Northern Ireland is at war, said a Belfast Presbyterian minister recently in the Times of London. Nonsense, replied an Ulster colonel later that week: the province “is in fairly normal state but at the peak of one of its frequent periods of open inter-sectarian hostility.”

As I was marveling at the military mind, my eye serendipitously caught a different item on the same page. A correspondent quoted an IBM programmers’ reference manual, which, he pointed out, contained the entry: “Normal: see Abnormal.” That might sum up the Northern Ireland tragedy. Try to come to grips with it, or even to describe the dramatis personae, and you feel like Hercules confronting the monstrous Hydra with all its daunting, inexhaustible complexity. And not least of the baffling features is official reiteration that the vast majority of the population, while acutely conscious of the violence, are not “involved” in it.

Since my 1969 essays in this journal (“John Bull’s Other Island,” September 12, and “Not Defending the Indefensible,” October 24) there have been significant developments in the situation, and some account of them might help in understanding the background. Most notable of these was the report of the Cameron Commission, which under a Scottish judge investigated the disturbances in the province. The document’s apportionment of blame was comprehensive: just grievances long officially ignored, left-wing infiltration of the civil-rights movement, police misbehavior, Roman Catholic immovability on certain issues, the unhelpful stance of the Dublin government, and the rabble-rousing proclivities of Ian Paisley, whose attitude toward the Armagh police was described as “aggressive and threatening.”

Regarding this Armagh incident, when the Paisleyites set out to disrupt a civil-rights march, the report’s deadpan prose has an engaging quality: “In reply to a police query, Dr. Paisley said he proposed to hold a religious meeting and did not intend to interfere with anyone. The police very reasonably disbelieved this statement.…”

The commission was impressed by the number of well educated and responsible people participating in the civil-rights demonstrations, and says: “We disagree profoundly … with the view which professes to see agitation for civil rights as a mere pretext for other and more subversive activities.”

The report attributes some responsibility for the trouble to Catholic insistence on segregated education, but it confirms that there had been discrimination involving housing, municipal appointments, limitations on local electoral franchise, and deliberate manipulation of ward boundaries.

On the other hand, there was a “solid and substantial” basis for Unionist fears. The commission pointed out that the constitution of Northern Ireland had never been fully recognized by the Republic (i.e., independent Eire to the south), and that the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy in the north had been “ambiguous.”

Exacerbating the situation also is the sectarian scoring of points, seen in Cardinal Conway’s and Ian Paisley’s extraordinary attendance at funerals after, respectively, a Catholic and a Protestant had been killed in riots.

A separately published commentary by the Ulster government appeared to accept the Cameron report with good grace, then went on to list a series of reforms previously announced, dealing with such matters as housing, investigation of complaints, and reform of local government (including the acceptance of the one-man-one-vote principle). An advisory board was set up to examine the whole police machinery.

Since then the wheels of reform have been grinding along, while attempts have variously been made to give them a push, stay them with sabotaging spanners, or (for different reasons) infiltrate the corridors of power in order to cut off the supply at source. The 11,000 Protestant B-Specials (police auxiliary) have been disbanded; the overwhelmingly Protestant regular police have been disarmed; both Bernadette Devlin and her adversary Ian Paisley have served prison terms for illegal activities; the British army is trying to (ironic phrase) “keep the peace”; Prime Minister Chichester-Clark, associated with many unpopular measures, was forced to resign after right-wing pressure.

But there has been a more sinister development: the recurrence of that frightful brand of terrorism known all too well in Ireland’s past. In addition to riot casualties involving police, military, and civilians, there has been indiscriminate killing, as in the case of the landmine that took the lives of five innocent people driving along a beautiful country road tourists might have used. Three young Scots soldiers, off duty and in civilian clothes, were lured from a Belfast tavern and cold-bloodedly shot dead; their bodies were found later in a ditch. The murderers have not been found but are widely believed to belong to an extremist section of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which, outlawed in both parts of the island, still hankers after the old dream of an undivided Ireland.

In recent months Ian Paisley has made in the Westminster parliament an impassioned, if somewhat belated, plea for an end to violence and the rule of the gun in Northern Ireland. There are areas of the province, he declared, that are terrorized by the IRA. In the (Catholic) Ardoyne ghetto, into which police dare not go, there is ample evidence that oppression has predictably made wild men wilder and innocent children wild. There are also, however, a self-imposed discipline, a touching spirit of community, and a system of mutual help that stems not least from the awareness of the great gulf fixed between “them” and “us.”

Neutrality is not an acceptable option in Belfast’s beleaguered areas. In the Catholic districts even the restraining hold of the priests has been loosened. The British troops are accused by activists on both sides of being sympathetic to the enemy. Brainwashed into hating, children are growing up for whom the abnormal is indeed the normal; their drab existence is lightened by the new exhilarating pastime of stoning the soldiers. In the (Protestant) Shankill district, mothers are reported to be alarmed at the increased incidence of nervous disease among their children. The cumulative influence on the minds of the young has ensured a deadly legacy from which Ulster probably will not recover this century.

Once more we are nearing the Twelfth of July, when amid scenes of frightful provocation the Orange Order parades in celebration of a battle won nearly three centuries ago, and the Scarlet Woman is left in no doubt who is the boss in Belfast. If the Order’s religious trappings really mean anything, it would surely not be incongruous for warlike demonstration to be replaced just once by a day of prayer for peace, penitence, and purged memories. One is tempted to add that a less religious country than Ulster would have tumbled to the possibilities long ago.

Devout, courageous Jews are stimulating a major revival of concern for religious liberty.

The immediate focus is the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union. Their activities have been restricted for many years, but the issue has been coming to a head only recently. Many want to emigrate to Israel. Soviet authorities have frowned on this but have let a few go.

The latest event interpreted by Jews as repression was a trial in May of four Jews in Riga, Latvia. They were found guilty of anti-Soviet activity and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to three years.

The trial provided Exhibit A for a crusading Jewess, Mrs. Rivka Alexandrovich, 47, who has crisscrossed the Western world in recent weeks to call public attention to Soviet persecution of those who take their Judaism seriously. Her 23-year-old daughter was one of the Riga defendants. “The only crime is that Ruth is Jewish,” said Mrs. Alexandrovich, who taught English in Riga for twenty-five years and was allowed to emigrate to Israel with an 18-year-old son only a few weeks ago. Ruth, a nurse, has been in jail since last October. At the trial in May she was given a one-year term. Her father has remained behind with her in the Soviet Union.

Pleas like those of Mrs. Alexandrovich are arousing the interest of many who heretofore have thought that religious persecution existed almost exclusively in the minds of right-wing nuts. They are also putting ecumenists on the spot, obliging them to speak up on the denial of religious freedom in many Communist countries. Thus far, the ecumenical movement has been promoting the kind of dialogue with Communists that sweeps such unpleasantries under diplomatic rugs.

Mrs. Alexandrovich has appeared on a number of television shows in the United States and has held press conferences and interviews arranged by the American Jewish Committee. She made an impassioned speech to the United Presbyterian General Assembly in Rochester, New York. Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, called her “the latest missionary of mercy to your consciences.” He said the Western world has been lulled into a feeling of security regarding religion in the Soviet Union.

In a meeting with churchmen in New York, Mrs. Alexandrovich said there are still about forty Jews awaiting trial in the Soviet Union, including nine in Kishinve, Moldavia. But she made it clear that Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and even Muslims also were under attack in the Soviet Union. When Tanenbaum remarked that the plight of the Baptists was just as bad as that of the Jews, she broke in, saying, “Terrible, terrible.” She said she had attended the trial of a Baptist peasant and marveled at his calmness. “I’ll never forget his speech,” she said. “He told the judge, ‘I’m not afraid of you. You are not a judge. I have only one Judge.’ ”

She said that the prison camp to which her daughter was being sent had eighteen women prisoners, and that most of them were Baptists.

She described as “an evil position” the stance taken by churchmen who say they avoid speaking out against specific acts of religious persecution because of fear of reprisals against those involved. “It is high time to go ahead and speak,” she declared. “Each step is a drop in the cup, and someday it will overflow.”

There is a remarkable renewal of interest in religion in the Soviet Union, according to Mrs. Alexandrovich, especially among young people. “One thousand Jews have become Christians,” she says, “and some Christians are becoming Jews.” She contends that “there is no underground church. That is a term of the KGB.”

Cuban Jews: Trial By Change

Jews in Cuba live normal lives and are not persecuted as those in coercive Russia. Their synagogues are open, and the Castro government pays the bus fares for their children to attend a Jewish nationalized school.

These startling observations come not from the lips of a government propagandist but from American rabbi Everitt Gendler, who recently returned from a see-it-yourself tour of Cuba.

In a report released privately in Geneva last month, Gendler said there is among Cuban Jews “a vitality of spirit, a dedication to the welfare and education of youth, and a cooperation and sharing which I had felt elsewhere only in Israel.”

Rabbi Gendler, who has been at the Jewish center in Princeton, New Jersey, says the bold Cuban experiment has not hindered the five Jewish congregations where worship is held in Spanish, English, and Hebrew. In one of these—Temple Beth Israel, situated in a fine old converted mansion on the broad, palm-lined boulevard of Velado—men and women sit together.

Before the Castro regime took over there were 10,000 Jews in Cuba. Rough estimates now place the figure at only 1,000. Most of the rest fled to the United States.

The Castro government has continued to permit the Jews to have kosher meat despite severe rationing. And the teaching of Hebrew and of Jewish history and culture is encouraged. After speaking with Jews of varying outlooks—some sympathetic to the revolution, some neutral, and some hostile—Gendler said: “I found unanimous agreement on one front. The government has been beyond criticism in its respect and consideration of Jewish religious needs.”

Cuba has full diplomatic relations with Israel. This leads to the ironic situation of a U.S.-supported middle nation helping a Communist country that is at great odds with the same U. S. government. Gendler, who is the first of his faith in the United States to enter Cuba since 1963, says that while there is no overt hostility from the government, a “deteriorating world political situation is likely to harden some of the present Cuban flexibilities.”

WILBERT FORKER

Anxiety In Israel

Eight years ago Nes Ammim, Israel’s only Christian settlement, almost lost its bid for existence, largely because of the opposition of nearby Nahariya’s chief rabbi, Dr. Aharon Keller. Rabbi Keller was outspoken in his fear that the Christian settlement would become a nest of missionary activity in Galilee. This has not happened, and today Rabbi Keller’s mind is changing. He is on the way to becoming a friend of Nes Ammim.

Recently Keller raised the red flag again when it-came to his attention that a group of Moravian Brethren from Germany was planning to buy the Narko Hotel in Nahariya and establish a rest home for Israelis who suffered under the Nazi persecutions. Rabbi Keller persuaded the owner to cancel the sale on the grounds that the group consisted of Christian activists.

A second missionary “scare” broke over the sleepy little town of Metulla following reported efforts of a German Baptist group to purchase Hotel Arazim and another unnamed German Christian body to purchase Hotel Hamavree. Influential voices, including that of a rabbi, urged government action to prevent such expansion of missionary activities.

Some Christians in Israel regard it as “sheer callousness” for Christian groups—especially from Germany where Jews suffered in an unprecedented way—to seek entree to Israel. They see other preferable ways of “helping the Jews.” On the other hand, Israel is thought by some to damage its image abroad when rabbis react excitedly to the presence of foreign Christian groups in Israel.

As one observer put it, “Israel religious leaders need to accept the fact and begin to live as a free people in their own land. They do not need high ghetto walls to protect them from outside forces as in Europe in former years. The proper place for the rabbis to express their religious views is from their own pulpits and not on the Knesset [parliament] floor.”

DWIGHT L. BAKER

The Jesus Movement: Now It’S In The Hamlets

Youth-accented revival has come to Greensburg, Kentucky (pop. 2,400), and to dozens of other small towns.

At the Greensburg United Methodist Church last month, a scheduled weekend of youth meetings led by Vanderbilt seminarian Jerry Matney, 24, stretched on for fourteen nights and 350 professions of faith, mostly by teen-agers. Toward the end, adults were packing into the 250-seat church too, and the entire town was talking about the revival—and the changed lives.

“I’ve been in the ministry twenty years and have never seen anything like this,” says pastor Gene Weddle, who adds that his own commitment to Christ deepened.

The meetings were marked by spirited hand-holding sing-alongs, Jesus cheers (“Give me a J …”), quiet prayer, testimonies by converts lined up by the dozens, and God-heavy folk songs by Matney interspersed with soft-spoken thoughts about Jesus and life. There was no hell-fire preaching, but plenty of tears were shed at the altar.

One night a husky football type sobbed, “I love Jesus, and I’m not going to booze him out any longer.” The area’s long-haired sandal set turned out. Billie Judd, 17, received Christ when a throng of converts surrounded him and prayed. Friends and teachers remarked about his abrupt change of life. “You just don’t know how it is to have Jesus until you experience it,” he explained. Hip collegian Ellis Estes made news when he testified in front of the courthouse as part of a witness delegation.

Baptist minister Paul Whitler tells of finding the town’s leading young trouble-makers congregated late one night outside a closed drive-in. Instead of petting and guzzling beer, he reports, they were talking about Jesus. “He’s what we’ve really wanted for a long time,” said one.

Sixteen-year-old Richard Patterson woke up his parents one night to tell them of his new love for Christ. His testimony at their rural Baptist church sparked a mini-revival there one Sunday.

Non-Christian students at the 800-pupil high school remarked in interviews about changes they’ve noticed among turned-on-to-Jesus classmates: joyous moods, vanished enmities, mutual concern and love. There were lunch-hour Bible-study and prayer sessions, campus outreach rallies, blackboards with Jesus slogans, and lapel buttons urging “Join the Jesus Revolution.”

Some townspeople—including a few of Weddle’s members—say the movement is only an emotional fad. Mayor George Huddleston, a Methodist, disagrees. “This is the most wonderful spiritual awakening this community has perhaps ever witnessed,” he says. As a pretty blonde named Linda put it: “It’s true I laughed and cried the first four days, but now I have a deep-down joy and peace. God is there.”

Others criticized the shouts and informal styles. Leading town merchant Jim Durham, who says the revival made his teen-age son happier than ever, insists there’s nothing to criticize: “no cult, no ritual, no gimmick.” And Mayor Huddleston believes many church members have made “formalities, rituals, and programs poor substitutes for the real thing, and our young people have seen through this.” He thinks the town’s adults are searching now too “for a faith that does something, like it has done in the lives of these kids.”

Weddle’s church has hired Matney, who grew up in Greensburg, for the summer. He and the Greensburg converts plan to carry the revival to neighboring communities and to hold forth in weekly non-denominational meetings.

Weddle worries about the future. Will Greensburg churches be able to bridge the generation gap? Will the movement survive its emotionally-high phase and go on to deeper things? There are examples around that serve to reinforce his worries—and to offer hope.

Matney, a rather new convert himself, had assisted street evangelist Barry Westbrook a few months earlier in youth meetings in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (pop. 18,000), where a weekend series in a Baptist church continued for thirty-five days and 2,000 decisions. But, said a church spokesman last month, everything is back to pre-revival normality; the youths left as quickly as they had come.

Deaths

REINHOLD NIEBUHR, 78, founding editor of Christianity and Crisis, professor emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, and one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century; in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (see also p. 23).

GREGORY PETER XV CARDINAL AGAGIANIAN, 75, retired chief of the Vatican’s missionary agency who in 1958 and 1963 had been regarded as a candidate for the papacy; in Rome.

But at Arnold, Nebraska (pop. 800), visited by revival last year, Methodist pastor Stan Schrag says effects linger on. Ten persons are already en route to the mission field or other full-time service, and four couples are preparing to follow them. Thirteen Bible-study groups headed by laymen thrive in the area. One coed who received Christ during the revival has been responsible for seventy-five conversions. The high school has sprouted a Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter, thanks to a coach turned on at the revival. Smokey Kellner, former race-car driver now confined to a wheelchair because of a neck injury, received Christ in the revival, then led a number of young people to Christ. He and his wife still conduct a weekly youth Bible study, and they are eyeing the mission field. Arnold is a farm community near the city of North Platte.

Arnold converts have been carrying the revival to other small towns, such as Nebraska City (pop. 7,500) and Buena Vista, Colorado (pop. 1,800), where recently hundreds of young people, including many transient hippies, joined the Jesus movement.

Meanwhile, the fires burn on elsewhere. Meetings at a Baptist church in Nortonville, Kentucky (pop. 755), ran six weeks after the young people took over. In Wauchula, Florida (pop. 3,400, sponsors hoped for 100 decisions in a week of meetings but got 1,100 instead, and spokesmen say the revival headed off racial trouble.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Religion In Transit

Faith Theological Seminary is selling its estate-like campus in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park. The school is to relocate in Cape May, New Jersey, on property made famous by Dr. Carl McIntire. The Cape May site has until now housed Shelton College, which McIntire is moving to Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the heels of a dispute with New Jersey educational officials over academic standards.

A dispute between Ukrainian Catholics and Pope Paul VI grew hotter last month when the Vatican announced its refusal to allow Josef Cardinal Slipyj to visit North America. Slipyj, 79, was released from Soviet prison camps in 1963, reportedly on the condition that he leave the country quietly.

Baptist evangelist Arthur Blessitt and a Florida preacher friend survived a five-day march through embattled Belfast, Northern Ireland. They carried a 200-pound cross throughout both sides of a no-man’s-land dividing warring Protestants and Catholics. They were threatened three times and picked up once by British troops, but quickly released.

The Church of the Divine Saviour in Chico, California, was among ten buildings cited for excellence in design by the American Institute of Architects. Also a winner of an AIA 1971 honor award was the Florence Hollis Hand Chapel at Mount Vernon College, Washington, D. C.

The blowing of the fire whistle in Dallas, Oregon, each Saturday noon played havoc with the close of the service at the local Seventh-day Adventist church. The pastor persuaded the town council to forgo the Sabbath blast.

An Institute of Contemporary Christianityhas been formed in Oakland, New Jersey, to combat occultism. The founders say they are particularly concerned with the effect of occultism upon youth.

A 109-year-old congregation on Manhattan’s East Side is selling its church to a developer in order to buy back the lot as part of a condominium. A new building is to be built for St. Peter’s Lutheran Church as an independent element in an office complex. The church stands to pick up $4,000,000 in the process, according to a New York Times report.

The makers of Hallmark cards say they will publish a series of inspirational greetings written by evangelist Billy Graham. The firm currently sells cards with messages from Norman Vincent Peale, Fulton Sheen, Martin Luther King, Pope John, and Cardinal Spellman.

The Kresge Foundation is offering a matching gift of $500,000 to Asbury College toward construction of a $1.5 million dormitory. The gift would be the largest single grant for capital development in the school’s eighty-year history. It is conditional on the college’s raising the additional $1 million.

World Scene

United Methodist Bishop John Wesley Shungu has pulled his 80,000-member church out of the recently organized Church of Christ in the Congo. Shungu said legal procedures were not followed in the establishment of the new communion.

Roman Catholic hospitals in Ontario have served notice that they will defy provincial government pressure to perform abortions.

A self-service vending machine sells copies of Scriptures to people walking along Rue d’Arlon in Brussels. The machine is situated on the street outside the headquarters of the Belgian Bible Society.

A new Word of Life camp was dedicated last month outside Nairobi, Kenya. It will serve as a youth center and a conference grounds.

A Presbyterian minister with a wife and three children was ordained into the Roman Catholic priesthood last month in Lisbon, Portugal.

Metropolitan Pimen of Krutitsy and Kolomna was named patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The 60-year-old priest succeeds Patriarch Alexis, who died last year.

The exodus is on!

Watch them inch onto the freeway ramps on Friday afternoon. See the lines of trailers, campers, and tent-type vehicles crawl toward the outskirts of the nation’s big cities. They’re headed for the good times at the lakes, rivers, mountains, and beaches. Before rushing back to suburbia by nightfall Sunday, millions of outdoor enthusiasts this summer will have crammed about forty-eight hours of leisure-time sun and fun into weekends that are slowly lengthening with the advent of standardized Monday holidays and the creeping popularity of the four-day work week.

There may have been a time when church members had strong qualms about forsaking their church for weekend camping or lazing at the cabin.

Few do now.

And many of the estimated 50 million Americans flocking to campgrounds this year wouldn’t be in church on Sunday even if they stayed home.

National interest in camping and tourism has skyrocketed during the past decade. Authorities, citing a steady 12 to 16 per cent increase in camper population annually, predict a 93 per cent rise in all outdoor activities and a total of 7.5 million camping vehicles on the road by 1980. By the turn of the century boating is expected to grow 215 per cent, camping 238 per cent. No wonder government outlays for federal and state acquisition and development of land leaped from $90 million in 1969 to $357 million this year!

Where will we put all the tents, campers, and boats—and people? Already many a campground on a summer night looks like a convention of Coleman lamp dealers.

And will the Church roll with its mobile flock so that somehow the Gospel is presented to the millions who increasingly spend what one cleric has dubbed “unstructured discretionary time” on the road, in the wilderness, or at resort and recreation meccas?

A growing number of Christian camps, tourism associations, and motel managers are catching hold of the booming trend. A survey by Christian Camping International and Scripture Press shows that 373 Christian camps in the United States and Canada in one decade will have doubled their nonsummer camping programs. Many are providing trailer and tent areas in addition to the traditional lodge or cabin accommodations.

Although there is—as yet—little overall coordination, varied groups are providing outdoor opportunities for Christian fellowship and evangelism in public and private parks, campgrounds, and resort areas. Several motel and campground chains provide come-as-you-are worship services early Sunday mornings for guests and are experimenting with small meditation chapels open around the clock.

Campers on Mission (COM), a Christian fellowship formed only last January by Southern Baptists, has exploded to a membership of 13,000 and is growing, officials say, at the rate of fifteen to forty new members a day. A blue fish emblem identifies their trailers or cars. Witnessing is the group’s main objective.

“No other nation in history has had such leisure enjoyed by the middle working class,” says John McBride, a key COM figure. “Our conviction is that where there are people, there ought to be someone there who knows the Lord and is communicating it.”

American Lutherans have a trailer ministry, the Lutheran Church in America (among others) has mounted a ski ministry at Aspen, and the Episcopal Church has a recreation work in Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington. Other more informal ministries exist in most states where Christian laymen have banded together to combine wanderlust and witness.

An outdoor ministry pioneer is the Reverend Warren W. Ost, who has headed the national movement “A Christian Ministry in the National Parks” since 1952. Ost, a United Presbyterian, caught the vision for a parks ministry when he was a bellboy at Yellowstone’s Old Faithful lodge in 1946.

The movement, with a present budget of $750,000 a year, gained impetus from the National Council of Churches’ Department of Evangelism, though Ost says the parks ministry probably will separate from the NCC soon. Ost is busy overseeing 225 seminary and college students representing thirty-four denominations in fifty-five national parks and resort areas this summer. The action extends from Mount McKinley to the Virgin Islands, and from Olympic National Park, Washington, to Cape Hatteras beach, North Carolina.

Ost, who says the ministry is “thoroughly evangelical,” notes it is the “oldest worker-priest ministry in America.” Although the staff (including five resident ministers) provide about 300 worship services each Sunday during summer (and year round in a few spots), Ost considers “the way they speak of Christ more important than the sermon they give on Sunday.”

Each staffer is hired by park concessions and works regular shifts. In addition, he or she leads choirs or Bible schools or mans Christian-oriented coffeehouses.

Following the National Park Service’s lead, thirty-three states now have similar state-park ministries. The Pennsylvania Council of Churches, for example, working with the Department of Forests and Waters, had fulltime chaplaincy programs in seventeen parks last summer, and plans more this year.

Holiday Inns of America has had a full-time chaplain for several years. W. A. Nance, a genial six-foot-four United Methodist, now has a full-time colleague in the Memphis headquarters of the giant 1,315-inn chain: Charles Woodall, an ordained Disciples of Christ minister.

The Holiday Inn (its chief officers are active churchmen) ministry is three-pronged: worship services early Sunday mornings (so as not to conflict with local services and to give travelers an uninterrupted day); “chaplains on call,” a twenty-four-hour counseling service by local ministers; and the erection of small on-site meditation chapels.

Services, led by local pastors, are held in 325 inns. The best-known site is probably the Penthouse Chapel atop the Hollywood, California, Holiday Inn, where World Opportunities president Roy McKeown often speaks to as many as 200 businessmen and travelers. Chaplains on call, about a year old, is operated at 550 inns, with a goal of 1,000 by year’s end, Nance says. The program has been credited with averting at least forty intended suicides.

Beside another ministry to its gigantic employee force of 107,000 worldwide, Holiday is now branching into a camping outreach. Eleven Holiday campgrounds are now open—with fifteen more under construction; services and chaplains will be provided, according to Nance.

The largest franchised campground, Kampgrounds of America (KOA), isn’t far behind. Official Don Ryan says that though no formal program exists yet, a chapel program is being tested at the Dallas, Texas, KOA. A local minister holds services there for forty or fifty people twice each Sunday. Franchised and independent campground operators have also, on their own, initiated special ministries.

Campers know that Granite Hill Family Campground near historic Gettysburg Battlefield, Pennsylvania, is different the moment they pull into the long driveway: the Christian flag flies atop the recreation hall. Jim and Pauline Lott turned the family farm into a campground a few years ago, and regular interdenominational services are a drawing card for Christians from miles around. Campers tote their folding chairs to the rec hall and face the huge stone fireplace, where a portrait of Christ adorns the mantle. Many of the Sunday worshipers had rocked the hall Saturday night with a lively foot-stomping square dance. And the visiting preacher, who gets a free campsite for his sermonic chores, may have been one of them.

A few townsfolk in the church that the family attends during the off-season think the Lotts shouldn’t be devoting so much time to non-church activities. Lott’s rebuttal: “We have to face the fact that we’re becoming a nation on wheels. We have to meet the people where they are.”

Nearby, at Oak Creek Campground in Bowmansville, Bill Benedick is a campground evangelist. A junior-high-school teacher who attended Dallas Seminary for two years, Benedick chose a “campground Bible ministry” when health considerations forced him to abandon overseas mission plans. He and his wife conduct children’s Sunday school, a teen service, and worship services for 400 during the camping season, as well as a year-round Bible-teaching ministry to permanent trailer residents.

In Pennsylvania, at least, it’s the minority of large campgrounds that don’t hold Sunday services, Benedick says. And large campgrounds in South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach, for example, have vigorous summer-time ministries staffed by laymen, interns, and—on a rotating basis—local clergymen.

Assorted outdoor ministries abound. An interdenominational church at which boats serve as pews, ushers paddle about in canoes, and ministers preach from behind a huge granite boulder is beginning its eighty-third season this month. The “Church in the River” is at Half-Moon Bay, an inlet of the St. Lawrence on the Canadian side. A boat ministry has been launched at West-Coast yacht basins. And in the heart of the Rocky mountains at Salida, Colorado, campers may come to a “non-conference” this summer where the Christian Missions Recruiting Service trains selected workers for full-time work in more than thirty countries. “Tell us the dates you plan to be with us.… What is the cost? Who knows? Just as the Lord leads,” beckons a brochure.

Bicycle ministries? Of course. For the hardy, “dynamic adolescent programming” is the word for Bob Davenport’s Wandering Wheels of Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. The interracial Christian couriers are making their first bike trip in Europe this month. Davenport (twice All-American footballer at UCLA), his wife, and their four children are accompanying the fifty-man pedal patrol. Wandering Wheels—which pushed off in 1964—will also feature its eighth cross-country tour of the United States this summer. And the first coed team will pedal 2,300 miles from San Diego to Savannah.

The Wheels’ main thrust is building bikers’ Christian commitment; a tandem benefit is the witnessing the youth do along the way in churches, parks, and roadside rests. The Wheels also give sacred concerts and testimonies en route.

The Mennonite Out-Spokin’ bicycling program and the Trail Blazers Camp in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, are other routes mobilizing youth for rugged discipline and Christian adventure.

As a quiet revolution is changing the work and play patterns of Americans, most leaders of Christian leisure pursuits and camping ministries see their work as an extension of the Church.

“Evangelicals must get awake to the fact that the camping movement is on the increase,” says campground evangelist Benedick. “It’s just beginning.… This is the first-century Church.”

Key 73: On The Bridge Together

Can two walk together except they be agreed? Can Baptists and Lutherans? United Methodists and Wesleyans? The National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches?

These and the sixty-plus other member organizations of the Key 73 evangelism coalition do not see eye to eye about everything, but last month in St. Louis they agreed overwhelmingly to walk together into 1973 with arms linked in joint outreach “to confront every person in North America more fully and more forcefully with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Until the St. Louis meeting each group was more or less committed to doing its own thing in 1973 (and each still is). But representatives decided to explore “things we can do together,” then voted to initiate development immediately of seven “concepts” or program areas. These include special calendar events, nationwide Bible study, lay witness projects, and proclamation of the Gospel to the masses. They also went on record urging local churches to get together and plan strategy without waiting for headquarters to push.

Roman Catholic clergy observers were present for the first time. Key 73 executive director Theodore Raedeke said their response was “enthusiastic.”

Generally, a let’s-get-with-it-now spirit prevailed, putting the pack out in front of cautious Key 73 leaders who feared that any appearance of presumption on their part might disrupt the fragile alliance. United Methodist evangelism staffer Joe Hale, member of the Key 73 Executive Committee, said the surprising show of unity and purpose made the meeting “our best yet.”

The only gloomy note concerned finances. April and May salaries and other bills were not paid, but officials were optimistic about wiping out the $6,600 deficit soon.

Meanwhile Key 73 is shaping up as a pan-institutional bridge leading to unified outreach unparalleled in American church history.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

‘Free To Be Itself’

The one-hundredth anniversary of the disestablishment of the Church of England in the West Indies is being observed by the Commonwealth of Jamaica with a set of commemorative stamps that depict a free church with its door open to the people.

The established Church of England, supported by the government and ruled by acts of Parliament, followed the crown to the British colonies in the New World. The bishop of London governed the church in the colonies but, because of slowness of communication, was uninformed about local conditions and needs.

“Organization of the church was random and feeble,” says the government of Jamaica in its official announcement of the commemorative stamps. “These difficulties in time resulted in a lapse of Christianity and of missionary work. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the evangelical breeze was blowing in the Church of England after the official slumber of the eighteenth century and had two effects: the anti-slavery campaign and the missionary movement.”

Methodist churches became strong, and Baptists and other evangelical groups established work in Jamaica. In 1824 the Church of England, to strengthen its work, established a local bishopric in Kingston. After abolition of slavery in 1833, pressure grew to free the Anglican church from dependence on the government in London.

When the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1869, similar action followed for the Church of the West Indies.

“The church had to grow up and be itself,” says the Jamaican government, “still supported by the Christians in England, but no longer by the state. In its freedom since then, the church has multiplied, and the centenary of disestablishment is well worth celebrating. It set the church free to be itself.”

GLENN D. EVERETT

Making Malta Modern

For a long time it looked as though the effects of Vatican Council II had bypassed Malta. The former British crown colony was for centuries held in thrall by a rigid sacerdotalism unparalleled even in rural Ireland. After independence came in 1964, the church used elections to stress salvation or damnation as political alternatives.

With painful slowness things have improved; no longer are Labour party leaders (who sought to improve appalling social conditions) put under interdict and banned from the sacraments. A minor battle currently raging in the ninety-five-square-mile Mediterranean island is indicative of changing times. In an attempt to modernize the 1,500 separate ecclesiastical units that take care of the 300,000 Catholics, a report by the McKinsey Company proposed sweeping reforms and economies for the better husbanding of the church’s annual income, said to be approaching the million-dollar mark.

Though the report was championed by Archbishop Michael Gonzi (85 but still formidable), reservations have increasingly been sounded by his coadjutor, Emanuele Gerada. The latter’s alleged association with the Labour party leader alarmed many priests who suspected an attempt to displace Gonzi, and they petitioned the Vatican in support of the reforms. With a general election imminent, Rome is playing it safe. The Vatican has switched from appearing to favor Gerada, and has now decided that old friends are best after all and that Gonzi should have his way.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Modern Miracle?

Students of Bethany (Oklahoma) Nazarene College still believe in miracles. The Lord helped them raise over $77,500 in less than three weeks, they say.

The challenge was given by the Reverend Charles (Chuck) Milhuff, 33-year-old evangelist from Kansas City, Missouri, on the last day of the college’s spring revival. Milhuff, as well as the students, was well aware of the school’s $600,000 deficit. He asked the student body of 1,500 if there were a thousand of them concerned enough to pledge the school $100 each to be paid sometime during the month of April. After a moment of silent prayer, students all over the chapel stood, agreeing to the pledge.

Plans started almost immediately. Blood was sold to the community bloodbank; students worked overtime jobs, wrote letters to interested friends and churches, and held a huge garage sale that netted over $5,000. By mid-May students had raised $88,500.

SHARON ZWINK

NEWS

The seeds of a new church fell on fertile ground last month as commissioners (delegates) to the 183rd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., meeting in Rochester, New York, received for study a new plan of union and reaffirmed interest in an old one.

The new plan was a study draft to unite the northern church (UPCUSA) with the southern, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.; the draft will be presented to the southern church next month. The old plan was the ten-year-old Consultation on Church Union, which is to be studied at the same time despite several sharp challenges. (A motion from the Presbytery of Pittsburgh “on discontinuing participation in the Consultation on Church Union” failed.)

The road to reunion is apparently a rocky one; even the more limited plan to unite the northern and southern churches met with opposition, led by the largely black Synod of Catawba. Several motions were made to delay by four years final presentation of the plan to the two Presbyterian churches. The result was a compromise: a one-year delay. This means the Committee of Twenty-four on reunion will present its final recommendations to the 1973, rather than 1972, General Assembly.

The assembly of the 3.1-million-member United Presbyterian Church also authorized conversations on the possibility of organic union with four largely black denominations: the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Second Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The first three already participate in the Consultation on Church Union.

As currently worded, the plan for reunion of the two Presbyterian bodies permits congregations to remain outside, retaining their property. It also exempts congregations and ministers deciding not to enter the new church from disciplinary action should they “seek to establish relations with others of like mind.”

In some ways this year at the General Assembly was the year of the underdogs—not blacks (they seem to have had their day) but young persons and women. Early in the week commissioners elected Mrs. Lois H. Stair as the first woman moderator in Presbyterian history. The Special Committee on Women later proposed that half the elected lay representation on church boards and agencies be women. After debate the assembly granted “fair representation” for women instead of the equal participation the committee had sought.

To many observers the highlight of the ten days of meetings came in the youth contribution, particularly that of the United Presbyterian Liberation Front. This is a group of “Jesus people” led by Dennis Rydberg, pastor to youth of the First Presbyterian Church of San Diego, California. The group gave old-fashioned testimonies—“I never heard the Gospel in my church; I only heard that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but Christ found me.… I am a new creature.… Jesus has made my hate disappear.… Social change is needed, but before you can get it you must be changed yourself”—and challenged the delegates to make new efforts toward “personal evangelism and leadership training.”

As a final gesture the Liberation Front handed out pennies under the banner “Evangelism ’70—A Penny per Year per Member,” calling attention to the annual allocation to the denomination’s Committee on Evangelism. The young people wished to double the efforts for evangelism. The commissioners gave their presentation a standing ovation.

Many observers also felt a new wave of enthusiasm for evangelism at the assembly, prompted in part by the interest of the young in conversions and in part by the denomination’s declining membership (77,000 last year). At times this mood seemed to contrast sharply with the interests of the major mission agencies, whose efforts have been largely in the social arena in recent years.

During the week the 183rd General Assembly also:

• Voted to raise $70 million for the self-development of impoverished persons during the next nine years.

•Approved an extensive fund-raising plan that will attempt to persuade 500,000 families to pledge 5 per cent or more of their income “to God through the church.”

• Asked its Committee on Ministerial Relations to study the possibility of (1) having pastors serve churches for terms of a previously specified length and (2) requiring ministers to retire at age 65.

• Endorsed a proposal for extensive restructuring—the first since 1923—of the denomination’s national and international agencies.

• Requested a halt to all United States military involvement in Indochina no later than the end of 1971.

• Called for general and complete disarmament, repeal of the Selective Service Act, environmental renewal, and far-reaching innovations in the nation’s health-care system plus a single national health agency.

A normally routine motion to continue an Emergency Fund for Legal Aid to the poor, established by last year’s assembly, was severely contested because of a grant last year of $10,000 to the Angela Davis Defense Fund. The Fund for Legal Aid was continued at a suggested rate of $100,000 per year as in the past, though the commissioners adopted by majority vote a statement questioning “the propiety” of the Angela Davis grant.

A preliminary enquiry into the activities of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, Incorporated, was dropped after the editor of the Presbyterian Layman acknowledged an error in judgment in publishing two articles highly critical of some aspects of the denomination’s work (see also editorial, page 21). In related action the assembly approved a set of principles for review of the Lay Committee and other organizations, noting that: (1) variety of opinion, expression, and activity is to be encouraged; (2) the right to dissent is inalienable; (3) judicatories do, however, have the right to insist that dissent and its method of expression be responsible; (4) responsible dissent does not include the right to attack the motives, character, or integrity of individuals or groups within the church; and (5) publications shall conform to the canons and ethics of responsible journalism.

The action to investigate the Lay Committee was initiated by the stated clerk of the denomination, William P. Thompson. In separate action Thompson was elected to serve a second five-year term in the church’s highest administrative office.

The War And The Kirk

“Why we get hoity-toity about Lieutenant Calley and My Lai I cannot conceive,” Lord George MacLeod told the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh last month. “At Holy Loch,” continued the militant pacifist spellbinder, “we are living beside missiles each of which can simultaneously destroy five towns of 500,000 people.” This reference to the American Polaris base in west Scotland (a favorite target of his) came when Lord MacLeod called for definition of the Church’s attitude toward the doctrine of the just war.

Just or not, there were more warlike mutterings when the assembly agreed by a narrow majority to send down to presbyteries a form of words that would demote the Westminster Confession from “subordinate standard” to mere “historic statement.” The theological right had feared that the kirk was disowning its heritage; the left wanted a completely new statement of faith; while four demonstrators in the public gallery rose at different times during the debate to testify that the pope was antichrist (for which enormity they were speedily consigned to the civil magistrate). Earlier in the week two others who penetrated the police cordon were arrested for expressing similar sentiments when the antichrist’s invited observer, Bishop James Monaghan, was welcomed by the new moderator, Dr. Andrew Herron.

Another specter considered laid long since reappeared to depress protesters further when Professor J. K. S. Reid, leader of the kirk’s panel in discussions with the Episcopalians, said there was no reason why Anglican bishops should not take part in the assembly. The alarmed were hastily assured that nothing could happen behind the assembly’s back.

The establishment got a hefty kick in the teeth when the assembly overwhelmingly decided that its publicity and publications committee had no right last December to fire the Reverend Leonard Bell, editor of the kirk’s 200,000-circulation monthly Life and Work. He pleaded that as the assembly had given him his job only the assembly could take it away. Bell was reinstated; the committee’s convener resigned.

The assembly also: expressed readiness to reconsider union plans with Scottish Congregationalists rejected in 1969 … agreed that the kirk should act as the trade union for thousands of unemployed who had no voice and for old people hard pressed by the inflation currently hitting Britain … appointed the Reverend A. G. McGillivray, 47, as deputy clerk and successor to Dr. J. B. Longmuir, who resigns next year as assembly clerk … heard that kirk membership over the year had fallen by more than 24,000 and now stood at 1,154,211 … supported the WCC grants to anti-racist groups but refused to open a special account to further the program … warned the Heath government against entry into the European Common Market (which threatened “the biggest surrender of British sovereignty since Charles II”) in defiance of the wishes of the people … declined to dispose of kirk shareholdings in South Africa.

Meanwhile across the street was meeting the eighty-three-minister Free Church of Scotland, which has no diplomatic relations with its big sister. Its moderator, Professor G. N. M. Collins, said the Free Church took no pleasure in the fragmented condition of the Church of Scotland today with its preaching “pitifully inadequate and so destitute of the message of salvation as to be an affront to the Gospel and an insult to the intellect.” The ecumenical movement was also castigated, as “one of the most controversial and influential sideshows of the present time.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Baptist Convention Opens Quietly

When the Southern Baptist Convention met in Denver last year, resolutions and motions were occasionally greeted by catcalls and boos from the floor. The most incandescent issue was the recalling of a Bible commentary on Genesis and Exodus prepared by the 11.6-million-member denomination’s Sunday School Board (see June 19, 1970, issue, page 32).

There were no such acrimonious exchanges this year—at least not during the first half of the SBC’s 114th annual session, held June 1–3 in St. Louis. In fact, during discussion of a resolution praising the American Bible Society, SBC president Carl E. Bates, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charlotte, North Carolina (he was re-elected for a second one-year term as expected), asked messenger (delegate) William Barner of Indiana, “Are you at the mike?” Barner, misunderstanding Bates, replied; “No, I’m not mad.” After sustained laughter quieted, the affable Bates quipped: “God bless you; may your tribe increase!” Such was the irenic spirit of the early hours of the convention, attended by more than 14,500 messengers and visitors.

At the half-way mark, the most enthusiastically received presentation was a twenty-minute Students Speak Up program by five Southern Baptist collegians and The Bridge, a folk-rock group from the University of Alabama.

“We believe in the Church and we want you to believe in us. Rather than talking to us, put us to work—please,” pleaded pretty Lois Weaver of Roanoke, Virginia. Against a multi-media backdrop, students testified to the power of the Jesus revolution now sweeping the world—in and out of the organized church. Scattered “amens” from approving adults coursed through the auditorium.

In early business sessions, the SBC completed a separation process started in 1970 that makes two formerly convention-related hospitals—one in Jacksonville, Florida, the other in New Orleans—private institutions, effective September 1. A $24.6 million Cooperative Program for the first nine months of 1972 was approved; it does not represent an increase in operating funds.

In related action, messengers accepted a goal of a dramatically expanded stewardship program that would channel a whopping billion dollars annually through their 34,500 local churches by 1975.

An important resolution on abortion, the first the SBC has taken at a national meeting, urged Baptists to work for legislation permitting abortion under certain conditions. These include: “rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” Attempts to amend the resolution by deleting the last clause failed.

At the same time, the convention said that “society has the responsibility to affirm … a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

In the annual convention sermon, John R. Claypool, pastor of Crescent Hills Baptist Church in Louisville, urged Southern Baptists to steer a middle road between the extremes of right and left.

The United States, Claypool said, must be like the Prodigal Son, who in his progress from adolescence to maturity, recognized his limits as well as his power in responsible freedom. And the Christian community must “act out the role of the father in this parable and lead our nation in maturing.”

“It would be suicidal if we tried to ignore our limits and go on trying to police the whole world,” he continued. At the same time, it would be tragic indeed for us to retreat into a neo-isolationism and deprive the world of the role we have been gifted by God to play.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Missions Today

Missionary, Come Back!, by Arden Almquist (World, 1970, 201 pp., $5.95), Call to Mission, by Stephen Neill (Fortress, 1970, 113 pp., $3.95), The Third World and Mission, by Dennis E. Clark (Word, 1971, 129 pp., $3.95), Student Power in World Evangelism, by David M. Howard (Inter-Varsity, 1970, 129 pp., paperback, $1.25), and World Mission and World Communism; edited by Gerhard Hoffmann and Wilhelm Wille (John Knox, 1968, 142 pp., paperback, $2.45), are reviewed by Samuel F. Rowen, coordinator of program development, Missionary Internship, Farmington, Michigan.

Publishers are investing many pages in the subject of world missions. This means there must be a good market for such books. That this outpouring of comment on world missions should come at a time when the Western Church is experiencing an identity crisis is perplexing. Some see the great interest in “over there” as merely a cop-out for failure at home; others view it as a necessary by-product of an affluent church, or as a sign of inevitable involvement in the global village; still others think it reflects an intense commitment to the truth of the Gospel.

Three of the authors whose books we consider here—Almquist, Neill, and Clark—deal essentially with the theme of the place or role of the missionary. The one great reality that faces the contemporary missionary is that the Church is. The truly pioneering missionary is a vanishing species. Therefore, the role of the missionary in relation to the existing church is of crucial importance. This topic determines the structure of Almquist’s Missionary, Come Back! and Neill’s Call to Mission. Both begin by discussing what the missionary did right, and conclude by building a case for a continuing role for the missionary.

Almquist is a medical doctor who served in the Congo and is now world-missions secretary for the Evangelical Covenant Church. In his first three chapters he so vividly describes the failures of missionaries that I began to feel the situation was beyond redemption. But then he shows their positive contributions effectively enough to make his plea for a continuing missionary involvement seem plausible.

Almquist’s passionate approach is both the strength and the weakness of the book. Those who are doing missionary work wrongly are, he says, the ones who preach an “Edwardian Gospel,” a name he derives from Jonathan Edwards. In his attack on the Edwardian Gospel he quotes approvingly Arthur Glasser; one wonders what he would say if Glasser turned out to be an advocate of that Gospel.

Almquist accepts Zabriskie’s exegesis of Acts 10:9–16, and this allows him to accept the secular world as the starting point for missions. He says:

By Christian secularity I mean the attitude of mind and style of life of the Christian who finds in secularization not only no threat to the Gospel, but a legitimate and even necessary explication of the Gospel regarding the relationship of the Church and the world, the Kingdom of God and the city of man.

Such a conclusion is rather determinative for the understanding of the Christian mission. However, there are more convincing foundations than the inadequate handling of Acts 10:9–16. The other great burden Almquist bears is that the majority of those pursuing the missionary vocation are of the fundamentalist commitment—the kind, he says, who are not needed.

A contrast to Almquist’s book is found in Bishop Neill’s balanced, scholarly work, Call to Mission. Neill calmly examines the reasons why some feel that missions is dead. He quickly gets to the heart of the matter: the reason for involvement in missions is that the Gospel is true.

Almquist finds as the main justification for missions the fact that the missionary is still needed in the life of the developing nations. I have an uneasy feeling that even though he pleads for an end to Western imperialism, there remains in his argument a subtle form of imperialism (i.e., “We have what you need”). Neill shows that the basic consideration is not whether the missionary is wanted or not but that the Gospel is true.

Neill is an outstanding historian of missions and calls upon his broad knowledge to illustrate his points. One point deserves careful attention, especially by those going through the tensions of transition in mission-church relationships. He says that the under-thirty Christians in India have all grown up knowing nothing but independence, both politically and ecclesiastically. These younger Christians are the ones asking for missionaries, he says, but missionaries of a special kind. He recommends that relationships with the younger Christians be cultivated as the working base of the future. Their elders who went through the pangs of independence have slow-healing wounds that make it hard for them to think positively about the role of the missionary. However, those who haven’t experienced these tensions offer the possibility of a meaningful relationship with the national church.

In The Third World and Mission, Clark offers a disturbing analysis of evangelical missions. He defines the third world as “the independent nations of Asia, Africa, and South America who increasingly want to determine their destinies apart from the influences and pressures of the so-called great powers.” The seventies will see two major factors influence the course of the third world, he says—the communications revolution and education. Other important influences will be “the conflict between affluence and poverty, industrialization and its shattering of the family, and technological developments with their depersonalizing effect.”

Clark does not question the validity of the missionary role but rather tries to determine what the role should be in the present decade. His most far-reaching proposal is related to the missionary compound: “… to dismantle all foreign mission compounds as well as to break up concentrations of foreign personnel.… At the latest, 1975 could be set as the target date to implement this action. Concentrations of foreigners and the old type mission compound would be an anachronism by the end of the 70’s.”

While this is a book that all evangelicals would do well to read, it carries with it the prevalent messianic optimism about the use of modern means of communication. To the author our great advance in technological gadgetry means that “great numbers can be reached through communications for far less money.…” But such optimism fails to take into account the sufficient data showing that the mass media are ineffective in bringing people to the place of decision. It is still the personal encounter that is decisive in communications. We must understand the role of the technological revolution in communications without forgetting that the key matter is the personal communication of an understandable and true message.

In Student Power in World Evangelism David Howard gives a readable account of how students have been a formative force in world missions. The book is built around what he feels are the two points that will motivate Christian young people to involve themselves in world evangelization: the biblical basis for world missions and the historical fact that God has significantly used students in world evangelism.

Howard sees the basis of world mission in the doctrine of creation. (It is interesting that in the footnote to this conclusion he cites Johannes Blauw and J. H. Bavinck, saying they began with Genesis 1:1. The reader could easily assume that these authors agreed about the mission of the Church. But Bavinck’s critique of Hendrik Kraemer would equally apply to Blauw.) This focus upon the essential biblical starting point for world missions is important. Evangelicals have devoted much energy to understanding the doctrine of creation as over against evolution. In so doing they have failed to grasp its foundational significance for the Church’s social and evangelistic responsibility.

World Mission and World Communism is a collection of papers given at the Academy of Missions at Hamburg University. The book analyzes the relation of the Church to Communism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As is true of most compilations, the chapters are of unequal value. But the first two, dealing with revolution, are worth the price of the book.

Heinz-Dietrich Wendland says the Church has failed to develop a proper understanding of revolution. He sees the doctrine of creation as the cause for what he decries as the conservative reaction against revolution. He quotes Tillich in denouncing the “Creation Myth” and calls instead for an eschatological ethic. A creation ethic says that society is responsible to remain within the boundaries or spheres established by God’s creative purposes. An eschatological ethic looks to the future and views things as “not yet” (even God himself). So creation again becomes a foundational issue in understanding the mission of the Church.

There is a great similarity here with Richard Shaull’s view of history as the starting point for understanding the mission of the Church. But to make history or eschatology the norm for ethics or the mission of the Church has consequences. Only a determinative word from God holds the prospect of a satisfying solution, not only for what the Church ought to be doing, but also for the real needs of men.

The other important doctrine that emerges in the book has to do with the Kingdom of God. Historically, the way one views the Kingdom of God determines how he understands the relation between church and state. Wendland, with the Lutheran view of the separation of kingdom and church, maintains the goal is not the founding of Christian societies and institutions but the “ ‘humanization’ of society, the improvement of law, of social and international peace.” Ludwig Rutt, a Roman Catholic, in discussing the Catholic attitude toward Communism underscores the place the Kingdom of God has in determining what the church-state relationship should be.

Not all these books are worth the same amount of time and cost, though each has value. I prefer Call to Mission, probably because of a bias to read whatever Bishop Neill writes. But The Third World and Mission is significant for the missionary, missions executive, and layman who are concerned about evangelical missions. Student Power and World Evangelism should receive a broad reading and will have particular value for students. The book that will have probably the smallest reading public (it may necessitate rereading), World Mission and World Communism, is possibly the most significant. Here is a good introduction to the rationale for the development of a “political theology,” which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from Marxism. To understand how the Church can become the vanguard of revolution, one would do well to start here.

Undressing White Christians

Your God Is Too White, by Columbus Salley and Ronald Behm (Inter-Varsity, 1970, 114 pp., paperback, $1.95), is reviewed by James S. Tinney, who teaches black studies at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri.

This book is the first on Christianity and racism to be co-authored by a black and a white. The fact that both are evangelicals is a bonus and places the volume alongside those by Pannell, Skinner, and Howard Jones. Skinner’s Black and Free and Pannell are autobiographical, Jones is analytical of Negro religion, and Skinner’s How Black Is the Gospel? is sermonic. Your God Is Too White is none of these. Instead it is the biography of a WASP, it analyzes the crooked line of white religion, and it is polemical.

Although some readers will criticize it for being mostly negative in attitude, they cannot say it is a diatribe. It is reasoned, logical, and supported by a body of footnotes. Only the person trained in black history will find the early chapters, which give a basic orientation to the black-white situation in America, redundant and slow reading.

That the book is primarily sociological in approach is no weakness either. Its biblical treatment of every situation is adequate enough to enlist the support of the wary as well as to defrock the super-righteous.

Substantially, Salley and Behm fulfill our expectations by their general indictment of organized Christianity (“a monolithic whole in the broad, popular sense”) and their defense of the non-discriminating, true Christian faith (“an independent religious reality”). On the whole, the book appeals to the black man on the thesis that “the white American who has perverted history to exclude his own atrocities and the black man’s achievements also may have perverted Christianity.” What is surprising, but nonetheless true, is that some unsuspecting persons are called to trial.

Mr. Citizen of the North, will you please take the stand? You are charged with refusing to admit the presence of the Negro, “insensibly fitting blacks for a continued subordinate role” by emphasizing industrial skills, and closely accepting the South’s solution to the problem.

How about you, Mr. Quaker—will you tell us the whole truth? The whole truth is that you neglected to encourage the freedmen to join your own churches, so that as a result you are today a part of a white church.

And where is the anti-slavery Protestant? You too are hereby indicted for limiting your concern to education and evangelism as solutions.

Oh, yes. Will Mr. Social Gospeler please submit to questioning? Let the world know that you too “neglected the racial problem and either adopted notions of racial superiority or refused to rebuke those who did.” Witness Munger, Gladden, Rauschenbusch, Abbott, Herron, and your unashamed colleague, Josiah Strong.

That broad sweep of guilt does not exonerate the evangelical. It is well known and often admitted that he has generally neglected social reform. (Although Timothy Smith’s book Revivalism and Social Reform betrays this pattern, it deals only with the era preceding the Civil War.) What comes as a novel idea is that the evangelical interest in foreign missionary work went hand in hand with social Darwinism to take religious and secular minds off racial injustice. (Moody and Sunday also were guilty of holding segregated campaigns.)

Other positions taken by the authors will probably raise more ire, because they deal with interpretation more than historical fact. Salley and Behm see inter-racial sex as the root of white fears. (Eldridge Cleaver and Kovel’s White Racism: A Psychohistory agree.) They call for structural change to precede attitudinal change (which goes a step beyond the liberal’s both/and proposition, and two steps past the evangelical’s change-of-heart Gospel). They call the Nordic Jesus a phony. (The foreword says, “The white Jesus is dead.”) And they say that Christ’s turn-the-other-cheek admonition applies only to persecution for the sake of Christian testimony, not to secular, civil-political, or national battles. (This subtle justification of violence will surely offend not only the peace churches but many other exegetes as well.)

Although the thesis of the book enlists my full support, I question some isolated statements. The NAACP is cited as the first protest organization; this is incorrect. DuBois’s Niagara Movement preceded that organization by three years and was a separate entity, although DuBois also helped found the NAACP. I doubt whether the authors’ rigid demarcation of eras—(1) slavery, (2) segregation, and (3) ghettoization—can be sustained; the last two terms overlap in meaning and may even be said to be identical.

Likewise, there is growing evidence that their charge, “the black church doesn’t attract the young,” is false. Baldwin at one time said this (the authors quote him), but his last book reverses his preoccupation with the failures of the black church, at least to some degree. Anyway, it must be remembered that Baldwin is representative of the disillusioned intellectual who himself “tried” Christianity—a highly emotionalized version at that—as a youth. He is hardly representative of the average teen-ager. (A Scripture Press survey in 1969 showed that black churches have more teen-age vacation-Bible-school classes than do white churches.)

Weak treatment of the Book of Philemon is also apparent. The authors devote enough space to the letter, but they seem on the defensive (the only place in the book where this happens) and leave the reader feeling that Paul did not adequately destroy the slave-master relationship. A much better treatment may be found in, for instance, Tilson’s Segregation and the Bible.

Finally, the book is short on answers. Several times it quotes Richard Wright, “We all know exactly what to do, though most of us would rather die than do it.” Now, for the majority of persons that is undoubtedly truth in the raw. But there are others, even if a slim minority, for whom specific directives would be a welcome addition to the book. A book that so accurately undresses white Christians should, it seems, leave them defenseless even on the last stand.

Newly Published

New Testament History, by F. F. Bruce (Doubleday, 462 pp., $8.95). The first third of the book recounts the Roman and Jewish context, then fifty pages survey the lives of John and Jesus, and the last half is a history of the first two generations of the Church. The best available treatment by an evangelical.

Esther, by Carey A. Moore (Doubleday, 117 pp., $6). Latest addition to the Anchor Bible.

Popular Song and Youth Today, by Louis M. Savary (Association, 160 pp., paperback, $2.95), Contemporary Film and the New Generation, by Louis M. Savary and J. Paul Carrico (Association, 160 pp., paperback, $2.95), and Peace, War, and Youth, by Louis M. Savary and Maureen P. Collins (Association, 191 pp., paperback, $3.50). A valuable informative series for those who do not listen to popular music, see popular films, or read popular peace-war literature. Each medium reflects the conflicting philosophies current among the young.

The Ethical Demand, by Knud E. Løgstrup (Fortress, 237 pp., $8.95). The book, now in its eighth edition in Denmark, is here translated into English for the first time. An important book, drawing examples from such novelists as E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence, in the continuing drama of situation ethics.

This Dramatic World: Using Contemporary Drama in the Church, by Alfred R. Edyvean (Friendship, 96 pp., paperback, $1.50). A good introduction to several major modern playwrights. Each playwright’s most famous play is discussed. The author contends that, while not necessarily Christians themselves, such men as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Arthur Miller write from a Christian world view.

Moral Issues and Christian Response, edited by Paul T. Jersild and Dale A. Johnson (Holt, 467 pp., paperback, no price given). Fifty well chosen readings representing diverse viewpoints on abortion, church pronouncements, civil disobedience, genetic manipulation, homosexuality, pornography, premarital sex, racism, violence, war, and other topics. An excellent way to enhance serious reflection on the issues on which evangelicals should write more adequately.

Reformers in the Wings, by David C. Steinmetz (Fortress, 240 pp., $8.50). A very welcome study of twenty of the sixteenth-century reformers other than the best known.

The Shattered Self: The Religious and Psychological Search for Self-Hood, by Theodore A. McConnell (Pilgrim, 109 pp., $5.95). An introduction to six definitions of adulthood. The author summarizes the ideas of Erikson, Allport, Fromm, Frankl, May, and Maslow. A good book for those who have neither time nor inclination to read first hand the works of these men, but who want an overview of modern psychological thought.

Does Science Confront the Bible?, by James W. Reid (Zondervan, 160 pp., $3.95). Discusses such witless questions as “Does the Bible speak of cars?” or “Does the Bible also refer to modern road buildings?,” finding affirmative answers in such passages as Nahum 2:4 and Isaiah 40:3–5. The only things of worth in this book are the interesting photographs.

The Gay Militants, by Donn Teal (Stein and Day, 355 pp., $7.95). One who is “gay and proud” gives a journalistic account of the two-year-old activist movement of his minority group.

Authority and Rebellion, by Charles E. Rice (Doubleday, 253 pp., $5.95), and The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, by James Hitchcock (Herder and Herder, 228 pp., $6.50). Two lay Catholic professors criticize the radical movement in the church, but the former argues instead for the maintenance of orthodoxy and the latter for more moderate and achievable reform.

Russians Observed, by John Lawrence (Nebraska, 192 pp., $5). Personal impressions and observations from trips spanning 1934 to the late sixties act as a street barometer of social, economic, and religious attitudes and progress. Sir John’s admitted love for Russia, his journalistic experience there, and his fluency in the language combine in fair and often positive descriptions of a reputedly oppressive reality. His adventures in tracking down churches and monasteries reveal much about Orthodox and Baptist activities in Russia, and the religious “revival” within the working classes despite the continual closing of churches. From Lawrence’s contacts with Russian citizens the reader gets a rare, intimate look at their daily life.

Dimensions for Happening, by Lois Horton Young (Judson, 96 pp., paperback, $2.50). A handbook of creative Bible study through art and music for church leaders of teen-age groups. Interesting and valuable for those who are oriented toward the visual, rather than the verbal.

Set Forth Your Case, by Clark H. Pinnock (Moody, 144 pp., paperback, $1.50). A new publisher and appendix for a well received apologetic work first issued in 1967.

Signs of the Times, by A. Skevington Wood (Baker, 126 pp., paperback, $1.25). A readable, reasoned approach to biblical prophecy and current events.

GUEST EDITORIAL

Reinhold Niebuhr, who died June 1 at the age of seventy-eight, placed within his debt evangelicals, no less than Christian thinkers of broader persuasion. His legacy may be viewed under a wide range of rubrics; we here restrict ourselves to five.

As a thinker, Niebuhr gave us a valuable example of searching self-criticism and rigorous self-evaluation, leading at times to a frank reversal of position. His convictions were shaped during the crisis of Western capitalism—the period leading up to the Great Depression. Niebuhr was confronted by the utopianism of communism as well as by the strident claims of fascism.

He was at first tempted to accept the view that violence was the only means to social justice. He shortly saw, however, that violence from the left was impelled by the same quality of hate that inspired violence from the right. His fearless honesty led him to reject the view that the gigantic butcheries of the Lenin-Stalin era were mere peccadilloes of “idealists striving toward the light,” and to assert, “We believe that not only fascism but communism has the perils of barbarism.”

We are indebted to Niebuhr, second, for his realistic view of human reason. It was his contention that reason is as largely affected by sin as are the appetites. Seeing the fearsome contrast between the “moral” individual and the “immoral society” of men in collective life, he affirmed strict limitations upon the ability of reason to curb the power of egoism.

To him reason appeared to be ambivalent, able at the same time to “check egoism” in one sense and to “justify the egoism of the individual” in another. Thus reason became an instrument for producing results as diverse as imperialism and proletarian resistance.

A third enduring contribution to Christian theology is his understanding of sin as pride rather than as sensuality. He shifted the locus of sin from the visible misuse of natural impulses to the more subtle assertion of human autonomy—to the attempt to deny finite limitation. This expresses itself, Niebuhr said, in both individual and collective egoism. Not only did he discern that the “sin of pride” needs greater analysis because of its relative freedom from social inspection; he also saw that collective pride asserts itself in ways transcending the capacities of the individual wills that compose it. It is scarcely possible to overestimate the value of Niebuhr’s thought here.

Permanent, too, is the contribution embodied in his protest against any theory or hope for the too-easy sanctification of society. His genius here lay in his ability to see the complexity of the factors in human behavior, and the demonic possibilities built into the structures of society, notably those of political and economic power. Certainly our century will not outlive the necessity for hearing his verdict upon the prevalence of pride as an ingredient in modern civilization.

Niebuhr saw, more clearly than most, that each age, while imagining that it approached the Kingdom of God at its most impressive moments, was in reality likely to be near the point of death at those times. Since death and mortality underlie all human endeavor, all empirical institutions are under God’s judgment. Niebuhr thus saw that the corrupting effects of human pride ruled out any and all mundane utopias.

Finally, Reinhold Niebuhr left to the world of Christian thought a theological model. His constant objective was to relate the Christian tradition (and primarily the Reformed tradition) to life. He sought the larger bearings of such doctrines as sin and grace on man and his history. Even the doctrine of judgment was seen by him to work toward hope, for as God judges man, he strips him of his pride and opens the way to a rebirth.

Evangelicals cannot claim agreement with all Niebuhr’s theological positions. They regret his lack of a high view of biblical authority, and his denial of the sinlessness of our Lord. They may at times feel perplexed by the ambiguities of his view of the eschaton. But the presence of these problem-areas does not cancel his great contribution to Christian understanding.

Niebuhr’s earlier (and profound) insights into the great questions of sin, freedom, and grace were brought to bear upon the entire range of man’s historical process. If as a revolutionary prophet he pronounced judgment upon society, he himself stood voluntarily under the same judgment. More important still, he will never let us forget that we are two-dimensional entities, living in tension between the relativities of our historical order and the absolutes of the future.