Evangelism Plus: Ford Reaches Out

“Dear God,

“Please don’t think me to be smart by putting grass in your offering plate. It means I am giving it up for your son, Jesus Christ.”

The letter—signed “Your daughter, Debbie”—and an ounce of marijuana came out of a collection bucket on the final night of the Leighton Ford crusade in Rochester last month.

Ford, 38, heir apparent to the Billy Graham role (he is Graham’s brother-in-law, vice-president of the Graham organization, and frequent speaker on Graham’s “Hour of Decision” broadcast), maintained his strong appeal among young people. More than half of the 3,293 “inquirers” were teen-agers. (Total attendance for the ten-day crusade: 65,400, a record.)

There were other notable aspects. Crusade planners—representing 250 churches—launched a unique social-action ministry to inmates in Attica prison, and Ford promoted a fledgling work among young people on probation. Jesus people were enlisted to work with street youths. And evangelical Catholics participated in significant numbers—even as counselors.

“I believe the ‘sweet bye and bye’ and the nasty here and now belong together,” declared Ford in forging the link between evangelism and social action. (That piety is essential but must be combined with involvement is a point he makes in his book One Way to Change the World.) Presbyterian pastor William Showalter, crusade chairman, noted approvingly that Ford had “developed social consciousness as an evangelist. Those who are socially concerned see in him someone they can trust.” Until Rochester, Ford had merely recommended certain service agencies on “Christian Action Night” in his crusades.

To set up the prison project Ford relied on his friend Richard J. Simmons of Seattle, who has established well-known help programs at a number of West Coast prisons. The project, known as “The Bridge,” will be beamed to prisoners at the nearby Attica State Correctional Facility, where forty-three died in a riot last September. Initially, thirty volunteers from Buffalo and Rochester will visit inmates regularly, then help them make a new start after they are released, staying with them throughout the parole period.

New York authorities expressed uneasiness about having outsiders run the program (more than 100 organizations asked to work at Attica after the riot), so it will be sponsored instead by the Genesee Ecumenical Ministries of Rochester and the Buffalo Council of Churches.

Ford also publicly endorsed the new Volunteers in Probation unit working with a county family court and the local FISH (Friends in Service Here) organization that volunteers help to the needy. The 5,300 at the crusade session where the three ministries were highlighted gave an offering of $3,500 to help stake them. An anti-war group tried to disrupt the meeting, but Ford welcomed the protesters and discussed issues with them later; they did not return.

Showalter, fellow Presbyterian minister James Rice, who served as Christian-action chairman, and others on the crusade planning committee suggested the Attica idea to Ford months ago. (Local Presbyterian involvement in evangelism goes back nearly 150 years, when evangelist Charles G. Finney drew thousands to his Rochester campaign and sent 635 new members into three Presbyterian churches. The area was so saturated with hellfire-and-brimstone preaching that it was dubbed “the burnt-over district.”)

The planning committee also recruited a dozen members of the Love Inn Christian community near Ithaca to counsel street people—some of them zonked on drugs—who made decisions. The young Christians helped reunite runaways with their parents and spent days rapping with other youths in parks and shopping plazas.

Another committee idea: a “Help” table next to the platform where nearly 100 in need signed up for aid in lining up job interviews, pregnancy and marriage counseling, and the like. (Two psychiatrists were on call.)

Catholic bishop Joseph L. Hogan of the twelve-county Rochester area gave the Ford crusade his official approval and urged his faithful to attend. (In an interview Hogan revealed that he often listens to Billy Graham and appreciates Graham’s style and message, “which you don’t hear much in the pulpit these days.”) Indeed, one-third of the decisions recorded were made by Catholics, and some Catholics—including at least one nun—served as counselors. It marked the first time a Ford crusade had gotten so much Catholic support and participation. (Catholics and Protestants alike from non-participating churches are provided special follow-up and referred to a Bible-study course, according to Ford’s advance man, Lawrence Selig. If Catholic churches ever participate officially, he replied to a question, new believers with Catholic backgrounds will probably be steered to those churches for follow-up.)

The crusade featured a Jesus witness march through downtown Rochester, where hundreds handed out evangelistic newspapers and tracts. A large 15- by 20-foot TV screen behind Ford on stage enabled the audience to maintain eye contact with him, another evangelistic first.

Among the firsts there was also a last: “crusade”—a word that has some bad connotations, especially among Jews. Ford’s next campaign will be billed a “Reachout.”

Billy Graham: From Birmingham To Belfast

Blacks and whites in Birmingham, Alabama, sat side by side through eight crusade sessions listening to evangelist Billy Graham expound the Gospel as God’s answer to man’s most pressing social and spiritual needs. Attendance averaged about 40,000 per service; of these, an estimated total of 10,000 streamed forward during the invitation periods indicating they wanted to try the answer in their own lives.

On the day before Governor George Wallace was shot, the presidential hopeful telephoned Graham and told him, “I will be with you from Thursday on.” The assassination attempt moved the 53-year-old evangelist to scrap a Youth Night sermon and preach instead on “the pornography of violence,” citing especially “the influence of the devil.”

In a different vein on another night, guest James Johnson, assistant secretary of the Navy, in a testimony related how upon his arrival in Washington he had committed himself to “make a friend each day for Christ.”

Scholars Agree …

What’s the “best” Bible? Austin Chapman of Minneapolis, Minnesota, conducted a survey among forty-six well-known Bible scholars, clergymen, and theologians to find out. Among those who responded to the questionnaire: Harold Lindsell, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Harold J. Ockenga, Gordon-Conwell Seminary president, and Francis A. Schaeffer, of L’Abri Fellowship.

Chapman’s survey covered the American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible, and the King James Version. Out of ten categories the RSV snagged seven first places and three seconds. The ASV took first in “most accurate,” but the RSV got first in “scholarship” and “best whole Bible.” The KJV came in last in nine out of the ten categories, including accuracy and scholarship.

A daytime school of evangelism attracted 1,000 participants, including many pastors. The executive committee of the crusade was racially mixed and represented every major branch of Protestantism. The racial mix was evident nightly on platform and program.

Back in 1964, when racial tensions were still running high, Graham conducted an Easter service at Legion Field attended by nearly 50,000. “That’s when blacks and whites learned they could sit side by side,” observed a reporter. “This year they learned they could work side by side.”

Having gotten blacks and whites together in Birmingham, Graham at the close of the crusade announced he would make a six-day visit to Belfast and Dublin in early June, presumably in hopes of getting Irish Catholics and Protestants together. He said he would have a few speaking engagements, including a television appearance, but would not fill a political role. Instead, said he, he would seek only to carry a message of love to “integrated” audiences (Catholics and Protestants), emphasizing the biblical message of reconciliation, while trying to learn from the Irish. As long as the United States is in Viet Nam, he pointed out, Americans have no right to tell others how to solve their problems.

Before leaving Birmingham he told reporters that a rehearing of the school prayer issue before the U. S. Supreme Court would be preferable to legislative attempts to pass a “Prayer Amendment” to the Constitution. But if no court relief is forthcoming, he said, he would assume his original stance and might even lead a march on Washington—“the largest of such marches”—to restore prayer in public schools.

Skinner Gets Them Together

Black evangelist Tom Skinner preached to about 30,000—many of them high schoolers—in an eight-day Flint, Michigan, crusade sponsored by more than 300 churches in the area. Associate evangelist Bill Pannell reported 1,167 decisions. More than 500 youths staged a Saturday ten-mile Trek-for-Tom walkathon to raise funds for the crusade; their efforts netted over $2,000. Crusade co-chairman Avery Aldridge of the Foss Avenue Missionary Baptist Church reflected: “A new day has come to Flint, a day when black and white Christians realize that we are together, truly serving the same personal Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

Earlier, Skinner and evangelist Leighton Ford had teamed up in an unusual outreach at the University of Virginia sponsored by the local Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship chapter, whose membership numbers in the hundreds. IVCFers from other campuses and a dozen Gordon-Conwell seminary professors and students were also recruited to aid in the low-key effort. There were meetings in the main auditorium, scholarly seminars, classroom lectures, an appearance before the debating society (seminary professor William Lane was accorded a standing ovation), and personal encounters throughout the campus, with a number of decisions for Christ.

Participant Richard Lovelace, church history professor at Gordon-Conwell, sees such involvement as a breakthrough that would “make the seminary a reaching as well as a teaching institution, helping to focus everything the seminary does on the practical demands of mission.”

Charisma In Pittsburgh

Overflow crowds—4,000 from twenty-four states and four foreign countries—packed into the stately Hicks Memorial

Chapel of staid Pittsburgh Seminary in mid-May for the annual six-day Greater Pittsburgh Charismatic Conference. They represented what charismatics like to call the “true ecumenical movement,” for among them were members of all the major denominations plus some old-line Pentecostals, “completed” Jews, and a large number of Roman Catholics. (The burgeoning Catholic Pentecostal movement began in Pittsburgh in 1967 at Duquesne University, site of next year’s conference.)

Intended to be primarily a “ministry of teaching,” the conference featured speakers from Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish backgrounds. They included well-known author Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch victim of a Nazi concentration camp, Derek Prince of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who specializes in exorcism. J. Rodman Williams of Austin Presbyterian Seminary conducted a clergy workshop on the theology of the Holy Spirit, laymen listened to popular Roman Catholic psychologist-lecturer John Klem, and converted Jewish rabbi Michael Esses of Anaheim’s Melodyland Christian Center led participants in a study of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament.

Speaking to overflow evening sessions (many were turned away) were Indonesian revival evangelist Mel Tari and Dr. Harold Ockenga, president of Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary. Tari, author of the best-selling Like a Mighty Wind, reported that the seven-year-old Indonesian revival is still spreading through that country’s islands and into New Guinea. He affirmed that the New Testament-like miracles are still occurring and answered his detractors with, “This is just the fulfillment of the Bible your missionaries brought us. Thank you for bringing us this word of God!” Tari told of Muslim priests on his island of Timor who had torn up the Koran and accepted Christ. He claimed that now 850,000 of Timor’s one million residents are Christians. (Some missionaries have disputed the authenticity of parts of his book, but Tari insists the accounts are true.)

Ockenga brought the house down at the closing session with a repeat of his prophecy address at last year’s Jerusalem Conference on Prophecy and a triumphant “Even so come, Lord Jesus!” Ockenga himself is not a charismatic.

Conference chairman Russell Bixler, a Church of the Brethren pastor, said hundreds had been “baptized in the Holy Spirit” and many had been physically healed. (Numerous conferees reported they no longer needed their eyeglasses.) He cautioned zealous charismatics not to come on too strong in their home churches, but to talk about Jesus and be a uniting force.

ROBERT E. FRIEDRICH, JR.

Amish Schooling: Unenforceable

The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously 7 to 0 that the state of Wisconsin does not have the constitutional power to punish Amish parents who refuse because of religious convictions to send their children to public high schools.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, speaking for the court, said a state’s interest in universal education is not entirely free from a balancing process when it impinges on other fundamental First Amendment rights. He held that Wisconsin would “greatly endanger if not destroy the free exercise of their religious beliefs” if Amish children were forced to attend high school and that the state did not show a compelling need for thus interfering with the traditional Amish religious way of life.

The court asserted that an Amish child would not be deprived of the ability to earn a living should he leave that faith in later years since he would have received excellent vocational training and learned habits of hard work and honesty in his Amish education.

Other justices, while agreeing with the basic decision, questioned whether the court was really taking adequate heed of the children’s freedom of choice, an issue that, they noted, was not directly raised in the Wisconsin cases.

GLENN EVERETT

Holding Academic Hands

An evangelical university system may evolve out of the Christian College Consortium. Dr. David L. McKenna, president of Seattle Pacific College, says the ten member schools in the consortium are already cooperating in a number of ways and are planning more joint efforts. One key project is a summer institute on faith and learning that will bring together faculty representatives to discuss the integration of faith and learning. McKenna is chairman of the executive committee of the consortium.

Scotland: Specter Of The Bishop

For five years clerical and lay representatives from six Scottish churches have quietly been talking about unity. They have now produced a 30,000-word interim report that is sure to cause a storm in a land where religion still regularly makes the front page.

Proposing a merger into one body that will draw on the traditions of all six, the document stresses that true unity will come only when “the road back” is closed for good. It sees one vital principle: “The authenticity and credibility of the Church depends not on any given form of order, worship or service, but on God’s own action of calling, sustaining and forgiving. The shaping of the Church has always been vitally affected by involvement and concern within a given historical situation.”

While the report goes into great detail on the organizational grouping of the unified church in congregations, parishes, and regions, many Scots will see in its recommendations only the “unexorcised specter of the bishop” come again to haunt them, unconvincingly disguised under the flexible appellation of “superintendent.” Said one Kirk minister, quoting an early Presbyterian, “Busk [dress] him, busk him as bonnilie as ye can, we [still] see … the horns of his mitre.” And the Beaver-brook press, which does not wish bishops well, resumed its traditional cries of outrage at yet another secret plot.

The six involved are the Church of Scotland (accounting for all but 300,000 of the potential 1.5 million membership), Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, United Free, and Churches of Christ. The report goes now for consideration to the governing body of each church.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Constantinidis, ‘Heretic’

Greek journalist George Constantinidis, an evangelical, has been sentenced to five months’ imprisonment and six months of deportation (confinement to a particular part of the country) on charges of proselytizing, but he is free pending appeal. In the same courtroom in Pyrgos, Greece, in November, 1970, Spiros Zodhiates, president of the New Jersey-based American Mission to Greeks (AMG), was acquitted of similar charges (see December 18, 1970, issue, page 43, and January 1, 1971, issue, page 29).

The charges against Constantinidis—sending New Testaments and evangelistic booklets to school children and sending literature to adults—were lodged by Orthodox bishop Athanasios of Elias. Orthodox officials claim the materials are “heretical” because they are published by the AMG’s O Logos publishing house, a non-Orthodox publisher. According to news sources, an Orthodox spokesman said the literature failed to mention the Orthodox teaching that salvation is effected by Jesus Christ only through the Greek Orthodox Church.

Defense attorneys tried to show that their client had been the victim of an Orthodox plot and that prosecution witnesses had lied, but they based their case mostly on the alleged invalidity of the anti-proselytism law, arguing that the Greek constitution allows the freedom to propagate religious beliefs.

Constantinidis explained that he had never tried to “convert” Orthodox members into the Evangelical Church but was intent only on “evangelizing” them, defined as “bringing someone to Christ.”

If a higher court rules in the journalist’s favor, it will be a landmark decision perhaps abetting the evangelical cause in Greece.

Religion In Transit

More than 265,000 homes in the San Diego area have received the Living Bible version of the Gospel of John, delivered by 700 members of the city’s Scott Memorial Baptist Church. Of 600 responses so far, 200 have resulted in professions of faith, says pastor Timothy LaHaye.

Park Street Church in Boston has pledged a record $335,000 for missionary work in the year ahead.

Stony Brook School, a leading evangelical prep school, held its fiftieth commencement. Speaker: Senator Mark Hatfield.

A federal study shows that 46 per cent of the nation’s unmarried women have engaged in premarital sex by age 19, and that “while proportionately more blacks than whites have had intercourse, it is the white non-virgins who have sex more frequently and are the more promiscuous.”

Roman Catholics in the United States increased by 176,261 to a total of 48.4 million during 1971, but decreases were reported in the number of priests, nuns, students, schools, baptisms, and converts.

Activist students on college campuses are becoming more “person-oriented” than “cause-oriented,” Lutheran Student Movement executives reported after a tour of campuses, confirming observations of John Charles Cooper in The New Mentality and Charles Reich in The Greening of America.

World Wide Pictures, producers of Billy Graham films, will produce a film version of The Hiding Place, World War II hero Corrie Ten Boom’s best-selling book co-authored with John and Elizabeth Sherrill.

A tornado roared through part of Heather Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis, but 500 praying parishioners huddled inside the sanctuary escaped unhurt. Among them: fifty teen-agers who left a makeshift Sunday-school building moments before it was destroyed.

The National Catholic Register again editorially urged Catholics to participate in the Key 73 evangelistic campaign.

Wheaton College students have raised $50,000 to support fifty-two students in Christian service abroad this summer.

The American Board of Missions to the Jews has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to deny WOR-TV (Channel 9 in New York) renewal of its broadcasting license because it canceled a film on the Passover last year, after which nine other major stations also canceled.

“DIMENSION For Better Living,” a twelve-page evangelistic tabloid newspaper supplement in color published by Moody Monthly magazine, is being inserted in a number of major dailies and distributed in other ways by interested Christian groups.

Inteen magazine, edited by Henry Soles, Jr., and published by Urban Ministries, Inc. (UMI), of Chicago, was named “Christian Education Magazine of the Year” during the recent Evangelical Press Association convention. The one-year-old UMI, founded by Melvin E. Banks and chaired by evangelist Tom Skinner, is the first black-owned independent publisher to produce interracial Sunday-school literature.

The executive board of the National Coalition of American Nuns, representing 1,800 of the nation’s 175,000 Catholic nuns, has called upon Catholic women to withhold church offerings until the Catholic Church gives women equal status with men.

Personalia

Pastor John Huffman of the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church has carried a Miami radio station from sixth to first in number of listeners on Sunday nights with a three-hour open-phone talk show that begins at 10 P.M.

Minneapolis insurance broker Vernon Blikstad, a Lutheran believed by many to be the nation’s largest single distributor of Scripture portions, has been ousted from membership in the Christian Business Men’s Committee for promoting the charismatic movement during CBMC luncheons. “The leaders of yesterday’s revival are the enemies of this one,” he countered.

American financier-philanthropist John M. Templeton, a United Presbyterian elder, announced creation of a “Nobel prize” for religion worth $88,400 annually to a person of any faith who is deemed significantly “instrumental in widening man’s knowledge of love of God.” The nine judges include World Council of Churches executive Eugene Carson Blake and Princeton seminary president James McCord.

For reasons of health, pastor Edward L. R. Elson, 65, of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington gave up his church duties last month rather than waiting until January to bow out as earlier announced. He will continue to serve as chaplain to the U. S. Senate.

World Scene

New York Times correspondent Anthony Lewis reports that early Sunday-morning masses at the Catholic cathedral in Hanoi are packed, and crowds worship in another Catholic church in the city. Authorities, however, allow no seminary, hence no new priests have been ordained in the past ten years. Meanwhile, Catholic officials denied that two French missionaries had been crucified by invading North Vietnamese troops north of Kontum, South Viet Nam.

Resorts are springing up on the site of Sodom on the shores of the Dead Sea, a development seen by some as a fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy of redemption for the infamous sin city.

The World Council of Churches’ anti-racism commission says it will press for the withdrawal of all foreign investments from South Africa as part of a stepped-up drive against apartheid.

Suburban Johannesburg authorities have arrested twenty-seven young people for “disturbing the peace” by street witnessing.

The Nationalist Chinese government refused to permit a recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan to discuss a controversial statement issued by the church last year. The statement reflected concerns of native Taiwanese displeased at domination by Chinese exiles from the mainland, and called for government reforms.

Indonesian Baptists have set a goal of one million converts by 1981; they have grown from 850 in 1960 to more than 20,000 today.

In evangelist John Haggai’s Lisbon, Portugal, campaign attended by 63,000, more than 2,500—mostly young men—professed Christ.

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