A Presbyterian pastor from Toronto confides he came to learn how to convince his church it should be involved in community problems. Another minister hikes up his trouser leg, testifying to a healing experience that permitted him to shed his elastic stockings. A young man relates how a residential center can be a life-changing refuge for drug addicts. Two long-haired “Jesus people” unashamedly embrace on the platform, enraptured by an ecumenical choir’s singing of an anthem. An entire row of persons stand with arms raised over their heads in Pentecostal fashion while a black minister gives the benediction. A surprised layman whispers to a friend, “I never thought I would see Presbyterians acting like this.”
It all happened at the Celebration of Evangelism September 20–24 in Cincinnati, where 3,150 persons from five Presbyterian-Reformed denominations gathered to revel in a “Revolution of Love.” The delegates discovered that evangelism and love are many-splendored things—and that you can’t have one without the other.
The public ministry at both the morning and evening meetings in Cincinnati’s new Convention Center, the afternoon workshops dubbed “Models of Ministry,” the exhilarating singing and creative worship services, the uninhibited sharing on a personal level—all were elements that left delegates overjoyed almost to the point of being overwhelmed by it all.
Jubilant national committee members met for a luncheon on the last day of the conference to assess the Celebration. Gary Demarest, program chairman and pastor of La Canada (California) Presbyterian Church, suggested the response demanded a repeat performance next year; others cautioned they wanted to let their feelings and thoughts simmer a few weeks. The fifty-member national committee will meet in Chicago next month to chart its future course.
At least one participant—Mrs. Lois H. Stair, moderator of the United Presbyterian Church—was not “completely thrilled” by what she saw. “I’m a little frightened by it,” she admitted at a press breakfast attended by the moderators of all five sponsoring denominations. “I hope this means that evangelicals are beginning to accept a little broader definition of evangelism—that it may mean reaching out with bail money for Angela Davis.”
Mrs. Stair said she would judge the success of the Celebration by whether it “serves as a bridge to bring together those on both sides of the theological spectrum or whether it merely further isolates” evangelicals from those more liberal.
In contrast, Dr. Ben Lacy Rose, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), saw the Celebration as a “point in a movement. I see a tide running toward a broad spectrum of evangelism.”
The other three moderators enthusiastically endorsed the Celebration: the Reverend Roy E. Beckham of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Reverend E. Thach Shauf of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and the Reverend Christian H. Walvoord of the Reformed Church in America.
If the Celebration proved to be a mountain-top experience for most, it was not at the cost of ignoring social ills. Of the fifty-seven “Models for Ministry,” roughly a fourth dealt with nittygritty topics such as “Congregations in Changing Communities,” “The Church in Housing and Evangelism,” and “Hunger, Poverty and Evangelism.” Proponents of healing and the charismatic movement also found a platform for their views.
At the seminar on “The Church in a Changing Neighborhood,” a black pastor from an inner-city church in Los Angeles explained he was having the same problem as most white ministers: how to get his congregation involved in the problems of the community.
“It is amazing how much whites and blacks are alike in that respect,” he noted.
It wasn’t difficult, however, to determine where the true affections of most of the delegates lay. Only fourteen persons attended the workshop on the “Church in a Changing Neighborhood,” while next door delegates spilled out into the hallway at the seminar on personal witnessing.
The “Jesus people” were the most visible of all groups and perhaps wielded the greatest influence in proportion to their numbers. They simply sang and loved their way into the hearts of the delegates.
Evangelism professor Robert B. Munger of Fuller Seminary in the keynote sermon declared that the “Jesus people movement is far more than a bizarre fad on the part of irresponsible youth looking for a religious kick.”
Bill Pannell, vice-president of Tom Skinner Associates, told the delegates on the succeeding night: “What you got yourself involved with when you signed up with Jesus is the high cost of loving.”
In an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, affable Robert Pitman, the Celebration committee chairman, said he believes its impact will spill across Presbyterian boundaries. “We are not the largest denomination in the nation, but the Presbyterian Church has always provided resources, leadership, and life style for the church at large,” he said.
Mrs. Billy Graham, also an organizer of the Celebration, said in an interview near the close of the event that it was an example of the “contagion of infectious Christianity.… Some of this is not happening in the churches.…”
At the last morning’s mass communion service—preceded by foot-washing!—a young black attempted to get to the microphone to make a statement. The platform committee denied him the privilege.
Dr. Munger, obviously baffled as to why the youth was not permitted to speak, explained to the committee members at the luncheon: “The young man said he felt he had been responsible for part of the division in the church because of his efforts in behalf of the Angela Davis fund. He said he wanted to stand up and say he was sorry in order to promote healing.…”
A multitude of voices were heard at the Celebration of Evangelism; the only regret anyone could have was that at least one more could have been heard at the concluding communion service. It would have been a fitting benediction to a week of spiritual serendipity.
Lighting Moral Darkness
Beneath Nelson’s column, monument to one of Britain’s better-known adulterers, 35,000 people last month packed London’s Trafalgar Square in a “Nationwide Festival of Light” to protest moral pollution. Predominantly youthful, they came from all over Britain and reflected a wide range of religious viewpoints, including Roman Catholic and Jewish. They sang hymns ancient and modern, and with a fervor to satisfy even the most demanding football coach frequently broke into their slogan, J-E-S-U-S.
The assembly called on the government to check “the vile commerce in cruelty, perversion and loveless sex,” demanded curbs on sex films shown in schools, and urged the Church and mass media to establish sound standards.
Among festival sponsors were Malcolm Muggeridge, pop star Cliff Richard, anti-apartheid leader Bishop Trevor Huddleston, and the indefatigable “Clean-up TV” warrior Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, recently returned from a talk with Pope Paul. Prince Charles also sent a letter supporting the festival.
During the meeting smoke bombs and other diversions were ineffectively tried by various groups whose “liberation” tendencies do not extend to free speech for others.
“We have a positive purpose,” said former Punch editor Malcolm Muggeridge. “We stand up and say that we still believe that to be carnally minded is death, and that to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”
Fifty thousand people attended a later meeting in Hyde Park.
Earlier, prayers for the cause were given in churches across the country and more than 250 hilltop beacons were lit; these were used as signals in olden times to warn of danger and calamities.
In another festival mass meeting, four thousand persons jammed British Methodism’s great Central Hall at Westminster. But Huddleston was forced to abandon his prepared address and Muggeridge could say only a few words because about one hundred demonstrators representing homosexual and women’s liberation groups clapped, hooted, and chanted four-letter words. Eventually about eighty disrupters were thrown out.
The campaign to rid Britain of written and theatrical pornography will be continued by various groups under the title “Keep the Light Burning.”
J. D. DOUGLAS
Bob Jones Admits Black
Bob Jones University has broken its longstanding ban on admitting Negro students. One was enrolled this fall.
The black male (his name was not released) is married, thus circumventing the university’s main objection to allowing Negroes: interracial dating.
“We began accepting Orientals some time back,” Bob Jones III, who at age 32 took over as president of the fundamentalist school last month, told the Associated Press. “But we stipulated to them that they could not date across racial lines and they accepted that rule.”
The board of trustees thought blacks wouldn’t accept such a rule, Jones added, saying: “We feel we can take qualified married Negroes, and maybe take them for the Lord’s service, which is the purpose for all our students.”
Nativity And A Pear Tree
In an effort to satisfy those who want a religious motif on the annual Christmas stamp issued by the United States Postal Service as well as those who object to sectarian themes on government-sponsored stamps, Postmaster General Winton M. Blount has again authorized both secular and religious stamps this year.
The religious stamp will depict a portion of the sixteenth-century painting “Adoration of the Shepherds,” part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art. The secular stamp will picture “A Partridge in a Pear Tree,” painted by Jamie Wyeth of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The opening words of an English ballad, “On the First Day of Christmas, My True Love Sent to Me,” will appear in vermilion lettering against a dark green background. One pear will be embellished with the denomination of the stamp, eight cents.
The Nativity stamp will depict five figures—the Holy Family and two shepherds—as painted about 1510 by the Italian artist Giorgione. It will be printed in eight colors, with the word “Christmas” in gold.
The stamps will be placed on sale November 10 at the National Gallery in Washington and will become available at post offices nationwide soon after. The Postal Service expects the Nativity stamp to outsell the partridge; a printing of 1.2 billion of the religious stamp, and only 800 million of the secular design has been ordered.
GLENN EVERETT
Abernathy Woos Communists As U. S. Backing Drops
While financial support for the civil-rights-oriented Southern Christian Leadership Conference lagged at home, the SCLC’s present president, Dr. Ralph David Abernathy, was in the Soviet Union and East Berlin courting Communist leaders.
At an ecumenical service in St. Mary’s Church, the main Protestant sanctuary in East Berlin, Abernathy (amid applause) demanded immediate withdrawal of U. S. troops from Viet Nam and the freeing of Angela Davis and other “political prisoners” held in America.
The SCLC president and successor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was given the Peace Prize of the East German Peace Council.
Saying that any country is “stupid” if it ignores East Germany, the black Baptist pastor from Atlanta added that West Berlin reminded him of conditions in the United States and that he was “homesick” for East Germany.
Communist party papers hailed Abernathy as “the leader of the suppressed colored U. S. population who together with the U. S. Communists denounce the cold-blooded terror of U. S. imperialism and its unscrupulous genocide in Viet Nam.”
While in Russia Abernathy preached in Russian Orthodox churches and on campuses. He said his visit was to promote “world peace and understanding.”
Meanwhile, SCLC sources in Atlanta said Abernathy got only $3,000 from the three largest black Baptist organizations in the nation when he appealed for funds at their national conventions last month. The bulk of the SCLC’s support is from whites, but even that has slowed, according to Abernathy. Staff workers have been cut from a peak of 160 during the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D. C., to 60 currently. SCLC income last year reached $1 million, up from $195,040 in 1961. But expenses have leaped from $191,048 then to $900,000 this year.
“Our present income does not indicate we will be able to carry on very long with a paid staff unless we start getting financial support,” Reuters reported Abernathy as saying.
Religion In Transit
In Kabul, Afghanistan, a Swedish missionary was arrested, tried, and fined $20 for giving away a copy of the Gospel of Luke. Karl Arne Nilsson was also ordered to leave the country, where anti-Muslim literature is prohibited. Nilsson serves in Pakistan and had been in Kabul on a holiday with his family.
The Black Unitarian-Universalist Caucus (BUUC) is floating an initial $5 million bond issue in a program to redirect church investments into minority enterprises. Investors will receive a return of 5 per cent, a prospectus says.
A new Hollywood, California, organization, Audio Bible Studies International, has been formed to distribute Bible teaching material utilizing tape cassettes to a worldwide market through a non-profit service program. Latin America will be the original target area.
Recently formed in Oklahoma City is the American Association of Christians in Behavioral Sciences, a group interested in applying Christian teaching to the problems of the classroom, the clinical and experimental laboratory, and the community. Dr. C. M. Whipple, P.O. Box 14188, is executive director.
The Church of God of Prophecy plans to build a $1,780,000 auditorium in Cleveland, Tennessee, to accommodate the denomination’s annual assemblies.
Pope Paul has given Duke University a facsimile copy of the Codex Vaticanus, a fourth-century Greek manuscript of the Old and New Testaments.
The Graymoor Ecumenical Institute, an arm of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, has announced plans to sponsor an ecumenical religious community. The location and life style of the group will be up to the new community.
The Enquirer, a Christian tabloid edited by Ron Marr in Toronto, has launched a U. S. edition that was mailed to 100,000 this month. Like its Canadian counterpart, the American edition (a monthly) will emphasize a Christian perspective on contemporary news.
A ten-day crusade in Marion, Indiana, led by evangelist Leighton Ford last month drew a total attendance of 52,000 to the packed coliseum. More than 1,100 persons went forward to register decisions. A four-mile “One Way” demonstration march for Christ by 1,200 young people launched the crusade.
Connecticut became the second state to permit homosexual acts between consenting adults last month, following Illinois. Oregon, Idaho, and Colorado will allow this beginning next year. Celebrating Connecticut homosexuals held a church service, danced, and marched on the capitol.
Support for union with the United Presbyterian Church and for merger through the Consultation on Church Union has diminished during the past year, according to a sampling of Southern Presbyterian Church members made by the Presbyterian National Sample. The first testing was in May, 1970.
Wycliffe Bible Translators has broken ground in the Dallas suburb of Duncanville for a $4 million international linguistics center that will serve as a worldwide research and training facility. Initial units should be operable in one year.
Amish parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have vowed to refuse new state subsidies for nonpublic schools that could bring them $210,000. Amish spokesmen said their 2,800-pupil county school system, which stops with eighth grade, will decline the direct aid to avoid possible interference by the state; education laws require children to attend school until they are sixteen.
Thirteen hundred young people stamped, whistled, and cheered for Jesus at a Lutheran Youth Congress in San Diego last month; the four-day event was the fifth such gathering sponsored by Lutheran Youth Alive, an independent, inter-Lutheran movement headquartered in Van Nuys, California. The congresses have been dubbed “Lutherans’ contribution to the Jesus People Movement.”
With about two-thirds of the nuns in the United States out of the traditional habit, the nation’s leading nunswear firm is stretching to make ends meet. “Prayer and perseverance” has kept Jamieson, Incorporated, of Chicago from closing during the past four years, the owner says. He thinks the situation has bottomed out, however, with the company shifting to ready-made dresses of secular and contemporary-religious style.
Bookrack Evangelism, a growing effort throughout Canada and the United States promoted by Mennonite missions agencies, last year sold 159,000 paperbacks through racks in secular stores. Pioneer J. Mark Martin now sells 7,900 in Virginia and North Carolina alone.
Personalia
Lloyd Ogilvie, pastor of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s First Presbyterian Church, has been named pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California, the United Presbyterian denomination’s largest.
Paul N. Kraybill of Landisville, Pennsylvania, will become general secretary for the Mennonite Church’s General Board next month.
The Reverend Carl H. Mau, Jr., associate general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, has resigned to become general secretary of the United States wing of the agency.
After a free country-music concert to 12,000 at the college auditorium, superstar Johnny Cash received an honorary doctor of humanities degree from Gardner-Webb College in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, for his Christian work with drug and alcohol victims and with prisoners.
Washington Redskin fullback ace Charley Harraway made a “dramatic” commitment to Christ at a prayer meeting for the players arranged by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last month. Harraway, who told a Washington Post sportswriter about his conversion a week later, was reached by the message of black evangelist Tom Skinner.
Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht, 55, reputed target of conservative opposition within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, lost his job as executive director of the Synod after the board of directors ruled that the post was abolished and that he was not a candidate for a new post to be called “administrative officer of the Synod’s board of directors.”
An American Holy Cross priest, Edward L. Heston, has been named to head press relations for the Vatican in Rome. He told a news conference the best approach is for the church “to be open, not insisting on secrecy and confidentiality as in the past.”
The Reverend Shirley Carter, chaplain-in-residence at the South Carolina State Hospital, has been ordained to the gospel ministry by Columbia’s Kathwood Baptist Church. She is believed to be the second woman in the United States to be ordained by a Southern Baptist church.
John Allen Templeton, associated with the All-Church Press since 1959, has been named editor of periodicals for the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. He will also edit Presbyterian Survey, the official denominational magazine.
Dr. Thomas C. Campbell, 42, associate professor of church and community and coordinator of professional education at Chicago Seminary, became president of the interdenominational school last month.
American evangelist John Haggai will conduct a large evangelistic crusade in Singapore later this year at the invitation of a multi-denominational coalition of the city’s religious leaders.
Dr. B. Dave Napier, a United Church of Christ minister and religion professor at Stanford University, has been elected president of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.
Dr. Warren Wiersbe is the new pastor of the historic Moody Memorial Church in Chicago. He is a prolific youth-ministry writer, was a Youth for Christ executive, and has been pastor for ten years at the booming Calvary Baptist Church of Covington, Kentucky.
Dr. Glenn A. Olds, 50, a Methodist minister and educator, has assumed the presidency of Ohio’s troubled Kent State University. Until recently he served on the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
World Scene
The national assembly of Catholic bishops and priests for Spain last month called for an end to the ties between the Spanish church and the Spanish government.
For the first time, an entire order of the Roman Catholic Church has defied a local hierarchy of bishops and pulled out of a missionary country. The White Fathers left the Portuguese overseas territory of Mozambique, which has 860,000 Christians including 660,000 Catholics. “We are anti-colonialists. The Portuguese are colonialists. We don’t speak the same language,” a superior general assistant told a Christian Science Monitor correspondent.
The Vatican has declined to grant patriarchal status to the Ukrainian Rite Catholic Church, ending nearly a year of protest by leaders of that rite against what they called second-class treatment.
Some 2,000 Catholics from a single parish in the Lithuanian Republic charged in an open letter to the Soviet leadership that freedom of religion is being curbed by local authorities.
The World Council of Churches made anti-racism grants to three different Angolan groups (see October 8 issue, page 56) precisely to avoid the charge that it was aiding any one political group, according to WCC general secretary Eugene Carson Blake.
The Central American Mission, which has served the region for eighty-one years, is expanding its ministry to Spain. Five missionary couples are scheduled to move there this fall.
Presbyterian and Reformed Church missionaries in Mexico plan to leave that country by the end of next year when the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico becomes autonomous.
Prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia attacked the Orthodox leadership in Russia as “Soviet-appointed” and called on the Russian people to stand fast in their faith; the message was in a joint pastoral marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the new U. S.-based church. Headquarters of the staunchly anti-Communist jurisdiction were transferred to New York in 1950.
Some 1,700 Puerto Rican Protestant churches are participating in a campaign to put a Christian book in every home on the island.
Lutheran World Relief has allocated $500,000 for agriculture, education, and welfare projects in Africa and Asia. The largest grant ($321,000) will go to establish oil palm plantations in Nigeria.
Catholic theologian Hans Küng says he expects Rome soon to publish a book rejecting his ideas as liberal. The book has been written by several theologians and edited, according to the Netherlands Roman Catholic Press Agency, by Karl Rahner, himself a target of Vatican missiles. Rahner has attacked Küng’s study of papal infallibility.
Deaths
PARKIN CHRISTIAN, 87, great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutiny on the Bounty; in Auckland, New Zealand. The mutineers established a successful experimental Christian community on Pitcairn Island.
EDWIN KAYEA, 35, personnel manager of radio station ELWA and director of Youth for Christ of Liberia; of liver failure in Liberia.
