National Association of Evangelicals: Amplifying His Voice

Amid reports that more and more of Southeast Asia was falling into Communist hands and missionaries were being evacuated, delegates to the thirty-third annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Los Angeles last month pondered the imperative, “Let the Earth Hear His Voice.”

The theme of the three-day meeting, attended by 1,050, was a continuation of the theme of the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne last summer. It was reflected not only by the strong position paper on the nature of evangelism adopted by the body and ten resolutions approved on a variety of social issues but also by the delegates’ expressed concern for the fate of Third World Christians.

One resolution urged Christians to pray regularly for “suffering humanity and evangelical believers in Southeast Asia” and noted that “the agony of Southeast Asia stirs the heart of compassion of a watching world. Christians everywhere are deeply concerned for fellow believers caught in the webs of the sweeping movement of anti-God and anti-Christ forces. The rolls of the martyrs continue to grow at a frightening rate.” Indeed, the delegates were told in a situation report on Southeast Asia that several Vietnamese pastors had been martyred (see following story). Louis L. King, field director for the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) in Southeast Asia, gave a moving account of “dismantling” CMA mission forces there.

The resolutions were non-controversial and passed unanimously, virtually without discussion. Some observers saw them as echoing the action-consciousness of Lausanne.

Included was a call to pray for and assist “the persecuted church” in Communist-dominated countries and elsewhere. Without Christian protest, the resolution said, “oppressive treatment may increase.” A series of resolutions protested “lowered moral standards relating to sex, vulgarity, blasphemy, and violence” in the motion picture, broadcasting, and television industries. Another objected to “widespread … advertising which portrays social drinking as attractive, healthy, and normal behavior …” Still another urged public officials to “put the welfare of those they serve above personal and partisan interests.”

NAE executive director Billy Melvin, in a keynote speech, stressed “growing recognition of the importance of united evangelical witness and cooperative action across denominational lines” and pointed to the convention’s thirty-three workshop sessions as “practical help” in bringing this about.

A workshop for evaluating short-term missionary service was led by Dr. Vernon Wiebe, general secretary of the Mennonite Brethren Board of Missions Services. It collated experiences of different missions groups. One point made was that lack of continuity, especially in countries like Japan, where mission efforts take much time, is a weakness of the short-term approach. In Zaire, some nationals complained that short-term medical doctors were “learning” or “practicing” on them; hence the need to involve nationals more thoroughly from the beginning in short-term efforts.

Although a few students came back from the field “disillusioned” with the “humanness” of career missionaries, most groups reported that a significant number of short-termers signed up for further service. Language difficulties and the need for trained nationals rather than outsiders were also discussed, but the conclusion was that short-term service was “more good news than bad.” Still, Wiebe cautioned, “the short-termer will always be ancilliary; the bones and muscle will always be the career missionary.”

A workshop on China concerns emphasized opportunities and problems of Chinese evangelicals in America rather than in Asia. Pastor Eddie Lo of First Evangelical Church in Los Angeles cited statistics showing that the number and size of Chinese churches in this country had grown “phenomenally” during the past ten years. American-born Chinese are largely unreached, however, Lo added, and though 90 percent of Chinese congregations are evangelical, the prevailing attitude toward theology “is apathetic.”

Lo pointed to two North American congresses of Chinese evangelicals, one in 1972 and the other last August, as signs of unity. A “Love China” conference will be held in the Philippines this September, and the International Congress of Chinese Evangelicals is scheduled next year in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, thirty applicants are already awaiting the opening of the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong this fall. Most encouraging of all, Lo said, is the commitment of 100 American Chinese evangelicals who are preparing to enter careers in mainland China “witnessing for Christ.”

Philosopher-author Elton Trueblood drew a standing ovation for his profound but lucid commentary on the future of Christian higher education during a luncheon sponsored by the NAE’s Higher Education Commission. Church-related colleges that have blunted their evangelical witness generally are in financial straits today, the Earlham College educator declared. On the other hand, “Christian colleges that resist pressure toward pagan conformity on the whole are doing better financially.” Praising NAE educators “refusing to be conformed to the new paganism,” Trueblood said he saw little hope for Western civilization “unless we can build up a great community of Christian intellectuals.” And he observed that evangelical schools, “little institutions without prestige, may be the very means by which [spiritual] renewal is achieved.”

A somber note was sounded by Pastor W. A. Criswell of the 18,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas. “Unless there is intervention from heaven,” he said, “by the year 2000 only 2 percent of the world’s population will be evangelical.”

Over all, the NAE this year appears robust, though hardly the avant-garde of evangelicalism. Good administration and financing, under the leadership of Melvin and NAE president Paul Toms of Boston’s Park Street Church, plus the infusion of some younger persons and a thrust toward taking social action more seriously, were generally credited by observers as the reasons for NAE health.

There are various membership levels in the NAE; individuals, churches, religious agencies, and denominations can all join. Some 30,000 churches are represented by NAE members, according to official estimates. Twenty-three denominations belong to the NAE’s military chaplaincy-endorsement commission. The NAE estimates it serves a constituency of 3.5 million persons.

For some, the big disappointment of the convention was a poorly attended fasting and prayer “non-dinner” intended to dramatize world hunger. Sponsored by the World Relief Commission, the event attracted only 138 persons, who were handed five-ounce packets of millet (used as bird feed in the U.S.) instead of usual dinner fare. The packets represent the average daily food allotment of millions in starvation areas. An hour later, however, more than 1,000 persons jammed the International Hotel Ballroom for a musical program and a message by Leighton Ford.

Toms and his first and second vice-presidents—CMA president Nathan Bailey and President Carl Lundquist of Bethel College and Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota—were reelected for a second two-year term. Lester C. Gerig, president of a Fort Wayne life insurance company and member of the Evangelical Mennonite Church of North America, was named NAE Layman of the Year.

New officers are D. Howard Elliot of Topeka, secretary, to replace Cordas C. Burnett, who for health reasons did not seek to retain the post he had for nineteen years; and the Reverend Arthur Gay, Jr., pastor of South Park Church, Park Ridge, Illinois, treasurer. Although there are only two women on the NAE Board of Administration this year, that’s twice as many as a year ago, “and there are plans to systematically increase this,” said the Reverend Robert P. Dugan of Lakewood, Colorado, an Executive Committee member.

Dugan, representing younger blood and leaning toward politics instead of an ecclesiastical career, was elected program chairman for the 1976 Convention. That convention will be held February 23–26 in Washington, D. C., jointly with the annual meeting of the NAE affiliate, National Religious Broadcasters.

NO MORE MOURNING MAÑANA

Thousands of mourners, most of them Cubans who fled their homeland after Fidel Castro came to power, crowded into and around the Church of the Soldiers of the Cross of Christ in Union City, New Jersey, one day last month. At the front of the church were the twin white coffins of 11-year-old Esli Hall and her brother Robert, age 6. They had been kidnapped and murdered by a man yet unknown.

A family friend sang a song the children’s father, once a teacher in Cuba but now a maintenance worker in Newark, had composed. It was a song of Jonathan and David and love. Then the diminutive, black-shawled mother, Elsa Hall, stepped to the pulpit. Reporter Peter Kihss summarized part of what she said:

“Leave the things of life,” she implored. “This is not life. Life is Christ. Life is salvation, where there is no more grief, no more tears. May all of you here make a promise from today on. Look for God. Prepare your life. Accept Christ.”

As for herself, she added, “I have faith and hope. Soon I will see my children.”

Out of the church and through the streets walked the mourners, escorting the slow-moving hearse and funeral cars. They stopped at a stadium for a community-wide memorial service. Again Mrs. Hall pointed to Christ and urged her hearers to turn to him and away from corruption and sin.

The procession moved on to the cemetery, more than a mile away. Amid the tears and sobbing Pastor Roland Stone, who was Orlando Pena in Cuba, pledged:

“Esli and little Robert, en la mañana veremos [we shall see you in the morning].”

Left Behind In South Viet Nam

The following update on South Viet Nam, written by News Editor Edward E. Plowman, is based in part on his interviews with government officials, mission leaders, and missionaries recently returned from Southeast Asia. It is also based on news-service reports and on accounts filed by correspondents Tom Steers in the Philippines and G. Edward Roffe in Laos.

Reliable sources confirmed last month that the seven American missionaries¹ missing after the fall of Ban Me Thuot in South Viet Nam (see April 11 issue, page 31) are alive. They and the five-year-old daughter of one of the couples were seen in a group of seventeen Caucasians in a stockade in Pleiku province. They were being detained with hundreds of South Vietnamese.

Other reports, unconfirmed, were less cheerful. Sources say Communists executed a South Vietnamese army chaplain along with other military officers in Da Nang. He was a minister in the Christian and Missionary Alliance-related Evangelical Church, the predominant Protestant body in South Viet Nam. The sources also tell of the slaying of a Protestant pastor, of several Catholic priests, and of scores of believers involved in education, business, and government leadership. Rumors were circulating at mid-month of the deaths of two Catholic bishops in the central highlands.

Observers say, however, that it may be a long time before the reports are verified or proven wrong. These observers point out that the Communists executed between 2,000 and 3,000 leaders who stayed behind in North Viet Nam after the mass exodus south in 1954. The observers predict the bloodbath in the south will be many times worse.

By April 24 all missionary personnel had been evacuated from South Viet Nam except for a handful of doctors, nurses, relief workers, and administrators. Christian and Missionary Alliance administrator Jack Revelle was having little success in arranging for the evacuation of key CMA nationals and those associated with several other missions.

Many nationals face an uncertain economic future. As they curtailed or shut down operations, some mission agencies gave generous severance allowances to their national employees (six months’ pay for them in at least one case). What value, if any, the currency might have under a Communist regime is not clear yet.

In an apparent first among the main denominations, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) unit sent a telegram urging North Viet Nam not to inflict terror and violence against South Vietnamese refugees.

Relief efforts aimed at helping the hundreds of thousands of refugees were continued last month by ecumenical, denominational, and independent agencies. Millions of dollars in cash, goods, and medicines poured into both government-and Viet Cong-held areas. How much actually reaches the refugees may be something else. A former medical missionary who served at Da Nang said the aid is often intercepted by the military, the rich, and others with connections. It is then hoarded or resold at inflationary rates—out of the reach of the refugees.

Church leaders in both South Viet Nam and the West debated the airlifting of thousands of orphans. The Vatican expressed displeasure, but leading Catholic Relief Services officials—who arranged some of the airlifts—endorsed the concept. The executive committee of the World Council of Churches took a dim view, condemning any use of the orphan issue for political or propaganda purposes. The committee also noted that a Geneva Convention guideline calls for orphans and lost children to be entrusted to persons of the same cultural tradition. A leading Buddhist in South Viet Nam demanded that all the children be returned.

The adoptive process had already started months earlier for many of the children; the airlift simply hurried things along. There were questions about some of the others.

“As we were leaving Da Nang,” said Judith Long, wife of an American medical missionary, “a number of parents wanted to give their children to us. This was an act of deepest love on their part. They knew there would be no future for their children under Communism.” Also, she pointed out, government officials said they could not care for all the orphans without the help of the volunteer relief agencies, and Christian orphanages would not be permitted to function under Communist rule. (World Vision alone was sponsoring about 15,000 children.)

Stories of the exodus from threatened areas are still filtering in. Southern Baptist missionaries Robert C. Davis, Jr., and Gene V. Tunell managed to escape Da Nang along with 6,500 refugees aboard an American freighter just hours before Communist troops entered the city.

A leader of the Hope Baptist Church in Da Nang saw his family off to Saigon but stayed behind to help evacuate the remaining believers. He and most of the congregation were unable to leave when hysteria and confusion gripped the city. The associate pastor of Hope pled for immediate assistance. Mission leaders chartered a small Vietnamese freighter to evacuate the Christians from Da Nang, but it arrived too late. Instructed to proceed to Cam Ranh to pick up Baptist refugees, the ship was diverted instead to Nha Trang where local authorities commandeered it. The Baptists at Cam Ranh, like those at Da Nang, were left stranded.

One youth from Hope Baptist made it to Saigon after five days of jungle and sea travel. He fled Da Nang, he said, because he was on the Communist death list. He had committed several “crimes” that landed him on the list: he had worked for the American Government, he was an officer in the Vietnamese air force, he had studied in America, and he was a student preparing for the Baptist ministry.

One pastor shepherded twenty-five orphans from Kontum in the central highlands. They were among thousands of soldiers and other refugees who were fleeing. Halfway to the coast they were forced into the jungle. On Palm Sunday the pastor and his orphans and other Christians paused for a worship service. After ten days they could go no further. Then a helicopter arrived. Aboard was a general, an old friend of the pastor. He shuttled the group to their destination.

The missionaries, many minus their personal belongings, have left behind houses, schools, hospitals, offices, and a lot of equipment, virtually all of it deeded to the nationals. They have also left behind a strong, though now disorganized, church. Its roots are deep, and it has been growing rapidly. For instance, says veteran CMA missionary evangelist Tom Stebbins, 3,000 tribes-people around Ban Me Thuot turned to Christ during outdoor meetings held by a Vietnamese pastor one month before the city fell.

Wycliffe Bible Translators has left behind eighteen years of translation and literacy work among tribespeople. On the day Ban Me Thuot was attacked, missionaries and nationals were making a final check of a translation of the New Testament in the Bru language.

CMA missionaries Charles E. Long and Truong-van-Sang (a national assigned to tribal work) recently completed translating the New Testament into the Jarai tongue. Believers among the Jarai hill people have grown from a struggling handful fifteen years ago to more than 5,000 today.

The missionaries are being reassigned elsewhere in Asia. Some will still work among Vietnamese. Cambodia, now closed to missionary work, has 200,000 Vietnamese. But, says national worker Doan-trung-Tin, there are 80,000 Vietnamese in Thailand (they have strong pro-North Viet Nam feelings), 42,000 in Laos, 100,000 in France, and 10,000 in the United States (before the current influx).

Open And Shut Cases

In rulings by two federal courts last month, racial discrimination was outlawed in admission policies of private schools, including church-related ones, and the biblical account of creation was shut out as required content in Tennessee textbooks.

A court in Richmond, Virginia, in ruling that blacks cannot be barred from private schools because of race, upheld a lower-court ruling based on the 1866 Civil Rights Act. The act prohibits refusing to enter into a contract with blacks because of their race. If upheld by the Supreme Court, the decision will affect the hundreds of segregated schools that were organized to skirt the high court’s 1954 public-schools desegregation ruling. Many of the schools are run by churches.

Relatedly, private schools would be required to submit annual proof of racial non-discrimination in order to qualify for income-tax exemption under an Internal Revenue Service proposal.

Meanwhile, an appeals court in Cincinnati declared unconstitutional a 1973 Tennessee law requiring public-school texts to give equal time to creationist views. The law stated that evolutionary content had to be labeled theory and could not be “represented to be scientific fact.” It also required that biology texts include the Genesis account. The court, agreeing with the National Association of Biology Teachers, said the law established illegally a preference for the biblical viewpoint—just as did the law that led to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial fifty years ago in Tennessee.

Psychological Studies: From Gothard To Gay

At last month’s twenty-second annual convention of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies in Oklahoma City, some 200 participants—mostly of Dutch Reformed background—delved into a diverse array of topics catching the interest of church members today.

Bill Gothard’s theory of spiritual gifts, taught in his well-attended “seminars on basic youth conflicts,” came under psychometric scrutiny by Dr. John E. Carter and Dr. J. Roland Fleck of the Rosemead Graduate School of Psychology in California. Gothard teaches that persons endowed with certain gifts of the Spirit as set forth in Romans 12 exhibit discernible character traits. These traits differ according to the gift as shown on lists Gothard has drawn up. Assuming that all of this is psychometrically verifiable, Carter and Fleck tested a large number of Christian-college freshmen, subjecting their findings to the sophisticated statistical analysis now prevalent in such research. Their results, though inconclusive, generally showed that gifts and traits do not line up the way Gothard says they do. The only gift in Gothard’s schema that correlated significantly with their testing procedures was “mercy.”

Many, including the researchers, agreed that the sample was deficient in its omission of believers in older age groups. Moreover, a non-Christian control sample would have added to the validity of their study, according to reactors in the audience. Nevertheless, the research into Gothard’s categories exemplified the possibility of empirical verification of the behavioral realities in Christian experience.

Three of the panelists in a symposium on the demonic expressed belief in the present reality of the biblical dimension of demonic activity. A strong dissent was voiced, however, by Dr. J. Harold Ellens, an articulate clinician and pastor of a Christian Reformed congregation in Farmington, Michigan, who averred that Scripture must be taken as conditioned by its historical and cultural context. Ellens expressed his doubts about the uncritical acceptance of a literal and unseen demonic realm, suggesting that the psychological scientists must bind themselves to empirical investigation and findings rather than to the assumptions concerning demons that were current in Bible times.

A symposium on homosexuality, Christianity, and the mental-health professions resulted in a second look at the standard evangelical view that homosexual behavior (as distinguished from homosexual orientation) is sinful. Taking their cue from a new study conducted by a Methodist, Dr. Thomas R. Clark, a practitioner in clinical psychology in Detroit, the majority of panel members agreed that homosexuals are no more predisposed toward neuroses or psychoses than are heterosexuals, that homosexuality is not a mental illness, and that the only real distinction is that of a non-voluntary sexual orientation toward the same sex resulting from a complex set of learning factors.

The possibility of a lasting cure was largely discounted.

Clark’s study of a rather sizable group of non-patient homosexual males in various occupations and professions, including professional sports, showed that these persons were functioning as normally and healthily as heterosexual males. Previous theories as to the psychogenesis of homosexual orientation were said to be inaccurate and no longer acceptable. Clark’s findings have attracted wide attention among American psychiatrists and clinical psychologists since they indicate that the vast majority of males, at least in their feelings, fall somewhere on a graded scale between homosexual and heterosexual, and are therefore ambisexual in varying degrees of intensity. In a majority of males, however, the heterosexual orientation predominates, and whatever homosexual feelings they may have are resolved in favor of a heterosexual lifestyle. However, when the homosexual orientation is strongly predominant, the ambivalence is resolved the other way, and the probability of any lasting reversal or permanent change is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, according to Clark and his colleagues.

In addressing themselves to the biblical-exegetical question of the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, the majority of panelists rejected the standard evangelical view that all homosexual behavior is sinful. They offered an alternative exegesis of the biblical passages relating to the subject: that God condemns promiscuity, fornication, adultery, and sexual permissiveness, whether heterosexual or homosexual, but that Scripture does not condemn homosexual behavior between committed Christians in a covenant relationship of love and loyalty. God’s “perfect” will is for the monogamous heterosexual family. However, according to the majority view, Christians burdened with an involuntary homosexual orientation could choose a committed homosexual relationship as within God’s “permissive” will rather than an unwanted celibacy.

Dr. Phyllis Peters Hart, a clinical psychologist from Chicago, declared that she had long held to the standard exegesis on the subject, but that the realities of her clinical practice led her to take a second look at the exegetical question. The upshot was that a strong case was made for thinking through again the meaning of the scriptural texts without compromise and without the imposition of exegetical or emotional preconceptions.

The symposium included a candid “testimony” by a minister of the Metropolitan Community Churches, a gay-church movement. He said he was both homosexual and a follower of Christ.

With the homosexual issue growing in intensity in the denominations, there seemed to be a deep sense of a need for further exegetical study to evaluate what the majority of the panelists, themselves professedly Bible-believing Christians, have come to think is the healing answer within the churches. No strenuous objections to the apparent pro-gay view were issued from the floor; audience reaction tended to be of the scholarly mull-it-over sort.

JOHN E. WAGNER

DIAL AN ATHEIST

Los Angeles Times religion reporter John Dart reports that when the American Atheists organization held its first convention in Austin, Texas, five years ago, only a dozen persons attended—and two of them dove under a table when the press was admitted and stayed there until the reporters left.

More atheists are coming out of hiding these days, observes Madalyn Murray O’Hair. About 160 registered for last month’s annual convention in Los Angeles, which was organized and conducted by Mrs. O’Hair. She says her organization, the Society of Separationists, has a mailing list of 60,000. Her ailing husband is president.

Helping to man the book table was her son Bill, 29, the central figure in the 1963 Supreme Court decision banning prayers in schools, a case initiated by the then Mrs. Murray.

The convention’s “atheist of the year” award went to Lloyd Thoren of Petersburg, Indiana, the owner of a small telephone company who ran a dial-an-atheist line in 1973 and 1974.

Convicted Watergate conspirator Charles W. Colson was voted “Religious Hypocrite of the Year” for “seeing the light” when faced with a prison term. (In reality, Colson’s conversion occurred months before Watergate began unraveling. He served a light jail term recently and is now teamed in Christian ministry with former Iowa senator Harold Hughes. They are based in Washington, D. C.)

On another front, Pastor Robert Bruce Pierce of the Chicago Temple-First United Methodist Church refuted Mrs. O’Hair’s claim on a Chicago radio station that the church pays no taxes on the twenty-two story building in which it is housed. The building, he said, is owned by a Methodist agency which paid $254,000 in real estate taxes last year. However, he pointed out, the one-fourth of the facility used for church purposes is exempt.