News from the North American Scene: May 04, 1979

North American Scene

Evangelist Billy Graham returned to his preaching roots last March during a Tampa, Florida, crusade. While attending Bible school in nearby Temple Terrace during the late 1930s, Graham preached his first sermon—to derelicts in a Tampa skid row district. The Florida Historical Society erected a commemorative marker on the site of those early street meetings during a ceremony attended by Graham, Florida Governor Bob Grahm, and Tampa area civic leaders. The five-day Tampa crusade attracted an average attendance of 35,000 and a closing Sunday crowd in Tampa Stadium of 52,000. Graham began a crusade in Sydney, Australia this month.

Over 550 Peoples Temple victims apparently would be buried in a cemetery near Mill Valley, California—the result of a frustrating search of several months by a Bay Area interfaith committee composed of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Some cemetery officials denied burial of the victims (250 of whom were still unidentified) fearing their cemeteries would become tourist attractions or pilgrimage sites for cult members. A judge ruled that $300,000 in Temple assets should be spent for the burial, but proceedings awaited final approval of a court-appointed receiver for Temple property. The bodies remained in an airplane hangar at a Dover, Delaware, Air Force base.

Delegations of ten church leaders from the United States—mostly from the National Council of Churches—and from the Soviet Union, representing six Orthodox and Protestant denominations, met at World Council of Churches headquarters in Geneva recently; they issued a joint statement calling for nuclear disarmament and approval of the SALT II accords. Its significance? The NCC notes this is the first such joint Soviet-U.S. statement. One Russia-watcher, however, noted that the Soviet government often uses its churches “as a tool for promoting peace” as a front.

Classes begin next month in Pasadena, California, at the new Samuel Zwemer Institute. The school, on the campus of the U.S. Center for World Mission, which will offer both graduate and undergraduate courses, will promote missionary witness to Muslims. It is named after the prominent Reformed Church Muslim authority who died in 1952. School director Don McCurry, a United Presbyterian missionary in Pakistan for eighteen years, led the recent Conference on Muslim Evangelization in Colorado, from which a mandate for such a school emerged.

Larry Flynt, who remains paralyzed from mid-thigh down after being shot during a Lawrenceville, Georgia, pornography trial, was back in the courtroom recently. An Ohio appeals court reversed his widely publicized 1977 convictions on charges of organized crime and pandering obscenity. (The latter case was returned to a lower court.) However, a state court in Fulton County, Georgia, convicted Flynt on eleven misdemeanor obscenity charges—suspending any jail terms pending Flynt’s payment of $27,500 in fines. Flynt, whose Hustler magazine became an odd mixture of religion and pornography after his professed born-again experience in 1977, fought the latter charges on grounds of freedom of the press.

Personalia

Haddon W. Robinson, 48, becomes president effective July 1 of Conservative Baptist Seminary—thus ending a three-year search for a successor to retiring president of twenty-three years, Vernon C. Grounds. Robinson, a faculty member at Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas since 1958 and chairman of its pastoral ministries department, also is director of the Christian Medical Society. Grounds will become president emeritus of the Denver, Colorado, school.

Patrick D. Miller, Jr., becomes dean of Union Theological Seminary next month; Miller, who will continue teaching biblical studies at the school, succeeds Neely McCarter, who resigned for an administrative post at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.

On July 1 Leander E. Keck assumes the deanship at Yale University Divinity School; he currently is chairman of the religion division at Emory University Graduate School.

Donald R. Mitchell, presently the vice-president for academic affairs at Wheaton College, was named president of King College, a Presbyterian Church U.S. (Southern) school in Bristol, Tennessee.

Robert Gerry, for twenty-eight years the Christian Literature Crusade (CLC) director in Japan and now the CLC International secretary, has been given an added post—general director of CLC’s North American work. He succeeds Kenneth Adams, who founded the Britain-based group in 1941 and who will devote his time to deputation and public relations projects.

Owen C. Carr, founder and president of Chicago Christian television station WCFC-TV, resigned effective July 31 to become president of Valley Forge Christian College, an Assemblies of God school located near Philadelphia. Jerry Rose, vice-president and general manager of the the three-year-old station, will become president; Carr will continue as chairman of the WCFC board of directors.

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