.”

CHERYL FORBES

God And Watergate

There’s been a lot of soul searching on the part of many slogging around in the morass of Watergate. In their search some have found God, and the outcome so far has been profound.

James McCord, the former CIA agent who headed up security for President Nixon’s reelection committee, says he wrote that tell-it-all letter last March to Judge John Sirica as a result of a series of sermons he heard preached by Pastor Richard Halverson in Washington’s Fourth Presbyterian Church.

This month attorney Charles Colson, the indicted former presidential counsel and Mr. Tough Guy of the Watergate cast, set off shock waves in Washington with a plea of guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice. Sentencing was set for June 21.

As noted by the nation’s press, Colson’s decision and the wording of his statement were thrashed out in a small prayer group he joined soon after his conversion last August (see January 4 issue, page 48). The Sunday night before his plea he conferred and prayed with his spiritual mentors: Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, Minnesota congressman Albert Quie, former Texas congressman Graham Purcell, and Douglas Coe, a lay missionary affiliated with Fellowship Foundation of Washington. (Quie, out of town on a speaking engagement, joined in by phone.)

“There were tears shed,” Hughes told reporters. “Here is a man who faces prison and disbarment.” Hughes said the group felt Colson might have gone free in a trial, “but he wanted to help in the cleansing process of the nation, to testify for the country and for Jesus Christ.”

Several weeks earlier Hughes and Colson had been quizzed about their faith in Christ by Mike Wallace on CBS-TV’s “Sixty Minutes,” the same day Hughes was interviewed on ABC-TV’s “Directions” about his faith and decision to engage in full-time lay ministry. Wallace had pushed Colson on the issue of righting the wrongs of the past. (Interestingly, Colson had already been quietly apologizing to certain persons for past misdeeds.)

A few months ago some of Colson’s Christian friends enlisted nearly 100 persons, many of them members of Fourth Presbyterian, to help him put together 5,000 Xerox pages of press clips in an attempt to convince the court he couldn’t get a fair trial anywhere in America.

Colson has said he will talk with government prosecutors; how much he tells and how far-reaching the consequences remain to be seen.

In an interview, Colson expressed dismay at the “lynch-mob atmosphere” and “lack of love” in Washington. At the same time he confessed that not too long ago he had a get-that-guy attitude himself. But Christ changed that, he said; now there’s love. He said he worries whether the nation “will ever find the healing that can only come when people turn to God and follow Christ.”

Religion has figured in the fortunes of other Watergate personalities, including former White House “plumber” Egil “Bud” Krogh and ex-presidential aide Jeb Magruder; both have expressed remorse over their past. Hughes says Krogh received Christ before he left for prison. Magruder, escorted to the courthouse by his pastor, Louis Evans, Jr., of National Presbyterian Church, told reporters he will spend part of his prison stay studying theology. Both men are serving light sentences at the federal minimum-security facility at Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

In the meantime, church leaders throughout the country were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the moral attitudes they saw in the transcripts of White House meetings. Many critics harped on evangelist Billy Graham for not denouncing President Nixon. Graham said he deplored the moral tone of the papers but, as Nixon’s friend, had “no intention of forsaking him now.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Religion In Transit

Under pressure, Union Seminary president J. Brooke Mosley, 58, announced his resignation, effective no later than November, 1975. Mosley, former Episcopal bishop of Delaware, has served the New York school since 1970. He instituted a number of board-directed changes that resulted in unrest among faculty members and students.

Guerrillas in northeastern Ethiopia took over an American oil company helicopter, landed near the American Evangelical Church hospital in Ghinda, and kidnapped a pregnant missionary nurse, Mrs. Deborah Dortzbach, 24, of Freehold, New Jersey. A middle-aged Dutch nurse, Anna Strikwerda, was shot to death, apparently resisting capture. She was single. Orthodox Presbyterian mission officials who sponsor Mrs. Dortzbach theorize she was taken to provide medical assistance to the guerrillas.

Most of the 46,000 inhabitants of the island of Siau, Indonesia, have fled following destructive earthquakes and eruptions of a volcano. The majority of the people are affiliated with the Evangelical Christian Church in Sangihe Talaud, so named for two large islands nearby. Only a handful were killed, but some 1,500 houses, nine schools, eight churches, bridges, roads, and thousands of acres of farmland were wiped out.

Conservative faculty leader Robert D. Preus, 49, of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, was elected president of Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois. Meanwhile, Evangelical Lutherans in Mission (ELIM), the organization of liberal-moderate dissidents in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, pledged $40,000 for support of Seminex graduates who fail to get official certification for pastoral placement. Seminex is the ELIM-backed school run by former teachers at Concordia, St. Louis.

DEATHS

GEORGE HENRY MORLING, 86, eminent Australian Baptist educator and evangelical leader; in New South Wales, Australia.

HAROLD C. SLADE, 71, controversial Toronto Baptist pastor and leader of several small separatist groups; in Toronto, of a heart attack.

- More from Barrie Doyle

Church Crisis in Chad

W. Harold Fuller

The future of the church in Chad hangs in the balance this month as the government takes the next step in its cultural revolution plans.

Twice the size of Texas but with only one-half the population, land-locked Chad is sandwiched between the Sahara desert in the north and jungle rainforests in the south. The southern third, with over half the nation’s five million population, forms the power bloc of President Ngarta Tombalbaye, himself a southerner. It also has been the area of greatest missionary activity and church growth, with over 60,000 members in 1,500 evangelical churches, plus thousands of adherents. A “saturation-evangelism” program in 1972 and 1973 by The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) in southwest Chad netted thousands of converts, and 4,000 prayer cells met regularly during the campaign. Missionaries view the rapid growth as a mixed blessing; it is difficult to provide adequate Christian teaching to so many at once.

Last year, President Tombalbaye launched a cultural revolution to strengthen his support in the “black” south; Muslim rebels controlled the other two-thirds of the nation. All “European” influence was to be removed. Non-Chadian names, including Bible names, had to be dropped. (Muslims, however, have not had to change their Koranic and Arabic names, nor undergo traditional initiation rites.)

Phase Two of the “authenticity program” was launched last November with a presidential decree that all tribesmen must submit to their traditional initiation rites—secret ceremonies often involving sacrifice to ancestral spirits and an animistic “rebirth.” The first area was to be the president’s own Sara tribe, in the southeast. Christians protested, bringing reprisal. Their homes and farms were ransacked, their lives threatened. The children of some were taken forcibly to the initiation camps. Sources say that one pastor who refused to let his sons go was shot, and that an evangelist’s son who helped translate the New Testament into the Sara language was killed.

The government blamed foreign missionaries for encouraging the opposition. The Ohio-based Baptist Mid-Missions, the largest Protestant group working among the Sara tribe, took the brunt of the government’s reaction. In November, six families and six single missionaries were arrested and expelled, thirteen pastors were detained, and all Baptist churches and schools in the area were closed (see January 18, 1974, issue, page 43). The sole remaining Baptist medical missionary, Dr. David Seymour, a friend of Tombalbaye’s for years, left Chad at the end of May, because he felt his presence was an embarrassment to the churches.

Some observers suspect a personal vendetta on the president’s part. Born into a Baptist Sara family in 1918, young François (his childhood name, now dropped) became a leader and teacher in a Baptist church. (There are a number of Christians in government, drawn from the mission-educated southerners.) Later the church disciplined him for “unchristian behavior,” and the incident reportedly embittered him. The local Baptist missionary, Daniel Hirschy, and his wife were among the first three couples expelled. (More recently one of Tombalbaye’s relatives was disciplined by the church for undergoing the initiation rites.)

The president has also been displeased with the Baptists for using the Sango language among his own Sara tribe. Mid-Missions had developed literature in Sango in its work across the border in Central Africa Republic, and found Sango was used as a trade language in southern Chad. The language was banned in 1961, but Sara believers say they still appreciate having Sango literature to read.

Despite his seeming antagonism toward the mission and church, Tombalbaye still claims to be a Christian. However, on a visit to the Sara tribe he stated that though the blood of Jesus Christ atones for sin, the initiation rites complete the cleansing. He is now also a polygamist.

The rites were to be enforced nationwide last December, but were postponed until this month, say sources, in order not to jeopardize school attendance or the cotton harvest—Chad’s chief cash crop.

In other tribal areas attitudes differ, and evangelicals may not face the same pressures. Converted witch doctors in some instances have denounced pagan practices. Some remaining customs are not seen as unchristian. “If we have to initiate people here,” one priest is reported to have said, “we won’t force any evangelicals to take the rites.”

The feeling among some observers is that although missionaries may not be expelled from the other tribes, pressure may continue until they all leave voluntarily. So far missionary visas are being refused, even to those without specialist qualifications.

The main Protestant missions working among the western tribes are Christian Missions in Many Lands, Lutheran Brethren, Grace Brethren, and TEAM, which recently took over the North American Sudan United Mission work in Chad. These missions are closely watching developments.

The Roman Catholic mission, which has more missionaries than the Protestants but fewer churches and members, generally faces no problem with the government because it permits members to undergo the initiation rites.

There are signs that the “cultural propaganda” is affecting the churches. Last November, evangelicals were united in disciplining any member who even approved of initiation. But by February, many church councils had agreed that anyone forced to take the rites should not be disciplined, and some pastors advocate that initiation be permitted. Missionaries express grave concern at the developments.

The government has set up a state church under the name “Evangelical Church of Chad”—the same name that TEAM has been using for its churches. Its top officials are two pastors who left the Baptist church because of discipline. Churches in the Sara tribe may reopen only if they sign allegiance to these two men and their group. In other tribal areas, the government has also appointed officers to head up the state church, in some cases appointing evangelical pastors and elders without their consent.

Observers note that Communist Chinese have replaced the Taiwanese agricultural experts, and that there has been an increase of Russians. The name of the sole political party has been changed to the National Cultural and Social Revolutionary Movement. Regional political committees have been formed, with a leading pastor in each district appointed. Membership is obligatory. The committees conduct self-accusation meetings, and have banned the title “Monsieur,” substituting “Comrade.”

Reports coming out of Chad are conflicting. Problems vary among different tribes. But one thing is certain: the evangelical church in Chad is going through its fiercest hour of trial. What happens in the next few weeks may be of significance to missions and young churches throughout the Third World.

Africa: Toward Moratorium

Liberation and African identity remained the two overriding concerns as the All-Africa Conference of Churches concluded its third assembly in Lusaka, Zambia, last month (see June 7 issue, page 45).

In a step seen as essential in achieving authentic Africanness, the assembly adopted a report calling for a “moratorium.” Said the report: “The contribution of the African church cannot be adequately made in our world if the church is not liberated and [does not] become truly national. To achieve this liberation the church will have to bring a halt to the financial and manpower resources—the receiving of money and personnel—from its foreign relationships.”

Exactly how the churches might go about implementing this recommendation was not made clear. The AACC itself is not in a strong position to lead such a movement, for the financial report revealed that its administrative budget is 97 per cent subsidized, and that even if the best expectations of the projected budget can be realized, still only 20 per cent would be met by the contributions of member churches. How then can the call for a moratorium be reconciled with the budget needs? Anglican canon Burgess Carr, the Liberian-born general secretary of the AACC, perhaps gave the clue in his keynote address, where in contrast to the assembly’s own later proposal he defined moratorium as “a demand to transfer the massive expenditure on expatriate personnel in the church in Africa to program activities manned by Africans themselves.” In other words, he calls for a moratorium on personnel but not on funds.

In his speech Carr also spoke of a crisis of faith in the African church:

[It] is not so much a theological crisis as much as it is a crisis of anthropology. At the very root of the problem is the cultural arrogance of that small minority of mankind, located in the North Atlantic world, who have imposed western man at the top of an imaginary scale of evolutionary development.… The western missionary movement converted this bad anthropology into bad theology, thereby transforming Jesus Christ into the prototype of their race, their values, and their customs.

The assembly, in addressing itself to liberation in South Africa and other countries under minority rule, passed a recommendation requesting member churches of the AACC to organize “national committees on liberation to assist the churches in sponsoring programs to bring about awareness among Christians on the relationship between salvation and liberation, and to find tangible ways of supporting movements struggling for liberation, justice, and reconciliation in Africa.”

A no-strings-attached gift of $5,000 to two liberation movements was voted (since 1963 the AACC has given more than $125,000 to such groups), and the assembly demanded that the concordat and missionary agreement between the Vatican and Portugal (described as making the church “an accomplice … to cultural genocide”) be annulled.

In a concluding “Message to the Churches” the assembly declared that there is a need to be freed from “theological conservatism which leads to stagnation and stops us from understanding, interpreting, applying, and experiencing the message of the Gospel afresh,” as well as to be freed from denominationalism, from fear to announce the new and denounce evil boldly, from hypocrisy, from selfishness, and from easy dependence on foreign money and men.

Presiding officer Richard Andriamanjato, mayor of Tananarive, capital of the Malagasy Republic (Madagascar), was unanimously elected president, succeeding the Reverend John Kotto of Cameroun. The Reverend John Gatu, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church in East Africa (and a major proponent of a full moratorium), was elected chairman of the AACC’s important General Committee, replacing Andriamanjato.

The AACC, founded ten years ago, includes most of the Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches of the continent. Lutherans have been somewhat slower to join, though the Lutheran Mekane Yesus Church of Ethiopia joined at this assembly. So far the Baptist churches are not strongly represented. A notable development is the interest of the so-called independent—non-mission-related—churches in the AACC. The Kimbanguist Church of Zaire was especially evident in assembly debates.

Scotland: Unexpected Reprieve

This was to be the year when the Church of Scotland general assembly administered the coup de grâce to the Westminster Confession as “subordinate standard,” with its double predestination, its strict Sabbatarianism, and its identification of the pope as the Man of Sin. A majority of presbyteries had agreed to relegate the mid-seventeenth-century publication to “historic document” status, and the Panel on Doctrine asked last month’s assembly in Edinburgh to ratify the decision.

Then something unexpected happened. Former moderator Andrew Herron, a prominent clergyman described by one reporter as “not to be classed among the fundamentalists,” persuaded the house to shelve the issue until a fuller statement of faith was forthcoming. The 292-to-238 decision caused a general furor among those who have been chipping away at the confession for many years and who now saw success unaccountably slip away. The reason for the reprieve currently remains a mystery.

Ironically, at an earlier session the assembly had not only welcomed Bishop Colin MacPherson of Argyll and the Isles as official Roman Catholic visitor, but had agreed that next year’s representative of that church should be invited to address the assembly (twenty-one commissioners recorded dissent from the decision). The Reverend John D. Sutherland of Kintyre reminded his colleagues that there was “a strong body of moderate opinion against entering into any kind of official relationship with the Roman Catholic Church,” which view was formed on “carefully considered theological foundations, not on prejudice.” Meanwhile outside the hall the annual group of protesters made clear what John Knox thought of it all.

Retiring moderator George Reid said that “the only greatness that properly belongs to the Church does not lie in adapting itself to the spirit of the present age, but in the faithful and uncompromising proclamation of the Gospel.” In an odd twist he spoke of the air’s being “polluted with a choking smog of cynicism and disillusionment” during a session at which five people fainted (the hall is notorious for inadequate ventilation).

The assembly proved recalcitrant also when the Inter-Church Relations Committee turned to the subject of episcopal church government. There is no more potentially explosive subject in Scottish Presbyterianism. This time the committee came at the matter obliquely, asking acceptance of an innocent-looking call for a clearer definition of the role of “superintendents.” The latter were promptly denounced as camouflaged bishops, and the assembly was having none of it.

Dr. Ian B. Doyle of the Home Board referred to the alarming rise of non-Christian religions and movements. “You may hear the tinkle of Hare Krishna bells in Princes Street [Edinburgh],” he said. “I have come across a Bahai temple in Campbeltown, and Muslim worship in Stornoway, and I am told there are black magic rites and covens of witches not so far from where we are meeting now.” Seeing the fundamental task as the reclamation of Scottish people for the faith of their fathers, Doyle concluded: “We believe that the work of mission must begin again at the level of the parish. If we fail here, we fail everywhere.”

ANYTHING BUT ROUTINE

There was nothing to suggest that the election of a new bishop of Glasgow and Galloway would be anything but routine business for the Episcopal Church in Scotland last month. The clergy and lay representatives of the church’s largest diocese without a dissenting vote duly elected the Very Reverend Frederick Goldie, dean of Glasgow, and presented his name to the six other bishops for formal confirmation. “We waited for one and a half hours,” said a layman, “and when the document was returned without assent you could have heard a pin drop. Then the place just erupted into a kind of fury.”

None of the bishops is talking, but it is understood that they were evenly divided, and not even the primus has a casting vote. It seems likely that the election will be held again, but Goldie is uncertain about his candidacy. “I am a loyal churchman,” he said, “and I don’t want to cause disharmony.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

The assembly also:

• Heard that the discovery of North Sea oil had increased drunkenness by 600 per cent in Easter Ross, where workers were “almost dehumanized cogs in an ugly piece of machinery”;

• Saw that tireless champion of un-popular causes Lord MacLeod of Fuinary achieve a rare victory by narrowly persuading the house to demand a national referendum on membership in the Common Market;

• Gave a standing ovation to New Testament scholar William Barclay, who retires this summer;

• Welcomed news that the minimum stipend would be increased to $5,280;

• Elected Dr. David Steel of Linlithgow as moderator;

• Accepted a proposal that charismatic gifts should be welcomed provided they are used for the benefit of the whole church;

• Expressed “deep regret” that the secretary of state for Scotland did not recognize the teaching of religious education on a level with other school subjects.

(Membership in the Kirk declined more than 21,000 in 1973, to 1.08 million; Kirk leaders hint more may be dropped from among the 384,405 who did not attend communion last year.)

Another politician came in for a hammering across the street at the general assembly of the Free Kirk. Commenting on the news that a prominent advocate had been selected to succeed Sir Alec Douglas-Home as candidate for a Scots constituency, Donald Jack of Leith accused the candidate of having “shown himself inimical to the Gospel,” and having been a supporter of an Edinburgh theater that had made “its own nefarious contribution to the permissive society.” In his opening address new moderator Alastair Ross, a clergyman of Oban, said that the political crisis in the country is matched by a spiritual crisis in the church. “Instead of stressing the urgency of the Gospel in our day,” said Mr. Ross, “the Church is, by and large, questioning the relevancy of it—even yet.”

Delegates at the annual synod of the Free Presbyterian Church in Glasgow criticized the Catholic Church for its alleged role in the unrest in Northern Ireland, and they voiced disapproval of Sunday sports.

In Edinburgh, the Episcopal Church at its annual synod heard rector Gordon Reid claim that money given to the World Council of Churches was “money given to the devil.” Accusing the WCC of subsidizing terrorism with its policy of murder, rape, and torture for political ends, Reid asked, “Will you stifle your conscience because it is not happening in Edinburgh?” Qualified support for the WCC was nonetheless approved when it was pointed out that no contributions had been made to the WCC’s Special Fund to Combat Racism. Episcopal Church communicants have dropped by one-sixth in the last ten years, it was reported; their number now stands at 46,045.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Chautauqua: A Century Of Culture

For many years in the small towns of rural America, when a large, brown-topped canvas tent went up in the public square, it meant that the annual Chautauqua series had come.

The forthcoming centennial of the founding of the Chautauqua Institution will be honored by the U. S. Postal Service with a ten-cent commemorative stamp depicting the familiar tent (see photo). To be issued in August, it is another in a series of stamps honoring the history of “Rural America.” It was designed by Philadelphia artist John Falter, who attended one of the Chautauqua sessions in his home town, Falls City, Nebraska.

The Chautauqua series brought religious inspiration along with education and entertainment to people in rural areas who otherwise would never have had an opportunity to hear the great preachers and educators of their day.

A Methodist minister and a Methodist layman founded the Chautauqua Institution at the Methodist camp meeting ground on the shore of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state on August 6, 1874. The clergyman, John H. Vincent, later a bishop, was editor of Sunday-school literature for the Methodist Episcopal Church at the time, and Lewis Miller, a wealthy manufacturer of farm machinery in Akron, Ohio, was a Sunday-school teacher interested in Vincent’s plan to improve the dry content of curricula and the often dull classroom sessions. They launched their improvement movement in 1873¹ and the following summer opened a fourteen-day teacher-training institute at Chautauqua. Miller suggested the site and the expansion of the program beyond Sunday-school needs. The first session featured serious lectures, but there were fireworks and music, too. Miller next suggested that a series of programs like it be offered in communities throughout the nation.

Within a few years Chautauqua was offering both credit and non-credit courses in a wide variety of subjects, and it was being copied by other groups throughout the nation. (To this day there are events billed as “Chautauqua” ones, but they have no affiliation with the Chautauqua Institution, where thousands will visit this summer.)

RETURNED MERCHANDISE

Revival works. About halfway through a nine-day Dayton, Ohio, evangelistic crusade conducted by Texas evangelist James Robison, a man came to the home of a local housewife and said: “Lady, you don’t know me, but last summer I stole your lawn furniture. I was saved the other night at the Robison crusade and I have brought back your furniture. I want you to know I’m sorry for what I did.”

“I believe in revivals that do things like that to people,” the housewife commented later to a reporter.

At the height of its popularity and influence, more than one million persons (of the total U. S. population of fewer than 100 million) were enrolled in the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, the forerunner of today’s book clubs. Commented Vincent at its founding in 1878: “Education, once the peculiar privilege of the few, must in our best earthly estate become the valued possession of the many.” By 1900, there were 10,000 literary groups reading and discussing the Chautauqua selections in science, history, religion, and literature.

The silver-tongued William Jennings Bryan was perhaps the most popular orator on its platforms but scores of other famous men and women (Susan B. Anthony, for one) “toured the circuit” every summer, speaking in a different community each evening. The correspondence courses offered by Chautauqua became the model for many imitators and of today’s organized adult education programs.

Increasing mobility and the advent of radio, motion pictures, and television brought an end to the Chautauqua circuit, but the lecture programs continue at the original site. Chautauqua has a 6,000-seat theater and its own symphony orchestra, opera company, drama troupe, library, art association, and a wide range of recreational facilities. Lecturers include Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and name personalities in secular entertainment are frequently featured. Despite the broad cultural and educational emphasis, Chautauqua retains its central purpose of spiritual enrichment, say its leaders.

Dr. Oscar E. Remick, a Baptist who has ties with the United Church of Christ and once taught at a Catholic college, is its president.

GLENN D. EVERETT

- More from W. Harold Fuller

Theology

Remember

Allan C. Emery, Jr.

The following is a guest column by Allan C. Emery, Jr., a businessman affiliated with Servicemaster in Boston, Massachusetts.

Samson, blind, standing between the great central pillars of the temple of Dagon, calls to the Lord and says, “O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.” Remember me! Remember me?

What thoughts went through Samson’s mind this day as he was made the center of attention and ridicule? He may well have thought of the angel’s announcement of his life mission to his mother and father; of his triumphs over the enemies of Israel, the Philistines; of his willful and foolish sin; of his capture and the searing pain; the darkness; the grinding, day after day, as a beast of burden. Samson remembered. Now his hair has grown, as has his faith, and now he speaks to God and says, “Remember me.”

Remembering can be both therapeutic and frightening, delightful and terrible. Remember the day you learned to ride a bike or drive a car. You can still smile at the memory of receiving your diamond engagement ring, or finding an electric train under the Christmas tree. But memory can also be a terrible word as you think of the day when you had forgotten to prepare for the Latin exam, or when you arrived at a party all dressed up and the other girls were in jeans. You can remember times of failure, of rejection, of scorn and ridicule.

The Bible uses the word remember in several basic categories. The first is the command to remember God and his commandments. “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them” (Eccles. 12:1). “Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy” (Exod. 20:8). “That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God” (Num. 15:40). “… And to remember the words of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 20:35). We are to remember God and his direction for our lives.

Then there is the use of the word remember as a personal plea for God’s remembrance. This was how Samson used the word in the temple of Dagon. The thief on the Cross looked to Jesus and cried, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42). Nehemiah, Job, and David asked the Lord to remember them in their needs.

The most common use of the word remember in Scripture is in connection with the faithfulness of God. In Genesis 9:15 God says, “And I will remember my covenant.” Time after time the Israelites are ordered to remember God’s faithfulness in delivering them from Egypt, “And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondsman in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee.” David says in Psalm 20:7, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the names of the Lord our God.” The prophet Nathan was ordered by God to tell David that “I took thee from the sheepcote, from following after sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel”; David was to remember God’s faithfulness, and he did. Asaph promises in Psalm 77:11, “I will remember the works of the Lord: surely I will remember thy wonders of old.” The Lord Jesus instructed his disciples, “Take, eat; this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:25). We are to remember God’s faithfulness.

We are also to remember man’s unfaithfulness. For a full two years the chief butler of Pharoah forgot Joseph: “Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgot him” (Gen. 40:23). Jesus advises us to remember Lot’s wife. The children of Israel were told to remember what Amalek did to them enroute from Egypt (Deut. 25:17). We are to learn from the mistakes of others. The Church at Ephesus is commanded to “remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent.”

Certainly the most beautiful use of the word remember in Scripture is in Hebrews 8:12. The Lord speaks of his redeemed ones, saying, “I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” Under the blood of Jesus Christ our sins are not only forgiven but forgotten by the Eternal God.

- More from Allan C. Emery, Jr.

Invest Your Illustration

Roger C. Palms

Sermon illustrations, like money, can be hoarded, squandered, or invested. The wise preacher tries to invest illustrations in each sermon, making a productive piece that is remembered and reflected upon by the congregation all week long. Without telling illustrations even the meatiest text can fall flat.

The ability to invest illustrations is not a gift that some preachers just happen to have; it is a developed skill. Unfortunately, many preachers never develop it.

There is the preacher who buries each good story or illustration deep in his files. He rationalizes, “I’m waiting for just the right sermon to use this good one.” He hoards his choice illustrations as if he thinks the Lord will never give him any more. Week after week, his sermons fall short of their potential while he exhausts himself trying to make an exciting message out of something that usually doesn’t even excite him.

Another preacher, having used a choice illustration with good results, will use it over and over again until the parishioners can quote it as well as he can. People don’t want to hear the same tired stories. Even if the minister has labored forty hours in preparing his sermon, the old illustrations give the impression that he just threw together something familiar and easy late Saturday night.

Still others, hearing a good story or finding an interesting illustration, are so eager to use it that they tell it the very next Sunday regardless of the subject of the sermon that day. This squandered story, only loosely tied to its context, loses its force.

Bright, memorable, apt illustrations that help package a sermon for easy recollection by the parishioner are the dream of every preacher. But most of us find ourselves lamenting, “I can’t invest what I don’t have. I’d use a lot of good illustrations if I had them, but I don’t have them!”

The complaint is likely to go like this: “I don’t travel or hear other preachers. Books of illustrations usually yield only one or two that are useful; the rest are dated. The newspapers aren’t that interesting, and most of my parishioners read the Reader’s Digest too. Where will I find illustrations to invest?”

Fresh illustrations, the kind that excite and warm and move a congregation to action, are usually close at hand. They are only waiting to be recognized. And God wants us to have them. It’s God’s Word we are preaching. He doesn’t want his message to sound stale, and he doesn’t want sermon hearers to miss the truth that is being proclaimed.

God can and will alert you to the right illustrations for next Sunday’s message; all you have to do is be ready to write them down when he points them out.

If you choose a scriptural text early in the week, the battle for illustrations is half fought. Then you are like a reporter out for a story. You already have your assignment; you’ve reflected upon it, prayed over it, and planned it. Now you’re ready for the illustrations that God will give.

This doesn’t mean you should do all your sermon preparation early. In fact, it may be better to put off the study of commentaries and homilies until later in the week, after you have gathered your illustrations. Then the serious study will be more detailed and specific. There will be a sense of direction because you will already have lived with the text as you watched for illustrations to accentuate it.

Your task in the early part of the week is to know the content of the scriptural text so that you can get the right illustrations. And you will be forced to get them because all of last week’s collection was invested in last Sunday’s message.

As you start fresh, with the text in mind, it won’t take long for illustrations to find you. They will begin to come even while you are handling your other responsibilities. One Monday morning a minister chose Ephesians 2:19–22 for his sermon text. Then, with the verses in mind, he left his office, got into his car, and started out for his first appointment of the day.

As he passed an apartment building under construction he looked, then looked again. Everything fit together—one part being added to the next. He had his first illustration before he had driven more than two blocks from the church. There it was, in an ordinary building project, the same one he had looked at for months. It even gave him his sermon title: “God’s Housing Project.”

That night he took his son to a high school wrestling match. He was fascinated at the way the muscles of the wrestlers worked together. He described it with awe the next Sunday morning as he talked about the people of God who are the Body of Christ, dependent upon one another and directed in their working together by the Head who is Christ.

Thinking about the same text, another minister attended the naturalization of a new U. S. citizen. He later described the ceremony, sharing with his congregation what he felt and saw as this “stranger” became a part of the American family. Still another minister, using this text, described the happiness of a church family when they adopted a baby into their household.

Illustrations are all around us. We overhear conversations in the drug store, read signboards, catch a scrap of dialogue on the car radio. What usually is half heard and quickly forgotten registers when we are alert to a particular emphasis.

A word of caution may be in order. One pastor found that he held the attention of his audience very well when he began: “I was talking to a young man this week about his sex life.… After that, very few parishioners came to him for counseling. No one wants to wonder if his confidential statement to the pastor will become next Sunday’s sermon illustration.

As the illustrations come, write them in a notebook, or on a torn out newspaper page, or paper napkin, or whatever is at hand. Then put them in a basket or in a pile on your desk. Don’t put them away; you will tend to neglect them if they are out of sight. You will forget to add to them.

Watching the pile of illustrations grow on your desk will give you encouragement and a sense of anticipation about preparing the sermon. Seeing the pile each morning will remind you to pray about the sermon and will bring parallel verses of Scripture to mind that you can also write down and add to the pile.

By the time you are ready to put the message together, the fresh illustrative material will be ready. You may not use it all, but use the best. Look over your collection of illustrations, decide which ones best fit the biblical text, and work them in at the most strategic places. Don’t save a good illustration for some future sermon that may never come. If it is forceful and relevant now, use it now.

It’s exciting to tell about something newly seen or discovered. To see it fresh is to tell it fresh. Biblical texts that may fall on deaf ears when described philosophically are listened to attentively when illustrated in everyday language.

Illustrations are like windows giving insight. As they enliven a text, the hearers are more willing to follow along in their Bible. This in turn makes us want to use more solid blocks of Scripture in our preaching. Scripture opens up easier in proclamation when it is tied together with illustrations. And most of us preach better to an audience that is hanging on our words. Attention stimulates delivery.

Best of all, with the help of fresh, relevant illustrations, our congregations will remember what we taught for weeks to come. It’s rewarding to preach like that. Let’s invest our illustrations—the returns are great!—ROGER C. PALMS, assistant editor, Decision magazine, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

- More from Roger C. Palms

Books

Book Briefs: June 21, 1974

Three Views Of The Congregation

Is the Day of the Denomination Dead?, by Elmer L. Towns (Nelson, 1973, 160 pp., $5.95), Will All the King’s Men …, edited by Robert Carvill (Wedge [229 College Street, Toronto 2B, Ontario, Canada], 1972, 255 pp., $3.95 pb), and The Base Church, by Charles M. Olsen (Forum House, 1973, 167 pp., $4.95), are reviewed by Dale A. Sanders, pastor, Barnam-Moose Lake United Methodist Church, Moose Lake, Minnesota.

The future and nature of the Church is the subject of wide interest in these uncertain days, and all three of these volumes address themselves to this interest. But if these books were comrades, they would quickly fall out.

Elmer Towns, fundamentalist, would initiate the falling out as a test of tribal loyalty. The pedagogical doyen of American fundamentalism has written the most readable of the three, but also the most vexing. What Towns presents is a vigorous style of American Christianity that purports to be New Testament Christianity of the earliest strain adapted to modern times. The word is adapted, not adjusted. The adaptation is not in principles or practices but pragmatic. Three B’s here: Bible principles, Baptist practices, and the bus.

This is a breezy survey of the nation’s largest, fast growing, mostly severely independent Baptist churches. This is not a review of dying mainline denominations. Nor is it, as the ads misleadingly put it, a call to a “long-needed awakening” in the moribund bodies. Towns is a propagandist rather than an analyst.

He is also the amanuensis of negativism, one of the enduring fruits of fundamentalism. That negativism rests on frustrated individualism and the erosion of Americanism. Dallas Billington, late pastor of the huge Akron Baptist Temple, is described as the “epitome of rugged individualism.” Jack Hyles, pastor of Hammond, Indiana, First Baptist, “speaks with bitterness in his voice” about denominationalism. The dozen Baptists presented here have built self-contained ecclesiastical mini-empires that provide all the services of a denomination without being one.

Herein is the problem of Towns’s thesis: Do we have here New Testament Christianity or an American variant? Or are these churches the gathering places of the disappointed? Whatever they are, they are a vital alternative to institutional bigness that is unresponsive and unwieldy.

Towns’s sketch of theological liberalism’s advance (chapter 6) is about the most useful I have seen for the average layman, but errors are present. It is doubtful that Towns has a good grasp of Ernst Troeltsch or Moberg’s elucidation of the same. It is disturbing that whole categories of explosive Christian growth are mentioned in the most cursory manner, if at all. The Pentecostals, of course, are heartily disliked by the ultrafundamentalists. One suspects the reason is not subjectivism per se but the threat to pastoral authority that it poses. There are also numbers of mainline-related churches that are experiencing great and even astounding growth. Towns makes no mention of, for example, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. He favorably quotes Dr. Robert Schuller of California’s Garden Grove Community Church without telling us of that congregation’s ties with the Reformed Church of America. The service Towns performs is to chronicle one super-aggressive branch of the Christian tree that is showing signs of a spring blossoming all over.

Towns quotes two men whose opinions appear in the second volume, a collection of essays. The viewpoints of John Olthuis and Hendrik Hart couldn’t be more different, though Towns cites them as if they were on his side.

This collection is Reformed rather than Baptistic; world-penetrating rather than world-abandoning; concerned with man in community rather than man as rugged individualist; Christian evangelical radical rather than American separatist patriot; and, on that touchstone of fundamentalism, eschatologically poles apart.

Will All the King’s Men … is a sequel to the highly controversial Out of Concern For the Church and is a clearly reasoned theological plea for a new reformation among the Reformed, especially the Christian Reformed. The bomb was dropped first, and the crater is smoothed with this addition and clarification. The five authors of the first volume are all here in the second, along with two new contributors. Most are associated with the graduate-level Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. There are strong political and social overtones from the Canadian experience.

I was impressed by the strength of conviction that animates each writer’s style. All are good, some gifted. Each is driving for a church that is formative, or at least has to be reckoned with, in the affairs of civilized men. They decry the despiritualizing of Christianity that has emasculated its Master and message. These Reformed men are not revivalists, nor conventional renewalists, but biblical radicals. However, they are not to be confused with revolutionaries. Christian radicals are Kingdom optimists while revolutionaries are utopian pessimists.

The esthete in the group is Calvin Seerveld. He writes in a Reformed realist mode that some might mistake for excitably pious existentialism. He pleads for a revitalized, loosened-up liturgy. Children are invited to sing refreshing biblical texts, and we are provided brief samples in the text, but taste may be stretched even for the radical evangelical parent, whose child is asked to sing three times from Amos: “The virgin Israel lies prone on her own ground hurled, unhelped, and utterly alone.”

Christians of all communions can benefit greatly from reading Will All the King’s Men.…

The last volume is the least interesting. Charles Olsen is director of Project Base Church, which is part of the Institute of Church Renewal (ICR). ICR had United Methodist origins but is found in many denominations through Lay Witness Renewal and the like. It is theologically eclectic. Revivalists will view ICR as compromising and the radicals as insipid. Both are correct.

Olsen is not a friend of the ordinary church. At least Towns’s Baptists are gigantically church-centered, and the Reformed cultus-oriented. Olsen writes: “People need both the intimacy of the small group and the contagious spirit of the large crowd. (They may not, however, need the larger group experience weekly—six to twelve times a year may be enough).”

NEWLY PUBLISHED

Memo For 1976, by Wesley Pippert (InterVarsity, 1974, 120 pp., $1.95 pb). Sound, practical advice on participation in the political arena from an evangelical who has been both inside as press aide to Senator Charles Percy and outside as an observer and reporter for UPI. Biblical and well written.

Vital Doctrines of the Faith, by Malcolm Furness (Eerdmans, 128 pp., $2.45 pb). Concise, biblical examination of the key doctrines of God, man, sin, salvation, and eschatology. Straightforward explanation for the serious-minded, growing Christian who wants an overview of the general teachings of Scripture.

Church—Who Needs It?, by David Allan Hubbard (Regal, 145 pp., $1.25 pb). Fourteen valuable radio messages on worship.

The Philosophy of Jesus: Real Love, by Jules A. DeLanghe (Dorrance, 141 pp., $4.95). An attempt to get “back to original Christianity” through a philosophical evaluation of Jesus’ teaching on love.

Love Makes the World Go Round, by Keith Huttenlocker (Warner, 128 pp., $2.50 pb). Presents the principles of love and gives specific examples for putting love into action.

Against the Tide, by Angus Kinnear (Christian Literature Crusade, 191 pp., n.p.). Sympathetic biography of Watchman Nee, a foremost Chinese Christian, many of whose writings have become extremely popular in the West.

The Hammer of the Lord, by Colin Morris (Abingdon, 160 pp., $4.75). Call for a sort of Christian hope in a world in despair. Little explicit biblical basis provided.

The Bible and Future Events, by Leon Wood (Zondervan, 208 pp., $2.95 pb) and Population, Pollution, and Prophecy, by Leslie Woodson (Revell, 159 pp., $4.95). Two popular treatments.

Game Free, by Thomas Oden (Harper & Row, 163 pp., $5.95). Exploration of transactional analysis (I’m OK—You’re OK psychology) and its insights into human relations, in the light of Scripture. Seeks to provide a biblically based “transactional theology.”

Me, You, and God, by George Edmonson (Word, 158 pp., $4.95). While sharing his own experience, a pastor provides a six-month program for Bible study, discussion, and experimentation in group dynamics.

Secrecy in the Church, by Richard Ostling (Harper & Row, 173 pp., $6.95). A Time religion reporter and former CHRISTIANITY TODAY news editor insists upon people’s right to know about the activities not only of their civil government but also of their churches. Cites many examples of what he considers improper attempts by churches to conceal data.

Tramp For the Lord, by Corrie Ten Boom (Revell, 192 pp., $5.95). A sequel to the best-selling The Hiding Place, telling of Miss Ten Boom’s worldwide ministry since her release from a Nazi prison.

God’s Tribesman, by James and Marti Hefley (Holman, 152 pp., $5.95). Inspiring story of Rochunga Pudaite, a Christian from India who struggled for the education to translate the Bible for his own people and now has an even wider ministry of Scripture distribution.

The Last Enemy, by Richard Doss (Harper & Row, 104 pp., $4.95). A thorough and challenging look at a Christian’s understanding of death. Dwells specifically with the significance of death and life after death from the theological perspectives. Geared to the serious layman and the pastor.

Run and Not Be Weary, by Dwight L. Carlson (Revell, 220 pp., $4.95). An earnest look at the problem of fatigue in the Christian’s life. Practical solutions offered by an M.D. who has studied and wrestled personally with the problem. Points out many obvious but often overlooked causes and solutions.

Jonathan, Oh, Jonathan!, by Lee Neil Isett (Time-Light, 85 pp., $1.25 pb). Christian refutation of the message of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Ambassador For Christ, by William Barclay (Judson, 183 pp., $1.95 pb). The well-known author’s first book, a biography of Paul, is reissued with slight revisions.

For Women Only, edited by Evelyn R. Petersen and J. Allan Petersen (Tyndale, 296 pp., $1.95 pb). Collection of articles on women and their roles by more than sixty authors such as Eugenia Price, Ruth Bell Graham, Gladys Hunt, Catherine Marshall, and Rosalind Rinker.

Everyone a Minister, by Oscar Feucht (Family Library and Concordia, 158 pp., $.95). Exhortation to congregations to avoid stultifying division into “clergy” and “laity” in favor of a truly practicing priesthood of all believers. Many quotations from similar books.

Jesus Christ: Lord of the Universe, Hope of the World, edited by David Howard (InterVarsity, 252 pp., $2.95 pb). Now everyone can share in the tremendous student missionary convention held in Urbana, Illinois, at the close of 1973, by reading and reflecting on these twenty-three messages delivered to the thousands assembled there. A very important book.

John Elias: Life and Letters, by Edward Morgan (Banner of Truth, 417 pp., $7.95). Account of an early nineteenth-century Welsh evangelist by one of his contemporaries.

How to Solve Conflicts, by George Sweeting (Moody, 153 pp., $3.95). Studies from the Book of James by the president of Moody Bible Institute. Intended not as a commentary, but rather as a “practical discussion.”

Beyond the Crystal Ball, by Merrill E. Unger (Moody, 189 pp., $2.50 pb). Explores occult practices and their relation to scriptural teaching, especially prophecy.

The Devil’s Bride, by Martin Ebon (Harper & Row, 245 pp., $6.95). Survey of various ways of dealing with demon possession throughout history. Stresses the psychological approach. Vague on Christ and demons.

The Bitter Harvest, by Albert Menendez (Luce, 228 pp., $7.50). A staff member of Americans United for Separation of Church and State offers a documented study of the last seven years of religious battles in Northern Ireland. He contends that the longstanding maintenance of separate Protestant and Catholic school systems contributes to the bitterness between the communities and accordingly proposes that the schools be religiously integrated.

The French Achievement, by Robert McHealey (Paulist, 150 pp., $3.95 pb). Examination of the practical outworking of state support to private, religious schools in France. Draws parallels for possibilities in the states. The author, a Presbyterian seminary professor, should next study how state support of religious schools has worked in Presbyterian-dominated Ulster.

Ireland: Where Time Stands Till, by Pat Nevin (Our Sunday Visitor, 224 pp., $3.95 pb). A personal description of the troubled isle. Contends that the violence is political, not religious: the conflict would rage even if both sides were of the same denomination, given the same circumstances otherwise. One hopes this is so; it is certainly embarrassing to assume that sincerely religious men could behave, in the name of God, as the Northern Irish are doing.

Christians in Persia, by Robin Waterfield (Barnes and Noble, 192 pp., n.p.). Concise history of Christianity in Iran from the second century on, but with special reference to the activities of recent decades.

The Ethics of Genetic Control, by Joseph Fletcher (Anchor, 218 pp., $1.95 pb). The author of Situation Ethics concludes that it is up to man to make his species “better” by artificial manipulation.

Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians, by John Calvin (Banner of Truth, 705 pp., $9.95). Calvin was primarily a preacher, although his role as reformer, theologian, and commentator has been more lauded.

To God Be the Glory: Sermons in Honor of George Arthur Buttrick, edited by Theodore A. Gill (Abingdon, 159 pp., $5.50). Anthology of sermons by Buttrick’s fellow preachers and teachers to commemorate his eightieth birthday.

A Theology of the Old Testament, by John L. McKenzie (Doubleday, 336 pp., $7.95). One of the best-known Roman Catholic biblical scholars presents an overview of his studies. The arrangement is topical: cult, revelation, history, nature, wisdom, institutions, and Israel’s future. The book is representative of prevailing academic opinion.

How Catholics Look at Jews, by Claire Hucket Bishop (Paulist, 164 pp., $4.50 pb), and Your People, My People, by A. Roy Eckardt (Quadrangle, 275 pp., $8.95). Two ecumenical attempts to arrest anti-Semitism and promote friendly Judeo-Christian relations. The first surveys the prejudice and injustice Jews have suffered from Italian, Spanish, and French Catholic education, exposed from within the church itself. The second, by an ardently pro-Israel college professor, offers an overview of modern historical Christian response, especially in Europe. His handling of the New Testament is defective. Both books present alternatives encompassing “Christian love” in action.

Man the Choicemaker, by Elizabeth Boyden Howes and Sheila Moon (Westminster, 218 pp., $9). An attempt to integrate depth psychology and the Scriptures, viewing much of the latter as religious myth. The emphasis is on man the doer.

The Interaction of Law and Religion, by Harold J. Berman (Abingdon, 174 pp., $4.95). Four rather general lectures dealing with religion and law, including their influence on each other throughout Western history.

The author loves diagrams, is more or less communal Jungian, and is big on consciousness jargon. Most quoted material is social psychology and is heavy on types like Roszak, Toffler, and Maslow. The theologian is Emil Brunner, up to a point. Olsen mentions L’Abri fellowship and Francis Schaeffer but shows not an iota of comprehension of what the evangelical dynamic is. Evangelicals can use to their own advantage some of the functionalist constructs. Olsen’s exegesis of Ephesians as a biblical base compares poorly with that of Ray Stedman in Body Life (Regal).

Buy the Dutchmen, borrow Towns, bypass Olsen.

Setting The Stage

The Middle East and the Aegean Region, c. 1800–1380 B.C., edited by I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, and E. Sollberger (Cambridge, 1973, 868 pp., $27.50), is reviewed by Carl Edwin Armerding, associate professor of Old Testament, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia.

This is Volume II, Part 1 of the third edition of the first two volumes of the monumental Cambridge Ancient History. It covers the period from about the time of Joseph to the eve of the Exodus (assuming the later dating). Although, in the nature of the case, there are few references to biblical events or persons (during this period Israel was first a single family, then a nation of bond-slaves, and finally a relatively insignificant band of conquerors from the desert), there are few periods when the history of the ancient Near East is more determinative for an understanding of biblical events. The very fact that Israel is not yet an independent entity makes the history and customs of those among whom she dwelt the more significant. For Israel was alternatively a part of Canaan and Egypt. She partook of customs illustrated in second-millennium tablets and monuments from Hurrian and Canaanite cities. She developed her own legal traditions in a world regulated by Babylonian and Hittite law, and it is the dynamic tension between Israel’s revelation and the world of her neighbors that provides the background for the entire biblical account from Genesis 12 through Joshua.

This volume divides its attention about evenly between the world of Egypt, Syria-Palestine, and the Aegean world, with somewhat less attention to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Persia, and Cyprus. As befits a modern historical work, both political and military history are included, but major attention is given to cultural and literary trends, with materials drawn from both archaeological and literary sources.

The third edition is a completely new treatment of the material (see my review of Volume I, Part 2 in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, May 12, 1972, pp. 21–24). As with previous volumes, the chapters in this book have been appearing consistently in fascicle form since 1961, and a fair amount of revision of earlier fascicles was required (but not always accomplished) to make the work completely fresh. The finished volume boasts a number of fine additions in plates or text-figures that were missing in the fascicles, though for the major plates accompanying the text we shall still have to await the issuance of a special volume. Finally, the new book contains a complete set of chronological tables in place of the fragmentary ones at the end of each fascicle.

Chapter one, “Northern Mesopotamia and Syria,” by J-R. Kupper, describes the Mari period, and biblical students will be especially interested in the presence of both “Benjaminites” and “Habiru” as part of the Amorite population among the West Semites of the area. Kupper opts for 1800–1775 B.C. as the dates for the great Hammurabi dynasty, a fact that has some implications for biblical chronology. In chapter two Egypt from the late XIIth Dynasty through the time of the Hyksos kings is discussed, but the chapter should have been revised since its original appearance in 1962. Chapter three, the work of Palestinian archaeologist Kathleen M. Kenyon, treats the remains of Middle Bronze Age Palestine (she begins by rejecting W. F. Albright’s contention that his so-called “MB I” period is really a part of the Bronze Age), and the new edition is complete with several helpful line drawings of pottery of the period. It is a disappointment, however, to see not a single addition to her original bibliography (published 1966), even for cities like Hazor and Jericho, although her later chapter eleven (published 1971) updates the bibliography to 1969.

Several chapters, including four, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, cover the history of Greece, Crete, the islands of the Aegean, and Cyprus. This is a major part of the book, and it is as well produced as any. Although biblical students tend to consider this part of the Mediterranean world somewhat remote from the biblical world, it is clear now (and evident in these chapters) that the Aegean peoples were in almost constant communication with the Eastern rim of the Great Sea, and much that they did and wrote (major attention is given to the Linear Scripts A and B) has great import for the student of biblical history. In chapter thirteen the discussion of writing and the rise of epic poetry (the Homeric epic) is full of significance for biblical critical scholarship. It should be pointed out that there may be parallels between Greece, in which a “literate” period of the late Mycenean world was followed by a “Dark Age,” and Israel, in which claims for writing by Moses and his contemporaries precede the decentralized period of the Judges with its epic elements. Whether the conclusion (p. 607) that “the mere existence of oral epic poetry like Homer’s … is itself evidence … that the Dark Age was illiterate” is valid, is still open to question, and the matter has obvious implications for the problem of oral and written sources in the Bible.

Chapter five, with its detailed résumé of the period of Hammurabi, is naturally of interest. That ruler’s Law Code is still the most complete analogue to the Mosaic legislation, and in this chapter the late C. J. Gadd explores the ramifications of that code for every aspect of society. Chapter ten, covering Syria and Northern Mesopotamia for the period down through 1440 B.C., gives details of the Hurrians (the biblical “Horites,” formerly misinterpreted as cave-dwellers), details the wars between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Hittites in the high period of the Canaanite city-state, and generally sets the stage for the time when the band of Israelites under Joshua would challenge that world for supremacy at the end of the Bronze Age.

Two chapters (six and fifteen) tell the story of the great Hittite empire, remnants of which are referred to in the Bible. (These references were once considered to be legendary by skeptical Bible scholars.) More than one custom illuminated by Hittite tablets has its analogous form in biblical times, and I was especially intrigued by the mention of the role of the Hittite Queen-mother and the matrilineal descent of the kingship that prevailed in the earlier period. The question of the office of Queen-mother in Israel has long fascinated Old Testament scholars, and O. R. Gurney’s summary of the Hittite evidence will keep that interest alive.

Another major section on Egypt (chapter nine) takes the account from the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty through the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III (considered by some scholars to be the Pharoah of the Exodus) down to the beginning of the Amarna Age. In more than one hundred pages, W. C. Hayes expands on almost every aspect of society, and I found the section describing the plight and condition of Egyptian slaves to be most helpful, though no evidence of XVIII Dynasty slave-building activity in the Delta has yet been uncovered.

Finally, there is a second archaeological survey of Palestine, again by Kenyon, and covering the period known roughly as Late Bronze I. This chapter, unlike her earlier one, is fully up to date, and features surveys of discoveries at such important Palestinian cities as Megiddo, Hazor, Bethshan, Shechem, Jerusalem, Gibeon, Bethel, Gezer, and Lachish.

Naturally, there is much that a review of this sort does not cover. Sections on Persia will be of interest to a more limited audience, while many of the details passed over here will be debated extensively by historians. But enough has been said to show that this volume, which now takes its place as the standard in its field, will have a strong appeal to the biblical student seeking a proper understanding of the world in which God’s chosen people was born. The bibliographic aids alone, for the student doing further research, will make the volume worth the rather healthy price. We congratulate editors and publishers for another fine addition to a vital series

Don’T Lose Your Balance

Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming, by C. Peter Wagner (Creation, 1973, 196 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by James Patterson, Ph.D. student, Princeton Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.

One of today’s most thriving religious movements is Pentecostalism in the countries south of the United States. A Fuller Seminary missiologist who formerly served in Latin America has sought to capture the spirit of this phenomenon in a highly provocative, popularized account. His main concern is to understand why Pentecostalism has sustained high rates of church growth, to the extent that it now encompasses two-thirds of Latin American Protestantism.

The chief virtue of Wagner’s work is its challenge to those concerned with church renewal. Through his description of the “mother-daughter churches,” “seminaries in the streets,” Pentecostal worship, and healing, he documents a movement that has achieved both vitality and indigenization. He presents a stern rebuke to the more traditional, missionary-dominated churches.

American evangelicals might not be so impressed with some other aspects of Latin American Pentecostalism that Wagner enthusiastically portrays. Examples include sanctuaries seating 25,000, congregational shouting during prayer, strict cultural codes, and an aversion to theological education. Consider his comment on preaching:

Pentecostal preaching is not intellectual, but emotional; it is not rational, but experimental; it is not exegetical, but allegorical; it is not doctrinal, but practical; it is not directed as much to the head as to the heart. The result of Pentecostal preaching is not that you learn more, but rather that you feel better [p. 118].

Wagner’s weakest chapter is “Are Pentecostals on a ‘Social Strike’?” At a time when American evangelicals are awakening to their social and political responsibilities, Wagner uses Dean Kelley’s (Why Conservative Churches Are Growing) conclusions to excuse Latin American Pentecostals from social involvement. There is no hint of criticism of the Pentecostals’ lack of a prophetic stance, which is curious, given Wagner’s article on revolution in the January, 1973, issue of Missiology.

Overall, Wagner’s book tends to read like a propaganda piece. It would be difficult to imagine a Pentecostal (which Wagner is not) writing a stronger apologetic. He seems to be concerned only with drawing lessons from the movement; this approach leads to a disappointing book. In every work of God’s Spirit there are both genuine and counterfeit manifestations. Jonathan Edwards realized this in evaluating the Great Awakening of which he was a part. But unlike Edwards, Wagner makes no attempt to discern the spirits. This book lacks balance, something not true of Wagner’s earlier works. The evangelical world still awaits a substantive study of the Pentecostals in Latin America.

PERIODICAL NOTES

One of the best buys among scholarly journals is the Calvin Theological Journal, now in its ninth year of publication by Calvin Seminary. While there are, naturally, many articles on Calvin, other topics treated in the last three issues include the rise of the Jesus movement, the experience of dying, the philosophy of Augustine, and the stylistic qualities of Hebrew poetry. There are also numerous book reviews. (2 issues/year; $2/year; 3233 Burton St., S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49506.)

Ideas

Bicentennial: The Personal Touch

The Editors

July 4, 1976, will fall on a Sunday!

This gives Christians a natural edge for their part in bringing off a meaningful and memorable American bicentennial. It offers a built-in platform upon which to recall and emphasize the spiritual dimension in America’s founding and development, as distinguished from purely political, ethnic, and cultural aspects. Since the country will be undergoing its first post-Watergate presidential election campaign in 1976, the religious community will need all the help it can get to wrest public attention from pure politics.

Now the question is: What will Christians do with the possibilities? How can the potential best be realized?

Already a lot of thought has gone into the matter of religion’s role in the 1976 observance, and some results are visible. Last month, the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., premiered Cavalcade ’76, a presentation by Dr. Caspar Nannes that blends education and entertainment in its treatment of religionists who figured prominently in the independence movement. In Boston, historic Park Street Church, where “America” was first sung, has prepared a multi-media feature to put on for visitors (in the past Park Street has had as many as 25,000 persons a month touring the church).

An inter-religious group headed by Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, retired general secretary of the National Council of Churches, is planning cooperative ventures focusing upon the bicentennial. The National Association of Evangelicals has been similarly active for the last two years and hopes soon to announce its goals. Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, a noted evangelical congregation located not far from Independence Hall, is likewise making preparations.

Unfortunately, the ideas and their execution are not coming easy, and the prospects for cooperative undertakings are dim. Many fear that Key 73 showed the virtual impossibility of Christians’ working together on any grand scale. Ecumenical fervor apparently has passed its peak. And the bicentennial itself seems to be the subject of a great deal of dispute among Americans, religious and otherwise. The main coordinating group created by the government has been so embattled that little has been accomplished. A rival “People’s Bicentennial Commission” is working on its own in Washington.

We cannot even agree on what should be celebrated. Nearly every “achievement” of America now has its detractors, who build a cause on the thesis that there is too much of this or not enough of that. There are Americans who wonder whether the colonists should have revolted and declared their independence from the British in the first place. For them, the only cause for celebration in 1976 is that the nation has survived its mistake!

But enough negativism. Surely every American can find something about this country that he likes and appreciates and wants to preserve and celebrate. And can we not take it from there?

Maybe it will be better for the country in the long haul if we celebrate in a low-key fashion. The fathers of the republic were sinful in the sight of God as are all other human beings. If there were saints among them it was not of their own doing but because of the grace of God manifest on Calvary. Perhaps it will be good if we do not get carried away with extolling their genius.

America has been a land of individualists to such an extent that people really do get together on that one point about as well as on any. That is, they close ranks reluctantly, and one of the few things that motivates them to do so is a threat to their individualism.

From the Christian perspective, that’s not so bad. God sent his Son to die not for neighborhoods or cities or nations but for separate human beings. So whatever else is or is not done in connection with the bicentennial, should not each one of us set up a personal commemoration, one that is appropriate to the gifts entrusted to us? Can we not celebrate the occasion at least by setting some special individual goal to be realized between now and 1976? Beyond that, we might try to think creatively of what might be done together and then share our aspirations. Perhaps someone, somewhere, will come up with a bicentennial proposal that will rouse the imaginations of a great number of Americans.

Church curriculum planners can give us a good start by designing materials to facilitate the study of American religious heritage and its meaning and importance for today. The responsibility for this kind of study ought to be shared by church and family.

The origin of this nation dates back a lot longer than 200 years. It goes back to the great Puritans, who like many later settlers were great individualists. In recent years, capable historians have been doing much to rescue the term “Puritan” from the narrow, unfavorable connotation it had come to have. The rediscovery of the real Puritan would in itself be a great event for 1976. The revival of their magnificent ideals would be even greater.

What Is ‘Billy Jack’ Saying?

Billy Jack, a low-budget film first released in 1971, finally started producing money its third time around thanks to an advertising campaign designed to make the half-breed’s name a household word. The film reportedly grossed $800,000 its first week back in the metropolitan Washington area. Among young teen-agers a cult is developing around Billy, who is a strange mix of violence and tenderness. The film presents him as a Christ-figure, and one high school sophomore commented, “Well, if Billy Jack really existed, he could be Christ come back again.”

A thin layer of morality coats the celluloid, making the film makers’ confused perceptions of Christ more difficult for young people to detect. Unfortunately, most viewers know little more than the film makers about who Christ is. Billy Jack perpetuates a popular illusion of Christ as merely an anti-authoritarian rebel.

Kennedy’S Contributions

When President Nixon’s tax returns were publicized, the question of the deductibility of his gift of presidential papers, whether the transfer was made in time to comply with the law, or whether it was a common-law gift prior to the actual signing date of the pre-dated deed, was complex enough to preclude an easy moral verdict on that aspect of his personal financial management. It was shocking, however, to notice that a person who has consistently posed as a Christian and expressed the highest regard for Christian work and for voluntary benevolences contributed so tiny a portion of his personal income to charities of any kind, religious or otherwise.

Now one of the most frequently mentioned possibilities to succeed Mr. Nixon in the highest office, Senator Edward Kennedy, has made his own tax returns public. It is gratifying to note that he, like most other Americans, paid a substantial portion of his personal income in federal and state taxes. What is surprising, though, is that the Senator’s charitable contributions equaled only 1.0137 per cent of his total income (discounting the outside possibility that Kennedy, for one reason or another, made contributions for which he did not claim a deduction). The across-the-board average for all Americans, at all income levels, is 3 per cent. From a biblical perspective, 3 per cent is inadequate; 1.0137 per cent is deplorable.

A Promising Start In The Mideast

Many Christians have been praying for the peace of Jerusalem. They are now rejoicing in the efforts of Henry Kissinger that led to a disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel. It is a promising start toward defusing the explosive Middle East. We can only hope that there are no secret agreements detrimental to the free world.

There is reason to believe that the Soviet Union, Red China, and Egypt were helpful to Kissinger in attaining the agreement. For this we all should be thankful without assuming that the basic antagonism between the free world and China and the Soviet Union no longer exists.

Amid the rejoicing we must not forget the unresolved Palestinian question. Until this has been settled reasonably, no one can realistically hope for a long period of peace in that troubled part of the world. The sympathy that we have previously expressed for the Israelis we feel for the displaced Palestinians also. Justice and compassion require a resolution of this problem. We hope that the United States will lead the way to a settlement so that Jerusalem may experience an extended time of peace.

Overcoming The Impasse

The deplorable conflict in Ulster, which is a disgrace to the Christian faith, can hardly be moved toward solution unless there is some softening of self-interest on both sides. Some principal in that situation has to express some sacrificial love if the situation is to be turned around.

We had that kind of memorable act in the guilty plea of Charles Colson (see the news story on page 40), and we hope that his example will have the effect of sparking spiritual renewal in the United States and establishing a new moral direction.

Duke Ellington

Last month a life-long affair with music came to an end with the death of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington at the age of seventy-five. Not until late in his versatile career of composing, arranging, choreographing, directing, and performing did Ellington express in public, or through his music, his ties with the Christian faith. He astonished many when he did, because jazz was long regarded (and still is in many quarters) as antithetical to sacred sounds. Yet Ellington did compose some Christian music, calling it “the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

Ellington’s father was a Methodist, his mother a Baptist, and as a boy he attended both churches each Sunday. Regrettably, he rarely attended services during his adult life. But he was an avid Bible reader, and found it difficult to understand scholarly assertions that the Bible contradicted itself. In 1965 he and his orchestra performed their first church concert, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco (see January 21, 1966, issue, p. 41), all the music composed by him. He also played at New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and in London at Westminster Abbey. In 1969 the Ellington orchestra played a special concert in Detroit in connection with a meeting of the National Council of Churches.

The text for his second concert, “Praise God and Dance,” was Psalm 150, and “Praise him with trumpet sound … praise him with loud clashing cymbals” (150:3, 5b) appropriately describes Ellington’s public admission of faith. As he said about his first concert, “Now I can say loudly and openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.”

May God help us to understand him better in death than we did in life.

Keep Your Eye On The Farm

World concern has been shifting, at least temporarily, from oil fields to grain fields. The immediate physical well-being of humanity now seems more dependent upon how much plant and animal life can be raised than on how much fuel can be coaxed out of the earth. Some experts are calling this year’s crop the most important in modern times. The world should look this summer not at what goes on in the big cities of North America but at what happens on the great plains, source of an estimated 60 per cent of the world’s trading wheat. The farmer may be taking some of the spotlight away from the politician.

Last year, many American and Canadian farmers made substantial profits in the inflationary spiral (North Dakota, thanks to the wheat price rise, was the state with the largest increase in per capita income: 30 per cent). But in 1974 a lot of farmers have been caught in a price squeeze, and bountiful crops could depress their market to the point of ruin. Soybean prospects have already plummeted because of the return, after a two-year absence, of millions of anchovies to the waters off Peru. In the past these fish were used for animal feed, and when they became unavailable, soybeans were substituted. This drove up the price of soybeans so that underdeveloped countries that had relied on soybean imports for protein were unable to afford them.

Such seesawing variables make the overall picture very complex. But at least one thing is clear: Christians must try to sort out the facts and determine what is being done in the economic realm out of respect and love for deserving human beings and, on the other side, to what extent there is exploitation of difficult situations. That’s not always easy to determine, but it is better to try and err than to ignore the problem.

For years, the big farm problem in North America was surplus. Now the U. S. government has taken all limits off food production for the first time since World War II, and the Department of Agriculture is urging farmers to produce as much as possible. The stewardship responsibility that this places upon all Americans from grower to voter warrants priority attention from everyone, but especially from Christians who seek to exercise compassion and who realize that all we have ultimately comes from God and that it is he who gives the increase.

The Limits Of Discussion

Anyone who has sat in a Sunday-school class or Bible-study group is likely to know and appreciate the value of give and take. Group participation often gives content a sticking quality not to be found in sheer lectures.

But the discussion approach to teaching also leaves itself open to abuse. The lazy, unprepared leader can get off the hook by posing a few provocative questions at the outset. In most groups that is enough to insure a debate lasting the whole session. Of course, the unguided discussion is quite likely to get off the subject, and to leave some false statements unchallenged.

There is also a temptation, especially when class members hold widely differing opinions, to gloss over crucial issues. Not uncommonly a teacher poses a question, then assures responders that there is no one answer, that what is important is what they themselves think the answer is. This may defuse a volatile situation, but it certainly does not serve the cause of truth. To many important questions, particularly in the religious realm, there is only one answer; other answers are wrong. Good teachers should recognize that it is not in the best interests of students to allow error to go unchallenged, or to imply that contradictory statements can be equally valid.

Good discussions require good ground rules.

Silence Hath Charms …

Picture if you will some solar ray suddenly causing all radios, cassette players, stereo sets, and televisions to stop working. Trembling hands impatiently twirl dials, adjust knobs, flip switches. Eyes are dilated with fear. Breathing comes in spasms.

Marx was wrong. Religion isn’t the opiate of modern man. Incessant sound is. We’ll listen to anything to avoid silence—long, pointless talk shows, boring conversations, round-the-clock news, and even rock and country music.

We like sound because it blocks out the despairing cry of our own souls as well as the still small voice of God. But we need occasionally to take God’s hand and journey into the fearful land of silence. It can be both painful and healing with the presence of the One who is able to still the despairing cry and give us a new song of thanks.

- More from The Editors

‘Revolt on Evangelical Frontiers’: A Response

Jim Wallis

In the interest of the ongoing dialogue we here print in full Jim Wallis’s response to Carl F. H. Henry’s article entitled “Revolt on Evangelical Frontiers” (April 26 issue). Wallis is the editor of the “Post-American,” which as he says is a “forum for the young evangelical consciousness.” Dr. Henry is out of the country and has not had the opportunity to see and respond to this critique. Although, as Wallis says, the “young evangelicals” believe in the authority and inspiration of Scripture, many of them cannot subscribe to the theological assertion of the Evangelical Theological Society (now a quarter of a century old) that “the Bible … is … inerrant in the autographs.” THE EDITOR

It was with a deep sense of disappointment that I read Carl F. H. Henry’s review essay of Richard Quebedeaux’s book The Young Evangelicals. “Revolt on Evangelical Frontiers” was especially disappointing because of the sympathetic stance toward many of us “young evangelicals” previously taken by Carl Henry. My basic argument with the article is that it contains some fundamental distortions and inaccurate caricatures in relation to the “young evangelical” consciousness that certainly is emerging. After reading Quebedeaux’s book, I also am left with the feeling that Henry misrepresented much of its basic thrust; but my primary purpose here is not to defend a book but to clarify some points that could foster division and misunderstanding among evangelicals.

First, Henry implies throughout his essay that the young evangelicals are characterized by a deteriorating view of Scripture. On the contrary, the new evangelical consciousness is most characterized by a return to biblical Christianity and the desire to apply fresh biblical insights to the need for new forms of socio/political engagement. Young evangelicals, just like “establishment evangelicalism,” have differing views as to the meaning and extent of inerrancy and infallibility, but clearly accept the orthodox belief in the authority and inspiration of Scripture. In fact, I would contend that much of this new evangelical consciousness takes Scripture more seriously than many evangelicals who accept the authority of Scripture doctrinally but balk at some of the more exacting biblical demands in relation to social justice and to their style of life. Quebedeaux states that most young evangelicals affirm “the principle of historical criticism,” which is hardly the “acceptance of higher criticism” that Henry charges. The principle of historical criticism in the context of full biblical authority is held by biblical scholars at evangelical seminaries and in the Evangelical Theological Society. The editorial stance of the Post-American, one forum for the young evangelical consciousness, has clearly demonstrated (as Henry should know) strong commitment to biblical authority. In the wider contacts made possible by the growing ministries and witness of the young evangelicals, they are clearly upholding and articulating a strong biblical faith. Other evangelicals should feel good about that as it is genuinely an evangelical cause.

Second, Henry’s article leaves the reader with the impression that theological blurring and even compromising is implicit in the suggestions Quededeaux makes for more cooperation between evangelicals and liberals. He quotes Quebedeaux as saying, “If the values and priorities of the young evangelicals and ecumenical liberals are really similar, continued separation serves no purpose …,” and as suggesting that the young evangelicals could become “an instrument of healing by accepting their ecumenical counterparts” and pooling their resources for more effective witness. Whether Quebedeaux’s suggestions are helpful or not, he is clearly speaking of a similarity in social concern and not in theology. Henry omits Quebedeaux’s very next sentence which makes the author’s primary point, “The Young Evangelicals thus might find a welcome in Ecumenical circles they never dreamed possible, for Liberals themselves cannot help being attracted to the dedication and strong biblical-theological foundation for action manifested by these young men and women.” Our own ministry has demonstrated this possibility to us. Throughout his book, Quebedeaux expressed the critique of religious liberalism made by young evangelicals: its lack of biblical rootage; its disregard for evangelism; its inability to offer spiritual life and resources in resolution of human problems; its clear lack of Christian foundations and distinctiveness. However, meaningful encounter between evangelicals and liberals is possible through young evangelicals who can shed the cultic and cultural baggage of fundamentalist history, the ethically crippling heresies of dispensationalism, and the unbiblical lack of prophetic social conscience so long characteristic of establishment evangelicalism. The proclamation and demonstration of a more holistic gospel which is addressed to all that binds and oppresses people, spiritually and economically, personally and politically, could well spark renewal and reconciliation among both evangelicals and liberals.

Third, a fundamental difference between the “young evangelicals” and “establishment evangelicalism” running through Henry’s article is, I think, a real difference and should be discussed. Primarily, it is a difference in how we view the world and American power in particular. Henry and others are quick to attribute Marxist leanings to young evangelical activists. His bias toward the general acceptability of the present American economic and political system is betrayed along with a rather paranoid and unbalanced view of socialism. Unfortunately, he neglects the fact that many young evangelicals are far more sophisticated in their Christian critique of a thoroughgoing Marxism: in its epistemology and eschatology; in its ethical failures over the question of ends and means; in its inadequate view of the human condition. A fair reading of the views of the young evangelicals reveals their insistence that a Christian’s basic allegiance be to the kingdom of God and that all ideologies, systems, and governments stand under the judgment of Jesus Christ and his kingdom.

It is characteristic of establishment evangelicalism to view the structure and exercise of American power in a generally positive way. (This is readily apparent from the last paragraphs of Henry’s article.) Most young evangelicals do not feel it is possible to do that and still be faithful to the biblical mandate to seek justice for the poor and oppressed, who experience the consequences of American wealth and power in basically negative ways. While Henry is willing to set “Vietnamese mistakes aside,” young evangelicals regard the U. S. role in Indochina as a moral obscenity matched only by official evangelical silence and support for American war policy. While many evangelicals minimize the possibilities for meaningful social change while enjoying the prosperity of the present system, young evangelicals insist that the call to discipleship demands fundamental breaks with the dominant values and life-style of the majority culture and provides the Christian with a different agenda than that of our political economy. Henry’s suggestion that civil religion “is rather unescapable and can be what we make it” strikes many young evangelicals as suggesting that we make the best of idolatry. The less than critical identification with the nation by many evangelicals is just not biblically responsible and could only be felt by those who are benefiting from the system instead of being victims of it. Young evangelicals are seeking to recover the meaning of being aliens and exiles who “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.”

A biblical protest is being mounted against the brutalities of war and global dominance, a materialistic profit culture, institutionally structured racism and injustice, and government by deceit and manipulation. New movements toward costly discipleship and social justice have been occurring among evangelicals which directly challenge the credibility of those who would still serve as chapplain to the status quo. With the decline of movements for social change present in the sixties (due to internal inconsistencies, co-optation, and lack of an adequate basis), it is highly probable that the strongest thrusts for prophetic witness and social justice may come from those whose faith is Christ-centered and who hold an unapologetic biblical faith. This can be accomplished if evangelicals of all ages (to put aside Quebedeaux’s categories of “young” and “establishment” evangelicals) begin to demonstrate the power of their sound doctrine by the style of life and action it creates in them.

- More from Jim Wallis

Eutychus and His Kin: June 21, 1974

Safety First

The new automobile seat-belt interlock system made mandatory on all 1974 model cars is a marked success in reducing not only injuries but automobile accidents. Injuries are reduced by approximately 23.2 per cent through the wearing of seat belts, and as approximately 61.4 per cent of drivers will wear them only 26 per cent of the time without coercion, the net result is a 10.54 per cent reduction in injuries. In addition, surveys show that 3.7 per cent of 1974 car owners are entirely unable to start their cars with the new system, while the remaining 96.3 per cent fail to start them on an average of 5.7 per cent of their attempts. This results in 9.18 per cent fewer trips being taken at all (except for those owners of 1974 cars who also own older model cars and take them when unsuccessful in starting their 1974 models).¹ The total reduction (injuries and accidents combined) approaches 20 per cent, a saving that eminently justifies whatever slight unpleasantness may be involved in the so-called “coercive” aspects of the mandatory system.

Success in auto safety has now led government planners to turn their attention to the most dangerous of all situations, the human home. As is well known, the majority of all accidents occur in the home, and the vast majority of all sickness either originates there or becomes localized there.

Beginning in 1975, all new homes will be required to have a safety interlock system on doors, permitting no one to leave the house during rain, or when the humidity rises above 95 per cent, without rubbers securely fastened to his feet. From 1976 onward, a more sophisticated interlock will permit no one to leave the house when the inside-outside temperature differential exceeds 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Centigrade) without a securely fastened muffler and gloves. To prevent circumventing of the safety installations, all first and second floor windows must be equipped with non-removable bars. (Extreme right-wing scare propaganda, to the effect that people whose houses catch on fire, even in summer, will be prevented from escaping until they have put on their mufflers and, in case of rain, their rubbers, should be branded for what it is.)

The interlock system has many possible commercial and ecclesiastical ramifications. Private clubs, for example, might obtain systems making it impossible to get up from club overstuffed chairs without depositing dues in a coin-operated dues machine. Churches could use an interlock system on Sunday-school room exits, permitting them to be opened only by the reciting of an appropriate Bible memory verse, which could be changed weekly. (Fire regulations now require that automatic sprinklers be installed in connection with the memory-verse interlock system.)

In short, we can all see that—despite some shortsighted criticisms—the interlock safety program has undreamtof potential for enriching human life, and we all owe government a vote of thanks for getting us started on it.

EUTYCHUS VI

Overlooking A Branch?

Thank you for the excellent article, “Revolt on Evangelical Frontiers,” by Carl F. H. Henry on The Young Evangelicals (April 26). It is encouraging to hear that there is a branch of evangelical Christianity that takes women seriously (or is attempting to) and that representatives of “establishment evangelicalism” are willing to take the new evangelicals seriously. I enjoy Dr. Henry’s articles and have read many of his books. However, whenever I read an article by him or anyone else in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, I get the nagging suspicion that it is assumed that all of the readers are male. It is heartbreaking to feel left out.

EVON BACHAUS

Minneapolis, Minn.

I would like to express my appreciation for Carl Henry’s discriminating and helpful review of The Young Evangelicals. The reference to my repudiating the “Second Coming copout” may be misunderstood. I most certainly do believe with all my heart in the Second Coming. What I have actually said is that the Lord’s return is not to be taken as a copout but as a spur to involvement, witness, and service.

LEIGHTON FORD

Charlotte, N. C.

First Hand

I was, to say the least, appalled by the implications made in the editorial, “Needed: A Strategy For Academia” (May 24). It may be true, as the writer implies, that there isn’t much concerted evangelism happening on most campuses in America, but it isn’t true of all of them. Further, his generalizations don’t reveal any firsthand knowledge on his part. I have to admit that to a large extent my ire is due to the fact that I know that our own Christian World Liberation Front street-theater troupe draws large crowds in the open several days every week at the University of California at Berkeley and at several other Bay Area campuses. Their “Collage,” “Choose or Lose,” and “Joseph” presentations in particular have been most effective evangelistic shows in addition to being true art. Further, our people and other Christians here and elsewhere have laid hold of the spiritual openings made available by the drawing power of the various Eastern religious groups rising up in this country. The Lord has raised up many disciples for himself as a result.

Further, the interest in our materials and methods by Christians on other campuses around the world tell me that Christian evangelistic action is not dead everywhere. At the invitation and on the initiative of Christians in other cities in California, we regularly participate in concerted evangelism. The large number of applicants for our summer intern program also is significant to me. Apathy may be rampant, but it has not overwhelmed Christians on campus.

There’s another fallacy set forth in the editorial which I want to say a little about before I quit. That is the idea that concerted evangelism has to have a speaker with “status and success” in order to be effective. Now that’s utter nonsense with no evidence to back it in the first place. There are some things about the students I know today that are relevant here. Even well-known speakers like Bobby Seale and William Kunstler are not drawing large crowds around here these days. Today’s students are also tired of rhetoric. Presentations through such media as street theater seem to get better attention and results. Also, disciples are not commonly made in large crowds. Remember that we are seeking to see people change government from the kingdom of this world to the kingdom of God. That requires action by groups of Christians, not speeches by celebrities.

I just can’t help adding that Christians here also have a broadly based, viable tutoring program in Berkeley high school. A large number of our people are also involved in a regular ministry to prisoners in jails and prisons. Read Right On newspaper regularly and you’ll see some visions for a Christian outreach that is “socially relevant and intellectually respectable in terms of a Christian apologetic.”

JACK N. SPARKS

Christian World Liberation Front

Berkeley, Calif.

Slipped Key

I would like to correct your comment (News, “Denominations: The Downward Drift,” May 24) relative to the reported 5 per cent loss in membership among the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.—referred to as “the largest decrease” among Protestant denominations. In actuality, American Baptist membership took an upward swing in 1968 and has steadily grown from 1,344,210 of that year to the present 1972 figure of 1,501,989. It was indeed unfortunate that correction of a key-punch error (discovered after statistics had been submitted for the 1973 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches) apparently was not received in time to adjust the ABC figure. Reports of membership over the past five years indicate this increase: 1968—1,344,210; 1969—1,353,129; 1970—1,396,900; 1971—1,484,393; and 1972—1,501,989.

ROBERT C. CAMPBELL

General Secretary

American Baptist Churches in the U. S. A.

Valley Forge, Pa.

For Food

It was very kind of you to list agencies involved in the famine program in Africa, and we are grateful, of course, for being included in this list (Editorials, “Feeding the Hungry,” May 24). I think it is wonderful of CHRISTIANITY TODAY to alert the Christian public to responsibilities in this area when the needs are so keen and acute.

TED W. ENGSTROM

Executive Vice President

World Vision International

Monrovia, Calif.

Your continuing interest in “Feeding the Hungry” is deeply appreciated by all of us who are trying to do something about it, and I am grateful for your good editorial reminder in the May 24 issue. In the interest of our thousands of friends and supporters, who must wonder why Medical Assistance Programs is omitted from such a list of organizations responding to the cause, I think it only fair that we set the record straight. [According to] a March 17 Disaster Memorandum from the Agency for International Development, State Department, Washington, MAP’s involvement is more than the other voluntary agencies combined. In addition to this, MAP sponsored a team of fifteen Seattle Pacific College students who are returning this week after nine weeks of invaluable assistance to the missionaries working in famine relief in Ethiopia.

J. RAYMOND KNIGHTON

President

Medical Assistance Programs, Inc.

Wheaton, Ill.

You failed to mention an organization that … by its very name would suggest unselfish devotion to the crying needs of humanity: Food For the Hungry.

PAUL C. PEPOON

California, Ky.

• Both MAP and Food For the Hungry were given prominent mention in our April 12 news story on the African famine. Many U. S. voluntary agencies have provided aid; space limitations prevented us from listing them all in the editorial.

—ED.

No Option

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has persistently upheld integrity and responsibility in the controversial question of Western Christians’ support of evangelical believers in the Soviet Union, particularly in reference to Bible smuggling (“Smugglers Are Deceivers,” March 1, and “Smuggling Reexamined,” April 26). I am dismayed to read opposition to your clear defense of biblical principle. Submission to divinely ordained authorities is not an optional matter for one who has accepted the authority of Scripture—as you have rightly emphasized. Those who counter, “We ought to obey God rather than man,” have failed to show that there is any command from God requiring Christians of the West to provide Bibles for their brethren inside Russia. Such civil disobedience as can be supported by reference to the apostles’ example (Acts 4 and 5) must be predicated upon the decision that to obey the requirement of civil authorities is to violate a command of God. My not smuggling Bibles into Russia is not such a violation. Thus, defiance of the Soviet regulations must be construed as defiance “of what God has ordained” (Rom. 13:2).

PAUL D. STEEVES

Assistant Professor

Stetson University

DeLand, Fla.

In Sight Of Excellence

May I congratulate you on the fine edition of CHRISTIANITY TODAY which deals with education (May 24). The article by Elisabeth Elliot, “Should You Go to College?,” is excellent. I have read many articles and pamphlets on this subject, but her approach and insight are superb.

UDELL SMITH

State Director

Department of Student Work

Louisiana Baptist Convention

Alexandria, La.

ERRATA

In the June 7 news story, “Clyde Taylor: Our Man in Washington,” “International Foreign Missions Association” should read “Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association.”

Their Utmost for His Highest

Sherwood E. Wirt

The well-known devotional author, born a hundred years ago this July, never wrote a book.

Of British Christians in the evangelical tradition who have influenced the twentieth-century through the printed page, Oswald Chambers ranks probably next to C. S. Lewis. My Utmost For His Highest, his famous devotional classic, has been translated into twelve languages. Yet Oswald Chambers never wrote a book. Thirty-two volumes bear his name on the cover, but he never knew about any of them.

Many devoted readers of these books are aware that Chambers died in 1917 in Zeitoun, Egypt, during his World War I service as YMCA chaplain to British army troops. Some know that he left behind a wife and a four-year-old daughter. Not many realize that his daughter, Miss Kathleen Chambers, is living today in her home in North London, and that for fifty years she and her mother were responsible for the continued influence of Oswald Chambers upon the Christian world.

Undetected appendicitis, which led to peritonitis, caused Chambers’s death in November, 1917, at the age of forty-three. His wife soon returned to Zeitoun and began holding evening prayers in her family bungalow. She continued to conduct devotional meetings for the soldiers every night as well as services on Sundays, just as Oswald had done.

A year later Gertrude and little Kathleen sailed back to England with no money and no prospects. Eventually they took a small cottage outside Oxford, “which had no light and no water laid on.” They held meetings for countrymen from around the district. Mrs. Chambers became a Methodist preacher and also, in response to many requests, began printing some of her husband’s messages.

Moving into a larger house but still in financial straits, Mrs. Chambers and Kathleen looked after four college students. Gertrude (better known as “Biddy”) furnished a study in the basement, and there in 1926 she typed the manuscript of My Utmost For His Highest, selecting and arranging extracts from Oswald’s spoken messages.

“When Mother was a child of thirteen,” Kathleen explains, “she was unable to continue her schooling because of illness. She then undertook to master shorthand, with the ambition of one day becoming secretary to the prime minister. She reached the fantastic speed of 250 words a minute. After she and my father were married she took down everything my father said, for it made it easier for her to understand and remember it. She had a compulsion to take verbatim notes even though she didn’t know what the compulsion was. But she felt it was from God.”

Oswald and Biddy were married in 1910, and five years later they left for wartime service in Egypt, taking with them the baby Kathleen. The army camp was in open desert under a scorching sun and catered to thousands of men in transit to or from the eastern front. Here Oswald Chambers held nightly Bible lectures during the week and sometimes four services on Sunday, and periodically journeyed out to the lines on days of pastoral mission.

Miss Chambers said that at the beginning of her father’s illness her mother received a verse from God: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God” (John 11:4). She thought Oswald was not going to die. Afterward she went into the desert early one morning to ask God to tell her what the verse meant. By slow degrees Biddy learned that the verse meant that books would come out of it and in that sense Oswald would not die. The last six words of the text came home.

Oswald was born July 24, 1874, in Aberdeen, Scotland, the fourth son of Clarence and Hannah Chambers. His father was minister of Crown Terrace Baptist Church. Later his father became a minister in Southgate, London. As a boy Oswald gave himself to the Lord and was baptized, and he soon became a Sunday-school teacher. He showed definite artistic gifts, and in 1895 he returned to Edinburgh to enroll in the university arts course.

One night at Arthur’s Seat, a hill in the center of Edinburgh, the call of God came with startling suddenness to Oswald: “I want you in my service, but I can do without you.” He returned to his lodgings to find in the mail a report from the Training College at Dunoon. His next nine years, from 1897 to 1906, were spent at this school, first as a student, then as a tutor. While teaching art, logic, moral philosophy, and psychology, he went through a deepening experience with God.

By 1902 Chambers had set aside his interest in art, poetry, music, and philosophy and had begun preaching at the Baptist chapel. His niece, Irene, describes his messages:

He always spoke in the same natural way; clear, colloquial, trenchant words in his rather penetrating voice with its Scottish tang. He used no poetic word-spinning and no emotional appeal, for he had no time for intellectual or spiritual bluff. “Be definite” was ever on his lips. The personal relationship of each individual soul to Jesus Christ was the essential of true living to him.

After leaving Dunoon Chambers conducted preaching missions in Japan and America.

On May 25, 1910, Oswald and Biddy were married. They accepted the challenge to found a Bible training college. The following year it opened at Clapham, and Oswald spent the next four years as principal. Kathleen says that someone once wanted to endow the college, but her father said, “No, If you do that it will probably go on longer than God means it to.”

Students of both sexes, all ages, and many Christian persuasions found their way to Clapham. They looked back on their B.T.C. training as the most gracious days of their lives. A student wrote:

The weekly devotional meeting was a time of inspiration and heart-searching. We were brought face to face with the demands of discipleship. But it must not be supposed that the students took everything lying down. The principal never argued, never sought to force his viewpoint upon us. I remember once hearing a student say, “I can’t believe that,” with reference to a statement in the New Testament, to which he answered cheerily, “Well, no one has asked you to! The New Testament was written for believers.”

Gertrude Chambers typed thirty-one volumes of her husband’s messages, and had started the thirty-second when she herself died in 1966. Her daughter finished the rest of the book, entitled Run Today’s Race. Still unpublished are notes on Isaiah and a few notes on Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Mrs. Chambers was emphatic about leaving royalty money in the fund for books to be reprinted as soon as they went out of print. Even after the Oswald Chambers Publications Association was formed, she would take from the fund £25 a month, no more.

When 40,000 books were lost through fire bombs one night during World War II, Biddy thought it was God’s way of ceasing publication of her husband’s books. She was wrong. Today, as David Lambert, his biographer, remarks, “the influence of Oswald Chambers is stronger than ever.” The words of Oswald Chambers are making up part of the moral fiber of thousands of young Christians around the world, and for that we can say, “To God be the glory!”

- More from Sherwood E. Wirt

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Church And Stock: David, Incorporated

God And Watergate

Religion In Transit

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Africa: Toward Moratorium

Scotland: Unexpected Reprieve

Chautauqua: A Century Of Culture

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Three Views Of The Congregation

Setting The Stage

Don’T Lose Your Balance

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What Is ‘Billy Jack’ Saying?

Kennedy’S Contributions

A Promising Start In The Mideast

Overcoming The Impasse

Duke Ellington

Keep Your Eye On The Farm

The Limits Of Discussion

Silence Hath Charms …

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Safety First

Overlooking A Branch?

First Hand

Slipped Key

For Food

No Option

In Sight Of Excellence

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