What is a “Christian missionary”? A Christian missionary is a person who feels called by God to communicate to others by lip and by life, on some frontier of the world, the good news of the Gospel of Christ. He becomes a “missionary” when he is set apart by the Church, or by an association of fellow Christians, to dedicate his every talent to the task of so presenting Christ to other people that they shall accept him as Saviour and Lord and become members of the Christian Community.…

Not only, however, must the Christian Church be represented in the world by missionaries whom it sends out and supports; it must itself be missionary. In consonance with its nature, in loyalty to its Head, the Church must be so inspired by its worship of God, and so illumined by its insight into God and the world, that it shall be, in every epoch and in every place, the vehicle of God’s redeeming love in Jesus Christ. Neither the true worship of God by a true Community of God, nor a true understanding of God by the whole Christian Community, can become a substitute for the missionary service of God. Called by God to participate in his redemptive activity, the Church must, in lowliness and reverence, and in dependence upon the Holy Spirit, dedicate herself to the fulfillment of her redemptive function.…

It is surely not an unwarranted presupposition that, if the Church is to be “in very deed the Church,” if it is to match the secular faith of Communism, if it is to be truly relevant to the deepest needs of men in this revolutionary time, Christians should be eager to communicate their faith and should win the right to be heard regarding it. This right is won when non-Christians, or merely nominal Christians, are eager to know what Christians have to say because they have learned to respect them for what they are. Nothing, on the other hand, is more tragic for the Church or for Christians than when “outsiders,” concerned but disillusioned people, are heard to remark or imply, “I cannot hear what you say; what you are sounds too loudly in my ear.”—Excerpted by permission from Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal, by John A. Mackay, president emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary, (Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 166–68, 179.

Emil Brunner carried neo-orthodoxy to the Anglo-Saxon world and to Asia

The total sinfulness of the natural man does not consist in the fact that all he thinks and believes is false, but in the fact that he is wholly unable to distinguish between the true and the false in his understanding of himself or of life. Therefore one to whom the truth of Christ has been granted has the task of making this distinction, and in so doing he has to explain the meaning of the Christian message. And this is the task of “missionary theology”.…

So Emil Brunner reflected the world import of his theology in The Christian Doctrine of God (Westminster Press, 1950, p. 102), and these well-turned sentences describe what was the standing concern of the influential Swiss theologian until his death at seventy-seven during Holy Week.

Brunner’s body was laid to rest in Zürich, not far from Winterthur, his birthplace, or from the university where he gained international fame as an exponent of “dialectical theology.” Because this view was pioneered by Karl Barth (anticipated by Sören Kierkegaard), Brunner was once known as Barth’s most famous student. But soon he became an independent voice for the “theology of crisis,” as it came to be called, leaving little doubt that his was no mere disgruntled revision of Barth’s main motifs.

Barth and Brunner shared a common emphasis on divine transcendence and initiative, the centrality of Christ, the sovereignty and holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, and justification by faith. Against the long influence of Hegelian philosophy and in support of certain aspects of Reformation theology, both emphasized the self-revealing God and divine-human confrontation. They dedicated themselves not only to denigrating modernism, but also to switching the concern of Protestant theology from religion in general to the disclosure of God in Christ, and to the restoration of religious interest in the uniqueness of the Christian revelation.

Yet Brunner offered a distinctive option within dialectical dogmatics. He was the author of twenty-five volumes in German, fifteen of them translated into English and some into other languages, and of three volumes in English only. His writings, familiarity with English, and wide travelling helped to popularize his views. Lectures in the Anglo-Saxon world and Asia extended the neo-orthodox impact. He had studied in Berlin and New York (where he was the first exchange student at Union Seminary after World War I) as well as in Zürich. Upon his later return to America, he gave strong support to Reinhold Niebuhr’s assault on the liberal illusion of man’s perfectibility. His Princeton appointment in 1938–39 as guest lecturer in the Charles Hodge chair of systematic theology drew fire from evangelicals who viewed as naïve President John Mackay’s assurances that the Swiss theologian set in bold relief “the great verities of the evangelical faith.”

Brunner’s cleavage with Barth emerged as a prominent feature of his teaching. While both rejected the natural theology of Roman Catholicism and held that there is no revelation without personal response to divine confrontation, Brunner insisted on the reality of general revelation. Barth’s unqualified Nein! dramatized their differences. The theological consequences of Brunner’s emphasis on general revelation were far-reaching. Although a pervasive dialectic required an unstable relation of revelation to science, faith to history, and theology to philosophy, Brunner combined dogmatics and apologetics, and was more eager than Barth to relate theological and social concerns. He deplored Barth’s failure to speak out vigorously against Communism.

Brunner’s acceptance of general revelation, on the one hand, and his qualification of miracle (he rejected the Virgin Birth), on the other, brought about a larger interest in him than in Barth among American liberals. Yet in America, in contrast to Europe, modernism viewed neo-orthodoxy as a stimulus to revision rather than a challenge to surrender, not because “reason” was demonstrably on the side of modernism, but because of the instability of neo-orthodoxy. For the dialectical theology that rejected biblical authority, propositional revelation, and objective truth still claimed to escape subjectivism. To some Brunner seemed too much a biblicist and too dogmatic, to others too experiential, to command a real break with liberalism. Yet in the Midwest some theologians still recall a meeting of Chicago-area divinity professors in the early 1940s—their institutions then still dominated mainly by liberals and humanists—when Brunner boldly threw down the gauntlet: “Modernism leads to nihilism; give me time and I can prove it.” Nobody took up his challenge. But thereafter the number of deserters to “Niebuhr’s bandwagon” and to neo-orthodoxy began to multiply.

Despite the frustrating tension between objectivity and subjectivity in Brunner’s dialectic—swiftly exploited by existentialist rivals—he ventured to systematize his positions in a three-volume systematic theology. In this he sought to speak as a Reformed theologian, although he broke with aspects of Reformation theology as fully as with the Scholastic theology that preceded it. Brunner disavowed any “final theology” and asserted that theology must be continually “reformed.” He completed The Christian Doctrine of God and The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption. But because of the difficulty of eschatology, the final volume of his Dogmatics, The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation, was delayed and originally appeared in segments: first, The Misunderstanding of the Church; then Eternal Hope. The latter volume reflected the tragedy that darkened his later years. The loss of his son in a railway accident, he wrote, made “this theological problem a burning issue of personal life.”

He offered his “outline of eschatology” as an effort “to express … without substantially modifying it, what the apostles proclaimed to their day and generation as the great abiding hope,” and also as “the fruit of the wrestling of a simple believing Christian who, assailed by the sorrowful experience of death, has sought the consolation of the Gospel” (Eternal Hope, Westminster Press, 1954, p. 220).

Few evangelical scholars felt that Brunner wholly achieved the high biblical aim set forth in Eternal Hope, but his announced intention could only command evangelical respect. As he put it, he wished to induce “modern humanity, so bankrupt of hope, to turn to the Gospel and its great promise for the future, which offers the only solution to the hopeless position of the world today.” The words recall an early appearance in Princeton University chapel; he had been uncertain about a theme, he said, until “the Holy Spirit touched me on the shoulder and said: ‘Emil, are you ashamed of the Gospel?’ ” Brunner proceeded to preach on the text, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.…”

After two years of teaching in Tokyo, health problems forced Brunner’s premature retirement, and a stroke in 1956 greatly curtailed his creative writing.

It is one of the ironies of American theology that the stilling of great voices that long proclaimed God speaks now coincides with the emergence of the vanguard that loudly proclaims God is dead. Between them stands Bultmann and his subjective, existentialist interpretation, which Barth and Brunner were powerless to forestall.

The lesson to be learned is that the loss of scriptural revelation is, in the long run, the loss of the self-revealing God as well. Brunner thought that emphasis on the self-revealing God could sustain a theology linked to the sacred-historical revelational faith of the Bible despite his rejection of divinely revealed truths. But the tide of recent theology has proved him wrong. In his volume A New Apologetics: An Analysis and Appraisal of the Eristic Theology of Emil Brunner (Kampen, Kok, 1955), P. G. Schrotenboer convincingly argues that the dialectical contention that faith has no propositional truth but only a person for its object, not only precludes believing in the Scriptures as Christ and Paul did but also is “a step in the direction of the abandonment of Christianity” (p. 214). The need therefore remains for a theology with profounder loyalties to the Bible. And to this larger opportunity, Brunner’s “missionary theology” points the way with his own epigrammatic remark, never fully pursued, that “the fate of the Bible is the fate of Christianity.”

Trouble In The Churches

“Are the Churches in Trouble?,” an overview of American Christianity in U. S. News and World Report (April 18 issue), notes that disturbing cracks are beginning to appear in the surface of church unity efforts. Americans are not attending church as before, and congregations are split on attempts to unify churches and to “modernize” faith.

The ambivalent outlook is summarized in the views of (1) a Jewish scholar who declares in the current issue of Judaism that the Christian era has come to an end; (2) a Baptist minister in Georgia who warns that “the twentieth century may parallel the fifth … as another ‘dark age’ of negligible religious impact on civilization”; and (3) some clergymen who believe that the present-day religious unrest may issue in “a new Reformation.”

The feature interview with evangelist Billy Graham carried by U. S. News in its April 25 issue combines the warnings of doom with the remnants of hope in a biblical summons to personal religious renewal. Graham does not lose himself in the abstractions of the intellectuals or the aphorisms of the politicians but strikes directly into the bedrock of the human predicament. Few should be surprised that Doubleday has already printed more than 600,000 copies of his World Aflame.

Lawlessness: A Bad Sign

We seem rapidly to be approaching a time like that spoken of in Judges 17:6, when “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

Months ago, New York City suffered a needless subway strike that wrought irreparable damage to the economy and life of that city. The brief imprisonment of labor-union officials was, unfortunately, not accompanied by the imposition of heavy fines, which might have been far more effective.

More recently the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen conducted an illegal and costly but brief strike that further evidenced a high degree of union irresponsibility. Stiff fines brought to a quick end this obfuscation of the acknowledged need to end featherbedding operations.

In another incident, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., admitted that his seizure of a Chicago apartment house was illegal, and sought to justify this “supra-legal” act in terms of a higher legality unknown to American law. However good his intentions, however bad conditions of the apartment house, however culpable the landlord, Dr. King was ill-advised to take the law into his own hands.

Lawlessness is a sign of our times, a bad sign that needs correction by the exercise of greater personal responsibility and by the impartial administration of existing laws.

The Old Money Morality

Public confidence in business ethics has of late been rudely shaken. The public was first dismayed at the ethics of pharmaceutical companies that marketed insufficiently tested dangerous drugs with improper labeling and misleading advertising. The reach for profits apparently overcame concern for public health.

Hard on this came the shocking news that several automobile companies were recalling approximately two million cars because they had been sold with defective wheels, defective steering apparatus, and sticky accelerators that sometimes failed to release completely when the driver lifted his foot. One company alone recalled a million and a half cars, reaching as far back as its 1964 models—which have been on the road a long time. The industry’s irresponsible desire for profits shows—just as reckless driving shows—a defective concern for human life. Verily, the love of money is still the root of much evil.

A Master Of Preaching

This magazine has been singularly favored in its regular contributors, among whom Andrew W. Blackwood, who died in his eighty-fourth year on March 28, was one of the most distinguished. A master teacher of preaching, Dr. Blackwood enriched the whole Church. In many pulpits throughout the land, his former students at Louisville and Princeton seminaries and at Temple University are practicing what he taught them about the art of preparing responsible, biblical sermons. And through his books he instructed a great multitude of ministers.

At the heart of Dr. Blackwood’s life and teaching was unswerving devotion to the evangelical faith and to the Bible. In an essay in our third issue, he described evangelical preaching as “God’s way of meeting the needs of sinful men through the proclamation of his revealed truth, by one of his chosen messengers,” and then went on to say, “Preaching as the proclamation of God’s revealed truth means that the man in the pulpit makes known to others what he has received from God, mainly through the written Word and there through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in response to the prayer of faith.” Thus he put in a nutshell a prescription for the greater health of the pulpit.

In his own preaching and in his teaching of homiletics, both in the classroom and through his writings, Dr. Blackwood was faithful to this high concept of preaching. We are grateful for his many contributions to our pages and treasure the memory of his loyal friendship.

“The population explosion, threatened nuclear destruction, emergent nations, racial turmoil, moral and theological revolution—all these cry out for the living Christ.”

One of the great evangelical outbursts of modern times—and one from which the church today may learn much—began in 1886, when the Student Volunteer Movement came into being at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts. Three years before, Robert P. Wilder, a student at Princeton University, had organized a small group of friends who had declared their willingness to become missionaries, and daily Wilder and his sister had prayed for a thousand volunteers for the foreign field.

Their watchword, which originated in an expression used by Wilder’s father, was “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation.” Adopted by the new movement and used as the title of a book by John R. Mott (who along with Robert E. Speer was early associated with Wilder), the words became one of the great slogans in Christian history. They voiced a heroic challenge as thousands of the finest young men and women from leading colleges and universities volunteered for missionary service.

The movement spread rapidly. Before 1920 more than 5,000 young people from American colleges alone had gone out as foreign missionaries through the Student Volunteer Movement. A similar ferment had been working in England, particularly through the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union, out of which years later the Inter-Varsity Fellowship and its American counterpart, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, came.

The response to the watchword, “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” was essentially transdenominational. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the word “ecumenical” had not yet come into the prominence it now enjoys. But the Student Volunteer Movement and much of the service rendered by its products was ecumenical in that Christians of various traditions were united in common loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ and worked together to make his Gospel known. Theirs was an ecumenism without a compelling urge for merger of churches. Something of its spirit was exemplified by the China Inland Mission, which attracted many student volunteers and in which Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others followed their own church traditions while united in a common effort. (Today this practical ecumenism continues in the Overseas Missionary Fellowship—successor to the China Inland Mission—and is also carried out in many countries by evangelical workers representing missions affiliated with the EFMA and the IFMA as well as with the denominations.) But the development of ecumenism as a distinct movement somehow failed to perpetuate the vision of evangelizing the world in a single generation; the torch was somehow dropped, the evangel compromised in some quarters, and evangelism at home and abroad neglected.

By the 1930s, the influence of the Student Volunteer Movement had begun to wane. Perhaps the rise of modernism and, later, the radical displacement and disillusionment brought about by the Second World War contributed to its decline. Today many take it for granted that the heroic challenge of Christian missions no longer appeals to youth and that such agencies as the Peace Corps have superseded the challenge of the global proclamation of Christ. The falsity of this is demonstrated by the great student missionary conferences held at the University of Illinois under the auspices of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and also by the many young men and young women who are giving themselves to the cause of world evangelism. Yet even here there are dismaying signs. While denominational boards have long faced a shortage of mission candidates, now independent missions are beginning to experience a decrease of prospective workers. And so, at a time of the world’s desperate need for Christ, fewer are willing to give up everything to make him known.

Thus the question arises, “Shall we revive the slogan?” Shall we revive it not just as a form of words but as a valid, realizable, and compelling goal not only for students but for every committed Christian?

Before considering an answer, it would be well to think about what the slogan means. Those who used it so effectively did not expect every human being in their generation to become a Christian. They were not advocating superficial witness, nor did they undervalue long-range work such as educational and medical missions. “ ‘What is meant,’ said Wilder, ‘is simply this: the presenting of the Gospel in such a manner to every soul in this world that the responsibility for what is done with it shall no longer rest upon the Christian church, or any individual Christian, but shall rest on each man’s head for himself’.… By ‘this generation’ the early volunteers meant their own lifetime” (A Cambridge Movement, by J. C. Pollock, p. 133).

If in the 1880s and in the early 1900s it was timely to speak of “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” how much more timely it is today. The population explosion, threatened nuclear destruction, emergent nations, racial turmoil, moral and theological revolution—all these cry out for the living Christ. Logically the question about reviving the slogan rests upon two subsidiary questions: (1) Is the slogan still relevant? (2) Is it possible to achieve?

By no means every churchman will answer the first question affirmatively. Advocates of the new morality and “the death of God,” those who are committed to the secular society or who elevate social reform to gospel status instead of insisting upon it as the essential outcome of the Gospel, will consider the renewal of the call to evangelize the world in this generation supremely irrelevant. Nevertheless, the challenge will not down. For Christians who are committed to the historic faith of the Bible, for those who know that trust in Jesus Christ makes all the difference in this world and in the world to come—and there are many all over the earth—the slogan can still be a mighty summons to action. In the scale of Christian values, a need constitutes a call. In Christian obedience the word of the Master is binding. Nothing has happened in this space age to alter in the slightest the command of Jesus Christ to preach the Gospel to the whole world.

But what about the realization of the slogan? Is it not quixotic to think that the globe with its 3.3 billion human beings multiplying at about 2 per cent a year (65 million at present) can be evangelized within this generation? Moreover, the growth of the church during recent decades has been terribly slow. At the turn of the century Christians were estimated at 35 per cent of the world’s population; now, six decades later, the proportion has fallen to about 30 per cent. If the rate of decline continues, by the year 2000, Christians will be 20 per cent of mankind. And yet—the slogan is realizable.

It is realizable because of the kind of age this is and because of the kind of commission Christians have. For the first time in human history, the majority of mankind can now be reached almost instantly, and no part of the earth is more than forty-eight hours in travel time from any other part. Modern means of communication and travel make the evangelization of the world in a single generation more possible now than ever before.

Consider the kind of commission we Christians have. Jesus Christ never promised his followers that the whole world would be converted through their efforts. But he ordered them to take his message to the whole world and to do it in the power of the Spirit. Unless universalism is assumed, it must be granted that some who hear the Gospel will be lost. Our commission is to preach and teach the Gospel but none can be forced into discipleship. Worldwide proclamation, yes, and this through Christ’s worldwide body made up of men of every tribe and nation who are in Jesus Christ through faith—this is the realizable objective. But it is realizable only through a radical rethinking of the whole enterprise of evangelism.

The greatest single factor inhibiting the evangelization of the world is the narrow concept of Christian witness that pervades practically all churches. The basic reason why Christianity is being outdistanced by the population is that most church members consider evangelism the business of professionals rather than the responsibility of every believer. The World Congress on Evangelism can do no less than urge Christians to take, as did John Wesley in his day, the whole world for their parish. What is needed is for the whole Church to begin witnessing—at home, abroad, everywhere.

No greater hindrance to the evangelization of the world in this generation exists than to limit the responsibility for it to men like Billy Graham and others to whom God has given special talents for reaching the multitudes, or to confine witness to Christ’s saving truth to the ordained. The idea that evangelism is chiefly to be done in churches and public meetings is a deadly inhibitor of the worldwide outreach of the Christian message. The Church must use new techniques, ranging from neighbors’ drinking coffee together, through special inner-city witness, electronic communication, and literacy programs, to penetration of the world of art and intellect on the one hand and of industry on the other hand. Not only at home where it is confronted by the indifference of secularism but also abroad where it is faced with the implacable opposition of Islam, the smothering syncretism of Buddhism, or the fierce challenge of Communism, the Church must break away from crippling dependence upon the ordained and the professionals to make the Gospel known.

Shall we revive the slogan? If the answer is a resolute affirmative, it must be an affirmative spoken with deep humility and in honest recognition of the cost. Humanly speaking, it seems impossible for Christians to manifest sufficient unanimity of witnessing power to evangelize the world in a generation. But let it not be forgotten that in the early centuries, to a degree since unparalleled, every Christian was a missionary. The call is not just to the nominal church member but to the minority of regenerate Christians all over the world who, minority though they be, yet comprise a powerful multitude for God. It is they who, energized by the Holy Spirit, must break the chains of custom that have bound so many to silence and join in making Jesus Christ known in this their own time.

Yes, the evangelization of the world in this generation is possible. There may not be another generation. A biblical eschatology holds out the possibility (not the certainty) that this generation may be the last, and destructive forces at large in the world underline the urgency of these days. But whether or not the consummation is at hand, Christ holds us responsible to be his witnesses “to the very ends of the earth.” Let the slogan be revived; let the task be done.

The church’s primary task is to evangelize the world, to preach Christ at home and abroad. But while the need continues, the present-day counsel of defeatism and gloom is taking its toll.

The population explosion, which has led to a rapid increase in the number of unbelievers, and the lethargy caused by a growing universalism that salves consciences and blunts the sense of urgency in mission are among the factors now having a great effect upon Christians and the Church. Many of us are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and the indifference and sophistication of an age in which a growing number feel that God and his Gospel are at best of secondary importance.

We need to take stock, first, of our obligation to preach the Gospel to all nations, and then of the assets at our disposal. Once this is done, pessimism will be replaced by confidence in God’s promises, and lagging attempts will be turned to Spirit-inspired activity.

Christians need to be realistic. They should heed our Lord’s command and be sensitive to the needs of a generation far removed from a knowledge of Christ.

The world might be likened to a person with a dislocated joint. The joint is painful, and its function is lost. Spiritually dislocated from God, the world is confused and frustrated because it knows neither the cause nor the cure of its suffering. Many persons I knew as a missionary in China tried to treat a dislocation with a poultice of pitch; and the world’s attempts to solve its problems without considering God are just as mistaken and futile.

This is where the Church comes into the picture, and she should give herself to the task of healing with unabated zeal. Instead of trying to relieve symptoms, however, she should see the cause and proclaim the God-given cure.

But let us be realistic. Is not the task too great? Are not the obstacles too numerous? Are we not too weak to bring about a change that can be effective against the overwhelming odds?

After Pentecost a handful of men, most of them uneducated and probably unprepossessing, went out to preach, and in a few generations the world was turned upside down for Christ.

What did they have that we do not have? Why was their witness so effective? They were a tiny minority confronted by the hostility of the Jews and the ridicule of the pagan Gentiles. But men were converted, the Church was established, and Christians helped bring about tremendous social changes. Did these uneducated and ordinary men have something we have lost, or perhaps have failed to use?

We have the same assets today. And we will be just as effective as the early disciples if we use them.

These men had an aura about them. They had been with Jesus, and they carried in their hearts and on their faces the sign of redeemed men, men who had had a personal experience with the risen Saviour. They had had the privilege of seeing, talking with, and even touching the One who they knew had been crucified and buried. Through simple faith we can have the same experience. Christ can be as real to us as he was to them, and transform our lives.

We have the same God these men had. He may be dead for those who have never known him, but we know that he lives and that by his grace we too live. We know him personally, and we are aware of his promise to be with us, even to the end of the age.

He is the God of whom the psalmist said, “from everlasting to everlasting thou art God” (Ps. 90:2c, RSV). He is the One of whom Isaiah wrote, “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable” (Isa. 40:28). He is the “Father of lights in whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas. 1:17).

We have the same risen Lord. The resurrection was an ever-recurring theme in the preaching of the disciples. Christ had risen from the dead, and his resurrection was the crowning proof of the validity of the Cross. How much do we stress this fact? Have we permitted the scientific approach of our day to blunt the belief that we have a supernatural religion that naturally has supernatural manifestations? Is our God so small that we look at him through a test tube, or seek answers about him from a computer?

We have the same Gospel, which the Apostle Paul said is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith” (Rom. 1:16). It is the same Gospel that Paul summed up in the wonderfully simple and clear statement, “… that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4). It is the same Gospel that today brings conviction, conversion, and redemption whenever and wherever it is preached—not to all men (nor did it in our Lord’s time) but to all who heed the Spirit’s call.

We have the same Holy Spirit, the One who was the power behind the apostles’ preaching and who is able and willing to make our preaching and teaching effective if only we will place programs, organizations, personalities, and activities in their rightful secondary place. The disciples were commanded to stay in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came upon them and they were baptized with his power: this was the equipment necessary for fulfilling the Lord’s command to make disciples of all nations. Our failures today stern largely from our forgetting that it is “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zech. 4:6).

We have the same Holy Scriptures, which continue to be the Sword of the Spirit wherever used and believed. The difference today is that we have a fuller revelation of divine truth than did the early disciples. They had only the Old Testament, and to this they referred for authority and for what they knew to be divine truth. We have the Old and the New Testaments, in which is revealed the Christ, faith in whom has brought salvation to all who believe.

We have the same privilege and power of prayer—direct communication with the throne of grace, where there is help, guidance, and blessing for all who seek it.

Since we, like those men who went out to shake the world for Jesus Christ, have all these assets, why has the cause of world evangelization lagged? The inevitable conclusion is that we are not making use of what God has provided. Weak in faith, distracted by world conditions, sophisticated to the point of disdaining the simplicity of the first-century approach (sometimes even feeling, perhaps, that we need not heed our Lord’s command to preach the Gospel to all nations because “people are already saved”), we are guilty of disobedience, or of unwillingness to give our all to Christ and go out as he commanded to tell men that Christ has the answer to personal needs as well as those of the entire world.

It can be done. With the assets we have from God, it can be done.

Bell, Book and incense

The Matter Of Control

I was leafing through some textbooks of philosophy, on the trail of something different on the Renaissance, and in due time I came to Rogers. His History of Philosophy, published in 1932, is still good, though dated.

Rogers is very readable, and the first thing I knew I was reading all sorts of things I hadn’t set out to read. Pretty soon I had touched on the Renaissance, the Reformation, Bacon, Paracelsus, and Alchemy (alchemy is not a philosophy). The understatement of the week is that this particular period in history is a very interesting one, with its breakthrough from the Middle Ages into our own day.

What surprised me was to recognize for the first time (and I can’t think why it took me so long) that, although Bacon has always been looked upon as a kind of scientific thinker at the beginning of the new science, he wasn’t too scientific at that. His biographers seem to agree that his personal life was atrocious, and I suppose the best thing you can say for Bacon is that he was a typical Renaissance man living in Britain instead of Italy. He understood the fast buck, all the angles, and the infighting in high-level politics, and he was not above crossing up some of his friends as well as some of his enemies. It is true that he gave a few guidelines on how to be very careful in scientific pursuits, but the sum of the matter is that, in spite of giving us considerable help along the way, he was still running loose. Science, such as it was, in spite of Bacon’s concern about the “idols,” still had to be brought under control. Paracelsus and his alchemy were just another illustration of the same amazing scientific interest and amazing looseness.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to rethink the modern age—especially the theology—with a rerun of the Renaissance man and the Renaissance atmosphere. There is plenty of excitement around these days but not much control.

EUTYCHUS II

Keeping Up With The Joneses

It is hardly to be expected that Bob Jones University, with its strong emphasis upon obedience to the Word of God, would get a fair representation from CHRISTIANITY TODAY … upon whose editorial staff is Dr. Nelson Bell, Dr. Graham’s hysterical father-in-law, a man who is never hampered by facts or hindered by logic when he launches his vehement attacks upon those who refuse to burn incense before the shrine of his son-in-law.

However, what is surprising is that a magazine that prides itself upon its scholarship would publish so shallow an editorial as appeared on page 28 of your April 1 issue. It hardly behooves you in this editorial to attack fundamentalism as “an emotional mentality,” since it is very difficult to imagine anything more emotional and less logical than this editorial.

You refer to the President of Bob Jones University as “leading with his chin.” Now, Bob Jones University, in its opposition to Dr. Graham, leads with the Word of God. It is most significant that neither you nor any of the other defenders of Dr. Graham have ever been willing to face up to the Scriptures which we quote—Scriptures which condemn Dr. Graham’s friendship for and support of infidels and unbelievers and the turning of his converts back to false teachers.…

BOB JONES, JR.

President

Bob Jones University

Greenville, S. C.

I read with approval your fine editorial wherein you wrote … “We have no desire to embarrass Bob Jones University; its spokesmen are able to do that for themselves.”

And they most assuredly did embarrass themselves when they conferred a doctorate on … Governor George Wallace of Alabama!… How can such a “hard-shell” unchristian institution call itself Christian, when it supports a demagogue like Governor Wallace, refuses to admit Negroes, and has one of its Jones boys read a “mock prayer against Billy Graham”? The Joneses must have halitosis of the intellect!…

JOHN F. PALM

Port Charlotte, Fla.

The information contained in the article (News, Apr. 1 issue) about Bob Jones University was most revealing, and I believe will be helpful to a great many people.

No doubt you are aware that Bob Jones, Jr., labels anyone who disagrees with him as a “nut.” So, with your editorial, “A Regrettable Spectacle,” I believe I can say “Welcome Aboard”.…

A. WAYNE JOHNSON

Coordinator

MEN of the Church of God

Anderson, Ind.

Some years ago I began research on fundamentalism, which culminated in my highly acclaimed book on The Fundamentalist Movement (Mouton Co., the Hague and Paris, 1963). In my research I came across the repetitive claim of Bob Jones, Sr., that Bob Jones University could be accredited, but there was something in the school’s administrative policy which prevented the school from gaining accreditation. Bob Jones, Sr., made it appear as though the accrediting agencies were trying to control or dictate his school’s policies, which anyone who knows accrediting policies knows is not so. I was suspicious and explored this matter and discovered that Bob Jones University operates its school not much unlike a feudal lord on a socialistic basis.… I must say that most people would be surprised about the totalitarian type of regimentation the faculty and students must endure.

I wrote to Bob Jones, Sr. [who] … suggested that I come to the campus.… On the day I arrived … I was escorted into the business office and told that Bob Jones, Jr., had ordered that I be denied visiting privileges, even though I had a letter from his father to visit the campus. I was given fifteen minutes to leave the campus voluntarily or the police would be called to evict me.…

LOUIS GASPER

Los Angeles, Calif.

As usual, Billy Graham’s supporters ignore the scriptural injunctions in the Word of God to “come out from among them and be ye separate”.… By the use of half-truths and carefully worded insinuations you have sought to create a bad image of one of our nation’s finest Christian institutions of learning.

REV. EDWIN S. ELOE

Calvary Baptist Church

Pontiac, Illinois

You completely obfuscated the issues involved in ecumenical (i.e., conservative-liberal) evangelism as raised by Dr. Bob Jones, Jr. Instead of carefully delineating the matter you committed the age-old fallacy of ad hominem by attacking both Bob Jones, Jr., and his son (honorary degrees, etc., never pointing out that Billy Graham also has an honorary as does Dr. John C. Bennett, president of the Union Theological Seminary, New York) and haymakering the university for its strong discipline, its posture on segregation, and its conservative stand both religiously and politically.

Bob Jones, Jr., simply doesn’t feel a Christian conservative should play religious footsy with: (1) liberals and modernists who not only deny our Lord’s deity, but also invariably continue to render aid and comfort to our Communist enemies and (2) institutions like the National Council of Churches, whose fifty-eight-year history involves modernism, pacifism, Wardism, Marxism, Communism, and the Lord only knows what else.

This doesn’t mean that we are not to pray for or speak to these unbelievers, only that we are not to make common spiritual cause with them, e.g., wishing them Godspeed or having them lead in prayer to their “eternal spirit who might or might not exist”.…

But then, you too must sense a paradox of sorts when on one hand you label the NCC’s position on Communist China “adrift on a Red Sea?” but on the other hand innocuously announce Dr. Graham’s forthcoming appearance and address before the National Council’s General Assembly in Miami, December 1966.…

DAVID A. NOEBEL

Christian Crusade

Tulsa, Okla.

Praise God for men like Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., and the university he represents. This truly is a fundamental university which is a rare thing in this day.…

You will not find a more loyal student body or alumni. Granted you have those students and alumni who have turned against the school, but the number is very small in comparison to those who are behind the school 100 per cent.

JUNE BROWN

Winona Lake, Ind.

I am truly amazed that you and Bob Jones University are bickering. It seems to me that you should have a much closer relationship to that organization than you would have with Dr. Graham. Your ultra-conservative positions seem to square much more with the super-ultra-conservative positions of BJU than they would with the more liberal conservative, Billy Graham.…

Keep up the fine work. Tear each other apart. Don’t you know that this aids the liberals. When you do it we don’t have to. We can save our energies and apply them toward making the Kingdom of God on earth a reality.

ROBERT R. ROBERTS

First Methodist Church

Tulare, Calif.

Adventist Advertising

We are very much surprised to see the Seventh-day Adventist Church radio ad of “The Voice of Prophecy” (Mar. 18 issue).

If you believe in the eternal punishment of the lost, how can you carry their ad?…

ROY DETWEILER

Logan, Ohio

Have the Seventh-day Adventists repudiated the teaching of their founder, Mrs. Ellen G. White?

If not, how do they rate even paid advertising space in CHRISTIANITY TODAY?

R. N. CULBERTSON

North Fort Myers, Fla.

Please set me straight. I always thought of [Seventh-day Adventists] as [teaching] a false gospel. They are law keepers for salvation.

GORDON H. FERRELL

Canal Winchester, Ohio

The Long And Short Of It

Re the article by Abram Miller Long, “Do Presbyterians Need a New Confession?” (Apr. 1 issue): Are the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY aware that the new confession teaches that Jesus Christ is God with man (Immanuel), that he is the Word of God incarnate, and that in him true humanity was realized once for all? That a picture of universal sin is set forth in terms of the imagery of Romans 1? That to refuse life from God is to be separated from God in death? That Christ took upon himself the judgment under which all men stand convicted, to bring men to repentance and new life? That God raised Jesus from the dead, vindicating him as Messiah and Lord? That those joined to Christ by faith are set right with God? That all who put their trust in Christ face judgment without fear? That natural revelation is described in terms of Romans 1 and Genesis 1 after the theme of First Corinthians 1? That covenant theology is defined and defended? That in the new birth the Spirit brings God’s forgiveness to men and initiates new life in Christ? That the struggle between sin and the new life in a man is summarized with strong overtones of Romans 7:13–23? That the preaching of the Gospel, in accord with Romans 10:14, 15, is the means by which saving grace is offered to the world? That the Church is equipped by God for its ministry of preaching and teaching by being given the Scriptures so that, in dependence on the Holy Spirit, man may be brought to accept and follow Christ? That God’s word is spoken to the Church today wherever the Scriptures are faithfully preached and attentively read? That Christ is Lord over all of creation in a plain statement with Calvinistic vision? That the Church’s action must match its preaching?… Is it with reason that I remember the answer in Luther’s catechism to the commandment on bearing false witness: “… and put the best construction on everything”?

Mr. Long compounds the unfortunate note of his article by choosing his interpretation of the Genesis account as the basis for his faith—and would [have it] the basis of my faith if he could arrange it. Haven’t we heard often enough the fallacious statement, “If this story is not true history, then the whole foundation of our faith is upset”?…

RICHARD H. BUBE

Stanford, Calif.

Dr. Abram Long’s attempt … to skewer the proposed confession … by charging with selected Bible passages in hand and shouting for a return to verbal realism is not so much to be praised as pitied. His understanding is narrow and exclusivist.… Small wonder, what with the constraints which Dr. Long has placed upon his own thinking, that his differences with the proposed confession are so sharp, and his protests so vociferous—and his contribution to the discussion of the confession so slight.

THEODORE H. SCOTT

Asst. Pastor

First Presbyterian Church

Rahway, N. J.

Exactly! As Dr. Long says so neatly: The proposed Presbyterian Confession of 1967 seeks to “adjust the North Star to suit the compass.” A beautifully apt expression!

Dr. Long could have gone on to say that the framers of that proposed confession, like liberals elsewhere in religion, in education, in politics, and in economics, no longer understand the difference between the North Star and the compass.

STEPHEN B. MILES

American Council on Correct Use of English in Politics

Falls City, Neb.

Correspondence Courses

This is to thank you for your fine editorial in the February 18 issue entitled “How to Make Adult Training Work.” I am in cordial agreement with your statement as to the general neglect in religious circles of the resources available in adult education.

It is with a sense of stewardship, therefore, that I write in response to your editorial. We may have the very kind of adult educational material for which many of your readers are searching.

The Seminary Extension Department represents the off-campus thrust of our six Southern Baptist seminaries. We channel a versatile and vital flow of instruction in Bible and related subjects to adults who desire study in depth for their own spiritual development and for a more vital witness to others.…

We provide courses in biblical, theological, historical, and practical fields of study. These are beamed to meet the needs of pastors lacking in formal seminary training, and laymen and women who want the benefits of study in depth and with discipline. We had 4,336 individual students enrolled last year.

Our work is done through extension centers and by correspondence. If any of your readers are interested, they may address their inquiries to the Seminary Extension Department, Post Office Box 1411, Nashville, Tennessee 37202.

RALPH A HERRING

Director

Seminary Extension

Nashville, Tenn.

Please Comment

Would you be willing to comment … on the item which appeared in the American Baptist Crusader (March, 1966)—“As the Editor Sees It.” It involves a letter received by Dr. Tuller [of the American Baptist Convention] concerning participation in the Consultation on Church Union:

“Anyone who would come into the Consultation as full participants at this point would have to be rather strongly committed to the agreements which we have reached so far.” These were generally defined as including (1) some form of the episcopacy (with recognition of apostolic succession); (2) baptism of both infants and adults by various methods; (3) a minimum common liturgy; and (4) the probability of some form of a creedal statement.

GEORGE WASHBURN

Middleboro, Mass.

• There are many varieties of dialogue. Some of them seek conformity to established prejudices, others simply seek light.—ED.

Dumb Protestants

The article “Is the Catholic Church Going Protestant?” (Mar. 18 issue) has an ulterior motive. I believe the whole Catholic Church would like Protestants to go for this idea so ably written by priest Eugene E. Ryan. He makes it sound like the Catholics don’t like it, but I’m sure they do. So many of the Protestants are so dumb that they will never really see underneath the conniving of the Catholics.…

LEO G. SIMMONS

Ottumwa, Iowa

Let me thank you for the articles in the March 18 issue, and particularly for your editorial, “Evangelicals in the Church of Rome.” It is very loving and discerning.…

BRADFORD YOUNG

Rector

Grace Church

Manchester, N. H.

Congratulations on your section of March 18 dealing with the papacy issues.

“The Protestant View” by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, with its ringing defense and studied statement of the Reformation position, is truly heartening in face of the misleading propaganda of Rome. The time is ripe for plain speaking.…

ARTHUR M. JEFFRIES

Lakeland, Fla.

I gather that you feel more warmly toward the Roman church than you do the NCC. To refer to Romanism in such glowing terms and contend that the changes taking place are “the work of the Holy Spirit” reveal a man who has been either deceived or sadly misinformed.…

CHARLES W. JOHNSTON

First Baptist

Watseka, Ill.

“We are faced with a rising number of responsive populations. Enough of these exist to absorb all the missionary resources of the Church and still require more.”

The rise of receptive populations is a great new fact in missions. There have always been populations in which many are willing to hear the Gospel and become responsible members of Christ’s Church. But today their number in all the continents has risen so sharply that they have become an outstanding feature of the mission landscape.

Mankind is not one vast, homogeneous mass; it is made up of many societies, classes, castes, and tribes. Each receives or resists the Gospel in its own time and in its own way. If we are to see humanity correctly, we must see it as a great mosaic, each piece of which, though it is in contact with others, has its own color and texture. That many pieces are today responsive is of paramount importance to the Church as it engages in mission.

To be sure, there are still many resistant and rebellious populations with faces set like flint against the Saviour. Generations of missionaries have spent their lives among them, proclaiming the Lord of love, beseeching men to be reconciled to him, and portraying him by loving service in hospitals and schools. Yet though these groups continue to reject Christ, this fact must not hide from our view the rising number of responsive populations. Enough of these exist to absorb all the missionary resources of the Church and still require more.

In Brazil, for example, receptivity is so high that we now find, as full church members, 53,000 Methodists, 167,000 Presbyterians, 235,000 Baptists, 300,000 Lutherans, and 1,689,000 Pentecostals (see William Read’s New Patterns of Church Growth in Brazil, p. 217). Since in 1925 there were in all Brazil only 69,147 Protestant communicants (excluding those in the immigrant Lutheran Church, which did not report), it is clear that the great growth has occurred in the last forty years. And its pace has steadily accelerated. In Chile 10 per cent of the population is now Protestant, and nine-tenths of this growth has occurred in the last twenty years.

As for Africa, Bishop Stephen Neill says, “On the most sober estimate, the Christian is reasonably entitled to think that by the end of the twentieth century Africa south of the Sahara will be in the main a Christian continent” (History of Christian Missions, p. 568). I heartily concur in this judgment, which reflects a receptivity running through at least twenty-four countries.

In Taiwan in 1945 there were fewer than 30,000 Christians. Today there are about 300,000 Protestants and 200,000 Roman Catholics. This is the sign of receptivity—not simply that people welcome a friendly missionary and listen to his message, but that in obedience to the faith they become visible members of Christ’s Church. In war-torn Korea between 1952 and 1962 tremendous growth took place, more than in any previous two decades. The total Korean Protestant community in 1962 numbered 2,687,451, according to the World Christian Handbook.

Leaders of missions might well keep before them a map of the world on which highly responsive areas are shown by one color, those moderately responsive by another, and those that are resistant by a third. Such a map would portray vividly the great new fact of missions.

But the map would have to be kept up to date, because receptivity waxes and wanes. As political, social, and economic revolutions surge forward in country after country and God’s providence operates in history, segments of populations turn responsive; and then, if they are not evangelized, they may harden their hearts against the Gospel. Japan, for example, was amazingly responsive between 1946 and 1953, but after that her receptivity declined.

Much receptivity passes away without commensurate church planting. Most missions are geared to the long, hard pull, and when sudden receptivity appears, they do not change fast enough to reap the harvest. Few missionaries dedicated to great church planting went to Japan immediately after World War II. Some solid missions in Latin America are achieving little church growth, because their resources are committed to activities fitted for 1945, not 1965. In Taiwan, the whole Highlander population (perhaps 220,000) could have been Presbyterian; but in 1956 (ten years after its striking new receptivity became abundantly apparent) there were only six Presbyterian missionary families assigned to this huge receptive population. And so today there are only 80,000 Highlander Presbyterians.

The great new fact of receptivity demands theological understanding. Receptivity does not arise by accident. Men become open to the Gospel, not by any blind interplay of brute forces, but by God’s sovereign will. Over every welcoming of the Gospel, we can write, “In the fullness of time God called this people out.”

This being so, it follows that as the Church leads men to the Promised Land, Gospel-accepters have a higher priority than Gospel-rejecters. Paul always observed this theological principle. At Antioch of Pisidia he said to the resistant Jews, “… Since you thrust it [the Gospel] from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles. For so the Lord has commanded us …” (Acts 13:46, 47, RSV). This principle guided the early Church in its expansion.

It pleases God for the missionary enterprise to determine its main thrusts in light of the growth of the Church. The bold acceptance of church growth as the goal of Christian mission is a theological decision, the bedrock on which correct action in the face of receptivity rests.

Together with an understanding of the theological meaning of receptivity there must go both an acceptance of the Bible as the true, authoritative revelation of God and a living experience of Christ. Certainty and fervency are the ground of church growth. If the responsive peoples of the world are to receive Christ, the messengers of God must let the Holy Spirit have his way in their lives and must believe that God has revealed his will perfectly and finally in the Bible.

The principles of church growth operate through the power of Christ and his Word and can be used effectively only by ardent, Spirit-filled Christians. We evangelize the nations not for self-aggrandizement but in obedience to our Master’s command. Among receptive peoples, growth is a test of the Church’s faithfulness.

Today’s receptivity also demands response on the part of the Church. Correct theological understanding of receptivity must be implemented by action guided by church-growth principles. Among many of these, six can be mentioned.

The first is to increase evangelism everywhere, and especially among growing churches. It is a commonplace in the world of missions that growing churches should be strongly reinforced and static churches lightly assisted. Reinforcement must issue in greatly expanded convert-winning, church-planting evangelism. When God grants his Church a precious growing point, let her make sure that it continues to grow. The first thing is not rich material or educational assistance. That will come later. If growth is great, material assistance can be used profitably; if growth ceases or remains small, much material assistance may prove fatal.

The initial principle of the church’s outreach is to harvest the crop, to put in the sickle. Nothing takes the place of action. In the presence of receptivity, the one thing to do is to bring in the sheaves.

The second principle of church growth is to multiply unpaid leaders among the new converts, training them to go out and communicate Christ to their unsaved relatives, neighbors, and fellow laborers. Any form of clericalism, any limiting of evangelism to paid leaders, works heavily against church growth. In a receptive situation, growth occurs in the church that mobilizes its laymen for continuous propagation of the Good News. Conversely, even in a highly receptive population, a church in which evangelism is an activity chiefly of missionaries or paid nationals does not grow.

There are many plans for training unpaid leaders. A good plan ought to integrate the individual into an organized churchwide effort. Mere organization, however, will accomplish little. The real measure of a good plan is that it mediates a deepened experience of Christ, and gets ordinary Christians gladly bearing witness to what Christ has done for them and persuading their fellows to become disciples of Christ.

The third principle is to take full advantage of insights now available from the sciences concerned with man. In receptive populations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, we should apply the knowledge of anthropology, sociology, and psychology to the task of reaching all men with the Gospel. An army of scientists are discovering detailed information about the social structures of classes, tribes, and castes everywhere, and the processes by which it pleases Almighty God to change societies are becoming known. Servants of Christ have the privilege of using the now known dynamics of culture-change to mediate Christ to men. Missionaries regard these insights from the social sciences as particularly important in the propagation of the Gospel.

The fourth principle of church growth is to evangelize responsive populations to the utmost. Too often a responsive field is regarded as a dangerous competitor of resistant fields and aided only slightly. Those who follow this fourth principle, however, will, on hearing of a responsive field, determine by scientific survey how responsive it is, and then make up and send in a task force to evangelize the population to its limits. Missionaries should not be sent to “work among” a receptive population. That phrase is a device of Satan! Missionaries should be sent to multiply churches and yet more churches in every receptive population on earth. And those sent should be trained in how to multiply churches in that kind of responsive population.

A weighty consideration is that as receptive peoples become Christian, they will in turn reach presently resistant peoples who may be rejecting centuries of European aggression rather than the Christian faith. One result of pouring resources into Africa south of the Sahara may well be that, once there are millions of Christians there, they will establish missions in the Muslin north and do a much more effective work there than Europeans, handicapped by the inheritance of the Crusades, have been able to do.

The fifth principle is to seek, without lessening emphasis on individual salvation, the joint accession of many persons within one society at one time. Not all members of a given social unit will accept the Saviour; but the more that become his disciples at one time, the better. Normal man is man-in-society. Wherever a man can become a Christian only by renouncing his own people, the Gospel spreads slowly and churches remain weak. Wherever men follow the New Testament pattern and side by side become Christians, there the Gospel spreads rapidly and churches develop muscle. Christian missions should learn all they can about normal group movements to Christ and help persons come to Christ with their families and relatives.

The sixth principle of harvest is to carry on extensive research in church growth. Astonishing discoveries about the growth of churches lie hidden in denominational, regional, and linguistic pockets. The facts about church growth must be laid out for all to see. To discover what churches are growing, to determine principles of their growth, and to apply these principles to non-growing churches—this is a basic requisite for church growth.

The secular world pours millions of dollars into research, considering it essential to progress in today’s changing world. It is high time for the Church to channel 5 per cent of what it spends for missions into research in church growth. Until this is done, missions will not see or develop the full potential for growth at which the finger of God now points.

Once research uncovers methods God is blessing in various communions, the new era of good feeling among the churches should issue in willingness to use these methods. If the Anglicans and Friends are growing in Kenya, other churches in Africa ought to find out and adopt the procedures that have led to this success in bringing men to God through Jesus Christ.

As these six principles and others governing action for growth are learned by the churches and applied to the responsive populations now emerging on every continent, the Church will enter a new era of obedience. She will liberate population after population by introducing them to the abundant life in Christ. She will bring them to advances in health, productivity, and education. And once more she will be shown the truth of the Lord’s saying, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”

A dramatic increase in the number of babies born throughout the world threatens to engulf those seeking to bring men to the “new birth” through faith in Jesus Christ. These charts presented on this and the following pages are based on demographic research for the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin next fall and show the realities clearly.

• A frightening population explosion is upon us; by A.D. 2000 there will be between six and seven billion people on the earth. The size of the increase alone is one of evangelism’s greatest challenges. Possibly the increase will be modified by such things as birth control, war, and extensive epidemics. In any event, the percentage of Christians to the total world population will probably decrease unless some new evangelistic impulse is felt.

• The length of time it takes for population to double is undergoing an alarming decrease. Formerly it might have taken four or five hundred years for the world population to double; it now will take only thirty-five years.

• The chart that plots the annual rate of growth of certain of the larger countries shows that special attention must be given to Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Indonesia, and the Congo, for their populations will double in less than thirty-five years. Of the world’s larger nations, only Japan has a rate of growth significantly lower than the average.

• While there is one missionary for slightly more than 70,000 people, the distribution of the total force is very uneven; there are no missionaries in China, for instance, with its more than 700 million people. The slackening of missionary enthusiasm in the sending countries and the scarcity of candidates suggests that the next missionary wave must come from within the younger churches, with nationals reaching their own people with the Gospel.

• The missionary force has increased faster than the populations have, but not fast enough to fulfill the Great Commission. Significantly, North America has become the key sending base, and this situation is likely to continue indefinitely.

• In the last hundred years, the number of non-Christians in the world has more than doubled. Although Protestants in growth have more than kept pace with population, they are still a small minority of the world’s population.

• Christians in the United States face a great evangelistic opportunity, since the country will have approximately 150 million more people by A.D. 2000. However, the rate of growth for 1965 was the lowest since World War II (1.2 per cent); and since the United States is among those nations most inclined toward birth control, the net increase of population by A.D. 2000 may be smaller than the estimate based on recent birth figures.

Data for the charts came from the following sources:

1. Population Reference Bureau, Incorporated, Washington, D.C.

2. Interpretative Statistical Survey of the World Mission of the Christian Church, edited by Joseph I. Parker, New York and London, 1938.

3. The Christian Yearbook, London, 1868.

4. Britannica Book of the Year, 1964.

5. Demographic Yearbook of the United Nations.

6. National Geographic Society.

7. Missionary Research Library and Dr. Herbert Jackson, director.

8. Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Missions and Oriental History, Yale University.

Proclaiming the Good News is “especially the responsibility of missionary boards and agencies” yet some now reflect “a declining stress on evangelism”

The nineteenth century has been called the “Great Century” of Protestant missions. In 1815 there were only a few hundred Protestant missionaries throughout the world, and many of these belonged to “missionary societies” not directly related to the Church; but by 1914 the number had grown to an amazing 22,000. The great denominations had come to recognize missions as central and had set up agencies to foster the enterprise in the world. Protestant churches had been planted in almost every nation. The Bible had been translated into more than 500 languages. And in North America the Student Volunteer Movement was vigorously challenging youth with chapters on every campus, and with its great conventions in which thousands heard the eloquent appeals of great leaders.

While the proclamation of the Good News is the responsibility of the whole Church and includes student movements, Bible societies, and lay efforts, it is especially the responsibility of missionary boards and agencies set up by the churches for this very purpose. The stance of these agencies is therefore a matter of vital concern. How are they fulfilling their commitment? Has evangelism continued to be the primary driving force in missions? Or are there other accents that tend to abate or obscure it?

Some aspects of the present situation are reassuring;

1. The 42,250 Protestant foreign missionaries throughout the world reported by the Missionary Research Library in its 1960 survey constituted the largest total recorded in any year up to that time, and the number continues to increase.

2. North American Protestants have more than doubled their missionary personnel since 1945, and the present number stands at approximately 28,000. This significant increase must be seen in the light of the drastic depletion of forces resulting from the financial depression of the 1930s and from World War II, so that the gain in part represents the retaking of lost ground. It stands, nevertheless, as a solid evidence of life and growth. Of the present 28,000, some 38 per cent represent boards and agencies associated with the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches; 44 per cent are from societies affiliated with the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (EFMA), the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA), and the Associated Mission Agencies of the International Council of Christian Churches (AMICC); and 18 per cent belong to societies which are “independent.”

3. An avowal of evangelistic purpose is contained in the official statement of aim of almost every mission board or agency. This can be affirmed on the basis of a private survey made at the end of 1965. A brief questionnaire addressed to twenty-three denominational agencies affiliated with the Division of Overseas Ministries and a like number related to the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association elicited seventeen replies from each group, thirty-four in all. Twenty-eight of these, an equal number from each group, gave an emphatic place to evangelism, though some of these mentioned other corollary aims. Six agencies did not reply specifically to the question.

4. Most of the thirty-four agencies that replied to the questionnaire feel there has been a strengthening of the evangelistic aim in their work during the past twenty years. On this point the seventeen DOM boards voted: “Yes,” twelve; “No,” four; and “No comparative basis,” one. One of these boards explained that it did not have a specific “evangelistic” category but used the term “church development.” While these are not equivalent terms, the church-development group has been counted as evangelistic for the purposes of this analysis. The seventeen EFMA societies voted: “Yes,” fifteen; “No change,” one; and “No comparative basis,” one. The overall ratio of evangelistic missionaries in the total force is reported by the two groups as follows: DOM, 40 per cent; EFMA, 75 per cent.

Significant as these facts and figures are, they cannot be taken as a conclusive sign of the strength of evangelism in the missionary program. There are other questions. What is meant by “evangelistic work”? What is the nature and content of the “Gospel” that is being preached? What are the grounds on which boards and agencies determine that this emphasis has been strengthened in their work? For example, a large DOM-related board that says evangelism has gained a stronger place in its program during the past two decades nevertheless shows in its published reports that the ratio of evangelistic missionaries has declined from 68 per cent of the total in 1945 to 45 per cent in 1965. During the same period, appropriations for evangelistic work, exclusive of salaries, have declined from 15.4 to 8.4 per cent of the total budget. Yet this is a board generally known for a relatively strong emphasis on evangelism.

Several factors awaken concern:

1. Many boards have revised, or are revising, their statements of aims. In general these revisions reflect a declining stress on evangelism as the central business of missions. The evangelistic purpose is not left out, but the inclusion of other coordinate or subordinate aims detracts from the pre-eminence of evangelism.

2. The emergence of “national churches” has confronted the boards with a new dimension in their work. An insistent question today is: “What should be the continuing relation between the missions or sending societies and the indigenous churches that are a result of their work?” Preoccupation with this problem has caused many boards to make far-reaching changes in policy. There is a new emphasis on “church development” or “interchurch aid.” Some boards have come to feel that pioneer evangelism is no longer an appropriate function of foreign mission agencies in such situations, and that their role now is to stimulate the national churches to undertake missionary endeavors of their own, to work aggressively through and with them, and to offer help with men and money. In any given field the “mission” organization is to be dissolved, and missionaries, together with all funds for the work, are to be turned over to the indigenous body and administered by it through its own agencies. New missionaries would be sent only on invitation of, and for assignment by, the national church. The board becomes, in effect, a subsidizing agency.

It is not surprising that this radical change of direction has met with considerable resistance from missionaries and loyal supporters of the work. There is a basic difference in scope and function between a mission and a national church, and a recognition of this is essential to an understanding of the problem. Why have missionaries been reluctant to see the administrative control of missionary funds and personnel pass to the indigenous churches? To suggest that they are loath to relinquish authority, or are committed to a sort of “colonialism,” is to do them an injustice. There is a better explanation. The indigenous church is an organized ecclesiastical body with a wide range of interests and responsibilities of which missions is only one, and sometimes not the principal one. It must be concerned with its own internal organization, its institutions and agencies, its publications, its discipline, the support of its ministry, and a dozen other matters. It is peculiarly subject to the temptation of using available money and men for the development of all phases of its program. It is not a distinctively missionary organization.

A mission, on the other hand, is supremely concerned with evangelization, outreach, and extension. It is not strange that missionaries are zealous to keep this emphasis. For this they have left home and native land. It is this to which they were commissioned by the church and in which they are supported through prayer and sacrificial giving. They are anxious to help the growing fellowship on the field as much as possible, to give it their love and cooperation, to serve it in all ways consistent with their primary obligation; but they will not easily accept interchurch aid as a substitute for missions. Their interest is in winning new believers and establishing new churches, not in subsidizing existing ones.

Further, it is pertinent to ask whether national churches can really be expected to develop a sense of their own missionary responsibility under such a system of subsidization. They tend to be confirmed as “receiving churches,” whereas all churches should be “sending churches.” For missions is primarily a matter, not of church-to-church relations, but of the relation of the church to the unbelieving world.

It is inconceivable that the coming into being of a relatively small body of believers in any country should put an end to the initiative of men and women who have been called of God to preach the Gospel to every creature. There are few countries in which Protestant missionaries are at work today where as many as one-tenth of the people have been won to the Christian faith. Any philosophy of missions that diverts attention from this unfinished task and interprets our continuing role principally in terms of interchurch aid must be seen as a major retreat in missionary strategy and a weakening of evangelism.

3. Any comparison of present missionary strength with that of former years must take into account the increasing category of “short termers.”

The latest annual report (1964) of the Division of Foreign Missions (now the Division of Overseas Ministries) of the National Council of Churches gives an analysis of the new missionaries sent out in 1963 by thirty boards and agencies affiliated with the division. These are classified by vocations and terms of service. The tables show a total of 864 sent during that year, of whom 155, or less than 18 per cent, are placed under the classification “evangelistic and church work.” Further, 244 of the 864, or 28 per cent, are listed “short term.”

There is no intention here to speak disparagingly of short-term workers, many of whom are superior in training, experience, and dedication; but they are not the group with the greatest promise in the field of evangelism. Most of them serve as “specialists” in such fields as Christian education, church organization, social service, agriculture, medicine and health, business and administration, teaching English, or various technical vocations. Since their tenure is seldom longer than five years, and sometimes even shorter than one, few acquire the language proficiency indispensable for evangelism.

Evangelistic work presupposes a depth of rootage in the country, and an understanding of its history, culture, social customs, attitudes, language, and religious inheritance, that can be gained only through prolonged residence. The short-term worker has his special contribution to make, but the growing tendency to attract young people by offering them a brief assignment in some missionary situation is already proving a discouragement to life-commitment and to evangelism.

4. Undoubtedly the chief cause of the waning emphasis on evangelism is the widespread erosion of faith within the Christian fellowship itself. No one who reads the papers can be unaware of the tides of unbelief sweeping through our pulpits and churches.

The missionary enterprise cannot be separated from the faith of the Church. The incentives for Christian missions derive from beliefs about the nature and character of God, the relation between God and man, the destiny of fallen humanity, the sufficiency of Christ as the Redeemer of the world, and the nature of the Gospel. When these premises are undermined, missions and evangelism lose their essential meaning.

In this decline of faith, three forces in particular work against evangelism:

a. Universalism: Despite the clear biblical teaching on the “lostness” of man, a tacit universalism questions the urgency, or even the need, of missions and evangelism. Emphasis on the love of God, to the exclusion of his righteousness and justice, has caused many to trust in a sort of divine indulgence instead of the costly and redemptive work of Christ. Such a view makes the Cross of no effect and actually distorts the love of God by making it seem that he permitted the sacrifice of his Son without sufficient purpose.

b. Syncretism: A newly active syncretism presents itself again as an obstacle to evangelism. The vigor and sincerity of our missionary efforts, indeed of our preaching at home or abroad, rests upon our conviction that God, in his plan for the redemption of the world, sent his Son as the one and only Saviour. The Christian faith recognizes no rivals. It lays claim to an absoluteness that denies the ultimate validity of any other faith. It represents itself as the only hope of man. It presents Christ to the world not as a way of salvation but as the way of salvation. If this position seems narrow, we must accept the criticism. Only let it be acknowledged that the same judgment must apply to the whole doctrine of the New Testament. The missionary enterprise, as developed in the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, rested upon precisely this view of the uniqueness and sufficiency of Christ. As the late Robert E. Speer put it in one of his books, “The early church believed that there was none other name given among men whereby they must be saved. All men everywhere needed Christ and Christ was enough. Neither Greek, nor Roman, nor Semitic religion had any correction to make or any supplement to add to Him.” And a vigorous evangelism can stand on no other ground.

c. Secularization: A secularized Christianity dismisses the Gospel of faith and salvation as having little relevance to life and accepts instead “another gospel,” drawn from platforms of political, social, and intellectual liberalism. The vital spiritual dimension of the encounter between God and man is virtually ignored by a so-called Christianity that can see little beyond man’s physical and social needs as a higher animal. Soteriology gives way to sociology: what God has done yields to what society must do; good news is replaced by good intentions; and evangelism disappears in favor of reform. As Dr. Eugene Carson Blake is quoted as saying, “We are not doing well. Society is becoming more and more secular. People are making up their minds in the light of what they hear from sources other than the pulpit” (Presbyterian Journal, Feb. 16, 1966, p. 4). And he could have added that some pulpits are finding their canonical authority more in secular voices of change and revolution than in Scripture.

Now, evangelicals consider the reaction to social injustices valid; but they hold that social structures cannot be evangelized. Regenerate Christians can influence these structures, and in the task of seeking regenerate individuals the historic denominations are, on the whole, failing badly.

It is not easy to determine just how far missionary agencies have been affected by this moral and theological confusion. One continues to hope and believe that they are the last to surrender to the pressures of unbelief. But they cannot remain forever impregnable. They are a part of the churches they represent and must sooner or later reflect the trends already evident in almost every denomination. It is not reassuring to read the record of the annual meeting of the Division of Overseas Ministries last October, in which the major emphasis was on the need for secularizing the missionary’s message, summarized in the following statement by an official of the division: “The amateurism and sentimentality of most Christian ministries overseas is no longer acceptable.… In theological enterprise, missions must take leadership in the growing movement toward a genuinely secular Christian faith—that is, an understanding of our belief not in terms of archaic philosophical concepts but in terms relevant and luminous with meaning in the scientific, world-affirming and world-understanding age in which we are set.” There seems to have been no statement of dissent from this position on the part of any of the five hundred delegates of the boards and agencies represented at that meeting.

By and large, it is the reluctantly confessed feeling of this observer that the evangelistic thrust of the “old-line” denominations in overseas work is declining along with their proportionately diminishing place in North American missions as a whole. Fortunately, to offset this trend, there comes into view at this time an ever

growing army of missionaries from other associations of societies—denominational, interdenominational, and independent—who are bringing new life and strength to the Christian witness abroad. Already these groups have more than 62 per cent of the total number of missionaries from this continent. Not all their methods will meet with full approval, but they are dedicated to the Gospel. Three-fourths of them are in evangelistic work. The message they preach is the good news of salvation. Their work is being blessed. Thousands are being brought to Christ. Increasingly, the gifts and prayers of Christian people are offered in their support.

No need is more critical in this day than to bolster the fundamental affirmations of the Christian faith and to reflect these in a New Testament call to evangelism. The need of the world is not abated. The sin-sick and sorrow-worn are still there. It is the supreme duty and privilege of those who have known the grace of God in Christ to preach the good news in all the earth, especially in those places where the beginnings have not been made and the Gospel of our Saviour is a strange story.

The Church must swiftly recover the evangelistic meaning of the whole range of Christian theology

A theologian may share the platform with an evangelist, but he rarely fills his shoes. Despite the example of the Apostle Paul, theology and evangelism have gone their separate ways—often with harsh words for each other.

This disjunction is not only dangerous; for Christian theology and evangelism it is inadmissible. Christian theology is evangelical; it is gospel theology. Because theology and evangelism are unified in the Gospel, there is little use in trying to isolate a special “theology of evangelism.” Instead we need to recover the evangelistic meaning of the whole range of Christian theology, and at the same time to recognize the “gospel structure” that biblical theology already has.

Theological evangelism has one grand advantage: it forces us to begin with God. So Paul began in his Epistle to the Romans with “the Gospel of God” (1:1). Only when we know the Gospel of God are we ready to hear it in the Church or bear it to the world.

A “church-centered” theology of evangelism peers anxiously from the spires of Christendom at the population explosion of the non-Christian world. Without asking what the Gospel is or what the Church is, it seeks more effective techniques. To be sure, after the gospel calling of the Church has been clearly grasped, fruitful questions may be asked about the witness of the laity, the ministry of mercy, the principles of church growth. But the calling of the Church begins where theology begins—with God, who calls and sends. To seek a “theology” for an enterprise or structure we have already defined is to court illusion. We may find only what we are looking for.

The swing from “church-centered” evangelism to “world-centered” evangelism moves from danger to disaster. Advocates of the new “secular Christianity” condemn a “supernaturalistic” view of revelation. They deny that “the human mind can apprehend a fixed reality transcending experience which provides an unchanging criterion for faith and action” (Gibson Winter, The New Creation as Metropolis, Macmillan, 1963, p. 69). Having disposed of the God Paul preached, they proceed to canonize social science. The new gospel of sacred sociology calls the Church to abandon its dream of the heavenly Jerusalem and seek the realization of the “new mankind” in the earthly city through the use of political power. For such an enterprise, Billy Graham’s efforts are an unwelcome diversion.

Evangelism must have a higher source than the church steeple or the high-rise apartment. But can evangelism actually be God-centered? Are not the issues of evangelism to be found in the slums of metropolis and the pews of suburbia? To be sure, the problems of evangelism are to be found in the world and in the Church; but just as surely their solution is to be found in God. Only as the Gospel of God does the evangel have the power to join together the Church in the fellowship of the Gospel; only as the Gospel of God is it the majestic foolishness that offends the world with the absurd message of the Cross.

Consider, for example, the form of the Church in the world. Is the Church in “shape” for evangelism? This question cannot be limited to the familiar and important problem of involving laymen in the evangelistic work of the Church. The query is much more radical. If, as many would say, the Church exists only in mission, then it must be shaped by its mission. The structures of the world must then determine the “shape” of the Church. If, on the other hand, the Church is called into God’s presence as his people, then fellowship with God as well as service to God must determine its form. The holy nation of God’s choosing cannot be conformed to the world but must be transformed as the body of Christ. In its mission as well as in its worship, the Church is formed by God. For the “shape” of the Church we are driven to the “shape” of the Gospel.

Other issues in evangelism may also be brought to radical solution through the perception of God’s Lordship in the Gospel. The reshaping of the Church is a comparatively recent question for evangelism; much older is the problem of reshaping the world. The social gospel of liberalism has undergone urban renewal but continues to be the “good news” of economic and social reform.

How does the Gospel relate to social action? When an evangelical reports the success of evangelism-in-depth, world churchmen are quick to condemn the “individualism” and “pietism” of such an approach. The promised peace of God’s Kingdom, we are told, is far more comprehensive. It cannot be limited to a few souls snatched from the burning but includes a redeemed humanity, a new heaven and earth. Social structures, not merely individual men, must be redeemed to usher in the shalom (peace) of the Kingdom.

Evangelicals are sometimes vulnerable to the charge of “spiritualizing” the Gospel. Although the literary caricature of the professional evangelist may be cruel, it is recognizable. Evangelism has often ignored the whole man as well as the whole society. Yet the social gospel, new or old, grounds its criticism in a misconception. It misunderstands the promise of the Gospel. To be sure, the shalom of the Kingdom is no airy “pie in the sky.” It is as tangible and physical as Christ’s resurrection body, the beginning of the new creation. In fact, the Gospel of the resurrection determines the peace of Christ’s Kingdom. The prophets who proclaimed shalom as God’s gift were forced to struggle against the false prophets who promised peace without judgment. “No peace to the wicked” became a prophetic slogan (Isa. 48:22; Jer. 6:14; Ezek. 13:10). In the same way, the Gospel warns that the Lord who came is coming again and that the time of the restoration of all things is the time of judgment. The full peace of the Kingdom comes “at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flaming fire, rendering vengeance to them that know not God, and to them that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thess. 1:7b, 8, ASV).

Only by taking seriously the eschatology of the Gospel can evangelism wait for Christ’s power and leave judgment to him. The call to evangelize by penetrating the power structures of society is a call to forsake the fellowship of Christ’s suffering. There is no power structure that is not already under his authority; obedience to Christ can never take the sword to bring in his Kingdom.

Again we are humbled before the Gospel of God. To suffer when our Lord has all authority, to die while he rules—this is not man’s conception of the Gospel of power and freedom. But it is God’s wisdom, and we must begin in the fear of the Lord to discern it.

Nothing less than the fear of the Lord can bear the Gospel. We dare not patronize the Gospel in church-centered evangelism nor subvert it in world-centered evangelism. Indeed, before we can consider the questions that drive us to reflect on evangelism, we face a prior claim; for to speak of the Gospel is to start with God (Acts 20:24). It will not do to add a little theology to our thinking about the Church and the world so as to gain a fresh perspective on the familiar problems of a powerless Church and an indifferent world. Theology cannot be packaged for convenience. The Gospel of God shapes evangelism in sovereign majesty. The Word of God, the presence of God, the power of God—these are the categories of theological evangelism. They declare that salvation is of the Lord.

To grasp the high sense in which the Gospel is God’s, we should mark the “angel” in evangel. Angels are fitting messengers to announce God’s good news (Luke 2:10), and when men are called to bear the heavenly message they do so as heralds of God (1 Tim. 2:7). Their proclamation is not man’s response to God’s salvation; it is God’s own Word (1 Thess. 2:4, 13).

God’s gospel Word declares the fulfillment of God’s Word of promise. What God speaks comes to pass. God says, “Let there be light!,” and there is light. God says, “Unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings” (Mal. 4:2a), and in God’s own season the true Light comes into the world (John 1:9).

Because the Gospel is God’s sovereign word, it is more than an announcement; it is a summons. God’s appointed time has come; his feast is spread. The evangelist bids men to come, “for all things are now ready” (Luke 14:17). To ignore this summons is to invite the wrath of the king and to incur judgment: those who refuse God’s bidding shall not taste of his supper. The Gospel of God is to be obeyed (Rom. 10:16; 2 Thess. 1:8, 9; 1 Pet. 4:17). It bids men turn from their foolish idols to the living God (Acts 14:15). Those who reject it are judged by it (Acts 14:15; 2 Cor. 9:13; Acts 28:23–30; Rom. 2:16; 1 Cor. 4:5).

Gospel preachers entreat and persuade men in God’s name, but they always bear a trumpet. To lose the jubilee blast of proclamation is to lose the Gospel itself. Just as the silver trumpets of the priests once sounded deliverance to the oppressed on Israel’s day of atonement, so does gospel preaching ring with the declaration of “redemption and release” in Christ. The Gospel is not good advice but God’s news. Yet the trumpet of God’s Gospel becomes a prelude to the last trump in the ears of those who refuse God’s grace. When the Gospel is not a “savor of life unto life” it is a “savor of death unto death.” Man cannot trifle with the trumpet of God.

The Gospel is God’s in another sense: the gospel trumpet proclaims God’s own presence. No one has understood the Word of God’s promise until he sees that God has promised too much. Abraham saw that when he laughed at God’s promise of the birth of Isaac. The Old Testament builds an impossible tension between the deepening guilt of God’s people and the soaring salvation of God’s promise. How can the peace of a new covenant in a new heaven and a new earth be given to a covenant-breaking people?

Only God in Person can keep his Word of promise. He must come as Lord, as the royal Shepherd leading his flock through the wilderness in a second exodus. The deserts bloom, the trees of the field rejoice, the eyes of the blind see the coming Lord. Yet if he came only as Lord, his presence would be a devouring fire. He must come as Servant, too, as the Lord’s anointed, bearing the guilt of the people and making perfect the righteousness of the covenant.

To usher in the peace of God’s saving rule, there must come the Prince of Peace, who is Lord and Servant, Son of David and Son of God. The Gospel of God’s kingdom is the Gospel of God’s King.

Because the Gospel announces God’s saving presence, it declares God’s saving power. The Son of God himself holds the keys of the Kingdom. By his miracles he shows his power to deliver the captives of Satan; by his word he calls together his little flock; by his death and resurrection he completes his triumph as the Prince of salvation. The Holy Spirit sent from the throne of his glory is the One in whom he is present in his kingdom, the Church, until he comes again in power.

The Gospel, in short, declares the royal saving will of God. The Christ of the Great Commission holds all power in heaven and earth, including the power of the Holy Spirit to give eternal life to as many as were given him by the Father (John 17:2; Acts 5:31). He is a Prince and a Saviour who gives repentance to Israel and remission of sins. The Gospel both celebrates and realizes his triumph.

The Apostle Paul compared his evangelistic travels to the progress of a captive of war chained to the chariot of a triumphing captain. Thanks be unto God, he cried, who always leads us about, triumphing over us in Christ. Paul the chief of sinners was the trophy of Christ’s saving grace (2 Cor. 2:14). His Epistle to the Romans presents his evangel—the showing forth of God’s salvation in Christ, demanding the decision of faith.

How does this Gospel of God shape evangelism? From the standpoint of human initiative, it offers the death of evangelism. Humanism demands freedom at God’s expense; grasping at equality with God, it refuses the freedom of sonship. Even among Christians the misunderstanding persists. If salvation is by God’s free grace, why should I not sin as I please so that his grace will abound (Rom. 6:1, 2)? If God’s election is supreme, why cannot the reprobate claim they have obeyed his will (Rom. 9:19)? The fallacy of such questions is that they call God’s sovereignty to account before the throne of man’s sovereignty. But if the kingdom is God’s, then only one man is Lord, the God-man who brings all things into subjection to the will of the Father.

Evangelism shaped by the gospel of God prays. Biblical evangelism is praying evangelism, and no prayer is more evangelistic than the Lord’s Prayer. “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.” That prayer anticipates the triumph of the Gospel. All things are possible for him who believes. The stone cut without hands, the Kingdom made in heaven, will destroy the idolatrous kingdoms of man and become a great mountain to fill the earth. By prayer the mountain of God’s Kingdom will be cast into the sea of the nations, and the very gates of the abyss cannot prevail against it (Matt. 21:21; 16:18). God is pleased to magnify his saving power through the cry of those whose trust is in him alone. If the Gospel is God’s, then prayer for the power of the Holy Spirit is the great secret of evangelism. True Christian prayer is always overwhelmed by God’s Lordship. Prayer is the real measure of a man’s conviction that salvation is of the Lord. Those who boast a Pauline theology without the unceasing prayer that was its life-breath have put a wax figure in the place of the new man in Christ. Living theology is praying theology; the first fruit of a biblical theology of evangelism is prayer.

When Jesus with supreme compassion saw the great harvest of the kingdom, his words to his disciples were not “Go ye as laborers into the harvest” but “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:38).

EXILE

Yes, it is beautiful country,

The stream in the winding valley, the knowes and the birches,

And beautiful the mountain’s bare shoulder And the calm brows of the hills;

But it is not my country,

And in my heart there is a hollow place always.

And there is no way to go back.

Maybe indeed the miles, but the years never.

Winding are the roads that we choose,

And inexorable is life, driving us like cattle Farther and farther away from what we remember.

But when we shall come at last

To God, who is our Home and our Country,

There will be no more road stretching before us

And no more need to go back.

EVANGELINE PATERSON

Evangelism shaped by the Gospel of God dares. Confronted by the threats of those who had crucified Christ, the apostles prayed for boldness; their prayer echoes through the New Testament. In the boldness of the Holy Spirit, Simon Peter, who had once cringed before a serving maid, stood before the Sanhedrin to declare that he had to obey God rather than man. Significantly, his message was that the crucified Jesus had been exalted by God’s right hand to be Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36; 5:31). His daring showed more than an understanding of the new situation brought about by the Gospel; it revealed the very power of Christ’s glory operating in him by the Spirit. Paul speaks of the power of the Gospel that is mighty to the casting down of the highest imaginations of human pride (2 Cor. 10:4, 5). An evangelist who had been working among the prostitutes surrounding an American army camp in Korea was challenged by a disturbing thought: Why not take the Gospel to the syndicate operating the houses of prostitution? His hand trembled as he knocked on the door of the vice headquarters, but his bold witness bore fruit. One of the exploiters was humbled by the Gospel and turned to Christ.

Evangelism shaped by the Gospel of God preaches. Since the Gospel is God’s, his Word is the two-edged sword that accomplishes its victory. Apart from the immediate working of God’s power, preaching is foolishness. Its authority is offensive to modern man; its simplicity is scorned. We are told not only that the day of mass evangelism is past (an assertion often made before Billy Graham’s ministry) but also that the day of verbal communication is past. Television has brought back the language of pictures, and preaching is an anachronism. But the wisdom of God is mightier than that of man. Until faith becomes sight, man is restored to the image of God by hearing God’s voice. The Gospel of God carries the blessing Christ promised to Thomas, the blessing on those who do not see, yet believe. God continues to call and send preachers; evangelism will always require evangelists—not only the daily witness of every believer but the convicting proclamation of men of God, mighty in the Scriptures and able to do the work of an evangelist.

Evangelism shaped by the Gospel of God cares. God’s Gospel is the Father’s word of mercy. Because it is God’s, it springs from his heart of love. The parable of the Prodigal Son really presents the welcoming Father and requires the true son of the Father to share his welcome of grace. The returning prodigal deserves nothing, but the father in love gives him everything: the garments of sonship, the feast of joy. The elder brother who refuses to enter the feast is shut out from the joy of his father’s house, from the joy of heaven over one sinner who repents. The true Elder Brother knows so well the love of the Father and his joy in recovering the son who was lost and dead, that he not only sits down to feast with penitent sinners but even goes to the far country to seek and to save that which was lost and to bring life to that which was dead. The zeal of evangelism lit by the Gospel of God has the individualism of God’s personal love. The shepherd rejoices to find one lost sheep from a flock of a hundred, the woman to find one lost coin out of ten, the Father to find one lost son from a family of two.

Because evangelism cares, it cannot pass by human misery. Until Christ comes to repay what is spent in his name, the ministry of the Gospel must include the ministry of mercy. The cup of cold water for the thirsty, oil and wine for the wounded, bread for the hungry, clothing for the naked, comfort for the prisoner—such ministries are performed not only in Christ’s name but to Christ himself. They show the genuineness of the Gospel, and they anticipate the final joy of the gospel promise that the conquest of sin will bring victory over suffering and death. Just as Christians who pray “forgive us our debts” are Christians who confess, “we forgive our debtors,” so too Christians who pray “give us this day our daily bread” are those who give their daily bread to those in need. To do men good is not bait for the gospel invitation—soup and a bed for those who respond in a rescue mission; neither is it an awkward auxiliary to the principal work of evangelism, like a thriving hospital that overshadows the missionary center from which it sprang.

Rather, the ministry of mercy is a sign of the Kingdom. The love that it shows is that peculiar love of compassion evoked by the love of God’s grace in Christ. Only such love fulfills God’s law. In it God’s will is done on earth as Christ did it on earth. Further, the relief of suffering points to the gospel promise of a new heaven and earth from which the curse has been removed. The heavenly city sought by the pilgrim church is coming; whenever human need is met in Christ’s name, the approach of the time of the restoration of all things is heralded.

Finally, evangelism as it is shaped by the Gospel of God suffers. Gospel heralds cannot avoid suffering, not only because they provoke the hostility of the powers of darkness but also because they share the griefs of the oppressed. Paul warns that the Kingdom can be entered only through many tribulations (Acts 14:22). He saw the chains of his imprisonment as bonds of the Gospel (Philemon 13) and spoke of the afflictions of the Gospel (2 Tim. 1:8) that he endured as he made up what was lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the Church.

The riches of the Gospel of grace remain the untapped resource of contemporary evangelism. We have assumed that we know the Gospel and have sought new forms for the Church and new relations with the world. The truth is we know the world all too well and have formed and reformed, organized and reorganized the Church until we have built a high Gothic cathedral of interlacing committees buttressed with boards and vaulted with task groups. What we do not know is the Gospel that is the power of God to salvation. Even our prayers for the Holy Spirit lack the boldness that flows from pleading God’s own promises in the wisdom of the Gospel. New avenues of communication with the world must be opened, new dynamics of fellowship in the Gospel must be discovered; but we will not fail in this if we learn what it means to know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.

Later this year the World Congress on Evangelism will convene in Berlin with delegates from many races and many lands. This issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY goes to readers around the world in advance of that momentous meeting, whose theme will be “One Race, One Gospel, One Task.”

One Race. At this moment in history, the world of men is drastically divided—language against language, religion against religion, nation against nation, color against color. In the midst of all these divisions, the Church must sound the clear note that God sees all men as a single race. Racism is wrong precisely because all men must own Adam as their father, even as all believers must recognize that God fashions the new man created in Christ Jesus, the second Adam from above, with utter indifference to race.

Racism attempts to divide humanity into competing groups on the basis of color. Biblically this is indefensible and absurd. Neither the law of God nor the Gospel of Christ recognizes such a distinction; both are color blind. God himself sees only two classes of persons, the saved and the lost; and the point of division is the condition of the heart, not the color of the skin. Evangelism presupposes the solidarity of the human race, the curse that has come upon every man because of sin, and the universal need of redemption through Jesus Christ. All men love, hate, eat, marry, reproduce, and die. And after that the judgment.

One Gospel. Through the Incarnation God has intervened for the salvation of lost men, and to his Church he has committed the proclamation of the one Gospel to the whole human race. This Gospel is God’s good news to men, the message of the Cross. It proclaims that men, who all have sinned and come short of God’s glory, all need the Saviour. At its heart is the truth that God’s only Son lived a life of perfect obedience in the flesh, bore the penalty for man’s sin in his own body on the Cross, and through his atoning death and resurrection freely offers reconciliation with God to the world of sinners. This is God’s only Gospel, and it is definitively communicated by the Bible, the Word of God written.

The adherents of the true Gospel stand forth-rightly for the integrity of the Bible as a uniquely inspired revelation, as against those who taper the Scriptures to the level of “saga” and “myth” and sever faith from an adequate grounding in historical fact. They believe in the “faith once for all delivered” rather than in creeds that distort the New Testament evangel. They call for the proclamation of the whole counsel of God rather than a message cut and compromised to man’s desires. They champion a message that Peter, Paul, and John would instantly recognize as their own, were they to walk today through the hallways of theological seminaries, the sanctuaries of the churches, and the byways of men. Amid the modern recasting and reformulating of the ancient message of the Cross, they crave the declaration of an undiluted Gospel that enhances and promotes the historic creeds of the Church, that is based upon personal devotion and integrity, and that calls error by its rightful name. They yearn for the warm preaching of a doctrine of reconciliation that brings men face to face with the perils of rejecting the claims of the Gospel and with Christ’s warnings that the wicked perish forever. They want the Church as its primary concern, to proclaim from the housetops the Gospel that Christ established. They seek a new responsiveness and commitment to the written Word of God as man’s only infallible rule of faith and practice.

As the World Congress on Evangelism assembles in Berlin, we cannot forget the stirring words presented by the chairman of the German delegation to the International Missionary Council meeting at Tambaram, Madras, India, in 1939, before World War II broke in full fury: “The Church of Christ … is moving forward into this world to proclaim the redeeming message.… The Church has not to bring into force a social program for a renewed social order, or even a Christian state. It cannot redeem the world from all inherent evils, but it serves to spend itself promoting all good works in obedience to its God-given call.”

One Task. Evangelism is the signal task of the Church: everywhere and always we are to preach the one Gospel, whose relevance to the whole human race is assured by our Lord’s Great Commission. In order to discharge its obligation the Church must recover the great evangelistic truths of earlier ages, truths too often diluted and neglected in our generation. Every evangelist must see in the contemporary desire to modernize the Gospel, the shadow of a new universalism that undercuts evangelism as the primary task of the Church by claiming that men are already redeemed and need only to be informed of their redemption; that an immediate decision, normative for the work of evangelism, should not be demanded of them; and that it is not necessary to speak of eternal life and eternal death when men are confronted with the Gospel, since all will ultimately be redeemed.

Sins that bar men from heaven according to the Scriptures have been validated by those who in their efforts to update the Gospel have lost it. At times, they say, such things as lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, and homosexual acts become legitimate expressions of the “law of love,” which assumes anything is right given the proper circumstances, and that objective and enduring moral standards are to be discarded as cultural primitivisms.

Evangelism’s task is to proclaim that the true Gospel is perennially applicable to man’s whole condition and to every aspect of human life, and that it brings under judgment man’s desires and present way of life. The Gospel cuts across that way of life, pronounces God’s awful judgment upon it, and calls all men to live the new life in the world, even though they are not of the world. It does not compromise to make itself heard; it speaks with the voice of judgment. Those who preach this Gospel are deeply concerned for men to accept Christ and heavily burdened for those who reject him.

Undergirded by the profound conviction that men who die in their sins without Christ are lost, the Church must hasten to proclaim the Gospel to them before they perish from the earth. The task must be performed according to the principles laid down in the Scriptures. Let any method, old or new, that can be validated from the Word of God be used to evangelize the world. Let educated and uneducated, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, clergy and laity, join together in obedience to the divine mandate.

Christ’s continuing commission is to evangelize till he comes again. As Leslie Lyall says in his book Urgent Harvest (London, 1962): “In these apocalyptic times, the urgency is greater than ever. The going will be different, the attitudes changed, the policies revised, the methods altered. The cost will be greater and the dangers increased. The swift current of events is sweeping the people along in its turbid stream. But people are still people with their sins and sorrows, their sadness and sickness, their soul hunger and emptiness: men and women for whom Christ died, needing him above everything else.… Multitudes, multitudes, multitudes, living and dying without Christ. Multitudes in the valley of decision. We dare not forebear to deliver. We must not consider the sky. It is a time to sow and also a time to reap.… The fields are white unto harvest, urgent harvest!” The task is ours. And so, inescapably, is the choice.

A Historian’S Testimony

In this world of men, with its aspirations and its struggles and its many philosophies and religions, there appeared one [Jesus Christ] born of woman and in the stream of one of these traditions. To most of such of his contemporaries as knew him he seemed a failure.… His followers … included few whom the nation or the world counted influential.

Yet front that brief life and its apparent frustration has flowed a more powerful force for the triumphal waging of man’s long battle than any other ever known by the human race. Through it millions have had their inner conflicts resolved in progressive victory over their baser impulses. By it millions have been sustained in the greatest tragedies of life and have come through radiant.… It has done more to allay the physical ills of disease and famine than any other impulse known to man. It has emancipated millions from chattel slavery and millions of others from thraldom to vice. It has protected tens of millions from exploitation by their fellows. It has been the most fruitful source of movements to lessen the horrors of war and to put the relations of men and nations on the basis of justice and peace.…

It is of the very core of the Christian’s faith that the God and Father of his Lord, Jesus Christ, will not be defeated. The Christian holds the resurrection of Jesus also to be fact. The life of Jesus, so he confidently maintains, did not end on the cross. Nor was it continued merely through the growing influence of Jesus, amazing though that has been. The Christian is bold to declare that through the resurrection Jesus entered into a fresh stage of life, glorified, endless, and inconceivably rich in love and power. He holds that in the resurrection God was working, bringing out of the evil of man’s rejection of Jesus a good far greater than could have been possible without that defeat.…

The Christian is certain that Jesus is central in human history. His confident faith is that in those who give themselves to God as they see him in Jesus there is working the power of endless life and that from them God will build, to be consummated beyond time, the heavenly city, the ideal community, in which will be realized fully the possibilities of the children of God. This eternal life and this ideal community are, in the last analysis, not the fruit of man’s striving, but the gift of a love which man does not deserve, and are from the quite unmerited grace of God.—Excerpted by permission from A History of the Expansion of Christianity, by Kenneth Scott Latourette (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1945), VII, 503 ff.