Slumper Time Again
What is slumper? It is a coined word for an annual condition. Our August yawn is a cavernous and common symptom of summer—the August disease of middle-class American Christians. Laymen from week to week throughout the summer hear old, old pulpit reruns. Harmony flees church music. The choir is out of tenors, low on basses, and only the altos with nasal twangs have been faithful to stay in church and sing adenoidal anthems to the uninterested congregation.
The flies buzz monotonously around the associate pastor, since the senior pastor has abandoned the fold to bless his drowsy sheep from afar. Three Bible classes have to band together to keep their dozing discussion from drifting into a coma. Zombielike, the ushers show occasional visitors into a sea of bare wood pews, and smile and hand them a bulletin. Behind a thousand glassy eyes there hides a common lament, “Alas, why did we take our vacation in May?…” and in the minds of the sluggish worshipers drift rare fantasies of vans and picnic coolers and beach unbrellas.
“Can it be the Gloria Patri is here already?…” The offering plate goes by with three quarters and two greenbacks, and the finance chairman laments the estate and prays for cooler weather and the beginning of school. Gratefully, the clock at last strikes 12 on Sunday and the church gives up her dead. The sermons abound with threats and scoldings that are concerned with the absentees but fall on the dull lot of the hapless cadavers that do show up. The preacher thunders his judgments, which ring off the bare wood backs of the pew-ocean, and the hollow sounds mesmerize the hapless converts:
• “What if God took off on July 31 and posted a sign on the great white throne, ‘OUT DURING AUGUST’?”
• “Does the indwelling Spirit of God lounge at the lake singing ‘the place where I worship is the wide open spaces’?”
• “Be grateful the Almighty doesn’t have a travel agent!”
Those who aren’t sleeping pray, and their prayers go like this, trying to focus through a wandering and drowsy mind:
“Excuse me, Jesus, it’s August, isn’t it [yawn]? In the good ole’ summertime.… Excuse me, God, but who’s your favorite video evangelist?… Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September—I can skip church on the hot days—I’ll send ten dollars to Jerry’s kids and read the Gideon Bible in a Waikiki beach house [yawn]. Our Father, who art in Heaven—Is it so bad if I’m in the Rockies? You spent a lot of time at Sinai. Think of it this way, God, the mountains are home to both of us.”
EUTYCHUS
Prison Rehabilitation—Exception, Not Norm
Concerning the editorial, “A New Solution to the Crisis in Our Prisons” [June 17], it is too idealistic and by no means pragmatic. As a conservative and evangelical pastor, I would suggest that no Christian support the Nunn-Armstrong Act as it currently stands. (I speak as one who was an adult probation/parole officer in the state of Oregon prior to going into the ministry.)
The concept is not new. It has been tried and shown not to work as intended. (It is called the Community Corrections Act in Minnesota and Oregon.) Prison population is up and probation cases have almost doubled. Repeat offenders come through the system numerous times. They usually drain the local public assistance programs. It is a myth to think that a judge or probation officer can revoke a probation because the “client” can’t find a job. Since the “client” can’t find a job, he is no longer required to pay restitution. Though he is not working, and he is not paying restitution, and he is on public assistance, his probation will not be revoked. That is law. Who loses? The victim and the public.
Rehabilitation is the exception rather than the norm. True rehabilitation comes with a new nature in Jesus Christ. It has been my experience that the threat of prison is the only solution for controlling the sin nature.
REV. GREG KUEHN
Community Church
Brisbane, Calif.
From Liberals To Bigots
Your news item “Falwell at Harvard” [June 17] confirmed my suspicions that genteel, sophisticated, Izod-clad, Ivy League liberals at Harvard are really genteel, sophisticated, Izod-clad, Ivy League bigots at Harvard. Liberal now means narrow, apparently.
REV. BILL SOLOMON
Cornerstone Presbyterian Church
Columbia, S.C.
School Prayer—Pro And Con
Regarding the Jaffree case [News, June 17], evangelicals are enthusiastic about classroom prayer when the school is in the heart of the Bible Belt (Alabama). But would the evangelical response be the same if public school students in a predominantly Catholic area were led in a daily recital of the “Hail, Mary”? Or if students in Utah schools were led in daily devotions unique to the Mormon faith?
Evangelicals cannot expect to call the tune when they’re the majority, yet still demand that their rights be respected when they’re the minority. Separation of church and state cuts both ways.
MARC S. MENTZER
Bloomington, Ind.
Disguised Criticism
I eagerly turned to “How to Pray For (and Against) Leaders in Government” [June 17]. I can only describe my reaction as disappointing.
This article was a thinly disguised criticism of conservatism and responsibility. May I suggest as an antidote that your readers turn to the pages of some of Russia’s writers, such as Tolstoi and Solzehnitsyn. Malcolm Muggeridge also sorts things out rather well in some of his recent books.
ROBERT B. HALTOM
Natchez, Miss.
Jefferson’S Deism
Terry Somerville notes that Thomas Jefferson banned the hiring of clergymen at the University of Virginia [“Did America’s Founding Fathers Stand on the Word of God?” June 17].
Some years ago I learned of an interesting connection between Miami University founded in 1809, and the University of Virginia, founded in 1819. William Holmes McGuffey, famed for his Readers, taught at Miami from 1826 until 1836, and then later at Virginia from 1845 until his death in 1873. McGuffey imbued his Readers with scriptural values. He was to become the first ordained minister to teach at Virginia. As he had done at Oxford, he also preached and led Bible studies at Charlottesville.
Universities originally established as Christian have frequently become secularized. But the reverse possibility of Christian professors penetrating secular universities also exists.
EDWIN YAMAUCHI
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
As a former university guide while a student at the University of Virginia, I appreciated Terry Somerville’s article.
In fact. Mr. Jefferson consciously articulated his deist beliefs in his beautiful design for the University of Virginia. He carefully faced the main buildings toward the nearby mountains to contrast God’s infinite creation with man’s indomitable reason. The Rotunda, the centerpiece of his plan, moves through a hierarchy of design up three stories until it culminates in the library, the seat of man’s accumulated knowledge. In concession to the aloof creator God, Jefferson placed a skylight in its domed ceiling, calling it his “window to the heavens.”
Thomas Jefferson may, however, be given credit for his willingness to maintain a spirit of inquiry. Although the university had no chaplain or chapel, religious services were occasionally held in the Dome Room. Jefferson even offered the major denominations land to build seminaries adjoining the university. He believed the university would draw students away from the seminaries by virtue of superior reasoning; Mr. Jefferson’s offer was refused.
STEPHANIE BLACK
Williamsburg, Va.
Real Christian Heritage
“Three Big Questions” [June 17] was outstanding. Too often we consider our Christian heritage as only from the life and ministry of our Lord and fail to go back to the riches of the Old Testament. This article once again reminded me of one of my all-time favorite books, Christianity Is Jewish, by Edith Schaeffer.
REV. JOHN WEYANT
Doral Springs Church
Miami Springs, Fla.
Black Political Trailblazer
Thank you for Randy Frame’s “Why Black Brethren Embrace Politics” [May 20], In his brief sketch of the history of the political involvement of black preachers, he overlooked the notable contributions of nineteenth-century black clergy living in the northern states. The most outstanding example is Henry Highland Garnet, an articulate and intellectual Presbyterian minister from the state of New York.
Garnet was a political trailblazer. In the early 1840s, when the prevailing abolitionist methodology was William Lloyd Garrison’s moral suasion and passive resistance, he was advocating direct political action. More than any other black leader, Henry Highland Garnet was responsible for drawing the black community away from Garrisonian nonresistance to political activism.
REV. CRAIG ANDERSON
Berkeley Covenant Church
Berkeley, Calif.
Stench—Not Perfume
I found myself reading your news item on “Remembering the Holocaust” [May 20] just three days after the U.S. Supreme Court denied tax-exempt status to the Goldsboro Christian Schools because of their discriminatory admissions policy. The Gathering of Survivors brings sadness because, as a believer who is Jewish, I cannot trace my roots beyond the pit that was Eastern Europe in the early 1940s. The Goldsboro Policy compounds the sadness because I see the same prejudicial hatred being manifested in my lifetime by those who claim to know my Savior.
I do not know what reasoning underlies the Goldsboro admissions policy nor do I understand how they justify it scripturally. I can only say that it gives off an aroma that is far more reminiscent of the ovens of Eastern Europe than it is of the perfume that Mary used to anoint the Lord.
CRAIG A. STREEM
Fresh Meadows, N.Y.
Abortion—What Is It?
I was pleased to see such a large portion of the May 20 issue devoted to the important issue of abortion. I was especially pleased to see that the focus of the coverage was to be Christian action rather than simply “rhetoric.” However, upon reading the articles I have become convinced that the abortion issue remains one about which few people are really informed, and that the “rhetoric” is both necessary and useful.
I commend the love and the compassion that was evident in these articles. Certainly our battle for the unborn must be built squarely on love and understanding; but at the same time, we have to keep the facts straight. We must recognize abortion for what it is—the killing of one of God’s most innocent creatures. And we must also recognize the unborn child as simply a very small person—not a future abused, rejected criminal, as I am afraid the articles in CHRISTIANITY TODAY implied.
LAURIE NAVAR
El Paso, Tex.
