Urbana ’76: Declaring God’s Glory and Word

Bible expositor John Stott was near the end of his third lecture at the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s missionary convention when he begged the congregation: “Please don’t clap any more; you’re wasting my time; I’ve only got two minutes more.”

Spontaneous applause for the Anglican evangelical’s teaching about an evangelistic church was just one indicator of the spiritual temperature of the 17,112 attending “Urbana ’76,” the eleventh edition of IVCF’s triennial North American student gathering. The record turnout for the event stretched the capacity of the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois.

The convention theme, “Declare His Glory Among the Nations,” and the way it was developed stretched the imaginations and consciences of those attending. They responded, not only with vigorous applause for speakers, but also with hearty singing and praying, with decisions to serve Christ abroad, and with generous financial contributions.

The spiritual warmth of participants contrasted with the bitter cold they had to encounter as they walked from one campus building to another during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Temperatures often dipped below zero during what the Chicago Tribune described as “this frozen week” in Illinois. A light snow blanketed the university grounds midway through the week.

Despite the cold the youths took in a full range of activities designed to acquaint them with current Great Commission imperatives. Students faithfully attended two-hour morning and evening plenary sessions in the mushroom-shaped Assembly Hall, but they also packed out the hundreds of afternoon electives that gave them the opportunity to meet missionaries, to learn about various types of overseas work, to question platform speakers, and to discuss matters of evangelization. In addition, they started and ended each day with small groups in their residence halls, studying the Bible and praying.

In the convention’s first major address, John W. Alexander, IVCF’s U.S. president, laid the foundations for the program which followed. He emphasized his belief that the Bible “is the infallible revelation of the infallible God—which means that it is entirely trustworthy and reliable.” He told the students, “Our attitude toward Scripture is desperately important.” Alexander declared in his address that he believed in biblical inerrancy while admitting its problems, “but I refuse to set myself up as judge of Scripture and commence deciding which problems are biblical error.” He reaffirmed the position in a news conference the following day.

Stott, who now pursues a worldwide speaking and writing ministry with the title of rector emeritus of London’s All Souls Church, spoke four times on the biblical basis for missions. He urged concentration “on the objective, historical Jesus, as he is presented to us in the Bible.” He suggested that students “use our contemporary experience of him to corroborate and illustrate the primary witness of the apostles.”

The convention’s most prominent speaker, evangelist Billy Graham, faced the issue of Scripture on the second full day of the week. He made himself available to answer questions for an hour in the 17,000-seat Assembly Hall, and nearly half of the delegates showed up there despite dozens of competing meetings. Graham said he fully backed the Alexander statement. He was applauded when he held a Bible aloft and said, “This is the infallible Word of the Living God.” He also reviewed for his student audience the 1949 experience in which he decided to accept the Scriptures as God’s Word.

In a news conference later the same day the evangelist expressed a hope that evangelicals will be able to handle their new visibility. He warned of the danger of being more of a target when they are more visible. Without amplifying his comment, he told reporters it was important that evangelicals “accept diversity in unity” and that they not try to “put everyone in the same mold.”

Journalists asked the fifty-eight-year-old preacher about his health, and he responded that he had no real health problems. He quipped that he had quit golf and was taking up tennis. Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, a blood clot developed in his leg, and doctors ordered him onto his back. He left the campus in an ambulance and was flown to Rochester, Minnesota, where Mayo Clinic physicians diagnosed phlebitis. Students were informed of his departure after he left, and they stood to pray for him and his ministry. He was scheduled to begin a crusade in Sweden on January 12.

In his principal address, delivered the night before he was stricken, Graham called for an all-out response to the convention theme. He told the students, “Because God has declared his glory, and because we have beheld his glory, we must act.” The evangelist warned of the high cost of commitment to Christ, but when he issued an invitation for the students to stand to indicate their surrender to God’s will, most stood.

Students were also invited to sign decision cards, stating either that they were ready to serve abroad or that they “will actively seek His guidance concerning placement.” Thousands were turned in before the students left Urbana, and additional thousands were expected to be mailed to IVCF later. No precise count was available early this month.

The significance of the decision cards was explained by David Howard, director of Urbana ’76 and a veteran of many previous conventions. He pulled from his pocket his own decision card from the first IVCF missionary convention (1946, Toronto). As a student he had tacked the card above his desk as a prayer reminder until sunlight faded all of it except the part covered by the thumbtack. The decision, he said, eventually led him to go as a missionary to Colombia and Costa Rica for fifteen years.

The missionary commitment of the Howard family was also evident at the convention in the person of the director’s sister, Elisabeth Elliot Leitch. The twice-widowed writer and former missionary to South American Indians was one of the most popular speakers at Urbana (this time as well as three years ago). Like Graham, she attracted thousands to the Assembly Hall for a question-and-answer session. In an answer to one of the questions about her attitude toward the Bible, she replied that she had “staked her life” on its trustworthiness. In her message, she stressed obedience to God’s will. Students gave her a standing ovation when she concluded her message, and when her A Slow and Certain Light was “book of the day” the following day they bought up all 7,000 available copies.

Standing applause also greeted the other woman speaker, Helen Roseveare, a British medical missionary in Zaire. Speaking out of her own experience of suffering during the 1964 Simba rebellion, she stressed the cost of service abroad. The problem of suffering and hunger among the world’s peoples was the topic of Indian pastor Samuel Kamaleson.

Most of the convention-goers gave up one meal and others contributed money to help feed the hungry. A total of $23,000 was collected for hunger relief and divided among World Vision, Food for the Hungry, and the Voice of Calvary in Mississippi.

The largest offering of the week was designated for the work of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. The cash collection was $245,000, and IVCF officials expected that when pledges are fulfilled IFES will get about $300,000 from the convention. There was an offering of about $12,000 to help defray convention costs (especially those connected with scholarships for international students). Participants gave an average of over $16 in the three offerings.

About 3,000 of those registered are not currently students. Among the non-students were some 700 missionaries who staffed the booths of their agencies and spoke at afternoon elective sessions. Also present were many pastors, college professors, and other friends of IVCF. Of the registrants, 14,879 came from the United States and 1,951 from Canada. Hundreds of applicants were turned away in the weeks just prior to the meeting because the capacity had been reached. More came from California (2,022) than from the host state of Illinois (1,529). Registrants identified themselves as members of a wide range of churches, with the largest number (1,046) United Presbyterians. A total of 283 said they were Roman Catholics.

Where does the Urbana convention go from here, having reached its capacity and a level of programming that was more highly praised than ever? According to Alexander and Howard, planning will start soon for the twelfth edition. It, too, will be on the hospitable Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, they said, since they have been unable to find better facilities elsewhere. In answer to journalists’ questions, they said they had given considerable study to other possibilities of going beyond the Assembly Hall’s capacity. Among the recommendations turned down because they thought they would reduce the convention’s effectiveness were regional gatherings and use of closed-circuit television for plenary sessions at Urbana.

One of the elements that would be lost if all delegates could not sit under the same roof would be the vigorous singing that characterizes the Urbana gatherings. Led again this time by Canadian youth leader Bernie Smith, but using a new Inter-Varsity book, Hymns II, the congregational singing was a highlight for many delegates. By week’s end most had learned Margaret Clarkson’s theme hymn, “Declare His Glory,” based on Psalm 96:3, and they were humming the tune, composed by Hughes Huffman, as they returned to their campuses.

What They Read

An unofficial poll of the campus post offices at Christian colleges found Time and Newsweek were received by more students than any other magazines. Sports Illustrated placed third, and Psychology Today and Christianity Today were tied for fourth. These were followed by Glamour, Campus Life, Mademoiselle, and His.

On secular campuses nationally, a Chicago research firm found Playboy, Time, and Newsweek the most read magazines. The campus newspaper, television, and the city daily serving the area all have bigger audiences, however.

The Year That Was

In the news lull at year’s end, many reporters traditionally sift through the events of the preceding fifty-two weeks to determine which stories were the big ones. For those covering religion, the top two stories of 1976 were the religious issues surrounding the presidential election campaign and the approval of ordination of women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. The Religion Newswriters Association (RNA), an organization of reporters who cover religion for the secular press, rated the women’s ordination story first, the election second. Religious News Service (RNS), a press service in New York that publishes dozens of stories five days a week, listed the two stories in reverse order.

The RNA listed the Roman Catholic “Call to Action” social-issues meeting in Detroit and the split in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod as its third and fourth choices. So did the RNS, but again in reverse order.

Other top-ten choices of the RNA, in order of importance: the controversy over Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church; the Catholic Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia; abortion as an election issue; the right-to-die decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court in the Karen Quinlan case; the Gallup Poll report that more than one-third of all Americans claim to have had a born-again experience; and the growing movement for divorce and remarriage reform in the Catholic Church. The last two stories tied for ninth place.

The RNS listed only one of these six stories in its top ten—the Eucharistic Congress, also in sixth place. Others: defiance of the Vatican by dissident French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a traditionalist who denounces Vatican II reforms; the women’s peace movement in Northern Ireland; church-state tensions in Third World, Latin American, and east European countries; and the ending of the Lebanese civil war (Christian-Muslim relations).

Even media with a more restricted field of interest selected the presidential election as their top story. These included Americans United for Separation of Church and State, concerned about the implications of religion as an issue in the campaign, and Southern Baptist editors and press-service staffers, who were delighted beyond words by the success of Jimmy Carter, a fellow Southern Baptist.

An important but mostly overlooked story was the continued groundswell of conservatism in major denominations. It was probably most visible in the United Methodist Church, but evidence cropped up in other groups as well. Media staffers of the United Presbyterian Church, for example, cited the denomination’s decision not to approve the ordination of practicing homosexuals as the top UPC story of the year (a close second: the UPC’s $3.5 million budget cut).

Theology And ‘Gutsy’ Exegesis

Biblical infallibility was the chief topic at the recent annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. Slightly more than 100 of the ETS’s 1,170 members plus several dozen observers attended the sessions, held at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. In a paper, Dean Kenneth Kantzer of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago stressed that inerrancy of Scripture will remain a key doctrine for evangelicals “for as long as Christ is Lord.” He cautioned, however, that “inerrancy should not be made a test for Christian fellowship instead of Christ.”

Since its founding in 1948, the ETS has made belief in inerrancy a basis of membership. Members are required annually to sign a statement confessing belief in the Bible “as the Word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the original manuscripts.” Some members, though, apparently differ on how inerrancy is to be understood. Lay theologian Richard Bube, a science-department chairman at Stanford University, returned his latest renewal application unsigned. He accompanied it with a request that the ETS reword the inerrancy statement. He suggested that it be made similar to Fuller Seminary’s revised statement, in which scriptural infallibility is limited to matters of faith and practice and not applied, for example, to facts of science. After a two-hour closed meeting, the ETS officers decided against recommending any change. Therefore Bube is no longer a member. (He told Religious News Service later that he believes the Bible “is inerrant when properly interpreted according to biblical criteria.”)

Church-history professor Clair Davis of Westminster pointed to one of the current problems within evangelical circles: “You’ve got people who say, ‘I believe the Bible is the absolute, infallible Word of God, but it’s full of errors.’ ” It is an issue likely to be debated vigorously in coming months.

Other matters were also aired at the ETS meeting. One set of papers dealt with whether the meaning of the biblical text was limited to what the authors understood or whether deeper ramifications were intended (beyond the authors’ own understanding but within the scope of the dynamics of divine inspiration). There were advocates for both positions.

In a paper dealing with the best textual basis for translations of the New Testament, Gordon Fee of Gordon-Conwell Seminary argued against those who insist that the King James Version is based on the best texts (as some ETS members do). He suggested the New International Version (NIV) as the best English translation of the New Testament because it is based on “the best Greek texts” and it employs the most “gutsy” exegesis of the texts by selecting the most apt English words that go to the heart of the Greek ones. (Fee was one of the NIV translators.)

Two papers brought into question the traditional fundamentalist view that the earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. This viewpoint usually applies to creation of the entire universe as well. Too many apparent-history miracles of creation must accompany this view, the papers argued (for example, it would have been necessary for the light from stars millions of light-years away to be created en route, according to traditional conservative views).

Professor Walter Kaiser of Trinity was elevated to the ETS presidency, and President Edmund Clowney of Westminster was chosen president-elect.

The First Women

At an afternoon service at All Saints Episcopal Church in Indianapolis on January 1, Episcopal bishop Donald J. Davis placed his hands upon the head of Jacqueline Means and prayed, asking God to “give your Holy Spirit to Jacqueline, fill her with grace and power, and make her a priest in your Church.”

Thus Mrs. Means, 40, a nurse, prison chaplain, and mother of four married to a truck driver, became the first woman to be ordained to the Episcopal priesthood since the denomination changed its rules last September to open the way for women to become priests.

Earlier in the service, Robert Strippy, a representative of the American Church Union, read a statement of protest to the congregation. About a dozen other protesters were with him. “We condemn this proceeding as opposed to the mind of the church and the will of God,” he declared. It is “an act of heresy,” he insisted. Davis expressed grief over “the separation between us” but said the service would go on. Strippy and the others walked out.

Davis, the bishop of Erie, Pennsylvania, substituted for Indianapolis bishop John P. Craine, who was hospitalized with a heart ailment,

On the next day, Sunday, Mrs. Means celebrated communion at All Saints, and about one-fourth of the usual 100 or so parishioners were absent. She acknowledged to reporters that there was division in the church over her. “The church is being tested through people like me,” she said.

Also on that day. a second woman was ordained—Patricia Park, 29, of Alexandria, Virginia. Bishop Robert Hall of Virginia officiated. The service was held at Immanuel Church-on-the-Hill in Alexandria, where former President Ford and his family attended for years and where she is assistant to the rector. After her ordination, Mrs. Park and her husband Stephen, also an Episcopal priest, celebrated communion jointly as a husband-wife clergy team, a first in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Mrs. Park co-chaired the National Coalition for Women’s Ordination.

About thirty women were expected to be ordained during January, and as many as fifty this year. Questions remained, though, about women in dioceses whose bishops are less than enthusiastic about women’s ordination.

In Kansas City, Missouri, Bishop Arthur Vogel ruled that Katrina Swanson must fulfill a diocesan requirement of three years of seminary training before he will approve her as a priest. She is one of fifteen who were irregularly ordained by retired bishops in 1974 and 1975. Others of the fifteen said they would delay their own ordination completion ceremonies in protest, and they asked other bishops to bring pressure against the West Missouri bishop. Vogel said his ruling would have been the same if the case had involved a man.

South Korea: Still Guilty

Eighteen prominent South Korean religious and political leaders, all Christians, who were arrested last March and sentenced to up to eight years for speaking out on politics had their cases heard in Seoul’s court of appeals last month. The charges against them concerned a declaration calling for restoration of democracy and the resignation of President Park Chung Hee. The declaration was read in an ecumenical service in Seoul’s Myongdong Catholic cathedral. The court of appeals upheld their convictions but reduced the sentences of sixteen of them and suspended those of two others: Presbyterian theologian Ahn Byung Mu of the Institute of Research in Theology and Presbyterian minister Lee Hae Dong. The case now goes to the nation’s supreme court.

Four defendants had their eight-year prison sentences reduced to five years: Yun Po Sun, a former president of the country and an active Presbyterian layman; Catholic Kim Dae Jung, who ran against President Park in the 1972 elections; Quaker writer Ham Suk Han; and theologian Moon Ik Whan, a Bible translator, who told the court the dissidents had felt “duty bound” to urge the government not to take the “wrong direction.”

Presbyterian Lee Oo Chung, president of the Korean Church Women United, had her five-year sentence reduced to three. So did Methodists Lee Tae Yong, South Korea’s first woman lawyer, and her husband Chung Il Hyung, a former foreign minister.

Nine of the defendants, who include Catholic priests, Presbyterian ministers, and former theology professors, had their two-to-five-year terms reduced to one-to-three years.

Eleven of the eighteen have been in jail since March; the others have remained free pending appeal.

Elsewhere, four Protestant ministers at Kwangju, south of Seoul, were charged with supporting the eighteen and handed sentences of from two to ten years in jail.

Park imposed martial law in 1972 and scrapped the former constitution limiting his term in office, issued a revised constitution that enables him to stay in power for life, and laid down emergency decrees banning dissent against him or the new constitution—all in the name of national security. Those who violate the decrees face stiff prison terms, even death.

Prominent poet Kim Chi Ha, 35, a Catholic, was sentenced to death in 1974 for publishing a poem, “Cry of the People.” The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, thanks to an international outcry, and he was released under an amnesty program in 1975. A month later he was back in jail for again being critical with his pen. The prosecutors claimed he was a Communist infiltrating the Catholic Church, and they asked for a ten-year sentence. Last month he was found to be in violation of the country’s anti-Communist law and was given a seven-year sentence.

Meanwhile, the supreme court upheld a death sentence on theological student Kim Chol Hyon, a Korean resident of Japan who admitted spying for North Korea. Three other students who met and allegedly helped him at the Presbyterian Hankuk Seminary in Seoul received sentences of from two to ten years.

An international consultation of church leaders recently met in Seoul at the invitation of the National Council of Churches in Korea and appealed for amnesty for the Seoul Eighteen. In Japan, the United Church of Christ (Kyodan) also appealed for their release.

The Second Coming

Two years after the death of their pastor at age 49, members of the Colonial Village Church in Flint, Michigan, still await his return from the grave. They now believe that a second person will also be resurrected—Mrs. Mescal McIntosh, the woman they have seen as their human link to God. She is still alive but has been unwell for some time, leaders of the independent congregation say.

In the meantime, the congregation does little—as a group or individually—without first checking with Mrs. McIntosh, who inquires of God, she says, and passes along the answers. Mrs. McIntosh, a resident of Flint for about twenty years, has five children and three grandchildren. She is separated.

The church members maintain a twenty-four-hour-a-day vigil at the church; someone is always there to pray and wait for the return of clergyman Bernard Gill. Gill, who founded the church, died in a Flint hospital on July 17, 1974, of a perforated ulcer and is buried in a Flint cemetery.

The resurrections will be a sign that the end of the world is not far off, the congregation believes. Members predict that whenever the resurrections occur (they will make no public predictions about the date) they will be the first of a number of signs that the congregation sees as “the vindication of the ministry of the prophet of the latter rain.” Gill described himself as an Elijah-like prophet of the latter rain. By that, he meant that he was a messenger announcing the second coming of Jesus Christ, as John the Baptist was the messenger announcing the first coming. (In Israel there were two rainy seasons; the reference to the second one is taken by some Bible students to mean the events surrounding Christ’s return.)

Other signs after the resurrections will include healings, more resurrections, and “cloven tongues of fire,” said Roderick Greene, one of two General Motors employees who are acting pastors (Gill is still considered pastor).

The story of the church began in 1968 when Gill, believing that God did not intend to have denominations, quit the pastorate of one of Flint’s larger, more prosperous Nazarene churches and founded Colonial Village Church.

A year before his death, he told of a vision he had had in the middle of the night, when he came to an understanding from God that he was one of two messengers to the last days of the church mentioned in the eleventh chapter of Revelation. Mrs. McIntosh was the other, he said.

Mrs. McIntosh, then in her forties and a sales clerk in a department store, had begun attending the church about two years after it began. She expressed her belief in Christ soon after her arrival and later began to have her own visions. She said she heard God’s voice, something Gill had never claimed. He came to ask her to ask questions of God.

Gill delayed entering the hospital for nearly twenty-four hours—until Mrs. McIntosh said the voice of God told him to enter. He died shortly afterward. Earlier, Gill had predicted that a man would be resurrected in vindication of his work. When he died, the congregation concluded that it was he who would be resurrected.

Some thought the pastor would come back to life at his burial. When he did not, they turned to carrying out his wishes in preparation for his return. They have nearly finished remodeling the building to look as much as possible like a colonial village, in accord with his wishes.

Some aspects of the vigil have changed, as Mrs. McIntosh has exerted more and more control over the congregation. For months after Gill’s death, his office was kept locked and his chair behind the pulpit remained empty. But now both are used because “the Lord told us some time ago that it was his will that we do so,” Greene said.

For a time, the congregation supported the Gill family, but as Mrs. Gill and some of the children quit believing in his return, the support was withdrawn. Mrs. Gill was asked to leave the parsonage (two teen-age Gill children still live there). Instead, Mrs. McIntosh began receiving financial support. The church leaders will not say how much, only that “her needs … are supplied.” Others say this means a solid weekly salary and the purchase of a house. Since Gill’s death, Mrs. McIntosh, now unemployed, has moved from a modest house in an older neighborhood to a large modern home in one of the city’s best areas. Members reportedly go to her for advice on such everyday matters as whether to buy a car and whether to go out for dinner.

Membership in the church, never large, has dropped about a third, to approximately fifty, in the last year. That does not disturb Greene and Dwayne Cross, the other acting pastor. “God will vindicate this ministry, even if there are only two of us,” Greene said. “It’s a time for separating the sheep from the goats.”

When Mrs. McIntosh dies, Cross and Greene admit, the congregation will face a new problem. She has been their link to God; who will take her place?

They say they believe God will find a way. For as Mrs. McIntosh said once: “If you look around at what Christianity is like, you know someone must come. God is giving us a chance to live a life of complete perfection and holiness.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. McIntosh says she sees Gill, as well as hearing his voice and those of others such as Elijah.

Nobody else, however, sees Gill—“not yet,” said Greene.

BETTY BRENNER

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