Gaining Perspective after a Decade of Change

The spiritual dimension has come more clearly into focus.

Remember 1970? Regular-grade gasoline was going for about 34.9 cents a gallon, and gold was priced officially at $35 an ounce. A scant decade later, we are paying 300 percent more for gasoline that we must pump ourselves, and an ounce of gold is being traded for nearly 1300 percent more. Add to these headaches the continuing crises in morality, authority, and world order. It appears certain that we face bleaker times and stiffer challenges.

Yet we should guard against gloom-and-doom pessimism. There were some surprises in the past decade: not everything turned out as badly as might have been expected. For example, when on Yom Kippur in 1973, Syria and Egypt—supported by Soviet airlifts—attacked Israel, some thought Armageddon seemed imminent. Instead, later on came Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, President Carter’s mediation, the prayer-punctuated Camp David meetings, and peace between Israel and Egypt.

China, seemingly a hopeless ideological recluse among the major nations, opened its door a crack in 1971, Richard Nixon pushed it open wider the following year, and eventually, in 1979, full diplomatic recognition was given by the U.S. China’s door may also be open to some new spiritual approaches from Christians.

These were just two of many surprising developments in the last decade. To help us put the 1980s in some perspective, it is instructive to recall a few of the major events of the 1970s. The decade began with the United States still at war in Vietnam, but hordes of our young people were protesting and burning American flags in the streets. Huge numbers of young people were involved in radical-left politics, free sex, dope, and other pits; an entire generation seemed lost.

But in 1971, to everyone’s amazement, the so-called Jesus movement spread rapidly among the young. It emerged from the debris of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and a dozen other unlikely places. With King James Bibles, evangelistic tabloids, jeans, guitars, and contemporary sounding music with lyrics biblically right-on, the youthful Christians came bounding into the 1970s with joy, enthusiasm, love for others, and unabashed openness in sharing Christ.

Although the Jesus movement matured and disappeared as a phenomenon, reflecting shifts in the youth culture at large, it left its mark on many churches, as evidenced by “body life” services, music that is abreast of the times, heavier sermonic emphasis on experience, and the like.

Renewed evangelistic fervor was one of God’s gracious “surprises” of the decade. More than 75,000 attended Explo ’72 in Dallas, essentially an evangelistic training conference for youth sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ, and two years later more than 300,000 registrants attended a similar event in Seoul, Korea. Some 2,000 young people, mostly from America and Europe, converged on Munich to proclaim Christ during the 1972 Olympic Games; 4,000 showed up four years later at Montreal.

Jesus camp-out rallies caught on; by 1976, 40,000 people were attending the rallies held annually in Pennsylvania, and similar ones elsewhere attracted large crowds. Youth With a Mission and other groups spearheaded coast-to-coast witnessing in connection with the nation’s bicentennial. Campus Crusade escalated its Here’s Life campaign to include the entire world, and launched a drive in 1977 to raise $1 billion to finance it. Seventeen thousand students flocked to Urbana 76, Inter-Varsity’s triennial student missionary convention.

Overseas, hundreds of thousands gathered in Seoul in 1973 to hear Billy Graham preach, and up to 250,000 at a time jammed into a stadium the following year in Rio de Janeiro. In 1976, the evangelist preached at a series of meetings in Hungary—his first major preaching mission in a Communist country. In 1978 he preached for ten days in large meetings throughout Poland.

A number of congresses on evangelism were held throughout the world. Many were spawned by the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974. Among other things, Lausanne represented a response to watery or aberrant positions on evangelism and salvation by the World Council of Churches, and it served as a catalyst for global evangelical unity.

The conversion of Watergate figure Charles Colson in 1973 and the candidacy of born-again Jimmy Carter for President in 1976 landed the gospel on page one. Books like Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Colson’s Born Again helped make the 1970s a boom period for evangelical publishing. Christian radio was bigger than ever, and Christian television stations—served by communications satellites in space—were being established at the rate of one a month as the decade closed.

One of the most remarkable developments of the entire decade was the election in 1978 of Polish Archbishop Karol Wojtyla as Pope, the first non-Italian to hold the post in centuries and an experienced hand at dealing firmly with Communist authorities on matters of religious freedom. John Paul II inherited from Paul VI a church beset by myriads of problems, all highlighted in the 1970s: declining attendance, lagging finances, serious shortages of priests, rebellion on the right by traditionalists, revolutionary fervor on the left by liberation theologians, and widescale unrest in the middle over the Vatican’s unbending stance on such issues as contraception, divorce, and the role of women in the church.

Yet there were encouraging signs of renewal. The Catholic charismatic movement, which emphasizes the establishment of a personal relationship with Christ as Savior and Lord, had fewer than 50,000 adherents at the beginning of 1970, mostly in the United States. Ten years later there were millions worldwide, and one of its own members, Cardinal Leon Josef Suenens of Belgium, was installed as the Vatican’s liaison with the movement.

Meanwhile, evangelical churches posted record gains at home and overseas, but the decade was a period of deep trouble for some of the major denominations. United Methodists were stunned when they discovered in 1976 that their church had sustained a ten-year loss of one million members. Southern Baptists brooded over the sharp decreases in the number of baptisms of converts from outside their church family.

Strong conservative tides began flowing. Denominational social action departments, long in the public eye and a source of constant irritation, were reined in. Evangelical caucuses gained in number and influence. Controversy shifted from the social arena of the 1960s to the theological realm. This time there was schism. A struggle over doctrine and structure in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) in 1972 resulted in the formation of the Presbyterian Church in America. Following six years of bitter strife over the inspiration of Scripture and the use of ecclesiastical power in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches was established to house many of those who had walked out or been tossed out. From the controversy over women’s ordination and prayer book revisions in the Episcopal Church came the Anglican Church of North America.

Abortion, homosexuality, the role of women, and Scripture were the big issues of the decade. Protestant forces were split pro and con over abortion. Although denominational staff personnel tended to be involved in proabortion activities, many in the grassroots joined Catholics in fighting permissive abortion. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973 overturned many states’ statutes and opened the way for public financing of abortion; since then, the abortion battle has been fought largely on political terms.

Homosexuality was heatedly debated in the United Methodist, United Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches. Advocates of prohomosexual positions—including the removal of barriers to the ordination of avowed homosexuals—received setbacks, but they gained greater visibility, and they can be expected to press their causes with increased vigor in the years ahead.

Internal troubles kept the pot boiling at National Council of Churches headquarters throughout much of the decade, but the NCC in its social action resolutions and activities managed to keep the heat on others as well—creating further distance between it and many grassroots church members. The financially ailing World Council of Churches suffered loss of friends and contributions for its imprudent granting of funds to some guerilla groups that used violence in fighting racism.

New religious sects, or cults, and the activities of their opponents commanded much attention during the decade. Cult foes gained immeasurable support for their cause as a result of the People’s Temple-related murders and suicides of more than 900 persons in Guyana in 1978. Despite our justified abhorrence of cult beliefs and practices, we must remember that many people joined cults because they were seeking love and spiritual fulfillment. We must also realize that crackdowns against the cults—a possibility in the 1980s—could eventually jeopardize the religious freedom of others as well.

Although the past decade had some distressing days, and some setbacks for Christian causes, overall it contained much for which we can be thankful. God calls his people today to look back with praise and to look ahead with eager anticipation, not because Christians are hopeless idealists, or because they can predict the future, but because they know the 1980s are the next step in God’s plan to culminate all things in the exaltation of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

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