Broadcast Deregulation Touches off Mad Scramble for Local TV Stations

New technology makes entry into field feasible for smaller religious groups.

The federal government is deregulating the broadcast industry so fast that thousands of new television stations are expected to spring up across the country in the next few years. New technology is causing start-up costs to drop dramatically, to the point where a church, for example, could start its own TV station for the price of a new parking lot. In the words of one expert, it amounts to “anew Oklahoma land rush” as video entrepreneurs hustle to stake their claims.

The fact that deregulation has suddenly created vast new opportunities to reach people with the televised gospel was not lost on the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) who gathered in Washington the last week in January for their annual convention, held this year in conjunction with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Workshops and seminars to explain the new opportunities drew stand-up crowds of station owners and program producers trying to catch up, or catch on, to the fast-changing field of television broadcasting.

A dramatic and unexpected proposal passed last September by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates the airwaves, sparked much of the interest at the convention. The FCC proposes to grant licenses for “low-power” stations capable of reaching audiences within a radius of 3 to 20 miles or more, depending on the terrain and the quality of the antenna. Licenses will go to those who file first, with preferences to minority groups and nonprofit organizations.

The first-come, first-served rule has touched off a fierce scramble and more than 1,000 applications have already been sent to the FCC, which hasn’t even had time to make up official application forms. Sears, Roebuck and Company’s Allstate division has applied for more than 100 low-power stations, as have other large companies. The Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission applied for 100 stations, and the Christian Broadcasting Network for 20 stations. Numerous other religious groups are applying. “The time to move is now,” before the choice markets are spoken for, warned one of the many experts on hand.

William Kitchen, president of Quality Media Corporation, a Christian-owned media consulting firm in Columbus, Georgia, predicts there will be 10,000 applications within a year. “They’re excellent strategic moves for ministry as well as good business propositions,” Kitchen told one stand-up crowd in a seminar that went to nearly midnight. He said a church could go on the air with its own station at a cost of $40,000, or even less if it buys used equipment. The FCC proposal requires neither studio nor local programming. The station needs only a low-power transmitter, a videotape player, and an antenna, and it is in business. The FCC’s troublesome Fairness Doctrine, which sometimes keeps television preachers from blasting away on such controversial topics as abortion and homosexuality, will still be in force but will be relaxed somewhat. Neither will there be a lengthy and expensive hearing before licenses are granted. The FCC’s decision to permit the profusion of new stations is still tentative and could be reversed, but that is not expected to happen, given the spirit of deregulation in the federal agencies.

The NAE is the evangelical umbrella group representing 3.5 million Christians from 40 denominations and portions of 33 others. This is the second time it has met jointly with NRB. The theme of this year’s “Convocation 81” was “Church and Media: Partners in World Evangelization,” with NAE representing the message and the broadcasters the means of spreading that message.

The broadcasters, however, dominated the convention, with the glitter of numerous Christian television celebrities who sang and preached, as well as scores of companies that exhibited products for every aspect of the broadcasting business—from videotapes to satellite receiving stations. In fact, the modern electronic wizardry now available to purveyors of the ancient gospel message is beginning to disturb some of the more thoughtful Christian broadcasters. “We tend to worship technology,” said David W. Clark, dean of the graduate school of communications at CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) University in Virginia Beach. “There’s something about the dials and the lights and the cameras that consumes people. People who have two color cameras say ‘Boy, if I just had three color cameras, then I could really win the world for Christ.’ It just won’t happen.” Clark called television a monster that gobbles vast amounts of material, and said broadcasters must start paying more attention to content and less to technology. He said the greatest need today is for creative writers.

The revival of evangelical Christianity in the last few years has brought million-dollar ministries to many preachers, both on and off television. With that has come the ethical problem of raising and spending vast amounts of cash properly, a subject on which there were sharp words during a seminar on ethical practices.

Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ said that as a youngster and a non-Christian, he naturally assumed that all religious leaders were crooked. When in later years he found himself in a Christian leadership role, he was determined to stay above suspicion himself, so the salaries in his organization were kept low and every aspect of its finances were made available for public scrutiny. Bright said that any minister who thinks he is somehow immune to disclosing how he spends the money entrusted to him is “automatically suspect.”

Olan Hendrix, executive director of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, said that in this cynical age every Christian organization needs an audited financial statement, “If your organization doesn’t have one, you ought to question whether you have the right to exist,” he warned. According to the Better Business Bureau, many religious broadcasters organize themselves as churches so they won’t have to file an annual financial statement with the Internal Revenue Service.

Evangelist Jerry Falwell addressed the convention at a breakfast for congressmen, which drew 69 members of the House and Senate. In a press conference that followed, Falwell rebutted in no uncertain terms some of the charges being heaped upon him by liberal pressure groups alarmed at his growing influence in the country.

Falwell said he will not enter politics because he has been called to preach. He said the country must get rid of “hate groups” such as the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Far from being prejudiced against Jews, he declared that he and other fundamentalist Christians are the best friends Jews could ever have because biblical Christians recognize that Jews are God’s chosen people. Some have charged that fundamentalists are out to “Christianize America,” but Falwell said the church has no right to control the government and that any religious leader who tries to do so, in “ayatollah fashion,” should be opposed. Falwell said Christians cannot impose their beliefs on others. Rather they must set the moral climate and show others what the proper standard is.

Later the same day the convention heard from Tyrone Brown, the only black FCC commissioner. He suggested that Falwell’s Morality Majority may contain overtones of racism and he declared the necessity of equal rights in the religious revival now under way in America. His speech contrasted sharply with Falwell’s. Today’s sophisticated technology notwithstanding, it appears that even those within the broadcast business itself are not always able to communicate clearly to each other.

Personalia

Stanley Rader, former treasurer and board member of the Worldwide Church of God, has resigned his position. Rader announced his resignation in a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times, noting he was keeping his promise to resign if the group won lawsuits brought against it by the California attorney general’s office. That office withdrew suits (alleging misuse of funds) when the legislature passed a bill removing the attorney general’s authority to take over operations of the sect.

Woodrow M. Kroll has been inaugurated president of the Practical Bible Training School, Binghamton, New York. Kroll was formerly chairman of the division of religion at Liberty Baptist College, Lynchburg, Virginia.

Denominations

American Baptists Ring The Evangelism Gong

“Witnesses on the Way: Evangelizing Community in the Eighties” was the theme of the American Baptist Churches (ABC) National Convocation on Evangelism held last month in Los Angeles. It was the first national conference devoted entirely to the issue of evangelism in the 73-year history of the denomination.

Attracting some 900 registrants, and as many as 1,800 for evening rallies, the conference symbolized “a renewed commitment to the importance of evangelism” within the 1.6 million-member denomination, stated general secretary Robert C. Campbell. The conference underscored this thrust by assembling an international roster of leaders in church evangelism. Over 50 workshops—on such topics as church growth, urban ministries, the charismatic renewal, the nuclear arms race, evangelism to Asians. Hispanics, and blacks—were open to participants.

At the opening banquet, Orlando Costas, director of Hispanic studies at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, warned that evangelism has become so powerful that it is being used as “an ideological weapon in the hands of those who seek to comfort the rich.” Christians should question the performance of churches that report phenomenal growth but maintain the star is quo, he observed.

Evangelist Leighton Ford challenged conferees to recapture a vision of “the tremendous privilege it is to call people to decision.” And that decision, he said, must be a radical one. “Many Christians have been guilty of offering Jesus as an additive to an already-adopted lifestyle, rather than as a radically different alternative.”

Reviewing religious life in America, sociologist David Moberg noted the need for “holistic ministries for the fragmented people of our fragmented world.” He called for a return to the historic roots of the Christian heritage with an emphasis on the whole Bible as the guide to faith and conduct, to Jesus Christ as the center of religious concern, and the spiritual well-being as the central goal of Christian ministry.

British pastor and evangelist David Watson predicted that “the battle of the eighties will be among Marxism, Islam, and Third World Christianity.” Western Christianity is “too flabby,” he charged, to do anything about it. He also urged preachers and evangelists to be creative in the ways they illustrate God’s love. “In this word-resistant age, people need to feel God’s presence before they can feel his words.” he said.

Other conference speakers included author Letha Scanzoni; Raymond J. Bakke, specialist in urban church ministry; Emma Lou Benignus, head of the ABC’s ministry to the elderly; Christine Brussclmann, a theologian and writer from Belgium; Harold Carter, pastor of New Shiloh Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland; Robert Fredrickson, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Wichita, Kansas; and Robert Lee, professor of social ethics at San Francisco Seminary.

Although he said there has always been a basic interest in evangelism in the denomination, Emmett V. Johnson, national director of evangelism (since the post was created in 1979) and the driving force behind the convocation, added that he foresees “a new day” for evangelism in the ABC. “Evangelism will be the center of our concern,” he said, “but not its circumference. We’re not so much interested in winning souls as in making disciples who will affect our world and win others to Christ.”

Campbell agreed, emphasizing the fact that the ABC is still strongly committed to social action. “We are an evangelical and ecumenical denomination with strong social concerns, and those will remain,” he said. “Evangelism is not contrary to those.”

“We’ve been through an era [in which] significant leaders of the church … had defined it as almost the entire mission of the church. When denominational leaders defined it so broadly, we failed to focus it. Now we’re trying to focus it. This conference does not represent a new turn for the denomination as much as a renewal of an ongoing concern. It’s just been a long time since we’ve run that gong properly.”

PHYLLIS ALSDURF

North American Scene

A Nashville pastor has requested dismissal from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. Cortez Cooper, pastor of Nashville’s First Presbyterian Church, resigned along with two assistants because their denomination had “defected from the absolutes of God.” The move shocked evangelicals who remained in the denomination after 300 conservative congregations pulled out in 1973. Cooper was a leader of a group of evangelicals who elected then to stay in the denomination. Cooper and the two assistants especially disagreed with the potential requirement that congregations include women on their governing boards.

The church must pay for a platform used by the Pope on his 1979 visit to Philadelphia, a federal appeals court has ruled. The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia must reimburse the city $204,569—the cost of a platform used by John Paul II to celebrate Mass. The appeals court declared, in a 2-to-l decision, that it was unconstitutional for the city to absorb the cost of the platform’s construction.

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