Two classes of people, Presbyterians and theologians, I regret to say, have something of a reputation for their skepticism about evangelism. “Theologians,” says Dr. Johannes Hoekendijk of Union Seminary, “have been among the most unconquerable saboteurs of evangelism.” And some Presbyterians, rather than evangelize, seem to take a perverse pride in losing members as if this attested to the fearlessness of their prophetic preaching—which may some times be true, but may more often testify rather to the peripheral nature of their preaching, articulate at the active edge, but silent at the vitalizing center, where commitment to Christ begins.

No Christian today, not even a theologian or a Presbyterian, can any longer afford the luxury of indifference to the call of evangelism. “Even theologians,” says Dr. Hoekendijk, “seem to have rediscovered here and there [evangelism’s] relevance. They realize that they jeopardize the biblical authenticity of their thinking if they go on refusing to acknowledge that the church is set in this world with the sole purpose of carrying the gospel to the ends of the earth …” (The Church Inside Out).

As for Presbyterians, can any Calvinist who has read his church history defend the proposition that evangelism is unpresbyterian? In less than eleven crucial years, from 1555 to 1566, 121 evangelists, personally trained by Calvin, were dispatched into persecuted France from Geneva. In their first four years those pioneer Presbyterian evangelists founded 2,000 new French Calvinist congregations. Evangelism is as Presbyterian as John Calvin.

But the first question to ask about evangelism is not, Are we for it or against it?, but rather What is it?

Unfortunately, one of the symptoms of the sickness of the Church in our time is that such a question is more apt to split Christians into controversy than to unite them in mission. Philip Potter, in an excellent paper entitled “Evangelism and the World Council of Churches,” notes with concern that an opinion poll on missionary priorities put “meeting human need” as the most favored priority; it also put preaching as the most opposed priority, and conversion as the most controversial subject.

How easily we divide about evangelism. To some people, evangelism is what Billy Graham does and what their pastor, alas, does not do—as if the two were pulling in different directions. To some, evangelism is a rapid stream of Bible verses fired at prospective converts. Others would never think of quoting the Bible. They prefer to think that anything they do as Christians is evangelism, and that a friendly world will prefer the warm but silent witness of a Christian life to the articulate and upsetting specifics of the Christian faith. To some, evangelism is changing people so that the world will believe. To others it is changing the world so that people will believe. To some it is the sawdust trail, scalding tears, and the confessions of a broken heart. To others it is the Sunday-morning sermon and the communicants class and the public confession of Christ in the congregation of the church. These are some of the ways we divide and differ as we define evangelism.

But if, as Dr. Hoekendijk has asserted, “biblical authenticity” demands that theologians rediscover evangelism, let us make sure that the evangelism we rediscover is biblically authentic. What does the Bible say that evangelism is? If God has something to say about evangelism in his Word, it would be wise for us to listen to him first, before we choose sides and allow our preconceived notions of evangelism to push us into one or more of the straitjackets that the current debates about evangelism hold out to us.

The Bible, however, gives no quick answer to the search for a definition of evangelism. God’s word is true but not always simple. With the best of intentions we tend to oversimplify what is not that simple, like the enthusiast who objected when the great Dr. Chalmers, the Edinburgh evangelist, sent his son off to St. Andrews for an education. “No,” said the zealous friend. “The times are too urgent. Send him to the fields white for harvest. Not to school.” And Chalmers gently replied, “Who accomplishes the most? The man who goes into the forest with a dull axe, and works all day, or the man who stays home long enough to sharpen his axe, and then spends the rest of the day chopping trees?”

Before we plunge into what we think is evangelism, let us sharpen our axe for a few moments with the Word of God. What does the Bible say evangelism is?

The first surprise of Scripture for the would-be evangelist is that the word “evangelism” is not in the Bible. It does not even appear in the English language until the seventeenth century. The Christian faith, as set forth in God’s word, does not come in abstractions, in “isms”—not even as “evangelism.” The Bible is written in living color, not in gray definitions. It centers on live people, not inert conceptions. We find “evangelist” as a scriptural word, but not “evangelism.” The nearest the Bible comes to the abstract concept is a phrase in Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy (4:5). “Do the work of an evangelist,” says Paul to his closest disciple. But what kind of work is that? What do evangelists do according to Scripture?

Once again the eager student who combs the Bible for simple specifics is going to be disappointed. There are surprisingly few references to evangelists in the Bible, and only fragmentary descriptions of their work. The word “evangelist” occurs just three times.

When the Bible speaks of evangelism it uses not nouns but verbs. The stress is on action! The biblical word is the verb, “evangelize.” This is where our definition must begin.

1. Evangelism in the Bible is, first of all, preaching.

There are six different words which the Bible uses for the act of preaching. One means no more than making oneself heard (laleo); another means “announce” (diaggello); others mean “advertise” (kataggello), and “argue” (dialegomai). There is also the great word “to herald” or “proclaim” (kerusso), from which we derive our current theological favorite, the kerugma. But “the greatest word of all,” sums up Max Warren in his description of these words, “the greatest word of all is evangelize (euaggelidzo) …” (The Christian Imperative).

This is what the angels did. They evangelized. They brought glad tidings of great joy (euaggelidzo), and the shepherds watching their flocks by night heard the good news (the evangel) of a Saviour. This is also what the Saviour did. Jesus evangelized. He came preaching. His message was the good news (the evangel) of the Kingdom of God. Paul, too, describes his own ministry as preaching, or evangelizing. “I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel [literally, how I evangelized you]” (1 Cor. 15:1, 2, NEB).

Evangelism in the Bible, then, is primarily preaching. It is a ministry of the spoken word. This is why I cannot quite agree with those who identify evangelism with what some are now calling “the Christian presence,” though that too is an important ministry. There is much to be said for the quiet, pervasive influence of “the Christian presence” in the world, a presence that does not offend by frontal dogmatic assault but penetrates as silently as salt or light, without the spoken word. This is good; this is important; this is necessary. But this is not evangelism. It may be an indispensable preparation for evangelism, but it is no substitute for evangelism. Jesus was thirty years in Nazareth as a Christian presence. But the good news was not carpentry. It was not until Jesus left his carpentry and came preaching, not until the word was spoken, that the good news was heard and understood. Until then the blind did not see and the deaf did not hear. Until then the poor were not evangelized. It takes the word, not just the deed, to evangelize, according to the Bible. Evangelism is the specific, articulate presentation of the person and claims of Jesus Christ. It is literally “preaching of Jesus,” or “telling the good news about Jesus.” This is how the verb “evangelize” is used in Scripture (e.g., Act 8:35; 11:20).

2. But, secondly, evangelism in the Bible is more than preaching. It is preaching with power.

If evangelism is what the angels, and Jesus and the disciples, did as they told the good news, it is more than what we today call preaching. There was a charisma, a power in it. There were “signs following,” as the Gospel of Mark suggests (16:17). At Bethlehem with the angels, there was a sign in the sky and a brighter sign in the manger. There were signs and wonders as Jesus announced his “evangel of the Kingdom.” In the preaching of the apostles, there were similar “signs following.”

Evangelism in the strangely upsetting world of the Bible is thunder and lightning, and leaping, healing power. And we Presbyterians shift vaguely and uncomfortably in our pews when we are reminded of it. I do myself. But I have discovered from experience that whenever the Bible makes me uncomfortable, in the end the trouble always turns out to be in me, and not in the Bible.

The signs, the rushing manifestations of the power of the Spirit, may make me uncomfortable, but I believe in them because I believe the Bible, and more importantly, because I believe in the Holy Spirit. My father believed in them also because he saw them. He was a missionary pioneer, opening up vast tracts of North Korea to the very first impact of the Gospel. His evangelistic labors, therefore, more nearly resembled those of the apostles than do mine, and he saw the signs. He had not special gifts himself. He was not even a revivalist. But he saw the Spirit at work in power in the great revival of 1907, and the Church in Korea has never been the same since. “It was a great sign and wonder” wrote a Korean minister. “I saw some struggling to get up, then falling back in agony. Others again bounded to their feet to rid their souls of some long-covered sin. It seemed unwise that such confessions be made.… But there was no help for it. We were under a mysterious and awful power, helpless.…” In those great days, to the preaching was added the power; and that was evangelism.

My father saw and believed in those signs of power. But he did not make the mistake of confusing the “sign” with the Gospel. I have heard him tell the story of one of the greatest of the Korean evangelists. This man, he was convinced, had the gift of healing. But one day the man surprised him with the announcement that he was giving up his healing ministry. “Why?” he was asked. “Because God has called me to evangelize, but people are now beginning to come to me not to be evangelized but only to be healed.” When the “signs” turn men’s minds to their bodies, or to anything other than Christ, they are no longer the power of the Gospel. They have become hindrances to the Gospel.

The New Testament signs of power had this major function. They attested to Christ that men might believe. When John doubted and wondered if Jesus was really the one he was waiting for, Jesus simply pointed to the signs: “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor are evangelized.” This is the primary and indispensable biblical link between witness and service, between evangelism and good works, between the social gospel, if you will, and the preached gospel—for the two belong together in Scripture. It is only our sectarian and unbiblical separation of the two into mutually hostile camps—preaching evangelicals against social-gospel activists—that traps both sides into an indefensible posture. It polarizes and divides the preaching and the action, the word and the deed, with the tragic result that too often neither side is any longer biblically evangelizing. If I believe I am evangelizing simply by preaching, and you believe you are evangelizing simply by acting for racial justice, we are both partly right, but we are both wrong. The preaching and the good works are never, never to be isolated, one from the other. Preaching is not done in a vacuum. The Christian who does nothing for racial justice had better not try to preach in Africa. On the other hand, however socially active he may be, if he is silent about Jesus Christ, he is basically not communicating Jesus Christ. Evangelism in the Bible is preaching with the power of “signs following,” namely, mighty acts.

It is possible that I have overreached myself by equating good works and Christian service with the signs of Pentecostal power. But I would remind you again of Jesus’ own words. When John doubted, what were the signs he pointed to? “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed.” These are good works. I would further observe that it is as much of a mistake to limit the power of the Spirit to its more dramatically Pentecostal manifestations as to deny the existence of such manifestations. The Spirit “worketh when, where, and how he wishes.” Healing is no less valid a sign and a wonder when it takes place quietly in a hospital in the name of Christ than when it occurs suddenly in the court of the temple or at the altar rail. In fact, in the history of modern missions, the medical doctor has often out-evangelized not only the faith-healer but also the Christian preacher. Only, however, when the healing is not separated from “the name,” and the power not separated from the preaching.

Sixty years ago in Taegu, Korea, there was just one medical doctor, a missionary, in a tiny, inadequate hospital. Today there is still only one American medical missionary there, though when my brother returns from furlough to his hospital there will be two. But there are also in that hospital today 120 qualified Korean medical doctors. Every one of them is a Christian. Every one also belongs to the hospital’s Preaching Society. For it is the business of those Christian doctors to be able, not only to minister to human needs with their highly technical medical skills, but also to say a good word for Jesus Christ. On weekends, teams of doctors and nurses fan out into the countryside where no medical care is available. The mobile clinic carries them into villages where during the day they give free medical care to the needy, and in the evening the same doctors and nurses assist the hospital chaplain in an evangelistic service. It is no surprise to me that out of this biblical welding of the word and the work have sprung up more than a hundred and twenty new churches in the Taegu area.

The objection has often been made that to bring good works in this way into the service of evangelism is to twist Christian service out of its true shape as a beautiful, unselfish end in itself and to debase it into a cold and calculating tool of proselytism. But in the Bible good works are not an end in themselves. That kind of thinking comes from Greek philosophy, not the Christian faith.

Perversion comes only when the preaching or the power, the word or the work, witnesses to self and not to Christ. Several years ago John Coventry Smith told the story of a conversation between Howard Lowry, the late president of Wooster College, and Dr. Radhakrishnan, the Hindu philosopher who became president of India. Lowry remarked that he was sometimes embarrassed by the Christian claim of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, which is at the heart of evangelistic preaching. To say to India, where only ten million out of four hundred million are Christians, “Jesus Christ is the light of the world”—isn’t that arrogance? Is not that a subtle form of exalting ourselves, as if to say, “We only have the light.” Dr. Radhakrishnan paused and thought and replied, “Yes, but the Christian has no choice. This is what your Scriptures say; you cannot say less. You are saved from arrogance when you say it in the spirit of Jesus Christ.”

The Hindu philosopher was right. The Christian has no choice. He must evangelize, which is to preach Christ. He must preach with power, with signs following, which is to bring Christian action into the service of the Christian word. For to take service out of the context of evangelism is to take it out of the will of God, who “is not willing that any should perish.” But he must do both in the spirit of Christ.

Samuel H. Moffet is dean of the Graduate School and professor of historical theology at the Presbyterian seminary in Seoul, Korea. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and of Princeton Theological Seminary and holds teh Ph.D. from Yale University. This essay is one of four lectures he presneted to three evangelisim conferences sponsored by Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns.

Missionary education in Pakistan, largely controlled by United Presbyterians, United Methodists, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics, is about to change. But the question is how.

A few things are certain. Pakistan’s Muslim government is determined to execute reforms designed to prevent any recurrence of the revolution that ousted President Ayub Khan this spring. Reform proposals are circulating the country and in September will be finalized. Missionaries are aroused over a proposal dealing with foreign missionary schools. It asserts these “tend to spread directly and indirectly the doctrines of religion and culture which are alien to our national values and Islamic concepts of life.”

Further, the proposal is critical because Muslim educators employed by these schools often are not allowed to take part in institutional decision-making.

Debate centers over the proposal’s conclusion: “The policy should therefore aim at nationalizing the institutions”—particularly the meaning of “nationalize.”

Significant is a small exception: “This recommendation should not apply to educational institutions run entirely by Pakistani non-Muslim communities.”

In early July a German press agency reported that missionary organizations working in Pakistan were going to lose all educational institutions that hadn’t been handed over completely to Pakistani leadership. Missionaries would have to give up their work, the release contended.

A Pakistani embassy official in Washington called this “ridiculous,” saying Pakistan doesn’t intend to “take over” the religious schools. His explanation is that the prohibitive cost at these schools allows only the very rich to attend. The government would like to see that educational benefits “filter down to the poor” by controlling admissions. It also wants to eliminate problem-causing curriculum differences. The embassy spokesman stressed that no one is asking missionaries to leave.

United Presbyterian Dr. R. Park Johnson reported that his Commission on Ecumenical Missions and Relations (COEMAR) maintains three colleges in Pakistan as well as secondary schools. Twenty-five missionary educators are involved. Government officials, he claims, told him they want to nationalize administration, not curriculum. Besides, says Johnson, his schools already follow the national curriculum, a requirement for granting degrees.

Johnson admits he’s a bit worried about the future of voluntary Bible-study activities under Muslim administrators. Consequently, he is having “conversations” with government officials, from whom he expects assurances that traditional Christian activities can continue.

Fundamentalist Carl McIntire and K. L. Nasir, a Pakistani formerly associated with COEMAR who is now with McIntire (see June 7, 1968, issue, p. 44), see the proposal’s exemption of “educational institutions run entirely by Pakistani non-Muslim communities” as putting COEMAR in a tight squeeze. McIntire and Nasir, maintaining that all of the “apostate” COEMAR’s properties in Pakistan are rightfully theirs, are calling on COEMAR to “give them back.” They are asking Anglicans and United Methodists to do the same, believing all three will prefer the control of Nasir’s nationals to a Muslim government “takeover.” Why to Nasir rather than other Christian nationals? Because, claims McIntire, all Christian Pakistani nationals give allegiance to him.

McIntire is delighted: “The missionary bodies are losing the property which they used to persecute these [Nasir’s] people.… It’s a tremendous thing.… God’s taken them away from them in his providence.” But Johnson will first have to be convinced that the McIntire-Nasir “tight squeeze” actually exists before he hands over the schools.

In any case, all mission schools will be faced with the dropping of English as an official national language. Teaching will be done in Urdu and Bengali.

The reform proposals will not be ready for government acceptance until October. In the meantime, missionary organizations operating schools in Pakistan have some homework to do.

They sang, “And we’ll guard each man’s dignity, And save each man’s pride.” But except for occasional appearances of husbands of one or two members, no men attended last month’s jubilee assembly of the American Association of Women Ministers. The group’s officers, chaplain, and speakers, as well as the American Baptist Assembly staff soloist and her accompanist, were women, and they conducted the meetings, preached, lectured, and passed resolutions without consulting men.

But they talked about men. “We must not rest content until ordained women have the assurance of equality in placement of service, without discrimination, along with men members of the clergy,” declared the president in her keynote address. “There can be no equality,” said the Rev. Marrietta Mansfield, “as long as the Church continues to permit a segregated ministry.” Inequality in the ministry, the Methodist from Cloverport, Kentucky, affirmed, is a major stumbling block to ecumenicity and the effectiveness of the Church.

The ladies talked of men who reject ordination of women and men who accept it. “Even a great theologian can have some strange ideas,” said Dr. Georgia Harkness, referring to Karl Barth’s belief that women are subordinate to men by creation but equal in sin and in openness to salvation. The Methodist theologian and author told also of a clergyman who refuted the claim that women should not be ordained because Jesus chose no female disciples. “On that reasoning we would need one Judas among every twelve ministers,” he said.

The first American woman to be appointed a district superintendent of the United Methodist Church also talked of men—the forty-five who serve churches in her northern Maine district. The Rev. Margaret Henrichsen finds that men talk easily to her, perhaps more easily than to other men.

Mrs. Henrichsen, who entered the ministry after her husband died in 1943, told the AAWM members she had accepted their invitation with reservations. An organization for women ministers, she had believed, was “about as necessary as one for red-headed ministers.” But she later changed her mind and joined, an announcement that was greeted with applause and was followed by her election to the board of trustees.

She admonished the clergywomen to be “real, reverent, and revolutionary.” “Get into the world we’re in,” she urged, “not the world of Madeline Southard or even the world we knew ten years ago.”

The Rev. M. Madeline Southard, who was named frequently during the four-day convention at Green Lake, Wisconsin, had founded the association fifty years earlier, one year before the Nineteenth Amendment allowed women to vote. Today the organization has grown from eleven members to more than 300.

The diversity of ministries among the fifty clergywomen and guests who met at the American Baptist Assembly grounds was demonstrated in a panel that included an evangelist, the Rev. Victoria Booth Demarest, grand-daughter of the Salvation Army’s founder; an associate minister of the Iowa Conference of the Disciples of Christ, the Rev. Mary Ellen La Rue; an administrator of Chicago’s Urban Training Center, the Rev. Peggy Way; as well as rural, suburban, and inner-city ministers.

Despite that diversity, there was little division at the integrated, interdenominational assembly with its theme, “A Diversified Ministry to Unite a Divided World.” The generation gap was almost nonexistent; but then there were only two students present.

At the close of the conference, the women didn’t want to stop sharing stories of their ministries and encouraging one another. Finally, as they stood in a circle for communion, the Rev. Hilda Ives, a retired pastor and seminary professor, asked each one to talk about a man—Jesus Christ. A German student at a U. S. seminary recalled Jesus’ forgiveness—as demonstrated by the Dutch woman with whom she had shared a room during the convention. The Rev. J. A. Ader Appels, who operates a community center in the Netherlands, was widowed when Germans killed her husband during World War II.

JANET ROHLER

While major mission boards are retrenching in the Far East, the hand-clapping, hallelujah-shouting Pentecostals are enthusiastically expanding their missionary activity. Two hundred missionaries and pastors from thirteen East Asian countries impressively demonstrated their growing strength at the third Far Eastern Fellowship Conference of the Assemblies of God, held in Seoul, Korea, last month.

Declining a state reception proposed by the Korean government—which is interested in South Pacific fishing rights—Iroji “king” Manene Colanry, 39, of the Marshall Islands captured the attention of the Korean press at the conference when he said: “I have come as a private Christian, not a ruler.” He is one of twelve Micronesian “kings” in United States protectorate territory, eight of whom are said to be converted Pentecostals.

The Assemblies’ largest field in the Far East is the Philippines, but the Korean Assemblies are among the fastest growing. Seoul’s Full Gospel Central Church—founded only eight years ago but now the city’s second-largest Protestant congregation with almost 8,000 members—hosted the event, proudly picking up the $15,000 hotel bill for the 120 foreign delegates.

SAMUEL H. MOFFETT

Spontaneous applause, brisk handclapping, and cheers greeted the announcement that the vote for pulpit and altar fellowship with the American Lutheran Church had passed—with a little to spare—at the Missouri Synod convention in Denver last month (see News, August 1 issue, page 34).

But only twenty-four hours later, a concerted conservative effort had been mounted to rescind the fellowship action. Announcement of a committee to plan for a national convention—with September mentioned as the time and Chicago the place—was made during waning hours of the Denver meeting.

Newly named Missouri Synod president Dr. Jacob A. O. Preus immediately discounted the seriousness of the apparent split, and urged the committee to “hold off such a convention for awhile.” Corridor rumors had it that 1,000 of the denomination’s 6,000 congregations would leave or withhold up to $5 million over the issue.

Spokesman A. O. Gebauer of Chicago said the committee’s primary purpose “is to continue our struggle for a truly confessional stand on Scripture …” and cautioned alarmists not to bolt the Synod. The committee pledged itself to work for reconciliation.

Another committee member indicated reunification could occur only if the conservatives “act together and in harmony.” Chairman of the new group is Larry Marquardt, a Dundee, Illinois, layman. A war chest will be established at Redeemer Lutheran Church of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.

Ten years ago, when the fledgling Fellowship of Christian Athletes was just getting a grip on the imagination of the nation’s sports greats, the luminaries in the movement were Al Dark, Adrian Burk, Vern Law, Pepper Martin, and George Kell. And Branch Rickey, an FCA angel and founding father.

This summer, Bobby Mitchell, Bill Glass, Bobby Richardson, Paul Anderson, Cazzie Russell, Tom Landry, Jerry Stovall, and Paul Dietzel are a few of the prestigious athletes on the roster of those involved in the FCA’s record number of conferences.

The first issue of the Christian Athlete a decade ago reported that a thousand persons had taken part in a Dallas rally. This spring, the magazine said 240,000 were directly reached during an FCA Weekend of Champions in the same city.

FCA’s rapid growth—especially in the past four or five years—is impressive: Sixteen week-long conferences this summer—up from last year’s nine; 1,500 official huddle and fellowship groups meeting regularly around the nation; and FCA support groups in 175 cities. Ever since the first national conference in Estes Park, Colorado, drew 256 athletes and coaches in 1956, the FCA has been trading on the belief that young, aspiring athletes will respond to the example and words of intelligent, strong men with a big faith who speak softly of their love for Jesus Christ.

Conference leadership includes both Protestants and Catholics. To attend, a boy must be certified by his coach and by his pastor or priest. “We have the most fundamental and the most liberal,” explained FCA associate director Gary Warner. No invitations to accept Christ are given at conferences, but “we try to center on the person of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.” Most decisions are made in one-to-one counseling situations, but Warner says there is no pressure. The FCA attempts to “complement or supplement” the local church rather than to compete with it.

Last month, the FCA called some new signals: About 150 of the nation’s pro, college, and high-school mentors gathered for the first annual coaches’ clinic at Estes Park to discuss motivation, morale, problem athletes, discipline, and mental attitude. Many told amiable FCA executive director James Jeffrey it was the best clinic they’d attended. The innovation also had a subtle hook. It was geared to reach coaches new to the FCA (notably, only about thirty of those attending had even been on FCA mailing lists before), and, hopefully, to enlist leaders to work with FCA’s growing coterie of kids at the local level.

On the drawing board: A new headquarters for the twenty full-time FCA staffers now crammed into a Kansas City, Missouri, bank-building office (the FCA has a site in Marshall, Indiana); plans to reach junior-high-age boys; and a shattering of the sex barrier—groups for girl athletes.

The board of directors * would like more blacks on the FCA team. The first Negro staffer, former Baylor University halfback John Westbrook, said to be the first black footballer in the Southwest Conference, recently was hired with this in mind.

Part of FCA’s success is that it scores with lesser-knowns as well as with Wheaties endorsers. For example, Lloyd Engel of Escalon, a veteran coach at a small high school in California’s central valley, keeps returning to conferences year after year—bringing new boys each time. “The FCA has been a tremendous boost to my Christian faith,” he says. And he obviously enjoys the easy fellowship with famous men he otherwise would never meet.

Coach Travis Raven told a skull session at Estes Park about his Austin, Texas, high school’s pass offense, then described to colleagues how association with the FCA had changed his life and made witnessing easier: “I used to be embarrassed to say that Christ is my Saviour and that I read the Bible. Now I’m not.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

It’s like going to church on Easter.

Whenever the White House holds a religious service, the nation’s elite show up—church-goers and otherwise. Fine dress abounds. The East Room offers the elegance of golden tapestries, spacious windows, flower-decked fireplaces. And many of those who attend spend as much time people-watching as worshiping.

President Richard Nixon began the practice of holding occasional Sunday services at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue shortly after his inauguration—in part, at least, to solve security problems involved in presidential church attendance. By the end of July, ten services had been held and the press was calling them a “national institution.”

At first, Mr. Nixon drew fire from liberal churchmen for so-called narrowness in his selection of speakers (the first three: Billy Graham, Richard Halverson of Washington’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, and House of Representatives chaplain Edward Latch).

That criticism has diminished, however, as the list has been expanded to include National Council of Churches general secretary Edwin Espy, Terence Cardinal Cooke of New York, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein of Jewish Theological Seminary, and Dr. Paul Smith, president of Whittier (Friends) College in California.

More recent criticism has centered on alleged dishwater ecumenicity in many services. Attenders sometimes feel efforts to satisfy all religious tastes have dulled the pungency of the preaching.

On the Sunday Rabbi Finkelstein spoke, the congregation sang the Christian “Doxology” (with the rabbi’s approval). On the Sunday of the moon landing. Dr. Smith’s sermon contained hardly a reference to God or religion. Most Sundays the sermons obviously avoid criticism of host Nixon.

This, plus the American tradition of church-state separation, caused the Washington Post to criticize the White House services in an editorial as inappropriate “in the politically charged atmosphere of the residence of a President.”

Public reaction, however, generally has been good, with numerous letters of praise for the innovation. “Everyone we talk to thinks it’s a delightful idea,” said a press officer. “For one thing, it gives White House staff family members (who usually never see a president) a chance to meet the Nixons. A lot of them are invited each time—and they love it.”

What takes place at this new American institution, the White House service? A typical Sunday:

10:45A.M. A staffer led the press pool into the East Room. An organist was playing as 350 persons waited quietly. First impression: So many VIPs (the Dirksens, the Burgers, the Agnews, the Mansfields, the Thurmonds, the …). Second impression: Everyone looking around to see who else was there.

10:50. Mr. Nixon entered and introduced the participants. He called it “an historic day” (the moon landing) and referred to the speaker (Paul Smith) as “the professor who most inspired me.”

10:53. The congregation sang the Doxology. Weakly. Then sat down.

10:55. Everyone stood right back up for Senator Mark Hatfield’s prayer. He prayed that the nations would “trust not in the power of their arms but in the Prince of Peace,” lest “we perfect the means for destroying human life and then believe we have found security.” He also asked God “to permit the invasion of the Holy Spirit.”

10:58. Everyone sang the “Navy Hymn” (“Lord, guard and guide the men who fly/Through the great spaces in the sky”), starting softly, ending loudly.

11:01. Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman read from Genesis 1—the words he and his crew sent to earth while circling the moon last Christmas Eve.

11:04. Smith spoke on “Reaching for the Moon.” He compared the Apollo 11 trip to the President’s upcoming Pacific tour. “Our intrepid President himself will soon go into orbit reaching boldly for the moon of peace. God grant that he, too, may return in glory.” In the next-to-last row, an elder statesman dozed. Next to him, a lady stared absently out the window.

11:12. The congregation stood again to sing “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Most reporters were silent.

11:14. Congressman John Buchanan, a Baptist minister from Alabama, gave the benediction. He prayed for the safe return of the astronauts and for “victory over man’s ancient enemies of hunger, disease, tyranny, and war.”

11:16. The service ended, dignitaries formed reception lines, and guests crowded into the Blue Room, the Green Room, and the State Dining Room for coffee, orange juice, rolls, and a chance to shake the President’s hand.

Mr. Nixon visited a minute or two with most of the guests, often slowing the line. He appeared tanned, signed occasional autographs (with a look of resignation), and talked as animatedly after two hours of hand-shaking as he had at first. Mrs. Nixon, the Smiths, and the Burgers also greeted worshipers.

1:15. The line of guests had dwindled to a few reporters waiting to ask the President how he felt about Senator Edward Kennedy’s accident. He made no comment, said he was too busy reading eighteen books for his Asia trip. The other guests had gone home for more star-gazing, this time at Armstrong and Aldrin—on the moon.

JAMES HUFFMAN

If YOUTHEXPO had come off as planned, 10,000 Lutheran Church in America young people—most of them white and non-urban—would have massed in Detroit’s giant Cobo Hall for one hot, mid-August week. They would have been bombarded with exhibitions (drug addiction to Motown records) and mass happenings (Mrs. Coretta King, to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles). They would have “celebrated life” and “become alive to the world,” especially its black urban problems.

But only 3,158 had registered by June 19, and six days later a tom cabinet voted to scrub the venture. The answer to “Why only 3,158?” is a lesson in white anxiety and black suspicion.

Officials cite “fear of the city” as the number-one reason. Parents fearing a “black thing” wrote letters, and even the Illinois Synod Youth Committee called for cancellation because “fear of the city is legitimate.”

Rumors that James Forman was involved and that Mrs. King was going to call for draft-card burning circulated widely and convinced predominantly rural and small-town pastors that YOUTHEXPO was no place for youngsters. Other common responses were: “Where is the presence of Christ?” and “Will the SDS take over?”

YOUTHEXPO’s most serious snag came from the Detroit-based Association of Black Lutheran Churchmen, irate over manager Clair Hoifjeld’s failure to contact them. Hoifjeld’s conciliatory offer to place a black on the cabinet was called only an “attempt to salvage and legitimize what you are going to do … a whitewash.” The ABLC added that because “you have failed to see the potential explosiveness of 10,000 white people coming to Detroit in the summer that could have ramifications of national rebellion, we will do all in our power to prevent black youth from participating, in order to protect white folk.”

YOUTHEXPO ignored the signs but insufficient registration finally ground the gears to a halt. Hoifjeld is not at all ready to say YOUTHEXPO failed. He points to little YOUTHEXPOs springing up. Another cabinet member, Pauline Redmond of Detroit, is frustrated and bitter; she may leave the Lutheran Church. She says: “We thought they were ready for confrontation, but all they really wanted was their Sunday social. We overestimated the maturity of the church.”

ROBERT E. FRIEDRICH, JR.