Despite political, economic, and religious turmoil in Israel, more than 4,000 persons from all over the world (the majority of them from the United States) traveled to Jerusalem this month for the first charismatic-oriented World Conference on the Holy Spirit. In all, thirty-five nations were represented.
The conference contributed to a revival of Israel’s vital tourism business, badly crippled by the October Yom Kippur war. For a while, the New Jersey-based Logos International Fellowship, sponsor of the conference, had considered canceling it. But, said Logos president Dan Malachuk to conferees on opening night, “God said to go ahead with our plans.” (Later, Logos announced another conference for 1975.)
The three-day meeting—part of a Logos fund-raising tour package—centered on worship, praise, and teaching, involving a variety of speakers and other participants. Loosely organized, the conference meetings at times were interrupted by prophecies and messages in tongues followed by interpretations; there was handclapping, dancing, and “singing in the Spirit.” The sessions were held in Congress Hall, the largest convention center in Jerusalem. Closed-circuit television brought the service to overflow crowds in rooms outside the main auditorium. Such speakers as the well-known author Corrie Ten Boom, theologian J. Rodman Williams, and broadcaster Pat Robertson emphasized the work of the Holy Spirit in lives today.
A healing service conducted by Kathryn Kuhlman got major attention in the Jerusalem press and was much discussed in Jerusalem streets. By popular request she held another service on the final evening of the conference.
The interest generated by the conference (even the Orthodox Jewish newspaper on the final day decided to devote attention to the story) was in marked contrast to the uneasiness over recent acts of terrorism in the city. Two weeks before the conference opened, several Christian-owned buildings were bombed, allegedly by members of the Jewish Defense League in apparent retaliation for mission activity. (But, according to a Jewish Christian source, one group bombed had no evangelistic outreach.) The Israeli government immediately offered to pay for the damage. Since last year’s rash of bombings and threats, the government has instituted stiffer punishments and increased efforts to catch terrorists badgering Christians who live in Jerusalem.
Some missionaries were concerned that with 4,000 evangelical and charismatic believers in town, some might be overly zealous in attempts to witness to the Jews—with the consequence of further hardship on those who live in Israel. But, said a Southern Baptist missionary, “we were relieved to find that this has not happened.”
The convention got some press coverage, but competition was stiff: Henry Kissinger was huddled with government negotiators, and Golda Meir had announced her willingness to resign as prime minister in the aftermath of the national election.
The overflow crowd—Logos had at first anticipated only about 3,000 participants—was a blessing to Israel’s strained economy. In the first two months of this year Israel’s cost of living rose 7 per cent; the increase in 1973 was more than a third. The price of food has nearly doubled in a year. Beef is scarce, and many conference delegates, especially Americans, complained of the steady poultry diet.
Delegates had more to complain about than lack of beef. Making arrangements for more than 4,000 people was a huge problem for the travel agents handling—or, chided some, mishandling—the task. Luggage was lost or misplaced, and there were mixups in accommodations (some who had paid for single rooms, for instance, were shoehorned in with two and three other persons).
Other than logistical complaints, the most commonly heard criticisms of the conference were that it lacked solid Bible teaching and placed too much emphasis on tongues and exuberance in worship. In commenting on the group’s worship style, Justus Du Plessis, brother of the well-known Pentecostal spokesman David Du Plessis (the conference’s keynote speaker), said: “It seems to be an infantile stage that newly Spirit-filled Christians must go through.”
He stressed that Bible teaching should have top priority. But unlike several other name personalities, Du Plessis, who is from South Africa, said he found some good instruction at the conference.
Interviews with various delegates indicate that the charismatic movement continues to grow throughout the world. In South Africa, for example, the attitude of the largest Dutch Reformed denomination toward neo-Pentecostalism has completely changed, according to Du Plessis (the two smaller Dutch Reformed bodies, however, still maintain an anti-charismatic stance). Also, the Anglican church in South Africa has at least one charismatic bishop and many charismatic priests. And there is a growing involvement of Catholics. All this has happened within the past two years or so.
Missionaries in Israel, too, are not unaffected by the new wave of the Spirit. Southern Baptist, Scottish Presbyterian, and Mennonite missionaries (they work mainly among the Arab population) now have charismatics in their ranks, and several of the few hundred known Israeli believers are part of the movement.
THE GOOD SEMINARIANS
Some Princeton Seminary students are a bit red-faced over an article in the March issue of Human Behavior.
It all started when a couple of researchers decided to find out if seminarians are Good Samaritans. They met individually with forty of the ministerial students under the pretence of doing a study on careers in the church. Each student was instructed to walk to a nearby building to dictate an impromptu talk into a tape recorder there. Some were told to talk on the Good Samaritan parable, others on their career concerns.
Meanwhile, the researchers planted an actor along the path who, as a seminarian approached, groaned and slumped to the ground. More than half the students walked right on by, reported the researchers in Human Behavior. “Some, who were planning their dissertation on the Good Samaritan, literally stepped over the slumped body as they hurried along,” they noted.
Winning With Watergate
As recent special congressional elections have shown, Watergate has been costly to Republicans. One of the losses was the seat left vacant by the elevation of Gerald Ford to Vice-President. Running for it were Republican Robert VanderLaan, 43, a Michigan state senator of Grand Rapids, and Democrat Richard F. VanderVeen, 51, a lawyer also of Grand Rapids.
Loser VanderLaan, considered a virtual shoo-in by just about everybody before the election, is a member of the Millbrook Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids and is forthright about his faith and its place in politics (“I believe that it’s a Christian politician’s responsibility to set a moral tone which will permeate that scene”).
Winner VanderVeen is an elder of Westminster (United) Presbyterian Church in town (his grandfather split from the Reformed camp), a past president of the Michigan Presbyterian men’s organization, and a former member of the United Presbyterian national missions board. Leaning toward universalism, he downplays religion as a factor for selecting candidates. “Christianity is action more than words,” he says. He doesn’t like civil religion (symbolized, he thinks, in national prayer breakfasts and the like), and he finds evangelist Billy Graham’s association with President Nixon “appalling” because of what he feels is a cloud of immorality over the White House. His win may seem like the prophet’s knock at the White House door; he made morality and Watergate the main issue of his campaign.
Britain: Surviving The Crisis
When then British prime minister Ted Heath last fall slapped heavy restrictions on public lighting as part of an energy conservation program, it looked bad for the night-playing soccer club, already hurt by slumping attendance. But the teams came up with a solution: Sunday soccer. The Sunday Observance Act passed in 1780 forbids the charging of entrance fees for Sunday sports. The promoters, however, took a tip from their cricket colleagues and sold programs for the Sunday matches.
Since November, attendance has doubled at many of the events. A recent poll showed that 64 per cent of all Englishmen want to scrap the 1780 Sunday law, but an attempt to repeal it failed in Parliament last month. Meanwhile, the militantly traditional Lord’s Day Observance Society continued to assail the Sunday sportsmen for acting “contrary to one of the express commands of God.”
The soccer controversy is but a small facet of the upheaval in English life growing out of the Arab oil ban and national labor problems. Among measures to conserve energy was a call to Britons to curtail Sunday driving. Heating and lighting in commercial premises were sharply reduced (churches were permitted six hours of heating per room each week). Heath ordered the nation into a three-day work week. The state-owned British Broadcasting Company shut down its nightly television operations at 10:30. Householders were urged to “S.O.S.”—“switch off something.” (In the process Heath and his government got switched off in last month’s election.)
The seething political-economic turmoil has had an impact on the life-style of British evangelicals. Many took seriously Heath’s plea regarding Sunday driving. Families who once drove two cars to church now make it with one. Many suburbanites who motored to large center-city churches now worship closer to home. (In response, Lansdowne Baptist Church in downtown Bournemouth, for one, helped to finance a suburban chapel.)
That is not to say the evangelicals are suffering in silence. Declared Baptist layman Sir Cyril Black, a former Member of Parliament from Wimbledon: “It seems strange indeed that it should be acceptable on six weekdays for people to use their cars to attend theaters, cinemas, or sporting events, but unacceptable for them to do so to attend God’s House on His day. Perhaps the malaise from which the nations suffer so grievously at this time arises from the fact that they have gotten their priorities wrong.”
Not only transportation bedevils the British church. Mission sources say the shorter work week has resulted in reduced contributions to mission work. Christian bookshops are suffering from the restrictions on light and heat. Industrial unrest is also cutting the production of tracts and books. On the other hand, many men are apparently devoting chunks of their additional leisure time to voluntary work with home mission agencies.
Archbishop Michael Ramsey spoke out on the economic crisis at the General Synod of the Anglican Church, which convened during the election campaign. He said that both strikes and property speculation thwart the struggle against inflation, adding that neither labor nor management is innocent. Concluded Ramsey: “Crisis confronts us with the divine judgment upon our whole civilization.”
WAYNE DETZLER
Twenty-Five Hours In Cuba
Increasingly, Christian students, laymen, and even pastors are getting involved personally in the needs of the foreign mission field. Project Partner, a rapidly growing private missionary-help group within the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), is one of the parachurch organizations that help believers get next to the action. Based in Wichita, Kansas, the agency sponsors work projects, traveling seminars, relief efforts (it helped with reconstruction of many houses in Managua, Nicaragua, after the 1972 earthquake), and the like.
Such involvement has its perils—and unexpected opportunities. In late February, thirty-five workers were on their way back to Ohio from Jamaica and Haiti, where they had helped nationals build a parsonage and a schoolhouse, when two Russian-built Cuban MIGs intercepted Project Partner’s twin-engine Convair 240 over Camaguey, Cuba. Forced to land, pilot Donald Shaver showed the written permit granting clearance over Cuba, but for some reason it was not enough. Authorities announced it would cost nearly $7,000 in “fines” to release the plane and party. Twenty-five hours later the money was sent through the Swiss embassy, and the group took off for home. (In all, Project Partner had to borrow some $10,000 to pay for the diversion.)
What were those twenty-five hours like?
“We figured it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness to Communist Cubans,” says work-team leader Claude Ferguson of Alliance, Ohio, “so we took it. We had three tremendous public prayer meetings in that time, and dozens heard our witness for Christ.”
The group was held under guard in a motel in Camaguey. Members opened the windows and sang gospel songs at the top of their voices. Hundreds listened as the group conducted a service in a courtyard. “We even sang ‘God Bless America’ with all our might as we stood between busts of Marx and Lenin,” commented stewardess Bobbie Feiring.
In both English and Spanish the workers told their captors about Christ. “No one was rude, and many seemed to genuinely appreciate our feelings and views,” says John Gobeli of Louisville, Ohio. “They’d turn their radios down and listen to our singing and testimonies for Christ.”
“We’ll go back to Cuba again,” vows Gay Combs of Windham, Ohio. “We know God wants to reach back into Cuba, and we’re praying that he will bless the seeds we have sown.”
DAN HARMAN
Muslim Summit
Delegates from thirty-six Muslim countries last month attended the second Islamic Summit Conference in Lahore, Pakistan. Among the delegates were several heads of state, including President Sadat of Egypt, President Gaddafi of Libya, President Amin of Uganda, and Prime Minister Mujib Rahman of Bangladesh.
One of the chief items discussed at the summit was Jerusalem, a city holy to Muslims as well as to Christians and Jews. The summit called for the liberation of Jerusalem and restoration of the city to Arab sovereignty as a “paramount and unchangeable” prerequisite for any settlement in the Middle East. A resolution, adopted unanimously by the conference, said any proposal that did not restore Jerusalem to Arab rule would be unacceptable to Islamic countries. Internationalization of the city was also opposed.
Meanwhile, a non-Muslim delegation led by Greek Orthodox patriarch Monsignor Elias IV arrived from Lebanon to extend nominal Christian support to Muslim demands on Jerusalem, and several Pakistani Christian organizations gave similar backing.
HUBERT F. ADDLETON
Plans For Pakistan
The cold mid-February rains in the northern regions of Pakistan did not chill or dampen the spirits of the members and friends of the Evangelical Fellowship of West Pakistan, who met in mile-high Abbottabad for the sixteenth annual EFWP conference. Plans laid for the coming year include continued outreach in Azad Kashmir and an EFWP campaign in Peshawar, gateway city to the Khyber pass. Amid the planning, talks, and evangelism reports, conference participants found time to mount a witness effort of their own in the local bazaar.
William Gill, pastor of the Brethren Assembly in Rawalpindi, was reelected EFWP chairman.
Guest conference speaker Anis Shorrosh of Mobile, Alabama, a Nazarethborn Arab and Southern Baptist evangelist, also held forth at EFWP-sponsored campaigns in four cities. Shorrosh said he appreciated the love shown him by his evangelical friends but wished there were more love among the brethren for one another. (A number of church groups have been hurt by warring factions. The strife is for the most part intra-church rather than inter-church; generally, however, the EFWP has been spared the conflict.)
The EFWP has no full-time executive secretary, and programs are somewhat limited by funds (the annual membership fee is five rupees—fifty cents—and donations are slim), yet the evidence indicates the EFWP is here to stay. It’s well grounded in Pakistani leadership—and in the Gospel.
RALPH E. BROWN
Church Presses Pressed
At the recent annual meeting of the Protestant Church-Owned Publishers Association in Orlando, Florida, representatives faced two imminent problems: the increasing competitive pressure for professionalization in what has long been a fairly sedate branch of the publishing industry, and threats of rising government intervention in several areas. These areas involve hiring practices (requiring a religious test of prospective employees), real estate taxes, and income taxes on “unrelated business.” A really strict interpretation of existing tax laws might make a non-profit publisher subject to real estate and income taxes if any of his property is used for any “unrelated” business activities—if, for example, one church-related publisher prints Sunday-school materials for another publisher.
According to Albert Anderson of Augsburg Publishing Company (American Lutheran Church), currently proposed tax “reforms” aimed at charitable and church-related enterprises might mean donors will be unable to claim tax exemptions for their contributions. Augsburg recently won a court decision in Minneapolis recognizing publishing as an integral and legitimate activity of the church “just as world missions are,” but the long-term battle is far from over.
HAROLD O. J. BROWN
