A Visit in Viet Nam

Only a few non-socialist visitors get a glimpse into Viet Nam these days. Among those who have are three Mennonites who visited the country last month on behalf of the Mennonite Central Committee, which has continued to fund projects there since the end of the war in April, 1975. They were Don Sensenig, a ten-year veteran of Mennonite missions in Viet Nam, Max Ediger, a Mennonite relief worker who stayed on in Viet Nam for more than a year after the war ended, and correspondent Harold Jantz, editor of the Canadian “Mennonite Brethren Herald.” Jantz filed the following report for Christianity Today.

During a two-week visit, spent mostly in Hanoi and Danang and in communities adjacent to these north and central Viet Nam cities, interviews were conducted with evangelical Tin Lanh (Protestant) and Catholic leaders, as well as with spokesmen for Buddhists. The Tin Lanh (“Good News”) church is a product of Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) work.

The talks strengthened the impression that while the Christian Church is clearly in a new situation under the present government in Viet Nam, many things that had been feared have not materialized. Ma Phuc Minh, who was the pastor of the largest evangelical church in Danang and is now the regional supervisor for about one hundred Tin Lanh churches in central Viet Nam, told the Mennonites their earlier fears had not been fulfilled. “We can function,” he said. Indeed, he reported, four or five churches destroyed by American bombs during the war have been partially rebuilt with money and supplies given by the government. Similar reports of help in rebuilding were given by others, both in the north and in the south.

A number of churches that grew up around refugee camps during the war have closed, Minh said, but the village churches still function. Around Danang, the scene of great confusion and panic during the final days of the war, it was easy for visitors to pick out the Tin Lanh churches; they were in good repair, and their signs showed they were in use. In the old days there were nearly 500 Tin Lanh churches in South Viet Nam, Minh said, and most of these continue, although some of the smaller groups appear to be breaking up. An attempt by a Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) doctor to bring about a unified church among the smaller groups apparently ran out of steam after the death of its originator, Nguyen Thanh Long.

Unification of the Tin Lanh churches in north and south Viet Nam is apparently on the government’s agenda. A government congress in December pressed for greater speed in bringing all mass organizations, including the religious bodies, into unified structures. Bui Hoanh Thu, general secretary of the northern Tin Lanh churches, was in Saigon last month working on unification with southern leaders. Vu dan Chinh, a pastor in Hai Hung province who preached in the Hanoi Tin Lanh church during a visit by several North American Mennonites, conveyed what was described as a very warm evangelical spirit, and he expressed to them his strong hope that the churches could reunite. (Thu has been a controversial figure. Colleagues alleged he was a member of the Communist party as early as 1954, say CMA sources, and he has served as a government functionary.—ed.)

In the south, Pastor Minh seemed to suggest that the road back together, after more than twenty years apart, is fraught with difficulties. The government apparently is using some strong inducements to help it happen. Last year it closed the largest Bible school in the country, the Nha Trang school with around two hundred students. Reopening of the school, which southern church leaders hoped would come this year, has been tied to reunification of the churches, Minh observed. Ong Van Huyen, former head of the school, was elected chairman of the southern association of Tin Lanh churches last June, and the school currently has no appointed head. Both southern and northern church leaders described church programs that seemed very similar to what they had before the new regime. In the north, the Hanoi Tin Lanh church has a Sunday-morning worship service followed by classes for children beginning at 7:30 A.M.; a Wednesday-evening prayer meeting; a Thursday-evening preaching service; and a Saturday-night prayer service for the following day. The main Danang Tin Lanh church begins with Sunday school at 7:00 A.M., holds an hour of worship from 8:00 to 9:00 A.M., and concludes the day with an evening evangelistic service. In the afternoon the church has activities for its children and youth. On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings different groups of the church have prayer meetings, and on Saturday night the young people have their prayer meeting.

In both the north and the south, the church leaders said they had enough pastors. With four or five preaching points for each of the twenty-two Tin Lanh pastors in the north, however, it would appear that the churches would clearly benefit from more Bible-school graduates. In the south, it was reported that some of the eighteen Tin Lanh men who had served as military chaplains were still not back from “re-education camps” to which they had been sent to “reform” their thinking.

The Tin Lanh leaders reported that they still hold church conferences. The northern church has two in a year, one for pastors and one as a general congress for all members. In the south, Pastor Minh spoke of a conference for central Viet Nam to which ninety delegates had come. A conference of Tin Lanh churches of all south Viet Nam was held last June, he said. Both areas also reported continued outreach. The central Tin Lanh church in Danang recorded that thirty persons were baptized last year, for instance, and the church in Hai Hung in the north had baptized fifteen. The Tin Lanh church in Haiphong reportedly baptized a dozen persons just before Christmas.

While Protestants make up only a small segment of Vietnamese society, Roman Catholics, who number about three million in the 50 million population, form a much more significant part. They also appear to have come to terms with Vietnamese-style Communism in a way that the evangelical Protestants still have not. Vu Thanh Trinh, a priest from Can Tho, south of Saigon, for instance, is also a member of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly. Trinh reported to the Mennonite delegation that there are at least a dozen Catholic Christians in the National Assembly, including three priests. Christians are also found in many other areas of public life, he said, and have been honored for their achievements.

Members of the National Catholic Committee of Viet Nam cited a series of specific guarantees for religious belief going back to a 1955 decree signed by Ho Chi Minh. Respect for religion and belief as well as the intention that religious groups should unify were reiterated by party chief Le Duan at the recent government congress, the Catholics said. They also reported that a national bishops’ conference to unify the Catholics of the north and the south is expected within the next year or so.

The Catholics, like the Protestants, reported government help in rebuilding churches. They said that a number of the 500 churches in the north partially or totally destroyed by bombs had been rebuilt with funds and materials provided by the government. Chinh Toa Cathedral, for example, received 300,000 piasters plus wood, cement, and other building materials, they claimed.

A vivid demonstration of the vitality of faith in the new Viet Nam was given the Mennonites at a Catholic mass they attended in the Hanoi Cathedral at the end of their visit in Viet Nam. The large cathedral was filled with worshipers, ranging from little children to old people. In the midst of the drab poverty of post-war, socialist Viet Nam, the Catholic believers entered into “a hauntingly beautiful experience of worship,” as one Mennonite described it. A choir of young and old voices “sang of glories not yet seen,” he said, and the faithful repeated confessions of the church many centuries old. A sermon preached without notes by the cathedral priest conveyed a message that would have warmed the heart of nearly any evangelical. “It is not enough to live ordinary lives,” said the priest. “Just as Jesus changed the water into wine, so he changes men into new men, into a strange, glorious, and shining newness. Through us, we become a sign for everybody, so they too can believe in Jesus.”

The light has not gone out in Viet Nam. Some believe it may be shining brighter than ever.

Graham: Warm-up in Sweden

In some ways it was colder than expected at the Billy Graham crusade last month in Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg (445,000 population). In other ways it was warmer, much warmer.

The weather turned out to be colder than expected in the coastal city, whose temperature is usually moderated by effects of North Atlantic currents. The spiritual temperature of the people, however, turned out to be far above the predicted low. The response he saw there prompted Graham to say the Gothenburg meetings were the “nearest touch to revival I’ve seen in nearly twenty years.”

Campaign chairman Sven Ahdrian, a pastor and medical doctor, commented, “We always think the Swede is a cool and calm one, never one to express his feelings in a public way. But we’ve seen people coming forward weeping as they have come to Jesus Christ.”

Graham said the response to the invitation to receive Christ was so unexpected and so overwhelming that people coming forward initially were unable to get help from the weeping counselors. A total of 867 decisions for Christ were recorded.

Attendance at the Scandinavium set a new record on Saturday, the fourth of five nights of the crusade. The crowd of 14,000 overflowed the auditorium, and hundreds who couldn’t get in stood outside in the snow. The event that drew the largest crowd to the arena previously was a Johnny Cash performance.

State church (Lutheran) leaders who had been cool to the crusade in the early stages warmed up, too. Graham got invitations to hold crusades in other major Scandinavian centers. Among them was Stockholm, where Archbishop Olof Sundby, the nation’s top Lutheran, said he would join the evangelist on the platform if he would preach there. Sundby is one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches.

Graham also noticed a different kind of reception from the Swedish press. It has been generally hostile to him in the past, but this time he got generous and often sympathetic coverage.

Back in the United States late last month the evangelist told reporters he would put a high priority on an early return to Scandinavia. At the National Religious Broadcasters meeting in Washington he said response to his recent crusades had taught him a lesson. His 1976 crusades had been held in some of America’s largest facilities (the Kingdome in Seattle and the new Pontiac, Michigan, stadium) even though he thought the day had gone when such arenas could be filled for gospel meetings. After the results there and in Gothenburg, he told the broadcasters, he decided “to continue [with the large crusades] as long as I have strength and breath.”

Big Day in Dallas

The 19,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas set aside one Sunday last month for a fund-raising drive to raise $750,000 in offerings and pledges to match a similar amount offered by member Mary Carter Crowley to dedicate debt-free a nine-story church building. At the close of the evening service on January 16, Pastor W. A. Criswell, using a telephone hook-up to the church’s business office, announced to the 3,000 present that $2.8 million had come in (including Mrs. Crowley’s gift), enough to pay off the $1.5 million balance on the $3 million building and to pay a few other bills besides.

A short time later, the congregation gathered in below-freezing weather to dedicate the Mary C Building, named in Mrs. Crowley’s honor.

The special offering was in addition to First Baptist’s normal Sunday contributions, which average $85,000 from three services and Sunday school.

Out of the Blue, A Vote

Evangelicals in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) who decided they would rather fight than switch (to the new Presbyterian Church in America) are now confident they made the right choice.

Those who stayed launched a major campaign to defeat a proposed doctrinal change in the denomination, and they now expect to have their victory before the end of this month. Under the church’s constitution, any merger or doctrinal amendment requires the approval of three-fourths of the sixty presbyteries. Only sixteen are needed to kill the proposed confessional package, and thirteen were recorded by February 1.

Opponents of the package (including a new declaration of faith, a book of confessions, and new ordination vows) were counting on votes still to be cast by presbyteries that have conservative voting records. They do not expect a majority of the regional bodies to cast ballots against the proposal, but they do expect to get more than the sixteen needed for defeat. In many of the twenty-one presbyteries favoring the changes as of February 1, the tally was close (such as Atlanta, 124–117, and Southeast Missouri, 35–28).

The opposition forces were mobilized largely by the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians, an independent organization that continued to try to work within the denomination after other such groups turned their efforts toward founding the Presbyterian Church in America in 1971. One example of their strategy that got newspaper attention was in the Middle Tennessee presbytery, where a pastor had to conduct a funeral an hour before his presbytery’s vote. A helicopter was hired to whisk him from the funeral in Nashville to the meeting in Shelbyville. His vote was one of the 68 against the proposal, and the number of favorable votes was only 62. In the same presbytery ten sets of tire chains were purchased for drivers in ten counties to assure that no one would miss the meeting if a forecast snowfall caused highway problems.

The fight is not over, however, since the denomination is also moving toward union with the United Presbyterian Church (which has a doctrinal position similar to the one being rejected in the PCUS). Presentation of a plan of union has already been delayed until after the confessional vote, but some observers expect a merger proposal to be sent to the presbyteries by 1979. Union would also require the affirmative vote of three-fourths of the regional units.

Winter, 1977

Weather patterns in January and February prodded people coast to coast to look heavenward. In the West there has been a devastating drought. “Humbly let all ask creator for his gift of rain,” implored a big lighted sign outside St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco. Mountain resort operators were praying for snow. If the snow doesn’t come more than skiers will suffer. Water and power shortages that have plagued the populous coastal region will be worse this summer, warn the experts.

Meanwhile, the brutal winter east of the Rockies plus the resulting energy crisis forced the temporary closing of many churches, church schools, and other buildings. In compliance with state conservation measures, the big Southern Baptist headquarters complex in Nashville, Tennessee, shut down for nearly a week in January, the first such closing in its history. Self-sufficient Amish in Ohio couldn’t get their buggies through the snowstorms and drifts to church, the first time many recalled this had happened.

Ohio governor John Rhodes, a Presbyterian, called for two days of prayer for his stricken state on the last weekend of January. He asked church people to pray “for strength to endure the coldest days of our time.” He and a sparse crowd gathered in the chilly capitol rotunda for a two-minute prayer meeting on Saturday. Among the four who led in prayer was Democratic legislator Phale Hale, a Baptist pastor in Columbus. He asked God to “turn up the thermostats of the world and give us heat.”

Rich Little Church

Hebron Baptist Church near Pheba, Mississippi, is a 125-year-old rural church with 130 members and an annual budget of $8,000. Its pastor is Willard Crawley, 26, a senior majoring in Bible and history at Blue Mountain College. The church recently inherited $2 million from the estate of a former member who is buried in the church cemetery. The will specifies that the money is to be used for the “preservation” of the church, parsonage, and cemetery, with a monthly supplement of $300 to be added to the pastor’s salary. Crawley estimated interest on the money will bring in up to $200,000 a year.

There could be difficulty in figuring out what can be done with all that money. One person may think “preservation” means upkeep only, says Crawley. “Another might think it could include spending for additions and support of missions.”

First in Portugal

Presbyterian clergyman Jose Manuel Leite, a member of the World Council of Churches Central Committee, was elected mayor of Figueria da Foz, a coastal town about ninety miles north of Lisbon, Portugal. It is believed to be the first time a Protestant minister has been elected to public office in predominantly Roman Catholic Portugal.

Retraction

Last fall the National Courier, a biweekly tabloid published by Logos International, launched a testimonial series on miracles. One of the first stories was about faith healer Alice Pattico, who claimed she had been healed in a 1974 Kathryn Kuhlman meeting from breast and brain cancer and addiction to pain-killing drugs. She said her breasts, which had been removed in surgery, were restored, and that God had filled thirteen holes that had been drilled in her head in 1973 to administer laser beam surgery. She and her husband provided the Courier with doctors’ letters to document her claims.

In its first issue this month the Courier forthrightly took it all back.

Unknown to the Courier at the time, a 1975 article in a Bakersfield, California, newspaper quoted doctors cited by Mrs. Pattico as denying they wrote letters presented by her. She left town and took her healing campaigns to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

When several doctors objected to the Courier article, the paper’s editors launched a two-month investigation of its own. The letters turned out to be fraudulent, the editors found, and the purported operations never took place. At last word, noted the paper, the Patticos were rumored to be back in California.

New Church Member In Town

Jimmy Carter’s first visit to the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., was in 1967. He was still smarting from defeat in his first gubernatorial campaign. This year he sat at the head table, a winner.

It was the twenty-fifth annual edition of the breakfast, sponsored on January 27 by the Senate and House prayer groups that meet weekly on Capitol Hill (see February 14, 1975, issue, page 61). More than 4,000 people attended, a record, and 1,000 of them had to be content to listen in from two large rooms adjoining the main ballroom of the Washington Hilton hotel. Among them, as in the past, were many representatives of America’s power structure: most members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Administration, other top government officials, and many in the private sector of national leadership.

The keynote speaker was House majority leader James Wright of Texas, a Presbyterian. He distinguished between religion and “religiosity,” emphasized God’s forgiveness through Christ, and called for a new beginning in national life.

The crowd gave him an ovation. Carter was the first to stand. He hugged Wright, said he was “proud to be a brother with him” and “a child of God,” and launched into a seventeen-minute sermon without notes on Second Chronicles 7:14 and its call for national humility.

Carter explained that he had wanted to use the verse in his inaugural address but settled on Micah 6:8 instead when his staff members convinced him that he might be misunderstood. The masses, they argued, would think he proudly looked upon himself as Solomon if he used the Chronicles verse, and they would think he was self-righteously calling them wicked.

He appealed to the leaders of the government to heed the exhortation of Jesus: “Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” “As those of us who are Christians know,” said the President, “the most constantly repeated admonition from Christ was against pride.”

In closing, he recalled some differences in attitude he had noticed during several White House receptions. Military officers, he said, were usually the ones to say things like “God be with you” and “We are praying for you” despite their being symbols of the nation’s strength.

At the outset of the breakfast a Navy ensemble sang “Amazing Grace,” Carter’s favorite hymn. Republican congresswoman Majorie S. Holt of Maryland, a Presbyterian, presided. Prayers and Scripture readings were led by Kentucky governor Julian M. Carroll, also a Presbyterian; Republican Senator Charles H. Percy of Illinois, a Christian Scientist; Democratic congressman Gunn McKay of Utah, a Mormon; Republican senator Peter V. Domenici of New Mexico, a Roman Catholic; Democratic senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, a Seventh Day Baptist; General David C. Jones, Air Force Chief of Staff; Burt O. Lance of the Office of Management and Budget; and former Senator Harold E. Hughes, a worker in “the Fellowship” (formerly International Christian Leadership), the behind-the-scenes group that directs much of the spiritual activity among Washington’s leaders.

Hughes had everyone join hands at their tables and pray informally “as led,” then closed the meeting with an eloquent prayer of his own.

At a Christian leadership luncheon sponsored by the Fellowship that day, evangelist Billy Graham remarked that it was the first national prayer breakfast since 1953 where a President of the United States spoke of Jesus Christ in a personal way.

Earlier in the week, Carter and his wife surprised a lot of people when on their first Sunday at First Baptist Church in Washington they presented themselves for church membership. Many had thought they would visit other churches before settling down. Joining with them by promise of a letter of transfer from the Plains (Georgia) Baptist Church were their son Chip and his wife Caron, and Annette, wife of son Jeff, who did not walk forward with the others. Nine-year-old Amy Carter expressed her desire to join on the basis of profession of faith in Christ, and she will be baptized later.

The President took part in the Sunday-school class that preceded the service and indicated his willingness to teach the class sometimes.

At the same time the Carters joined, a black from North Carolina was also voted into membership. About fifty of the church’s 946 members are black. It is dually aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Convention. Harry Truman was the last President to worship there regularly.

Pastor Charles A. Trentham, a former seminary professor and university dean, spoke on the theme of “new beginnings” as the Carters themselves experienced a new beginning.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

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