Not a Time for Timidity

EDITORIALS

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster, said Jonathan Swift.

Evangelicals today should follow the lead of that initial oyster-eater. If we look about us, we see all kinds of potential for more effective proclamation of the Gospel. We must transcend our timidity and take that first bite.

The greatest danger posed by today’s radicals is not that Christianity might be overcome but that it might be rendered ineffective. Cries of revolution, instead of goading us into fresh initiatives, sometimes intimidate us into quiet retreat. We cower in the corners of our sanctuaries, hoping that the storms of change will pass by and leave us unscathed.

This kind of reaction is clearly not that prescribed by the New Testament. From the Gospels through the Epistles, boldness is a recurring theme. The Greek parrhesia appears at least twenty times in one form or another. It means candor and plainness of speech, and a confident courage. The leaders of the early Church, facing vastly more serious reprisals than Christians in the West today, nonetheless prayed and talked and acted with a kind of joyous fearlessness. They would have balked at the modern idea that Christians ought not to cultivate an image of authority but ought rather to appear as mere fellow seekers, beggars telling other beggars where to get bread.

Peter and John are illustrious examples of the kind of daring that ought to characterize believers of all ages; the ecclesiastical establishment of their day marveled at their boldness (Acts 4:13). The Apostle Paul, who continually did exploits for the Gospel that involved a high degree of risk, told his proteges that the spirit of fear was not of God.

The word meek in Matthew 5:5, appearing in the context of the especially profound Sermon on the Mount, has perhaps had a dampening influence upon would-be Christian initiators. Virtually all scholars would attest that the Greek praeis did not have anything like the connotation now attached to the English meek. It really suggests something more like gentle strength. The Interpreter’s Bible notes that the Greek word has “sinew,” and That it decidedly does not suggest “sad resignation.” The word was that of Jesus himself, who could hardly be called a milquetoast.

Some might say that boldness brings out pride. What is more likely is that pride can keep us from being bold. We let our fear of failure and error (and the resulting embarrassment) keep us from undertaking new ventures. We would rather leave well enough alone, protecting whatever reputation we already have.

The timidity syndrome is not confined to the ecclesiastical realm. The business world is in the midst of an infatuation with “scientific management,” which sees management as a precise discipline. In problem-solving, computers are replacing people, and the decision-makers who are left are increasingly afraid to go out on a limb. Many seem to think if they wait long enough, the risk will evaporate. But delay itself is a decision, and is often detrimental.

There is, of course, the danger of being too adventurous, or of regarding boldness as an end in itself. These are temptations, partly because boldness is admired no matter what cause it serves. If we are to err, however, this is probably the preferable direction. Christian history seems to bear out an observation Dryden made, “rashness is a better fault than fear.”

To encourage boldness, we may have to become more tolerant of honest mistakes. We ought at least to distinguish between mistakes that result from laziness and those that come out of creative and imaginative effort. Mistakes are part of learning. If a decision made after thorough investigation proves wrong, the maker is still ahead. At the very least his knowledge has been stretched beyond that of his hesitant colleague.

Christian proclamation calls for a holy boldness with a piety appropriate to the day in which we live. It may well be that the so-called Jesus People and Street Christians are the evangelical avant-garde. They are the kind who would be the first to eat an oyster if they thought it was the Christian thing to do. They are not afraid of confronting people with divine demands, of casting aside traditions that have lost meaning, and their methods seem to fit rather well the idea of “gentle strength.”

Is this perhaps what charisma is? Not merely a glamorous image but a creative boldness, a determination to see the potential in new situations and to act decisively. This is the biblical mandate, and indeed the only course for Spirit-sensitized evangelical leaders at every level who seek to make an impact for the Gospel upon our confused culture.

A Penney To Heaven

His middle name suggests his business success but not where his heart was for most of his ninety-five years. James Cash Penney, founder of the well-known department-store chain, slipped away last month to keep an appointment with the Lord whom he loved and served in life.

Penney’s father, a farmer who doubled as a Primitive Baptist minister on Sundays, introduced him in boyhood to the application and worth of Scripture in dealings with others. The Golden Rule became the name of J. C. Penney’s first stores, and the principle to which he pledged himself and his business. He introduced profit-sharing and made his employees “associates.” He held out against automation and self-service because they “depersonalized”; his feel for human values made him seem more a character from Disneyland’s nostalgic Main Street era than a man of our own day.

In 1931, at age 56, Penney was a broken man in deep personal crisis in a Michigan sanitarium. He had lost everything in the depression. One morning he heard the strains of “God will take care of you” coming from the chapel. He went in and someone read Matthew 11:28. Penney committed himself completely to Christ and experienced a “miracle … a dawning sense of rebirth … that joy and peace of mind which comes with the certain knowledge of the everyday and everlasting love and power of Jesus Christ our Lord.”

As he rebuilt his business he also gave himself in service to Christ as never before, from speaking at rescue missions to leadership in the Laymen’s Movement for a Christian World and generous acts of Christian philanthropy.

The New York Times eulogized, “He seemed too good to be true, but he was as he seemed and others recognized it.”

J. C. Penney was a Christian businessman.

A Memorable Woman

Although black people have contributed more than their share to American culture, the gift is seldom acknowledged or appreciated—even in this day of black consciousness. The tourist in Washington, D. C., for example, must look long and hard to find any memorials to black people. As part of a long-overdue corrective, a monument is planned in the nation’s capital to the late Mary McLeod Bethune.

Mrs. Bethune is a happy choice for this symbolic tribute. Through it she will become better known, an honor she richly deserves, for she perhaps more than any other woman in this century provided hope, encouragement, leadership, and inspiration to black people in America. It was partly her great determination to get a better deal for them that paved the way for recent achievements in civil rights.

Mrs. Bethune was a devout Christian believer. And to read her biography is to realize that it was only her unwavering faith that brought her success against awesome odds. She was reared in Methodism and as a youngster attended a Presbyterian school for poor Negroes in South Carolina. A Quaker dressmaker in Denver gave her life’s savings to finance Mrs. Bethune’s later education, and she graduated from Moody Bible Institute hoping to be a missionary to Africa. When a Presbyterian mission board turned her down, she went south again to work in education. She bought land for what is now Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida, with a five-dollar down payment on property that had been part of the city dump and was known as “Hell’s Hole.” She earned the money selling ice cream and sweet potato pies to construction workers. With the growth of the school she gained esteem and worked for Negro rights. She served as advisor to four American presidents before she died in 1955.

Her Christian zeal enabled her to overcome repeated rebuffs. “No matter how deep my hurt,” she said, “I always smiled. I refused to be discouraged, for neither God nor man can use a discouraged person.”

Ailing Seminaries: Unfit To Be Tied?

When he was president of San Francisco Seminary a decade ago, activist Theodore A. Gill remarked: “The seminary is the knot in the end of the church’s thread.” Apparently the United Presbyterian knot is not only slipping—it’s almost untied. United Presbyterian seminaries are in big trouble. In fact, they will be “out of business” and the denomination “up for grabs” unless the schools are drastically changed, according to a scathing report.

The study, made by the Washington, D. C., research firm of Douglas Trout and Associates, has been under wraps since it was submitted to the church’s Council on Theological Education in Louisville last November. It’s time the report was made public. The malaise of the six United Presbyterian seminaries is shared by other mainline denominational schools. Their officials ought to read the Trout findings.

The report sharply attacks the shaky financial base of the seminaries. It accuses the schools of wasteful program duplication and lack of innovation. It charges that they ignore the influence of contemporary life styles and counter-culture movements. “This apparent disregard for and waste of resources is unconscionable,” the report says. Though resources are adequate now, they “are indefensibly and unsupportably inefficient and unbearably uncertain” for the future.

Dr. John W. Meister, executive secretary of the Council on Theological Education, described the 130-page report as “devastating.” The council commissioned the study, funded by an anonymous donor, three years ago.

One of the report’s sixteen recommendations is that the seminaries become “specialist institutions,” rather than offering traditional courses “training traditional pastors for traditional churches.” If the seminaries can’t move quickly in this direction, the report warns, “they will be left to … continuing isolation, ridiculously costly duplication, and eventual and certain bankruptcy.”

The Trout report gives a perceptive analysis of seminary sickness. Its recommendations, however, are mere patching plaster. A major theological restoration is needed. The report finds that the institutions studied have shifted to the left from their original theological positions. These seminaries should return to those sure biblical foundations so articulately defined by the seminary founders. One of the report’s most telling observations is that “the church has made no official recent statement of what is the nature of the ministry—even for the present—much less for the 1970s. Even the costly and extensive Study of the Nature of the Ministry conducted between 1962 and 1966 with a churchwide series of 145 seminars, attended by some 5,300 ministers and 4,800 laymen, did not result in any … definition of ministry because a consensus could not be obtained.” A church that doesn’t know why it exists or where it is going is bound to founder!

We are not picking on the United Presbyterian Church; its problems are simply illustrative. Most churches need to recapture a specific understanding of their mission and ministry. Their seminaries have a key role in this—they are the knot in the end of the thread. But the seminary should serve as the agent—not the initiator—of mission and ministry. The seminary ought not to determine what the church should be. Rather, it should train men for what the church already is, to carry out the goals the church has already established.

Seminaries can lose their sense of being guardians of the “eternal deposit of truth.” Then they become like untied knots, unable to hold fast against the unraveling seams of time.

Mexico For Christ

Last summer the United States’ northern neighbor was the scene of a Congress on Evangelism in which concern was expressed for reaching all of Canada with the Gospel. Now its southern neighbor is the object of an ambitious scheme to bring the good news to the fifty million people in that country. Approximately 7,000 Mexican churches and more than forty denominations are involved in the effort to mobilize all believers in an Evangelism-in-Depth type of campaign that will run until March, 1972.

The Mexican evangelicals are not wealthy, and raising the projected budget of nearly a million dollars will test their faith and determination. The leaders of this evangelistic outreach have called on their fellow believers in the United States and around the world to form prayer groups to intercede for them as they work toward the goals they have set. We urge Christians to accept this challenge.

Beyond Mexico lie the smaller Central American republics and the great continent of South America. If the Mexican program succeeds, it will challenge many of the other countries of Latin America to similar programs of complete saturation and especially those where the churches have grown by leaps and bounds and now have a task force that could evangelize to a finish.

Water Beds

The popularity of the new high-priced water beds may merely show how many desperate insomniacs there are. More likely it signifies a high level of sexual dissatisfaction in our culture. Actually a large, flat plastic bag full of heated water, the bed provides an undulating motion with the movement of the occupant(s). Some makers and retailers play down the sexual implications, but others coyly advertise them. Says one: “Two things are better on a water bed. One of them is sleep.”

We suspect that the so-called new freedom in matters of sex may have made its practice more frequent but not more satisfactory. There is a basic incongruity in the attempt by the “liberated” to make sex more pleasurable by separating it from love. The young bride of Canticles cries, “Upon my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves.…”

The sexual drive finds its highest fulfillment when a man and a woman are committed to one another in that kind of soul relationship described by Christ as making them one flesh, one that the word of God compares to the tie between him and his people. It was God who made sex to be one of our greatest physical experiences. It is most truly rewarding when used according to his rules—water bed or no.

The Therapy Of Lent

Nowhere in Scripture is the Lenten observance explicitly prescribed, but there are principles behind it that are clearly biblical. One is the need for repentance, which Vance Havner discusses in this issue, beginning on page 12. Modern pilgrims invariably want to take a short cut to avoid repentance.

Another Lenten principle we tend to overlook is the human need for occasional periods of austerity and isolation. Scholars differ on the contemporary relevance of fasting as a condition to spirituality. But there is little question that fasting can be a factor in spiritual therapy, not to mention possible physical and mental benefits.

Then there is the need to get away from it all. If there were ever an age that should heed this principle, ours is it. Yet despite the example of a number of biblical characters, we simply do not make room in our lives for genuine retreats. Often what we call retreats are short periods that are more taxing than our routine. Little wonder so many are uptight!

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