Fourth in a Series
We have already noted that the present American scene shows pockmarks of moral decline and spiritual unrest. Our frontier society finds contraceptive devices a gateway to sexual licentiousness and abortion the happy solution for overpopulation; the marriage concept it scorns as a deterrent to the good life. Numbers of people reject the prevalent view of work as a means to affluence and prestige, not because they have the higher motivation of work as service, but because they expect the redistribution of wealth, more and more government welfare programs, and larger opportunities of leisure. The confused political situation among those who rely on law and order meanwhile encourages the discontent to foment disorder.
The spiritual sky is ominously beclouded. Jesus-freaks and Satan-worshipers have both come to the fore, organized ecumenism is struggling to retain power, fragmented evangelical forces are parrying a more cooperative way into the future. A vast array of cults, the big-city Graham crusades, the charismatic movement, thousands of student conversions to Christ, a widening use of television by Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, and others, the growth of Pentecostal Catholics, and the emergence of a noteworthy Christian Jewry all crowd the religious scene today.
How are we to assess the evangelical prospect amid these forces? Some thinkers envision a new age of religious syncretism that will aim to span the differences between Christ and Confucius, or even between Matthew’s gospel and Mao’s. Others credit the Jesus people with launching a spiritual revolution in America. Still others think that American and European Christianity has now largely had its day, and that the evangelical future will move through Asia, Africa, or Latin America.
Many lamps of evangelical promise are agleam in the present dark hour, and some remarkable developments of new life are easy to discern.
Amid intellectual fatigue and moral chaos on the campuses, a nucleus of Christian students and teachers openly declare their personal faith in Christ. Differing local situations may determine how this phenomenon becomes organizationally absorbed—Campus Crusade, Inter-Varsity, Navigators, or some exceptionally virile denominational work. Often the new surge moves simply under the broad umbrella of the Jesus movement. At Marshall University about 300 students declared for Christ in the span of just a few months. Inter-Varsity’s triennial Urbana conference has become a well-known and respected missionary-recruiting grounds for hard-pressed denominations. In June some 85,000 gathered in Dallas for Explo ’72, a nationwide student Christian conference organized by Campus Crusade.
Young Jesus-followers seem uninterested in the professional ministry as a vocation; they seek evangelistic and missionary patterns outside the pulpit. At the same time converts on non-evangelical campuses, deluged by intellectual pressures on faith and confronted by issues of social justice, are burdened about stating Christian claims in a coherent and compelling way; they do not wish to separate a Christian world-life view and socio-cultural sensitivity and evangelistic engagement. Although in somewhat smaller numbers, recent alumni of Christian colleges also show these same larger concerns, and are earmarking their graduate studies in philosophy, law, and political science for larger involvement in the cultural debate. The publication Universitas that has been projected by evangelical campuses aligned in the Consortium of Christian Colleges may reinforce these interests. The Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, a mobile fellowship of evangelical professors, many serving on prestigious campuses, seeks to advance Christian perspectives by sponsoring invitational scholars’ conferences and research grants to mature writers engaged in frontier issues. To become more than a salvific cult that from the sidelines of culture conducts periodic forays to rescue prisoners in an alien milieu, evangelical Christianity must engage energetically in the conflict of ideas and in the struggle for public justice.
During the past century evangelicals have developed their affinity through cooperative evangelistic and missionary momentum, and evangelism, indeed, still offers the most inviting doorway to transdenominational engagement. Key 73 offers Christian believers across America an unprecedented opportunity to reach their fellow countrymen from the Atlantic to the Pacific. If Key 73, already endorsed by almost 150 American denominations and evangelical agencies, becomes merely an occasion for each participating group to do its own thing while others do theirs, it will make about as much permanent impact as a Fourth of July celebration. But if, across the nation, in block after block and precinct after precinct, believers of all races and stations come to know one another as God’s concerned people, a powerful river of spiritual life could pour through our sick cities and weary land. A transcultural concentration of committed Christians, an interracial vanguard of the spiritually concerned, could become a tide of healing in our great cities, where schools and mass media are now vulnerably exposed to radical and destructive pressures that threaten to inundate the nation.
One hopes that an open Bible will be the central core from which the diverse groups will hear what the Spirit says to the churches. No evangelical movement today wholly enfleshes the Kingdom of God, and each needs to be brought from merely confirming its peculiar tenets to obediently serving the Lord of Glory. The charismatic movement today weaves through almost all strands of the religious spectrum; some devotees are oriented toward tongues-speaking, others toward healing, some toward simply a deeper work of the Spirit. Who would have dreamed, when the question was wrestled whether to invite Roman Catholic observers to the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism, that only half a decade later 50,000 Pentecostal Catholics in the United States would identify with apostolic rather than medieval loyalties? Today thousands of Catholics are meeting with their neighbors in interdenominational home Bible-study groups. Many resent not having been taught the Scriptures by their priests, at the same time these Catholics find little appeal in local Protestant churches where the Bible is also largely ignored. Throughout America, while the adult Sunday school suffers severe decline, more and more weeknight neighborhood groups are meeting for Bible study. This fact reflects, in part, dissatisfaction with theological compromise in much denominational church-school literature, and with preaching devoid of, or antagonistic to, scriptural authority. In present-day Jewry, a vanguard of Christians, including young intellectuals who insist in their synagogues that Jesus is the Christ, is restoring the Book of Acts to contemporary reading, and spurring the recent interest in New Testament charisma to an even deeper probing of New Testament Christology.
CARL F. H. HENRY
