Holiday outings, parties, pageants, beauty queens, football games—and some heavy action for Jesus.
That’s what happened the week after Christmas. Thousands of students attended evangelistic training conferences, then hit the streets in aggressive outreach and witness marches, complete with placards and Jesus cheers. Members of Stanford’s winning Rose Bowl team tried to tell a national television audience about Christ. Street Christians staged gospel rock and handed out thousands of tract-like tabloid newspapers. And in both large and small conferences sponsored by churches and church-related organizations, thousands of young people across the nation indicated their interest in—and availability for—foreign missionary service.
Campus Crusade for Christ held eight regional training conferences that attracted more than 7,000 youths. The largest gatherings were at Dallas and Atlanta.
In Atlanta, 1,500 collegians marched from their Marriott Hotel headquarters to the state capitol, where Governor Jimmy Carter proclaimed the occasion “Spiritual Solution Day in Georgia.” Afterward, the students—representing ninety-six Southeast colleges—tried out their newly learned “Four Spiritual Laws” on Atlanta residents and reported 780 decisions for Christ.
One of the largest Atlanta contingents came from Auburn University in Alabama where, says Crusade’s Southeast director Jim Buell, “a large spiritual movement is building on campus.” Weekly College Life meetings there draw up to 1,000, he says, and recently one-third of Auburn’s 15,000 students turned out to hear Crusade illusionist Andre Kole.
Another 1,500 attended Crusade sessions in Dallas, with 800 workers recording 160 decisions in an afternoon of witness. The San Francisco Forty-Niners football team happened to choose the same hotel as Crusade and became perhaps the most witnessed-to team in the post-season playoffs. At least one Forty-Niner back reportedly attended all Crusade sessions.
Crusade’s Southwest director Jim Craddock said a poll of the Dallas conferees confirmed that a spiritual revolution is indeed sweeping college campuses: half the trainees accepted Christ during 1971.
He also pointed to a mood noted by observers in virtually all the large holiday conferences: “These kids are deeply committed to discipleship; many want to do missionary work overseas.”
For 700 of Crusade’s 1,000 trainees in Southern California, the missionary task entailed getting up early on New Year’s Day and piling onto twenty-two buses for a trip to Pasadena, where they circulated among the thousands of spectators at the Rose Parade. They reported several hundred decisions for Christ.
Street Christians, headed by Hollywood entertainer Duane Pederson, handed out thousands of copies of Hollywood Free Paper, his underground-like tabloid. A million copies of the issue were printed for distribution throughout the nation, stated Pederson.
Meanwhile, forty Stanford football players turned out for a pre-game prayer meeting conducted by Crusade worker Jim Stump and footballer-turned-preacher Don Moomaw. “We’ve been praying all year to win the Pacific Coast title so that we’d have a chance to witness for Christ on TV,” said a spokesman.
The Rose Bowl committee turned down requests by the Stanford players for time to tell game viewers of their faith in Christ, but athletic director Chuck Taylor granted them a segment of his pre-game TV time. As taped, All-American linebacker Jeff Siemon commented: “Many things have happened to our team this year, but by far the most important is that many of our guys have come into a personal, dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ.”
NBC television officials, however, axed the segment on the actual telecast. Nevertheless, Siemon was somewhat consoled by a story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times sports section on Christmas day: “Siemon Uses Football to Spread Christianity.”
Midwest Crusade staffer Glenn Plate reported that 1,100 students attended Chicago sessions and led more than 200 to Christ in airport, shopping-center, and street encounters. They also decided to eat a bowl of rice instead of a scheduled steak dinner, then sent the $5,000 savings to stake Crusade’s fledgling but fertile work in Egypt.
(Crusade’s European director Bud Hinckson recently trained twelve Egyptian students in England, returned to Egypt with them, and conducted a three-day leadership-training institute in Cairo that drew 150 college students and professors. Representing every campus in Egypt, the group reportedly led more than 200 to Christ during the institute.)
Lutherans were on the move, too. A youth spotted hundreds of teen-agers and young adults in a Minneapolis hotel and, thinking a booze party was under way, crashed the gathering. It turned out to be an evangelism congress sponsored by Lutheran Youth Encounter (LYE). The youth accepted Christ, joined the nearly 2,000 others in a Jesus march, and showed up a few nights later at a home Bible study hosted by LYE director Dick Denny, 48, a former businessman. The six-year-old inter-synodical LYE sponsors evangelistic teams on twenty-five college campuses and, during summer months, to countries abroad.
Simultaneously, a similar congress—sponsored by the inter-synodical Lutheran Youth Alive (LYA)—drew hundreds to the Washington, D. C., area. When speaker Nicky Cruz, a former New York street-gang leader, invited hearers to receive Christ, an estimated 100 of the 1,000 present responded, including two clergymen.
LYA was founded several years ago by David L. C. Anderson to champion the cause of evangelism among Lutheran youth. Nearly 10,000 have attended the seven LYA evangelism congresses held since November, 1969. A noisy, forthrightly evangelical tabloid, Lutheran Youth Speak Out, is circulated to 17,000 Lutheran churches and to thousands of individual Lutheran youths.
“We are effecting change in the churches,” Anderson says. “Churches are open to our witness teams and testimonies.”
The first West Coast Conference on Evangelism, sponsored by Hollywood First Presbyterian Church, despite such name speakers as Leighton Ford and Robert Munger, drew a crowd of only 600, mostly adults (3,000 were expected). The $30 registration fee “disenfranchised a lot of young people we wanted,” explained student minister Don Williams. The purpose of the meeting was “to relate Jesus people to the world mission of the church and also to historic Christianity,” he added.
Along The Blessitt Trail: Campaigning For Christ
Presidential candidates were plagued by New Left radicals in 1968, but times have changed, and this year their steps are being dogged by flamboyant Baptist evangelist Arthur Blessitt and his followers. Blessitt aims to make Jesus, morality, and national revival big issues in the upcoming election campaign.
On the same day this month that President Nixon’s name was added to the growing list of contenders in the New Hampshire primary, Blessitt unloaded a “Bill of Responsibilities for President of the United States” in a sidewalk press conference in front of the White House. The bill lists a number of social and spiritual concerns Blessitt wants candidates to affirm.
Nothing New Under The Son
West Coast street-Christian singer Larry Norman claims he originated the familiar “One Way” sign of the Jesus revolution less than two years ago. But Elmer Horton of Elkhart, Indiana, recently spotted this sign in a Constantine, Michigan, graveyard—on an 1863-vintage tombstone.
In addition to pursuing such goals as peace, racial justice, and moral clean-up in the nation, the President should “call a national day of repentance, prayer, fasting, and brotherhood beginning with his inauguration,” the bill declares. Furthermore, the president-elect should be a turned-on Christian “who will openly share his personal commitment to Jesus Christ,” an “open witness for Jesus” who will seek “to live his life and lead this nation on the teachings of the Bible so that it can truly be said, ‘In God we trust,’ ” the bill continues.
As for the incumbent: “If President Nixon is a Christian he ought to come out and say so,” Blessitt declared in an interview.
The evangelist, whose staff has been working for months in New Hampshire (see September 24 issue, page 41), is now foraging for the signatures of 20,000 New Hampshire residents to add clout to his ultimatum.
“We will raise these issues at every shopping-center rally and town meeting where a candidate speaks,” Blessitt vows. The candidates can expect some heavy witnessing during hand-shaking sessions. “Our people will grab hold and say, ‘Senator, do you know Jesus?’ ”
No reactions were immediately forthcoming from camps of candidates. Some churchmen oppose Blessitt’s injection of religion into the campaign, and even some fellow evangelicals have expressed doubts whether anyone could measure up to the ideals stated in the bill. But many young believers say they dig Blessitt’s call for a Christian leader in the White House. While Blessitt spoke with newsmen in front of the executive mansion, a contingent of Washington-area youths prayed, sang, and handed out tracts to passersby—until halted by police who threatened to bust them for demonstrating without a permit.
Blessitt interrupted his election doings for one weekend this month to fly to Great Britain at the request of BBC television and talk for an hour about Jesus to viewers in Scotland. He said a BBC official telephoned him on New Year’s Eve with word of a spiritual awakening taking place in the land.
The evangelist, known popularly as “the Minister of Sunset Strip,” spent the last months of 1971 carrying a large cross and conducting meetings during a witness march throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. The Anglican bishop of Birmingham joined him in leading a witness trek of more than 1,000 people through the streets of that city, according to front-page news stories. And more than 15,000 marched behind Blessitt in Manchester.
During the trek, says Blessitt, he spoke in many churches and on college campuses. “There’s a spirit of revival in the churches of Great Britain—even in the Anglican churches,” he says. His visit snagged wide press coverage.
Blessitt was apparently a hit among Catholics in Dublin, and in strife-ripped Belfast both Catholics and Protestants joined him in the line of march.
“Pray for the believers of Belfast,” he exhorted an Arlington, Virginia, church audience this month. “There are forty-two groups witnessing openly out on the streets: they’re sowing the seeds of revival that can heal the land.”
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
Archbishop Ahead Of Press—Hands Down
It might be called—by the secular press at least—the Great Ecumenical Sleight-of-Hand Trick.
An important ecumenical “breakthrough” at a New Mexico consecration of an Episcopal bishop apparently went unnoticed by secular journalists, according to Religious News Service.
Roman Catholic archbishop James Peter Davis of Santa Fe laid his hands on the head of the Reverend Richard M. Trelease at his consecration December 15 as Episcopal coadjutor bishop of New Mexico. So said the Right Reverend John H. Burt, bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Ohio, who with Presiding Bishop John E. Hines was co-consecrator during the Albuquerque ceremonies.
Burt said this complete participation in a consecration was “a first” in U. S. Episcopal-Roman Catholic relations. He added that Davis had informally announced his intention to “lay on hands” before the rite. Burt placed his own hand atop Davis’s at the moment of consecration.
Observers said journalists covering the event failed to report the action.
“I only know of one earlier case of a Roman Catholic bishop laying on hands in an Episcopal consecration,” Burt said later. “That was when David R. Thornberry [now Episcopal bishop of Wyoming] was consecrated in Laramie. A Catholic bishop did lay his hands on Dr. Thornberry’s head, but I don’t believe he meant to.”
Kinky Cathedral
Not since Ian Paisley’s supporters tried to interrupt a visiting popish prelate has St. Paul’s known such controversy.
It began when an overture from the management of the rock musical Hair led to the cast’s being invited to sing at a Communion service in the famous London cathedral last month. Anglicans of very different churchmanship promptly mounted a steady barrage of protest, pointing out that the play simulated onstage sexual activity (“masturbation can be fun”), glorified drugs (“marijuana is a gift from God”), and contained blasphemous elements.
Dean Martin Sullivan remained unmoved, even when diocesan synod members added their voice to the criticism. St. Paul’s was for all, he insisted, and the service would take place. So it did.
Doors were locked more than an hour before it began, the police were out in force, but the planned demonstration and open-air service on the steps by several hundred clergy and others were dignified and orderly. Only twice during the cathedral service itself (the cast sang three numbers) were there individual interruptions (“what does this have to do with Jesus Christ?”) and ejections.
A chapter spokesman pointed out that St. John’s cathedral, New York, had hosted the Hair cast last April. Since then New Zealand-born Sullivan, whose trendy tendencies have hit past headlines, has visited America to raise money for the 250-year-old Wren masterpiece. The current publicity has given welcome boosts, not only to this cause, but to the flagging sales of Hair; both sides were intent on that going-on which is the motto of show business.
Still, it was left—astonishingly—to a national newspaper to put the Christian position most succinctly: “Christ died for sinners, we are taught,” said an editorial comment. “We are not taught that His Body and Blood should be treated as stage properties to further the ends of commercial publicity.”
J. D. DOUGLAS
Olympic Gospel Blitz
Thousands of young Christians from throughout the world plan to blitz this summer’s Olympic Games in Munich, Germany—with the Gospel. The witness campaign will be mounted by Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth With a Mission, and other organizations—including German churches and church-related groups—as well as hosts of street Christians traveling on their own.
Evangelical Christianity, revived churches, and a thriving native-grown Jesus movement in Germany have received wide media attention in Europe of late, and some outreach spokesmen predict the revival climate will be “just right” when the summer’s visitors arrive. As many as three million persons are expected to attend the Olympics, according to press estimates.
The Munich YMCA is recruiting a number of U. S. Jesus-movement leaders to participate in the gigantic witness fest. David Rose, 22, head of the House of Agape ministries in Kansas City, Missouri, was one of the first to sign up. In an Olympian feat of sorts, his Agape group has reportedly accounted for more than 10,000 conversions in the past year and a half. Most of the new converts are long-haired youths. Many have been channeled into churches, according to Rose, though not necessarily into the mainstream of church life. More than 1,000, he says, hold forth in their own Sunday-night meetings in the Second Presbyterian Church. They recently sponsored a charismatic teaching seminar attended by thousands.
Rose and his wife Toni came to Kansas City in mid-1970 from Berkeley, where he was a leader in the Christian World Liberation Front and an elder in the House of Pergamos street-Christian ministry. He had been led to Christ from the Sunset Strip drug scene in Hollywood a year earlier by evangelist Arthur Blessitt, and had received training at Campus Crusade for Christ headquarters.
Rose says he found the Kansas City street scene spiritually barren when he arrived: “Nothing was really being done to reach the kids.” But response to his witnessing snowballed. The Agape ministry today has ten houses, a dozen elders, and scores of full-time volunteer workers.
Munich evangelicals hope a similar spiritual explosion will rock their city.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
Evil Machinations, $26 Million Worth
When the head of the Baptist Foundation of America, Incorporated, a Los Angeles-based, tax-exempt, non-profit organization, was indicted in July, 1970, on charges of grand theft, writing bad checks, and giving a kick-back to a loan officer, BFA executive committee member Ray Chappell was sure that “when all the information is in” the charges wouldn’t amount to anything (see August 21, 1970, issue, page 43).
The U. S. House Crime Committee thought otherwise last month. About $26 million otherwise, in fact.
That is how much the Crime Committee—during three days of hearings—accused the hapless foundation of bilking out of numerous legitimate businesses through “major swindles.” The BFA issued $26 million in worthless promissory notes through the infiltration of organized crime, congressional testimony related.
“Using a phony statement of assets and a glowing brochure describing hospitals that were never built and a retirement plan for clergymen that never paid a dime, the so-called foundation was run by a preacher and reportedly manipulated by mobsters,” said the American Baptist News Service.
The president of the now-bankrupt BFA and its chief executive officer was the Reverend T. Sherron Jackson, who is under criminal indictment in California and Ohio. According to his brother-in-law, the Reverend S. Taylor Sullivan (who was vice-president of the foundation), Jackson is in Germany after suffering a “slight heart attack.” He is the son of a nationally known Baptist leader, Dr. D. N. Jackson of Oklahoma City, publisher of the American Baptist.
Dr. Hubert Porter, an American Baptist official at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, said that the BFA “has no connection whatsoever with any of the major Baptist groups.” Sherron Jackson, according to a House Crime Committee spokesman, “is the person most responsible for the debacle.”
In addition to three BFA directors (Sullivan, Chappell, and secretary Thomas E. Dacus of Pomona, California), other witnesses were Lawrence Tapper, a California official assigned to investigate BFA financial statements, and Gilbert Robinson, a California court-appointed attorney named as receiver of BFA assets. Tapper reported all listed assets to be non-existent, and Robinson said there were no funds to pay more than $26 million worth of outstanding foundation notes.
Three reputed underworld figures, also appearing before the committee, pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify.
In an opening statement at the hearings, the Crime Committee chairman, Representative Claude Pepper (D.-Fla.), said the BFA flap “is only one of the many manipulations which have been perpetrated by this national apparatus of sophisticated criminals. It is important to note that the activities demonstrated here are no reflection on the 25 million Baptists (of whom I’m one) who had no control over the machinations of the criminals.…”
Courage Amid Unrest
A member of the Salvation Army was killed last month when Belfast’s Central Citadel was damaged after a bomb explosion in a nearby factory. Bomb blasts have become a regular feature of life in Northern Ireland’s capital, causing much destruction, with death and injury to ordinary people.
Dr. James Dunlop, a former moderator of the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly, pastors a church bordering a disturbed area in North Belfast. “One gladdening and heartening thing,” he commented recently, “has been to find the steadfastness and quiet courage of most people, and particularly of Christians, amid all the unrest.”
Since last July a hundred families connected with his church have left the area, many because of bombing or intimidation. Most of the present confrontations are between troops and Roman Catholic IRA sympathizers, not between Catholic and Protestant crowds.
S. W. MURRAY
Religion In Transit
There were more baptisms by Southern Baptists in 1971 than in any other year in the denomination’s history except 1959; more than 412,600 were reported last year. “There is a moving of the spirit of God in America and a new openness to the Gospel of Christ,” declared SBC evangelism head Kenneth L. Chafin of Atlanta.
Membership in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada dropped nearly 40,000 between the 1970 and 1971 reporting periods.
The Layman’s Hour, the radio ministry of the United Presbyterian Lay Committee, went off the air last month after a year and a half, largely because of financial considerations.
The Federal Communications Commission has approved the sale by Bob Jones University of its stations WAVO and WAVO-FM in Decatur, Georgia, to new owners who have promised to avoid racial discrimination in both programming and personnel. Bob Jones U. offered to sell rather than contest a complaint to the FCC charging segregationist policies and asking that BJU’s station licenses not be renewed.
The Pay Board ruled last month that a $2-a-week increase in the allowance of a Salvation Army lieutenant would not be inflationary; unmarried lieutenants now get $37.50 weekly.
One approach to teaching about religion is being tried in the Park Ridge (New Jersey) High School. Local ministers teach in rotation (under supervision of the social-studies chairman) an elective course looking at the scriptures, history, and contemporary life of such diverse groups as Hare Krishna, Judaism, Mormonism, Pentecostalism, and Presbyterianism.
The Stony Brook School on Long Island, New York, cream of boys-only Christian prep schools for forty-nine years, will admit girls as boarding students next September, completing a move to coeducation started last fall when thirty girls—all day students—joined 227 boys.
Personalia
Mabel Pew Myrin, 82, daughter of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph N. Pew and brother of the late J. Howard Pew, died this month in a Philadelphia hospital. The widow of H. A. W. Myrin, founder of Kimberton Farms School, Mrs. Myrin was on the board of several charitable, medical, and educational institutions. She was a major contributor to evangelical causes and the Republican party.
A Rockville, Maryland, United Methodist minister has opened a strip joint. But the only legs revealed at Gordon Lewis Wilson’s business are attached to old desks, chairs, and tables; he owns the Circuit Rider Shop, which removes paints and varnishes from furniture, auto parts, brass beds, and iron work.
Louis A. Moore, news director of Southern Baptist Seminary for the past several years, will become religion editor of the Houston Chronicle next month, taking the place of Janice Law, who is on an extended tour overseas … After twenty-four years as editor of the Catholic World, John B. Sheerin retired with last month’s issue.
The board of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California—a pioneer cooperative of ten seminaries—reportedly accepted the resignation of its president, John Dillenberger, “with deep regret.” But informed sources indicated Dillenberger was pressed to tender the resignation.
Dr. David L. Vikner has succeeded Dr. Arne Sovik as executive secretary of the Board of World Missions of the Lutheran Church in America.
The first biography of fundamentalist firebrand Ian Paisley, written by a Southern Irish Methodist, has been published in Dublin. But it will require translation before its subject can read it: Ian Paisley agus Tuaisceart Eireann (Ian Paisley and the North of Ireland) has been written in Irish by Risteard O Glaisne.
“If you serve the Lord … and serve him with all your heart, he’ll find the way for you,” intoned Margaret HoIIen, 99, who has been married to Edd Hollen, 105, for eighty-two years. The Kentucky couple gives the Lord the credit for nuptial bliss in what may be the world’s longest marriage on record.
Missouri Synod Lutheran clergyman and Yale professor Jaroslav Pelikan has become the first non-Catholic to win the top honor of the American Catholic Historical Society, for his book The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition … United Methodist ecumenist Albert C. Outler of Southern Methodist University meanwhile became the first non-Catholic president of the association.
Navigating Time
Jesus Christ was nominated 1,800 times for Time magazine’s Man of the Year, but Richard Nixon, the runner-up, trailing far behind, was the magazine editors’ selection for the January 3 cover story.
Never before had the Man from Galilee received so many “votes,” but then, it was also the first time that the Navigators had organized a write-in campaign. All but twenty of the nomination letters for Jesus that floated into Time’s office during the first three weeks of December were steered there by Navs, a Time researcher said.
World Scene
Increasing financial support enabled the Church of the Nazarene to increase its world mission budget by $800,000 in 1971 to a total of almost $8 million. This is an increase of 11.4 per cent over the 1970 budget. The denomination also opened gospel work in two new areas during the year: Singapore-Indonesia, and Nassau, Bahama Islands.
The flow of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel is now so large that El A1 Airlines plans to use Boeing 747s to transport the immigrants from Vienna to Israel, according to an Israeli Radio report. (Vienna is a major stopover point for emigrant Soviet Jews.)
The Irish Christian Advocate, weekly journal of the Irish Methodist Church, was forced to suspend publication recently after the destruction of its offices by a bomb explosion in downtown Belfast. The paper published for more than a century.
The Orthodox Church in America (formerly the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America)—second largest Orthodox church in the Western Hemisphere—has threatened to withdraw from the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas if voting power in that organization isn’t realigned. The OCA council objected to election of officers from groups related to the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul.
Dr. Carino Alvaro, president of the Lutheran Church of the Philippines, is the new chairman of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines.
United Church of Canada officials said they were “completely bewildered” at news from Helsinki that the denomination’s director of planning assistance, a former United Presbyterian Church employee, had been arrested on charges of an armed hijacking attempt of a 707 jet. Leonard (Jock) Milne, 49, reportedly said he planned to rescue Simas Kudirka, the Lithuanian sailor sentenced to ten years in a Soviet prison for trying to defect from a fishing vessel to a U. S. Coast Guard cutter a year ago.
For the first time in its six-year history, the Christian Service Corps, headquartered in Washington, D. C., is sending two volunteers on short-term missionary assignment at the direct invitation of a government. The Muslim government of the Republic of Niger has asked John and Dorothy Luke of Lake Worth, Florida, to spend the next two years teaching in a Niger village.
Deaths
CALVIN P. BULTHUIS, 47, editor-in-chief of the Reformed Journal, a leading evangelical publication, and editor-in-chief of the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; in Grand Rapids, of cancer.
F. RUPERT GIBSON, 65, moderator of the 1971 General Assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church, and superintendent of the Irish Mission since 1954; in Belfast, following a seizure.
METROPOLITAN IAKOVOS, 51 (formerly Bishop James of Philadelphia), head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Germany; in Bonn, in an auto accident.
WILLIAM A. POEHLER, 67, president of Concordia College, St. Paul, from 1946 to 1970, and since then interim president of California Concordia College (Oakland); in Bloomington, Minnesota.
HANS PUTTFARCKEN, 60, former Ministry of Justice official in the state of Hesse, president of the Synod of the Evangelical Church (EKID) in Germany from 1961 to 1970; in Wiesbaden.
WILLIAM F. ROSE, 52, Baptist minister, religion writer for the Oakland (California) Tribune for eighteen years; at his desk at the paper, of an apparent heart attack.
CLAUDE HOLMES THOMPSON, 63, United Methodist professor at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, since 1950; in Atlanta, of cancer.
