Especially within the realm of evangelical missions, many eyes are turned toward a fast-growing educational phenomenon: the extension seminary, more properly “theological education by extension” (TEE), a sort of class-less approach to learning. In TEE, the student can stay at home—and on the job—with self-study materials and occasional contacts with his teacher. Denominations and missions are spared the costs of expensive school facilities and resident faculties. Churches need not suffer even the temporary loss of effective workers.
Rarely has a basic alteration of institutional modes moved so rapidly, hop-scotching its way completely around the world. Where TEE has touched, enrollments in theological education have skyrocketed. More importantly, according to some of its chief proponents, the educational experiences have taken on a fresh relevance to the needs of the Church.
TEE began ten years ago in the Presbyterian Seminary in Guatemala. Two engineers-turned-missionary-educators, Ralph Winter (now at Fuller Seminary) and Jim Emery, teed off with five extension students. Extension, a monthly newsletter reporting TEE developments worldwide, recently listed 9,030 extension students studying in 742 centers throughout Latin America. The largest program reported is that of the Presbyterian Seminary of Brazil, which involves 3,000 students.
Dr. John Sinclair, who oversees Latin American work for the United Presbyterian Church, thinks TEE has helped to open up an improved relationship between his denomination and the Presbyterian Church in Guatemala.
In January, 1971, extension programs began in five centers throughout India. By last November, there were twelve centers, and enrollment had jumped from 120 to 250. Similar organizations exist in Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Africa. The Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches has budgeted $245,000 for TEE projects. This is equal to the amount it designated for all other types of experiments in theological education. A major reason for the Fund’s interest in TEE is its financial viability in the third world.
One feature of TEE programs has been the use of programmed instruction. Extension students must have self-instructional materials that they can handle on their own between periodic contacts with the teacher. Opinions vary on the value and use of programmed materials but responsible research is going on. For instance, Lois McKinney, a Baptist missionary in Brazil, has just completed research under a Ford Foundation grant related to her studies in ethno-pedogogy. Such research may resolve some of the questions, especially those related to the cross-cultural transformation of instructional materials.
Although TEE has been primarily a third-world phenomenon, it is of increasing interest to North American theological educators. Several conferences to discuss the implications of TEE for North America are in the works. Wheaton College has included TEE in its summer graduate program, attracting not only missionaries but teachers from North American schools. Fuller Seminary has plans for four extension centers this fall.
Two factors suggest that the interest in TEE will not soon subside—a renewed interest in a theologically literate laity and the need for an effective continuing-education program for the professional ministry.
The search for more effective educational alternatives is not limited to theological education. The U. S. government is investing substantially in research on “non-formal” modes of education. TEE provides rome of the best examples of what is meant by non-formal educational programs, and Lois McKinney’s studies are part of the governmental research project. In a meeting in Penang, Malaysia, for ministers of education of ten Southeastern Asian nations, Dr. Ted Ward of the Institute for International Education at Michigan State University gave a paper on “Effective Learning in Non-Formal Modes.” Ward, an evangelical, has been a strong advocate of TEE and has conducted workshops for missionaries in Africa and Latin America.
Participants at a TEE seminar two months ago in São Paulo, Brazil, were told there are 60,000 functioning pastors in Latin America with no theological training. For most of them, TEE is their—and the churches’—best hope for a remedy.
Some see TEE as a fad or have taken a wait-and-see stance. Ward feels the fad stage is past. “Educational fads usually show signs of mortification and have peculiar odors within three or four years,” he says. “Aside from some setbacks related to overselling and some very responsible hesitation in certain countries, there are no real signs that the extension idea will die the death of a fad.”
The disciples of TEE vigorously promote their faith. Some of the difficulties of the early days are being remedied by the reorganization programs. In January, fifty-three delegates met in Medellin, Colombia, and formed the Latin American Association on Institutions and Theological Seminaries by Extension (ALISTE). In so doing they dismantled previous structures geared chiefly to the production of programmed textbooks. In Singapore, a filmstrip, “TEE Could Be the Answer,” is helping to push the extension idea in Asia.
Experts see two problems that may impede TEE expansion. The willingness to change does not always include an enlightened view of how change occurs, they caution; there is a danger of substituting one pattern for another without really coming to grips with the breadth of the problems underlying theological education. The second problem they cite is the cultural insensitivity that often underlies the exportation of institutional forms.
At the Brazilian seminar, sponsored by the Evangelical Association for Extension Theological Training in Brazil, a number of tough questions were discussed, including:
How are the dynamics of the classroom (group dynamics) maintained with only one hour of group study per week? How are music (voice) and speech (preaching) taught? Can extension training replace intensive, full-time reflection, in-depth research, with only marginal study time that may take up to ten years to complete? What happens to honest discussion, ethics by example, and lapidacao (knocking off the rough corners)?
In the long run, the central question facing TEE is whether the change to extension modes will be merely a movement from one rigid system to another. The advocates of TEE admit the danger. But they think TEE offers the most promise for breaking the mono-cultural death grip that has held back theological education in the third world.
A LOAN FROM PETER TO PAUL?
The eighty-five-year-old founder and president of the Home Echo nursing home in Columbus, Ohio, withdrew $45,000 of the home’s money from the bank and donated it to Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church. But the nursing home trustees knew nothing about the transaction. They are threatening, consequently, to charge Mrs. Carrie Stewart, the president, with criminal embezzlement, and several have asked for her dismissal.
It seems that not only did she obtain the money from the bank without the signature of a co-signer as required by the corporation’s by-laws, but she also could not give reasons for the withdrawal except that “it was to feed the poor and needy.”
Pastor T. R. Gasten of Rising Star maintains that the money was given to “the poor and hungry in Mississippi and North Carolina.” But no specifics or records have emerged regarding the gift or its disbursement.
Mrs. Stewart claims that she only borrowed the money and intends to pay it back.
Theology Down Under
The difficulty of theological training in the Southwest Pacific was recently highlighted by an eighty-five-page report from the Australian and New Zealand Society for Theological Studies. The five-year-old society, an ecumenical fellowship that includes a large Roman Catholic segment, was organized to support serious theological inquiry and to promote development of theological studies in Australian universities.
Denominational conflicts and ecclesiastical pressures operative when the universities were founded there more than a century ago resulted in statutes excluding formal religious disciplines from the official curricula. Several schools offer some biblical-type subjects in their liberal arts, history, or Semitic studies departments, but enrollments are low, and clergymen say the courses do not prepare a student for the parish ministry. Each of the churches has therefore founded its own theological colleges that prepare men for denominationally accredited ordination. These, in the main, require university entrance standards but—unlike their U. S. counterparts—have no power to confer recognized degrees, a practice reserved for the state universities.
The Australian College of Theology, an Anglican school, and the interdenominational Melbourne College of Divinity offer external examinations in theology in the “University of London” correspondence tradition. These appear to have little status, however, outside the churches.
The society’s report found there were 2,374 theological students in Australia, New Zealand, and the near Pacific Islands, with a full-time faculty of 264 and 154 part-time teachers. Anglican students numbered 363 in eleven schools, Presbyterians 274 in four, Methodists 203 in six, and Baptists 156 in six. Lutherans, Congregationalists, Reformed, and Churches of Christ enrolled a total of 209 students in nine other schools. More than 1,100 were enrolled in Catholic schools.
There now appears to be a real move toward improvement. Many of the students in the denominational theological colleges are taking concurrent or postgraduate secular university degrees, and some church-sponsored residential halls have been established at or near universities.
There is also a plan to establish a department of “religious studies” at the Australian National University, in Canberra, the capital. Because of Australia’s location, this university has a vital interest in the political, commercial, and cultural elements of Southeast Asian societies. The plan is to set up a department that, while centering on the Judaeo-Christian tradition in religion, will give greater attention to Buddhism, Islam, and other Southeast Asian religious interests. The liberal thrust of its approach can be seen in an extract from the foundation committee report: “No member of the [religious studies] department, either staff or student, shall be expected to share or not to share any particular religious belief or belief in religion in general.”
“Undoubtedly a very small and questionable beginning,” comments an informal observer. “But it is at last evident that the climate is favorable to a more academically respectable development of theological training than before.”
Evangelicals meanwhile remain concerned that the ecumenical thrust that has reduced university hesitancy may result also in a further crippling of conservative theological perspective.
CRAIG SKINNER
Extending The Seminary
Presbyterian churches in Birmingham, Alabama, have come up with an idea to plug the gap in theological education for clergymen and church workers lacking seminary training. Last fall they launched the Birmingham Extension Seminary for Theological Education, and now dozens of degree students—many of them college graduates—are enrolled.
“It’s just what I’ve been waiting for,” commented a black Cumberland Presbyterian minister with ten years of experience. “I have had to hold a secular job all of my years in the ministry, and still do. I have been dreaming of this all my life. God sent it.”
Classes, held on weekends, are taught by four volunteers, all Presbyterian ministers, and a visiting seminary professor (paid for by a low tuition fee). Covenant Seminary in St. Louis approves credits offered by the school, and three more seminaries are expected to do likewise. One church provides classrooms, another operates a library, and still another runs a bookstore for the extension students.
Missouri Synod: Stacked Deck?
Another entry in the simmering dispute between Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) president Jacob A. O. Preus, an advocate of biblical inerrancy, and the majority of the Concordia Seminary faculty is the LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR). After studying the first of a two-part declaration of faith by the faculty, the commission rejected the document as “not correctly representing the issues under debate in our synod,” and said it would tend to “confuse rather than edify the church.” The CTCR also charged that when the statement does touch on issues at stake (the inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of the Bible), it departs from what is considered by the commission a “Lutheran position.”
This month at the seminary in St. Louis, the majority faction dismissed CTCR findings because the commission allegedly did not substantiate its charges and refused to discuss the theological positions set forth in the faculty document. There were also angry murmurings that the commission was stacked in favor of arch-foe Preus.
The CTCR reports on theological issues in the Missouri Synod, and, though it has no policy-making power, critics agree its views are respected in many LCMS churches. Several CTCR members are appointed by the synod president, some are elected by the synodical convention, and others represent LCMS seminaries.
In a related decision, the commission will recommend to the upcoming New Orleans convention that the synod reject any method of biblical interpretation that deprives Scripture of divine authority.
Meanwhile, Crossroads, a lay-clergy alliance, claims it has received more than 190,000 individual endorsements of its call for Preus’s reelection at the New Orleans convention.
Methodists: For Free Flow
The United Methodist Church’s powerful global ministries board adopted positions on several important issues at its annual meeting last month. In one, the agency committed itself to Key 73, calling on United Methodist congregations to develop evangelism programs that are “faithful to the full gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Stating it deplored “mounting efforts of governments” to control reporting and analysis of the mass media around the world, the board pledged itself to “a free flow of information about our own activities.” It also endorsed a National Council of Churches resolution calling on the U. S. government to be generous in providing relief and reconstruction in Indochina, and through one of its units voted $597,000 for Indochina aid.
Records show the board spent more than $42 million in 1972, including $17.4 million for overseas missions and $11.5 million for national missions.
Sentenced By Soviets
In the Soviet town of Osipovichi, Belorussia, two dissident Baptist leaders were recently sent to labor camps on charges of violating Soviet laws on the separation of church and state and failing to register their congregation. Pastor Lazar Sotnichenko was sentenced to five years at hard labor and lay minister Mikhail Dernovich to two years.
A Young Communist daily reported their trial and church-in-the-home activities. Police searches were said to have uncovered religious material smuggled in from Paris and Brussels and the secretly printed Reform Baptist (Initsiativniki) magazines Fraternal Leaflet and Salvation Messenger. Other seized items included tapes of gospel broadcasts in Russian, songbooks, religious poetry, sermons, and copybooks filled with Bible passages written by Russian Baptist teen-agers. Copies of appeals to the United Nations protesting religious persecutions were also confiscated.
ANGELO COSMIDES
Just Between Jews
Despite attempts at conciliation, the conflict over evangelism of Jews is still on, in both the United States and Israel.
In Portland, Oregon, rabbis say the Jewish community is “tense” over recent efforts by youthful Jews for Jesus to witness during and after synagogue services. Police were called to two synagogues to remove the Christians, who, rabbis claim, interrupted services by shouting, waving hands, and distributing tracts. A spokesman for the Christians said they did not intend to interrupt, but he admitted there were expressions of praise—as at a Jesus rally.
Washington, D. C., area Jews denounced as “trickery” a “Purim” party sponsored by a mission. (Purim is a Jewish feast traditionally dating from the days when Esther saved the Jews from genocide.) The party, held by Beth Sar Shalom (House of the Prince of Peace), an American Board of Missions to the Jews front, included a play based on the story of Esther along with an explanation of Jesus as the Messiah. Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations denounced such use of “the trappings of Judaism.” The Hebrew Christians replied that they are still Jews, celebrating Jewish holidays with deeper understanding because they are “fulfilled” by Jesus.
Similar hostility and protest caused cancelation of a half-hour television program in New York City. WPIX-TV cut the program shortly before airing after Jewish leaders, who were given a preview of the show, complained to the station management. The program, also sponsored by Beth Sar Shalom and titled “Jews for Jesus,” featured talk-show host Les Crane interviewing Jewish followers of Jesus.
In North Carolina a TV series entitled “Ben Israel” is upsetting Jewish viewers. One rabbi said he tells protestors simply to turn the program off if they don’t like it. Hosted by Jewish evangelist Arthur Katz, the weekly half-hour program features Katz and guests discussing faith in Jesus. Officials at WRDU-TV in Durham say the program is causing “quite a stir,” with letters and telephone calls running six to one against the show. Ten segments have been shown so far, and Katz is hoping to syndicate the program.
A leading Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Post and Opinion, editorialized that it’s time for Jews to increase proselytizing efforts among Christians. Such a campaign would give confidence to Jews about their own faith as well as win Christians to Judaism, it said. Moishe Rosen, a California Jews for Jesus spokesman, said Jews may be surprised to find no resistance among evangelicals to proselytizing efforts. “If Judaism became a missionary religion, it could lead to a better understanding between Jews and Christians, resulting in mutual respect,” said Rosen. Christians, he added, would welcome increased information on their Jewish roots, “which would serve to buttress and strengthen their own beliefs in Christ. Furthermore, where the law is preached, the grace of Christ abounds.”
The Post and Opinion has already gained an aura of notoriety in the Jewish community by running the controversial “Smiling Jews” ad sponsored by the American Board of Missions to the Jews. The result: a flood of mail, mostly in outraged opposition to the ad and the newspaper’s decision to run it. Editor Gabriel Cohen, hit by numerous cancelations, says he published the ad to show the maturity of the Jewish people and their ability to resist evangelism. As a sop, he later published a free “Jews for Judaism” ad.
In Israel, meanwhile, it was announced that a Boston rabbinical court annulled the “conversion” to Judaism of evangelism activist Carol “Shira” Lindsay, daughter of a Texas evangelist. The court said she failed to tell the rabbis that she believed in Jesus. Israeli authorities can now withdraw her visa issued under the “Law of Return,” which grants immediate Israeli citizenship to Jews. To expel her, the government presumably must take her to court. If that happens it will be the first time in Israeli history that a Jewish immigrant’s status is challenged.
Delegates to the recent “World Bible Conference” in Israel issued a protest to Prime Minister Golda Meir over what it called “periodic pressure” against missionaries and “discrimination against Christians Jews seeking to become Israeli citizens.” The 350 signatories also called on the United States to curtail economic and military aid to states that practice “subtle forms of religious intolerance.”
Religion In Transit
Many church leaders and church groups are publicly protesting the Nixon administration’s proposed 1974 budget cutbacks affecting a variety of social programs.
Toronto journalist Allen Spraggett and Canon William V. Rauscher of New Jersey assert in a new book that the late spiritual medium Arthur Ford cheated in that 1967 séance when the late Bishop James A. Pike believed he communicated with his dead son. The authors say Ford had researched details in lives of some of Pike’s deceased friends.
The annual Interreligious Film Awards, sponsored by the nation’s major Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish bodies, went to The Emigrants, a film somewhat critical of Christianity, and Sounder, about rural blacks.
Safeway Stores, the target of recent boycotts and consumer suits, has filed a $150 million libel suit against farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez, the Interfaith Committee to Aid Farm Workers, and others. Safeway, charging legal and economic harassment, cited statements allegedly distributed by religious and union groups.
Christian Heritage College and its Institute for Creation Research directed by Henry M. Morris has moved from San Diego to a former Catholic college campus in the suburbs.
The staid 2,000-member St. Mark’s Episcopal Church of Glendale, California, reported a “joyous spiritual revival” with hundreds gathered at the altar, during the visit of a sixty-volunteer lay witness team.
Christian Broadcasting Network began operating its fourth television station this month: Channel 33 in Dallas. CBN own stations in Atlanta, Boston, and Portsmouth, Virginia, and has commercial affiliates in nine other cities.
Campus Crusade for Christ has launched The Agape Movement, aimed at recruiting 100,000 persons by 1980 for international Christian service. Agape will combine witness with social work. The initial project involves training 1,000 with medical and agricultural skills to serve in South Korea.
Personalia
Astronaut-turned-evangelist James B. Irwin, 43, was temporarily grounded by a heart attack that he suffered while playing handball at an Air Force base in Colorado.
Archbishop Ieronymos, primate of the Orthodox Church of Greece since 1967, resigned, suffering from ill health and from intense criticism on several fronts (one being the hierarchy). The church’s ruling body, however, refused to accept the resignation and gave him a three-month sick leave instead.
Atlanta Baptist pastor Martin Luther King, Sr., who was recently named Clergyman of the Year by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, took his hate-no-man message on a tour of Israel.
Evangelist Oral Roberts is the latest name churchman to be elected to a major corporation’s board of directors (Oklahoma Natural Gas).
Marjoe Gortner, 28, filmdom’s famed ex-evangelist, walked out of an NBC television studio in Chicago without making a scheduled appearance on a popular late-night show. Sources say he didn’t want to talk religion with copanelists Robert Schroy, head of Chicago’s Jesus Rally, and Jews for Jesus leader Moishe Rosen.
Charles Mellis has retired as Missionary Aviation Fellowship’s president; veteran MAF pilot and leader Charles Bennett succeeds him.
National Council of Churches executive John E. Biersdorf was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Pastoral Studies, succeeding the learning center’s founder, Reuel L. Howe, who has retired. The center recently got a $195,000 grant from the Lilly foundation.
Well-known World War II bombardier Jacob DeShazer, 60, a Free Methodist missionary to Japan (he was converted in a Japanese POW camp after getting shot down in the memorable Doolittle raids) and a critic of the U. S. role in Indochina, has come out for amnesty for draft-dodgers. In a Detroit Free Press interview, he also said that he had advised his three sons to go to Canada to evade the draft but that they served anyway, and one took part in B-52 raids on North Viet Nam.
World Scene
The fourth Islamic Foreign Ministers conference, a twenty-five nation meeting in Libya, heard Libya’s Mansour Le Kekhia charge that “the four million Muslims in the Philippines are facing collective genocide by [President Ferdinand] Marcos and his Christian terrorist gang, in implementation of a plan that was organized after the Pope’s visit to Manila in 1970.” Philippine officials denied the allegation.
Wading into the furor over Sex and Confession, a book by an Italian couple who tape-recorded responses of priests to fake confessions, Pope Paul VI ordered the automatic excommunication of anyone who breaks the secrecy of the confessional booth with a tape recorder.
Chiong-hui Hwang, former moderator of the 200,000-member Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and now director of the World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund, announced a campaign led by Christians to achieve self-determination for the Taiwanese. (The 12 million native Formosans are under martial rule of the Nationalist Chinese, representing two million refugees and descendants.)
Pastor Patrick Krieling of the Dutch Reformed Church, Wellington, South Africa, will not be able to live in the parsonage because it has always been used by whites and he is “coloured.” Trustees will build him a new house.
Swedish Pentecostal missionaries in Burundi in central Africa may be in for trouble from the government. The ruling Watusi (Tutsi) tribe apparently resents missionary help given to refugee Hutu tribe members. The Tutsis killed more than 100,000 Hutus last year. Meantime, strife between Hutus and Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda has left hundreds of Christian families homeless.
In 1967, Albania proclaimed itself the world’s first atheist state and declared every religious practice a crime. Today the church is virtually non-existent there, concedes the Vatican. The background of Albania’s 2.2 million population is said to be 70 per cent Muslim, 20 per cent Orthodox, and 10 per cent Catholic.
An Italian military court jailed seven Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing military service. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union blocked a move of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to secure universal recognition for rights of conscientious objectors. Explained a Communist official: “Under the Soviet constitution, it is the sacred duty for every Soviet citizen to protect the nation, hence to do military service.”
Spanish radio stations are said to be quietly dropping evangelical programs.
The Assemblies of God has 3.8 million members and adherents in the ninety-two countries where its foreign missionaries serve—a one-year increase of 10.7 per cent (100 per cent in the past six years). There are 25,579 AOG churches and outstations manned by 1,087 missionaries and nearly 19,000 national workers.
About 50,000 South Korean servicemen have been baptized in the past two years, and hundreds of chaplains and pastors are engaged in follow-up. An estimated 25 per cent of the nation’s armed forces personnel are professing believers, compared to between 10 and 13 per cent of the population.
Partnership Mission’s Rochunga Pudiate affirms that as many as 1,000 letters a day are pouring into the New Delhi office in response to a well-publicized campaign in which the Living New Testament is being mailed to India’s 1.2 million telephone subscribers. Reports of conversions number into the hundreds, he says.
Archbishop Ralph Dean of the Anglican Church of Canada, former executive officer of the worldwide Anglican Communion, warned that unless the World Council of Churches moves away from policies that equate salvation with social justice it will lose the backing of “a lot of conservative churches” (including entire denominations).
Brazilian newspapers say Rome is concerned about Protestant growth in Brazil. Despite the importing of 1,200 priests from Holland alone and the shortage of pastors in many Protestant churches, there are now more Protestant pastors than priests, say the papers.
Visiting missionaries found that the Christian church at Chali in southern Sudan had more than tripled in size since 1964, when the government ousted all missionaries. There are now 1,100 baptized believers, up from 310, and eight centers have been opened, led by youths who were schoolboys when the missionaries left.
