Expo’s Religious Reflection: Accidentally Accurate

It wasn’t planned that way, but Expo 67 mirrors surprisingly well the state of today’s Christian Church, its big theological cleavage, and its relation to the world.

Dozens of pavilions boast of man’s achievements with scarcely a reference to spiritual forces. Not even the dominant U. S. Pavilion finds a place for religion’s role in its national life. The pedestrian Soviet and glamorous Czech pavilions, however, manage to preserve a little corner to reflect their countries’ Christian heritage.

Somewhat off the beaten path on Notre Dame Island is the $1,300,000 Christian Pavilion, a valiant effort of major Canadian church bureaucracies to present a solid front. Its message, projected via a glorified photo exhibit, wallows in the sea of subjectivity. As an experiment in indirect communication it emphasizes questions and minimizes answers.

Much more in the mainstream of Expo traffic is the Sermons from Science Pavilion featuring the well-known Moody evangelistic films based on natural wonders. Although it is an independent effort, it draws significantly from Canada’s old established churches for support. It doesn’t raise many questions, but it zealously promotes the Answer to man’s most basic problem.

The pavilions of Israel and Judaism unashamedly exhibit their spiritual histories. The pride of the white stucco Pavilion of Judaism is a 440-square-foot model of the Temple of Jerusalem built by Herod. The building also contains the only chapel on the fairgrounds; Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform congregations take turns conducting services nightly.

The Expo visitor might well interpret the fair’s religious flavor as strikingly similar to what he finds in the world: an uncertain church leadership that champions relevance but seldom achieves it, an aggressive movement from evangelical sectors of the grass roots, and a reclaiming of its past by Jewry. Conspicuously underplayed in this microcosm, as it is in the world, is Christian confrontation on the intellectual, ideological, and cultural levels.

“Perhaps it is time that Church planners and executives came to terms with the Church’s greatest problem,” says the Canadian Churchman, the national Anglican paper of Canada. “It does not lie in the area of techniques—but in the area of content.”

Churchman editors say the Christian Pavilion reminds them of a war-time chaplain who had ten minutes to speak to his troops and chose to talk of sin and redemption: “He got so enthusiastic as he warmed up about sin that the ten minutes were gone and he never did get around to redemption.”

The reaction is typical. Easily the most common criticism leveled at the pavilion is that it depicts human alienation (see April 28 issue) but pretty much leaves the viewer to find the way out himself. A spokesman for the pavilion says the implicit hope is that the questioning visitor will seek a clergyman for further details. Staff members are prohibited from answering theological questions posed by visitors. Observers have noted that more Christianity is depicted in the Pavilion of Judaism than in the Christian.

A Popular Photography reviewer asserts that photographic exhibits at Expo “have suffered in the hands of clever designers who have no respect whatever for the medium as such,” and calls the Christian Pavilion “the worst offender.” “You will hunt far and wide for a more unchristian presentation,” the critic says. “Photographs of the most sordid and unpleasant scenes are forced into the cubes of a pipe construction that would be more appropriate as a jungle gymn in a playground than in an exhibit of announced inspirational nature.”

In defense of the Christian Pavilion, some observers have wisely noted that the negative impression is a corrective influence for the exaltation throughout the rest of the fair of what a great job man is doing with the world. Severe criticism leveled at the Christian Pavilion at the outset of the fair has tapered off considerably, and long lines of people await admission each day. Soon the pavilion will have counted 1,000,000 visitors.

The Sermons from Science Pavilion, with a smaller capacity, is also handling capacity crowds. About 500,000 persons have been through the building to see a film or witness a science demonstration with spiritual applications. As of mid-August, approximately 2,500 commitments to Christ had been recorded. These are being followed up through coast-to-coast contacts. Sermons from Science teams have trained about 6,000 counselors throughout Canada and the northeastern United States, and the names of inquirers in these regions are forwarded to counselors living near their homes. Elsewhere in North America and abroad, the names are given to Moody Bible Institute to follow up through Christian training correspondence courses.

A big problem in the Sermons from Science Pavilion is finding enough French-speaking counselors. Two-thirds of the persons counseled are French Canadians.

The Sermons from Science message is simple and direct and uses the four-spiritual-laws approach popularized by Campus Crusade. It is geared to the common man, pre-set to average conditions. Everyone going through the pavilion gets the American Tract Society’s leaflet, “The Prior Claim.”

The crowds aren’t as great at the Pavilion of Judaism, but the model of the temple is nonetheless the most interesting religious exhibit at Expo 67. The model is the work of Lazare and Suzette Halberthal, a Rumanian couple who came to Canada in 1952. It took them an estimated 15,000 hours to build it.

Visitors to the pavilion are forbidden to take pictures of the model, but they can purchase photographs there at nominal cost. Admission to the pavilion—and to all others—is free, once an Expo “passport” is purchased.

Missions Exodus

Mission leaders and the U. S. State Department are watching closely developments in Assam State, India, where three American missionary couples and missionaries from Canada and the Netherlands were expelled recently on charges that they helped rebel uprisings.

Religious News Service says that nearly eighty missionaries have been informed that their residence permits will not be renewed when they expire—some within a few weeks—and that many other persons apparently have been ordered out.

Thirty-five Missouri Synod Lutherans have been evacuated from eastern Nigeria, which is in revolt against the central government. Federal troops reportedly have been warned against desecrating churches in the east.

In the Philippines, new interest in foreign missions is evident in a new gospel team that made its first trip abroad last month. The group, led by the Rev. Max D. Atienza, was invited by Christians in Indonesia. Now under the new evangelism division of Far East Broadcasting Company, the team wants full support from Filipinos.

Learning In Splitting

Church splits, long considered a scourge, may actually strengthen young Christian communities. Cambridge-educated J. B. A. Kessler concludes from an exhaustive study of Protestantism in Peru and Chile that Christians there have learned from their mistakes. Though they have experienced some sixty-six divisions, the church has been growing phenomenally. Lessons have been learned, especially in cases in which there have been organizational weaknesses.

Kessler, missionary to Peru, documents his arguments in a dissertation for the University of Utrecht, Holland. Professors praised the work as a model for histories of young churches and awarded Kessler a doctorate cum laude. His thick tome has been printed in English.

Among the points he makes is that Christians in Chile have learned more from their own mistakes in churches which have no missionary connection than in those which retain a link with foreigners. Kessler also contends that young churches in which missionaries didn’t want to share in the exercise of authority themselves often experienced the most internal problems.

Missionaries should give nationals great freedom to experiment and find their own ways, he adds. But strong growth is seen partly as the result of authoritarian forms of church government, which may have been dangerous, but which were better understood by the nationals than the democratic processes most Protestant missions were trying to introduce.

Kessler studied physical sciences at Cambridge, and while there came into contact with Inter-Varsity Fellowship and committed his life to Christ. Subsequently he volunteered for missionary service and was accepted by the British faith mission, Evangelical Union of South America.

Kessler is the son of a millionaire former president of the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. His decision to become a missionary greatly distressed his father, and relations were strained for years. More recently the father committed his life to Christ.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

When To Pull The Plug

It was bound to happen in this day of medicine’s miracle machines. Somebody asked, “When is the patient dead?”

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation decided that a panel of doctors and clergymen could surely provide the answer. But at last month’s AAMI convention in San Francisco, no definitive answer came forth.

Catholic Chaplain John Ring of the University of California Medical Center cautioned doctors against emphasizing “mere length of life at the expense of transcendent values.” The center’s Episcopal chaplain, Charles Carrol, spoke of a woman who, though in a coma since January, recently gave birth to a healthy daughter. He suggested she was more an organic test tube for scientists than “a mother in the human sense.”

Medical philosopher Otto E. Guttentag offered, “Death has come to humans when there is irreversible loss of spontaneity—freedom to choose and move according to choice.” But psychiatrist Michael Khlentzos scolded fellow panelists for being less than Freudian in equating life with consciousness. He argued that the “vegetable” in the resuscitator who gives no electric signs to the EEG machine and whose dilated, staring eyes bespeak a dead brain may nevertheless be living on the unconscious level. Since unconscious factors underlie all conscious behavior, the Freudian asks, “Who is dead?”

As for the difficult moral decision of when to pull out the electric plug on the machine, Guttentag proposed that each person have a “guardian ad mortem”—a friend or relative with express legal power to say, “Stop everything; let him die in peace.”

Generally, the clergymen favored pulling it sooner than the doctors.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Spain: Protestants Say No

The Evangelical Defense Commission, which represents all Protestant churches in Spain, has sent a letter to the Department of Justice announcing that Protestants will not apply for legal recognition under the nation’s new religious-liberty law.

Under the law, the churches must register like secular organizations and report on membership and finances. The letter, sent in July, says this violates statements on religious freedom by the United Nations and Vatican II. Last month the Southern Baptist mission near Bilbao was closed by police for refusal to register. A meeting of most of the nation’s 500 Protestant clergymen next month will act further on the situation.

N.Y. Aid Ban Fades

Forces opposing state aid to religious schools—led by New York City Unitarian minister Donald Harrington, who is Liberal Party chairman—lost a major battle on August 16. New York’s Constitutional Convention voted 132 to 49 against retaining the flat aid ban that has been in force for seventy-three years.

It appeared likely some aid would be allowed, but the specifics were unclear at mid-month. One plan was simply to repeat the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. But the vote might mean many Jews and Protestants will now oppose the final state constitution.

More Sisters Secularize

The swinging Glenmary Sisters, one of America’s youngest orders, early established a reputation as a “can-do” group who often worked with sleeves rolled up at their training-center farm. Now sixty-five of the eighty-five sisters have asked Cincinnati Archbishop Karl Alter for a dispensation from their vows by this week so they can form a church-affiliated lay organization.

Sister Mary Catherine Rumschlag, superior of the society and supporter of the change, said the new organization will focus on “religious and social needs,” primarily among the poor of Appalachia.

The order got national attention a year ago when National Catholic Reporter revealed that Alter had put the sisters under restrictions concerning books they read, hours they kept, and their conduct with the opposite sex. The trouble reportedly started when five sisters complained that the order was too liberal in interpreting the role of nuns in the post-Council era.

JAMES L. ADAMS

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.