Lonely but Loved in Lansing

Evangelist Leighton Ford continued his innovative ways in mass evangelism at last month’s ten-day “Reachout” in Lansing, Michigan. Social-action committees worked with the needy and elderly, and set up booths in shopping malls both to communicate the Gospel and to help people with personal needs. Clusters gathered nightly at the Reachout “Help” table to ask about jobs, social services for family problems, help with drug addiction, and other matters. Some were simply lonely.

Seven “worlds” were created to bring together Christians in the vocational worlds of education, press and media, construction, real estate and insurance, finance, government, and manufacturing. The aim is that believers come up with not only a strategy for promotion of the Gospel but also a Christian life-style within their vocation realms.

His every move magnified on a twelve-foot video screen behind him, Ford explained to the crowds at the 5,000-seat Civic Center that man must reach out to God in faith and to others in Christian love. Not minimizing the need to be born again, he proclaimed man’s social need as well. One night black evangelist Tom Skinner joined Ford to amplify that theme.

Prior to the Reachout, Ford spent several days talking to students on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing, and associates visited high schools in the area. In connection with Ford’s MSU visit, Christian collegians mounted a week-long campus thrust to reach the school’s 40,000 students. Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox believers took the Billy Graham organization’s counselor-training classes, engaged in personal evangelism on campus, and handed out nearly 40,000 copies of the “Big Ten” edition of the Good News for Modern Man New Testament.

“Brother, it’s the Good News,” proclaimed a Catholic as he gave away a copy. At the distribution table his priest, feverishly unpacking more boxes, grinned and said, “This is beautiful; we can’t keep up with the demand.” An Israeli grad student took his free copy, then asked for fifteen more to distribute to friends. Muslim students gladly accepted, too. (The Christian students had raised $5,000 to purchase half the New Testaments; the American Bible Society donated the other eight tons.)

As part of the outreach, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship circulated its multi-media production Twentyonehundred around the dorms. Folk singer John Fisher and black evangelist Ralph Bell, both with the Ford team, also drew campus crowds. Later, at the Civic Center meetings, three-fourths of the 515 counselors were under 25, and the majority of the 600 first-decision-makers were youths, including about seventy MSU students.

Nearly 200 churches and groups backed the campaign, led by chairman Howard Lyman, pastor of Lansing’s Central Methodist Church. Brief television commentaries and testimonies initiated during the Reachout will go on.

Despite the visibility of blacks at leadership level and Ford’s emphasis on social action, comparatively few blacks participated in the Reachout. Black minister Raymond L. Coleman, the crusade’s prayer chairman, was disappointed at the sparse showing. For one thing, blacks are not oriented to the highly polished organizational structures and time schedules, he explained. But he also lashed out at black leaders who were “too busy with social issues to get involved spiritually.”

“The races must come together in Christ,” declared Coleman. “We must lose our identities and petty differences so that we can share together in Christ. We must stop trying to be missionaries to each other and instead show the world that we love each other as we work together.”

Cry 3:

Journey From Plastic City

Sight. Sound. Spirit. That’s CRY 3, a Clear Light production.

The forty-five-minute sound track of rock music (featuring such singers as Cliff Richard, Shawn Phillips, Paul Stookey, and the Byrds) is synchronized with black-and-white and color slides (six slide projectors are used with a special multiple-fade-dissolve unit) as the production explores the anguished cry of despair and loneliness of alienated youth, adults, and elderly. But CRY 3 doesn’t leave us with despair.

TEARFUL RECOLLECTION

An American missionary imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II met his prison-camp commandant for the first time in twenty-eight years during special ceremonies at a Christian retreat near Kyoto, Japan. The two—mission executive Joseph M. Smith of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and Rokuro Tomibe, now a Kyoto businessman—recalled old times.

Tomibe was commander of a camp in the Philippines holding 500 Americans, among them Smith, his wife, and their baby. He had put Smith in charge of the vegetable garden. Tomibe was later fired for being too lenient with his prisoners. (He had permitted considerable freedom, even allowing several couples to be married and offering Japanese rice wine for the celebrations.) Eventually, Tomibe was interned by American forces.

The meeting between the pair was initiated by Smith and was marked by an exchange of gifts—and by tears. During the service, Smith made Tomibe an honorary member of the church, explaining: “You’re a better Christian than I am.”

The multimedia festival starts with Genesis: “And it was good,” chant the people. “But something went wrong,” echoes voice after voice, as we see ravaged and ravishing nature, the predators and their prey. The screen fades into the cry of dehumanized personality. We see no people in this sequence, just mannequins with empty stares and beautiful clothes—our plastic society, our material wasteland.

The journey out of plasticity begins. Real people with twisted faces and agonized features are searching for reality, for freedom. Drugs and hypodermic needles flash on the screen, but only for a few seconds, a symbol of the dead end they lead to.

The isolation we see and the desperation we feel shocks us into painful awareness of our situation as a voice moans, “Where do we go from here?” Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius have no answers. But Jesus, the man who claimed to be God, claims to be man’s answer. As the screen considers Christ’s claims, we hear a song of “reflections.”

“Between reflections I must choose,” intones the singer. The two reflections—himself (“a fool”) or “a man I could not face,” a man with nailprinted hands and wounded side. That man “was in my place,” and the singer succumbs to Jesus.

The production ends as it begins—with nature, but a nature at peace as God intended it before man scarred himself and his world. The eschatological implications, silently yet profoundly stated, lead into the final frame: “What will you do … with Jesus?”

Two-year-old Clear Light Productions, a seven-person, Boston-based company, has found one of the most vital media through which to communicate Jesus’ vital claims. The creative editing and packaging make this multimedia show one to rival the best secular productions. (The largest marketing agency in Boston agrees and has booked CRY 3 into colleges across the country.) The company is also producing Because I Am, a two-hour, feature-length, movie-slide film, with a rock-music sound track (the album will be out soon).

Founders Don Andreson and Dave Bliss, both in their twenties, graduated from Princeton University (Andreson also attended Wheaton College) and served as interns with Africa Evangelism (Andreson returned to South Africa for a short term as a missionary in urban evangelism). They attend Park Street Church in Boston. The organization should have a great future in media work. Just such a company of talented, committed evangelicals has long been needed in the fields of sight and sound to present Jesus to a spirit-hungry culture. CRY 3 is a show to attend more than once.

CHERYL FORBES

A Bow To Science

One of the most serious outbreaks of paralytic polio in the United States in seven years has hit a Christian Science school in Connecticut. Eleven students were given medical treatment, and the other 119 were vaccinated.

Christian Science officials said the medical procedures do not represent a shift in church policy. They said Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the sect, provided that where faced with laws demanding vaccination, church members should bow to the law.

The disease hit Daycroft School, a private institute officials describe as serving children of Christian Scientists but not affiliated with the church. Connecticut law requires polio immunization in state schools but exempts private schools. School officials said that although most students had not been immunized, parents did not object to the current crash program.

Peking’S Protestants

Tucked away in the heart of Peking is the only Protestant church serving mainland China’s capital. Known as the Rice Market Street Church and located on the upper floor of a two-story building, it is operated by the Peking Protestant Society. The society was formed in 1958 by the merger of all Protestant denominations in China.

News of the church came in a report filed to the Toronto Globe and Mail by its Peking correspondent. The church had been closed to foreigners since the outbreak of the cultural revolution in the mid-1960s, reopening to all comers last Easter.

The half-hour long service has no sermon, though Scripture readings, prayers, and a brief exhortation from the altar are allowed. According to the report, services have a “Methodist” tinge in their lack of ceremony. The minister, Yin Chi-chen, said there are about 500 Protestants in Peking. “Not all come to church,” says Chi-chen, but services are held frequently, sometimes four or five a week, depending on the demand. Sole support of the ministry comes from donations placed in a box at the rear of the church.

Finding Christ In Kabul

Curious Afghanis gathered at Kalga Lake outside Kabul, Afghanistan, recently to view the first known public Christian baptisms in their country. Those baptized were mostly long-haired American and European “world travelers.” It may be a long time before any Afghanis take the public step. Their militantly Muslim kingdom prescribes capital punishment for any who convert to another religion.

The sole Christian church in the land exists as a repaid favor to the memory of President Eisenhower (see January 7 issue, page 46). Its pastor is Christy Wilson, an American Presbyterian. His congregation in Kabul consists entirely of members in the international English-speaking community. The church was nearly always filled last summer as 100 or so long-hairs joined the regulars for worship.

An estimated 150,000 per year travel the hippie trail through Afghanistan. Drugs are cheap. A habit that costs $100 a day in New York can be maintained for less than $1 a day in Kabul. Many run out of money while on the road and are left stranded in Kabul during winter months. Scores died last winter from drug overdoses and malnutrition. Others, arrested for possession of drugs, languish for months in jail. They must rely on friends outside; no food is provided.

Uli Köhler, Dieter Bofinger, and Wolfgang Altrauter were among a band of young Germans stranded. They found help at an evangelistic teahouse and drug rehabilitation center run by independent missionary Floyd McClung and a team of youthful associates. The German youths also found Christ there. Köhler and Bofinger have returned to Germany to make restitution (they face draft and drug charges).

A number of converts have stayed on to assist with outreach in Kabul, but several moved east to Katmandu, Nepal, to help worker Harry Schaumburg in a center there. McClung envisions similar outposts in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India. In several of these countries, morphine pills manufactured by a German firm can be purchased over the counter at $3 for twenty pills. Sources say the Afghan government, impressed with McClung’s rehabilitation success, is quietly looking the other way as he goes about his evangelistic chores. American embassy personnel often refer stranded youths to the teahouse.

THE LORD HATH PROVIDED

When the professors at the fundamentalist San Francisco Baptist Seminary were hired, they were promised by contract that their salaries would be paid “as the Lord provides.” The school fell behind in payments, and earlier this year a policy clash ripped the ranks from students and constituency to the administration and faculty. Five of the seven full-time professors either quit or were fired—minus their back pay.

The Lord has not provided, explained President Arno Q. Weniger at a state labor department hearing. He pointed to a bank balance of only $3.10. But professors introduced evidence of a $4,000 fund drive to help move in faculty replacements. “It is our responsibility to pay the moving expenses of these [new] teachers,” commented G. Archer Weniger, board chairman and brother of the president.

The claimants should have been paid first, ruled the labor unit in ordering the Wenigers to pay the nearly $15,000 they owed. Remarked labor commissioner Marie Monti: “When assets are acquired, whether before or after wages accrue, the Lord has truly provided within the meaning of the contract.”

Next case.

McClung expects fifty young people will be on hand to help in the ministry this winter. Their ranks will be swelled by several hundred volunteers next summer, many of whom will hit the hippie trail themselves and try to get those gospel outposts set up.

DON STEPHENS

Bishops Aye Women

The ordination of women, one of the most controversial issues on the agenda for next September’s biennial convention of the 3.2-million-member Episcopal Church, was endorsed at last month’s meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops. Although some dioceses have announced opposition to the move, more than two-thirds of the church’s bishops after a two-hour debate voted for ordination of women.

Only five bishops, among them San Francisco’s C. Kilmer Myers, voted against the statement. Myers is considered a possible candidate for presiding bishop to replace John E. Hines, who announced he will retire in 1974. Myers led the heated debate, warning the church against swallowing “the notion of Christ as a unisex being.… We have a questioning of Christ’s uniqueness because he was male.”

Since 1970 women have been allowed to preach, teach, and administer as deacons, but have been barred from serving holy communion and baptism.

Religion In Transit

In a Wall Street Journal interview, an Internal Revenue Service commissioner denied claims that the IRS harasses churches and religious organizations that oppose government policies. “Churches are the least-checked group in America,” he says.

A mock election at Gordon-Conwell Seminary netted McGovern and Nixon 127 votes each. Jesus got one. There were 141 who favored immediate withdrawal from South Viet Nam, and thirty-four supported legalization and sale of marijuana to adults.

The Girl Scout promise has been revised. Instead of “On my honor, I will try to do my duty to God and my country …” it now reads: “On my honor, I will try to serve God, my country and mankind.…”

Jaramogi Adebe Agyeman, better known as Albert B. Cleage, Jr., black United Church of Christ minister in Detroit, has organized the Black Christian Nationalist Church, Incorporated, and installed himself as national chairman of the new denomination.

At its thirty-fifth annual meeting, the Christian Business Men’s Committee International reported that forty-seven new local chapters were added last year to its 650 units around the world.

Millions of copies of One Nation Under God by Norman Vincent Peale have been given to school children by Peale’s Foundation for Christian Living. The booklet explains the role of religion in American history.

Personalia

Glenn C. Taylor, 37, Ontario Bible College dean, was elected president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada. In a first, the vice-presidential post went to a French Canadian, pastor Yvon Hurtubise of Drummondville, Quebec.

English Baptist minister Arthur Dixon, formerly youth director of Yonge Street Mission in Toronto, is the new director of Shantymen’s Christian Association, an interfaith ministry to the hundreds of remote mining and lumber camps in Canada and northern United States.

Evangelist-healer Kathryn Kuhlman and Pope Paul VI exchanged gifts in Rome last month, according to a news source.

John Erickson, former University of Wisconsin basketball coach and general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks, is now executive director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Founder-president Donald E. Hoke of the Tokyo Christian College has moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, to make ready for the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization, of which he is co-ordinating director.

Stephen Slocum left his post as general director of the American Tract Society to become executive assistant to President John Walvoord at Dallas Seminary. The seminary, enjoying a record enrollment, has embarked on a major campus-expansion program.

Editor J. Martin Bailey of the United Church Herald will take over editorship of A.D., a merger of the Herald and Presbyterian Life. The latter’s editor, Robert Cadigan, will retire next month. A.D. has 620,000 United Presbyterian subscribers and 80,000 United Church subscribers.

World Scene

Biblical Theological Institute, the first Assemblies of God Bible school in Yugoslavia, opened last month in Zagreb with eighteen students. It is the eighth Pentecostal Bible school in Europe. The largest is five-year-old Continental Bible College in Brussels, with fifty students from twenty-seven nations.

Following protests by Christian young people in Denmark and the publication of a British report on pornography that reflects unfavorably on the Scandinavian country, Copenhagen police closed most of the city’s live sex shows.

Opposed by their government, thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses have fled from Malawi to Zambia and Mozambique. Before the latest persecution, the Witnesses had about 23,000 members in Malawi and 56,000 in Zambia.

The National Christian Council of Japan and Buddhists, fearing a revival of the former established religion, are opposing legislation that would give state recognition to a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. It is dedicated to the dead of World War II. Churches have tried for years to remove the names of four Protestant pastors from the list of the “deified” dead at the shrine.

Death

MEL LARSON, 56, editor of the Evangelical Free Church of America’s Evangelical Beacon; in Minneapolis, of cancer.

A second unsuccessful arson attempt was made against the home of newly elected Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren in Jerusalem. Goren has been bitterly opposed by religious conservatives who don’t like his allegedly unorthodox approach to Orthodox Judaism.

So far, the Vatican has been unable to quell a rebellion by the Ukrainian hierarchy. It may lead to the first major Roman Catholic split in modern times.

Evangelist John Haggai reports 31,000 decisions in five Korean cities. Missionaries say these include large numbers of rededications.

The Seventh-day Adventist church is growing faster in Mexico and other Latin American countries than anywhere else in the world; more than 7,000 have been baptized so far this year, according to reports at recent SDA world council sessions in Mexico City. In Jamaica, meanwhile, more than 7,000 new Adventists were baptized on one weekend alone.

Rhodesian evangelicals, led by missionary William Warner, have taken first steps toward establishing the first non-denominational Christian college and communications center for all races in southern Africa.

Evangelist Billy Graham will be among the speakers at SPREE ’73 next August at Earls Court and Wembley Station in London. The “Spiritual Re-Emphasis” week is expected to attract thousands of young people from Europe, according to Anglican bishop A. W. Goodwin Hudson.

The 250,000-member, 700-language United Church in Papua, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands this month is celebrating the centennial of the Gospel’s arrival in Papua, brought by the former London (Congregational) Missionary Society. The United Church is a 1968 merger of churches that developed from Congregational, Presbyterian, and Methodist missionary work.

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