Church-related and Christian colleges are acutely aware—more than ever this fall—that educational success lies in beating the cost spiral, rising as much as 18 per cent a year in many cases.

Although financing is the most obvious problem (see “Crisis in Christian Education,” May 21 issue, page 4), there are also difficulties over school purpose, image, and programs.

These matters are not unrelated: well-heeled alumni of evangelical institutions grow uneasy and tend to zip their pocketbooks when controversy erupts over parietal rules, dress codes, and outspoken campus newspapers, and when rumors buzz about “liberal” teaching emanating from some professor’s classroom.

Spirits of some church college administrators soared in midyear when the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that public funds may be used to build academic buildings on campus (thus holding constitutional a 1963 law). Nonetheless, the Association of American Colleges has reported on the basis of a poll of 571 private institutions that the financial situation is worsening; deficits at responding schools totaled $87 million. A prime cause was an inflation rate of 7 per cent.

And enrollment in private schools, including Christian colleges, is declining; these schools account for only one-third of the student population this year, according to the AAC.

The crisis has spurred fresh thinking and innovation, however, and some evangelical alternatives to the traditional Christian college are beginning to catch hold.

Among them is Satellite Christian Institute (formerly Skyline Christian Institute), a residential study center in the San Diego, California, area that opened with a handful of students last September, a year later than expected. (See August 30, 1968, issue, page 45, and September 12, 1969, issue, page 49.)

Satellite’s head, Dr. George Failing, aims to quadruple the school’s size this month to about sixty students; he estimates there can be seventy-five as soon as a full year’s program is offered. The cost, adds the gray-haired former editor of the Wesleyan Methodist and onetime public-relations director of Houghton College, will be about one-quarter that of a typical Christian college.

Top enrollment for Satellite will be 200, but Failing thinks that the concept is highly “copyable” and that many similar technical-type schools “dedicated to training Christians for positions of leadership either in the Church or in the secular world” will soon spring up.

Satellite now provides three avenues of Christian leadership preparation: lay Christian ministry (for college graduates who want to devote their lives to secular professions but who also want to have a significant influence as Christians), licensed Christian ministry (for those interested in church-related Christian service), and alienated-youth ministry (for persons ministering to counterculture young people).

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Although SCI grads receive degrees from secular academic communities nearby (or have already earned them before coming to SCI), they also qualify for the Fellow in Christian Leadership (FCL) after completing SCI course, vocation, residence, and chapel requirements. Failing said California approval for accreditation is expected “very soon.”

Seed money for SCI was given by S. S. Kresge of the well-known dime-store chain. More modest capital gifts have followed from foundations, board members, and three churches. The 1971–72 operating budget is about $60,000 according to Failing. He and Paul W. Dekker, acting head of the World Mission and Evangelism Department, are SCI’s only full-time faculty.

Meanwhile, several new Christian institutions planned to open their doors this month:

In Miami, Florida, the Baptist University of America will use facilities of the New Testament Baptist ChurchAn independent, fundmentalist church affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship. and the Dade Christian Schools, a church-affiliated elementary and high school. A. C. Janney, pastor of the church and director of Dade, will be president of the college, which expects 150 students this fall.

The college will initially offer degrees in education and add others as demand develops. Construction of dorms and an administrative building is set for 1972.

Also in Miami, an outgrowth of Miami Bible College, Miami Christian University, announced the appointment of three vice-presidents for administrative areas. This school year launches a ten-year development plan for the university. Its name, Miami Christian University, was chosen in 1970; Miami Bible College is now a division of the university. A target of 5,000 students has been set for 1981.

In Phoenix, Arizona, sessions opened at Arizona College of the Bible under the leadership of president Paul Eymann, who taught Bible and theology for several years at the now defunct Arizona Bible College. The new school will offer a three-year diploma based on a major in biblical studies.

On September 7 the Christianview Bible College opened in Willowdale, Ontario, under the auspices of the Pentecostal Holiness Church of Canada. Dr. Noel Brooks, a graduate of the University of London and a recent arrival from England, is the first president. A B.A. degree with a Bible major and a Bachelor of Christian Education degree will be offered.

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In other recent developments, Dr. Kenneth Monroe has been named president pro tem of Westmont (California) College until a successor to Dr. John Snyder is found (see March 12 issue, page 57). Rangy, affable Monroe, who came out of retirement to fill the slot, held the same assignment twenty-one years ago until Dr. Roger Voskuyl was named president.

While Monroe came back on campus, forty-five Westmonters left it September 7 on a four-month Europe-Israel study junket that encompasses six countries and offers twelve to sixteen academic credits.

In another appointment, Dr. Edward Neteland has been named first full-time director of the recently formed Christian College Consortium (CCC), an association of ten prominent evangelical colleges (see April 9 issue, page 44). Neteland, who was president of a learning-resources company in Chicago, and before that, dean and vice-president of development for Trinity (Deerfield) College, has proposed a $1 million three-year expenditure to test the feasibility of an open university system of Christian colleges.

The ten-year-old Florida Bible College has been moved from Miami to a Hollywood, Florida, resort hotel purchased for more than $5 million. Some 850 students pay $10 a week for rooms formerly renting for $70 a day.

A palace revolt in the court of radio preacher Dr. Carl McIntire has produced yet another school: Biblical

School of Theology, scheduled to open this month in a former public school building in suburban Philadelphia.

The revolt occurred in early summer after the Faith Theological Seminary board, on the recommendation of board chairman McIntire, who cited mounting economic problems, voted to sell Faith’s multi-million-dollar estate campus in Elkins Park near Philadelphia and move to the vacated premises of McIntire’s Shelton College in Cape May, New Jersey. Faith’s veteran president of thirty-seven years, Allan A. MacRae—who had announced his retirement in June—and all but one of Faith’s full-time faculty members bolted from McIntire’s camp. They joined evangelist John W. Murray, an ex-McIntire backer, and his Bible Evangelism organization to found the new school, to be headed by MacRae.

One teacher who insisted on anonymity said the proposed move to Cape May was “the last straw” in overall disenchantment with McIntire’s administrative policies and political activities.

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After the rift opened, McIntire decided against moving to New Jersey, where Faith would be subjected to the close scrutiny of state schools chief Ralph Dungan. Dungan had led the state’s case against Shelton for alleged inadequacies and misrepresentations, stripping Shelton of degree-granting rights. (Shelton reopened this month in the milder climate of Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a student body said to number 130). The Faith board decided to postpone indefinitely McRae’s pension voted earlier.

McIntire, meanwhile, as Faith’s new president, wrote letters to the school’s new and returning students (many reportedly committed to following their professors to the new school), warning that the new school was not accredited.

As registration approached, Faith was rummaging for faculty replacements, and the splinter school was scouting for students.

China Revisited

A retired Candian diplomat who was born in China and served there as a missionary recently paid a return visit to find church buildings still standing and a small number of Christians still meeting regularly.

Chester A. Ronning, now 76, went back at the personal invitation of Premier Chou En-lai, with whom he had developed a friendship while serving in the Canadian diplomatic mission to China. His month-long trip was described in an article in The Lutheran, published by the Lutheran Church in America.

In returning to the town deep in China’s interior where he was born, Ronning found a church building he remembered and learned that a group of believers, mostly old people, met in a guest room. “I don’t know whether there is a pastor or not,” Ronning declared.

The article, written by Edgar Trexler, an editor of The Lutheran, said that Ronning had been principal of an academy in Fancheng, and that his return visit included a week there.

The church still stands on the academy grounds, but an old hospital on the site had been torn down. “It’s significant that the church is still standing,” Ronning declared.

He argued that the anti-Christian campaign of the Communists was a reaction to practices of the church. “The emphasis was on the expulsion of a foreign political and cultural power, not religious persecution,” Ronning added.

The Toils Of Greece

Even the prospect that some of the may meet the biblical requirement for angels unawares has not deterred the Greek Orthodox Church from a distinctly chilly attitude toward the two million strangers that will visit the country this year. A prayer announced by the holy synod says in stoutly unequivocal words:

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“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on the cities, the islands and the villages of our Orthodox Fatherland, as well as the Holy monasteries, which are scouraged by the worldly touristic wave. Grace us with a solution of this dramatic problem and protect our brethren who are sorely tried by the modernistic spirit of these contemporary western invaders.”

When the wave passes over them, however, Greeks will have the further difficulty of knowing what to do with the estimated $250 million that the accursed tourists will inflict on the fatherland.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Asian To Head Ifes

Anglo-American domination is no longer a problem for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). Chua Wee Hian, 31, a native of Singapore, will be general secretary of the IFES in 1972, following the resignation of C. Stacey Woods, 61, who has held the post since the group’s founding in 1947.

Furthermore, several new national movements were admitted to membership in the organization of evangelical Christian students by the Eighth General Committee, meeting in Austria last month. (Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship is the U. S. movement of the IFES, which emphasizes the autonomy and cultural integrity of each national group.) With more than thirty member movements, the IFES is working in about seventy countries to bring college students to Christ.

Newly accepted members are the Union des Groupes Bibliques Universitaires d’Afrique Francophone (a French-speaking African group), and groups from Nigeria, Ghana, and (provisionally) Pakistan.

“During the four years since the last General Committee, the most impressive development of the student work of the IFES has been in French-speaking Africa,” reports Harold O. J. Brown, who served as theological secretary until last month.

Extensive debate on the meaning of “entire trustworthiness” when applied to the Scriptures occupied much of the week of meetings, ending in the reaffirmation of the doctrinal basis of the IFES that confesses “the divine inspiration and entire trustworthiness of Holy Scripture, as originally given, and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.”

The subcommittee that drew up the reaffirmation also said:

“The words ‘entire trustworthiness’ have a wider and richer meaning than infallibility and inerrancy. Scripture is entirely trustworthy in the sense that its message conveys the true knowledge of God and of His works, especially the way of salvation, and that whatever Scripture teaches or states is altogether reliable and will never, if properly interpreted, lead into error those who receive it.

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“Proper interpretation takes into account the sacred writers’ intentions, use of language, style and contexts. It also consistently acknowledges the divine origin of Scripture and its organic unity. It not only requires the use of the tools of philological and historical sciences, but also unqualified submission to the teaching of Scripture and prayerful dependence upon God’s Holy Spirit.

“We were asked whether ‘entire trustworthiness’ applies to chronology, history, geography, etc. This is a more complex question than it might seem to be and no comprehensive answer has been possible in the time available. We would, however, state that in the practice of interpretation, difficulties often arise from the inappropriate imposition of modern scholarly and scientific conventions. On the other hand, we would stress that no a priori limitations should be set to the authority of the Bible.”

The General Committee also approved moving IFES headquarters from Lausanne, Switzerland, to London. In 1962, the headquarters was transferred from the United States to Switzerland to avoid the impression of domination by the numerically strong British and American Inter-Varsity movements. With Hian as general secretary (he was the associate general secretary for East Asia), and with increased world membership, the problem of domination appears to be resolved. A smaller European office will remain in Lausanne, however.

Internal Problems Vitiate Christian Peace Conference

Domination by Orthodox members from the Soviet Union in the Christian Peace Conference (CPC) has finally all but wiped out the Prague-based organization’s influence as a vehicle for East-West church interaction.

The U. S. Association of the CPC in effect severed formal relations late last month when it decided not to send official delegates to the fourth All-Christian Peace Assembly in Prague this month. Princeton Seminary professor Charles West, chairman of the American group, said the U. S. association will change its name and devote itself to the problem of East-West relations from a Christian perspective.

West said there was no indication the assembly would “provide a platform for fruitful dialogue among the delegates in public, or that the delegates will have any appreciable influence on the personnel or politics of the CPC.”

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The CPC situation rapidly fell apart after the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. Dr. Jaroslav Ondra was forced out as CPC general secretary, and Dr. Joseph L. Hromādka (who taught at Princeton Seminary during World War II) resigned as president shortly before he died in late 1969 (see December 19, 1969, issue, page 35).

Some Western delegates walked out of a CPC committee meeting after CPC chairman Metropolitan Nikodim refused to allow debate on Ondra’s ouster. Then the British CPC unit folded, the French were expelled, and Dutch and Swiss committees withdrew support because of the Soviet-dominated structure.

Religious News Service reported that the Prague CPC invited Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Ralph David Abernathy to this month’s conference in an apparent attempt to give the impression of prominent U. S. participation.

Hromādka founded the CPC a decade ago; until recent years it was considered the major channel between Christians in Socialist lands and those of the West.

Mennonite Mandates

The General Conference Mennonite Church, meeting in Fresno, California, last month, pledged its support to its draft-age youth who refuse to cooperate with the Selective Service System, and to those “who feel called to resist the payment of that portion of taxes being used for military purposes.”

The support by the traditionally pacifist church extended even to young men unwilling to perform “alternate service,” Mennonite-sponsored work that “identifies with the suffering in the world and thereby seeks to prevent violence and war.”

The General Conference admitted ten new congregations with a combined membership of 1,150, bringing the Newton, Kansas-based church’s total membership to about 57,000 in 314 congregations in the United States, Canada, and South America.

But General Conference historian Robert S. Kreider told the convention he predicts the denomination will become smaller in the next twenty years and will send out fewer missionaries (currently there are 400 people in mission and relief assignments). Kreider said the decline would result from a lower birthrate and the upward mobility of present members. “Going on to college and entering a profession is especially hazardous for Mennonite church membership,” he said.

Miss Hedy Sawadsky became the first woman to be elected a Conference executive officer. Director of Christian education for a Henderson, Nebraska, church, she defeated two male candidates for the position of Conference secretary after she was nominated from the floor. The Reverend Henry Poettcker, president of Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg, was reelected Conference president. □

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Godless Minister Goes

It took three hours of debate, but the British Methodist conference last month showed its heart was still in the right place by expelling one of its ministers who no longer believed in God. Not that the facts were in dispute: the Reverend Raymond Billington, 41, freely admitted he had not used the divine name for three years (“if you want to call a sense of duties and values ‘God’ that is fine”).

Billington made headlines in 1964 when he joined Nicolas Stacey’s team based on the Anglican parish of Woolwich, which is well known for radical experiments (one of the most controversial was the obtaining of a license to sell hard liquor to youth). Stacey finally resigned as rector and went into a relief organization.

In that same year the Methodist Conference expelled another of its ministers who did not believe in the Virgin Birth. Generally, however, the denomination avoids drastic action: both Leslie Weatherhead and Lord Donald Soper in previous years had been acquitted of similar charges of heresy, and both went on to become president of the conference. Billington, now a humanities lecturer at Bristol Polytechnic, said he felt no bitterness about the decision: “The Methodist Church was caught up in its machinery and had to act.”

South Africa

Sanctioning U.S. Business?

The Episcopal Church, along with several other mainline U. S. denominations, has for several years been trying to persuade American businesses to withdraw from South Africa in protest against the republic’s policy of apartheid. But after a recent trip to that country on behalf of Presiding Bishop John E. Hines, two top-ranking Washington, D. C., Episcopalians said they now feel American presence through business investment in South Africa should be continued, not withdrawn.

Bishop William F. Creighton and Dean Francis B. Sayre of Washington Cathedral said that economic sanctions in South Africa accomplish little and that U. S. business activity there “offers the possibility of some kind of social leadership through that investment.” Creighton said bridges between the people of South Africa and the outside world “are so fragile that where you have a bridge you have to use it and build on it and not destroy it.” Sayre added that economic sanctions will work only “as they give spirit and courage to the black population, who have never before been really conscious that people outside Africa are concerned about them.”

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The two clergymen, along with Episcopal layman and New York jurist William Booth, a Negro, were sent to report on the case of the Anglican dean of Johannesburg, who heads the only integrated congregation in South Africa. Dean Gonville ffrench-Beytagh was arrested last January and charged this summer with violating the country’s Terrorism Act, including plotting to overthrow the white government of South Africa, and distributing funds to banned organizations.

The dean pleaded innocent last month to a thirty-eight-page indictment that also includes charges against the Foreign Mission Board of the United Church of Christ. The prosecution presented as evidence letters allegedly written by ffrench-Beytagh, and a tape recording also supposed to contain conversation about sources of funds for some black African liberation movements.

Sayre said many people in South Africa believe the aim behind the prolonged legal actions against ffrench-Beytagh is to “[intimidate] the eight million dark-skinned victims of a system that holds them in virtual slavery” and to silence dissenting voices among churches, students, and the press. Since the dean has not been deported, added Sayre, the general feeling is that the move is an attempt to put pressure on the Anglican Church. The larger Dutch Reformed Church nas not taken the vigorous stand against apartheid that the Anglicans have.

Religion In Transit

The United Presbyterian Church’s Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR) will have $1.1 million trimmed in 1972 from its present $14.7 million budget. Overseas personnel, already severely pruned, will be reduced another 220 over the next two years; headquarters staff and budget will also be pared.

Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, has received the largest grant for capital development in the eighty-year history of the liberal-arts school: $500,000 in a conditional grant from the Kresge Foundation for a $1.5 million women’s residence hall.

The Iowa Board of Public Instruction has exempted all Amish children from state education standards for another year; a U. S. Supreme Court decision on the issue is expected soon.

Of the nation’s 100 largest Sunday schools—all over 1,000 in membership—87 are Baptist. In its fourth annual survey of Sunday schools, Christian Life magazine also said nineteen of the largest schools write their own materials.

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Only 16 per cent of American blacks feel white churches “really care” about achieving racial equality, according to a recent Harris Poll. Trailing close behind were local realtors; 14 per cent of blacks surveyed felt realtors “really care.”

Pennsylvania governor Milton J. Shapp, a Jew, signed into law last month a bill that provides direct cash to parents with children in nonpublic schools; the measure was expected to receive an immediate court test.

Sale of two FM stations (KBBI and KBBW) in Los Angeles and San Diego by Biola Schools and Colleges has been approved. A Pacific Southwest Airlines subsidiary bought the stations, which lost $350,000 for Biola, for $1,150,000; they will now have a commercial format.

Personalia

Steve Board, for three years a worker in the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in Chicago, has replaced Paul Fromer as editor of His magazine. Fromer is on sabbatical at Wheaton Graduate School; Board’s qualifications include “reading magazines most of [my] literate life.”

Commander Gordon E. Paulson, a Baptist General Conference U. S. Navy chaplain, has received the nation’s first graduate degree in alcohol studies: a Master of Arts from the Pacific School of Religion, an inter-denominational seminary in Berkeley, California.

Bishop William W. Baum of Springfield-Cape Girardeau has been appointed by the Pope as a special nondelegate representative to the general assembly of bishops at the World Synod opening in Rome September 30. Four other prelates were elected by the U. S. hierarchy.

South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu has awarded two Christian leaders in Saigon the highest civilian decoration for service to the South Vietnamese, Newsasia Religious News Service reported. The men are World Vision director Doug Cozart, and Christian Missionary and Alliance missionary Garth Hunt.

Elected to the top post in a vast area of western Canada last month was Ralph Dean, bishop of Cariboo, now Archbishop of the Anglican Church of British Columbia and the Yukon.

New York Jets footballer Steve Thompson, a six-foot-five, 245-pound defensive tackle from the University of Washington and a three-year pro veteran, has retired from the team because he “received direction from the Lord to do something else”—perhaps a teaching job in Eugene, Oregon.

Anti-Communist evangelist Dr. Billy James Hargis has vowed he will fight attempts by the Internal Revenue Service to collect $218,481 it claims he owes for back taxes. Hargis says the assessment is a “vendetta” and has called for Congress to investigate the IRS.

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Nathan F. Leopold, convicted in 1924 with another man for the “thrill-killing” of a 14-year-old boy and sentenced to life plus ninety-nine years, died in San Juan, Puerto Rico, August 29 at the age of 66. Paroled in 1957, he worked for thirteen years in a small mission hospital maintained in the Puerto Rican highlands by the Church of the Brethren.

World Scene

More than 50,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses from twenty nations packed into a London stadium for the Witnesses’ biggest convention yet in Britain. The sect is said to be one of the two fastest-growing religious groups in the land. The Mormon church is the other group.

The first edition of the Canadian Mennonite Reporter, published in Kitchener, Ontario, rolled off the presses last month; the new paper is intended to be the successor to the Canadian Mennonite, suspended last February.

A new United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southwest Africa has been constituted, joining the Rhenish Mission Church and the Ovambokavango Evangelical Lutheran Church. The 285,000 members of the new body represent 95 percent of the territory’s Lutherans.

The transfer of thirty-five mission stations, dispensaries, and Bible schools from the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) to the Evangelical Churches of West Africa in Nigeria was reported by Africa Now, an SIM publication.

A new Baptist chapel in northern Guatemala was burned to the ground, climaxing months of harassment. The mission in Pocola is a product of a movement toward Christ among the Kekchi Indians that is bitterly opposed by leaders of the area’s traditional religion, a mixture of Mayan beliefs and Catholicism.

Pope Paul has issued a statement making it possible for a marriage annulment to be pronounced after a single trial, instead of the two and sometimes three now necessary. The reform, effective October 1, is expected to cut years off the duration of some matrimonial cases, easing the burden on church courts and saving money and spiritual anguish for Catholic couples.

In a move toward “complete normalization” of church-state relations, Poland’s government granted the Roman Catholic Church full title to church property in territories acquired from Germany after World War II. Many of the 4,700 churches, 2,200 other buildings (mostly clerical residences), and 2,000 acres of church gardens had belonged to Protestants.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon and the Central African Republic and the Lutheran Church in Malaysia and Singapore have been accepted for membership in the Lutheran World Federation, bringing its total membership to eighty-four churches and 54 million people.

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Israeli police have several times forcibly barred Jewish youths from conducting prayer meetings in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount compound where two Muslim mosques now stand. Fearing that Jews might accidentally stand over the now-obliterated site of the sacred Holy of Holies—the ancient Temple room accessible only to Jewish high priests—the Orthodox Rabbinate has decreed that Jews may not pray on the mount. (Tourists meanwhile swarm over the area daily.)

Protestants in East Germany have contributed more than $100,000 to the controversial World Council of Churches’ Program to Combat Racism. WCC funds in the past have been given to guerrilla-type liberation groups operating in some African nations.

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