Page 5613 – Christianity Today (2024)

In this “Bible issue,” Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen prick our consciences: they show how deeply and subtly tradition has warped evangelical thinking—even the evangelical Bible. Tradition itself is good. We owe much to it—far more than we think. Yet according to an old and honored Protestant tradition, the only infallible rule of faith and practice is the Bible. And that tradition passes its own test. It is taught by Christ, the Lord of the church, and by the Scripture, which he inspired for the guidance of his church.

Friends of the Living Bible will want to become friends of Ken Taylor, the author of the translation/paraphrase that has proved to be such a spiritual blessing to millions in the past two decades.

Leland Ryken points up the nature of the Bible as a book of salvation history. The heart of the Bible is a story—the greatest story ever told. It tells how God himself out of his infinite love for lost and despairing humanity chose to come down into the world, to become a human—the God-man, to live and to die on our behalf, and to conquer death so that we might live, live abundantly, and live forever.

Finally, Walter Kaiser explores for us the so-called “new hermeneutic” with its covert denial of biblical authority, and offers direction for a valid interpretation of Scripture as the written Word of God.

HERBERT BUTTERFIELD, 78, eminent preacher and spokesman for British Methodism, author, and professor of modern history at Cambridge University for 19 years; in Cambridge, England.

Robert Baptista resigned in May as president of Taylor University, Upland, Indiana, because of a “conflict in management philosophy” between Baptista and the board of trustees. Milo Rediger, chancellor and former president of the college for 10 years before Baptista became president, has again assumed the presidency.

M. Wendell Belew is the new president of the American Society of Missiology. Belew, who has been with the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board since 1956, reportedly is both the first Southern Baptist and the first missions strategist to head the society, which has about 600 members in the United States and Canada.

Missionaries again will be able to work in Brazil under resident visas, according to church sources in Rio de Janeiro. Last year the Brazilian government tightened restrictions on foreign visitors, issuing only tourist visas. The change reportedly was in reaction to the United States government’s stand on human rights and its subsequent pressure on Brazil.

Rehearsals are under way for an altered shorter version of the famed Oberammergau Passion Play. The small Roman Catholic Bavarian village has presented the seven-hour spectacle almost every decade since 1680. However, the 1980 version contains changes in response to criticisms from the Jewish community, which is upset with implications in the 170-year-old script that all Jews of Jesus’ time called for his death and that all of Jewry has inherited their guilt. An Anti-Defamation League spokesman said last month that the changes “have significantly reduced the anti-semitic potential” of the play. But Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee dissented. “The basic problems remain,” he asserted. “The basic structure of the play is that the Jews killed Christ.”

The pastor and choir leader of an unregistered Baptist church near Moscow have received sentences of three years each. They were charged with slandering the Soviet state, apparently because they circulated copies of the Bulletin of the Council of Evangelical Christian-Baptist Prisoners’ Relatives, which reports cases of persecution of the church. Alexander Nikitov, a full-time pastor supported by the Ryazan Church, also was charged with parasitism (living off of others without working). Nikolai Popov, the choir leader, served a three-year sentence from 1966 to 1969 for religious activities.

Church bells rang last month in Equatorial Guinea for the first time in a year. That was because the military in this tiny West African nation—formerly a Spanish colony—had just overthrown its 11-year first president, Macias Nguema Biyago. Although elected by popular vote, Macias had killed off many of his political opponents, some by beatings, and had given his country a reputation as the “Auschwitz of Africa.” A Roman Catholic turned atheist, Macias at first ordered that his name be included in all masses. Later he expelled or killed most priests in a nation that is 80 percent Roman Catholic. A year ago all churches and mosques were ordered closed.

Prime Minister Abel Muzorewa of Zimbabwe requested and received a leave of absence from his other job as bishop of the United Methodist Church there. He asked for a six-month leave, but was granted one of indefinite length. Muzorewa was succeeded earlier this month by Ralph E. Dodge, the retired white bishop who had preceded Muzorewa. Dodge was bishop in absentia from 1964 to 1968 after he was expelled for criticizing the government and advocating black majority rights.

The outlook for missionary activity in Chad remains clouded. Heads of the six states bordering Chad last month were pressing for a cease-fire, dissolution of the fractured Government of National Union, and formation of a new coalition government. But internal conflict continued. All missionaries, except for a handful in the capital, N’djamena, have been evacuated. Missionary Aviation Fellowship last month announced it was ending its two-plane operation in Chad, since all flying had been stopped by government order. No early resumption was anticipated.

Baptists report starting 56 new congregations this summer in Tanzania. They also baptized 2,575 members of the Sukuma tribe living in villages formerly untouched by the denomination. Seven two-man evangelistic teams each spent a week in a different village, then proceeded to another for a total of eight weeks. The government earlier had settled 4.5 million Sukuma people in easily accessible villages of 1,000 to 10,000 in order to provide them education and other services. This resettlement made the missions project feasible. At the end of each week, the village’s converts were baptized and leaders were chosen. Follow-up teams will train these congregations until next June, say Southern Baptist sources, when a new evangelism cycle is planned.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran is taking seriously biblical and koranic injunctions against usury. One of Iran’s largest banks, Sepah, is about to open a special account at all its branches. Money deposited by the public will accrue no interest. Instead, the funds will be used for interest-free loans to the poor and investment in development projects. Other banks are expected to follow.

Current China policy toward religion may be returning to that which prevailed before the cultural revolution. That is the judgment of experienced observers, who note that from 1949 to 1966 authorities sought to control Christians through a Bureau of Religious Affairs and through merging the Protestant and Catholic churches into two “patriotic” organizations. The Red Guards, attempting to obliterate religion, devastated this “visible” church more than the “hidden” church. As a result, even former pastors and priests of the “official” churches are reluctant to serve as pastors of newly reopened official churches. Participants in secret house meetings are even more skeptical of recent trends. They see them as government attempts to lure believers back into the political mainstream by rehabilitating but controlling the church.

The witness of the church is adulterated by the affluent lifestyle of its members.

On a visit to the United States, I worshipped on successive Sundays in Honolulu, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. The congregations were very different and there were not many similarities among the services. But all three preachers called for a greater simplicity in lifestyle at one point or other in their addresses. They criticized the materialism they saw penetrating the church from contemporary culture and they found it hard to reconcile this with the biblical picture.

It is possibly a coincidence that this one theme should recur in such widely separated places. But it seems more likely that the recurrence points to a need deeply felt by an increasing number of Christians, in the United States as elsewhere.

The fact is that Christians these days often lead lives that are characterized by affluence. This is probably not due to any set determination to depart from previous Christian practice. It arises rather from a natural desire to seek comfort coupled with the fact that we live in a society where that comfort is not very difficult to obtain. But the result may well be that we are taken away from “the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3). There is need for care here.

It is inevitable that Christians share in the general acceptance of ideas that are common in the culture to which they belong. It is part of life that we all enter into a cultural heritage and that we find it easy to agree with most of the ideas commonly accepted throughout our community. We absorb many such ideas quite unconsciously. We do not think them through. We do not give reasons for and against. We simply accept them.

We should not regret this or rebel against it. We do not have time to think through everything. And many of the ideas we pick up from the community are good ones, well worth acquiring. They help us establish a frame of values into which we can fit comfortably. This is an inevitable part of life and we should not be surprised when it happens to us.

But we should be on our guard, nevertheless. It is not easy to maintain that a community like that to which most of us belong these days is in any meaningful sense a Christian community. It will have some Christian ideas; it will engage in some Christian practices. But these will not be the essential thing. The fact is that many of our fellow citizens—and particularly many of those who shape public opinion—owe no allegiance to Christ. Much of what we read in our newspapers or hear on radio or television emanates from a non-Christian source.

This does not mean that we should not read it or listen to it. We must. We must pay attention if for no other reason than that we are members of the community in which it originates and we cannot but play our part as members of that community. We must know what is going on.

Further, we are committed to the task of commending the gospel to the people of our day. Unless we understand them and meet them on their own ground we cannot fulfill that Christian duty. Indeed, one reason for the limited success of much of our evangelism is that all too often we present the eternal gospel in a time-conditioned and stereotyped form. People dismiss it accordingly as a relic of the past. We have then failed to lead them to appreciate its relevance to their need.

For these and other reasons it is important that we enter into an understanding of the thinking of our day. But that does not mean that we must simply accept it. Part of the duty of the Christian in any state is to survey the policies of that state and line them up against Christian standards. He cannot demand that the whole community, Christian and non-Christian alike, live by Christian standards. But he can make plain what those standards are. He can advocate them. He can try to persuade people that those standards are better than other standards. He can try to get them to accept them for themselves. He can follow Jesus Christ’s direction to be like salt or like light.

There is no great problem understanding all this, though there are difficulties in putting such a proposal into practice. But there is danger that, when we are not consciously thinking about what Christianity has to say to our generation, we may relax a little and simply take over the generally accepted ideas of the day. Some of those ideas, as we have noted, are good ones; then there is no harm done. But others of them involve a denial of important elements of the Christian way.

Like the preachers referred to above, Christians in many parts of the world are realizing the importance of a simple lifestyle. Although they often live in rather affluent communities, they are coming to realize that the people of the Bible did not. Jesus himself was poor. He could point to the fact that, whereas foxes had holes and birds had nests, he himself did not have a place where he could lay his head (Luke 9:58).

And his teaching contains some forthright statements about poverty. While we have tended to take them figuratively, many are now asking whether this is justified, and point to the frequent warnings against the peril of riches. They are asking whether Christians in the modern world, particularly in the more affluent sections of the modern world, may not be taking these too lightly.

It can scarcely be denied that most of us share in the luxuries of affluence. We rarely think of ourselves as rich—but compared with the millions of people in the world’s poorer countries, we are wealthy. But we do not compare ourselves with such people. We compare ourselves instead with others among whom we live. We see them enjoying the luxuries modern technology and modern income put within their (and our) reach. And we find it hard to resist the temptation to keep up with our particular Joneses.

We read impressive statistics about the large percentages of the world’s goods and energy employed in our country compared with its small percentage of the world’s population. We realize that there is a tremendous imbalance but we see no way to reconcile it with the Bible’s teaching about poverty.

What are we to do about it? There would seem to be no way that individual Christians—or even the church as a whole—can carry out a redistribution of the world’s wealth. We can agitate for more enlightened policies on the part of our governments, and we should. As much as in us lies we must see to it that action is taken to relieve the world’s appalling poverty.

In the circ*mstances of modern life, we cannot go back to the lifestyle of biblical times. But we can certainly live far more simply than is the custom of many today. In the words of the title of the important book by John V. Taylor, we can realize that “Enough is enough.” We can reject the values of a selfish, affluent, materialistic society.

Leon Morris is principal of Ridley College, Victoria, Australia.

A mailman in Macon, Georgia, has to know his Presbyterian churches. Otherwise, he might deliver mail to the wrong Vineville Presbyterian Church. There have been two churches by that name in Macon for the past six years—the result of a church split.

But what was once only a matter of local confusion, now has attracted the concern of several mainline Protestant denominations as well as Roman Catholic and Orthodox bodies. At stake is the question: Who owns the church property of a local congregation—the congregation or the parent body?

A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving the Vineville church seemed to cast a vote on the side of the local congregation. For that reason, at least one group—the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.—rang its alarm bells. At a hastily called meeting on September 16, the church’s Missions Council voted whether to convene a first ever special General Assembly.

If called, the General Assembly would consider an amendment to the church constitution that would clearly specify that local church property is held in trust for the entire denomination.

For more than a century, the bodies merged into the UPCUSA, often called the Northern Presbyterians, have operated on the principle that property is held in trust for the parent body. This policy evolved primarily from an 1871 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Watson vs. Jones, which said that decisions of church courts were final in cases involving “connectional” churches.

However, in its July 2 ruling involving the Vineville church, Jones vs. Wolf, the high court said that if “religious societies” want local church property to revert to the denomination in the event of a congregational schism, they can either write such provisions into their constitutions, or local congregations can write such provisions into their local charters.

Specifically, in its 5–4 majority ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court gave state courts the freedom to decide church property ownership cases on secular considerations when the denomination’s constitutional provisions are not specific. The court said. “We cannot agree that the First Amendment requires the states to adopt a rule of compulsory deference to religious authority in resolving church property disputes.”

In effect, the Supreme Court upheld its 1970 ruling involving two Savannah, Georgia, churches. This case was decided on the basis of “neutral principles of law,” rather than on the denomination’s doctrine, theology, or arbitrary decision.

This and the most recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling involved the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), often called the Southern Presbyterians, which is the reason some observers question why the UPCUSA, and not the PCUS, reacted hastily to the Supreme Court ruling.

UPCUSA stated clerk William Thompson told the Denver Post that the ruling posed “troublesome questions” for his denomination since the Northern and Southern Presbyterians have similar constitutions. Each body operates under the “implied trust” theory, which only assumes that denominations control congregational property.

Thompson told the Post there have been perhaps six property cases involving United Presbyterian congregations, but that “you never know” when others might surface.

One Presbyterian observer wondered if UPCUSA officials are worried about certain congregations’ dismay over a ruling passed by the General Assembly last spring. The measure, which met approval of 79 of the 152 presbyteries, requires local congregations to give “fair representation” to women, youth, and ethnic minorities, when electing deacons and elders. Some conservatives opposed this ruling as placing physicial characteristics before spiritual ones in the election process. There have been rumblings that some local congregations would rather pull out of the UPCUSA than abide by the ruling.

The Southern Presbyterians at press time had announced no plans for a special assembly. Commenting about the assembly vote by the northern body, PCUS news director Marj Carpenter said, “They’re trying to shut the bam door before their horses get out; ours have already gotten out.”

PCUS lawyers and the denomination’s property committee discussed the implications of the Vineville decision soon after it was announced. And the property committee said it would withhold recommendations pending the outcome of a church property case involving Trinity Presbyterian Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

That case since has been decided—and not as the PCUS wanted. By unanimous decision last month, the Alabama State Supreme Court awarded the $2 million Trinity property to the majority of the congregation that withdrew from the Southern body to join the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

The decision implied that the simple identification of a church as Presbyterian does not establish the denomination’s claim to local church property.

The southern body has experienced numerous church splits and resulting property disputes in recent years. Scores of PCUS congregations abandoned their parent body in 1973 in favor of the newly-formed, more conservative, PCA. Some of these congregations reportedly paid money in various amounts to the PCUS for their “freedom.”

Unlike the larger UPCUSA and PCUS, the rapidly growing PCA specifically disavows in its constitution any claim or interest in property belonging to member congregations. Several smaller Presbyterian bodies—a total of seven in the United States—give similar autonomy to member congregations.

G. Aiken Taylor, editor of the independent weekly The Presbyterian Journal, pointed this out in his written brief, which was presented during the Vineville deliberations by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices were surprised, Taylor said, when “I pointed out that the word Presbyterian doesn’t automatically carry with it a hierarchical philosophy of property ownership.”

Meanwhile, back in Macon, the issues are unresolved. Six years have passed since a majority of the Vineville congregation voted to withdraw from the parent PCUS to join the PCA. (About two dozen other PCUS congregations in that area simultaneously left the denomination for the PCA, said Taylor.)

Georgia state courts again must judge whether the Vineville majority has a rightful claim to the church’s property. The state supreme court earlier had ruled that the withdrawing majority did, in fact, own the property according to state law. That ruling prompted the appeal which led to the recent Surpreme Court ruling.

After its August recess, the state supreme court would consider whether to put the Vineville case back onto its docket. Observers say the case likely will return to the U.S. Supreme Court, regardless of how the state court rules.

The minority of the Vineville congregation that remained loyal to the PCUS continues worshiping under the name Vineville Presbyterian Church—but with a “U.S.” added. “You can imagine how this creates confusion with the other Vineville church,” said Spencer C. Murray, pastor of the 110-member congregation, which has been meeting on the Wesleyan College campus.

The PCUS loyal had asked their presbytery for a change of names, said Murray. However, the denomination’s lawyers told them to wait until the court dispute is settled. Murray said his congregation has “moved beyond the emotional issues of 1973,” although there are “still some scars.”

Murray, like certain other PCUS and UPCUSA officials, says property value has little to do with the dispute. More important, they say, is use of church property and the denomination’s principles of government.

United Presbyterian information officer Vic Jameson said “the symbolic unity” of his denomination is involved. Murray, of the Southern Presbyterians, said, “It is my feeling that a congregation does not have absolute sovereignty.

Vineville Presbyterian Church—PCA branch—would disagree. The church is one of the “fastest growing in the PCA,” said Taylor, the immediate past moderator of the denomination. Its 491 members continue meeting on the original church property.

How long they will continue to do so, the courts ultimately will decide.

hom*osexual Controversy

Gay Church Music: Litigation, Not Jubilation

A potential landmark case that pits evangelical Christianity against the gay rights movement is under way in a San Francisco municipal court.

On one side is Kevin Walker, a musician in his early 20s who is being represented by Gay Rights Advocates, a San Francisco legal firm that looks after the interests of hom*osexuals. (San Francisco’s hom*osexual population exceeds 100,000, according to most estimates.) On the other side are Charles A. McIlhenny, 32, of the First Orthodox Presbyterian Church of San Francisco, the 41 members of his congregation, and the nine-congregation regional body of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. At issue is Article 33 of the San Francisco Municipal Code, an ordinance enacted in April 1978 that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of their sexual orientation.

In April 1978, McIlhenny hired Walker, then a music student, as church organist for $10 a week. Church employees are required to be Christians, and McIlhenny recalls that Walker gave an acceptable Christian testimony in a prejob interview. Five months later McIlhenny received a report that Walker was a practicing hom*osexual.

When the minister confronted him, Walker acknowledged that he is indeed a hom*osexual. McIlhenny says he read Scripture to Walker, reviewed the church’s position on hom*osexuality, and asked him to repent. Walker replied that he saw no need to repent. McIlhenny dismissed him as organist because of “the sin of hom*osexual practice” but invited him to keep attending the church services. “I’ve been wanting to start a ministry to gays,” said the pastor. But Walker never showed up again.

A few months ago, Walker filed a suit against the church, seeking an unspecified amount for general damages and $1,000 in punitive action; he did not ask to be reinstated in his job.

McIlhenny and his congregation, backed by their denomination and other interested evangelical groups, have vowed to fight the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. They are soliciting financial aid for their Christian Rights Defense Fund. Pretrial depositions were to begin this month.

In a reply to the Walker suit filed last month, McIlhenny’s lawyer, John Whitehead of Washington, D.C., argued that the complaint conflicts with the U.S. Constitution. He also argued that the city ordinance is not only unconstitutionally vague, but that it also has been preempted by a similar California law that exempts churches.

The only major chink in the defense, according to some observers, is that Walker was never required to become a member of the church—an oversight that technically exempted him from the disciplines of membership. Therefore, the observers say, his only relationship to the church was as an employee in a job that did not require involvement in verbal ministry—seemingly excluding him from the doctrinal standards of those who engage in public ministry. That point is certain to be argued long and hard.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Assemblies Of God

Establishmentarianism

Greater institutionalization coupled with a slowing pace of membership growth were evident as the Assemblies of God celebrated its sixty-fifth anniversary during its biennial general council meetings last month in Baltimore.

While a record 11,662 registered for the convention, Joseph R. Flower, general secretary, stated that church membership in the Assemblies had slowed to a 3.7 percent growth during the last two years, compared to a 14.4 percent growth in the previous biennium. The number of actual conversions dropped by more than 50,000 over the previous period.

On the other hand, the Assemblies have absorbed a steady stream of charismatic clergy from other denominations—largely the results of the denomination’s charismatic liaison committee (and a larger charismatic resource committee). General superintendent Thomas F. Zimmerman said that in the previous two months alone 63 ministers from other denominations have joined the Assemblies of God.

During the council business sessions, there were attempts to shore up the standardization of beliefs among members. A motion to establish a committee for the purity of doctrine—something that had generated considerable opposition in earlier meetings—passed without vocal dissent. Committee members, who will be appointed by the general presbytery, will be scholars in the area of biblical theology. They are expected to counter a younger, more liberal minority, which rejects inerrancy and questions bedrock Assemblies’ beliefs, such as the initial evidence belief about tongues.

A parallel motion repealed the right of the frocked ministers to trial by jury. Under the adopted ruling, the general presbytery may decide if an appealing minister has the option of such a jury.

Gerald Sheppard, an Assemblies of God professor at Union Theological Seminary, expressed dissatisfaction with these changes, but hopes that older Pentecostals will resist attempts to defy or purge the membership on doctrinal grounds. (The Assemblies was founded on the idea that the movement should not have formal creeds and centralized authority—an idea that has been gradually eroded in recent years.)

JAMES S. TINNEY

Free Methodists

Vetoing a ‘More Equal’ Bishop

Free Methodist Church delegates meet only once every five years. And at their most recent World Convocation last month in Indianapolis, the delegates cast their eyes on the next 10.

Specifically, the five bishops of the Free Methodist Church in North America called their constituents to a simpler lifestyle “consistent with the challenge of the eighties.” Their no-nonsense statement, which many believed to be the strongest pastoral statement ever made by Free Methodist bishops, spoke to all church members: “None, from the least to the greatest, should exempt himself; none should consider this unimportant.”

The bishops also lamented membership growth statistics in their North American churches. They cited an 18 percent membership growth rate in overseas Free Methodist churches during the past five years, and compared that figure to a smaller 7 percent growth rate in the North American churches. (The denomination has 150,000 members worldwide.)

In their pastoral letter, the bishops said “it grieves us” that some North American pastors and churches are “content to exist year after year without new converts.…” Their solution was a reemphasis on clear Bible preaching, the message of holiness, and local church revival meetings.

Perhaps the most controversial action during the convocation involved the bishops themselves. The delegates had considered a resolution calling for the election of an administrative bishop who would oversee the denomination’s headquarters complex in Winona Lake, Indiana. Four of the five Free Methodist bishops now live in Winona Lake (a fifth lives in Canada), and the resolution was intended to free those four to live in their own jurisdictions and do primarily pastoral work.

However, the presiding bishops opposed the resolution. They charged that such a person would, in effect, become an archbishop with four assistants. Their opposition had a veto effect, and the proposal was voted down. As a result, David L. McKenna, president of Seattle Pacific University and the man whom many hoped would become administrative bishop, became runner-up as delegates turned to the more pastorally oriented Robert F. Andrews. They elected Andrews, who had been speaker and director of the denomination’s radio program, “Light and Life Hour,” to replace retiring Bishop Paul N. Ellis.

VICTOR M. PARACHIN

Panama

The Zone Twilight

A going out of business sale took place last month at the Panama Canal Company commissary in Balboa, the U.S. enclave on the Pacific side of the canal that resembles an affluent Midwest suburb with palm trees. That was the only outward indication of things to come in the Canal Zone. Since its creation nearly 75 years ago, the 533-square-mile Canal Zone has been a tropical “little America”—almost a nation unto itself. But after midnight, September 30, the Canal Zone becomes the territory of the Panamanian government under terms of the Panama Canal treaties, which the U.S. Senate passed last year.

In interviews, several U.S. Zonians worried that Panamanian authorities would be unpredictable, corrupt, and leftist. There would be far more bureaucratic red tape when Panama gains sovereignty over the Zone after a 30-month transition period, they said.

Canal Zone church leaders, who represent nearly every Protestant denomination, also were concerned—especially since the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) was informed recently by its government supervisor that the agency’s 10-year contract with the Panamanian government would not be renewed. The contract with SIL (the overseas designation used by the U.S.-based Wycliffe Bible Translators) expired in June. SIL reportedly was given seven months to phase out its Panamanian work: five teams of translators working among indigenous Indians. SIL director in Panama Robert Gunn blamed “political pressures” from the Panamanian government for the no-renewal decision.

American churchmen in the Canal Zone hoped the Wycliffe situation was not an indication of things to come. But T. M. Schoewe, Lutheran pastor in Balboa, said U.S. churches would have to learn to function under a different governmental system—just as U.S.-based missions agencies have always done in other countries. American Zonians have been sheltered and living in an “unreal situation,” he said, and that now “a lot of people are imagining things are going to be a lot worse than they are.”

Schoewe and other Canal Zone pastors weren’t waiting idly for October 1, however. They have been attending meetings of the Joint Subcommittee on Nonprofit Organizations, one of 23 binational committees working out various aspects of the Canal Zone transition. The Panamanian government has classed together all nonprofit organizations, both churches and civic groups, and leaders of these groups are worried about excessive regulation from the Panamanian government.

Probably the most immediate concern for Canal Zone churches is financing. The churches now enjoy considerable financial privilege. Many officials of nonprofit organizations receive the same commissary and duty-free buying privileges as Panama Canal Company employees. Churches have been able to license property for a nominal annual fee from the Canal Zone Government.

But after October 1, church staff members begin to live within the Panamanian economy. Churches, suddenly resting on Panamanian land, will pay higher property taxes. Houses that now rent for $200 per month in the Canal Zone might cost nearly $500, said Zone residents.

Interestingly, some Canal Zone churches have benefited from the Zonians’ queasiness. Spencer Bower, pastor of the evangelical Crossroads Bible Church, said the impending transition, if anything, has “enhanced his ministry.” Some persons who previously have felt secure—since most of their physical needs were provided by the Canal Zone system—now are seeking spiritual guidance, he said.

One Crossroads member, Vicki Boatwright, said, “We’re seeing people coming to church now that never came before.” Mrs. Boatwright, editor of the Panama Canal Company weekly newspaper, the Panama Canal Spillway, was aware of U.S. Zonians who have sought spiritual comfort because of the “emotional and mental strain.”

Church involvement has never been particularly strong in the Canal Zone: year-round sports and some of the richest fishing waters in the world tempt potential churchgoers. Frequent Canal Company personnel changes and military reassignments have disrupted the continuity of church membership. One pastor called the social scene in the Zone “a miniature Peyton Place.”

But several churches, such as Crossroads and the long-established Balboa First Baptist, have had an evangelical input in this 50-mile long, 10-mile wide, strip of land surrounding the canal.

From Panamanian church leaders, the transition may demand an increased sense of ownership and responsibility, one U.S. missions worker said. In the past, he said, some Panamanian churches have leaned on the richer Zone churches for “handouts,” which might end when the U.S. churches become part of the same Panamanian economy.

Nationals operate the only Christian radio station in Panama. The Balboa First Baptist Church began Radio Station HOXO 30 years ago, and later gave the station to World Radio Missionary Fellowship (WRMF) when the ministry became “bigger than it could handle,” said HOXO English programming director Robert Hall. WRMF took the station with the intention of turning it over to national control, and did so at the turn of the decade, said Hall.

JOHN MAUST

North American Scene

Charismatics are uniting within the mainline denominations. United Methodist Renewal Services Fellowship—an unofficial group within the denomination—organized last month the first national conference for United Methodist charismatics, “Aldersgate ’79,” in Louisville. Robert Tuttle, who recently left Fuller Seminary for a teaching post at Oral Roberts University, told the 1,500 participants in an address that they must maintain United Methodist theology in order to avoid splitting the denomination. About 8,000 Lutheran charismatics attended the eighth International Conference on the Holy Spirit last month in Minneapolis. Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod president J.A.O. Preus addressed the group—the first time a president of a major Lutheran body has done so.

A small group of black activists want a letter by Martin Luther King, Jr., added to the Bible. This proposal emerged last month from the annual conference of the Black Theology Project—a three-year-old group of black clergy and laity formed three years ago to develop the theological implications of the Black Power movement. The unconventional group, which claims the support of 1,500 black Christians in its programs, hopes King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” eventually can be the final book in the Bible. King wrote the letter to Birmingham area clergymen to explain his involvement as a minister in a social action campaign. The letter became something of a doctrine for the civil rights cause.

About 1,500 Roman Catholic priests and laypersons attended a three-day National Catholic Celebration of Evangelization. They kicked off a campaign to evangelize the estimated 80 million unchurched Americans, as well as about 12 million “fallen away” Catholics. Churched persons are not targeted within the evangelization effort.

The first Heart of America Bible Conference had expository preaching and emotional calls to revival, and, for the most part, it avoided the attacks on “liberals” in Southern Baptist colleges and seminaries that characterized the denomination’s annual convention two months earlier. Dallas pastor W. A. Criswell and evangelist James Robison organized the conference—the first of a series to be held nationwide—in which Southern Baptist churchmen will promote biblical inerrancy. The conference last month was held in Saint Louis at Tower Grove Baptist Church; its pastor, Larry Lewis, was one of the most vocal conservatives at the denominational convention in attacking “liberalism” in Southern Baptist seminaries.

The doors of Glen Cove Bible College stayed shut this fall. School officials announced last month that higher operating costs had forced the closing of the Baptist-related school in Rockport, Maine, which had been training pastors since 1959. The most immediate impact will be on area churches, which have relied in the past on Glen Cove graduates for pastoral support.

The upcoming CBS-TV movie “Flesh and Blood” has a scene of implied incest, despite the protests of the mass media watchdog group, National Federation for Decency. A controversial scene, which involves a mother and her son entering a bedroom together, remains in the movie (to be aired next month), which is based on author Pete Hamill’s book by the same name. “I would say you know exactly what’s going on,” said CBS press information officer Jim Sirmans. NFD president and Methodist minister Donald Wildmon says this indicates CBS was “flat-out lying” about the movie. Last May, when NFD-inspired protest letters flooded CBS, audience services director Marjorie Holyoak issued a letter saying the movie “will not, as has been reported in the press, ‘feature a case of incest.’”

Evangelicals face uncertainty during transition from Somoza to Sandinista.

With the civil war ended, Nicaraguan evangelicals face the uncertain peace with mixed feelings—thanksgiving for their protection and a preoccupation with wondering which way the new government, still struggling to organize itself, will head.

As in several recent disasters in Central America, casualties among believers were relatively low. Following the seven-week war that toppled dictator Anastacio Somoza, estimates of the death toll ranged from 20,000 to 40,000. Many of the bodies were buried or burned on the spot, but only a handful of evangelical Christians were known to be among them.

Stories of miraculous escapes abound. Efrain Flores, a professor at CAM International’s (formerly Central American Mission) Nicaragua Bible Institute in Managua, was typical. He and his family were pinned in their home for 12 straight days as Sandinista guerrillas and National Guardsmen fought for control of their neighborhood. “The houses across the street, on both sides, and behind us were hit by rockets and mortar shells,” said Flores, “but we didn’t even have one bullet hole in our home.” When government troops ordered everyone to evacuate the area as the end of the offensive in Managua neared, Flores and his family got out without a scratch, although shells exploded around them as they left the house.

Damage to church buildings and believers’ homes also was relatively light. CAM’s El Alba Bookstore was looted, but the Baptist and Nazarene bookstores were untouched. Churches continued Sunday morning services during much of the fighting, but most evening meetings ceased and had not resumed.

The new government has promised religious freedom, and a number of pastors are serving on neighborhood civil defense committees, which the government has organized. The committees are handling cleanup operations and distribution of relief supplies on a city block basis.

The bulk of the evangelical relief effort is being channeled through CEPAD, the Evangelical Committee for the Relief of Victims, which functioned effectively throughout the war. CEPAD currently is supplying food to 50,000 families throughout the country. About half of the supplies have come from the International Red Cross; the rest is being funded by Protestant relief agencies.

The CEPAD food distribution program was to be terminated September 15. For the remainder of the year, CEPAD has requested $2 million from various relief agencies for programs to help restart or set up small businesses, and for low-cost housing.

The new government needs all the material help it can get. Somoza and his allies looted the treasury before they left, and much of the industry around Managua is in ruins, having been bombed, looted, or burned by forces from both sides. Almost all the shopping centers in the capital city were stripped bare by mobs, and commerce is almost at a complete standstill, except for the thriving open markets. Unemployment before the war was estimated at nearly 50 percent, and now may be closer to 90 percent.

“The majority of the Christians were strengthened by their experiences during the fighting,” said Gustavo Parrajón, a doctor, and president of CEPAD. However, there was, and still is, tension in the churches, he said. Some pastors supported the Somoza regime on the basis of Romans 13, while many young people from Christian homes joined with the Sandinistas. “As the church, we have to minister to both sides,” said Parrajón.

One of the greatest needs in Nicaragua is for spiritual rebuilding—for the ability to forgive the wrongs done on both sides. And as church leaders face an uncertain political future, they are preparing themselves for what may come. Said one national leader, “We need to really get into our Bibles—and get ready to testify to a Communist government.” Early indications, however, were that a collective leadership was adopting a pragmatic mix of socialism and private initiative in governing, including guarantees of human rights. The Roman Catholic Church for the most part supported the Sandinista revolution. The archbishop of Managua, Monsignor Miguel Ovando Bravo, and the national hierarchy, had publicly criticized the Somoza regime, and two Catholic priests are members of the cabinet of the new government: Miguel D’Escoto, minister of foreign relations, and Ernesto Cardenal, minister of culture.

However, in recent weeks the Catholic church has disengaged itself, at least partially, from Sandinista politics. A pastoral letter issued by the Nicaraguan bishops last month contained what the government claimed was a veiled criticism of the new regime. The bishops stressed that the church should not align itself with any political power system. “God is the source,” they said, “not only of life, but also of social law and order. When power systems ignore this source, they end up by becoming absolutist and make man into a slave instead of liberating him.”

Guatemala

Counting It All Joy

Most of the family was still in bed when 10 guerrillas surrounded the home of Wycliffe Bible translator Stan McMillen at 7 A.M. last July 16 in Las Pacayas, Guatemala. The guerrillas herded the parents and four children outside and proceeded to ransack the house. Later they allowed the McMillens to dress, and took them to the village plaza. The guerrillas then gathered the townspeople and berated the McMillens publicly until noon.

“They [the guerrillas] were Marxist Communists,” said the 37-year-old McMillen. “They told the people the gringos [North Americans] were stealing the land and keeping people poor.”

Then as the guerrillas left town, the McMillens saw smoke: they had set fire to the McMillens’ house and clinic. Ben, 16, was the first to reach the house. He found that a motorcycle had been set on fire under their car, from which the gas cap had been removed. Amazingly, the vehicle did not explode, and Ben was able to pull out the burning bike and save the car. That and a generator were all that was salvaged of the family’s possessions.

Lost were five years of translation materials, including notes, Bible stories, literacy materials, and most of the published copies of the Gospel of Mark. McMillen estimates that the fire set him back two years in translating the New Testament into the Uspanteco language.

The guerrilla Army of the Poor, which carried out the attack, has been active recently in northern Quiché province in Guatemala. Guerrillas briefly occupied several towns and killed a number of plantation owners. This was the first incident involving missionaries, but it appears to have been directed against them more as North Americans than as missionaries. An ex-Peace Corps paramedic, Joe Nark, who had a clinic in the same area as the McMillens, was also threatened and has left, leaving the village with no medical care.

The guerrillas had warned the McMillens to leave the area and not to return. But they plan to continue their translation work, temporarily from a base in a large town several hours’ drive from the village. “I want to go back and demonstrate that we want to help the people in every way possible,” Stan said.

As they poked through the ashes of their home, Margot, 36, said, “I was reminded of the verse, ‘Count it all joy …’ I realized it was all right because we have a big God.”

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

South Africa

Church Also Tarred by Brush of Scandal

The so-called information scandal that has shaken the South African government now has spilled over to the churches. And doing the “spilling” has been the former top civil servant in the government’s now defunct Department of Information, Eschel Rhoodie.

In an investigation a judicial commission had found that the department secretly used public tax money for payoffs to politicians, establishing “front” companies, and secret funding of newspapers and magazines. Rhoodie was extradited last month from France to South Africa, where he would face charges of theft and fraud involving the Information Department’s secret fund. The trial may be conducted in secret.

In several of its summer issues, however, the Dutch magazine Elseviers published Rhoodie’s version of how some of the secret funds were used. Rhoodie alleged that more than $450,000 per year was channeled to the conservative Christian League of South Africa, which is headed by Methodist minister Frederick Shaw. Rhoodie says the league used the funds for operating and expanding its newspaper, Encounter, to step up its guest program for overseas visitors, to organize seminars, and to launch a publishing program designed to expose Marxist ties to the World Council of Churches. Shaw has denied Rhoodie’s claims.

Rhoodie’s latest revelations involving another group have been confirmed. He said that Information Department funds totalling $180,000 were provided to launch an Ecumenical Organization Bureau under the auspices of the powerful white Dutch Reformed Church. The bureau intended both to counter efforts by overseas churches to influence the South African economy, and to establish ties with other church bodies opposed to the WCC.

Spokesmen for the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (the official name of the Dutch Reformed Church involved) have confirmed Rhoodie’s charge that its ecumenical agency was a “front” for the government. The funding ceased last October when the information scandal broke.

The church has received the inevitable criticisms for its involvement with the secret activities of the Department of Information. The English-language national paper, the Rand Daily Mail, rebuked the Dutch Reformed Church for not giving evidence to the Commission of Inquiry that investigated the information scandal. “By its silence,” said the newspaper, “this large and influential church failed, in a time of moral crisis, to give its flock a lead.”

THEO COGGIN

An Evangelical Systematic Theology

Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. 1: God, Authority and Salvation, by Donald G. Bloesch (Harper & Row, 265 pp., $12.95), is reviewed by Paul D. Feinberg, associate professor of philosophy of religion and systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

In his many writings, Donald Bloesch has distinguished himself as a leading spokesman for evangelical theology. Thus, it is with no small interest that his two-volume theology is received. Essentials of Evangelical Theology is precisely what the title implies: a survey of the central questions in evangelical theology, with no effort to deal exhaustively with any one subject of theology. In volume 1 the areas of God, authority, and salvation are treated.

Bloesch dismisses certain stereotypes or misconceptions that outsiders may have of evangelicals, then attempts to specify very clearly the roots of his theology. He affirms the primacy of the biblical norm, but makes it clear that his understanding of theology is within the Reformed tradition and heavily dependent upon certain thinkers within the Catholic tradition—a point which may surprise some readers. He often calls his theology an evangelical catholic theology.

The doctrine of God is dealt with under the general rubric of the sovereignty of God, and such traditional topics as the attributes of God, the decree, and trinitarianism are all discussed. This section closes with an excellent treatment of the erosion of the biblical view of God. Bloesch shows how philosophy—process philosophy in particular—and secularism have combined to leave our culture with an emasculated view of God.

In a chapter entitled “The Primacy of Scripture,” Bloesch affirms the divine origin and authority of the Bible. He also gives his views on the difficult questions of inerrancy and hermeneutics.

In the final five chapters, comprising approximately the last two-thirds of this volume, there is an examination of themes that bear on the doctrine of salvation, including sin, man’s state in sin, and the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. The nature of sin, its effect upon Adam’s posterity, the relationship of the two natures in Christ, and his self-emptying are all treated here. Bloesch then turns to more properly soteriological questions such as the meaning and extent of the atonement, the nature and extent of election, as well as the relationship between faith and works in salvation.

I note a number of strengths in this theology. It is, first of all, not merely a rehash of standard fare found in other theologies; Bloesch achieves a highly creative and original treatment of the topics under discussion. He is aware of issues within their current theological milieu and, given his understanding of the biblical norm, is not afraid to correct his tradition when he thinks it has gone astray.

Second, the breadth of knowledge Bloesch brings to the theological task is impressive. Besides an understanding of basic biblical data, there are references to the fathers, important figures in medieval theology, the Reformers, and contemporary theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, with the theology of Karl Barth particularly prominent.

Third, in general the work is nicely balanced. In his discussion of the biblical view of God, for example, he steers a nice course between the static, immobile deity of Greek philosophy and the wholly dynamic and process god of modern philosophy.

Yet, I perceive that some of the strengths lie at the root of the book’s weaknesses. Creativity, originality, and a synoptic vision can be a two-edged sword, and this is evident in at least four ways. First, the previously mentioned strengths lead Bloesch to positions that, to me, appear inadequate if not erroneous. God’s omnipresence is not to be understood as spacelessness. Rather, he is “not confined or contained in any place.” Moreover, “it does not mean that his being literally permeates all matter but that everything is included in his overall vision.” “Everything is immediately accessible to him.…” While Bloesch’s cautions are correct, his positive statements do not say enough. God is personally present to every point in space. To say that nothing escapes God’s vision merely combines omnipresence with omniscience. Nor is it sufficient to claim that every place is accessible to God, for it at least opens the possibility that, while God could be at some point in space, he is not.

Second, while at some points Bloesch retains important theological terminology, he so radically redefines terms that at worst they are self-contradictory and at best lack much relationship to their historical usages. To give two illustrations, Bloesch argues that an evangelical theology must affirm both the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible. These, however, must be qualified in light of what Scripture says about itself. According to Bloesch, this does not leave us with a “totally inerrant” Bible. “We cannot affirm with some of our evangelical brethren that an unbiased investigation will disclose that the Bible does not err.” Inerrancy can only be disclosed to and by faith. Bloesch is surely headed in the right direction. But I find it difficult to see how the Bible can be inerrant and yet err.

As further illustration, Bloesch’s treatment of irresistible grace contains the same perplexity. He believes the idea of irresistible grace is theologically correct, yet goes on to qualify the concept. Although grace is given to all and not to just a select group of the elect, this does not mean that all are saved. Grace is seen as triumphing even in the unsaved “in the form of wrath and judgment.” Is God then drawing them irresistibly to wrath and judgment? Clearly, Bloesch wants to say no, but it is not easy to see how he can.

In the third place, Bloesch’s position is not clear at times. In dealing with the nature of corruption that man under sin possesses, he rejects both a societal and an ontological interpretation. His claim that man’s “being in the world is corrupted” is not clear to me.

Finally, some of the solutions Bloesch suggests to problems appear more verbal than real. In discussing the substitutionary atonement of Christ he says that “the deepest meaning of substitutionary atonement is that God takes upon himself his own wrath out of his boundless love. This has already been accomplished in the preexistent Jesus Christ, but it needs to be demonstrated, revealed, and fulfilled in an atonement within history” (italics mine). One can see Bloesch struggle with the common objection to Barth’s view of the atonement, namely there is no genuine change from wrath to grace in history. In other words, the atonement is de-historicized, and its historical demonstration, revelation, and other aspects are superfluous to God’s action. Although Bloesch is clearly trying to avoid this objection, I doubt that he has.

While it is difficult to agree totally with any statement of Christian theology, disagreement, fortunately, does not preclude profit; it may rather enhance it. I think this book represents just such a case.

A Good Evangelical Novel

The Last Year of the War, by Shirley Nelson (Harper & Row, 255 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Harold Fickett III, lecturer in writing, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

The evangelical world remains uncharted territory for the novelist. Though it contains and accounts for the way of life of many Americans, writers have rarely tried to describe this form of faith or its subcultures. Those writers who have talked about evangelicals (i.e. Sinclair Lewis and Flannery O’Connor among others) have done so from a distance; they have produced a literature in which there is tremendous psychic distance between the author and his subject, a literature of satire or the grotesque. But Shirley Nelson in The Last Year of the War writes out of sympathy for the evangelical world. She tries to capture the heart and mind of this world and produces a testament to the quirky yet rich life evangelicals lead.

The Last Year of the War narrates the life of a young woman, Jo, during the last year of World War II while she attends Calvary Bible Institute of Chicago. (All those who approach fiction with gossipy instincts will immediately wonder if Calvary Bible Institute is a pseudonym for Moody Bible Institute. It must be, but that makes no difference to the story.) Jo spends her time attending classes, participating in Bible studies, prayer meetings, and a gospel team outreach group to the skid row of Chicago. She studies when she has time; she sleeps on rare occasions. Anyone who knows this scene will be constantly delighted by moments of recognition: the verisimilitude here is outstanding. It is also treacherous. For every such time as the reader recalls how he, too, stood in chapel service and sang “Showers of Blessing,” there are other times—as when Jo has been called in to see the women’s dean or heard her classmates surreptitiously praying for her—that the reader must acknowledge that witch-hunting persists and seems inherent to that part of him that remains puritan.

Much of the narrative recounts Jo’s relationship with a troubled outcast, Clyde MacQuade, who also attends Calvary. Clyde epitomizes the way the great paradoxes of Christianity (i.e., if you would save your life, you must lose it) can be transformed into principles of self-destruction by pathological fanaticism. Jo’s involvement with Clyde is also meant to dramatize the extremely vulnerable and guilt-ridden position of young women who try to be kin to their unlovable brothers in Christ. Unfortunately, and this is my major reservation about the novel, Jo seems too much a cipher in her account of Clyde’s story. The reader is uninvolved because Jo is not sufficiently present as a character for him to feel with her. And so, Clyde’s story remains in part a short story that is not completely integrated into the novel’s structure.

The real dialectic of the novel, or the engine that makes the narrative run, consists in Jo’s mental shuttling between the world of Calvary Bible Institute and the world of her family. Calvary is presumably a sacred world and her family secular, if not profane. Certainly, Jo’s father does his best—in his classically liberal, “nondirective” way—to convince his daughter to see her revival meeting conversion as a sublimated sexual experience. He wants her to face the “real world” with objective, scientific eyes. Though Jo cares about her father and his doubts, going so far as to consult one of her teachers, Dr. Peckham (the most credible and likeable holy man to appear in a book in a long time), the real test of her faith comes from her brother, Loring.

Significantly, Jo never tells anyone at Calvary that Loring was reported missing in action after a bombing raid over Europe. While Jo does not tell the reader, he concludes that she believes those at Calvary—the world of Calvary—cannot understand this tragedy. Loring represents all that is good and natural in life, seeming to need no religious justification, no sanctifying. Calvary cannot understand about Loring because its categories leave Loring out; he is neither sacred nor profane. But in the book’s denouement, Jo undergoes a religious crisis that skillfully associates Loring’s death with the real Calvary, Golgotha, and Christ’s resurrection. Her religious crisis results in a final conversion of her imagination; she sees how Calvary and the Resurrection provide psychic access to the horror of death and thereby grant passage through that horror to the greater reality of Life and Love. Jo’s Christianity escapes the boundaries of Calvary Bible Institute to embrace all of life. The denouement may leave theologians scratching their heads, trying to decide if Jo’s concept of the Resurrection is in a theological sense “adequate.” But that is not the point. The book’s dialectic demands an imaginative synthesis, and Shirley Nelson achieves it.

Anyone interested in imaginative literature about the evangelical world ought to read this book. It is fine, honest work.

For Christians, mutual service replaces mutual suspicion and cooperation replaces competition.

During the winter of 1978–79 there was industrial civil war in Britain. We had strikes of bakers, of garbage and other road haulage, railway workers, ambulance drivers, journalists and teachers, and of hospital social workers. During the first three months of 1979 more than five million working days were lost through industrial disturbances, which are more than half the total for the whole of 1978. Something went sour in our society.

Social turmoil is of special concern to Christians because we are in the business of right relations. Reconciliation is at the top of our agenda because it is at the heart of our gospel. Jesus is the world’s supreme peacemaker, and he tells his followers to be peacemakers too. But how?

A vital biblical principle is spelled out in 1 Kings 12. Despite his wisdom, Solomon had been a tyrant. His ambitious building program had been completed only by the use of forced labor. Industrial relations were at an all-time low. So when he died, the people described his oppressive regime as a “heavy yoke” and begged his son Rehoboam to lighten it. Moreover, the elder statesmen advised him to heed their appeal: “If you will be a servant to this people and serve them, they will be your servants” (v. 7).

Nevertheless, this principle remains the essential basis of every constitutional government and democratic institution. It is the principle of mutual service arising from mutual respect. It is service based on justice rather than mere expediency, for it recognizes people as human beings with human rights, made in God’s image, and deserving our respect as we deserve theirs. This is the fundamental truth behind the Old Testament instruction to care for the handicapped and destitute, and to administer justice impartially in the law courts, as well as behind the New Testament teaching about the regard masters and servants should show each other, since they have the same Lord and Judge.

Turning from biblical principle to contemporary society, the contrast is glaring. For what we have is an adversary situation born of suspicion, instead of a service situation born of trust. Moreover, it is deeply embedded in our stratified British society. As David Steel, the leader of the Liberal Party, said before the recent General Election: “The major single defect in British society … remains its class-ridden nature. Class division … bedevils … industrial relations.…” In consequence, many people feel underprivileged and alienated; what motivates them when they agitate for higher pay is not greed so much as grievance.

Such a situation of strife is incompatible with the spirit of Jesus Christ, and in his name his people should set themselves against it. But how can mutual suspicion be replaced by mutual service, and competition by cooperation?

First, we should abolish discrimination. This applies to everything which perpetuates a “them-us” confrontation. What, for example, is the justification for making wage earners clock in, while the salaried staff do not? Or for restricting the former to a rather sleazy “works canteen” (workers cafeteria) while the latter have a posh “staff restaurant”?

Behind these symbols of discrimination there lies the reality of social injustice, namely the unjustified disparity between the high paid and the low paid. I do not think that total egalitarianism is the Christian way, for God himself has not made us equal in natural endowments. What Christians should oppose, however, is the inequality of privilege. Is it really beyond the wit of man to devise a graduated pay scale, which covers the whole range of workers, managers, and directors, which rewards training, skill, responsibility, achievement, and long service, plus conditions of dirt and danger (as well as responding to the laws of supply and demand), and which is seen to be just because all disparity is rationally justified?

Secondly, we should increase participation, both in decision making and profit sharing. In many companies the workers lack self-respect because they lack responsibility. They feel oppressed because they are powerless. Other people—remote, faceless people—make all the decisions for them. Their only role is to obey. But decision making is part of our humanness. To be a human being is to make responsible choices. To deny to adults a share in making decisions about matters that affect them is to treat them like children, even like machines.

In the last century Christians opposed slavery because by it humans were dehumanized by being owned by others. In this century we should oppose all labor arrangements in which humans are dehumanized by being used by others—even if they have signed away their responsibility in a voluntary contract. Thank God that on both sides of the Atlantic various experiments in industrial democracy are being made, whose purpose is to create a positive partnership between management and workers in the development of company strategy and in the making and implementing of decisions.

Profit sharing also rests on biblical principle: “the laborer is worthy of his hire.” If a company prospers, the workers as well as the shareholders should benefit, whether in bonuses, in stock, or in pension.

Thirdly, we should emphasize cooperation. Labor unions were developed in the nineteenth century, as an indispensable protection of workers against exploitative bosses. Are they not an anachronism in the twentieth century? The tragedy is that confrontation is now built into the very structures of industry. Why should we assume that this structural confrontation is inevitable and everlasting? Why should we not dream of better structures that express cooperation instead? When management and labor are locked in confrontation, the public suffers; but when they cooperate in the service of the public, their relations to each other improve.

Good labor relations in contemporary society constitute a powerful challenge to Christians, whom God calls into business or industry, to help organize their company on the principle of mutual respect and service, to eliminate all unjustified discrimination, to facilitate full participation in power and profit, to develop cooperation in the service of the public, and so to demonstrate the possibility of industrial relations that are harmonious.

We Christians should not acquiesce in bad industrial relations as if they were inevitable. Even the unregenerate have an inborn sense of justice and compassion. Better relations are possible. We need both to exemplify them in the Christian fellowship and to work for them in the world, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England.

The electronic church serves as a mouthpiece; but it should not be confused with the whole body.

The program’s preliminary speaker is a skilled Assemblies of God pastor from Maine with a lyrical Irish accent. He begins calmly, “I just want to share a few verses of Scripture with you here, and then I’ll be done.”

The story, from I Kings, becomes less a retelling than a 20-minute dramatic performance. His arms flail the air. He falls to his knees. “God will take your nothingness and through it do anything!” he shouts.

A crowd erupts into applause. In front of them a well-groomed, smiling man in a vested suit nods his head enthusiastically, holding his hands high and clapping to encourage applause, pantomiming “Amen” and “Praise the Lord.”

To the right, off camera, is a formal living room setting, with a plush blue carpet and baby blue walls accentuated by cream-colored Corinthian columns. Jim Bakker, 38, host of the PTL Club (“Praise The Lord,” or “People That Love”), sits behind a desk there, shuffling through papers, studying the lineup of guests who will appear as soon as the preacher finishes.

Miss Illinois of 1959 is clearing her throat, waiting for her entry cue. Four cameras mounted on silent electric carts—$80,000 cameras, the best in the business—sweep the scenes, focusing now on the preacher, now on an intense listener. Overhead, a bank of 300 computer-controlled lights swivel and adjust.

Other people flutter around the studio, dodging cameras and stepping over electric cables thick as an arm. Beautiful, stylishly dressed women whisper instructions to the next guests while a make-up expert freshly powders their noses. The smell of perfume hangs like a cloud in the air.

Offstage, all this activity is fed into an audio control board that is rumored to be the most sophisticated in the country. Twelve video tape editing machines, worth $75,000 each, patch together the very best camera angles.

Meanwhile, at 7:30 A.M. in New York City, 10:30 P.M. in Chicago, 3 P.M. in Manila, and 8 A.M. in Anchorage, people sit down to listen to the upbeat Bible story from I Kings. It’s as if an old-time Pentecostal church service has been captured intact, extruded through machines, monitors, microwaves, and satellites, and then magically dispatched into millions of homes simultaneously. No one went to church to hear that pastor preach on the widow’s miraculous supply of oil; he came packaged into their bedrooms and living rooms.

And I, propped on a stool amid the whirl of energy, am one of the waiting guests. I had come to Charlotte, North Carolina, to examine PTL as the most visible and controversial symbol of a mushrooming phenomenon: the electronic church.

Besides the normal tensions of live television, also present are unspoken but crackling tensions about the future of PTL. For a year Jim Bakker and his show have been attacked in the local press for shaky financial dealings, and a feeling of anxiety pervades the staff. Executives have left; employees have been fired.

There are few signs of tension on Jim Bakker’s face, however, after the preacher finishes speaking and he begins chatting on camera with other guests on the show. He is laughing, pleasant, and easygoing. On the desk are meticulously prepared prep sheets on each guest, including a list of stimulating, relevant questions to ask them. But, as usual, he ignores the preparations and goes with his instincts. He talks about whatever he feels like discussing, giving each guest as much time as he “feels led,” disregarding the prepared schedule. Sometimes guests who are flown in from far-away cities never get on the show.

Those very instincts pulled Bakker to the top in Christian television, first in starting the “700 Club” and now at PTL. “It’s not listed in the Bible,” he says, “but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk show host. That’s what I’m here on earth to do. I love TV. I eat it, I sleep it.” A good talk show host has the ability to make each viewer—not the masses of viewers, but each individual viewer—feel that he understands and is speaking directly to him or her. Somehow, to his loyal audience, Jim Bakker accomplishes that. As many as 20,000 viewers contact PTL each day, either through letters or by phone. In a year, 30,000 call in to be born again through telephone counseling. And 700,000 PTL partners support Bakker monthly—even throughout the recurring money crises. Because of his impact, the Atheist Journal named Bakker “the most dangerous Christian in America.”

Despite his spectacular success and popularity, Jim Bakker feels misunderstood and persecuted by the Christian community at large. Some criticize his down-home unsophistication, some the show’s excessive emphasis on charismatic gifts and healing, and almost everybody criticizes his use of money. After the program, at a private lunch in the brick kitchen of the mansion that serves as PTL’s headquarters building, he vented some of his frustrations. “The Christian press picks up material that was in error when it went into the paper here—half truths mixed with lies—and then they go with the same spirit as publishers who are atheists and whose reporters are Jewish. All that is repeated in a Christian magazine as being gospel truth.” Bakker is weary of answering questions and of bearing the incredible strain of the financial obligations to which he has committed PTL. “I feel like I’ve been pushing a railroad train up a mountain,” he says.

He is a complex man, full of ironies. His book, Move That Mountain, tells of his youth: short of stature and insecure, he grew up with an inferiority complex and in relative poverty as the son of a machinist at a piston ring plant. After he dropped out of North Central Bible College (in Minneapolis) to marry his wife, Tammy, the two traveled together as a gospel team, sleeping in pastors’ bedrooms, cheap motel rooms, and dusty church attics, accepting whatever meager “love offering” their host church offered. Those painful, struggling days are etched sharply into Bakker’s memory, and today he can’t understand why people censure his plush lifestyle.

It took Jimmy Carter a few months in the White House to realize that he was no longer a peanut farmer in Georgia, that every word he spoke, every glint in his eye, every personal taste, no matter how trivial, would be picked up instantly, perhaps distorted, and then broadcast around the world. Jim and Tammy have not yet adjusted to seeing themselves as symbols in the public eye. For example, they fail to understand the outcry that arose when, the same month that Jim wrote a direct mail letter saying, “Tammy and I are giving every penny of our life’s savings to PTL,” he bought a $24,000 Drifter houseboat equipped with white shag carpeting, two wood-paneled bedrooms, a gas grill, TV, and refrigerator. “I paid for that boat just like anyone else,” he protests. “I financed it with a bank—there was no PTL money involved.”

The Bakkers also drew flak for moving into a $200,000 house during one of PTL’s worst financial crises. A wealthy donor had provided the house free of charge.

Visiting reporters wax eloquent in describing the luxury of PTL headquarters in Charlotte. The mansion, obtained by PTL at a bargain basem*nt price, is tastefully decorated with chandeliers, a grandfather clock, and oriental rugs over solid mahogany floors. Bakker’s office is paneled in mahogany with a black marble hearth on his fireplace.

The $3 million studio is one of the best in the world, and a TV tower is cleverly concealed in the steeple of a giant replica of the Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg. Outside, brick sidewalks lead to a meditation garden and a pool lined with 50 flags.

Interviews with Bakker keep drifting toward financial questions, and with good reason. The electronic church, of which he is an impressive representative, has skyrocketed to a place of financial prominence in the evangelical world. The shift of power and resources is as abrupt and decisive as the recent shift of world resources to the Arab oil countries. Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts both have yearly revenue that is expected to top $50 million and PTL may surpass them in 1979. PTL was started in 1974 with $65 in a bank account. Last year, during a telethon, it raised $1 million in a single day. One man, with a five-year-old television ministry, can easily beat the annual income of Zondervan, Revell, or Word book publishers. Established organizations such as Inter-Varsity and Youth for Christ struggle to raise funds, only to find that PTL gathers in a sum equal to their annual income in a single week.

Naturally, grumblings have emerged from certain Christian quarters, notably the evangelical denominations, who fear a siphoning off of needed revenue. Bakker, however, insists his effect is to raise an awareness for giving among his viewers and that giving to churches actually increases during his telethon appeals.

What do PTL donors get in exchange for their money? First, of course, is the daily two-hour program aired throughout the U.S. and the English-speaking world. Purchasing of air time from local stations consumes a third of the PTL budget. Currently approximately 200 broadcast affiliates carry PTL, at a cost determined by audience size and the time of day of the broadcast.

PTL also finances other electronic ministries. On their satellite, an RCA Satcom I, they broadcast 24 hours a day of Christian programming, featuring their own programs as well as those of Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller, Jerry Falwell, James Robison, and others, with no charge to an affiliate. By investing around $60,000 for a receiving dish and transmitter, a local station can hook up to the satellite’s free programs and broadcast prerecorded Christian programs around the clock. The PTL studios also underwrite a $2 million Spanish program seen in 17 Spanish-speaking countries with a potential viewing audience of 30 million. Guests are flown gratis to Charlotte for the tapings. A new version has been broadcast in Nigeria and Kenya and others are planned for Asia and Europe.

But Jim Bakker’s dreams extend far beyond the television ministry. In his autobiography he records that he got the idea for Heritage Village, a miniature version of colonial Williamsburg, from a direct revelation.

“God had imprinted a blueprint of the building in my head. I began drawing it just as I had seen it. With the Carters Grove mansion situated in the front, the buildings would be interconnected with walking paths and flower gardens.” Besides the mansion, the studio, and the well-equipped offices, the complex now includes a sauna, a massage room, and a remarkable $200,000 swimming pool, which is surrounded by white Grecian columns, arched mirrors, and plastic trailing vines.

But Heritage Village is dwarfed by Bakker’s latest project. Fifteen miles down the road, just over the border in South Carolina, PTL purchased a 1400-acre tract of ground, and Bakker’s eyes light up when he tells about the big plans for “Heritage, U.S.A.” One aspect of it is an already completed recreational mecca for Christians who have been blessed by PTL’s ministry. There are log chalets overlooking a lake, which rent for $150 a night, and tent and camper hookups (an RV space costs $16 a night, including cable TV and phone hookups, though PTL partners pay half that amount). Open-air tram vehicles shuttle guests along the winding asphalt drives to shady hiking spots, an Olympic-sized pool, eight lighted tennis courts, and a barn auditorium seating 2,000, where summer TV programs are taped. The village includes a general store and gas station that sell PTL frisbees, T-shirts, and sun visors.

A massive Polynesian-style pyramid, designed to house Heritage University, dominates the site. The university started off in grand style, boasting it would serve 12,000 students in four years, and hiring Donald Barnhouse, Jr., son of the late Donald Grey Barnhouse, as its dean. Barnhouse later resigned, as did two successors, and early this year almost all the students left. Now plans for the university have been vastly curtailed, and PTL officials are studying how to use the nearly-completed building.

All facilities on the Heritage, U.S.A., property—costing $10 million so far—were completed in just one year, despite work stoppages when contractors insisted on cash payments. Bakker also talks, less confidently now, of a retirement center, a 12-story Polynesian hotel, a clinic, an Old American Main Street, a golf course, a high-rise condominium, and other developments, all approaching $100 million. The entire grand scheme is called the Total Living Center. Bakker defends the project: “I know some will say that I should not have built the Total Living Center, but I know I heard from God.”

Such plans have taken their toll on the PTL ministry, however. Last November creditors started hounding Bakker for up to $13 million in debts. In his telethon appeals he spoke darkly of the threat of PTL going into receivership. On the air he tearfully warned viewers that he might have to sell the studio: “We’re within days of this network ceasing.” In fund raising letters he pleaded, “Unless God performs a financial miracle, this could be the last letter you will receive from me,” and “It will be a sad Christmas for Tammy and me without your help.”

But Bakker was caught in a great pincer. As he cried and described the failing financial situation on TV, more and more money poured in. Giving never sagged—it was up 100 percent last year. But anxious creditors, scared by his pronouncements, demanded cash before resuming work, banks refused to make loans, and creditors filed liens against PTL assets. The cash squeeze became so serious at one point that payroll checks were delayed. In April of this year, Bakker handed over the managerial and financial responsibility of the network to his new executive vice-president and general manager, Edward Stoeckel. Bakker remains president, however, and will continue to host the PTL Club.

While Bakker has his desire for big, impressive monuments—one Charlotte reporter accuses him of having “an edifice complex”—he also has his compassionate side. One on one with a hurting person, he can be deeply touched. When a black church building burned down in Charlotte, he helped rebuild it at PTL expense, and with no fanfare. When visitors from such organizations as Wycliffe Bible Translators or Teen Challenge describe their needs on his show, Bakker will often weep, then on the spot promise the group whatever amount it needs.

In the midst of all the financial haggling, he made a five-week, around-the-world survey trip to see firsthand the needs in other countries. Bakker hit Calcutta, India, shortly after the disastrous flood in 1978. The sight devastated him. “As tears streamed down my face, I cried, ‘Oh Lord, please make it possible for us to do more.’ ” Though PTL was at the brink of crisis, he tripled the pledge for India to feed more children each day and to supply a new nurses’ wing at a hospital.

Bakker urgently appealed to his supporters to make personal sacrifices. It was an unusual request: the mastermind of a multimillion dollar, first-class Total Living Center begging American Christians to give up the money they waste on sweets and soft drinks to help the starving in India. The appeal went live via phone hookup through one of the most lavishly appointed studios in the world. Such are the anomalies of Jim Bakker and PTL.

After his trip, Bakker was so impressed by the needs of the world that he decided to commit 10 percent of PTL’s gross income to overseas mission projects. He did, however, include a clause that allows PTL to use the funds for operating expenses if needs arise. Recipients of those funds have reported it may take a year for money designated for them to reach overseas work, and the FCC is investigating some contributions that never made it overseas.

Charlotte newspapers delight in pointing out PTL’s profligate use of money, editorializing how the money would best be spent. Yet impoverished people who read the papers rise in righteous anger to Bakker’s defense. “If Jim Bakker got $1 million a year, it wouldn’t be too much,” said one (his salary is $52,000), “when you consider the marriages he’s saved, the healings, the alcoholics, the dope addicts.” PTL’s use of money is widely broadcast, but giving—most of it averaging $15 per gift—continues to climb.

When asked, “If you had $100 million to spend on implementing the gospel of Jesus in the world today, is a Total Living Center—with its chalets, campgrounds and condominiums—the best way to do it?” Bakker responded first by describing the education that future missionaries would receive, then the retirement section, then the nursing home and hospital. Then he concluded, “People talk like there’s a lack somehow in God, like there’s a shortage, and that if we build a Christian retreat center, we wouldn’t have the money to send to India, or we wouldn’t have the money to do this or do that. There is no shortage in God, believe me.”

Bakker’s belief in God as a benevolent resource permeates his theology and the message he offers his viewers. His 182-page autobiography contains 55 specific instances where God responded to his pleas for material assistance or requests for healing. In two instances he “felt led” to write checks for $20,000 knowing there was no money in the bank to cover them, believing God would fill the account before the check was cashed.

He consistently holds to a “health and wealth theology,” believing God will bless Christians materially wherever they are. If you turn to Christ, your life will work. India’s problems, he says, are due to that country’s rejection of Christian principles. In Africa and India, he has observed, the Christians’ homes are better and more comfortable than non-Christians’. Most ghettos, he says, are “ghettos of the mind. The gospel will bring people to a higher standard than they’ve known before. I’m convinced that Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of life—not a religious experience. And I believe the Scripture says, ‘Delight yourself in the Lord and he’ll give you the desires of your heart.’ ” His book relates one prayer incident where a man who asked for a brown Winnebago got exactly that.

When asked how this Christian lifestyle differs from the Positive Mental Attitude or Dale Carnegie lifestyle, Bakker replied, “It doesn’t. They base about everything they do on scriptural principles. The Bible says, ‘Give and it shall be given unto you.’ ” He flares up at people who blame America for oppressively contributing to the world’s poverty, asserting that the original principles of America—such as the freedom of man and free enterprise—are biblical principles that naturally result in success. Bakker’s Christianity is not a counterculture; it is a superculture, a realization of the very best the world has to offer.

How does Bakker handle such passages as the one where Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell all he has? “Keep reading,” he says. “Later in that chapter Jesus says everything we give up will be returned to us. What would have happened if the rich young ruler had given all to serve Jesus? I sincerely believe he probably would have moved up in his ruling class. Everywhere we turn Jesus was preaching an abundant, full life.”

In television Jim Bakker has found a perfect vehicle for his promises of health and wealth. His message seems to fit the medium. TV is made for packaged promises and easy-to-grasp answers. National network shows resolve life situations in neat one-half- or hour-long segments. Commercials promise solutions, not problems. It is a miserable platform for discussing complexity and struggle, and hosts who try to represent life’s complexity, such as Dick Cavett, are eventually relegated to the minority viewing audience of public television. Inevitably, a Christian faith tailored for a TV audience comes across as scrubbed-up, incomplete. A non-Christian friend, who has watched PTL faithfully, though mainly out of curiosity, comes away puzzled. “If their God is so benevolent,” he asks, “why does he allow death and suffering? The Bible can’t be as polyannaish as it seems on PTL.”

Indeed, Jesus did not paint a rosy picture to his disciples or to the early church. Jesus warned the church against temptation, dissension, attacks from outside, lukewarmness, and painful persecutions. Discussing these aspects of the Christian life does not appeal to a large audience, though.

Many viewers of a more conservative persuasion are disturbed by another emphasis on PTL: physical healing. Tammy Bakker on one show recalled a bizarre personal episode of healing. She had a hernia and was scheduled for surgery to relieve it, but she believed God did not want her to have to endure the trauma of surgery. So, one Sunday during Communion she felt moved to immerse a wart on her finger (she didn’t explain the connection) in the Communion glass. She felt a sudden energy rushing through her, and discovered the next day that her hernia had been healed and surgery was not necessary. As I listened to her I wondered how many devoted viewers canceled their scheduled surgeries that day.

Yet PTL is flooded with accounts of healing from its viewers—20,000 in a single year. In addition, people describe in great detail marriages saved, families reunited, and miracles performed. And the experience of hearing and seeing others’ faith on television challenges many to seek new spiritual heights.

Critics, of course, point out certain dangers implicit in an experience-oriented Christianity. Grounding faith in a God who will make your lifestyle comfortable and take care of your health opens up several alarming possibilities. First is the confusion that arises when problems don’t seem to work out. Christians like Joni Eareckson, who was not healed despite fervent prayers, suddenly feel the implication that they are second-class citizens, somehow unworthy of God’s best for them. Faith is tied to a money-back guarantee of God’s protection—exactly the bargain Satan wrongly accused God of sealing with Job.

Also, when people tie religious experience to a lifestyle experience, rather than grounding it in objective reality, they seem to make Christianity equal to other faiths that promise similar results. Mormons, Moonies, Christian Scientists—they all have impressive success records, complete with their own stories of healing and financial rewards. Where are the distinctives of Christianity, that cost God the death of his Son? Exuberant Tammy on one show got carried away: “This life is so great—I just love it whether or not it’s true!” Life is not always so great, at least in material terms, and it is worth living precisely because it is true.

In short, PTL offers an affirming, upbeat brand of faith, free of many of the negative strictures of traditional fundamentalism. In Charlotte, the staff seems to reflect this philosophy. Employees are warm, considerate, and loving—even to local critics of their organization. Bakker grounds his approach in love, not in fear or threats of hell. He is capable of brimstone preaching, but he adapts himself to the “cool” medium of TV, smiling, constantly affirming, “God loves you, and we do too.”

The explosive growth of the electronic church, symbolized by PTL, is such a recent phenomenon that its impact is still being measured. Certainly it expands the total outreach of evangelism, reaching into homes unaware, presenting the gospel to people who would never seek it out in a church. The loyalty of PTL viewers demonstrates that there are millions of needy, lonely people whom the church is not reaching. They see Jim Bakker as a friend, someone they can count on to understand their problems. Scores of thousands of them write him personal letters and send in prayer requests. (PTL has one person in charge of the prayer room full-time, and other employees volunteer to pray in shifts for these requests.) Their effusive letters recounting how PTL and its guests have touched them are undeniable testament to the power of an electronic ministry.

Barker freely admits his ministry and others like it are supplements to the church, not replacements for it. “To those pastors who feel like the media is draining from the churches,” he says, “I would advise them to seek God for what they are feeding their sheep—the sheep will go where there is good food. If they are fed in their churches, they probably won’t need PTL or Oral Roberts or anyone—if the church would do the job.”

TV evangelists have not yet, however, sifted through the limitations that electronic media place on them, and the resultant effect on the message they present. In television, the consumer is in control—at any moment he can reach up and turn the channel selector—so the emphasis of the message must be on what the viewer wants to see, more than what he should see. One can hardly imagine the Old Testament prophets with their stern message from God capturing an acceptable viewing audience. Even Jesus—though he might arouse the curiosity of TV documentary crews—would hardly fit the normal TV format; his discussions were too slippery, not packaged right for a consumer-oriented society.

Bakker admits TV ratings limit him from, for example, Bible exposition. Yet television can offer programming not available to the local church. What church could afford the weekly lineup of famous guests that appear before PTL’s cameras, as well as the musical professionalism of the PTL Singers and the likes of Gary Paxton, Noel Stookey, Reba Rambo, and B. J. Thomas?

To people on the fringes of Christianity, especially those with acute personal needs, the PTL Club opens up a whole new avenue of hope. Bakker and his guests promise that their viewers’ lives can have answers and fulfillment. To many lonely people, PTL is the one, big, bright spot in an otherwise overwhelmingly dark existence. One reason PTL staffers are so hurt by criticisms is that they are aware daily of suicides prevented and lives remade because of their ministry.

One encouraging trend at PTL is to refer callers with problems to local pastors who can follow them up personally. So far, over 2,000 pastors have agreed to help. A prison ministry is on the drawing board, whereby volunteers would organize small group Bible studies oriented to PTL programs.

The danger comes when viewers confuse the excitement of PTL with the message and the work of the church incarnate. Compared to the glitter of television, the average local church is lackluster. Services are boring by contrast; the message seems complex and confusing. And perhaps most dangerous of all is the latent effect of TV to create a dependence on vicarious experiences. The church on TV is experienced, after all, not in a room that includes sniffling children, restless teen-agers, hard-of-hearing grandparents, and sleepy parishioners. It occurs in a much safer, more sterile environment: your own living room.

When you watch a TV church, no one asks you to participate in a visitation program. No one challenges you to hold the attention of a junior high Sunday school class. No one asks you to make meals for shut-ins. The only response PTL solicits is a monthly check of gratitude. What better way is there to reach the world for Christ? A member of the electronic church may easily conclude the answer is his cash contribution to the newest satellite, never questioning whether his own personal involvement is of greater value. What can one solitary person’s service accomplish, he may wonder, when dwarfed by the marvels of electronic evangelism.

The Bible presents a realistic picture of the Christian life, including long, dull marches through the wilderness, humiliating failures, pain, and struggle. These don’t come off well on television—unless they’re told as a quick, summarized prelude to the victorious conclusion. The resulting picture of the Christian life as being one of incessant joy and constant success can actually backfire instead. The viewer, whose experience is different, can begin to feel distressingly inferior, as if somehow he’s missing out on the magic of faith.

In essence, the electronic church is the mouth of the body, but without the other parts. Few Christians would question the validity of the mouthpiece of the body of Christ, or the remarkable potential of electronic media for exploding the gospel’s outreach. But people can confuse the mouthpiece with the whole body. Occasionally people are so turned on by what they see on PTL that they pack up and leave their homes, spending their savings on a plane or bus ticket to the Charlotte headquarters. “Wouldn’t it be better,” they reason, “to visit Jim Bakker in person, to let him lay hands on my arthritis, to share in the financial success that is so alluring on the television screen?”

Naturally, PTL is not set up to handle pensions, senior citizens’ housing, marriage counseling, healing clinics, food distribution outlets, and race relations centers. It is not the church; it is only a mouthpiece. But by appealing to the needs in humanity that can only be met on a local, corporate-body level, PTL fosters exactly the kind of situation it is not set up to handle. Despite the compassion shown by individual PTL staffers, many of these vagrant people turn away bitter.

In order to experience a direct link with the people PTL is reaching, on my last day there I volunteered as a phone counselor during the live TV show. I was quickly instructed about how to handle suicide calls and prank calls, and briefed on how to fill out the four basic telephone response forms: blue for prayer requests, green for salvation reports, pink for praise reports, and yellow for miscellaneous requests or criticisms.

My first call was from a black boy in Arizona, age ten. “How do you stop bein’ bad?” he asked, then giggled and hung up. Next was a New Jersey housewife trying to locate the song “In the Center of His Will.” Prayer requests followed, including one for “a fearful spirit and insecurity,” two for heart conditions. Some more prank calls were sprinkled in among the requests; one said, “Merry Christmas,” then hung up, and another said, “Hey, I need eight dollars.” One woman wanted to become a Christian, she thought, but preferred to read the book Salvation Clear and Plain first. And so it went.

The last call of the day was the most involved, and the most telling. A lady from California described in great detail her troublesome situation, which developed after her husband left her a year ago. Though she declined to give her name, she told me intimate accounts of fights with her husband. Her dilemma is basically financial. She has two sons, aged nine and three, and she must work to support them, since her husband sends no child support. Yet the only jobs she can find require weekend work, and she has to hire babysitters. She feels an obligation to be with her sons, who become mean and irresponsible when they’re with babysitters so much. Yet when she quits her job, welfare money ($350 per month) is not enough to pay basic expenses.

Telling me this on the phone, she was torn, confused, and sobbing. Her lack of skills confines her to low-paying jobs, and she hates herself for neglecting her children in a struggle for survival. She said she had accepted Christ, but was very disheartened because nothing seemed to work out right.

Could PTL help this woman? Something about its guests with their easy, confident smiles and their suede sports coats and fancy dresses had attracted her. Even in her financial straits, she spent $10 on a desperation phone call. But the prayer I offered for her, across 3,000 miles of telephone transmission, seemed puny in light of her problems. When PTL admirers pull into their campsites and plug into the phone diverter hookups to counsel people like her, what can they offer but hope?

Could the local church help? As a Catholic, she felt rejected because of her church’s stand against divorce. No church around her had extra funds to dole out to needy people; none had free babysitting service.

This lady, eager to do right, but unable to cope with the pressures of her world, represents millions with great human needs. PTL and other programs like it tap into those needs, awakening a thirst for justice and hope and joy. Yet television is limited; it is not the church, and so its help is incomplete. What the California woman needs is some old-fashioned, sacrificial Christian love—someone to be her friend, to keep her sons sometimes, perhaps to help out financially. I couldn’t help wondering how many of her Christian neighbors are too busy watching TV to give her that love.

“He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself …” (Isa. 44:20).

Some times ago, a New Yorker cartoon showed a portly man and his wife looking through the picture window of their living room at a lovely vista of fields and trees. The man was saying: “God’s country? Well, I suppose it is. But I own it.” We smile. Yet that cartoon points to the confusion between God’s ownership of everything we have and our stewardship of it. The confusion is one we have all at some time slipped into—not that we should ever think of expressing it so crassly as the cartoonist did.

In one way or another, the culture we live in is pushing us toward more elaborate living. No society in history has been so incessantly stimulated as ours to spend more and more money on nonessentials. And if the resulting materialism hinders our witness to a needy world, as it surely does, not all the fault lies with Madison Avenue and its unremitting appeals to self-indulgence. It lies also with us. With all our devotion to the Bible, we evangelicals have not been biblical enough to resist the pressures around us. We are zealous for bringing people to Christ—and I say this without disparagement. But we have neglected essential parts of Scripture in which God sets forth what he requires of us in our relation to our neighbors. Our fault has been, and still is, an unbiblical selectivity in the preaching, reading, and application of the Word of God.

Here is an excerpt from a full-page advertisem*nt of a certain reference Bible: “At first glance you will recognize its major feature: a unique color shading system that instantly classifies all verses dealing with the four major Bible themes—Salvation, The Holy Spirit, Temporal Blessings, Prophecy.” There you have in a nutshell the imbalance that is weakening evangelical obedience to the whole counsel of God.

Since the 1920s I have attended evangelical churches and participated in many Bible conferences. Yet never have I heard at a Bible conference a responsible treatment of Amos’s strong words about the injustices done through the misuse of wealth or an exposition of the great passages in Isaiah and the other prophets that stress God’s concern for the poor and oppressed. Not, in fact, till this year have I heard in a conservative evangelical church any really forthright preaching about these things, which are so important in God’s sight. Prophecy, yes—but only in its predictive, eschatological aspect with little or nothing about the major witness of the prophets against the idolatry of things and the oppression that may be entailed in accumulating them.

Why are so many evangelicals apparently insensitive to injustice? One reason may be an Old Testament translation problem. A discussion with a Christian friend in Washington, a distinguished professional man, showed me this. We had been talking about civil rights and my friend amazed me by insisting that the Bible has practically nothing to say about justice. Like most older evangelicals, my friend was devoted to the King James Version. So I investigated the use of the word “justice” in the KJV and found that mishpat, which the Hebrew uses far more than any other word for “justice,” is translated “judgment” 294 times in the KJV and only once “justice.” But in over 90 of these 294 times, mišpāṭ means “justice” and is so translated in newer versions. Thus for the reader of the KJV, Psalm 106:3, “Blessed are they who maintain justice” is “Blessed are they who keep judgment”; Isaiah 30:18, “The Lord is a God of justice” is “The Lord is a God of judgment”; and Amos’s magnificent imperative, “Let justice roll down like waters” (5:24, RSV), is narrowed to “Let judgment roll down like waters.” So also in scores of passages. Obviously the KJV use of “judgment” for “justice” has for many readers obscured the totality of the Old Testament emphasis on “justice,” an emphasis vitally linked to the need for a simple lifestyle.

But we are to think about some Old Testament aspects of the question, “How in This Affluent Society Should We Then Live?” Here, then, are six categories of Old Testament teaching that shed light on the need for simplifying the way we are living.

1The account of our creation, found in Genesis 1:26–27. This is the greatest thing ever said of humanity—that God made us in his image, an image which, though marred through the fall beyond human power to repair, is not beyond God’s regenerating power, an image that has never been effaced. This is the source of human dignity—not wealth or position, but our creation in God’s image.

No one has put the implications of this more powerfully than C. S. Lewis in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory”: “The dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.… You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations [and, may I interpose, all the trappings of affluence]—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

What has this to do with our subject? Well, for one thing it sets our lifestyle in the perspective of the human dignity inherent in our creation. It compels us to see whether anything in the way we live tends to diminish or degrade the humanity of our fellow image-bearers. So it faces us with the relation of our lifestyle to meeting the needs of the poor and hungry and oppressed—in short, those whom God himself is especially concerned about. The Old Testament makes it clear that God’s people were to enjoy the fruit of the land and celebrate his goodness in joyful feasts. Yet along with this there had to be continuing provision for the needs of the poor and hungry. Christians can do no less.

Now the account of our creation also gives us another perspective. Here in Genesis 1 is the first biblical reference to stewardship. God made man responsible for the earth—to “fill [it] and subdue it” and “rule over” all living things (Gen. 1:29, NIV). God put him in the garden “to work it and take care of it” (Gen. 2:15, NIV). So man received a delegated authority, a subordinate administration for which he was accountable to God. The biblical principle of the relation of humanity to God’s world is not ownership but stewardship. Therefore, for us to degrade the environment in the pursuit of affluence is to sin against our fellow image-bearers, because degrading the environment diminishes their rightful heritage. This is a perspective that we who live in the most wasteful society in the world, one that is consuming God-given natural resources at an unparalleled rate, must take seriously.

2The Decalogue (Exod. 20:1–17). The first two commandments confront us with a basic perspective. The Old Testament refers many times—and not always negatively—to prosperity and riches. Yet it also insistently warns against the idolatry of material things and allowing them to turn us from God. There is a sense in which the biblical history of Israel is one long record of their lapsing into idolatry and of God’s judgment upon them. What happened to Solomon, who began by asking God for wisdom instead of wealth and ended up by letting his lifestyle betray him into idolatry, including even the worship of Molech (1 Kings 11:7), shows the inherent snare of affluence. Not all idols are religious ones. Materialism with its inordinate preoccupation with money and with things is idolatrous. The mention of Molech, to whom human beings were sacrificed, raises a question about the place of the automobile in American life with its mounting toll of over 50,000 highway deaths annually—a number that most Christians, including those committed to social action, accept with little or no protest. Surely a responsible Christian lifestyle must be concerned about this sore spot in our national life and reckon with the idolatrous pride of possession that so often goes with car ownership.

Consider next the fourth commandment. In their reaction against Sabbatarian legalism, most evangelicals have given little thought to the Sabbath principle in the Old Testament. It is true that Christians are not bound by the Hebrew Sabbath regulations in keeping the Lord’s Day. Nevertheless, the Sabbath has important things to say to us. One of them relates to the acquisitiveness that coexists with affluence. My friend, Dr. Joshua O. Haberman, senior rabbi of the Washington Hebrew Congregation, put one of the perspectives of this fourth commandment like this: “On the Sabbath,” he said, “I must acknowledge God the Creator by resting from my acquisitiveness, because I have no real title to anything. The Sabbath is the Day that fully shows God as Creator. In it we add nothing to what he has done.”

One of the pitfalls of a lifestyle marked by getting more and more things irrespective of need, is the false sense of ownership it fosters. But in its witness to God as Creator and to his ownership of everything, including material wealth, the Sabbath reminds us of our creatureliness.

Look now at the tenth commandment. Consider the link between its prohibition of covetousness and the fall in Eden. It was their inordinate desire for something they did not have that the serpent used to entice Adam and Eve into rebelling against God. The temptation was for them to reach out for another lifestyle that was not God’s will for them. This tenth commandment probes the sin behind the progressive aggrandizement that is leading Christians today into idolatrous lifestyles in which almost everything is spent on self and only a pittance given to help the poor and hungry. Inherent in covetousness is idolatry. The New Testament word for covetousness (pleonexia) has the meaning of “wanting more and more,” and Paul was right in saying twice (Eph. 5:5; Col. 3:5) that covetousness is idolatry. So an increasingly elaborate lifestyle, spurred by constant pressures to keep on getting things, comes full circle with the first two commandments.

3The Sabbatical Year and the Year of the Jubilee (Lev. 25). Few Old Testament passages have been more closely studied by socially concerned Christians than this chapter. In it the Sabbath principle of the fourth commandment is extended and intensified. As Hans Ruedi-Weber says, “You cannot understand the Jubilee Year without understanding the Sabbath.” Built into the Jubilee Year regulations is the principle that the land does not belong to us but to God. We are “strangers and sojourners” (NIV, “aliens and tenants”) in it. Coupled with this are some powerful economic perspectives. As Arthur Holmes said in the Reformed Journal (Oct. 1978), the Jubilee Year regulations “prevented the perpetuation of destitution by periodically returning to the family those lands which had passed into the possession of others. The veto on Israelites charging [interest] is not in itself unjust. Fair pricing was also required, a corollary of the fact that business is a service to others rather than the pursuit of unqualified self-interest.”

But liberation was also built into the Jubilee Year, because in it the Hebrew slaves were to be freed, a provision that was likewise built into the Sabbatical Year. Since it was the prosperous Israelites who had slaves, this was an act of justice for the poor. Nor should we think that the provisions about slaves are irrelevant for us. All oppression of others is a form of bondage, and lifestyles that lord it over others are tainted with the spirit of slavery.

One more thing: the time when the Jubilee Year was proclaimed throughout the land was the tenth day of the seventh month—the Day of Atonement. So its context in Israel’s calendar was one of reconciliation. With its check on unrestrained aggrandizement and its stress on rectifying injustices, the Jubilee Year gives us perspectives on the relation of the way we use our resources and wealth (of which the land and slaves in Old Testament times were the counterpart) to the reconciliation available to us all in Christ—rich and poor alike. In short, the link of the Jubilee Year with the Day of Atonement reinforces the principle that we must not tolerate anything in our lifestyle that will diminish our brother or sister for whom Christ died.

4The tithe and the law of gleaning. Four principal Old Testament passages set forth the law of tithing in Israel: Leviticus 27:30–33; Numbers 18:21–32; Deuteronomy 12:5–18; 14:22–29. Questions as to how many tithes there were are for scholars to answer. But the perspectives of Old Testament tithing are plain. The practice of setting aside one-tenth of all produce of the land, including that derived from the animals that lived on it, powerfully affirmed stewardship. Tithing clearly implied that everything humanity has belongs to God. Imbedded in its laws was the compassionate provision that at the end of every third year the tithe for that year was to be laid up for the use of the Levites, and that the fatherless and widows were to come and eat it. Thus a kind of reserve would be built up.

Akin to this was the beautiful law of gleaning (Lev. 9:9–10; Deut. 4:19–21). This required that at the harvest the fields were not to be reaped to their very borders nor the vineyards or olive groves stripped bare. Something was always to be left for the poor and the sojourner. (The second chapter of Ruth gives us a poignant glimpse of this practice.) We see, then, that in the law of gleaning God put into the economy of Israel still another compassionate requirement for helping the needy. This divine concern should lead us rich Christians to reassess the extent to which we are sharing our resources with the poor.

5A statement and an exhortation (Deut. 6:4–5). “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (RSV). In these great words, there is first a basic theological statement and then an exhortation. The pattern is, as John Stott says, that “our theology must govern our conduct.” For us the perspectives implicit in these words in Deuteronomy are especially important, because the Lord Jesus used them, along with Leviticus 19:18, in defining the heart of Christian obedience based on love (Matt. 22:37–40).

Central to the Shema is the exhortation to love God, which occurs in Deuteronomy and nowhere else in the Old Testament. The three terms—with all your heart, soul, and might—include our total being, our mind and will and desires, our emotions, our intellectual and physical energies. Yes, and our possessions too. The Jewish commentator Rashi related the words, “with all your might,” to “with all your money, for,” he said, “you sometimes find a man whose money is dearer to him than his life.” For us Christians, Deuteronomy 6:4–5 probes the integrity of our commitment to the God who “did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32, NIV). In its perspective, we must examine our lifestyle to find the extent to which it reflects our love for God and our love for our neighbor. Hard questions come to mind: Does an indulgent lifestyle betray a failure in love? Is increasing expenditure on material things depriving our poor and hungry neighbors of help? Is idolatry of things impairing the integrity of our love for God?

The words of Deuteronomy 6:6–7, moreover, compel us to think about what our lifestyle is teaching our children. Is it such as to give them the feeling of entitlement to having more and more things that characterizes children of the affluent? Does it show them that, beyond our oral testimony, we love God with our whole being, and with our money too, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves? And if we feel compelled to cut down our manner of living drastically, let us be sure not to deprive our children of any necessities, for our children, too, are our neighbors.

6The great body of Old Testament teaching about possessions and prosperity. The Old Testament says much about wealth and possessions. Passage after passage deals with these things. Scripture neither idealizes poverty nor condemns wealth and prosperity as themselves evil. In his covenant-dealings with his people, God does reward obedience with material prosperity. There are Scripture promises—not a few of them—of temporal blessings for God’s people. But along with these, there is always the underlying premise of God’s sole ownership of everything and of his grace in doing for his people what they cannot do for themselves. Though the Old Testament says that God gives prosperity to the righteous, as Ronald Sider points out, it denies the opposite—namely, that wealth and prosperity always indicate righteousness. On the contrary, it shows over and over that wealth may be the fruit of oppression and exploitation—sins for which God has not only destroyed individuals but wiped out whole nations.

Many thoughtful readers of the Old Testament have felt the tension between the promises of prosperity for the righteous (as in Ps. 37:34) and the plain fact that the righteous are sometimes poor and needy through no fault of their own—a circ*mstance the writer of Psalm 37 apparently overlooked when he wrote: “I have been young and now am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread” (v. 25). Perhaps he was stating the norm to which there are always exceptions. It is interesting that when this psalm is read in Jewish worship after a meal the leader sometimes reads this verse silently lest a righteous poor person should be offended.

For a divine perspective on the tension we cannot help feeling between the righteous poor and the flourishing wicked, we may go to Psalm 73, where Asaph says his feet had “almost slipped” when he saw the wicked—strong, proud, and carefree, boasting in the enjoyment of their wealth. “When I tried to understand all this,” he wrote, “it was oppressive to me till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny” (Ps. 73:16–17, NIV). There follows in the psalm the picture of the swift destruction of the wicked rich as God’s inexorable judgment overtakes them.

With all the Old Testament says about wealth and prosperity, it sets them in clearly defined perspective. While not forbidding them, it hedges them about with restrictions and cautions. They are not to be accumulated just for the sake of getting more and more, they must not be gained by oppression and injustice, they can and do lead to covetousness. They do not belong to us but to God, who is the ultimate owner of all we have. Therefore, we are stewards, not proprietors, of our wealth. In our use of it, we are sinning if we do not reflect God’s strong concern for the poor and the hungry, the weak and the oppressed. What we do with what we have must be in accord with the great command to love God with everything we are and have. Even our ability to gain wealth is a stewardship like any other talent. The Old Testament reminds us that it is God who has given us the ability to get wealth (Deut. 7:17–18, RSV).

The Old Testament does not tell us specifically whether we should buy a better car, or keep the one we have, or have no car at all. It does not tell us whether we should upgrade our lifestyle by getting a bigger house or cut it back by getting a smaller one. It does not specify exactly what our lifestyle should be. What it does do is to give us certain principles by which we must measure our lifestyle. To face these principles honestly and prayerfully is bound to lead to changes in how in this affluent society we are living—changes that will simplify our lives and help us to be more obedient disciples of our Lord.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

Life magazine once dubbed the Sunday school the most wasted hour of the week. Not so, say curriculum people and Christian educators. Problems—yes, there are myriad. Challenges—yes, of course. But most people involved in the Sunday school are proud of what has been accomplished in the last decade, and they have dreams and goals for the next.

Yet enrollment in many Sunday schools is declining. Futuristic leaders in colleges and curriculum companies have to identify the new and continuing problems of the Sunday school. They must respond to those most immediately involved—the teachers and the students—if they are to meet the challenge of the 1980s. How will they answer John Klem, eleventh-grade student from Glen Ellyn, Illinois? “Some Sunday school classes are a bore. I’ve been in ones where we could care less about the subjects. Yak yak, and the whole period was irrelevant.”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY interviewed 11 men and women who are involved in some way in the ministry of the church through the Sunday school. They shared information and opinions on the failures and successes of Sunday school and curriculum, recent curriculum trends, and some challenges for Sunday school in the 1980s. Included among their comments are those of four teen-age Sunday school students.

Why are some people saying that Sunday school and Sunday school curriculum are irrelevant? Some respondents feel that the problem centers on the church’s failure to view Sunday school in the context of its total ministry. Others believe the problem is with curriculum. Still others say the problem is with the attitudes of those who attend Sunday school.

Norman Harper, chairman of the Christian education department and dean of the Graduate School of Education at Reformed Theological Seminary, fits into the first category. “The Sunday school has never been integrated with the total mission of the church,” he says. “It came into being as a parachurch organization. It was developed by lay people, primarily for children. It was self-supporting. When it was brought to this country, it was used primarily for evangelism. But it still existed outside the church.

“When the institutional church began to bring the Sunday school into its structure, it never really integrated it with the total ministry of the church. When the Sunday school hour is over, people still say, ‘Are you going to stay for church?’”

Some Sunday school students agree with Harper. They find that when both the Sunday school teacher and the pastor give them different sets of content and life responses, it’s too much. In the information overload, they are short-circuited. Randy Mains, 16-year-old high school junior from West Chicago, Illinois, says, “I wish we would discuss the sermon more in Sunday school. Then maybe we would understand better how to put the message into practice. We could get questions answered at our level; we’d like to know how we are supposed to serve Christ. We could check each other each week on how well we did living last week’s sermon.”

According to Paul Fromer, free-lance curriculum writer and associate professor of writing at Wheaton College, Sunday school is too easy. “Christians almost never study for Sunday school in advance,” he said. “Life principles that the Scripture teach are important and sufficiently complicated that they require advance thought and later reflection. If children can go to school and get assignments, why can’t they get them in Sunday school? The further along the youngsters get in school, the more different Sunday school is from school, and the more it appears that Sunday school is for Mickey Mouse, and school is for real. If Sunday school is to survive and grow, that must change.”

Availability of funds and personnel is also a problem. “Sunday schools are understaffed and underfinanced,” says Glenn E. Heck, vice-president for planning at the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois. “The inadequate contributions of time and money people make to Sunday school indicate that Christians simply do not believe that teaching is a vital command of Christ.”

Some sunday school problems were traced to curriculum. Doris Freese, associate professor of Christian education at Moody Bible Institute, feels that Sunday school curriculum has slighted adults, and calls for a rethinking of the way adult materials are structured. “Adults are students of lesson manuals and commentaries. The typical adult teacher’s manual,” she says, “is a huge commentary. I think more is being done in materials that are written for home Bible studies than is being done at the adult level in Sunday school materials to help adults learn to discover biblical truth for themselves.”

Heck says that curriculum producers have shot too broadly at the adult market without making fine enough distinctions about their needs. “If the content in adults’ courses is not pointed directly at a felt need, adults won’t come. Our greatest growth should be in the adult market, and the key to attracting this market is providing materials appropriate to the felt life needs and interests of adults.”

Another problem many have with curriculum is that it doesn’t deal with issues such as world hunger, political involvement, or social justice. This also includes the “felt needs” mentioned by Heck. Most curriculum isn’t scratching where it itches.

“We don’t start out by saying, ‘Let’s come up with a course that deals with a particular contemporary topic,’” explains Wes Haystead, senior editor in the education division of Gospel Light Publications. “We start with the Scriptures and say, for example, ‘Let’s have a course from Ephesians.’ So then it’s a matter of what issues are dealt with in Ephesians. We tend to deal most with issues that touch the personal level—personal interaction, personal attitude, personal behavior—and less with global issues.” Many prefer this personal approach, but growing numbers of evangelicals want Sunday school to provide biblical guidance on some of the larger issues. Some teen-age students think Sunday school may be slighting some of the issues of primary importance to them, too. “What about dating, marriage, and sex?” asks John Klem. “How about some more realistic teaching in those areas? One reason I come to Sunday school is to meet and date Christian girls. I want to marry a Christian woman.”

Randy Mains picked the practical area of witnessing. He doesn’t feel it’s been taught effectively in his classes. “If I ever came up to someone who didn’t know the Lord and wanted to know, it might be hard for me to share my faith. I’ve never gone over that in depth.”

Wendy Barran, 12-year-old seventh grader from Salem, Oregon, agrees. “I go because I know that Jesus says I’m supposed to, and I want to learn how to share him with others. But I’m not learning that. In fact, I’m not learning anything.”

Larry Richards, of Dynamic Church Ministries, points to what he says is a basic flaw in curriculum structure. “Curriculum people assume that different content is appropriate to different age levels, and what you do is look through Scripture to find studies or lessons that fit the age. That’s a mistake,” says Richards. “Christian teaching ought always to be organized around theological core issues. For example: Man is made in the image of God; God is a heavenly father; God is a forgiving Person. Every single biblical doctrine can be experienced by a Christian at his level of development. If I’m going to be teaching about forgiveness, I know a nine-year-old will not understand forgiveness conceptually as an adult can. But he can experience the reality of the Christian teaching of forgiveness at his own level. Even an adult won’t understand forgiveness in the same way God does. So we never get to the place where we are intellectually capable of encompassing all God’s truth.

“I don’t believe,” says Richards, “that curriculum publishers have ever come to grips with that basic issue—what is the core of their curriculum.”

D. Campbell Wyckoff, professor of Christian education at Princeton Theological Seminary, feels that the curriculum itself is not as much a problem as how people use it. “I think that we have in curriculum at the present time most of the important possibilities out before us. I would like to see a mature and thorough attempt to use what we already have.”

How have curriculum companies faced problems like the above in past years? A survey of the past decade shows that evangelical curriculum producers have made great strides.

The mainline denominations had their Christian education theory and practice developed by theoreticians and experts. The evangelical or conservative church outside these denominations, on the other hand, never had that kind of leadership provided by the schools. “Curriculum houses took the leadership in developing Christian education styles,” says Richards. “This is their major contribution.”

And there have also been some significant people-centered contributions. For example, in the area of childhood education, “this decade has made us more aware of children’s abilities to learn spiritual truths—not just by memorizing, but by seeing and experiencing different kinds of activities,” says Charles G. Schauffele, chairman of the Christian education department at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. “I remember 15 years ago there was no such thing as curriculum for two- and three-year-olds. Now they are all over the place.”

Curriculum companies have also shown concern for the teacher. Teacher training has a long way to go in the 1980s, but it is not starting from a vacuum. “We have worked very hard for the past 10 years providing a continuing training program to help the Sunday school teacher succeed,” says Haystead. “We perceive that most churches see training as something they give only to a new teacher. We need to emphasize the need for every teacher to be involved in continuing training.” Wyckoff considers the effective way Sunday school curriculum has kept the best of theological and educational developments in reach of the ordinary Sunday school teacher to be the most praiseworthy achievement in the last decade. “The teacher has at his fingertips the materials that are needed, the ideas that are central, the activities and the procedures that will be most effective.”

The tenets of faith do not change. But methodology and the ways in which people assimilate and use information does. Curriculum companies examine each trend that appears in the secular education field. They then evaluate which trends will effect basic changes in how people learn and which are simply fads. The latter should be avoided. For example, open classroom hit the educational scene by storm and whole school systems were reorganized to allow this method to be implemented. Now it is being strongly questioned.

On the other hand, if a trend will change how people think and learn, it must be incorporated into curriculum if effective communication between teacher and learner is to be maintained. Sesame Street, for example, changed the way a whole generation of children think and respond. No curriculum company with pre- and early childhood curricula dare ignore it.

“We wanted to be sure that Sunday school materials were getting through to Sesame Street children,” says Joseph Bayly, vice-president of David C. Cook Publishing Company. “We employed a consultant who had been on the Sesame Street creative planning team. We created a totally new curriculum for preschoolers. Biblical content is directed at children in such a way that they are able to learn without shifting gears between what they see on television, what they are learning in a secular school, and what they are getting in Sunday school.”

Bayly points out that if children find the weekday school creative and Sunday school dead, the church is going to lose these people, not on the basis of an essential moral decision—what would you do with Jesus?—but on a peripheral thing “where we have no excuse not to strive for excellence.”

Curriculum companies also point to their successes in helping teachers train their students to study the Bible. “We emphasize Bible study,” says Haystead, “and our primary purpose is to get the student at the appropriate age level involved with Scripture for himself. Rather than stretch our curriculum so we provide all the answers, we want the student to discover truth on his own.” Lloyd Cory, editorial vice-president of Scripture Press Publications, also says that Bible teaching is a strength of his curriculum.

How to deal with contemporary issues is a question curriculum companies still struggle with. How do curriculum producers help their customers grow without pushing so hard that the churches cancel their orders?

“There is a tendency for us, since we’re in the suburbs, to become suburban,” says Cory. “We’re always fighting that, both in our art and in our copy.”

If publishers avoid places where biblical concepts apply to our culture, they are accused of being sub-Christian. “On the other hand,” says Bayly, “we have to recognize that teaching implies ignorance initially on the part of the learner, and in some areas people have not been stimulated to think. If we clobber them with the whole thing at once, we are going to turn them off.”

One area of tension, for example, is that of justice versus order. “The Bible, you know, is usually in favor of law and order,” says Cory, “but not always. Consider Peter’s illegal prison break. We are not straight law-and-order people. We try to present things as they come up in Bible study.”

One area in which curriculum has done a pretty fair job is in its minority representation. “A decade ago,” Bayly says, “we went out on a limb by showing integrated art and photographs. At the time, not knowing how the market would respond, it was a big chance to take. But we were convinced it was the right thing to do.” Today most publishers aim at a fair representation of minorities. Progressive National Baptist, a black denomination, imprints David C. Cook materials, and Scripture Press has a split-off company, Urban Ministries, whose materials are mostly for blacks.

What happens when a curriculum company realizes that some change is necessary to help it better reach its market? Cory says, “We hear from customers and from editors who are out there teaching that change is needed. Most of our editors are teachers. We do marketing research. After we determine what needs changing, we prototype and test a new product on the field. Then we change it as testing requires. After it’s been out for six months or a year, we do some in-use research to see how the changes have been accepted.”

Changes in curriculum may come slowly, but they do come. Two recent trends in the industry have been toward inductive Bible study and toward family-centered curriculum.

Inductive Bible study is a learning method that allows people to study the Bible for themselves. It can be done with or without a Sunday school teacher. It asks three kinds of questions about a Scripture passage: (1) What are the facts? (2) What do these facts mean? How do they go together? What principles are being taught? and (3) What does the teaching of this passage mean to me personally?

More and more, companies are structuring lessons that will allow for guided or pure inductive study. Maggie Fromer, author of several inductive Bible study guides, explains why: “I think that as evangelicals, we have had such a respect for Scripture that we’re likely to think it takes someone who is skilled and well trained to understand it. We’ve almost reversed the emphasis that broke the Protestant church away from the Catholic church—that the Holy Spirit can instruct the believer in all that he or she needs to know in biblical understanding.

“Instead we are almost afraid to handle Scripture without having someone who is extremely well trained teach it to us. What inductive study ends up doing is showing a class that just by careful observation of the passage, people really can understand.”

A second trend, still in its early stages, is toward family-centered curriculum. Curriculum companies and several hundred churches are now doing research on its viability.

In a family cluster or intergenerational approach to Sunday school, three or four families and singles study together, forming an artificial family group. Both Schauffele and Bayly have taught intergenerational classes.

Schauffele thinks the family cluster concept is the up-and-coming thing. “My experience is that children from around the age of two can be involved,” he says. “They are interested as they creep, crawl, and toddle around. Teens pick up an enormous amount by listening to adults other than their own parents. Parents, in turn, gain insights into other young people.”

Bayly agrees. “The church may have contributed to the generation gap by separating people into strict age level groups. Some beautiful relationships have developed as we’ve studied the Bible together. My hope for the future is that Sunday school will be seen as an extended family, and that regardless of the age level, there will be a caring and sharing attitude among people.”

Schauffele warns that not everyone will go along with intergenerational study. “Start with a few seed families—four or five—who want to try it within the existing Sunday school framework.”

Some educators question the value of the family cluster, and others offer cautions. “I think there is a time for togetherness and a time for apartness,” says Cory. “Little kids especially can learn more if they are taught on their own level than they can sitting with their parents in an adult service.”

“Obviously, kids need some learning on their own level,” says Richards. “Adults, too, need a chance to study Scripture with other adults. But I think Sunday school can be an intergenerational experience where various learning abilities are stressed.”

Sunday School Plus (which was funded by Dynamic Church Ministries) tried to redesign what happens in Sunday school using a socialization model rather than an education model. It did not insist on intergenerational experiences. But it found that a lot of churches did use the curriculum intergenerationally. In fact, now that the curriculum is no longer being produced, Richards has gotten letters from churches asking for backdated curriculum. They are convinced that this teaching model is working in their churches, and they would rather use old material than switch to something they doubt would work as well.

Amy Wakesfield, a 15-year-old high school junior from Phoenix, Arizona, is one convert to intergenerational study. “In our house church,” she said, “the junior high and senior high kids come into the adult group. As the sermon is given, anyone is free to interact by giving an opinion or asking a question. I really enjoy it. I can hear about older people’s problems and learn what it’s like to be an adult.”

Randy Mains, on the other hand, is pleased with his traditional class of senior highs because one of his primary purposes for coming to Sunday school is to get to know the other kids. “I don’t have to be in an adult conversation and compete with adults in class,” he says. “I can talk on my own level.”

The last decade has been one of severe change in the Sunday school, and unless that pattern is continued in the next, this educational ministry of the church will fail. The public changes: Sesame Street changed preschoolers; the conservative political climate changed adults; the decline wrought by the rebellion of the 1960s changed teens. If Sunday schools and the materials they use can’t change as quickly, they are targeted at no one.

The home is a key link to the next decade’s success. The Sunday school must find a way to link more successfully with the home, and the curriculum companies must provide the support materials. “We need to make a serious effort to impress parents with the impossibility of providing effective Christian education without their participation,” says Heck. “If I were offering a simple goal for the 1980s, I would say we should expect every Christian from high school on up to contribute five work hours a week to Christian education and 10 percent of his tithe for the costs of Christian education.”

Harper would like to see the whole program restructured away from the Sunday school model, a separate educational arm of the church. In its place, he would put a church model where there would be no differentiation between the educational goals of the Sunday school and the goals of the church. He would like to see responsible clergymen and lay people grapple together with the integrating questions: What is the mission of the church? What is the role of the church? What is the role of education in implementing this mission?

If Harper’s concept of a unified mission of the church is to be achieved, curriculum companies must begin to supply materials that will work in harmony with what’s happening in the 11 o’clock hour. “There ought to be a way for the classroom materials and the pulpit message to operate in concert,” he says.

Bayly says that in the future Sunday school curriculum must provide building blocks that can be combined in various ways to meet the specific situation in the church. “Sunday school curriculum is in some ways where automobile manufacturing was when Henry Ford said, ‘You can have any color Ford you want as long as it’s black,’” says Bayly. “Up to this time we have tried to satisfy the needs of everyone with the same curriculum.”

This is, however, a difficult concept to implement. Could a different curriculum for each church, or even for each small denomination be prepared? The costs would be prohibitive.

Richards has suggested one way it might be done. Get people in the local church to understand the philosophy of the curriculum—why it does what it does. “When they understand that,” says Richards, “they will be able to personalize it.” Only then, he says, will individualized teaching take place in the local church. The key to this is in the hands of curriculum publishers. They have got to do a better job of training the teachers who are using their materials.’

Haystead points out that another aspect of teacher training involves changing how many teachers feel about themselves and their role. “We think a lot of people who are involved in teaching ministries do so out of a sense of duty or obligation, rather than out of a sense of satisfaction and ministry. We’d like to give churches some help with this problem.”

Paul Fromer talked about a subtle problem that he would like to see corrected in the 1980s. Men participate in Sunday school far less than women, and perhaps our curriculum materials reinforce the idea that evangelicalism is a woman’s religion. “Issues that women are interested in discussing are more likely to be brought up,” says Fromer. “Curriculum writers have got to do more to keep men in mind if they are going to hold them in the next decade.”

On the issues of the 1980s, Wyckoff has identified the areas of communication and research. “I would hope,” he says, “that we in the curriculum field would find the personnel, money, and facilities to carry on a thorough research program in which we not only evaluate where we’re going, but also enter into a program of developing on as broad a base as possible. I have seen situations in which very similar curricula have been developing in the same city, and the people who were doing them were not aware of each other. Fruitful dialogue would improve the situation.”

Wyckoff wants curriculum developers to isolate and answer the primary questions that must be dealt with before a curriculum can be written. Those questions, in his opinion, are basic to doing a responsible job. Among them are: Why are you creating this curriculum? What is its scope? What educational processes are built in? In what context will the curriculum be used? Who will be involved? When is the appropriate time for it to be taught?

For Heck, the most essential message to communicate with curriculum companies is that they must work harder on building the link between informing and participating. He says, “We’ve done pretty well in informing students, giving them the facts, but we need to better link content to life. Linking learning to life is the next developmental stage for Christian education.

In conclusion, Sunday school and Sunday school curriculum have their problems, but in past years both have made much progress. Many challenges lie ahead, but the outlook remains hopeful.

Perhaps a comment by Dr. Wyckoff epitomizes the responses of those interviewed for this article: “Sunday school is as American as crab grass. People, churches, theorists, have done their level best to get rid of it, and it endures and comes back strong. For all its defects, it is the most effective agency that we have ever had for Christian education or that is now in sight.”

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

Professor of Education

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

“Put prayer and Bible reading back in public schools” is a cry often heard today.

Various reasons are given for wanting to put “God back in the classroom.” Some people claim many children who do not attend church receive no religious instruction at home and, unless it is done at school, they will suffer. There is a linking of the increase in crime to the lack of prayers and Bible reading at school. There is the claim that children will not relate religion to everyday life unless schools include these activities. And there is fear which comes because many young people are joining such groups as the Hare Krishna and the Unification Church (Moonies).

Efforts thus are made to remove the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court over religious activities in public schools.

This raises an interesting proposition.

Suppose God is using the Supreme Court—with its rulings against school prayers—as an instrument to test the commitment of those people who claim the name of Christian.

Perhaps God is finding out which of his people are willing to be involved in his work and which are lukewarm, leaving this work to others. Perhaps, in the words of a hymn, Christians are being tested to find out” Are Ye Able?”

Faint-hearted Christians would do well to reread the Great Commission Jesus gave to his disciples. He told them to go to all people everywhere to make disciples and to teach them to obey all Jesus taught.

The disciples were told to be active, to get to work. They were not to be superficial in their approach—read a few verses, say a bland prayer, and hope something would happen. They were to teach. They were not told to have the government do the teaching to a captive audience. The disciples were to do it themselves.

Christians today who are concerned because some children do not hear the Word of God should make it their responsibility to reach these children themselves.

Christians should reach out, through the church, to bring in those children who receive no religious instruction in their homes.

Christians should model Christian beliefs for children in stores, hospitals, schools, and highways.

Christians who are convinced that what they believe is worthwhile will not want to turn the job over to others who may not be as committed. They will become active themselves, teaching and being the examples.

And to these Christians the U.S. Supreme Court will be a blessing, for they will become “doers” not “buck-passers” of the Word.

Science Says ‘Excuse Me’ After The Radioactive Burp

DAVID L. MCKENNA

President, Seattle Pacific University

When the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island developed a bubble in its tummy and emitted a radioactive burp, parental scientists and politicians panicked. “Excuse me” was frantically boradcast across the nation, but too late. Nuclear energy had committed a fatal social error—not because it burped, but because its breath was so bad. Worlds died with the bubble at Three Mile Island.

Death came for the world of unchecked nuclear plans. As a small but crucial hope for relief from the energy crisis, nuclear power plants were scheduled to string the states from coast to coast in the coming decades. Protests by a few leftover radicals were expected to slow, but not stop, the process.

Shortly before the incident at Three Mile Island, I came through Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Greeting me at the exit were three “pro-nukers,” clean-shaven, blazer-clad, wire-rimmed, and penny-loafered. Around their necks were hung placards with neatly printed statistics and shibboleths stating that nuclear power was our hope. Just after the Three Mile Island accident, I came through O’Hare again. The “pro-nukers” had stood their ground, but their signs had changed. One said, “Nuclear energy is safer than Ted Kennedy’s car.” True, no one died in the infected circles around Three Mile Island. No one had to. The specter of cancerous genes and contaminated grandchildren bodes worse than death itself. So, as I shook a “no” at the “pro-nukers,” I thought, if the “no-nuke” crowd, even with beards and sandals, stood at the same exit and called for a vote among the deplaning passengers, a new majority would probably choose their side.

Our fantasies about an unreal technological utopia also died at Three Mile Island. Despite the warnings of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, our wishes persisted for a technological heaven. Presumably, our superior technology would bring peace by weapons, good will by space ships, food by tractors, knowledge by computer, joy by television, life by transplants, and light by nuclear energy. One by one, these tin gods have fallen.

No particular person or group is guilty. Technology woos our rising expectations each time a new breakthrough is reported or a new gadget is announced. Warnings about the limitations of resources and the negative tradeoffs of technology have gone unheeded. Even today, we gulp the gas, not as if there is no tomorrow, but with the blind faith that our technological Ponce de Leons will discover a fountain of perpetual energy. But technology lost its blank check at Three Mile Island, and its bubble made realists of us all.

Deeper down than nuclear plans or technological dreams, the philosophy of unquestioned scientific authority died at Three Mile Island. For two decades now, Americans have suffered the losses of legitimate authority in areas of morality and government. But somehow, the authority of science has remained intact. Scientific surveys shape our behavior, think tanks show us our future, and scientists top the credibility polls. Human reason, crowned with the scientific method, has ruled unquestioned in the minds of the masses. No more. Science, as an institution of authority, can expect to plummet on the scale of public opinion until it joins the church, the university, the legislature, and the corporation in a struggle for legitimacy.

“Lord, to whom shall we go?” is our nation’s next question. Without a standard by which to live, institutions upon which to depend, and leadership around which to rally, we are open in our emptiness to the onrush of seven devils. We also are open to the authority of the Word of God. With human authority in disarray and Three Mile Island commemorating the death of unquestioned scientific authority, a nation that will flounder in this question may well be ready to listen to the answer, “Thou hast the words of eternal life.”