The New Evangelical Surge

NEWS

The theme for the twenty-ninth annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals was “Jesus Christ, Lord of All.” Indeed, before the convention was over, the evangelicals made it unequivocally clear where they stand in matters of faith and in acknowledging Jesus Christ as sovereign over mankind. “There can be no real humanity and no true life apart from him,” their statement of purpose said.

They called for individual Christians to make Christ, therefore, Lord of life. “Jesus the Lord is calling his people to full surrender, non-conformity, radical self-denial, and servanthood in identification with the brokenness of the world,” their statement proclaimed.

But before the last delegate boarded his plane homeward to expound for the locals the impact of the NAE Los Angeles convention, if his mind had been open to new movings of the Holy Spirit, a new meaning in the words “Lord of All” had been confirmed.

Especially from evangelist Billy Graham there had come persuasive evidence that the word all might include more than the “thus-and-so” breed of Christians NAE has under its aegis. Graham spoke convincingly of what he recognized as the Spirit’s moving among the off-beat, New Testament-type Christianity springing up spontaneously among youth across the land.

The evangelist had his information first-hand. He told of going incognito down Hollywood Boulevard and the area around Sunset Strip to see for himself these “way-out” happenings he’d been hearing about. He said he had entertained some doubts when he set out but had come back a believer. “These youth tried to get me down on my knees,” he said.

Graham’s endorsement of the basic soundness of this type of “street Christian” was one of the key developments of the convention, because the phenomenon has aroused a measure of controversy among evangelicals.

Things have been going unduly well for evangelicals—possibly too well. It appeared that they unwittingly might be failing to keep up with the new evangelical surge occurring not only in the Southern Hemisphere and, to a degree, in Europe, but right in their own back yard. Some were calling it “wild-fire.”

Graham, NAE president Hudson Taylor Armerding, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Harold Lindsell all affirmed that the ground had been broken up under the liberals and the existential nihilists, with their doctrines of despair and meaninglessness. The youth, they indicated, and churchmen who have at last begun to wake up, were proving that.

Each interpreted this big groundbreaking by the Spirit as a necessary prelude to completing the Church that Christ established at Pentecost, with the mandate to spread the Gospel. Now, as they saw it, the consummation of that temple was close, with Christ soon to return.

Armerding especially stressed the need to “occupy” until Christ returns. He chastised those Christians who in these days have an attitude of withdrawal and isolation. As a result of this, he said, “involvement in the world” has been left “to those who are unworthy to lead or to those whose primary motivation is activism and whose goals are those of this life only. Their zeal for the amelioration of social ills is commendable, but the incompleteness of the remedy they present to mankind is tragic indeed.

The Wheaton College president said that evangelicals should regard their life’s work as being under the direction of God, and that even though that work might be secular, they could become the “salt” and the “light” of the world.

“I have in mind here the activity of Christians in the major decision-making areas of our culture where integrity and commitment to high principle were never more needed than today.… It is well to emphasize that the lordship of Christ is not designed to divide witness and service into separate categories but rather to make them complementary elements in the life of the obedient Christian.”

Graham’s stress appeared to be considerably more activist and more open than this. He suggested, before a standing-room-only crowd at Hollywood Palladium, that it was time for evangelicals to “get in step with God.” This could mean marching on Washington—a somewhat less than acceptable idea to many of the thirty-nine denominations making up NAE’s three-million-member constituency.

Graham’s call was, however, that evangelicals march to declare that “we are concerned about race, war and pollution, but that our greatest concern is the spiritual welfare of America and the world.” What if, Graham asked, all those who say they favor restoring prayer and Bible reading in the public schools should suddenly march through the streets of Washington? He saw such a prospect as a good means to get the moral message of Christianity across to a world that views it only from the outside.

Since 1942, when the NAE was formed, the strides of evangelicals—partially at the impetus of the NAE and the movements and leaders that have grown out of it—have been tremendous.

In 1942, Graham said, “evangelicalism was not laughed at as it had been in the twenties when Elmer Gantry was written. It was just ignored. The evangelicals weren’t considered to be a force to be reckoned with.”

Although Graham didn’t say so, few delegates present would question that the evangelist himself was probably the biggest single factor—humanly speaking—in winning this new-found acknowledgment of the evangelical.

The NAE, Graham pointed out, established cooperative ministries and brain trusts that emerged into increasingly reputable institutions, and these promoted leaders who were increasingly able to give academic respectability to what once was laughed at.

Graham may have stunned many of the delegates when he placed heavy stress on forming a type of evangelical superstructure (see May 7, page 37) comprehensive enough to include evangelicals of all stripes, from all churches and from around the world.

This international umbrella group, clearly the most important suggestion to come out of the convention, would in effect supersede the NAE. Heresy? Or a necessary step if evangelicals are to keep pace with God? Graham is not alone in thinking the answer should be found soon. The Spirit of God might not be in a waiting mood.

But what also remained to be answered after the conference was this: Are the evangelicals of the NAE—less than one-tenth the United States’ total—willing and ready to enter the second and possibly final lap of the race? The NAE inner sanctum is quite divided over the youth movement. And some members look askance at the charismatic movings in the mainline churches, which are making strong inroads even into the Catholic Church.

In short, evangelicals are turning up in unlikely places under unlikely circumstances. Can old-line evangelicals take them in stride? Will they catch the extended meaning of Jesus Christ as Lord of all? Or has their success caught them off guard?

The Seven-Minute Module

Bring your child to Calvary Temple’s Sunday school in Denver, Colorado, and he’s apt to be evaluated through a battery of scientific, computerized tests. Then he may be programmed through two or three seven-minute modules of personal Bible study (through earphones), and another set of seven-minute modules of worship.

“Concept Five” is part of Calvary Temple’s 2,700-attendance Sunday-school program, said to be the tenth largest in the nation and the object of study by numerous religious educators seeking to adapt it to their own churches. Concept Five and the Omega Youth Program are brainchilds of James R. Spillman, Calvary’s minister of education, who now heads Christian Dynamics, a subsidiary of the Miami, Florida-based International Computer Group. Adaptations of Concept Five will be the backbone of Christian Dynamics.

The concepts include personal Bible study, teaching of a particular Bible lesson, a physical expression of the lesson, its application to missions, and worship. Extensive use is made of audio-visual aids and team teaching.

Calvary’s Sunday-school program, reports Miami Herald religion writer Adon Taft, is one of the reasons why a recent business survey of Denver showed that the church is the mile-high city’s sixth most popular attraction. Annual attendance at Calvary tops that at the Denver Broncos football games, all the “X” and “R” rated movies, and that tourist favorite (no free samples) the U. S. Mint.

Demonstrating For Jesus

What role, if any, should Christians have in such events as the recent anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D. C.?

Ask the young activist evangelicals who showed up at these and other protest gatherings a few weeks ago—to introduce demonstrators to the Prince of Peace.

The Berkeley-based Christian World Liberation Front fielded several hundred to witness to the 200,000-plus rather docile marchers in San Francisco. The Christian youths carried gospel placards, preached, sang, and handed out 100,000 copies of a special edition of CWLF’s newspaper Right On (see April 9 issue, page 38) and 50,000 peace-in-Jesus pamphlets. They also operated a lemonade stand next to the speaker’s platform at the post-march rally in Golden Gate Park.

“This gave us a chance to rap with people about Christ while caring for a physical need,” explains Pat Matrisciana, a CWLF leader. He says there was more openness to the Gospel and less hostility than at similar events in the past. An undetermined number of persons prayed to receive Christ, he reports, and follow-up is under way.

In addition, the Gospel was heard by thousands of others when a popular radio station broadcast a taped conversation between two of the Jesus people and a non-Christian at the demonstration.

A lower-keyed but no less effective witness was carried on by evangelicals in Washington who decided that the way to a demonstrator’s heart is through his stomach. Street Christians of the four-month old Maranatha House and the older Presbyterian-backed Agape community set up shop in West Potomac Park and fed thousands of war protesters and drug-dazed rock-fest revelers. But they served up plenty of Gospel with the beans and sandwiches. They also cared for the sick who came seeking help, and they looked after some of the countless drug-overdose victims. Their operation indeed resembled something of a mobile rescue-mission ministry in the midst of a floating youthful skid row. Conservative church members who disliked the protesters’ views and behavior provided food and other logistical support.

“We made it clear to everybody that we were not there to advocate any position on Viet Nam or to talk politics,” says Maranatha leader Denny Flanders, former World Bank employee and a veteran of the Indochina conflict. “We were there only to share Jesus and to express the love of God in a tangible way to people in need.”

His band more than tripled itself through conversions. Some converts were given a crash course in basic Christianity and put to work almost immediately in reaching others for Christ. Among other things they circulated 20,000 copies of the Hollywood Free Paper among the 50,000 at the protest-related rock festival.

After police broke up the encampment, the long-haired Christians continued to witness and provide food and medical aid to the remaining thousands of hard-core militants who staged disruptive tactics in the streets, and some of the faithful were arrested in the ensuing police roundup even though they did not engage in any illegal activities. But, said one youth, this merely created a captive audience for Jesus people.

Elsewhere, Christian students staged a one-day “Jesus Festival of Love” at Kent State University during campus activities in memory of the four Kent students slain by National Guardsmen a year ago. The Crimson Bridge, a Christian rock group from Chicago, sang and testified to the 500 who attended (while entertainer Dick Gregory addressed a rally of 6,000 nearby), and street evangelist Arthur Blessitt of Hollywood preached. Two dozen received Christ, reports festival organizer Lee Birdsong, a Baptist student worker.

Blessitt next took off for Belfast, Northern Ireland, to walk the streets of that religious strife-torn city with a large wooden cross (“half Protestant, half Catholic”), and to fast and pray for several days in no-man’s-land while calling for repentance and revival. He said the act was in response to a harsh slur against Christianity by a British Broadcasting Company cameraman to whom he recently witnessed.

Meanwhile, in the midst of a Beirut, Lebanon, crowd marching in protest against the presence of American secretary of state William Rogers, a lone Lebanese-version street Christian lugged a Blessitt-style cross. Tacked to it was a thirteen-point Jesus-centered program for world peace to be delivered to government officials.

Jesus demonstrators are popping up everywhere.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Recalling Revival

Major evangelistic forays in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana last month recalled the initial phase of the Second Great Awakening experienced by that part of America. The proclamation of the Gospel in 1971 lacks much of the emotion that characterized the frontier camp meetings, but the ultimate impact may be greater.

Billy Graham’s four-day crusade in the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum in Lexington undoubtedly had its greatest effect upon young people, and therefore will be felt for years to come. Counselors noted on the opening Sunday afternoon that about 70 per cent of those who responded to the invitation to receive Christ were young people. They came forward not with tears so much as with enthusiasm and determination and an open expression of joy.

As Graham crusades go, the Lexington effort was almost an afterthought. Normally, up to two years of planning and preparation go into a campaign. But in this case the city had only ten weeks’ notice. The meetings nonetheless came off without a hitch and attracted overflow crowds. The aggregate attendance was 77,500, approximately 2,000 of whom recorded decisions for Christ.

Prior to the crusade, only Kentucky’s perennially front-running basketball team had filled the Lexington coliseum since it was built in 1947. The building accommodates about 15,000. Those who couldn’t get in sat across the street in a football stadium and heard Graham over loudspeakers. All the meetings were videotaped in color and are to be shown on television stations all across the country this month.

In Canton, Ohio, Tom Skinner held a week of meetings that captivated the attention of the population. Again the focus was upon youth, but not limited to them. Said a crusade spokesman, “There was a coming-together on a beautiful level of young and old people, Protestants and Catholics, blacks and whites, laymen and church leaders.”

The response to Skinner’s invitations was particularly gratifying. Out of some 32,000 who attended the meetings, about 1,200 stepped out to accept Christ. The crusade was described as “a genuinely spontaneous outworking of the community,” the result of two years’ prayer and work by a group of Christians in Canton. This group had gotten together to try to reduce divisions and tensions in their churches and to show concern for violence and unrest in the city.

In Elkhart, Indiana, an eight-day crusade was led by evangelist Leighton Ford, a brother-in-law of Graham. He preached to 45,000 people, and 669 of them walked down the aisles as a sign of commitment to Christ. His accent was likewise on youth, and he stressed the freedom offered by the Saviour. An offering of approximately $2,000 was donated to community-service projects in line with Ford’s continuing concern for Christian social involvement.

On the frontier, evangelism got its biggest impetus through camp meetings. The West experienced the Second Great Awakening around the years 1795–1810, after a post-Revolution period of spiritual depression. The most memorable manifestation came under the preaching of Barton W. Stone at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in an August, 1801, meeting that was attended by a crowd variously estimated at from 10,000 to 25,000. Stone went on to form a church body, part of which became the Disciples of Christ and part of which eventually merged with American Congregationalism.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Evangelicals Speak Up

The United Methodist publicity office issued a four-page news release last month describing a plea by three of the denomination’s leading evangelicals for a return to Wesleyan theology in curriculum resources and educational programs of the church.

The three testified during a week-long meeting of the United Methodist Program Curriculum Committee in Nashville. One of them, Dr. Claude Thompson of Candler School of Theology, submitted a paper but became ill and was unable to attend. The two who were there were President Frank Stanger of Asbury Seminary and Dr. Evyn M. Adams of Central United Methodist Church, Phoenix. Invitations went to the three on the heels of increasing criticism of United Methodist curriculum materials, some of which are soon to be used by United Presbyterians also.

A Church Restored

Renovation of the church where Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech is scheduled for completion this year. St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, has been undergoing repairs since 1965, when structural deterioration was discovered. A restoration fund drive has collected some $250,000.

The building was the site of the Second Virginia Convention, which met in 1775. Speaking on a resolution favoring the establishment of a Virginia militia to fight the British, Henry chastised those who called the plan too radical. “Is life so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” he asked. “Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for myself, give me liberty or give me death!”

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