Page 5945 – Christianity Today (2024)

In April, 1770, Captain James Cook in his ship Endeavour made the first known sighting by a European of the eastern coast of Australia. In August, after sailing northward up the coast, he hoisted the English colors on Possession Island and formally took possession of the entire land, naming it New South Wales.

The continent was not completely unknown before that date. Dutch sailors and others had sighted parts of the coastline and even made landings. But for the most part they had seen the barren and inhospitable northwest. On the east coast Cook found a new and different land.

Little was done about his discovery immediately. But after the British had their misunderstanding with the American colonists, things began to happen in the south. The British had been in the habit of shipping their convicts to America, and when this convenient solution to their penal problem was no longer open to them, the gentlemen of England bethought themselves of the great southern continent. And so when the first fleet sailed for Australia, it was not carrying a group of idealists filled with the spirit of free enterprise and anxious to establish a new nation. Instead it was filled with a collection of convicts, together with their guards and the paraphernalia of government.

One wit has said that Australia’s first settlers were selected by the finest judges in England. His remark reminds us of their legal standing as convicts, but we should remember that this does not mean they were all desperate criminals, or even men of low moral standards. Those were the days when a hungry man who stole a loaf of bread might get seven years in jail. Many of the convicts were hardened criminals, but many others were not.

At the very least, however, they were all in some sense rebels against authority. They had refused to accept the standards laid down for them by English society. And as a group they could not be expected to be profoundly religious. Religion was part of the code of a society that they had rejected. Undoubtedly some among them had a very real religious faith. But most had little time for religion. When they had served their sentence and were released, they were not likely to build up a strong church life in the free community they formed.

Soon, however, free settlers arrived in Australia, and before very long they far outnumbered the convicts. Many of them were churchmen, and they strengthened the religious forces of the new land, though not necessarily in the old ways. The reason they had left their motherland was that they were not content with the old ways. They wanted to make a new start in new surroundings, and so they helped to develop independence of outlook.

Right from the beginning religious observances were carried out in the colony. The first fleet had a chaplain among its passengers, and when it arrived safely after the long voyage he preached the first sermon in Australia from the text, “What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me?” But the Reverend Richard Johnson did not receive much support. The instructions given to the governor by the British government included this: “And it is further our Royal Will and Pleasure that you do by all proper methods enforce a due observance of religion and good order among the inhabitants of the new settlement, and that you do take such steps for the due celebration of public worship as circ*mstances will permit.” But the effectiveness of such a directive depends, of course, on the man charged with enforcing it, and Governor Phillip does not seem to have been greatly interested in religion.

Some of the other early officials were men of real piety, however, and from them came the suggestion that one-seventh of the land of the colony be given to the Church of England. This, it was pointed out, would provide a magnificent endowment that would not only pay the stipends of the clergy but also enable the church to set up a system of schools on the best British model. The proposal was aimed at establishing the Church of England and securing a church-oriented system of education.

Understandably, the considerable number of Roman Catholics in the colony were less than enthusiastic about the proposal. The growing number of Presbyterians were also opposed, and a curious alliance between Rome and Geneva effectively ended the project.

This and other disputes left a legacy of bitterness. When an educational system was finally set up, there seemed to be no way of reconciling denominational differences, and so the system had to be largely secular. This was so in both schools and universities. To this day theology cannot be taught in the University of Melbourne, and, while the statutes of other universities are not quite so stringent, the situation does not differ greatly anywhere in Australia. Since theology has not been taught in Australian universities, there have been comparatively low standards of theological learning. Attempts have been made in the theological colleges (the Australian equivalents of the American seminaries) to keep up standards. But usually these colleges have been poor, and their teachers have had so many duties that they have not produced much significant theological writing.

Education has always been a state and not a federal responsibility, and the attitude toward religious teaching in schools varies from state to state. In some there has been no religious teaching at all. In others, some religion has been taught, often by the use of volunteer teachers from the denominations, or pupils have been allowed to read passages from the Bible without comment. On the whole, religion has not loomed large in Australian education.

There is a myth that Australians are an out-door people, athletic and vigorous, and that they derive these qualities at least in part from living far from the debilitating influence of the cities. In reality, Australians are largely city-dwellers. More than half of the population lives in the capital cities. Yet the myth persists. It is partly responsible for shaping an attitude toward life that makes for a love of sports and other pleasures but not for profound religious feeling.

But it would be wrong to leave a picture of unrelieved religious gloom. Even if there is less vital faith than church members would like, there is also much for which they are thankful. Church life has in fact been quite healthy, though many Australians remain outside the orbit of the churches. Australia has never experienced a real religious revival, but it has had its moments. A number of the world’s great evangelists have visited the country with fruitful consequences. Billy Graham’s crusades have been well attended and have had striking spiritual results. The largest audience ever to gather at the Melbourne Cricket Ground came not to a sporting event but to the final meeting in Graham’s 1959 crusade.

A great majority of Australians claim some church connection. The last census shows the Church of England as the largest denomination, with 33.5 per cent of the population. Next is the Roman Catholic Church, with 26.2 per cent, followed by the Methodist Church (9.7 per cent), the Presbyterian (9 per cent), the Orthodox (2.2 per cent), the Lutheran (1.5 per cent), and the Baptist (1.4 per cent). Slightly more than one-tenth of the people gave no reply to the question about their religious denomination. Since the census, the most significant changes are probably a slight drop in the percentage of Anglicans and a rise in that of Roman Catholics (helped by immigration, especially from southern Europe).

The churches are active throughout the country. They have been conspicuous in the missionary enterprise, and there is a greater number of Australians on the mission fields of the world than the population of the land would lead one to expect.

As the nation celebrates the year of its two-hundredth anniversary, there are signs that life within the church is far from static. There is a keen interest in evangelism, evidenced by attendance at the Graham crusades and by the presence of Australians at evangelism congresses held overseas. At the same time many oppose the old-style evangelism, preferring to concentrate on teaching and on living the faith in the life of the community.

The ecumenical movement claims the attention of many, and the next few years may see a merger of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregational churches. There is a good deal of cooperation among the denomination that sometimes extends to the sharing of worship. The Roman Catholics are engaged in conversations with the Australian Council of Churches, and the resulting working party has issued some noteworthy statements on areas of agreement.

Probably never before have so many Christian youth organizations flourished in Australia. Some concentrate on building up the faith of believers, but many are concerned with evangelistic outreach. Bible institutes and colleges have large enrollments.

With 3,000 square miles of territory and only 12 million people, Australia is by far the world’s least densely populated continent. It is highly likely that continuing population problems will cause India, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia to look in the direction of this still largely underdeveloped and attractive land. At the moment the future of Australia is securely tied to the Western world, but the Asian influence will no doubt be felt increasingly. In the face of such possibilities, if Australian church life at the moment is not so vigorous as churchmen would like, at least things are being done. There is a readiness to experiment, and many are interested. Australian Christians face the future with hope and some enthusiasm.

Understanding others is everyone’s business. The parent wants to understand his child; the teacher, his students; the doctor, his patients; the pastor, his congregation; the lawyer, his clients; the executive, his employees; the politician, his constituents; the novelist, his characters; the husband, his wife.

Our ancestors saw few people and had simpler problems in their human relationships. We, by contrast, are becoming part of a complex world-society of billions. More and more, we spend our days with others and must face the problems created by being with others.

The idea of sensitivity can help Christians understand their obligations to the living God and to their fellow men. Christians have a responsibility to be sensitive, to try to perceive and respond to a variety of stimuli. They should be sensitive to people, to human need, to sin, and to the divine will. These are stimuli that demand a Christian response.

First, Christians need to be sensitive to people, and this requires high motivation to understand others and an openness to new experiences with them. Christ commanded that his followers love their neighbors, and understanding is a big part of living. A teen-ager may respond to a quarrel with his parents by saying: “They don’t love me.” He feels unloved because he feels misunderstood. Parents may feel their children do not love them if the children fail to understand the importance of what the parents are trying to communicate to them.

To be sensitive to people, we must be open to experiences with people. Much of our failure to understand our children, our spouses, or our colleagues comes from a failure to be open. Sometimes we are not open because we simply are not physically available. Many parents fail to understand their children simply because they are never around. They are not at home enough to talk with, play with, and in other ways experience life with their children.

Many marriages fall apart because of the unavailability of the one partner to the other. Understanding demands communication. The best kind of communication comes when one can experience the total presence of another person. Anyone who has been through courtship knows that eye-to-eye communication does much more than letters or telephone calls to deepen a relationship.

Physical availability is important if we are to understand people. But it does not ensure understanding. We must also be psychologically open and willing to give full attention to the other person. To decide to “be available” but then to tune the other person out by watching television or reading the newspaper or in some other way obstructing the channels of communication will accomplish little. Our listening must be sincere if it is to lead us into new depths of understanding another person. We must be willing to hear what he says, though we may find it unpleasant and disturbing.

Second, Christians need to be sensitive to human need, not only the needs they see around them but the great problems and needs of the family of man. Overpopulation, widespread hunger, the plight of war victims—problems like these require social and often political solutions.

It is all too easy to be callous toward these great needs. Most of us have enough problems of our own—we don’t feel we need a few more. Yet our Christian responsibility involves the whole human race. The whole world belongs to its Creator. As his servants, we must feel the world family to be an important part of our concern.

Once we have become aware of human need, then we must be prepared to give of ourselves. For some of us this will mean entering a vocation that ministers to the needs of people. Others will have to give money sacrificially. Others will need to become involved politically—writing letters to congressmen, working in a political party, even running for political office.

Third, Christians need to be sensitive to sin. Closely related to the matter of human need is the matter of social sin. Many Christians refuse to take seriously the matter of social injustice. Yet the Bible gives many examples of prophets who spoke out in the name of the living God against this kind of injustice. Problems of injustice abound in our nation. We only need eyes to see and ears to hear.

Once we have seen social evils, we must be willing to speak out. This is not easy. To take a stand for social justice in our society is often risky business. Many ministers in both the North and the South have been driven from their pulpits for speaking out on the race issue. Still biblical faith calls us to be aware of social evil and to speak out in the name of a righteous and holy God.

Besides being sensitive to social sin, we must also be sensitive to personal sin. Some people who are quite aware of social injustice seem incapable of putting their own morality in order. We must be willing to hear the feedback that comes from our own conscience and from others about our own problems, our own personal habits and attitudes that in no way glorify God. Once we have heard this, then we must be prepared to change. This calls for old-fashioned confession and repentance. In this way we can become better servants of the living God.

Fourth, Christians need to be sensitive to the divine will. The Christian needs to ask: What is God’s will for my life? What is God’s will for me this year? What is God’s will for me right now?

How can we find out what God’s will is? Let me set down six practices I have found helpful. We can know God’s will through (1) careful study of the Holy Scriptures; (2) regular prayer in which we earnestly seek to know his will; (3) conversation with fellow Christians; (4) knowing ourselves as best we can; (5) doing that little bit that we know to be his will (when we do, more will be revealed to us); (6) learning from our mistakes.

Once we feel we know God’s will, then it is important to act with courage when the time is right. This is particularly important in our attempts to win people to the Christian faith. We may sense that the time is right to speak to a person about the Saviour but then back off because we lack courage. Or we may know we should speak to someone and have the courage to do it, but be unable to tell when the time is ripe for doing it. It is important to sense God’s timing. We must hear his voice and then act with courage at the right moment.

Jesus Christ was a man who was sensitive to the divine will, to sin, to human need, and to people. This sensitivity was vividly demonstrated in his meeting of the Samaritan woman at the well, his feeding of the five thousand, his purging of the Temple, his going to his death on the cross. And his plea to his people is, “Follow me.”

In the highly commercial world of entertainment, publicists long ago recognized the value of appealing to the voyeurism of the masses. The shill artist working the girlie show at a county fair leers at the country boy and promises more of the same—and better!—inside. The Times Square marquee froths in frenzies of comparison: “Female Animal begins where Fanny Hill left off!” Advertisem*nts turn the theater pages of the sedate New York Times—“All the news that’s fit to print”—into a succession of titillating appeals:

An erotic odyssey … through the perverse … the phallic … the mystic and the sad*stic …

Without a Stitch is a Danish sex-education film which bars no holds!

Special! Direct from Europe: The newest film from Denmark where prurient interest is legal!

A far-out collage … a catatonic young man, a bizarre madhouse, a weird doctor, a gun-fetishist teacher and wife, black humor, adultery, pregnancy, abortion, death.

These panderings appeal to the basest nature in man, whose preoccupation with the grotesque and distorted subjects of his society has always found its adequate expression. The barbarism of the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, the tours of Bedlam, the brothel spectacles in the Tenderloin, the propositions in the Free Press and the East Village Other—these are the natural results of that unrepressed bestial*ty of which St. Paul speaks at the outset of his letter to the Romans.

Thus, because they have not seen fit to acknowledge God, he has given them up to their own depraved reason. This leads them to break all rules of conduct. They are filled with every kind of injustice, mischief, rapacity, and malice; they are one mass of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and malevolence; whisperers and scandal-mongerers, hateful to God, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent new kinds of mischief, they show no loyalty to parents, no conscience, no fidelity to their plighted word; they are without natural affection and without pity. They know well enough the just decree of God, that those who behave like this deserve to die, and yet they do it; not only so, they actually applaud such practices (Rom. 1:28–32, NEB).

Hamlet said that the purpose of drama is “to hold as twere the mirror up to nature.” If so, we must assume that the image of our society that we find in our plays and motion pictures is as William Barrett has described it:

There is a painful irony in the new image of man that is emerging, however fragmentarily, from the art of our time. An observer from another planet might well be struck by the disparity between the enormous power which our age has concentrated in its external life and the inner poverty which our age seeks to expose to view. This is, after all, the age that has discovered and harnessed atomic energy, that has made airplanes that fly faster than the sun, and that will, in a few years (perhaps in a few months), have atomic-powered planes which can fly through outer space and not need to return to mother earth for weeks. What cannot man do! He has greater power now than Prometheus or Icarus or any of those daring mythical heroes who were later to succumb to the disaster of pride. But if an observer from Mars were to turn his attention from these external appurtenances of power to the shape of man as revealed in our novels, plays, painting, and sculpture, he would find there a creature full of holes and gaps, faceless, riddled with doubts and negations, starkly finite (Irrational Man).

Yet this is not the message we receive from most social commentators. We hear instead of the glory of our new freedoms and the grandeur of our passage into the Age of Aquarius.

The evangelical Christian, thus comforted, may feel confused, even trapped. He knows that he is in this world yet not of this world. It is not his purpose to be “with it,” turned on to the rhythms of each different drummer. Still, it is his purpose to serve, and he hopes to find an appropriate means of service. As he participates in the cultural life around him—attending to his interests in education, in science, in the arts—he knows he can there learn something of value to the service he brings. But all too often the evangelical is victimized by naivete. He is told—and he believes—that sinful man’s imagination is saying what it is not capable of saying. Then comes the uneasiness. “Perhaps,” he says, “in the narrowness of my vision, I have missed a glimpse of transcendence.”

Evangelical Christianity is suffering from an overdose of sudden sophistication. Freed from the enshackling interdictions of the fundamentalist taboos—“Thou shalt not attend the theater, motion pictures, ballet, or opera”—many evangelicals feel at liberty to attend a Broadway show or the local moviehouse. But much of what they find offered as art, by today’s relativist standards, many persons would recognize as undisguised smut.

The first reaction is often one of immediate offense—not at the lewdness so much as at its pretentious posturing as art. The sense of having been cheated is never pleasant; one feels the bristling that tells him he has once again been bilked. Then, it seems, the rationalizations begin, the attempts at justifying the experience in the name of narrowing the cultural gap between generations or, worse, consecrating the experience in the name of redemptive theology. Before the drive home has been completed, the Christ-symbolism has been all worked out; the religious significance of every disagreeable scene has been authenticated. The pragmatic evangelical has salvaged his evening and placated his conscience.

It should be clear that some contemporary plays and films do indeed attempt to render a religious experience. Although I cannot claim to understand their intentions, it seems to me that Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were attempting to show in some measure the validity of the Christian claim in their movie Easy Rider. Several scenes speak to the point. Early in the cross-country trek, the two cyclists stop for a meal at a rancher’s home. The blessing before the meal leads to a comment about the serenity of the rancher’s life. Later, at the hippie commune, the family gathers to ask God’s blessing on the seed just planted. The 360°-panning camera scrutinizes each face and fails to identify a disbeliever in the group. In the New Orleans episode, the LSD-induced hallucinations are uniformly terrifying and unfulfilling. They are also rooted in Christian relationships and their demonic antitheses. The rosary, the statutes of saints and angels in a graveyard, the prostitution of agape into eros, are strikingly portrayed in a montage of scenes that brings the viewer to the rim of Dante’s Second Circle.

But Easy Rider does not pretend to go beyond this. There is no sloppy, sentimentalized attempt to transform either principal into a Christ-figure. Their deaths are representative not of soteriology but of aimless bigotry. After their wretched experience at Mardi Gras, one says to the other, “We blew it,” and the viewer knows what he means. In these respects Easy Rider is exceptional in the clarity and simplicity of its religious implications and their Christian applications.

Most contemporary films and dramas are more ambiguous. Out of this ambiguity there often develops, among both the professional critics and the coffee-cup amateurs, a critical opinion composed of aesthetic nonsense and theological rubbish. Such criticism is dishonest to sound aesthetics and to sound doctrine. One is not surprised to find the spiritually blind leading the blind. What is truly disappointing is to find ministers and theologians and other persons of putative insight cowering before the public’s insatiate lust, shrugging off their responsibilities as prophets to join the vanguard of the profane.

Every obscenity trial lately seems to produce more clergymen as witnesses for the play or movie than can be found to testify against it. The champions of this revival of Dionysiac Christianity seem centered on the south side of Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village. There one can attend LeRoi Jones’s newest diatribe, Slave Ship, housed at the Washington Square United Methodist Church. Just to the east stands the Adoniram Judson Memorial Church, a long-time base for experimental drama, including nude dancing in front of the altar. Passers-by will scarcely notice the cornerstone of the church—a fountain, its metal cover splattered with city filth, and on its faces in faded carving these words: “Let him that is athirst come and drink of the water of life freely.”

Yet in today’s inverted economy, the thirsting masses cannot be sure that the Water of Life will be offered from some pulpits. Instead they may be served the bitter waters of anarchy and upheaval or else the elixirs and aphrodisiacs of our amoral art. To quench their thirst they may need to turn to the rock musicians, who sing “Jesus is just all right with me” but never tell why. And if some honest seeker were to ask for the answers to life’s most pressing questions, he might well find himself directed to the Biltmore Theater and Hair.

According to a recent issue of New York magazine, scalpers can still get $50 for a pair of good tickets to the long-running Broadway show Hair. Weekend seats are sold out more than eight months in advance. Billed as “The American Tribal-Love Rock Musical,” Hair is a prototype of the emerging theater, a theater that represents itself as being anarchistic and improvisational. In fact, however, Hair is carefully structured, if not indeed contrived. Its gestures are studied, its music is commercial, its lyrics combine modish audacity with cliches and bromides reminiscent of Nellie Forbush and Lieutenant Joe Cable. Its non-book, aptly termed as such by the authors, consists of the attempts of Berger, Woof, Hud, Shelia, and the rest of the self-styled tribe to keep Claude from the draft. This is the production of which Clive Barnes, the Times critic, has written, “If you have just one show to see, make it Hair!”

And what is Hair? It is a dramatized concert rather than a play; the performers are singers, not actors. Its best moment is the famous nude scene that closes the first act with Claude’s singing,

Where do I go?

And will I ever discover why I must live and die?

The nudity, for all its sensationalism, contributes to the song’s sense of futility and essential aloneness. It comes as one of the most restrained moments in the play; it may, in fact, be the most chaste as well. For Hair, if the truth be told, is an interminable dirty joke—not funny, not ribald, not bawdy as is much of the great comedy of literature, but dirty, in the crude fashion of the junior-high locker room or the lavatory in the bus depot. The effect produced, in spite of lighting stunts and choreographic gymnastics, is one of boredom—simple boredom.

The song “Sodomy” places Hair in its philosophical milieu. After enumerating several varieties of sexual activity, the singer concludes that “masturbation can be fun.” This declaration typifies the level of serious thought arrived at in the play. It points unmistakably to the early-adolescent mentality in its preoccupation with pubic hair and other aspects of the human body. Hence the repeated gesturing, the imitations of intercourse, the self-conscious auto-eroticism, are manifestly isolated, alienated, cut off from any possible experience of joy—just as masturbation must be. The closing song, “Let the Sunshine In,” is undoubtedly one of the most ironic and anti-climactic finales in the history of musical drama.

Yet Hair professes to speak the truth. “Discover America—See Hair,” its posters read. New productions have recently opened in Toronto and Tokyo, and everywhere the critics echo each other, while the bemused public nods compliantly.

The Christian must leave Hair, and many another current show, knowing he has been lied to—lied to by performers whose production maintains that chaos is freedom (while repeating the same lines, the same blocking, night after night) and that discord is harmony (while singing and playing rhyming words set to conventional chord structures, song after song). Lied to by critics, not one of whom dares to declare his weariness with attempts at “truth” through this or that perversion of love; not one with fortitude enough to say that violence is ugly, that hyper-sexuality is also common in dog-packs chasing a bitch in heat, that psychosis or neurosis is no longer a novelty disease to be exposed to public ridicule, and that the shocking language has all been said before, by Marine drill instructors and by little boys trying to sound tough.

The Christian will also know that he has been lied to by some preachers desperate to appear informed; by theologians eager to appear hip; by youngsters of easily impressionable enthusiasm; by persons pathetically afraid of not being “with it.”

Worst of all, such a Christian may well feel he has lied to himself in expecting more than a sick and dying world can offer of itself. When he comes to this realization, he will read with caution and with apprehension the final verse of Romans chapter one. And perhaps, in the future, he will refuse to be intimidated by those false and shallow evaluations that dignify disorder and attempt to sanctify a screech in the night.

HYMN TO GOD ON MY WAY TO HIM

I sing of rumored splendor hiding as

it were across a dried and fissured fiood

of grayness. Dead it seems. My search

like climbing some black, shaken

hill and slipping, lurching

on a viscous something most like blood

that trickles down its side.

Until that awful, death dark

moment when one step returns in

finding nothing where it should have marked

a way; but nothing there except a wide

uncharted gap of emptiness. There I fall

and drop disgusted (no, much more—

done) down and breathe, I think, my last.

Finished, flickering, almost out—but then before

the final rattle something still and small.

All dead but new-found ears that hear;

no life but past-blind eyes that seel

It’s true—the rumors live again.

I’m hugged and laughed with, told with awful

tenderness that he has long been

on his way to me.

MARK NOLL

There is a Maginot Line mentality among evangelicals that shows up in many particulars. While we valiantly hold the line on some item, the panzer divisions of evil sweep right around our defenses and conquer the rear. One of these areas is federal aid to higher education.

As a youth I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the orthodox position on separation of church and state. I could also recite the evils of “Romanism” and the evidence for political machination. Much of the evidence was stale, though, and certainly it did not take into account the ways in which American Catholicism is now adapting to the American scene and to the democratic or pluralistic way of life.

What the orthodox Protestant position on separation of church and state, no matter how noble its theory, really seemed to mean, as I now look back upon it, was, “Don’t let the Catholics get anything.” Therefore our strategy and our activity were aroused wherever we could smell a possibility of tax support for any Catholic project—we were automatically against it. Our efforts were not necessarily wrong; but while we were trying to hold that bastion, the real and much greater enemy swept around us and conquered.

To put it baldly: While we were saving ourselves from the Catholics we sold out to secularism! We kept the Catholics from getting tax dollars and at the same time allowed those dollars to be used to subsidize irreligion, atheism, godlessness, humanism, naturalism, mechanism, and other idolatrous anti-Christian creeds. One reason why this happened was that in the heyday of liberalism, evangelicals, under the banner of evangelism, became anti-intellectual. The result of anti-intellectualism was the naïve assumption that secularized education was merely a neutral lack. We fooled ourselves into thinking that secular education was harmless as long as we could keep the Catholics, or some other denomination, from using it to teach their particular views. We still live in this naïve view, as is proved by the vast number of evangelicals who send their youth to secular universities and colleges, supposing that, aside from Bible and religion courses, subjects have the same content and are taught in the same way in both secular and Christian schools.

Let there be no mistake about it. There is a very real difference between the secular and the truly Christian institution. The difference is found in the classroom. It makes a difference whether the whole range of arts and sciences is seen within the framework of a Christian world view. In the specific disciplines the difference is probably least in mathematics (which Brunner said was least disturbed by the Fall). But in some of the more sensitive areas it is almost a life-and-death matter.

In science, for instance, when theories of origins are under consideration, it makes an enormous difference whether the door is left open for creation or whether it is arbitrarily and blindly ruled out. In sociology and psychology, it makes all the difference in the world what basic view of man is adopted. Is he a cog in the relentlessly turning wheels, just a part of a machine? Or is he free? Is there anything more to man than his observable behavior? Are norms for his conduct to be determined by statistical averages that show what most men are doing? Or could there be a revealed standard? Is man the hopeless, meaningless, idiotic, and pathetic creature reflected in the art, music, and literature of our day? Or, on the other hand, is he still the thing of glorious beauty and value about which the humanists talk? Is our view of man to be idealistic or pessimistic? The Christian, of course, is a realist. He knows both the sublimity and the wretchedness of man—his wisdom and his foolishness. But he sees him as redeemable. That is the third dimension. It is hope.

These considerations are not just theoretical. We must face the facts. If we evangelicals are to have youth prepared to live in a society in which Christians are increasingly a minority and are surrounded with increasing paganism, they must, in addition to a personal experience of Christ, which is basic, have an intellectual understanding of their faith and its relation to the arts and sciences. The personal experience of Christ may be maintained by students in a secular university. But many who do so permit a dichotomy in their lives. Their personal faith is one thing, their intellectual life another. This is not good enough for leadership in the days ahead. Because an intellectual understanding of the relation of the liberal arts to the Christian faith is not given in the secular university, keeping the evangelical colleges alive and relevant is a life-and-death matter.

By relevant is meant, of course, that these colleges must be as strong in their attitude of open inquiry as in their commitment to Christ. The two things must be self-consciously kept in balance. There are church colleges whose inquiry is so open and broad that it precludes any commitment. There are others whose Christian commitment is so dogmatic that it precludes any real openness of inquiry. The relevant Christian college has to keep these in real balance and not allow either one to transcend the other.

In the forties, undergraduates were about evenly distributed between private and tax-supported colleges. Today the trend away from private and toward public higher education has become a tidal wave.

There are, perhaps, three special reasons for this tide. First is the simple matter of costs. Tuition in private colleges has gone so high that multitudes of students do not even consider these schools. A student can save at least half by going to a state instead of a private institution. Secondly, there is the assistance given by planners. There are many, both in the Office of Education in Washington and outside, who see no future for the private college. These persons openly desire a national system of education in which the standardization of education would come, not from the innovative experimentation and excellence of private institutions, as in the past, but from the planners in Washington. One can sympathize with their desire to bring the schools of impoverished states up to standard, but the loss of private education would be horrendous. The third reason for the growing tide toward tax-supported institutions is their greater permissiveness about student conduct, something that appeals to growing numbers of youth.

The major educational associations of our day have joined the prestigious American Council on Education in asserting that the problems of all institutions of higher education are now so great that they can be solved only with massive federal aid. Present aid directed to special projects is inadequate, they say, and must be supplemented by direct block grants to the institutions.

In my judgment, this kind of aid is inevitable. But when it comes, will it also be available to private institutions? The tax-supported institutions will oppose this, for they want it all for themselves, and most of them would be glad to see the demise of private education in the interest of a nationally (or state) controlled system. There is also the question of constitutionality. It is difficult to predict what the Supreme Court will do. Many church colleges, including Catholic institutions, are cutting their official ties with churches by setting up independent boards of trustees in the hope that this will let them under the line. Still, it is possible that the court will take a new line, as it has on other issues, like school buses.

If that should happen and grants become available to church colleges, evangelicals may have to rethink their position. They may have to wrestle with the question whether it is better to have tax dollars support religious colleges—Jewish or Mormon or Catholic or Protestant—for their respective constituencies, than to have a tax-supported system that is exclusively secular and godless.

Some will insist that there is a third alternative: keeping private schools alive through private funds. There was a day when this argument was realistic. It is no longer. Educational costs have advanced in such astronomical ways that, for a few already wealthy institutions, small church colleges have about as much likelihood of financing their future out of their present resources as private industry has of managing the space-exploration program without the government.

There is a better way of solving the problem, but it is much less likely to be adopted nationally, though we might make the effort. It is through tuition-equalization grants to the student. This grant would help pay the difference between costs at a tax-supported institution and costs at a private college. Several states already have such provisions. If this kind of aid could be made available on a national basis and in amounts large enough to allow institutions to charge the real cost of education in tuition fees, the problem of the private college might be solved. Still another method is to allow parents to claim tuition that they have paid for their children as an income-tax credit.

President Upton of Beloit College has proposed an extension of this idea, making it the basis of all tax support of higher education. He suggests that the tax-supported institutions arrive at a cost-per-student figure, which would then be the standard tuition fee. All state and federal aid to education would be paid, not as grants to institutions, but as grants to bona fide students to cover this standard tuition charge. The student could use the grant in the school of his choice. This would get around the church-state issue, really cover the cost of education, preserve the right of the student to choose his type of education, and preserve the life of the private college if it was good enough to attract students. This plan seems by far the best to me, but I suffer from no illusions about its acceptability to tax-supported institutions.

Any plan by which the grants are made to the students has the advantage of helping to restore the student’s right to choose the kind of education he feels to be suitable for him. We have become very sensitive to this right in the case of those who have suffered from racial or economic discrimination. When will we become sensitive to the discrimination against religion in education that is part of the present injustice? It has been assumed that basic education should be made available to all with tax monies and that religious education was a luxury open to those who could afford it. But what about the students who believe no education is basic that leaves God and religion out? Their fundamental right is being sabotaged with our tax dollars. We are subsidizing irreligion. Government, in effect, is saying to students, “Come now, leave God out of your education and we will pay most of the bill.” To some of us this is tantamount to subsidizing inadequate, not to say bad, education.

In a pluralistic society, should Washington planners have the right to say what education shall be subsidized? If the rich man’s son is subsidized in a secular college, should not the religious student have a right to an equal subsidy in the college of his choice? I think there is a fundamental bit of human right involved here, and we have been silent about this injustice much too long.

Evangelicals must wise up to the danger of secularized education and the necessity of keeping Christian colleges alive and vigorous. To do so, we must take a searching look at the legitimate ways in which tax money may be used to help. Either we must agree on a program and fight for it, or we must face the alternatives. They are just two. One is to let Christian colleges die and secularism triumph. The other is to undertake the private financing of Christian colleges, and this would call for the kind of zeal that hitherto we have shown only for evangelism and missions.

Our readers will be especially pleased with the publication of the Frankfurt Declaration, which was brought to our attention by Donald McGavran of the School of World Mission at Fuller Seminary. Dr. McGavran wrote an introduction to the document for us. He was one of the most vocal critics of the Section II (“Renewal in Mission”) draft of the Uppsala assembly of the World Council of Churches (see August 16, 1968, issue, pages 4–7) and helped to bring about important changes in the final document.

W. Stanford Reid distinguishes between a true and a false humanism, relating the latter to current patterns of thought advocated by Sartre and Freudians. Clark Pinnock’s essay will cheer those who long ago concluded that dialectical theology ends up in pure subjectivism. He calls for a return to evangelical theology as the only viable alternative. Klaas Runia refutes the notion that Christians ought to be other-worldly and thus not interested in culture. He appeals for solid and persistent efforts by evangelicals to bring culture more in line with the Word of God.

Readers will look forward to seeing the films of Billy Graham’s Knoxville crusade, which has just ended. The films will be telecast this summer.

Kudos to J. Howard Pew, eighty-eight-year-old-member of our board, who received the William Penn Award in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. Mr. Pew was cited for his “monumental contribution to the well-being of this region.”

A couple of years ago I was having lunch in Quincy House at Harvard and there fell into conversation with a young man from What Cheer, Iowa. He was doing some teaching at Harvard and was serving as a counselor and advisor of undergraduates, and he was doing very well in both assignments. Since then he has been given a post in an outstanding college on the West Coast. This young man not only had started out in a small town—what more can be said of What Cheer, Iowa?—but had graduated from a small church-related college of somewhat Dutch background.

We talked about his preparation for a successful career in the Harvard Graduate School. “Tell me,” I said, “do you find much difference between the students here at Harvard and those who went to your own college? And what about preparation in a small college for a large university?”

“I think there are always a few geniuses floating around the university somewhere,” he replied. “Take a Leonard Bernstein, for example—we always have some of them in production. But as far as the cross section is concerned, I think the best students at Harvard are matched by the best students at the small college, the only difference being that at Harvard there are more of them. So the best students are about the same, but the average of the student body at Harvard is higher. As for professors, there are always some very good ones in small colleges, and you always have access to the best ones there, something that isn’t always true in the large schools.”

The church-related colleges are now, as always, skidding along on the edge of financial disaster. Many people are ready to wrap them up and forget about them, feeling they have served their time and are no longer capable of competing with the heavily endowed Harvards or the universities that wallow in the affluence of state support. What has dropped out of the discussion, however, is a lack of confidence—confidence in what church-related colleges are accomplishing in the total educational scheme, confidence in what they could accomplish if they would concentrate again on what they ought to be and what they ought to do. I am convinced that if this confidence were regained, proper financial support would follow.

There were reasons why church-related colleges were started in the first place, reasons why they took on a certain climate and atmosphere of life, why they have constantly fed graduate schools (not to mention the schools and the churches) with great distinction, and why millions and millions of dollars have been poured into them across the years. Enough people have believed in them to support them with students and money, and results have been gratifying. Do they now need a fresh start? I should like to make a few suggestions.

First, most colleges will have to retreat before they can go forward. As C. S. Lewis once suggested, it doesn’t matter how fast we are moving if we are on the wrong road; the only way to go forward is to go back to the place where we got off the road.

Most church colleges ought to reduce the number of their students so as to improve quality both in academics and in moral suasion. Colleges have been building dormitories and using government money, and so they have to keep the dormitories filled with warm bodies. As a result, despite loud affirmations to the contrary, they have lowered their admission standards in every direction. If they cannot maintain quality, they have no reason for continuing their existence. They have nothing better to offer than state universities. Colleges are not reform schools, or special recess centers for the mentally deficient. To cut back on a student body is a very, very expensive operation, but unless this price is paid we can just forget any worthwhile contribution from the small, liberal-arts, church-related college.

Second, some faculty members ought to be unloaded. (This means big trouble, as anyone who has ever tried to unload a college professor knows.) The ones who should go are those who in general do not agree with the purposes of the college, and who by affirmation and innuendo cut the college down in the classroom. By the manner of their own lives they are audio-visual aids for a great many things the college doesn’t stand for.

Third, to get anything like the above accomplished requires a special kind of board. Board members must be willing to stand the heat, in these days when a great many newsmen are making a living from the troubles of college campuses. The heat will come from some disgruntled parents, too, and there may even be a lawsuit or two, not to mention a little picketing.

Fourth, the president of the college must be given full power to act as the chief executive officer of the board. The function of a board is to ask questions like these of the president: What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How is it working? Have you examined other options? If the president is ineffective, he should be unloaded. If he is effective, he should be supported to the hilt against all comers. When the board no longer supports him completely, the president should resign.

It doesn’t do in college circles anymore to separate responsibility and power in the man who is supposed to be in charge. Judging by the number of colleges looking for presidents right now, it is no great thing to be a college president. And those who want colleges had better begin thinking seriously about what it takes to create an educational system and keep it useful.

As for the students, I guess the time has come for the majority of them to quit taking the guff from the minority. The ability to be loud, rough, and argumentative does not always line up with where the truth is. College students need to realize that college is an opportunity that they are welcome to pay for and use but not welcome to destroy for others. Most college students already look on college as an opportunity. They are being robbed by their peers.

As I suggested earlier, all this is very, very expensive. But the road we are on now is leading to disaster. This is manifest to us all. Some board and some president pretty soon now will have to find the fortitude to lose money, suffer misunderstanding, look bad—in short, bear a cross. If the church college goes down the drain, I have a feeling that a great many other things we can’t afford to lose will go down the same drain. We can no longer serve God and mammon.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

Some call it an “underground” movement. Others describe it as the closest thing to New Testament Christianity this country has ever seen. But those involved—thousands of bearded, long-haired, rather unkempt former hippies—term it a “spiritual revolution.”

“These kids still look like hippies,” says the just-over-thirty youth minister of Hollywood (California) Presbyterian Church, Don Williams. “But the change on the inside is miraculous!”

“This ‘revolution’ is taking place almost completely outside the organized church,” Williams adds. “Christian kids today are out talking about Christ on the streets, in churches, at the beach.” He parallels the rise of Christianity with the fall of hippiedom: young people are disillusioned, he believes, when the hippies’ solutions don’t work, and they turn to Christ for workable answers.

Although their appearance raises eyebrows at many churches, some churches not only accept these young people but go out looking for them as well. One such church, First Baptist of Beverly Hills, brings Sunset Strip hippies in for Friday-night rock concerts and sends its pastor, Barry Wood, out to witness and counsel on the strip. Another is Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. This independent church has a thousand members, half of them teen-agers who, three times a week, pack the auditorium for youth services that often last past midnight.

Two years ago Calvary Chapel’s minister, Chuck Smith, realized that “kids who had been on drugs were looking for a way back.” “They had accepted Christ,” he says, “but there was no place to go.” The result was a Christian commune—the first of hundreds now dotting the West Coast—“closely related to the early Christian practice of believers’ living together and sharing what they have.” New residents in the communes begin with a two-week “free ride” in order to orient themselves to a new way of life. Then they must decide whether to get a job to help support the commune or to enter a witnessing ministry. A married couple usually is in charge of each house.

It’s not a bad way to live, claims a long-haired, bearded runaway from Boston. “I really dig commune living,” Jeff says. “Hippie communes fall apart because each person is doing his ‘own thing.’ But a Christian commune grows and thrives because we’re all bound together by Jesus.”

To reach yet another segment of the youth culture is the aim of Christ’s Patrol. From headquarters in an abandoned movie theater in Rosemead, California, members go out on the streets, to the beaches, and to local hangouts in order to meet bikers and members of outlaw motorcycle gangs on their own grounds.

“We feel like nobody really cares about the bikers,” says president Phil Smith, “but we love them.” “Blade,” as his friends call him, adds: “Bikers passed the church by because they couldn’t see anything real. But as violent as they were for the devil, they become violent with love through Christ and for him.”

Smith is a licensed minister who began to witness to bikers on the streets of England several years ago. He then carried the work around the United States. Since this ministry began five years ago in Cleveland, chapters have sprung up in twenty-one U. S. cities.

These independent ministries in the Los Angeles area are linked by the Hollywood Free Paper, founded six months ago and edited by Duane Pederson, 31. Every two weeks, 75,000 copies hit campuses, streets, beaches, and parks with an evangelistic message. For the churches, the paper provides information about what other Christians are doing. Farther north, in the San Francisco area, Right On serves a similar function.

If this evangelistic youth movement is “underground,” it is because no one can accurately estimate its effect; new converts and organizations appear daily. If it is a “revolution,” it is because of changes in the lives of young people. As one of them exclaimed: “Man, I was on drugs for two years! It was a nowhere trip. Then I met a guy in the park who told me about Jesus Christ and the permanent high he offered me. I accepted Christ that day, and I haven’t been the same since.”

Adds Williams about these revolutionized young people: “‘Clairol Christianity’—only God knowing for sure if you’re a Christian—is a thing of the past.”

RITA KLEIN

A ‘Satellite’ Abandoned

The Christian and Missionary Alliance, which planned to establish a “satellite seminary” adjacent to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago, will have to seek an alternative. The whole deal is off. CMA officials had been planning the cooperative venture with Trinity, operated by the Evangelical Free Church, for three years.

The Free Church Board of Education had adopted a resolution expressing itself as feeling favorable toward the proposal, and proceeding on that action the CMA purchased twenty acres of land for erection of buildings adjacent to the Trinity campus. CMA officials disclosed, however, that earlier this year they were notified that the Free Church Board of Education had decided to terminate the negotiations. Free Church spokesmen cited additional costs and administrative burdens and “internal problems” as key factors in their decision.

The news stunned the more than 1,000 delegates attending the seventy-third annual General Council of the CMA in Toronto last month. The CMA does not have a seminary of its own at the present time, and had counted on affiliation with Trinity.

Observers also had viewed the proposal as a healthful reversal of the trend toward educational fragmentation that has long characterized the U. S. evangelical scene.

Under the affiliation plan, CMA students would have taken some classes at Trinity and some at the newly established satellite campus under CMA professors.

Many in the CMA feel they are losing promising young men to other denominations because they have no seminary of their own. Prior to the Trinity negotiations, the CMA had for a time recognized the Graduate School of Theology at Wheaton College for its prospective ministers, and a special curriculum had been arranged for CMA students who matriculated there. The CMA terminated that arrangement several years ago.

Pregnancies By Permission

A Church of England clergyman has suggested that married couples be licensed by the state to have children according to the level of their intelligence. Said the Reverend Stanley Owen, rector of Elmdon-with-Bickenhill: “It may sound drastic, but the position is such that if drastic measures are not taken, the result will be absolute murder.” In Owen’s view a normal couple should be licensed to have two children, a couple graded as inferior should be limited to one, and an exceptional couple could have three or four. Such rigid state birth control would prevent starvation in the year 2,000, he says.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Manila Crusade: Bold New Program

A bold cooperative program of evangelism that will involve the entire Philippine Christian church during the next five years was unanimously approved last month. Planners of this aggressive thrust are dedicated Filipino churchmen who compose a national group called the National Fellowship for Philippine Evangelism (NAFE).

This group sponsored the eight-day All Philippines Congress on Evangelism May 12–20 atop the hills of Cainta, Rizal, on the outskirts of Manila. More than 300 delegates and observers from some fifty-six denominations and Christian organizations of the country attended. Most of the NAFE members were participants at the Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism held in Singapore in 1968; the rest attended the Berlin World Congress on Evangelism in 1966.

The Philippine congress served as a launching pad for the new evangelistic program and will be followed by a year of regional seminars on evangelism throughout the Philippines. These will be followed, in turn, by a two-year Evangelism-in-Depth program. The ultimate goal of the congress is to set up at least 10,000 evangelistic Bible study groups all over the country; these are expected to be the outgrowth of a national evangelistic crusade in Manila to be held after the in-depth program.

The venture, first of its kind in the Philippines, is considered to be the most carefully planned follow-up to any evangelism congress held in Asia.

During the year of preparation for the Philippine congress there were strong doubts among conservative evangelicals about the participation of churches from the conciliar and ecumenical groups. But these feelings dissipated under the ministry of Dr. Leon Morris of Australia, the main Bible-hour speaker. Conservative and liberal Philippine church leaders studied the Bible together for eight days under his leadership.

Issues on theology were for the first time brought into the open by the young and brilliant theologian from India, Dr. Saphir Philip Athyal. The dean of the Union Biblical Seminary in Yeotmal, Maharashtra, was given a standing ovation for his lectures on the theological dilutions that hinder evangelism. It may be too soon to conclude that the sharp theological cleavage between conservatives and liberals was finally healed, but at least the major differences were made clear.

The congress declaration, presented to the delegates in the final-day plenary session, was hailed as a document for the Philippine church now and in the years to come. Major points in the four-page declaration include a clear statement on evangelism as the primary task of the Church, a categorical definition of the evangel, an endorsem*nt of the centrality of the Word of God, a comprehensive statement on social concern, and a bold declaration on national leadership. After about an hour of deliberation, the congress unanimously approved the declaration and read it in unison. Thunderous applause followed.

The delegates minced no words in confessing that they had come short of the Great Commission, that they had not given primacy to evangelism in their respective churches, and that they had not been responsive and alert to the challenge of evangelism at a time when the country is ready to respond. They admitted “we have pursued a divisive and fragmentary witness when we should have shown a more cooperative and corporate program of evangelism.”

A high point was the paragraph on national leadership: “We hereby declare … our responsibility to reach our own people with the message of Christ. We do not assert this as a right as if the task of the Church is the sole prerogative of the Filipino. We simply and boldly accept the challenge … because we are convinced that the time has come when we as nationals must lead our own people in the task which God has given to the Church in this our land.”

A note of gratitude to foreign missionaries read: “We will always be grateful to missionaries from other lands who have served in our country, and will continue to welcome them as fellow laborers in God’s vineyard.”

What seemed the capstone of the congress declaration was the full endorsem*nt of the program proposed by the NAFE. The Philippine church now looks forward to five years of a corporate and cooperative program of evangelism; its representatives at the congress seemed convinced the effort could well be the most significant chapter in the church’s history.

NENE RAMIENTOS

Catholic Decline

For the first time this century, the Roman Catholic population of the United States decreased last year. As of January 1, there were 47,872,089 U. S. Catholics, down 1,149 from the previous year. Other decreases were in the number of converts, priests and seminarians, and Catholic school students. The number of bishops was up, as were over-all resident parishes, and marriages.

Personalia

Johnson C. Smith University, a small, predominantly black, Presbyterian-related college in Charlotte, North Carolina, will have a white, Roman Catholic dean of freshman studies next fall. Chancellor Leo McLaughlin of Fordham University will help devise an experimental curriculum there.

The newest member of the nude musical Oh! Calcutta is the daughter of Episcopal Bishop Robert W. Hatch of western Massachusetts. Dancing nude doesn’t bother 22-year-old Louise: “It’s very free and very nice. I just feel sorry for people who get uptight about it.”

Composer-arranger Duke Ellington received the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana, this month for his contributions to sacred music.

To preserve “the good Christian people of Georgia,” Governor Lester Maddox threatened to sue two newspapers whose editorial writers, he says, are “lying devils and dirty dogs.” The only publication containing truth these days, says the governor (who may in turn be sued by the papers), is the Bible.

New president of the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association, representing more than 835 missionaries, is Donald E. Hoke, president of Tokyo Christian College.

In Syracuse, New York, a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church won $100,000 in his suit against the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company. Norman R. Davis accused the firm of discrimination when it fired him for sharing his religious convictions with fellow employees.

“Art of Living,” the weekly radio series begun in 1936 by Norman Vincent Peale, will have as speakers this summer Dr. Charles L. Copenhaver, minister of the Reformed Church of Bronxville, New York, and Keith Miller, its first layman, the Episcopalian who wrote Taste of New Wine.

United Methodist Francis L. Garrett will become Navy chief of chaplains next month, succeeding Chaplain James W. Kelly. Garrett, who will gain the rank of rear admiral with the post, won the Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious service” in Viet Nam.

President C. A. Kirkendoll of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, has been elected one of nine bishops of the 400,000-member Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Simpson Bible College will have a new president next month: Mark W. Lee, a Christian and Missionary Alliance minister … The dean of faculty of Westmont College for fifteen years, Frank L. Hieronymus, has resigned, tentatively to return to his former post of professor of history … A former Harvard professor will be Mennonite Goshen (Indiana) College’s tenth president. Dr. J. Lawrence Burkholder will assume the post in July, 1971.

Paul B. Henry, son of the founding editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, received his Ph.D. in political science at Duke University this month and will teach at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the fall.

Union Seminary in New York, an interdenominational Protestant school, and Woodstock College, the oldest Jesuit seminary in America, jointly appointed Father Raymond E. Brown a professor. Brown will assume the position, perhaps the first of its kind in the United States, in July, 1971.

They Say

Dr. Bob Jones, president of Bob Jones University, regarding the four students killed at Kent State University by National Guardsmen: “Those young people got exactly what they were entitled to. I’m all for the police shooting to kill when anyone is in mob violence attempting to destroy property and attack law enforcement officers. More power to them.”

Religion In Transit

Having won dancing privileges, coeds at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, asked permission to wear slacks. Their request denied, they inched up their skirts daily till officials relented. Now they’re dancing in slacks at the Baptist school.

Theological, linguistic, and musical comments were recently published in a “companion” to the 1964 edition of the United Methodist Hymnal. The ecumenical encyclopedia, which covers every period of church history and every form of hymn, was in preparation for eight years.

Eight weeks on the best-seller list (prepared by the New York Times Book Review) and selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club were some of the credits of the New English Bible two months after its publication.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled unconstitutional a proposal to pay teachers of secular subjects in parochial schools with state funds.

Baptized membership in the American Lutheran Church declined during 1969 for the first time in its ten-year history.

Deaths

PAUL W. LAPP, 39, professor of Old Testament and archaeology at Pittsburgh Seminary; former director of the American School for Oriental Research in Jerusalem; drowned near the island of Cyprus.

CLARENCE S. RODDY, 72, professor of homiletics and practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary for more than fifteen years; in Silverton, Oregon.

World Scene

“How much does a missionary cost? We want to buy one.” The question came from Congolese Christians who have not had missionary leadership since the nation won its independence. Doors are wide open, according to Berean Mission.

Haitian Christians reaped a two-to-one harvest from a three-day Lay Institute conducted last month by Campus Crusade for Christ International. Five hundred Haitians, armed with French versions of the Four Spiritual Laws, counted a thousand conversions.

A candidate for baptism into the sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses nearly landed instead in the stomach of a twelve-foot crocodile. Two hundred other candidates for immersion in a river near Lusaka, Zambia, released the crocodile’s captive—and then released the crocodile. “It is a creature of God,” said the local leader.

Divorced New Zealand Anglicans may now remarry in the church if they regret the failure of their first marriage and approach the second with “an avowed intention to abide by the lifelong intent” of their vows.

Baptized Christians compose about four-fifths of 1 per cent of Japan’s population, according to the Japan Christian Yearbook. The 803,615 Japanese Christians include members of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant groups.

Forty-one Congolese churches, formerly that country’s Protestant Council, recently united to form Church of Christ in the Congo.

East Tennesseans are proud to tell you that they live in “Big Orange Country,” so named in honor of the orange-and-white-clad athletic teams of the University of Tennessee. Folks in this part of the country take their football seriously, and on many an autumn Saturday afternoon they have packed out Knoxville’s Neyland Stadium to pay homage to the usually victorious “Big Orange” football team.

Recently on ten successive days (May 22–31) East Tennesseans poured into the stadium for a different kind of worship. The cries of “Go Big Orange” were replaced by the singing of hymns, and the action on the artificial turf of the football field came when Dr. Billy Graham invited “hundreds of you to get up out of your seats and come” to the platform to indicate a decision for Jesus Christ. Hundreds did—a total of 12,303 during the Billy Graham East Tennessee Crusade.

Although Knoxville is not a large city (about 180,000 in the greater metropolitan area), 552,000 turned out for the ten meetings. Some crusade planners were surprised and delighted at the response: people came from throughout Tennessee as well as several nearby states.

Knoxville warmly welcomed the crusade team and special guest Ethel Waters; there was the kind of cooperation and participation one might expect from people who live in the “Bible Belt” and the “Volunteer State.” Churches and pastors gave strong support; 5,000 prayer groups were formed; one of the largest choirs (5,500) ever assembled sang; area media gave thorough coverage; and city officials warmly endorsed the effort (each night Mayor Leonard Rogers took his place on the field with other counselors to talk to persons coming forward). Opposition was negligible. One independent Baptist church did manage to schedule services at the same hour as each crusade meeting.

The two largest crowds of the crusade turned out to greet two special visitors. On the first Sunday afternoon, 62,000 persons welcomed singing star Johnny Cash, who told reporters that appearing with Billy Graham was “the pinnacle of my career.” He said he became a Christian at age 12 but was singing more religious songs on his TV program lately because “I’ve come to appreciate the true values of life just recently.” Cash paused between songs (they included “The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago,” “What Is Truth?” and “Were You There?”) to warn young people against drugs. “Take it from a man who’s been there,” he said, “it ain’t worth it.”

The informal atmosphere surrounding the Cash appearance gave way to tension and tight security as the other special guest arrived a few days later. At the invitation of Graham. President Richard Nixon stopped off at Knoxville on his way to the California White House. Before Nixon and his entourage of White House press corps, Tennessee congressmen, and other government officials arrived at the stadium, a rather bizarre battle of slogans and songs broke out between three to four hundred anti-Nixon and anti-war demonstrators, most of them University of Tennessee students, and the rest of the record crowd of more than 70,000 (approximately 25,000 others had been turned away).

When protesters, carrying signs reading “Thou shalt not kill,” shouted anti-war slogans, others in the crowd drowned them out with patriotic songs. Most of the crowd broke into applause when a few of the demonstrators were removed by police. The conflict continued through Graham’s words of welcome and President Nixon’s speech.

Nixon, who later met with the president of the University of Tennessee Student Government Association aboard “Air Force One,” spoke about the problems of youth. “I believe in young America and I think that they have something to say,” the President affirmed. In his introduction of Nixon, Graham said that all the recent presidents had made unpopular decisions because they felt that they were doing so “in the best interest of the country.” He stated that Nixon was President of all the people and as such “deserves the sympathy, understanding and prayers of all the American people.”

Many of the protesters left when Graham began to preach. In later interviews some of them indicated they felt things had at times gone beyond what they had intended (especially when obscenities were shouted during a prayer for God’s blessing on the President). Others stated that plans for a further demonstration (including some sort of activity during the invitation) had been abandoned. Some students distributed mimeographed leaflets before the service expressing their resentment of what they believed to be a politically motivated invasion of their campus and the crusade. In a later press conference, Graham emphasized that Nixon’s visit wasn’t political. He said he had invited Nixon to speak to the young people during a special youth-night service.

Night after night Graham stressed the themes that have characterized his ministry. He clearly presented submission to Jesus Christ as the answer to the needs of both the individual and society and as the only way of approach to God. Showing a keen awareness of the strong religious orientation of his audience, the evangelist repeatedly pointed out the vast difference between church membership or religion in general and a personal commitment to Jesus Christ.

During the crusade the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association sponsored a School of Evangelism that brought together more than 900 pastors and seminarians to study methods of evangelism.

Graham said his only regret about the crusade was that he had been unable to accept many invitations to speak to various groups. He did find time to go to Oak Ridge to address a gathering of 200 to 300 scientists (he spoke of the problems that science has not solved) and to meet with officials of the Oak Ridge laboratories, who briefed him on current research in the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

Come fall, Tennessee football fans will again crowd into Neyland Stadium to cheer their “Volunteers” to victory. And no doubt many of them will remember the victories won in the lives of thousands of people during the East Tennessee Crusade.

RICHARD L. LOVE

Key ’73: New Resources For Evangelism

Some fifty church leaders christened a promising new effort in evangelism “Key ’73.” The biblically oriented, interdenominational thrust has its sights set on 1973 as a special year of evangelistic emphasis throughout the continent.

A corporation is being formed, a secretariat is being established, and a national coordinator is being sought to implement agreements reached in St. Louis last month at the latest in a series of meetings of top churchmen.

Key ’73 aims to let each participating group (church, denomination, or organization) work out its own evangelistic program, but will seek to develop resources, share information, and undergird the effort with national advertising. There are to be separate “task forces” for congregations, public proclamation, small groups, the media, literature and the arts, and creative evangelism.

So far, the loosely knit Central Committee of Key ’73 has officials from thirty-four Protestant denominations, seven independent evangelical organizations, and three evangelistic associations. Included are large denominations (United Methodists, the three largest Lutheran communions in America, American and Southern Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Christian Churches and Churches of Christ) as well as smaller groups ranging from Pentecostal and Holiness to Mennonite and Friends. This is the first time such a wide spectrum of American Protestantism has agreed to cooperate in an evangelistic effort on a national scale.

A fifteen-member executive committee headed by Dr. Theodore A. Raedeke of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is leading Key ’73 preparations. Office space being leased in St. Louis will be ready for occupancy by September 1.

Key ’73 grew out of a series of informal meetings among evangelical churchmen. The initial stimulus was an editorial in the June 9, 1967, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY entitled, “Somehow, Let’s Get Together.” Evangelism was given priority at an early stage of the discussions and has dominated all the proceedings.

Raedeke has been primarily responsible for the organizational development of Key ’73 while the Reverend Joe Hale of Nashville has prepared an ideological platform. Hale is a convert of a Billy Graham crusade who serves on the United Methodist Board of Evangelism.

The first stated objective of Key ’73 is “to confront every person in North America more fully and more forcefully with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

‘Cross And The Switchblade’ Suffers Schizophrenia

It’s an evangelical natural: a full-length feature film based on David Wilkerson’s best-seller, The Cross and the Switchblade. The story of his work among teen-age gangs in the fifties is well known in church circles. Now the film version, with the teen-age idol of the fifties, Pat Boone, in the leading role, will be released this summer to local theaters (see October 10, 1969, issue, page 52).

A lot of money and work went into its production, and The Cross and the Switchblade could have been a great film. Unfortunately it suffers from being two films, one good and one bad.

The good film incorporates the acting and dialogue of Puerto Rican and black youth in New York City’s ghettos. The actors portray believable characters. They have believable lines, and though young, show themselves masters of their craft. Their story captures the rhythmic accents of inner-city culture. Their violent life style is immediate, now, real in 1970.

The bad film depicts adult interaction with the seething reality of ghetto life. The police come across as buffoons, running around like Keystone Cops. Boone’s Wilkerson walks his way through slum neighborhoods like a white knight with a razor haircut. His lines are simplistic: magic words attracting throngs of eager teen-agers, his acting only sporadically believable.

The bad film is tragic, for the essence of Wilkerson’s story is that God is alive and working in the inner city. Transformations from violent unbelief to humble, open belief should have come through as real, credible, and attractive. Some viewers—those who believe that “magic words” communicate a message—may miss this note of un-believability. For the most part, the film will probably not communicate the reality of God’s love to today’s movie audiences who happen to be young, hip, and, at least, honest about their unbelief.

JOHN EVENSON

Chaos At The Kirk: Pills, But No Miracles?

Uproar in the public gallery, distinguished foreign guests insulted, proceedings disrupted, three arrests, the prime minister confronted by jeering pickets, and a national newspaper accused of “biased, unfair, lying comment.” Any enterprising humanist might thus have made capital out of scenes at last month’s Church of Scotland General Assembly in Edinburgh, and added that if the protagonists were as Christian as they claimed to be, they didn’t love one another very much after all.

Last year a band of militant Protestants, taking their cue from Ian Paisley, who had crossed the sea from Ulster, succeeded in getting the opening session suspended when they cried outrage at the kirk’s reception of a Roman Catholic priest-guest. This year the target was three churchmen from the Greek Orthodox communion: the patriarch of Alexandria, Nikolaos VI; Archbishop Methodios of Axum (Ethiopia); and Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira and Great Britain.

When the newly appointed moderator, Dr. Hugh O. Douglas, began to welcome them, eight protesters in the gallery held up cards spelling out “No POPERY.” Douglas suspended the session in the ensuing outcry and with his guests left the chamber to fifteen minutes of confusion. Led by Paisley’s Scottish colleague, bearded pastor Jack Glass, the Bible-brandishing protesters shouted texts, slogans, and abuse, and before they left showered leaflets on the heads of commissioners.

The Ethiopian Methodios graciously waved aside official apologies. “There are foolish people everywhere,” he said.

Criticism just as deeply felt was expressed in the scheduled program when the assembly discussed the Moral Welfare Committee’s report. This “reluctantly concluded” that in certain circ*mstances contraceptive pills ought not to be denied to unmarried women. Pre-assembly publicity had brought accusation from a newspaper (edited by a prominent evangelical) that “those permissive churchmen” would want next to abolish marriage. “Utter rubbish!” snorted the Reverend John Peat, committee convener, claiming that his report contained one of the most penetrating, positive, and powerful defenses of marriage ever penned.

Some were not convinced. “Feelings of deep distress, shock, and even outrage have been stirred by what the committee has said,” declared the Reverend James Philip of Holyrood Abbey church. A blistering attack came from the Free Kirk Assembly, which was meeting fifty yards away from the national church’s (with whom it has no fraternal exchanges). The pill decision, said the Reverend Hector Cameron, convener of the morals committee, would bring “considerable peace to many a licentious heart” and provide “a proliferating stimulus to the type of calloused womanhood which figured so prominently with the collapse of many great civilizations that went before us.” People would be thrilled to get the impression that the church nowadays was not too hard on a fellow’s or a girl’s little weaknesses, he added.

Another feature of the assembly this year was the first-ever appearance of a woman as Lord High Commissioner—the queen’s representative. In her address Miss Margaret Herbison, formerly minister of social security in the Wilson government, contrasted the “searing poverty” in developing countries with the vast expense of putting men on the moon.

The assembly also: turned down a proposal to replace the King James Version by the New English Bible, but commended the latter for use in public worship; approved a permanent invitation to the Roman Catholic Church to send a representative to the assembly; and received a report showing a decrease in membership over the year of 23,499. (Over the past ten years the kirk has lost 128,000 members.)

The latter point may have been in the mind of the Reverend Murdo Murray when he gave his moderatorial address at the closing of the Free Kirk Assembly. Many ministers in Scotland, said Murray, are total strangers to the Gospel. “It is sad to think of Scotland’s churchgoing people being fed with teaching of men who have openly declared that they do not believe in miracles.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

New Religious Landmarks

Have a yen for vacation travel and a bent for viewing historical landmarks? This summer, enterprising vacationers can tour twenty-two churches and religious buildings in the United States that have just been designated as National Historic Landmarks by Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel.

Each building designated, on recommendation of the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments, will be eligible for a bronze marker and inclusion in the National Park Service’s list of historic landmarks. Many of the structures are still in daily use; they will remain under private ownership. Caretakers are pledged to preserve the buildings’ original architecture and to make them available to visitors.

The new additions to the list of National Landmarks are:

FROM THE RUSSIAN COLONIAL PERIOD—Russian Orthodox Mission Church, Kanai, east shore of Cook Inlet, near Anchorage, Alaska. The Russian Orthodox Church within Fort Ross State Monument, California (erected in 1828). A rare example of a log church constructed on the “vessel” design.

FROM THE FRENCH COLONIAL PERIOD—Church of the Holy Family, Cahokia, Illinois (1786). An unusual example of upright log construction.

FROM THE ENGLISH COLONIAL PERIOD—Christ Church (Episcopal), Alexandria, Virginia (1767). The parish church of George Washington, who was a regular communicant and whose pew, along with that occupied by Robert E. Lee, is preserved. Bruton Parish Church (Episcopal), Williamsburg, Virginia (1712). Restored and preserved by Colonial Williamsburg. Single Brothers’ House, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1768). The earliest major building preserved in the Moravian community of Old Salem. Christ Church (Episcopal), Philadelphia (1727–44; steeple added in 1754). Attended by many of the republic’s early leaders; an outstanding example of Georgian architectural dress. Pompon Hill Chapel, St. James’ Church (Goose Creek), St. James’ Church (Santee River), St. Stephen’s Church, all in the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina (eighteenth century). Well preserved Episcopal churches, described as “superb examples” of the design and architecture of the time. Yocomico Episcopal Church, Westmoreland County, Virginia (1706). “An early, rare, and excellent example of the small, traditional country church that includes elements of both medieval and Georgian architecture.”

FROM THE SPANISH COLONIAL PERIOD—Cathedral of St. Augustine, St. Augustine, Florida (1797; restored after a fire in 1887). Considered to be the finest parish church surviving from Spanish Florida. St. Catherine’s Island, ten miles off the Georgia coast in Liberty County. One of the most important Spanish mission centers in the southeastern United States from 1586 to 1684; later became the home of Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. El Santuaria de Chimeyo, San Estvavel del Ray Mission Church, San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church of Taos, and San Jose de Gracia Church of Taos County, all in New Mexico (late 1700s). Mission Concepcion, San Antonio, Texas (founded in 1716; restored in 1887). One of the oldest buildings in Texas; in regular use as a Catholic parish church since its restoration.

FROM THE MEXICAN PERIOD—Three California missions: La Purisima Mission (Santa Barbara County), San Diego Mission Church (San Diego), and San Luis Rey Mission Church (Oceanside, San Diego County).

GLENN EVERETT

Muzzling Atheists

“Universities today are teaching atheism,” said opera singer Jerome Hines. Because “by every standard atheism is a religion,” he continued, the teaching of atheism should be prohibited on the campuses of universities and colleges receiving federal funds.

Hines announced that he hopes to find a suitable case next fall to institute a legal suit. “Injunctions will be entered.… It could be an anthropology professor, perhaps a psychology professor.” His remarks came unexpectedly during a brief announcement time at the end of a New York meeting of the Fellowship of Christians in the Arts, Media, and Entertainment May 24. There was no discussion.

The singer amplified his comments to a reporter later, saying that he is now enlisting support for his plan. He said he expects to meet with the same group in September to discuss strategy for the suit.

When informed of Hines’s announced intention, Dr. C. Stanley Lowell, associate director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, agreed that Hines had a “point in theory.… If you can attack one [teaching religion], you can attack the other” [teaching atheism]. But in Lowell’s view, it would be hard to pinpoint “overt, open teaching” of atheism for a clear-cut case, and Hines’s chances of winning such a suit would be slim.

In the celebrated Madalyn Murray O’Hair case, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that a required devotional ritual in public grade schools was unconstitutional. Hines’s issue, on the other hand, strikes at the tradition of academic freedom for all points of view (including Christian), and the protection in the Bill of Rights articles on freedom of expression.

Expressing alarm over Hines’s announcement, several leading evangelicals contended that a legal precedent limiting freedom of expression in the classroom would harm Christian witness there, and that even filing such a suit would identify evangelicalism with repression and obscurantism. Some others, however, said that if the suit is filed and loses, the ensuing climate might allow greater freedom for evangelicals who now feel restricted in teaching from their religious commitment.

Summer Service

Scores of students have put down pens (and perhaps protests) for a summer of missionary service. Nearly 800 Southern Baptist young people will serve around the world, sixty-nine of them in twenty-three foreign countries, including South Viet Nam. Eleven Barrington (Rhode Island) College students will go to seven countries.

Their ministries will vary. Some skilled in foreign languages will do personal evangelism; others will work in hospitals and gospel broadcasting, take inventories, or apply their brawn to cleaning and building chores.

Time was when general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church were addressed solely by august elders who had earned their right to be heard. No longer. At last month’s 182nd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in Chicago, everyone seemed to be speaking, and the traditional form of address to delegates (“fathers and brethren”) was dropped as being singularly absurd.

The new openness allowed for a wide diversity of speakers. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Romney defended government policies on Southeast Asia. Presbyterian elder and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird spoke at an early-morning breakfast sponsored by the conservative Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns.

These were highlights. But a full assessment would also include numerous youth advisory delegates (granted power to speak but not vote), the girl who did a two-step on the way to the podium to speak for women’s rights, and the spokesmen for the hippie-type Submarine Church of the West who addressed the assembly in language so vile that it made dozens of commissioners furious and caused some to weep.

Measured by the vehemence of the debate, the most controversial business of the assembly was the report on “Sexuality and the Human. Community,” prepared by a subcommittee of the Council on Church and Society. The report, accepted for study and “appropriate action” by congregations, was already a storm center before the Chicago meeting. It denies that the Bible can provide “systematic ethical guidelines for our time” and substitutes for it the approaches of situation ethics and psychology as the means for dealing with most sexual practices and norms.

The document, among other things, calls laws making hom*osexual acts a felony “morally unsupportable,” favors making contraceptive devices generally available, and urges that all laws against abortion be immediately dropped. The report also seems to open the door to intercourse by some couples before marriage. Although it denies giving “either tacit or explicit approval to premarital sexual intercourse,” it nevertheless says that if such couples have “taken a responsible decision to engage in premarital intercourse, the church should not convey to them the impression that their decision is in conflict with their status as members of the body of Christ.”

Defenders of the report lauded it as “a milestone in church-centered research into the subject of human sexuality.” Critics said it was in obvious opposition to clear biblical principles, “the way of hell rather than the way of heaven,” and divisive. Final vote on the document, implying a desire to study its findings but not necessarily approval of them, was 485 for and 259 against.¹Some commissioners regarded as ironic the added request that the Department of Church and Society “provide further biblical rationale” for the report when it is distributed to the churches.

The significance of the vote was seen most clearly in preceding action that by a similiar majority rejected minority reports reaffirming the covenantal relationship of marriage, approving sexual union only within the bounds of marriage, and acknowledging the Bible’s condemnation of hom*osexuality, fornication, and sexual perversions.

After the report had been received, an attachment expressing conservative views was also passed by the smallest vote margin in the week-long assembly. By only nine votes (356–347) the assembly reaffirmed its “adherence to the moral law of God as revealed in the Old and New Testaments” and acknowledged that lust, adultery, prostitution, fornication, and the practice of hom*osexuality are sin.

In additional action based on the study document but implying full endorsem*nt of the assembly, the commissioners declared that artificial or induced termination of pregnancy is “a personal matter between the patient and her physician,” urged establishment of “medically sound, easily available, and low cost abortion services,” and called for elimination of laws governing the private sexual behavior of consenting adults.

In contrast to the paper on sexuality, a carefully written biblical study preceded the conclusions of the widely praised report “Work of the Holy Spirit.” The document, which deals with charismatic gifts such as tongues, healings, and exorcisms, argues that “the practice of glossolalia should be neither despised nor forbidden” but on the other hand “should not be emphasized nor made normative for the Christian experience.” The report, two years in the making, appeared to be received without dissent.

The report also reminded the ecumenical church that the new Pentecostalism may have a valid contribution to make. It told those who have had Pentecostal experiences: “Keep your neo-Pentecostal experiences in perspective. No doubt it has caused you to feel that you are a better Christian. Remember that this does not mean that you are better than other Christians, but that you are, perhaps, a better Christian than you were before.”

The assembly also responded favorably to three reports that will substantially affect the church in years to come. By adopting recommendations of the two-year-old special Committee on the Laity, commissioners endorsed in principle the equal representation of women and under-thirty adults on all church boards and sessions, and the election of elders based “on their ministry to the world, rather than solely on the basis of their service to the institutional church.”

A related report rejected the idea of a special call to a separate clerical ministry in favor of “one call of God to all the people of the earth.” Chief feature of this report: provision for the participation of laymen in the celebration of the sacraments, possible ordination of ministers in secular occupations, and an easing of the ways men may leave the ministry.

The third report, on the plan of union drafted by the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), called for its reception and transmission to the churches for study. The report was approved by voice vote, despite the most significant dissent to date by any participating COCU body.

The Reverend Leon F. Wardell from the Presbytery of Donegal, Pennsylvania, objected, saying the plan reduces lay participation in the church in clear opposition to other action by the General Assembly. According to Wardell, this can be seen in the introduction of the office of bishops coupled with the elimination of the office of elder.

Earlier in the gathering, delegates approved a report calling for a “non-punitive” approach to the use of drugs. In its original form, the paper called for a moratorium on all criminal penalties for marijuana-users until the effects of continued usage have been clearly established as dangerous. But objections by several lawyers—supported by youth delegates—led to amendments advocating that offenses be considered misdemeanors instead.

The 182nd General Assembly also:

• Approved a plan admitting baptized children to the Lord’s Supper, now to be approved by presbyteries.

• Concurred with several presbyteries in a desire to form a churchwide plan of evangelism to stem shrinking rolls (see story following).

• Urged formation of “violence review boards” in cities, but not exclusively “police community review boards” as originally requested.

• Concurred in the requested rewording of the fourth objective of the Presbyterian Lay Committee to read: “… to encourage official church bodies to seek and express the mind of God as revealed in Scripture on individual and corporate moral and spiritual matters. We therefore urge that official church bodies refrain from issuing pronouncements or taking action unless the authority to speak and act is clearly biblical, the competence of the church body has been established, and all viewpoints thoroughly considered.”

• Declared its “opposition to the continuation of military combat of the armed forces of the United States of America in southeast Asia” and called for “termination” of the war in light of the lack of declaration of war by Congress. The action came at the end of the assembly after commissioners had heard Eugene Carson Blake denounce the Indochina conflict as “morally wrong” and had heard George Romney defend it. Romney had flown to Chicago as President Nixon’s representative after commissioners had requested that the President appear personally to defend his policy. Nixon appeared instead that week at the Billy Graham crusade in Knoxville, Tennessee.

JAMES M. BOICE

Pastor Laws Heads Upusa

The old adage “a successful pastor makes the best moderator” seemed to guide again last month as commissioners to the 182nd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church elected the Reverend William R. Laws, Jr., to head the 3.2 million-member denomination. Laws, 53, succeeds Dr. George E. Sweazey, pastor of the Webster Groves Presbyterian Church in St. Louis.

North Carolina-born pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Columbus, Indiana, Laws holds degrees from Davidson College and Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. He has been serving on the General Assembly General Council, including chairmanship of the council’s Committee on Long Range Planning, and has been moderator of both the Presbytery of Indianapolis and the Synod of Indiana.

At a press conference, Laws said he hopes COCU, the plan to unite nine Protestant denominations including the United Presbyterians, will succeed.

The new moderator also spoke on the accelerating annual drop in church membership (for the third straight year), attributing it to increasing population mobility, a “disengagement” of members because of changing worship forms, and some dissatisfaction with the activities of pastors—particularly in the social-action arena.

His remarks on membership were based on recent denominational statistics showing a drop of nearly 57,000 members in one year. Church-school enrollment declined by more than 102,000. On the positive side, overall giving to the church rose by about $3.3 million, while pledges to the denomination’s highly successful $50 Million Fund now total nearly $72 million.

Southern Baptist Recall: Broadman Too Broad

Messengers to the 125th anniversary sessions of the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Denver, Colorado, this month called on their Sunday School Board to recall volume one (Genesis and Exodus) of the “Broad-man Bible Commentary” because it “is out of harmony with the beliefs of the vast majority of Southern Baptist pastors and people.”

In the unprecedented action the messengers made it clear they were in no mood to tolerate any deviation from the traditional Southern Baptist affirmation of the infallibility and authority of Scripture. The same motion requested that the volume be rewritten “with due consideration of the conservative viewpoint.” One messenger seemed to capture the feeling of the convention when he said that making room for liberals and conservatives within the denomination was just “too much room.”

Until the vote on the Broadman Commentary, which came midway through the convention, the sessions had been characterized by restraint and moderation. In the opening session, W. A. Criswell, completing his second and last term as president of the 11.5 million-member denomination, called on fellow messengers to hold fast to the common bonds of mission commitment, doctrinal conviction, and cooperative effort.

The new SBC president is Carl E. Bates, 56, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charlotte, North Carolina. He set a moderate tone in his first press conference as president. Carefully avoiding any statement that would fan the fires of disharmony, he voiced his personal hope for the coming year that Southern Baptists would tone down attention to extreme positions within the denomination.

In the annual convention sermon, Grady C. Cothen, president of Oklahoma Baptist University, pled with Southern Baptists to tone down criticism of one another and to practice more restraint and Christian love.

Prior to the consideration of the Broadman Commentary issue, critics of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission failed to eliminate or withhold budgeted funds from the denomination’s social-action agency. Action against the commission grew out of the seminar on morality it sponsored recently in Atlanta, Georgia. Speakers at the seminar included Anson Mount of Playboy magazine and Joseph Fletcher (see April 10 issue, page 45). Messengers approved a record budget for 1971 of $29,146,883, including the $200,000 allocated for the Christian Life Commission.

One of the afternoon sessions was interrupted by a visit from fifteen black youths, representing the Afro-American Student Union, who challenged white Southern Baptists to “live up to the precepts of Jesus Christ” in their attitudes toward blacks. Granted permission to address the convention, the spokesman for the group, made up of students from Metropolitan State College in Denver, led in a prayer for “bigoted Southern Baptists.” He emphasized that the union didn’t want money. One student told a reporter the group had come in love and peace as Christians.

RICHARD L. LOVE

Do children really learn in Sunday school? Would they learn better if parents helped at home? And do boys and girls respond similarly to these learning opportunities?

The junior departments (grades four to six) of six randomly selected Free Methodist Sunday schools in Michigan were reorganized for an experiment. The juniors were divided into four groups. Group one, the control group, received no relevant instruction; group two received class instruction; group three, home instruction; group four, instruction both in class and at home. There were 239 children involved. (The research is fully described in Donald M. Joy, “The Effects of Value-Oriented Instruction in the Church and in the Home,” thesis, Indiana University, 1969).

The children were randomly assigned to the four experimental groups after being tested in concept and value expressions related to “what is Christian about Christians.” The instruction explored that concept, and afterward the children were tested again, but not for factual recall.

It was at once evident that class instruction can produce significant effects and that home instruction does almost as well. The two in combination showed up even better. Table II pictures the gain in concept score for each of the four conditions.

The two sexes were assigned randomly to all four groups to balance any differences attributable to sex. But since there were 148 girls and only 91 boys, random assignment could not overcome this 38 per cent to 62 per cent sex imbalance. If boys in general responded differently from girls, the boys’ pattern would be diluted or lost by the larger number of girls. Table III shows that when the findings were separated by sex, the patterns were found to be not only different but reverse.

The full implications of these findings are by no means clear. What is evident, however, is that if these congregations and similar ones wish to communicate beliefs to children, they must find ways of using both church and home instruction. If the boys are to be drawn to Christ and the Church, they obviously must have heavy assistance at home during the junior years.

Let us assume that the male-female imbalance, the boys’ poor showing in class, and the boys’ high gains at home are all somehow related. What are possible clues to understanding these findings?

Patriarchal cultural effects? From early childhood, males in our society are made aware that they will perpetuate the family name. “I don’t much like girls,” one ten-year-old is reported to have said, “but I guess I’ll get married all right. If I don’t, there won’t be anybody to carry on the name.” It is a big load for a child, but he wears the responsibility as a badge of honor. Listen to the conversation of schoolboys. They address one another by the family name in a kind of ritual denoting respect. It seems likely that a boy is attentive at home to clues to what “being a Jones” means. In contrast, the young girl discovers that her identity will probably be attached to that of another family name. She may be in open search of value signals from sources outside the home.

“Identification” differences? The studies of such researchers as Robert Sears have begun to define the probable link between a boy’s strength of moral character and the strength of his relationship with his father. No clear similar correlation has been found for girls with either parent (Robert R. Sears, L. Rau, and R. Alpert, Identification and Child Rearing, Stanford University, 1965, p. 231). Sears is forthright in the filmed report The Conscience of a Child. “There is no question,” he says, “development of conscience lies squarely in the hands of parents.”

In a 1960 research project among high-school students in the Free Methodist Church, a correlation appeared between seeing oneself as an “active Christian” and being in a home where there was family prayer “regularly every day.” A teen-ager’s chance of being an “active Christian” was six times greater in such a home than in a home where the family prayed together only “once in a while” or “practically never” (Donald M. Joy, “A Survey and Analysis of the Experiences, Attitudes, and Problems of Senior High Youth of the Free Methodist Church,” thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1960, p. 106). Is it possible that the home, perhaps the father in particular, has been made the prime custodian of values in the grand scheme of things, and that a mysterious “identification” must occur in the home if the values are to be transmitted effectively?

A woman’s church? In the Michigan sample there were almost equal numbers of men and women teachers in the junior departments (fifteen men, seventeen women). But only three of the sixty-one staff members below junior level were men. Imagine the impact upon a young boy of spending the first ten years of his church life in the care of women. He hears religious ideas expressed only in feminine tone and perspective. The sights, sounds and odors are controlled by women. What is more, feminine qualities tend to be rewarded—submissiveness, quietness, inactivity. The display of energy, spontaneity, and curiosity is usually discouraged, even punished. The system may tend either to “feminize” the captive males or to encourage the non-conforming males to leave at the first chance.

Boys slow? Boys lag behind girls in physical maturity. They reach puberty twelve to eighteen months behind girls. To the extent that reasoning prowess or verbal skill also lags, the boy is unequally yoked until high school or college. By then he may be ready to drop out of everything in which the girls showed him up—schools, church, even faith.

What can be done to equalize learning opportunities for boys?

1. More and wider research is needed to ask systematically the kind of questions suggested above and to establish whatever correlations may exist.

2. Parents must be viewed as chief instructors in faith and values. Church programs must hand back the parental role along with instructional materials, making Christian education a home-church team-teaching affair.

3. Men must be placed in strategic roles and in equal numbers with women in early childhood ministries of the church, from crib nursery upward.

4. Boys must be set free from class or other structures where they perceive themselves as inferior to girls. This can be done by placing boys in classes with girls who are a year younger, or by separating the sexes and staffing boys’ classes with persons who respect and can harness the more masculine behavioral expressions.—DONALD M. JOY, executive editor of Sunday-school curriculum, Free Methodist Church, Winona Lake, Indiana.