Finding a New Stride

However serious our misgivings about present-day American Christianity, we should be encouraged by numerous promising developments at home, and take heart over spiritual advances in a number of foreign countries as well.

In Korea, for example, the Yung Nak Church in Seoul recently raised $530,000 in one special missionary offering. At its three Sunday services attendance averages between 8,000 and 9,000 persons; of these more than 1,000 are university students. Each month the church adds about seventy families to its ranks.

The scene in Indonesia is spectacular. Just before the onset of the seventies, 250,000 Indonesians turned to Christ, many of them in an explicit repudiation of Communism. A major Graham evangelistic crusade is projected there for 1972. In Central Java, church membership has tripled from 30,000 to 100,000 over a six-year span; some churches still almost double their numbers annually.

In Hong Kong, a communications center to train Chinese students in newspaper, radio, and television techniques is operated by. Timothy Hu, whose journalistic gifts have been unsuccessfully wooed by numerous secular enterprises. Promoting a venturesome witness where freedom of information prevails, Hu is also readying a gospel witness that cannot easily be suppressed when atheistic dictators uproot churches and shut down Christian schools and hospitals.

Battle-torn Laos, long one of the most impenetrable Buddhist pockets in Asia, numbers only 25,000 Christians among its three million people. But these relatively few Christians now have ready for printing an improved translation of the New Testament in their national language.

Christians often suffer violent hostility or costly persecution at the behest of totalitarian tyrants. Sooner or later the tyrants are gone, however, while the Gospel remains and continues to offer forgiveness of sins. In Nuremberg, Germany, U. S. chaplains now conduct Sunday worship services in the very auditorium used by Hitler to brief his Bavarian field marshals during World War II. And in Seoul, the former grounds of the Russian embassy now supply a base for a projected $2 million training school and hostel for 7,200 university students who will engage in summer evangelistic outreach to Korean youth.

Even in Eastern Europe it is becoming more and more evident that programs of materialistic redistribution, whatever else they may achieve, do not satisfy the deepest yearnings of the human spirit. Soviet-sphere nations have too impressive a past heritage of literature, philosophy, and theology to keep perpetually out of mind the enduring concerns of spirit, conscience, and truth. Their countries have a long history of formal identification with Christianity, even if ecclesiastical establishments left much to be desired. It is not surprising then, that as fulfillment of the Marxist promise of earthly utopia becomes ever more remote, interest in the Gospel of Christ and the Kingdom of God begins to reassert itself. Should Communist party functionaries cease to penalize Christian believers, and Christianity no longer be caricatured by atheists but presented on its own merits, then that growing interest might even break into a prairie fire. Yugoslavia happily offers evangelical energies a more relaxed atmosphere than do other Eastern European nations.

Evangelical spiritual vitalities in America are mainly evangelistic. While larger engagement in social justice is now evident, academic concern for the victory of truth still lags notably. In this latter respect, biblical Christianity in America contrasts unfavorably with that in England.

To be sure, at a time when ecumenical student work has all but disappeared, evangelical student commitment in the States is gathering spectacular momentum—more so on secular campuses than in church-related colleges. Urbana ’70 attracted more than 10,000 collegians to the University of Illinois, mainly under an Inter-Varsity canopy, for one of the largest student missions conventions in history. Campus Crusade for Christ, already noted for bold spiritual initiative on many campuses, projects Explo ’72 in Dallas for 100,000 students in an international student congress on evangelism.

One ought not, of course, to compare statistics between countries of strikingly dissimilar populations. But look at Cambridge and Oxford universities with their Christian Union meetings. Where in America could one find 300 young intellectuals meeting every Saturday night for an evangelical lecture and Sunday night for an evangelistic sermon? And while Inter-Varsity in the United States increasingly publishes significant works, British Inter-Varsity still has a superior publications record. Equally important, Christian students abroad combine their concern for evangelism with the pursuit of learning, and concentrate academically for future teaching posts. What’s more, evangelicals already holding university posts are readily identifiable as Christian scholars in their fields of learning. A tribute to the intellectual earnestness of British Inter-Varsity is Tyndale House, Cambridge, a research and study center whose evangelical library facilities surpass those of the University divinity school.

One should not minimize the fact, however, that in America evangelism has become an aggressive student concern. Not a little student vitality is channeled into underground activity quite independent of both the ecumenical and evangelical establishments. Often these young believers move into venturesome creative paths, despite high risks. More and more evangelical movements seem to be emerging free of established church patterns.

Key ’73 will correlate all evangelistic resources at the city level in cooperative and simultaneous evangelism. This can be highly significant, for in the United States on an average Sunday three-fourths of the people do not attend church; and half are not members of churches or synagogues. The Graham crusades are constantly and clearly contending against a cultural decline that competes as never before against spiritual and moral commitments and undercuts evangelistic gains. Comparatively few churches have recaptured the vision and practice of evangelism as the perpetual initiative of the local congregation; churches where this has occurred, however (Fourth Presbyterian near Washington, D.C., is an example), are notably successful. Neighborhood Bible classes in some areas are attracting numbers of Roman Catholics; while many of these would hesitate to attend Protestant churches, they nonetheless criticize their priests for not teaching them the Scriptures.

Key ’73 may offer Americans a last opportunity in this decade to achieve an authentic evangelical ecumenism—interracial and transdenominational. If they succeed at the evangelistic level, their prospect for cooperative witness in authentic social concern and educational affairs will brighten as well.

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