2,000 Christian Youths Reach out at Olympics

Visitors to the Olympic games, European televiewers, and newspaper readers all over the continent saw a significant sidelight in Munich virtually unreported by the American media: a vast outreach effort mounted by more than 2,000 young Christians. In some ways the results of the marathon witness were more spectacular than some of the games.

There were many professions of faith in parks and on downtown streets, in Christian coffeehouses, around a university campus, and on the Olympic grounds. Converts came from scores of nations; among them were Arabs and Israelis who discovered togetherness in Jesus, several athletes, and at least two Communist journalists. Thousands of Bibles, Gospels, and tracts in Eastern European languages were gobbled up by athletes and tourists from Communist-bloc nations. Millions of pieces of literature were handed out.

The young people were perhaps at their best during and immediately after the tragic events involving Arab terrorists and Israeli hostages. Clusters gathered outside the Olympic Village in prayer vigils as a somber mood settled over the city. Evangelistic training sessions at outreach headquarters west of Munich were canceled; hundreds participated instead in a day of prayer. Jewish followers of Jesus sat silently with anguish-stricken Israelis. Guitars and tracts were laid aside; believers sought quietly to comfort unbelievers. A leader explained: “There is a time to evangelize and a time to minister.”

Two days later, Olympic officials canceled the free entertainment featuring nude sex acts that had been going on in the main amphitheater at the Olympic site and gave the Christians free use of the facility for the final four days of the games. SRO crowds in excess of 3,000 at a time listened to testimonies and sermonettes in several languages interspersed with music by the fifty Bethesda Singers and The Last Day band from Wenatchee, Washington, and Noah, a southern California band. During altar calls scores of persons of many nationalities walked forward or raised their hands indicating they wanted Christ.

A TV station interviewed Jesus-follower Elizabeth van Ravensberg, 23, a Dutch Israeli, on the day after the shootings. Her Christian witness was aired four times. Youth With a Mission (YWAM) rushed into print with 20,000 copies of a Jesus paper carrying a front-page photo of Egyptian Joseph Faragalla, 35, shaking hands with “Jew for Jesus” Ron Phillips, 22, of Chicago. The headlined caption: “We have found love and unity in Jesus.” (Some leaders expressed concern about the forthrightness of Faragalla, a United Nations accountant in Alexandria. But he went on to declare his faith openly at a large rally downtown, proclaiming that only in Jesus can hatred and hostilities end. Arabs in the crowd seemed pleased by his remarks, especially when he expressed belief that “God is going to give our land back to us.”) Among the last to leave YWAM’s coffeehouse, The Crossroads, on the night after the tragedy were a Palestinian Arab refugee and an Israeli; both had appointments to return the next day to have further questions about Christ answered.

It all led an Australian journalist to observe that sports had failed as a medium of world unity but that the Jesus people were proving Jesus to be the answer.

The Olympic outreach was born three years ago in the mind of Herbert Müller, a former accountant now business administrator of New Life evangelistic association based near Cologne, Germany. His vision was for a unified witness with well-coordinated leadership. (Christian groups were on hand for the Winter Olympics at Grenoble in 1968, but each did its own thing and impact was minimal, he said.) He was rebuffed by Munich churchmen who were turned off by the evangelism idea, but thirty-seven organizations eventually agreed to work together on the project—a minor miracle itself, according to some leaders, because participants ranged from somewhat separatist and anti-tongues groups to state-church and charismatic ones. Most of the groups were German, but American-led organizations fielded the most workers, recruited from all over Europe and the United States (YWAM, 1,000; Campus Crusade for Christ, 175; Assemblies of God, 140 to augment a national Teen Challenge force; Word of Life, 100).

Müller was named coordinator. He received strong help from the Munich YMCA staff. Many of the latter have had the charismatic experience and are enthusiastic about evangelism.

YWAM and Word of Life housed and fed more than half the workers in castles and a hotel they own and lease west of the city. The facilities serve as permanent conference and training centers. The YMCA and several Munich churches cared for hundreds of others. (Nineteen workmen from Bethel Church in San Jose, California, had flown in earlier at their own expense and built bunks for 600, shower rooms, and a dining canopy at the YWAM castle. A brewery donated a tent to seat 1,000, and another provided chairs. Youths pitched in freely to overcome logistical problems—sandwich-making and toilet-cleaning, for example. Participants paid their own travel costs plus $100 for outreach expenses. The YWAMers also gave $33,000 in an offering for a payment coming due on their castle.)

On the day the games opened the Christians stood in a cross formation on a high hill overlooking the main stadium. They sang “He Is Lord” and “Alleluia” while pointing upward in the One Way sign—a familiar sight and sound all over Europe this past summer. Then they staged a candlelight march around the grounds.

Police at the last minute shifted a well-advertised Jesus festival a week later to a remote site north of the city and broke up a massive witness march. Although the festival was deprived of an anticipated large attendance by non-Christians, two dozen publicly professed their faith in Christ at the close of a sermon by New Life’s Anton Schulte, noted German evangelist.

That night a leftist demonstration downtown left fifty-six policemen injured. Newspapers next day carried that story and followed with an account of the festival, complete with a photo of youths holding a banner that proclaimed, “God bless the government!”

The young Christians entered the well guarded Olympic Village almost at will. Inside they participated in Bible studies with athletes and witnessed to others. Eastern Europeans were their main target. Many, especially Romanians, eagerly secreted away Bibles and other literature. Soviet and Bulgarian athletes eluded supervisors and did likewise.

An ecumenical chapel in the village manned by fifty ministers was almost always empty. One exception: a packed-out concert for the athletes by Campus Crusade’s Forerunners. A female U. S. track star said nine on her team were committed Christians who were witnessing. Some wore sweat shirts bearing the One Way slogan. There was an unconfirmed report of a profession of faith by a Russian weightlifter. (Olympic weightlifter Russell Knipp, associated with Crusade’s athletic program, is popular among other athletes and is an aggressive locker-room witness.) Village employees took up a collection of $3,000 and donated it to the Jesus cause.

Cambridge University students and Jesus Liberation Front members arrived from England in double-decker buses ablaze with Jesus slogans in a number of languages and attracted a lot of attention, especially from Eastern Europeans, in the bus parking lots. Literature distribution teams working aboard trains bound for Iron Curtain cities were ejected several times upon complaints from Communists. Witness encounters between two or three in the Marienplatz outside the town hall, where Christians vied with Marxists and ticket-scalpers for attention, nearly always attracted crowds within minutes. In one such encounter a middle-aged East German tourist burst into tears and prayed to receive Christ.

The Christians operated several coffeehouses downtown, and some of the heaviest action occurred there. YWAM’s Crossroads hosted hundreds every night, and scores professed Christ. Among them: Udo Lemke, 24, and Kurt Blumenthal, 20, both Communist journalists. Lemke had served time in French and German jails for his radicalism, and Blumenthal (his father is a Communist official) had been a leader of the youth wing of West Germany’s Communist party. Both expressed interest in full-time Christian service; Lemke says he will enroll in YWAM’s School of Evangelism in Lausanne, Switzerland. Both said that seeing the futility of politics to solve the world’s ills was a factor in their conversion. “Having a world led by unchanged men will not do,” commented Lemke.

Moody Bible Institute showed Bible and science films to about 15,000 in a rented ($500 a day) theater on the Marienplatz and reported an average of fifty follow-up “conversations” daily. (Fifty Moody students and grads were on hand to assist in counseling.)

The Olympic effort capped a summer of evangelistic activity in Europe that saw thousands of young Christians involved in Jesus festivals, door-to-door evangelism, coffeehouse ministries, and the like. As elsewhere, leaders in Munich are engaged in follow-up.

Meanwhile, the Gospel has apparently gone out from Munich to the ends of the earth.

Doublemindedness Down Under

Australian Presbyterians are of two minds about a proposed merger with Methodists and Congregationalists: they’re for it, but then again they’re against it. In recent voting, 75 per cent—well over the required two-thirds majority—said yes to merger, but 40 per cent said they wanted to remain in a continuing Presbyterian church should merger occur.

The vote puts Presbyterians in a quandary. Evidently some favor union but want their own churches kept out of it. Included in those choosing to remain Presbyterian is the prestigious Scots Church of Melbourne, one of the largest in the country.

In similar voting, both Methodists and Congregationalists overwhelmingly approved merger. None of the denominations is committed by its vote, and the proposal must now be sent to state and federal assemblies and conferences.

Since such a large Presbyterian minority wants to stay out of the union, it may be that the church as a whole will reject merger rather than be so decisively split. If so, will the Congregationalists and Methodists proceed anyway? Right now there is confusion, and the prospect of some interesting months ahead.

LEON MORRIS

Where Have All The Cardinals Gone?

“The venerable fathers in blood-red garments …, locked up as if they were smooth con men,” may be a thing of the past, says Jean Guitton, French author and confidant of the Pope. The crimson-robed fathers are, of course, the Conclave of Cardinals, who elect the pope. Paul VI is reforming the conclave, and some believe he is about to abolish it.

The speculation about the conclave’s future or lack of one is fueled by the fact that Paul has delayed so long in calling another consistory to fill the depleted ranks of the College of Cardinals. This, together with his ruling that disqualifies cardinals over 80 from voting in the conclave, is interpreted as a move to downgrade the cardinals and open papal elections.

But according to latest reports the Pope may hold a consistory for the creation of new cardinals in mid-October to highlight the tenth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. The last consistory was held in 1969.

Many in Catholic circles are urging that the pope be elected by a synod of all the world’s bishops. Others suggest that the conclave be enlarged to include the presidents of the various national bishops councils, heads of religious orders, and perhaps a few laymen.

But at least one critic, the indomitable theologian Hans Küng, is certain that the Pope is in no mood for sweeping democratic reforms inside the church structure. Küng called Paul’s other reforms “poorly applied cosmetics … eyewash for the growing choir of criticism from both clergy and laity.”

ROYAL L. PECK

Advertising Theology

“Twenty-five per cent larger”—than what? “Incomplete comparatives” were one of the practices that drew displeasure from Canadian theologians who made a study of the ethics of advertising. Others were: illustrations that were “deliberately distorted to convey a false or misleading impression”; “advertising which puts so much emphasis on acquiring status and material possessions that it subjugates human values to this drive”; and “deliberate omission of highly relevant information.”

The study was undertaken by the Toronto School of Theology at the request of two advertising associations. Heading it was Arthur Gibson, a Roman Catholic who is head of religious studies at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.

The report approved the use of attractive models, male or female, if the accompanying text didn’t mislead the purchaser—and if the model didn’t substantially distract the prospective customer from making a reasoned appraisal.

The theologians told the advertising industry there was need for more psychological research into the effects of advertising, more courses on communications in schools, courses on moral norms in industry, and better consumer information.

LESLIE K. TARR

‘Grant Us Peace’

To commemorate the 300th anniversary of the death of composer Heinrich Schütz, who was the greatest composer before Johann Sebastian Bach, the German Federal Republic on November 6 will issue a stamp showing a score for two violins with the text “Verlein uns frieden gradiglich” (“Graciously grant us peace”) from his cantata of the same title. The stamp will also reproduce the musician’s signature. Schütz was born October 14, 1585, and died November 6, 1672.

GLENN D. EVERETT

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