Passover Telecast

When Christ walked the shores of Galilee the world population was about 250 million, a little more than the present population of the United States. About five to eight million were Jews, but Jesus’ words reached only a few of them. Since then, the spread of the Gospel has barely kept up with the rise of the world’s population. The percentage of Jews reached with the Good News has not even equaled that.

During the week of April 4–10, the American Board of Missions to the Jews, through a single-shot, prime-time television program, may reach upwards of one million Jewish persons in the United States and Australia—7 per cent of the world’s Jews and 15 per cent of those in this country. This may well be the most Jews to whom the Gospel has been communicated at one time in man’s history.

The telecast, a remarkable presentation called “Passover,” is timed to coincide with the Jewish Passover holiday on April 10—as well as the Western Christians’ Good Friday, April 9, and Easter, April 11. At various times during that week the program will be televised in twelve U. S. cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and Denver. It will also be shown in five Australian cities.

In the quiet setting of a Jewish family around a table, the telecast will portray the Feast of the Passover. It will illustrate the Old Testament story in vivid water colors, and the cameras will capture the symbolism of the utensils. In a muted, appealing way—with no mention of missions—the program will draw the connection between Passover and Calvary.

“Perhaps no celebration has deeper significance for the Jewish people than Passover,” the narrator says. “God in his sovereign wisdom chose first to reveal his plan of redemption to his ‘chosen people’—those to whom he referred as ‘Israel my firstborn.’ To the Christian, these symbols also carry deep significance. Christians believe Christ took the place of the Passover lamb and no further sacrifices were necessary. In fact, deliverance in Egypt by means of a blood sacrifice is seen as a picture of a greater deliverance to come for every man through Christ.”

“Passover” was first shown in 1970 in Los Angeles. An estimated 20 per cent of that sprawling metropolis’s 500,000 Jews watched. And 5,000 persons (3,000 were Jews) wrote letters about it.

The surprising success of “Passover” is compelling the ABMJ to make the most innovations in the thrust of its ministry since the days of its founder, Leopold Cohn, in Brooklyn in the 1890s. ABMJ’s first missions were store-fronts. They reached only the poor Jews living in ghettoes. There were small bands of believers at each mission, but as one ABMJ official put it, “nobody expected much success.”

During the last fifteen years, the ABMJ established clean, attractive centers where—to quote the same official—“any middle-class Jew would feel at home.” There are now thirty-three of these mission stations on four continents, in big cities where Jews are likely to live. The centers are manned by a staff of seventy-five missionaries.

Still, for all their toils, the ABMJ missionaries have reached only handfuls of persons. The well-to-do and more sophisticated Jews pay them little attention. “Passover” is done so well, however, and the Gospel presented so winsomely, that it can confront Jews of every stratum with the message of Christ. There is, of course, no way to learn how many of them will become Christians. But the confrontation will take place—often, perhaps, for the first time in the Jewish person’s life.

“We have gone as far from store-fronts as we possibly can,” says ABMJ general secretary Daniel Fuchs. “If we are going to reach the masses of Jewish people we must use modern communications.” Perhaps the prophecy that in the last days the Jews will come to Christ is near fulfillment.

Showing Who’S Boss

The archbishop of Canterbury returned to the attack on the World Council of Churches’ grants to combat racism when the Church of England general synod met at Westminster last month. In his presidential address Dr. Michael Ramsey reiterated his earlier warnings that the grants were “encouraging a sort of emotional belligerence which does not face the serious questions about what a just war or a just rebellion would involve.”

The primate left the packed house in no doubt that he considered “very mistaken” the limitation of the WCC program to the generally abhorred white racism, and called for “far clearer thinking … about the methods of the Church’s witness in the fields of social and political action.” However understandable, passionate concern might in this case bring misleading results. “In the coming period of history,” concluded Ramsey, “questions about resistance to oppression are likely to become prominent in new ways. All the more necessary will it be for the churches not to be selective in their symbolic acts of moral judgment upon human sin, and not to blur the distinctive role of the Church in prophecy and in reconciliation.”

Whatever the wider implications, Ramsey’s words apparently reflect a rift in episcopal ranks, for the bishop of Bristol. Dr. Oliver Tomkins, is a member of the WCC executive committee that made the original decision on the grants.

That many in the Anglican synod were still grieving for the merger scheme that failed was seen when a motion was accepted that would set up a joint group with the Methodists to report on those points that “have created stumbling blocks for significant numbers of persons in either church.” Many observers consider this pointless on the grounds that continuing opposition from different Anglican quarters will make unattainable the required 75 per cent majority (already achieved by Methodists).

But the groans that day were not all ecumenical. The new general synod, widely heralded last fall as giving bishops, clergy, and laity joint responsibility for governing, came to its moment of truth at this second meeting. It started innocently enough. A layman moved that copies of a controversial report be distributed so that members might come equipped two days later when the bishops’ decision to close certain theological colleges was due to be “noted” by the synod.

This was opposed, ostensibly on the grounds of administrative difficulties in reproducing twenty pages in the interval. Dr. Ramsey didn’t want it either. A vote was called “by houses.” Results showed the motion carried resoundingly by the laity, comfortably by the clergy—and opposed 18–1 by the bishops. So it was lost, for under

the new dispensation in the Church of England the bishop is still boss.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Calendar Power

The date has been set for ending the Indochina war. Twenty-four church, synagogue, and other religious agencies want all U. S. military involvement there to end by December 31, 1971. The campaign backers, who include representatives of national organizations of fourteen denominations, have named the inter-religious coalition “Set the Date Now.”

Participants are attempting to get members of their groups to press government leaders to “get the date set,” according to campaign director Herschel Halbert, a former national executive of the Episcopal Church.

Besides a sponsoring committee of national churchmen. Set the Date Now participants include:

American Baptist Convention; American Ethical Union; American Humanist Association; Church of the Brethren; Church Women United; Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam; Disciples of Christ; Episcopal Church; Fellowship of Reconciliation; Friends Committee of National Legislation; Lutheran Church in America; Mennonite Central Committee; National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice; National Coalition of American Nuns; National Council of Churches; Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—Society of Friends; Presbyterian Church, U.S.; Union of American Hebrew Congregations; Unitarian Universalist Association; United Church of Christ; United Methodist Church Board of Social Concerns; United Presbyterian Church, Women’s Division; United Methodist Church; and World Conference of Religion for Peace.

Charming Power Of Witchcraft

On the eve of the archbishop of Canterbury’s visit to Nairobi last month, the annual accounts of a leading soccer club in Kenya showed an expense item of $3,060 on witchcraft. Other clubs also employ witchdoctors for consultation on strategy and chances of winning, refuse to announce names of players in advance lest they be bewitched, and before vital games have sentries patrolling the stadium to see that no one places a charm on the ball.

This is but one evidence of the bubbling cauldron of witchcraft abrew not only in Africa but also in enlightened England. For instance:

Black magic practices that are “dangerous spiritually and sometimes physically” have taken place in his area, says the Right Reverend Cyril Eastaugh, bishop of Peterborough, seventy miles north of London. Holder of the military cross for valor, the blunt-spoken 73-year-old high churchman warns in his diocesan magazine that “manifestations of evil intelligences” are too common to be rejected as nonsense, and that to open the door to them “is to court evil with unknown possibilities.”

Black magic was suspected last November when the interior of a local parish church was extensively damaged, but police inquiries into this and other curious happenings in the county have proved fruitless.

Law officers in other locales have known similar frustration. In Highgate Cemetery (Karl Marx is buried there) they collared one man stalking around with hammer, stake, and other approved anti-vampire equipment, but the magistrates decided he had broken no law. At Rochford, Essex, five youths were charged under an old act with “behaving violently” in a churchyard, but were freed when the vicar said their quest for witches had resulted from a “villagers’ leg pull.”

Another rural clergyman, however, claims to have quit his parish after telling of finding graves opened, bones placed in a circle, skulls on iron bars, and other jolting sights. Such “nonstop black magic rituals” got him down, said the Reverend Lewis Barker, 67, of Clophill, Bedfordshire.

But all this is nothing compared to the “real orgies,” if we are to believe Charles Pace, who, he declares, is known to witches as “Hamar-At.” Pace confidently puts the number of practicing witches in Britain at around 30,000. Though witchcraft is not illegal in the country, participants tend to be coy and elusive, and not even the most colorful Sunday press story has achieved any substantial uncovering of covens.

Church of England psychical expert Canon J. D. Pearce-Higgins of Southwark Cathedral attributes interest in the subject to “the failure of the churches to have any reasonable eschatology.” The canon gained much publicity some time ago by condemning his church’s Article on the Resurrection as “absolute nonsense,” and by refusing to read in the cathedral an appointed passage from the Book of Revelation.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Forecast For Shelton: A Few Degrees Warmer?

By bailing out a small southern California Bible college, radio preacher Carl McIntire may have kept afloat the degree-granting capabilities of Shelton, his Cape May, New Jersey, college.

The latest McIntire maneuver, announced last month, involves gaining control of Linda Vista Baptist Bible College and Seminary in El Cajon (it is already renamed Southern California Reformation College) by settling its second mortgage of $117,000 for a reported $85,000. The mortgage holders had threatened to foreclose and sell the fifty-acre campus, estimated to be valued at $2.2 million.

Now, McIntire contends, since he had the El Cajon college board of trustees replace three of its five members with Shelton trustees, Shelton has majority control of the newly acquired school. “The college in southern California with its degree-granting privileges will be able to cover and protect the studies of the students at Shelton and also at Cape Canaveral,” McIntire wrote in the February 25 issue of the Christian Beacon. The controversial leader of win-the-war rallies recently purchased a 300-acre resort hotel complex and site for his “Gateway to the Stars” college near Cape Kennedy (see January 29 issue, page 30).

Education officials for the State of New Jersey, who revoked Shelton’s license as of next July, were not so sure about McIntire’s issuing “Shelton of the West” degrees to students from the Cape May campus. An official of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education (who asked not to be named) said in a telephone interview that Shelton students could not attend the Cape May school and take courses designed for academic credit without state approval.

But, he added, they could take courses at Shelton advertised as being only for “student enrichment.” “If it wanted, the California institution could accept such non-credit work toward a degree.” But he cautioned: “We can’t really make a judgment until we find out what Shelton intends to do.”

In any case, according to the Reverend Otto Reese, founder-president of Linda Vista, “We require approximately a year’s residence work at our institution if we are going to give a degree.” His college, which has about eighty-five students, now grants several bachelor’s degrees, as well as the master of library science and the master of religious education degrees.

The El Cajon campus was purchased from San Diego Roman Catholics two years ago for $550,000, but Reese’s college operated from 1946 until 1969 in San Diego.

McIntire, who has appealed the New Jersey revocation that cited “substantial academic deficiencies,” said the three campuses will interchange courses, faculty, and students. “Shelton in its agony gave birth to greatly expanded visions and accomplishments,” he noted triumphantly.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

39 Appeals

Five hundred twenty-four persons were reported to be imprisoned in the Soviet Union “for no other reason but their faith in God.” The tally comes from documents reaching the West from a secret meeting last December 12–13 attended by the parents of jailed evangelical believers. (This was the second such meeting; the first was in 1969.)

Eight persons were said to have been tortured to death either in prisons or during interrogations by the KGB.

The disclosures were reported by the Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Convention and published in Svoboda, a Ukrainian daily newspaper published in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Thirteen documents containing detailed allegations of religious and political persecution were said to have come to light at the secret meeting, which was held in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. One, a letter addressed to the government of the Soviet Union, said there had been 986 government-instigated and -conducted attacks on Protestant prayer meetings since 1961. Svoboda did not say whether the documents indicated how long ago the killings took place.

The letter to Moscow was quoted as saying that the attacks on prayer meetings resulted in beatings, arrests, and lengthy interrogations, as well as burnings of Bibles, “prayer-books,” and other religious articles. It was reportedly noted that the prisoners’ parents had advised Soviet leaders of the persecution in thirty-eight previous communications, none of which had been acknowledged.

Other letters made public were said to have been addressed to “all Christians of the world,” to U.N. Secretary General U Thant, and to the president of the Baptist World Alliance. Dr. V. Carney Hargroves of Philadelphia, current BWA president, said he has received no such letter. Spokesmen for the BWA headquarters in Washington also said they had no knowledge of it.

The letter to the Soviet leaders was signed by five people and gave a temporary address, noting that the group’s president, where mail was apparently being received previously, had been arrested. The letter cited names of persons that it said had constantly been persecuted for the profession of faith.

“As we are convening here,” the letter said, “168 of our kin are suffering behind the walls of prisons. All this at a time when you are proclaiming to the world that there is freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, etc., in the USSR.”

The document demanded freedom of worship, freedom from persecution because of religious belief, release of the imprisoned and the return of children to their parents, and return of confiscated homes, literature, and money collected in fines.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Religion In Transit

Sales of the 18-month-old Reach Out! edition of The Living New Testament have reached the one million mark, Tyndale House publisher Ken Taylor announced. The entire “Living” series has sold more than eight million copies, including 500,000 of an inexpensive

serviceman’s edition. Campus Crusade for Christ and World Home Bible League are now printing it under their own names.

The Reverend Gilbert Caldwell of Harlem was named successor to the Reverend James Lawson of Memphis as head of Black Methodists for Church Renewal (BMCR). At its Dallas meeting last month, BMCR also asked the United Methodist Church to earmark the $1.3 million it received from the federal government in war-damage claims for use in inner-city work.

The United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race bailed out the Inner City Parish urban ministry in Kansas City with a $40,000 grant this month after the controversial program was spurned by its founders last year.

Eleven top U. S. Catholic theologians in a report this month favored the re-institution of ordaining women deacons to offset the declining number of religious workers in the church.

All ten teaching nuns at St. Raymond’s parochial school in Detroit have quit, protesting “non-Christian racial attitudes” of parents of the children. The action reportedly had full approval of their order, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and John Cardinal Dearden.

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has dedicated Memphis Deaf-Eternal Mercy Church for the deaf, the only one of its kind in Tennessee, and one of only a few in the United States.

The Federal Communications Commission has again refused to renew the license of Carl McIntire-controlled radio station WXUR in Media, Pennsylvania—no doubt setting the stage for a court test. The FCC contends the station fails to air both sides of controversial public issues.

Plans have been submitted to the Pentagon for construction of a Jewish chapel and religious center at West Point Military Academy … A small religious center, compared to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and the Matisse Chapel in France, opened in Houston last month. Fourteen paintings by the late American abstract artist Mark Rothko adorn the chapel walls.

New York State last month announced dispersal of $10.1 million in state aid to 1,365 religious schools.

Circus Kirk, known as the “Circus with a Difference,” will tour Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland this summer. The interdenominational, interracial circus, a youth ministery project of the Lutheran Church in America, is now recruiting performers, musicians, riggers, and mechanics through Box 181, East Berlin, Pennsylvania, 17316.

Nearly 9,000 converts—most of them rural blacks—joined the Baha’i World Faith during a recent thirteen-county conference in the South.

Led by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the Foundation for Christian Living has asked Christians around the world to join in a twenty-four-hour prayer chain for all mankind on Good Friday.

Personalia

Killed in a fiery airplane crash near Corona, California, this month were E. W. Hatcher of Fullerton, California, a longtime Missionary Aviation Fellowship employee, and United Airlines employee John Wilson of New Jersey. The MAF Cessna 185 was on a routine flight; the cause of the accident was under investigation.

Dr. L. Doward McBain, pastor of Phoenix, Arizona’s First Baptist Church, has been named chairman of the American Baptist Convention’s committee for planning the ecumenical evangelistic emphasis. Key 73.

The Reverend Mitsuho Yoshida has been elected to succeed the Reverend Kiyoshi Ii as moderator of the United Church of Japan (Kyodan), the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

Myron L. Boardman, executive director of the Foundation for Christian Living, has been elected president of the Layman’s National Bible Committee, sponsor of the annual National Bible Week observance.

A Welsh Baptist, the Reverend Brian Russell-Jones, has become director of the Belgian Protestant Information Service (BELPRO) in Brussels.

Theology professor William H. Weiblen, 52, of Wartburg Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa, has been named president of the ALC institution succeeding ALC president Kent S. Knutson.

Norval Hadley, assistant to the president of World Vision, has been appointed general superintendent of the Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends (formerly Oregon Yearly Meeting).

Missions and evangelism professor H. Wilbert Norton of Wheaton (Illinois) College has been named dean of the college’s Graduate School of Theology.

Nine prominent church peace fighters, including Stanford University’s religion professor Robert McAfee Brown and chapel dean B. Davie Napier, shut down a San Mateo, California, draft board by blocking the entrances. The San Mateo Nine sought arrest during the Ash Wednesday protest, but police ignored them.

World Scene

Greek archaeologists announced this month that they had unearthed the remains of the original Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre built by the Roman emperor Constantine more than 1,600 years ago on the site many Christians believe to be the spot where Jesus was crucified and buried. The find is under the present high altar about thirty feet from the traditional Rock of Calvary.

A “bugged” Indian basket of gifts is a new tool to aid missionaries to learn more about the primitive Auca tribe in Ecuador. Missionary Rachel Saint says the basket, with hidden radio transmitter, is parachuted into Aucan villages; recorded conversations of the group help identify them to long-separated relatives who have since become Christians.

The Orthodox Church of Greece announced last month that it won’t recognize the independence of the Orthodox Church of America, the former Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America.

A third nationwide Baptist evangelistic campaign in Portugal is planned for May 16–30.

World Radio Missionary Fellowship of Quito, Ecuador, won the Moody Institute of Science Operation Mobile Missionary prize package: a thirty-one-foot trailer fully equipped as an audiovisual center, towed by a camper pickup. There were 162 applications from 64 countries.

The first French-language Baptist congregation in the Ivory Coast recently dedicated its new building in Abidjan.

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