Moody Bible Institute: A Male Casualty of the Feminist Issue

Moody Bible Institute

A Male Casualty of the Feminist Issue

In 1976 Stanley Gundry wrote a book called Love Them In—an analysis of the theology of Moody Bible Institute founder D. L. Moody. Three years later, the author may be feeling more left out than loved in.

Gundry, a professor of theology for 11 years at Moody, submitted his resignation from the faculty last month—but only under pressure from the Institute hierarchy. Gundry speculated that had he not resigned, “I gather that I would have been terminated with no severance benefits.”

Moody’s displeasure with its respected faculty member (Gundry is immediate past president of the Evangelical Theological Society and a prolific writer) was primarily due to the feminist views espoused by Gundry’s free-lance writer wife, Patricia.

Patricia Gundry wrote Woman, Be Free in 1977. “The basic idea of the book,” her husband explained, “is that there should be no bars to women in places of Christian leadership. She does this while adhering to the authority—even the inerrancy—of Scripture. This is something other books in this area don’t do.”

Gundry agrees with his wife’s views, and says his own position has been known for some time. The subject seldom came up in the classroom, he said, but when it did, “I was careful to state both positions and assign reading on both sides of the issue.”

So why the sudden action against Gundry—nearly two years after publication of his wife’s book? Moody reportedly has received many letters criticizing Mrs. Gundry’s book, and particularly her expressed views on the feminist issue during recent speaking engagements. Constituency and, perhaps more important to the administration, its conservative donors, objected to her advocacy of women’s ordination, said a school official who asked to remain anonymous. (While the book itself doesn’t endorse women’s ordination, said the husband, “that’s an obvious implication.”)

Zondervan Publishers, which only last spring released its paperback version of the book, expressed surprise at the events at Moody. “We’ve received no hate letters about this book,” said Carol Holquist, of the author relations department. “Actually, Woman, Be Free is a Gundry very gentle book.”

The Institute has no official statement on feminist issues or women’s ordination. Public relations director Eric Fellman said, “We have a position that a woman should not be ordained, but I don’t know that it’s stated anywhere. Dr. [George] Sweeting [MBI president] has mentioned that position in his radio messages and so forth.”

Institute officials, according to Gundry, said his position on the feminist issue violated the Institute’s “historic position.” He added, “They considered this particular question to be a matter of such obvious interpretation of Scripture that I was in serious doctrinal error.”

Alfred Martin, Institute vice-president and dean of education, reportedly was most closely involved in the resignation proceedings. However, school officials say the trustees board itself took action on the matter. Martin left for vacation soon after Gundry’s August 1 resignation and could not be reached for comment. However, the Institute released an official statement through its legal office:

“The position of Dr. Gundry and his wife regarding the feminist movement, and therefore the role of women in the church, is objectionable to the administration and trustees of Moody Bible Institute and is the basis of his resignation.… Because this is a personal matter, we have no further comment.”

Gundry objected more to the handling of his departure, than to the basis for it. “At no time was I allowed to state my position to those who were deciding my future at the Institute, and at no time was I allowed to make a defense or appeal.”

The action against Gundry came when most colleges already have firmed up their staffs for the fall term. Gundry, 42, the father of four, was job-hunting from his Wheaton, Illinois, home.

He planned no legal action against the Institute because “there has been a fair financial settlement.” (Moody faculty have verbal, not written contracts, said Institute personnel director Lloyd Dodson. These are reached, he said, during annual spring meetings between the administration and faculty members.)

But Gundry, who says he has many friends at the Institute and has “run the whole gamut of emotions” since his departure, hopes at least to prevent future situations like his own.

“If there is any way that I can be influential in setting up proper grievance and appeal procedures at Moody, I would do that for the benefit of the Institute and the faculty that remain there.”

JOHN MAUST

United Methodists

United or Untied?

The theme of the recent Good News Convocation at Ashland (Ohio) College was “Growing Together as Christian Families.” And the 1,600 participants at the three-day meeting seemed to indicate their opinion that the family with the most growing problems is the 9.8-million-member United Methodist Church.

Paul Mickey, Duke University theologian and chairman of the Good News board of directors, said in an address that “we are in trouble as a church.” While noting that the United Methodist Church “can be renewed” with the help of the Holy Spirit, he noted five crisis points in the denomination. Among these was a theological pluralism that “has been stretched and pulled into a big-top and has collapsed, wet, soggy, and suffocating on the church.”

Mickey’s other concerns, expressed frequently in the past by officials of the 11-year-old unofficial evangelical caucus group, included misplaced denominational funding priorities, a church bureaucracy that had reduced the authority of the annual conferences and local congregations, and church leadership structures that had become more organizational than spiritual.

The Ashland meeting was the final Good News Convocation before the 1980 General Conference, and participants talked political strategy for influencing the 1,000 clergy and lay conference delegates. At two previous General Conferences, which are held only once every four years, Good News sympathizers made their presence known, but this spring they intend to be more systematic and thorough in their lobbying efforts.

Good News won’t be the only special interest group at the General Conference. The liberal Coalition for the Whole Gospel was formed out of a meeting last March of 45 persons in Madison, Wisconsin, for the purpose of influencing the 1980 Conference. One stated goal: to “address directly the intimidating effect of the New Right’s political and theological agenda in the life of the United Methodist Church.”

The Good News Movement hasn’t been exactly popular with at least two other United Methodist groups. The Methodist Federation for Social Action, which, according to executive director George McClain, operates from “a liberation theology perspective,” frequently has criticized Good News. The Evangelical Missions Council of Good News called last year for the resignation of the entire staff of the United Methodist Women’s Division, charging that some of its members had “Marxist views.” Then, in a letter last spring, four former presidents and 60 former members of the division defended the agency against the “libelous attacks” by Good News and against “innuendoes without proof.”

These inner tensions, in addition to a variety of potentially divisive issues—such as ordination of homosexuals, various moral issues, and the evangelical emphasis in missions—indicate that the General Conference next April in Indianapolis will be anything but casual.

One issue certain to attract long and perhaps heated discussion at the General Conference involves the present method of church funding. Local United Methodist Churches now pay an apportionment—based upon annual budget and church membership, among other things—to a common fund, the World Service Fund, which finances the various church program agencies.

Good News and certain other Methodists are advocating a policy of “designated giving,” however. In other words, they want to give Methodists the privilege of deciding the agency to which they give their money, and how much.

Charles Keysor, top staff executive of Good News, said that designated giving is a way for church members to “vote with their dollars.” Many United Methodists would not have given money to the Board of Global Ministries, for example, Keysor said in a telephone interview, had they known the agency would give $4,000 for operation costs of a New York office of Robert Mugabe (the guerrilla leader).

Arguing against designated giving has been the General Council of Ministries—an agency that helps determine funding for the various program agencies from the World Service Fund. It went on record last March as saying that selective giving would “destroy the very fabric of our connection and [would] be a theological denial of our concept of Christian community.”

GCM general secretary Norman Dewire in a telephone interview opposed designated giving as a “boycott tactic.” Proponents of designated giving counter that United Methodist officials for years have advocated use of economic sanctions as a means of expressing disapproval of corporate or public policies. Liberal groups then argue that designated giving would lead to an abandonment of funding for social action programs.

The Good News board of directors meeting in Ashland, for the first time announced a policy that would allow United Methodists to support and advocate non-United Methodist mission agencies and missions.

Good News officials said the policy was not a rejection of the denomination’s mission program. Instead, they explained, the policy was meant as a way to give church members more latitude in their giving if they found they could not in good conscience support certain programs or practices of the Board of Global Ministries.

When asked by the Texas Methodist how United Methodist officials would react to the policy, Keysor said: “The general church is proud that it works ecumenically through such groups as the World Council of Churches. What’s disloyal about us doing the same thing through groups we trust?”

… The Unseen Chairman at Every Meeting …

Genevieve Koepke died last March, leaving the Concrete Pipe Company of Menasha, Wisconsin, without a chairman for its board of directors. Her son, the company president, held an election to replace her. In the small board room of the company, he held up the picture of “a face that’s familiar to us all” and nominated Jesus Christ.

The other two board members were enthusiastic, and the three unanimously elected Christ as head of the 45-year-old company, which reported a sales volume last year of $2 million for its concrete pipe for sewers. “Certainly there probably will be some people who will say, ‘Don must have hit his head on the windshield a little too hard that last time,’ ” Koepke told an Appleton Post-Crescent reporter.

Koepke, 41, has been recuperating for most of the past two years from two bad traffic accidents, which he said have brought him “a lot closer” to Christ.

“He [Christ] runs the place anyway, so it’s time he got the credit for it,” said Koepke.

As required by Wisconsin state law. Concrete Pipe filed the board’s election report with the secretary of state. The state office had not responded yet, although Koepke said that the public’s and company employees’ support of the election has been “fantastic.”

Christ’s director’s fees will be paid to local churches, said Koepke. And should the state ever request an address for the new director, “We’ll say ‘wherever two or more are gathered in his name,’ ” speculated Koepke.

As far as he is concerned, Christ’s election is permanent: “Who’s going to fire him?”

North American Scene

Most Southern Baptist ties with Wake Forest University would be cut, according to terms of an agreement reached by the university and the North Carolina Baptist State Convention. The agreement, which must be approved by university trustees and at the convention’s annual meeting in November, came after a year of negotiations and two years of tension between the two groups. Points of disagreement have included the university’s desire to obtain federal grants—something the state convention said violates separation of church and state principles. The agreement would end most convention restrictions on the school and regular convention financing of it.

Plans continue for a transdenominational American Festival of Evangelism. The festival will be held in July 1981 in Kansas City as an outgrowth of the work of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Thomas F. Zimmerman, planning committee chairman and general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, says the estimated 25,000 participants will consider ways to evangelize the nation’s unchurched.

The Greek Orthodox Church U.S. was irate over Southern Baptist appointment of two Greek-speaking misionaries to the Boston area. Archdeacon Methodios G. Tournas sent identical letters to Southern Baptist Convention president Adrian Rogers, and to William G. Tanner of the appointing agency, the SBC Home Mission Board, in which he called the appointments “blatantly unchristian, nothing short of proselytism.” Surprised by this reaction, Baptist officials said their intent was to evangelize the unchurched, not to make Baptist proselytes. Tanner said his agency had only responded to requests from Greek-Americans for missions assistance in the Boston area.

The Church of Scientology will pay more than $2 million in damages to a 22-year-old Portland, Oregon, woman. A Portland jury last month ruled in favor of Julie C. Titchbourne, who had filed suit against the church, claiming that it defrauded her by failing to fulfill its promises to improve her life. Mrs. Titchbourne testified that she paid large sums of money for Scientology courses, which, she said, promised, but never gave her, greater self-knowledge, creativity, and higher IQ test scores, among other things. She said she suffered emotional stress as a result. Science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard established Scientology in 1954. His church claims a world membership of four million and calls itself an applied religious science.

A Missionary Aviation fellowship pilot died in a July 23 crash in an isolated area of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Jim Lynne, 39, a New Hampshire, Ohio, native and navy veteran of 150 Vietnam combat missions, was alone with a load of cargo in a 14-passenger, twin-engine aircraft of Australian make. The crash was probably due to mechanical failure, said an MAF spokesman. This follows by one week an accident suffered by Australian MAF in Papua, New Guinea, in which nine persons—one missionary family and two Papuans—were killed. Only recently, MAF, which reports an injury accident rate of only once every 50,000 flight missions, and Wycliffe’s Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, began a safety program that they believe has the potential for 300 to 500 percent improvement in crash survival probability for most aircraft types in mission field use.

The Pope has ordered disclosure of Vatican finances, for centuries one of the world’s best-kept secrets. The Italian magazine L’Espresso reported last month that John Paul II pushed through an order for publication of the Vatican’s budget before the end of this year. He has the support, it claims, of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state. Publishing details of church finances “is so revolutionary,” said L’Espresso, “that only a foreign pope would have the courage to bring it off.”

Church-And-State Issues

Roloff’s Child Care Homes: Religious Rights or License?

“Fight for six years and then give up? Nonsense,” thundered the evangelist. “I will be open again at school time. Jesus never taught anybody to quit.” So said evangelist Lester Roloff, who, in spite of six years of court defeats, a few imprisonments, and the refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case, is still fighting to operate three child care homes in south Texas without state licensing.

Roloff operates some seven child care homes in the south but, on religious grounds, has persistently defied orders by the Texas Department of Human Resources to license his three child care homes located in Texas. State District Judge Charles Mathews ruled in June that Roloff’s nonprofit corporation, Roloff Evangelistic Enterprises, Inc., violated his 1976 injunction against operating the children’s homes without license as required by law. He ordered the corporation to pay $23,000 in penalties for violating his order.

The three homes, which housed more than 300 residents, have been shut down on the orders of the judge. The affected homes are the Rebecca Home for Girls and the Lighthouse Home for Boys in Corpus Christi, and the Anchor Home for Boys in Zapata County. Roloff has vowed to continue his fight for what he sees as his religious and constitutional right to keep the homes open without state interference.

Christine Wisian, the DHR agency and institutional licensing representative in Corpus Christi, explained that Texas law requires that anyone operating a child care home for children not related to the employees by blood or marriage must obtain a state license. Roloff, however, insists that his religious conviction prevents him from accepting the authority of the state to license the homes.

Residents of the Roloff homes are mostly troubled teen-agers who have backgrounds of violence, emotional problems, and insecure family relationships. Most of the teen-agers are assigned to him by parents who feel they can no longer cope with these children. “They are mostly the kind of kids other child care homes won’t accept,” Roloff said.

The Roloff homes came to public attention in 1973 when beatings and other questionable forms of punishment were reported. There were allegations that staff members were heavy handed with the children and employed paddles, leather straps, and sometimes withheld meals in disciplining the children. Such methods violate state standards for corporal punishment which, however, allow spanking with open hands.

Roloff and his supporters justify the strict disciplinary methods by pointing out that many of the children at the Roloff homes are hardheaded delinquents.

Last year the Rebecca Home for Girls was the scene of an unreported murder attempt that involved five female residents who tried to stab a sixth girl. Asked why the murder attempt wasn’t reported, Roloff said he did not report the incident because “I knew the state would come and take them over and make them worse than they were. I kept them and had them all saved.” He claims a 90–95 percent conversion rate among the children.

Roloff said that his facilities are maintained on the basis of Bible precepts and that licensing the homes would destroy the religious and moral foundation responsible for the success of his venture.

He said he has refused to be licensed because the state’s child-care laws are “humanistic to the core.” “They [the lawmakers] believe in abortion, and I don’t. They recognize homosexuals and lesbians, and that’s sin.”

He explained that licensing the homes would mean he can’t make the children go to Sunday school or church. “You can’t make them memorize the Bible or go to Bible studies,” he said. “You make it a state home. I don’t run a state home because I don’t take money from the state. No one can license my faith.” Roloff claimed that he saves the U.S. taxpayers $10 million a year by taking in drug addicts and delinquents who would otherwise be housed in state institutions.

Attorney General Mark White and Texas Governor Bill Clements expressed satisfaction with the operation when they visited one of the homes. Nevertheless, the attorney general said, the law regarding licensing must be enforced.

Roloff, who describes himself as a fundamentalist, independent, Baptist preacher, said that licensing is “Russian and Communistic.” “We don’t need to be accredited by a failing humanistic system that has no Christ, no Bible, no God, and no standard,” he said. He also intimated that about 200 churchmen who run state accredited child-care centers plan to join him in the violation and have turned in their licenses. However, when contacted, the DHR director of agency and institutional licensing in Austin said that throughout the state only one person, Rev. Earl Little, pastor of Miller Road Baptist Church in Garland, had returned his license in protest.

Texas Attorney General Mark White offered to let Roloff relocate the children if Roloff would obey the court order and close. Some of the girls were moved to Bethesda Home for Girls in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where a state license is not required. Others were placed in the homes of Roloff supporters.

County Attorney Mike Westergreen saw such an agreement as a “scandal” and spearheaded a battle to have Roloff indicted by a Neuces County grand jury. He complained that Roloff “intimidates everybody from the governor’s office down and gets away with it.”

Clements said he had done everything he could to help Roloff, and that the only recourse at this point is for the state legislature to pass laws exempting church-related homes like Roloff’s from state regulations. Such attempts failed during the regular session of the legislature. The governor indicated he might resurrect the “Roloff bills” in a special session of the legislature, and he encouraged Roloff’s supporters to use their persuasive powers on legislators so the bills might be passed.

However, with People’s Temple still in mind, some state legislators were wary of having unaccountable to the government the more than 2,000 private, church-related child-care homes housing about 98,000 youngsters.

Nevertheless, even some Roloff critics admit he is doing a good job with the children. “If only he would get a license,” a DHR worker said wistfully.

Lamenting one of the now empty homes that once housed more than 150 girls, Roloff said in a telephone interview, “Look at the fabulous sparkling facilities, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the million-dollar building, empty—not one girl in it right now. Pray for us.”

FELIX AJOKU

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