Methodist Evangelism Congress: Shattering Stereotypes

“We will waste no time arguing the dichotomy of the supposed pietists and activists,” declared Dr. Joseph Yeakel in the keynote address of the United Methodist Congress on Evangelism at New Orleans this month. “Let’s tuck this one away for good,” continued the general secretary of the denomination’s Board of Evangelism, which, with the Council of Evangelism, planned the four-day event. “We must all be activists and servants … but without commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, our humanism will not last for long.”

The congress, actually a smorgasbord of twelve separate conferences, featured an assortment of workships, seminars, experimental events, and speeches involving key church leaders. Speakers attempted to shatter old stereotypes and categories of evangelism; they appeared to be largely successful.

Recurring themes in plenary sessions and interest-group conferences stressed that the outmoded activist-pietist struggle is unfaithful to the whole Gospel, emphasized the need of ecumenical evangelism for an effective world witness, and urged the discovery of “new and authentic Christian lifestyles.”

Dr. Albert Outler, perhaps Methodism’s greatest living theologian-historian, dazzled the crowd of 2,400 persons (elected evangelism leaders from local congregations formed the largest attendance bloc) with his nightly lectures on “John Wesley’s Theology for Today’s World.”

Updating the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, Outler, who is professor of church history at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas, alluded to “striking similarities” between evangelistic concerns of churchmen today and those of Wesley. In this third message, Outler predicted a possible “Third Great Awakening” for America, led not by “professional renewalists” but by a vanguard of Roman Catholics deeply touched by the charismatic movement. Although he said that “Pentecostalism and glossolalia are not my bag,” the puckish professor added that without another spiritual awakening, “current renewalist movements won’t survive this century.… Revival is our only hope.”

According to Outler, the marks of another awakening, if it is to come, must differ from those of the Second Great Awakening of the last century. New revival must be evangelical, modern in its world view, deeply concerned about the Church as a community of faith and the sacraments, ecumenical in its outreach, and social-action oriented, and must be an “outpouring and infilling of the Holy Spirit,” he said. Thus far the growing charismatic movement in the Catholic Church is the most hopeful sign that such an awakening may be stirring, the theologian intimated.

The congress had considerable more zing—and greater participation—than recent Methodist quadrennium thrusts in evangelism. Perhaps prodded by the success of the Good News Methodist conference in Dallas last August (see September 25 issue, page 23), denominational evangelism leaders pulled out the stops to assure doubters that the church is indeed interested in individual as well as social salvation.

The New Orleans event was a programatic potpourri, rather than being mainly inspirational, as was the Dallas meeting. Still, there was spirited gospel singing (“Marching to Zion”) and street witnessing. The final message was given by Methodist healer-evangelist Oral (up from Pentecostalism) Roberts of TV fame.

The National Council of Churches’ evangelism secretaries were belatedly invited to hold their regular meeting in the Roosevelt Hotel with the congress, and at least a dozen NCC types sat in on the UM conference on New Styles in Cooperative Evangelism. There, Methodist ecumenical evangelism director Joe Hale and Missouri Synod Lutheran Ted Raedeke, director of Key 73, outlined the potential of Key 73’s cooperative evangelism push for 1973.

In that conference and others where the Key 73 presentation was made, the concept was warmly received. One annual conference evangelism leader said he thought Key 73 was the most important topic at the congress and several participants left New Orleans unhappy that more attention hadn’t been given to implementing Key 73.

Lord Donald Soper, London’s Methodist open-air preacher for forty-three years and a member of England’s House of Lords, titillated the conference for preachers with his anecdotes and with his defense of outdoor preaching and socialism. Declaring that he is no Marxist, the Hyde Park dean nonetheless said that capitalism is “totally unchristian” while socialism and pacifism are biblically based.

Soper struck a note also sounded by speaker Bruce Larson, president of Faith at Work: A Christian environment or life-style is often more important to winning converts than is orthodox doctrine or evangelical preaching unrelated to persons in need.

Daily street meetings, using musicians, artists, and singers to attract the curious, added an informal touch to the congress. One windy evening during five o’clock rush hour, about 150 gathered at Bourbon and Canal Streets while Wilbur Sales played his chord-a-box (“an accordian with an organ transplant”).

The few passersby who paused were surprised to learn the group was Methodist rather than Salvation Army. The use of “portable congregations” from the hotel guaranteed an audience at each of the sidewalk sorties. But the singing-preaching seemed more of an exercise in flexing Methodist evangelistic muscles (to see if they were still there?) than a true evangelism mission.

Some genuine witnessing did take place, though, including that of two teen-age girls who presented Christ to a black-robed member of the Process, a Satan cult, who was selling Process magazines on the opposite corner of Bourbon Street. And at a late-night rally in historic Jackson Square attended by 500, Southern Baptist Convention president Carl E. Bates testified how he had been converted many years earlier at a nearby hotel through reading a Gideon Bible.

Anti-Protestant Vandalism?

The outspokenly anti-Catholic head of an evangelical ministry in Quebec reported last month that vandals “virtually destroyed” one of his summer camps. Harold George Martin said provincial police estimated $25,000 damage to Camp Laurentide, 35 miles north of Montreal.

Martin blames Catholic influence for a number of reverses his ministry has suffered, including government seizure of property and records and removal of tax-exempt status.

There are dozens of Catholic camps in the same area, including one just across the road, Martin declared, but none of these has been vandalized.

Setback For Scientology

The longest libel action modern Britain has known ended last month when a member of parliament was cleared of libelling the Church of Scientology of California. The latter had claimed that during a 1968 television interview Geoffrey Johnson Smith (in whose East Grinstead constituency the cult has its British headquarters) implied that scientology was a harmful organization. He had repeated a statement made in parliament by the then minister of health that scientologists deliberately directed themselves towards “the weak, the unbalanced, the immature, the rootless and the mentally or emotionally unstable.” In 1968 the Labour government banned foreign nationals from entering the country for the purpose of study at East Grinstead.

At the end of the seven-week hearing, earlier described by scientologists as “the freedom trial of the century,” the jury found that what Johnson Smith had said was not defamatory but substantially true, without malice, and was fair comment. Costs charged against the cult were unofficially estimated at up to $200,000. In a statement made after the court decision, scientology officials said there would be no appeal. They pointed out that the jury had not been asked to adjudicate on scientology itself. Referring to five other libel actions outstanding, a spokesman said they “are lying dormant and in the present calm climate are unlikely to be pursued.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Storm Over The Bosporus

The oldest American campus abroad, missionary-inspired Robert College in Turkey, may have to write off its current school year because of student demonstrations. The students are protesting a decision to move a graduate school and consolidate two undergraduate campuses.

More than a hundred years ago a New York philanthropist, Christopher Robert, entrusted a respectable sum of money to Cyrus Hamlin, a Congregational missionary, to build a Christian college in Constantinople. The funds served to establish Robert College, situated on the enchanting slopes of the Bosporus at Bebek. At the inception its most prominent academic aspect was a theological school; that school eventually was made independent and ultimately moved to Beirut via Greece to become the Near East School of Theology. Robert College withstood numerous storms, but in the process it lost its missionary identity.

A graduate school was built on the campus in 1953 for engineering, business administration, science, and language students. For a time Robert seemed to be making a notable educational contribution. But financial demands, student unrest, and other problems increased. So the Near East College Association, which administers Robert and a girls’ campus at nearby Arnavutkoy, decided to make the graduate school an independent Turkish university. The Turks are being given the girls’ campus, and the two undergraduate schools are being consolidated at the older but better Bebek campus.

Students at the graduate school, with a current enrollment of about 1,000, reacted vociferously. Demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara magnified the issue into a quandary of national proportions. The protests took on an anti-American cast. Classes were shut down.

At first Robert College drew many students from racial minorities, mainly Bulgarians and Armenians. Church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette wrote that “as a pioneer in a Western type of higher education it had a profound effect through its graduates, especially in Bulgaria.” In more recent years, the college became a prominent educational institution for the Turks themselves, and many of today’s Turkish high government officials are alumni. Interestingly, a number of leftist leaders were trained there. THOMAS COSMADES

The Loved And Loathed

After studying replies to 3,500 questionnaires issued to visitors, Madame Tussaud’s (London’s famed waxworks) have listed the loved and the hated. Leading the field of favorite figures was Sir Winston Churchill, voted also the hero of all time, ahead of Jesus Christ, John Kennedy, Admiral Nelson and Joan of Arc. The most hated figure was Hitler, who outranked Mao Tse-tung, Enoch Powell and President Nixon. Level in fifth place were Prime Minister Edward Heath, Spiro Agnew, and Dracula.

J. D. DOUGLAS

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