Christianity Today has been the prime agent in demarcating, informing, and providing morale for the neo-evangelical, now evangelical, movement, at least in North America. We who have awe for the printed word have to remind ourselves that CHRISTIANITY TODAY is only a magazine and, as such, has limited power. But within those limits, it has in 25 years achieved something that is both gossamer and global. Gossamer, because the evangelical strands are wispy, tangled, and elusive. Global, because the evangelical net is covering ever more of the Christian world near the end of the second millennium Anno Domini.

A geographical image can illustrate the two main components. Picture the editors, first in Washington and now near Wheaton, looking out their windows in two directions. Northeasterly are the relics of evangelicaldom, where once their own spiritual ancestors thrived. Today they see valleys of dry bones, landscapes of empty cathedrals, eroding stones. Is a polar ice cap of the spirit to stretch from the steppes through secularized Scandinavia and reminiscentlv Christian Western Europe, through Canada and the American Frost Belt?

CHRISTIANITY TODAY leadership 25 years ago began to aid conservative Christians who would try to witness new life in dry bones, try to rescue treasures on that landscape. From that world came ancient creeds that could still define truth. The Reformation evangel from that soil still held appeal. The editors, more at home with the “second-generation” movements that occur after passions and ambiguities diminish, found seventeenth-century Reform documents congenial. They also lived off the Pietism and Puritanism and then the Methodism and earlier evangelicalism that all suffused those more starkly scholastic formulas. The magazine could never abandon the believing remnant of European evangelicaldom, though it could report on little new fervor there.

The southerly view from the editorial windows featured the world of evangelism. Of course, evangelicaldom and evangelism are tangled together, but here let the two terms represent head and heart, reason and the affections, cultural artifact and soul hunger, mannered churchliness and individual fervor. CHRISTIANITY TODAY leaders have been uneasy with “enthusiasm.” But they knew they had to reckon with and, in positive ways, to exploit the more robust evangelism. Most of them had been born in its world.

In that vista, these journalists looked out on “south sides” of northern cities and the American South, where black Christians were evangelistic though they seldom drew on the formulas and habits of evangelicaldom. The magazine seldom led the blacks, but it did welcome some leadership from black Protestantism. The white Sun Belt, whose population grew twice as fast as that of the Frost Belt these years, offered more promise. The editors found some of the swaggerers in boom-or-bust Sun Belt Protestantism distasteful, but they encouraged the more serious and restrained church leadership. Most of all, they did not scorn the millions who had once been disdained as “Bible Belters,” but instead promoted the best of their values.

On that southern terrain, not least of all in Latin America and Africa, but moving northward in influence, was Pentecostalism. The editors found its “the-Spirit-talked-to-me-directly” versions abhorrent. Sometimes even charismatic moderates seemed to be pushing the edges of older evangelical syntheses. But the CHRISTIANITY TODAY demarcators drew many Pentecostals inside the boundaries of legitimacy and applauded the growth of the movement.

This partly literal, partly metaphorical view of the globe must seem like the old Sherwin-Williams paint advertisements, in which everything viscous slipped southward. To bring the fervency of evangelism to evangelicaldom then looks like defiance of the laws of mapmakers’ gravity. To bring something of worth from the old evangelical formulas and achievements to the enthusiasts looks like defiance of the laws of personality and taste. But in both cases, the magazine contributed to and chronicled some successes.

Achievements and Failures

Four achievements stand out, the first being so obvious it needs no more than a mention. The editors consistently saw their theological refurbishings of evangelicaldom’s heritage to be most urgent. Even if their representations of these were sometimes stodgy and unnecessarily crabby, they did retrieve and restate selective elements of a larger tradition and made them plausible in a time when “modern man” was supposed to have moved beyond them.

Second, they re-presented the piety-and-moralism blend of evangelicaldom’s prime. Once again, choices between Vice and Virtue would determine a culture, and Duty would serve as an impetus in personal life. Piety? Much of the magazine’s devotionalism has been dull and drab, the kind of “gray print” that the pious expect to find in a religious magazine. It has seldom reached creative heights. Moralism? To its critics the journal’s moral outlook often looked bourgeois as much as biblical. The blend? It looked somewhat grim; self-perspective and humor, even in the humor sections, have not been CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s strong points. “What if …?” But in a time of chaos, many found the magazine’s reformulations assuring.

Third, more surprising and refreshing has been the magazine’s constant concern for the Christianity-in-culture motif, one that many in the tradition as of 1956 were slighting. Sometimes the editors confused faddish Muggeridgean world-weariness—perhaps because it came stated with such elegance—with judgment on culture. But often they were more subtle and more constructive. This world—which God loved so much that he sent his Son to it—does not exhaust God’s possibilities, the editors kept saying: this is the world in which he is incarnate, in which the Holy Spirit risks.

Evangelicalism has not been culturally as productive as Catholicism, at least not for centuries since, at its edges, Bach erupted in music, Rembrandt and Dürer in art, Bunyan and Milton in literature. A review of the magazine’s indexes confirms the impression that its editors and writers would have been lost without their overworked C. S. Lewis wind-up doll. Yet their overall effort has been valuable. The editors have kept suggesting to the “One Way” people the amplitude of that Way in a complex culture, and to the “One Book” people that the Bible gains in the context of the biblia, which also must be known.

Fourth, thanks originally to founding editor Carl Henry’s uneasiness about evangelicalism’s social conscience, there has been concern about the confrontations of Caesar and Christ, Mammon and Christ, Prometheus and Christ. A model for editors was nineteenth-century English evangelicalism as it took on slavery, inhumanity in prisons, and the plight of industrial workers. CHRISTIANITY TODAY moved beyond talk of merely personal Vice and Virtue to societal issues as well. Never quite sure whether to settle for a Christian voice in a pluralist culture or to push for Christian privilege, the editors showed abilities to change and to learn on this ever-troubling front.

The gossamer character of their achievement is especially evident here. On the editors’ right were many of the first financial sponsors, lay people whose economic outlook seemed shaped more by Adam Smith and the Charles Darwin of Social Darwinism than by anything biblically prophetic. So the editors played it safe with “the system.”

On the same flank were purists who would figuratively bottle converts in their baptismal water and store them away until the Second Coming, lest they be tainted in the world. Still others wrote letters to the editor suggesting that evangelicalism should care about society only if it could run it through born-again political leaders, legislated imposition of evangelical norms, and the commerce of Christian Yellow Pages. Often with a tinge of acid and a brace of courage the editors stood off both the purists and the monopolizers.

Meanwhile, there has been a smaller evangelical left that found CHRISTIANITY TODAY to be establishmentarian, conformed to the world, unmoved by the Word according to Amos and Ellul. Now, at anniversary time, when political conservatism is in vogue, this left has been lonelier than ever. But the editors have never let their radical cousins go unmonitored or unheeded, have regarded them as being in the family, and on occasion have been moved by their proposals.

A rereader of old volumes will find that the magazine seldom provided venturesome leadership to the evangelicals in civil rights and other rights struggles or social action causes. Only after a movement made its way and began to become less controversial did the editors grow less wary. Yet occasional inconveniencing positions have been aired: against unquestioned nuclear armament, needless despoiling of the environment, or neglect of the poor and the hungry. Given the potential power of quickened readers of the Bible, with its many calls for justice, one looks with hope for biblical discernment by the editors who address a large evangelical constituency.

The Developing Years

So much for the bifocal vision and the four main areas of achievement. After 25 years the question is, how did the editors come to the vision and how did they pull off the achievements? Answer: the time was right. So say people in retrospect, the easiest “spect” to have. But did people in 1956 generally know that the time was right? The editors then often spoke in the language of kairos, pregnant time. The Spirit, which blows as the wind will, they implied, was blowing fresh breezes for those who would catch them and sail with them. The climate of the Eisenhower-era religious revival was with them.

Then, for a few years, the culture seemed to hold their strivings in disfavor or to see them in eclipse. The New Frontier and the Great Society, Vatican II and Secular Theology, Social Action and the Movements caught the cameras’ eyes. Christian utopians for a moment foresaw a kingdom of technology and politics that would be bannered by the name of a Jesus without the cross.

Soon after, more than the editors would admit, the Zeitgeist was with them, producing a genus of which they were a Christian species. For the past dozen years they could play secretary to the “spirit of the times,” or, in Nietzsche’s terms, could think “what the day thought,” and still look oppositional. Yet a rereader cannot help but note a change in the claim of the editors as evangelicalism became established and even voguish.

In harder times, they argued for the intrinsic view of truth and colored it with Christian rigor: “You can tell we speak the truth even though and especially because so few find it attractive. Jesus did say that his would be a little flock.” As the clientele grew and gained worldly favor, the instrumental view became more frequent: “You can tell we speak the truth because so many find it attractive. We have the package people naturally want.”

This has been a quarter-century of depressions of spirit and inflations of economy, of existentialist despair and hedonistic forgetting, of apocalyptic announcements and desperately private searches for meaning. Only in the cloisters of the academy and the hall of mirrors called “the media” did people fail to perceive what CHRISTIANITY TODAY leaders knew by instinct and calculation: authority and experience were craved. Not that everyone bought the evangelical packaging of these. To many it looked familiar, like a retread. They went off for the exotic authoritarianism of the cult or the esoteric experientialism of the occult. But through the years many have come back to the authority and experience available in traditions like those CHRISTIANITY TODAY kept attending to.

To put it another way, “the old-time religion” has always understood the demands of modernity better than has adaptive cultural modernism. On Christian soil, Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran, and even Catholic evangelicaldom too long relied on vestigial church establishment and territorial Christianity. Edmund Morgan said the Puritans believed that the faith would pass through the loins of godly parents to their children, and these settled-down Christians have kept thinking thus. Even during the American migration to the suburbs in the 1950s they acted as if “leave them alone and they’ll come home.” But they didn’t and don’t come home unbidden. Faith and church are easily escapable, and one can be serenely ignored while serenely ignoring both today.

Ever since the Great Awakenings, however, evangelicals and evangelists have read the modern condition differently. They went out to convert their own younger generation, along with the listless at hand and the heathen afar. They made less of the church as the given body of Christ and more as the achieved voluntary association of the converted. They knew that modernity impels choice, and they set out to force decision. They provide “rites of passage” for the young as they are thrilled across the threshold to Christian adulthood. They know that evangelical ancestors made their spiritual journeys on the firm soil of evangelicaldom, but now the descendants make theirs on the high-risk high wire of pluralist culture. No wonder people want a net of authority underneath.

For CHRISTIANITY TODAY the net has been “the inerrancy of Scripture,” the main demarcating feature of evangelicalism. The editors have quite sincerely held to the theory of inerrancy, but they have played varying games with it. Some of the writers and second editor Harold Lindsell have wielded it as a heavy nightstick, driving away the countless evangelicals who have other views of biblical authority but who come with “pre-understandings” not set by Reformed dogmatics, the Scottish Enlightenment, or nineteenth-century Princeton Seminary. The wounded evangelicals complain that too much such wielding has split the movement, and it unfairly regarded as “bad faith” the good faith of those who work within other hermeneutical circles in the interest of the same faith. Other editors and writers, as firm in that faith, have been more fair to these varied evangelicals, choosing the ways of persuasion, and relying less on well-funded efforts to rally the laity to a view of authority that seems more firm and sure.

Inerrancy, these evangelical critics point out with more force each year, has settled little in the way of truth. The pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY show that absolutely contradictory views of millennium, sabbath, and sacrament derive from people who hold to it. Inerrancy, they say, has already bruised many evangelicals, split denominations, stigmatized seminaries, and led to shunning of families—sometimes, it is said, with the editors holding the persecutors’ coats or themselves throwing the stones at the saints.

Yet at times the pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY also show a need to moderate. The wording of the Lausanne Covenant of 1974, which had to take into account European and black evangelicals who had not come the Princeton route, was a lovelier and livelier affirmation of what Scripture affirms. The outside reader, whose role I am asked to assume, will keep watching with interest this draining struggle, one that has produced little of theological depth or spiritual vigor to match the political fanaticisms it engenders.

Causes and Conflicts Ahead

The editors know that other tests are coming their way in the quarter-century ahead. Current editor Kenneth Kantzer has spoken in the elegiac mood founder Henry also lapses into: evangelicalism of many sorts is in an “Indian summer.” Almost anything today can go under the label evangelical, and there is as much factionalism in that camp as in any other sector of Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s excellent news section fortnightly reports on excesses in commercialized evangelism. The editors often rue the way the movement has gone beyond responsible churches and has fallen into vulgar consumerism and its own kind of appeal to hedonism. It is a long way from evangelical calls for modesty in appearance to the early-bordello or late-country-and-western “Christian Charm School” advertisements. Those responsible for the magazine cannot and do not look on with favor as classic churchliness turns to classless hucksterism or as Christian worldliness becomes mere worldliness with a Christian gloss.

The editors just as consistently express regret over lost opportunities. Among these is the dream of an evangelically based Christian university, or at least an evangelical think-tank bigger than a backyard hot tub. They watch Texas billionaires buying bumper stickers for Jesus or TV satellites that mainly produce the need for more expensive TV transmissions, while ignoring the need for Christian thought centers. Doesn’t anyone, the editorials plead, realize that a healthy Christian church must not only out-entertain but also out-think someone out there?

So the tarnish on the silver anniversary comes from the editorial realization that for all their efforts and gains, the world is in most ways not less secular than before their movement prospered. The culture is not less confusingly pluralistic, but vastly more so, especially in religion. The range of pseudoreligious options has grown exponentially. The bewildering array of quasi-evangelical alternatives grows apace.

Heroic efforts, then, lie ahead for editors and writers who feel snubbed or snobbed out by stereotypers who know evangelicalism only through its more crass and superficial purveyors. The mass media are not attuned to getting the subject right. They have room for only two code words per year in the field of religion: 1976, Born Again; 1978, People’s Temple; 1979, Electronic Church; 1980, Moral Majority; 1981, Scientific Creationism.

Why do the mass media overlook the dynamism of deep faith in noble lives? Why, in the academy with its many Christian professors, is the Christian voice lost in pluralism or, often casually, sometimes studiously, overlooked? Why do book review journals report on the evangelical market but bypass the act of reviewing evangelical books? Why are “we” not taken seriously?

Those are the fightings without that inspire questions within. And there are fears within. The dream of a commonwealth that includes a Christian presence fades, to give place to a New Christian Right whose forays into politics lead them to fight a Department of Education or a Panama Canal treaty in the name of Jesus. The vision of a consistent Christian business ethic among the new people of power phases off as evangelical hostelers hustle to build gaming casinos. The churchly revivals of the high Graham era often degenerate to noisy appeals by competitive entrepreneurs.

Timing and the Right Blend

And yet … and yet … To say all that is not to take away from the evangelical achievement at the juncture of old evangelicaldom and constant evangelism. Nor does an evaluation suggest that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has failed to live up to its basic responsibility. The magazine is just learning how precarious are its postures, how fragile its coalitions in the years of triumph. Back in the days of obvious adversity, when the “nonevangelical” foes in Christendom were more powerful, they helped the editors in the task of demarcation. Today the outsider is less helpful for defining; the Enlightenment has grown dark; Bultmann no longer towers. So the evangelical movement finds its enemies within, and the task of demarcating and defining is harder than before.

Modern evangelicalism under some name or other would have existed without CHRISTIANITY TODAY, but not likely in anything of the shape it has assumed. Let this be part of my anniversary compliment: without this magazine, the movement would likely have been more cramped and mean, less full of vision and venture. On these pages, at least, there have been calls for civility and culture to match the passion and firmness of faith—and this is the blend needed at this moment when an epochal shift in Christian consciousness is called for. No longer dare the inquisitor, the fanatic, the crusader be the Knight of Faith in a day when reflexive tribalism and reflective terrorism also operate in religion. But the field cannot be left, either, to the wan in faith, the mere relativizers. Elsewhere I have rued the fact that today the committed are seldom civil and the civil seldom committed.

Except for some lapses on the inerrancy front, CHRISTIANITY TODAY has often come up with the right blend. The editors spoke not in the name of a God as predator but God as persuader. John Courtney Murray said that civil society was not so much a place of agreement but of a disagreement that moves past confusion and on the basis of some consensus. It implies that citizens will be “locked in civil argument.” That is not a bad model for movements within the Christian church. The stakes are too high for people to be other than deep and serious about contention. But to the degree that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has resolved to state and has learned to state its case with some respect for those who do not share its every detail, the magazine has brought a gift to go with its evangelical claims.

I know that the magazine has only won a subculture, not the culture. It has shaped an evangelical world, and not the world. But, one must ask in a consoling spirit, where does it say that the Lord asked the steward to be successful? Not successful. Only faithful.

And, after all, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is only a magazine.

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and associate editor of the Christian Century magazine. He is the author of some 25 books, most recently The Public Church: Mainline-Evangelical-Catholic (Crossroads, 1981). A Lutheran, Dr. Marty is currently president of the American Catholic Historical Association, the second non-Catholic to hold the office.

Person-to-person spontaneity is the Spirit’s style.

Does the power present at Pentecost stack up against today’s professionals?

Is it conceivable that God’s plan for world mission is at the mercy of the economy? Is it possible that the God who spoke the universe into existence, who owns the land, the silver and the gold, the cattle on a thousand hills, the earth and all its fullness, could be the victim of the economy?

This serious question arose as I prepared to address a meeting of missionary executives and administrators. The subject assigned, which was to be in dialogue with a professional economist, was “The Future of Missions in the Light of the World Economy.”

At first, the question of God being a victim of the economy seemed rhetorical. It was inconceivable. It was impossible. The God from whom all things are could not be frustrated in his plan for the whole world.

The concern of missions executives, however, seems to indicate the contrary.

The program of missions is so geared to the economy that mission boards and agencies, as well as local churches, are experiencing difficult times. Cost-of-living wage increases are imperative. More dollars must be sent overseas just to maintain the buying power of the missionaries. Evangelicals are beginning to feel the tension of various religious organizations competing for their dollars.

What is the explanation for this tragic contradiction? How is it that God’s plan for the world can be threatened by the economy?

In this context I reexamined the Acts of the Apostles. Once again I experienced a sense of the free flow of God’s power in the gospel emanating from Jerusalem following Pentecost, as thousands and thousands embraced faith in Christ. Persecution in Jerusalem did not hinder this incredible, spontaneous movement. On the contrary, it hastened it. Dr. Luke records that all except the apostles were scattered, and wherever they went they preached the gospel.

The sheer effortlessness of this spontaneous expansion of the primitive church stands in sharp contrast to the immense effort, organization, planning, programming, and implementing of the twentieth-century church in its world mission.

That early spontaneity did not change when the church at Antioch was led by the Spirit to send out Barnabas and Paul. Despite hostile opposition, the gospel of Jesus Christ penetrated pagan cultures, and the influence of Christian witness spread like a benevolent infection in the ancient world. And all of this happened even though one does not see in the Acts—or in the epistles, for that matter—strong exhortations to mission, elaborate plans, or preoccupation with evangelistic methods (Acts 2:47; 6:7; 9:31; 16:5).

The New Testament is strangely silent in contrast to the busyness of institutionalized mission in the twentieth century. Nowhere in the record is the Great Commission repeated by the apostles. Yet certainly they knew it was their mandate. Certainly they understood that they were to be witnesses to the ends of the earth.

How does the contemporary church differ? It differs in the emergence and growth of professionalism in mission. Early in the primitive church a professional class began to emerge and gradually assumed the mandate for mission as its responsibility. The apostolic pattern began to change from that era when every believer, filled with the Holy Spirit, was a witness to Christ. Little by little, through the centuries, church tradition replaced New Testament practice. The work of ministry was given to or preempted by a relatively few professionals like preachers, evangelists, missionaries, and Christian educators. The task of the average believer became that of supporting the professional in his mission.

The clear teaching of the apostle Paul in Ephesians 4 was completely disregarded by the church. According to Paul’s understanding, the work of ministry belonged to the people of God. Christ gave to the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. He intended that they equip the people of God for the ministry that was theirs in the divine economy. The professionals are to be the equippers, according to the New Testament; the ministers are the people of God. In the New Testament church every believer was in full-time service for Jesus Christ.

For the last half-century we have seen a resurgence of the ministry of the laity. Many books have been written expounding the New Testament pattern. Methods without number have been devised to help the laity “share faith.” Organizations have developed to train the laity for ministry.

But the unstated assumption of many programs is that the laity are to be trained to work in much the same way the professionals work. The result has been the emergence of a kind of semiprofessional class who think of ministry in terms of the professional model. Hundreds of thousands of lay people have been taught to do evangelism, which they conceive of as all there is to ministry. They do not think of themselves as Christ’s ministers (servants) in all they do, but only when they are busy at tasks like the professionals.

Furthermore, for the thousands who have been trained there are millions who have not been trained and therefore assume their lack of training justifies noninvolvement. Frustrated because for whatever reason they were unable to take the training, and indoctrinated that one must be taught “how to share his faith,” they assume they are not qualified to witness.

In company with this has risen the destructive polarization between secular and sacred—a distinction one does not find in the New Testament. It is this thinking that makes the assumption that teaching public school is secular; teaching in Bible school or Sunday School is sacred. Running the business of a corporation is secular; running the business of a church is sacred. Singing in a choir is sacred; singing on the stage is secular. Constructing an office building is secular; constructing a church is sacred.

As a result, lay people see most of their time as spent in “secular” activity. They believe that the only time they are serving Christ is when they are doing what is “spiritual,” like teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, serving on an official board of the church or when, as opportunity affords during the week, they share their faith, read the Bible, pray or attend a group. Because their “secular” jobs are very demanding, they have little time to do these “spiritual” things, and they experience a relentless low-grade frustration. They do not think of themselves as ministers of Christ.

One man who visited me some months ago commented: “I’m 45 years of age; I’ve been an engineer for 20 years. Now I want to go to seminary so I can serve the Lord.” It would be humorous were it not so tragic. Somehow he had missed the point that Christ had called him to be an engineer. If he had understood what the New Testament teaches, everything he did as an engineer could have been service for Jesus Christ.

One executive of a large corporation said: “My church has never given me any indication that it had any interest whatsoever in how I conducted myself as a business executive with my corporation.”

So in spite of all the rhetoric about the ministry of the laity, what has been communicated is that the laity ministers only when involved in a specialized way in what is thought of as “spiritual.” How a Christian behaves as parent or neighbor, in his social circle or on her job, has nothing to do with ministry. That is presumably “secular.” Ministry only happens in the rare moments when the lay person does what it is assumed the professional does when preaching or teaching or evangelizing.

If professionalism is the means whereby God’s plan for the whole earth is implemented, then we expose that plan to the mercy of economics. Depending on circumstances, it takes a hundred or a thousand or whatever number of the laity to support one professional in ministry. The whole mission is thus delicately sensitive to inflation, recession, depression, devaluation of the dollar, unemployment, and other factors. The more professionals sent to the field the greater the number of laity it takes to support them.

What a difference in the New Testament where the believer was Spirit-filled, and because he was Spirit-filled he was a witness! He spoke of Christ as “the Spirit gave him utterance.” He spread the gospel in a way natural to him. He did not have to be taught how to witness; he did it spontaneously under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Those first Christians had very little theology. They did not begin to know about Jesus Christ as we do today. They did not have all the advantages two thousand years of experience have given us. But they were filled with the love of God and demonstrated this love by caring for others, by sharing their possessions. In fact, Dr. Luke records they actually sold their possessions and turned over the proceeds to the apostles to be shared. Their witness was unselfconscious, spontaneous, efficient, powerful, fruitful.

The early church was effective in its witness because the apostles and other church leaders heeded Paul’s admonition in Ephesians 4 to equip the people of God for the work of the ministry. Together they turned the world upside-down.

The maximum influence of the church of Jesus Christ on earth now is not the influence of the mass media, despite the millions being reached every day. The greatest impact is through the witness of the body of Christ, the aggregate of individual believers. They achieve this through the way they live between Sundays in their homes and neighborhoods, in their social contacts, and on their jobs day in, day out. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit they demonstrate Christ’s love and caring and, in ways most natural to them, tell their friends and others about God’s love in Christ. They affirm confidently how he changed their lives and how he can change the life of anyone who takes him seriously. In terms of influence on the world, nothing equals the witness of individual believers as they cope with their own sin and inadequacy, with reverses and tragedy, with weakness, with pain, with failure in the grace and power of the Holy Spirit.

Professionals are essential. But the measure of their effectiveness is determined by the laity who accept what they do between Sundays as God’s vocation for them, to be done to the glory of God and their witness to Christ. When the New Testament model is operative, the usual situation is reversed. Instead of many laity supporting one professional, one professional equips tens or hundreds or thousands for mission, and they support themselves in their ministry.

In 1977, Robert S. McNamara, then president of the World Bank, addressed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the problem of population. In discussing solutions, he made a statement that remarkably confirms the efficacy of the lay ministry strategy in the New Testament: “… the mass media, while influential with people who are already in general agreement, or at least neutral, can rarely—through direct messages—persuade people to reverse deep-seated convictions, or long-standing behavior … no form of media information is as effective as person-to-person communication. Messages can be sent electronically thousands of miles, but it is ultimately people talking to one another in a classroom, on the street, at the village market, or in the village home where the essential questions are discussed, and the essential answers are explored.”

The person-to-person communication extolled by McNamara has a parallel in the New Testament model for the church. Let the individual believer, equipped by spiritual leaders and empowered by the Holy Spirit, fulfill his or her role as a witness—and wonderful results will follow. The work of the church will flourish, unhindered by the fluctuation of world economies. The impact of personal witness on individuals will immeasurably exceed the accomplishments of mass media. And the plan of God for world mission will surge toward that glorious fulfillment when the gospel shall be preached in all the world, and people are gathered to his kingdom from the ends of earth.

Time religion editor Ostling picks the top ten stories

Choosing the “top ten” religion stories from 1956 to 1981 seemed so impossible a task that I immediately accepted it as a form of journalistic calisthenics. We reporters deal with relative slivers of time and pause all too rarely for a longer look.

I selected the big “stories” (trends and clusters of phenomena as well as specific events) in all of religion worldwide. It must be admitted, however, that these judgments inevitably come from an American Christian viewpoint; a non-Western Christian or non-Christian might well produce a radically different list. My big ten are not necessarily in order of importance.

Pope John’S Council

In 1956 the Roman Catholic church seemed an unchanging monolith, controlled from the top by an autocratic Italian pope surrounded by men of like mind. The 1958 election of the engaging Pope John XXIII changed much of that. It did so because John decided to use his brief tenure to institutionalize change by launching an Ecumenical (that is, worldwide Catholic bishops’) Council.

Both benefits and disarray have resulted. In four annual sessions (1962–65) the council produced 16 decrees that were promulgated and implemented by John’s successor, Pope Paul VI. Among other things, the council instituted worship in vernacular language, balanced Vatican Council I (1870) by defining the authority of bishops along with that of the pope, recognized the laity’s role, acknowledged Protestantism, encouraged ecumenism, emphasized use of the Bible, reduced hostility toward non-Christian religions, condemned anti-Semitism, and declared that Jews bear no collective guilt for Christ’s death. Vatican II’s policies led to numerous high-level ecumenical talks, an advisory Synod of Bishops, and reforms in Vatican supervision of doctrine. The church’s social and economic views are modernized in many ways, most notably in seeking détente with Communism.

Perhaps in historical terms, and certainly in American terms, the most important decree was the Declaration on Religious Liberty. It held that true faith cannot be imposed “except by virtue of its own truth,” thus granting that in spiritual matters everyone needs “immunity from coercion in civil society.” This ended a cross-and-crown policy dating more or less from Constantine.

In return, Catholicism asked freedom for its own people to worship unhindered by government. The decree did not alter “the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion.” In other words, God and the church hold men and nations accountable, but do not use government power to force compliance. The council did not countenance free thought within Catholicism, but various church liberals have proceeded to question virtually every tenet of the faith.

The Pill

In May of 1960 the United States permitted marketing of the first oral contraceptive, with considerable impact upon the Roman Catholic church. The problem, however, had begun years ago. In 1930 Pope Pius XI, nailing down long Catholic tradition, had forbidden nonnatural methods. In 1951 Pius XII allowed use of the natural “rhythm” method, if for good reason. Vatican II declared that Catholics cannot use methods deemed “blameworthy” by church authorities. The pope assigned the problem of what methods to a special study commission, which did its climactic work in April–June, 1966.

According to documents leaked to the press in 1967, a majority of both bishops and theologians on this commission favored a basic shift in church teaching. But in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Paul VI boldly rejected that advice: “The church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law … teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.” In stating this he cited both the 1930 and 1951 papal documents.

Ecclesiastical reaction proved as important as the substance. Theologians and priests openly dissented, some bishops emphasized individual conscience, and papal authority was undermined (mostly in the West). There appears to be a ripple effect of questioning other traditional teachings in faith and morals. The vigorous reassertion of the ban by Pope John Paul II and the 1980 Synod of Bishops has not ended the problem.

There are three other effects. During the quarter-century, abortion became a popular and legal method of population control in nominally Christian nations, even though all denominations had once considered it abhorrent. The Catholic protest against abortion was weakened by the decline in doctrinal cohesion, and because the church denies the “out” of contraception for women who do not wish to bear children. Second, the availability and promotion of birth control doubtless have encouraged promiscuous and adulterous behavior. Finally, the decreasing birth rate in the West and the widespread failure of birth control in poorer nations increase the economic disparities among nations.

A Polish Pope

In 1522 the Sacred College of Cardinals elected a Dutch pope, who died a year later after failing either to stem Luther’s revolt or to reform his church. Italians held a monopoly on the papal throne from then until October 1978, when Karol Wojtyla, a dynamic and brilliant cardinal from Poland, was elected. The choice came at a conclave occasioned by the untimely death of John Paul I.

The election of a non-Italian was possible because Pope Paul VI had internationalized the ranks of cardinals eligible to participate. For the first time non-Europeans had a slight majority, and less than one-fourth of voters were Italian. Since John Paul II is so profoundly conservative in doctrine and discipline, it is important to remember that he ended up as the candidate of the relatively liberal cardinals who feared that a pope like Giuseppe Siri would try to scuttle the Vatican II changes.

John Paul II’s policy is to reconsolidate Catholicism around Vatican II—as he perceives it. Among his early actions: removal of German theologian Hans Küng from a Catholic teaching faculty; reaffirmation of the bans on married priests, women priests, and birth control; removal of priests from partisan politics; tightening of the grounds on which men are permitted to quit the priesthood; an extraordinary synod to stem a liberal drift in Holland; a first-ever advisory meeting with the College of Cardinals; establishment of official reunion talks with Eastern Orthodoxy for the first time since 1439; staunch opposition to the “new morality” on homosexuality and other matters; criticism of the spiritual void in both Communist and consumer societies; denunciation of more radical forms of Marxist-inspired “liberation theology”; and sweeping advocacy of human rights and economic justice.

With his appealing personality and vigor, John Paul is traveling as much as possible, thereby strengthening his office at the grassroots level. His election and his triumphal return home to Poland in 1979 revitalized a sense of nationhood that perplexes both the Kremlin and its clients in the ruling Polish Communist party. This contributed greatly to the union-led rights movement that began in 1980. The de-Italianization of the papacy reduces church entanglement with Italian politics, but it is not yet clear whether it will have lasting impact on the church’s central government, the Vatican Curia.

A Golden Age Of Bible Translation

A period slightly larger than our quarter-century, 1952–81, stands as one of the golden ages of Bible translation in English, and in areas influenced by Anglophone churches. The list of complete new Bibles includes: the Revised Standard Version (1952); the Catholic Jerusalem Bible (1966) and the New American Bible (1970); the Protestant New English Bible (1970); the updated New American Standard Bible (1971); the Living Bible (1971), a problematic paraphrase with fabulous sales; the American Bible Society’s big-selling Good News Bible (1976); and the New International Version (1978), aimed at the growing evangelical movement.

The hegemony of the King James Version has been a boon for English literature, but the modern renditions get closer to the original manuscripts and make the Bible message clearer and livelier for most readers. The American Bible Society’s strategy of common-language and “dynamic equivalence” translation is producing modernized renditions in many other languages. According to the society, by 1980 the full Bible had been published in 275 languages, and 1,710 languages have at least one book of the Bible. Wycliffe Bible Translators formulated new written languages to make the Bible available for even preliterate tribes in the remotest areas.

Women’S Liberation In Religion

In the past decade, religious groups have been arrayed conspicuously on both sides of the debate over women’s role in home and society in the West—and especially the United States. Within the church, the movement centers on admission of women to the clergy and offices of lay authority. Women have long held great “clout” through separate Protestant auxiliaries and Catholic religious orders, and have become clergy in some groups.

In 1956, however, women achieved full clergy status in two U.S. establishment denominations: the United Presbyterian church and United Methodist church (which elected its first woman bishop in 1980). Subsequently, the breakthrough occurred in other churches and in Reform Judaism. The Church of England and possibly Conservative Judaism seem poised to open up in the 1980s. However, Catholicism and Orthodoxy require worldwide practice and follow tradition in such matters, and both made it clear in the 1970s that they will not countenance a change.

In North American Presbyterianism, meanwhile, the women’s cause has become so legalistic that seminarians who think the New Testament teaches against women clergy have been denied ordination, and local congregations have been required to nominate women to their lay boards. The women’s issue has contributed to small Protestant schisms in the United States.

The “New” Morality

This was Joseph Fletcher’s 1966 catch phrase for a utilitarian ethic. More broadly, it signifies a gradually spreading belief in the Christian intelligentsia that traditional absolute rules of right and wrong need radical investigation, or should be eradicated. Among items of the “old” morality under special attack: (1) adultery is always wrong; (2) homosexual activity is always wrong; (3) abortion should be forbidden by church and secular law except (Catholicism aside) for serious danger to the mother’s life.

The latter two issues have spilled from moral theology into secular politics. The change in moral philosophy leaves society open to radical future possibilities in the technological manipulation of the human species. Along with the intellectual debate, there has been a cultural revolution in TV, the press, and the popular music industry toward publicizing hedonism, promiscuity, and abuse of narcotics.

The Evangelical Groundswell

This is largely a U.S. development, but it has worldwide ripple effects due to America’s leading role in Protestant world strategy and funding. Similarly, the American-born “charismatic renewal” is exporting an evangelical flavor for the first time to many Catholic nations.

Beginning in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, “born again” became a sportswriter’s cliché, but the power shift toward this component of Christianity was readily apparent years before. By 1980 the hard right of the movement was bidding for secular political influence.

The inchoate movement includes these sectors: (1) the growing evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal element in mainstream Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches, which arose in the 1960s; (2) the neo-Pentecostal denominations and independent congregations; (3) the caucuses and networks that rally evangelical minorities within the relatively liberal Protestant denominations; (4) a profusion of “parachurch” agencies to meet evangelical needs that old-line Protestant denominations have neglected—in such areas as television, radio, music, books, magazines, Sunday school curriculum, youth work, missions, evangelism, and college and seminary education.

The Six-Day War

In this instant war of 1967, Israel occupied geographically and spiritually strategic areas. The move had a multiple effect on religion in the area. First, the war added measurably to the linkage of Jewish identity with the nation of Israel. Anti-Zionism is now a spent force on the left and right of Judaism. However, in recent years a minority element has been questioning whether it is spiritually healthy for Judaism to be so dependent upon the situation of one nation. Second, the change in status of Muslim shrines in East Jerusalem and elsewhere (e.g., the Patriarchs’ Tomb in Hebron) has exacerbated Muslim-Jewish tensions and reverberated in secular politics. The occupation has helped foster a pan-national sense of Islamic unity and has focused “holy war” talk upon Israel. Third, among some Christians who emphasize Bible prophecies, the capture of acreage on which the Jews could rebuild the Jerusalem temple has produced expectations that the end times are upon us. However, there is no evidence that late twentieth-century Judaism will be able to build a temple on what is already a Muslim holy site, or to restore ritual sacrifices.

The Centrality Of African Christianity

During the quarter-century, most of black Africa won its independence. Far from withering away when the colonial offices closed, Christianity has prospered as never before under dynamic black leadership. Religious demographers, notably David Barrett of Nairobi, estimate that the continent will be the statistical center of Christianity by the next century.

The new churches still accept skilled missionaries who are willing to play a subordinate role, but Catholicism is somewhat handicapped by its dependence upon white missionary priests and its ties to a universal see in Rome. The Christian religion faces historic competition with Islam and tribal animism. It is confused as well as strengthened by the numberless African independent churches, some of them only quasi-Christian. It confronts political oppression in some black nations, and the embarrassing identification of Christian culture with white supremacy in South Africa.

Black Liberation

The civil rights movement in the United States, beginning around 1965, was a great moral crusade. But it is also an incomplete one, given the current tenuous state of race relations and black fortunes in the nation. The movement was substantially the work of black Protestantism, supplemented by many religious and secular groups. Its unchallenged leader was the Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., who won the Nobel Peace Prize and was assassinated in 1968.

The movement brought incalculable moral benefits to the U.S., but its very achievements may have skewed some churches’ concept of mission too far toward political success. During the 1970s, churches became increasingly involved in the struggle for black independence in white-ruled areas of Africa. By 1980 this focused on one remaining minority regime: South Africa (and its pseudoindependent black enclaves and its colony of Namibia). The liberation activity of black Christians, and the response of white South African Christians, will take on overwhelming importance in the coming quarter-century.

A few brief comments are in order about other significant developments.

Militant Muslims. A militant mood is undoubtedly on the rise in the Muslim world. The question is whether the force is religio-spiritual or political. For instance, Iran’s revolutionaries regularly violate commandments of the faith, in God’s name. Such power games could eventually corrupt Islam as a moral force.

The Cult Scare. This is the most overblown development. Most of America’s new religions would have to multiply at a furious rate to reach the size of many denominations we journalists never even notice. However, the so-called cults have severely tried (1) the parents of their converts; (2) the blithe myth that “it doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you’re sincere”; and (3) America’s commitment to religious liberty. The tolerance for abduction and “deprogramming” of adult “cult” converts is rather frightening.

Institutional Ecumenism. Christian unity is now an ineradicable issue for most churches, but there is apparently declining interest in older institutional forms of it. The National and World Councils of Churches have tended to become less a means for building unity around Christian belief, more a channel to pursue social visions even if they divide Christians. The Consultation on Church Union is stalled, although there have been many smaller organic mergers.

Video Religion. U.S. religious television, usually evangelical, has increased remarkably, but much of it is stronger in technique than in conveying the full biblical message to Christians or to reaching the secular audience. Indeed, this may be beyond the capability of television. Since the medium is not the message, a lot of hard strategic thinking is needed. In other parts of the world, radio provides a means for spreading the gospel in “closed” societies.

The Death of Theology. This is, of course, a whimsical overstatement inspired by the “Death of God” boomlet of the 1960s. God survived, but reflection upon him seems in a moribund state except in Catholicism, where it is confused but lively. The Protestant giants have left no successors of equal stature. Sometimes the very concept of expressing belief in verbal form is considered offensive. If truth and meaning cannot be conveyed through the admittedly problematic means of human language, however, a basic rationale of all theological efforts is eliminated.

Christianity Today is 25 years old. What has happened in and to the churches during this period, and what can we forecast for the future? This much we do know: the knowledge explosion has more than doubled all the knowledge that men of all ages learned up to 1956. This explosion has seriously affected the churches and the world in ways we do not yet fully understand.

If we go back to the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century movement characterized by the use of the empirical method in science and by the waning of biblical authority, we can understand today’s happenings. Until the Enlightenment, the Judeo-Christian world-and-life view undergirded Western culture. But since then, it has come under persistent attack. Western society has increasingly rejected God’s rule, and substituted a secular, man-oriented viewpoint. The last quarter of a century has witnessed the full flowering of the Enlightenment in the United States, the last bastion of Western civilization. As far as the dominant underpinning of our culture is concerned, we may have already entered the post-Christian age.

A recent editorial in the Indianapolis Star observed: “Church-going, belief in God, patriotism, the family, free enterprise, and a consensus about the undesirability of unmarried cohabitation, homosexuality, pornography, drug use, and other practices were fundamentals of an ethical system that held sway in the United States until 1960. The same virtues were praised and the same vices condemned in schools, universities, the mass media. Then traditions came under assault.… For example, in the mass media today the ‘reigning pieties of 20 years ago’—religion, capitalism, patriotism, the family—are under relentless attack, represented as ‘thing because they are rigid, sclerotic, and atavistic,’ while those who believe in them are ridiculed as insecure, stupid, neurotic, hypocritical, and fanatical.”

The editorial added this about the churches: “ ‘Mainline’ churches and powerful social agencies, particularly those of the government, employ the same strategy to set up a ‘secular, pluralistic’ ethical system on the ruins of the old.”

Quoting James Hitchcock, professor of European history at Saint Louis University, the editor went on to say: “What is at stake today is not merely the survival of particular denominational groups or of once privileged dogmas. What is at stake is the survival of all values and of any kind of belief. Finally what is at stake is the survival of humanity.”

The editor then drew his own conclusion: “Can ‘secular humanism’ be defended against the charge that it is a creed of nihilism and moral anarchy?”

It is fascinating that even those who do not stand in the Judeo-Christian tradition talk about Armageddon. While they have no use for the biblical view of life, they sense that the alternative to it is chaos—especially in light of the increasing threat of man’s complete annihilation. There are three major developments that explain this awareness.

First, reduction of distance: we now have systems which can send missiles to any point on planet Earth in a few hours. Second, the development of nuclear weapons: we now have the means to destroy all mankind. Third, the division of the world into two major groups—the Marxists and the Western democracies: the sharp enmity between these two groups has caused them to develop a mighty array of offensive-defensive armaments that boggles the mind. Each now has a motive to annihilate the other. And, given the history of man and his incalculable ability to blunder, the use of these arsenals cannot be kept in check.

This ideological polarity has also crept into today’s churches. Strong ecclesiastical voices in mainstream denominations support the Marxist viewpoint by condemning capitalism and advocating socialism. They even advocate revolution as the means to destroy capitalism. The World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches in the United States have demonstrated their support of the far left by defending far-out groups whose views are radically antibiblical. In general, these voices encourage a secular rather than biblical lifestyle.

The Decay Of Mainstream Denominations

The mainstream denominations connected with the ecumenical movement have experienced a severe reversal during the last 25 years. This decline is the bitter fruit of their theological liberalism, which led to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the 1920s. Granted, the liberal colossus slowed down following the rise of neo-orthodoxy, but later emerged as a strong movement toward the theological left. Instead of strengthening the churches, liberal theology has weakened them dramatically. This may be illustrated in the areas of evangelism, missions, and Christian education.

The mainstream denominations largely have lost their concern for evangelism and missions. As a consequence, their membership has dropped and their overseas missionary outreach has declined severely. CHRISTIANITY TODAY will later run an essay with statistical charts pinpointing the amazing and tragic decline of these churches in both areas. The twelfth edition of the Mission Handbook has a review statement by David M. Stowe, who observed: “The center of gravity of Protestant missionary-sending is shifting constantly away from the ‘ecumenical’ agencies toward conservative and fundamentalist ones.”

One set of statistics can highlight the shift. In 1979, the career personnel of missionary agencies connected with the Division of Overseas Ministries (DOM) of the National Council of Churches numbered 3,473. On the other hand, employees of the major Bible-believing missions agencies and unaffiliated bodies numbered almost 32,500. The DOM reported an income in 1979 of $146 million; evangelical groups reported an income of over a billion dollars.

The decline of the Sunday school among mainstream denominations has specific implications for the future. The accompanying chart shows the Sunday school enrollment figures of many NCC churches along with those of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Church of the Nazarene. While virtually all of the NCC churches experienced declines in Sunday school enrollment, the Southern Baptists remained stable, and the Church of the Nazarene increased from 671,000 in 1962 to 897,000 in 1979.

The Roman Catholic church has rediscovered the Bible, and the dramatic increase in Sunday school enrollment reflects this fact. Comparative enrollment, however, does not equal that of the Southern Baptists.

Smaller Sunday school enrollments guarantee a decline in biblical literacy on the part of churchgoers. Those who attend one worship service each Sunday of the year, but not Sunday school, would hear the Word of God (if it was proclaimed) about 25 hours for that year—approximately the same amount of time they spend watching TV in any week. A biblically illiterate churchgoer bodes ill for the spiritual vitality of a congregation. In the eighteenth century, the rise of the Sunday school movement went hand in hand with the dramatic rise of the modern missionary movement. Likewise, in today’s mainstream denominations, a decline in one area naturally leads to the demise of the other.

While I see no human reason to predict a marked revival of the Sunday school in mainstream churches during the next 25 years, I do not want to paint too bleak a picture. There are also positive signs. For example, literally thousands of home Bible studies are meeting around the country every week These interdenominational studies are generally evangelical. Moreover, during the same period in which mainstream Sunday school enrollment declined, enrollment among many smaller evangelical denominations rose. The Assemblies of God grew from 508,000 to 1.3 million. The Christian and Missionary Alliance enrollment rose from 137,000 to 152,000. The Baptist General Conference rose from 98,000 to 112,000. The Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) grew from 283,000 to 380,000.

Theological Education

Theological education has undergone vast changes in 25 years. But the next quarter of a century promises many difficulties and challenges, even disaster for some of these institutions. Today, more students are attending seminary than ever before. The Fact Book of 1979–80, published by the Association of Theological Schools, states that in 1969 there were 29,000 students in theological schools. The numbers jumped to 49,611 in 1980. But the numbers alone do not tell the whole story.

Today 20 percent of the seminary enrollees are women; between 4 and 5 percent are black. The number of men working for the basic M. Div. degree has declined from 80 percent in 1969 to 54 percent of the total enrollment. In some of the leading schools, 45 to 49 percent of the students have registered for advanced degrees. In the past decade, 14 seminaries closed their doors. Another 15 were engaged in mergers, resulting in 8 schools instead of 29. It is estimated that another 30 will undergo serious changes in the decade ahead—relocation, merger, or closure. But even that is not the whole story.

Because of declining birth rates, the student pool will decrease through the end of this century, leading to stiffer competition among seminaries. Enrollments may shrink by as much as 20 percent.

Right now most seminaries are feeling the financial pinch. Many sustain annual deficits; others scarcely balance their budgets. Faculty salaries have not, for the most part, kept pace with inflation. Energy costs are soaring; one institution reported that by 1985, the school may spend as much for fuel as it now spends for its entire program. Many students now graduate from seminary with $9,000 to $10,000 debts. Unlike graduates in medicine, law, and business, they will have to begin repayment while their salaries are very low. Except at Southern Baptist and Lutheran seminaries, which keep their costs low, tuition will continue to rise in the years ahead. Moreover, the fact that far more seminary students today are married and have families increases the tensions. As husbands pore over the books, wives work, many children are farmed out to day-care centers, and family alienation can result.

The Fact Book does not take into account the numerous schools of Bible college level and the many seminaries unrelated to the ATS. Nor does it include much information on independent churches in America. Surely one challenge is the planting of new churches, the reopening of closed ones, and missionary work among non-English-speaking peoples, particularly Hispanics.

The secularization of American culture and of its churches has dimmed the role of the Holy Spirit, whose task is to call and endow God’s people for the ministry. Those who win coveted theological degrees but who have not been called to the ministry of the church by the Holy Spirit cannot but be seriously handicapped, however good their intentions. The churches to whom they seek to minister will also suffer from the impairment of the uncalled. Moreover, in the years ahead, there may have to be a recovery of a sense of sacrifice in which money and success are subordinated to a simple ministerial lifestyle, and seminary professors may have to live on a lot less. At the same time, churches may understand that their members who study for the ministry are worthy of financial support as much as missionaries overseas. And students who receive support from churches may have to defer marriage until their education is completed. Moreover, no one who takes the Bible seriously can doubt that the sovereign God who calls will meet the material needs of those who accept his call.

The Evangelical Advance

In the last 25 years, liberalism’s biggest guns were silenced, marking the end of an age. Tillich, Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, and Niebuhr passed from the scene. Instead, evangelicals came to the forefront to carry the faith in almost every field—Billy Graham in evangelism and missionary outreach, Francis Schaeffer and Edward John Carnell in apologetics, Harold Ockenga in evangelical cooperation and theological education, and Clyde Taylor in evangelical political activity. In the magazine world were Sherwood Wirt of Decision, Donald Grey Barnhouse of Eternity, and Carl Henry and Kenneth Kantzer of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, to name only a few.

The National Association of Evangelicals symbolizes the rise and maturation of evangelical ecumenism. Through its commissions and affiliates, such as the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, the World Relief Commission, the National Religious Broadcasters, the National Association of Christian Schools, and others, it has blazed a responsible trail that promises greater achievements by the end of the century.

In the fields of radio and television, Theodore Epp of “Back to the Bible,” Oswald Hoffmann of “The Lutheran Hour,” Pat Robertson of the “700 Club,” Rex Humbard, Jerry Falwell, Bob Schuller, Jim Bakker and, of course, Billy Graham have left their mark. Multitudes of others, small and great, have also used these electronic media for strategic witness.

Consider the remarkable growth of the National Religious Broadcasters. When Ben Armstrong came to the organization in 1966, the NRB had 104 organizational members. Fifty percent of air time was sustaining and most of it was allocated to NCC-related groups. Today the NRB has 900 organizational members. Only 8 percent of air time is sustaining and the NRB membership represents 80 percent of all religious broadcasting. Right now, one new evangelical radio station comes into existence each week, and ten new evangelical television stations a year are coming into being.

In student outreach, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, John Alexander of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, David Howard of IVCF’s Urbana missionary conferences, and organizations such as Young Life, Youth for Christ, Christian Service Brigade, Pioneer Girls, Awana Youth Clubs, and Child Evangelism swelled the ranks of evangelistic witnesses for Jesus Christ. Christian evangelical organizations of various stripes ministered around the nation. And younger men assumed places of leadership in churches that became noted around the country: Adrian Rogers of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Raymond Ortlund of Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, Charles Swindoll of the Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, California, Chuck Smith of the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, Ralph Wilkerson of Melodyland School of Theology in Anaheim, California, Chris Lyons of Wheaton Bible Church in Wheaton, Illinois, Gordon MacDonald of Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, and Bailey Smith, currently president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who baptized more than 2,000 converts in 1980 in his church in Del City, Oklahoma.

The evangelical advance in the U.S. made possible a series of international conferences on evangelism sparked by Billy Graham—Berlin, Lausanne, Pattaya, and a number of national congresses including Minneapolis in America and the 1981 Festival of Evangelism in Kansas City, Missouri. During the same period, small groups of evangelicals formed in many of the mainstream denominations so as to challenge theological liberalism. Methodism,

Presbyterianism, and Episcopalianism, for example, have felt the impact of these agencies. Theological seminaries committed to orthodoxy grew by leaps and bounds, and evangelical liberal arts colleges and Bible colleges matured.

The evangelical resurgence has not been without external problems. A rising tide of opposition has begun to surface in the struggle between two opposing theological ideologies—one favoring biblical authority and inerrancy, and the other opposing all this movement stands for. Churches are leaving their denominations and forming new ones, such as the Presbyterian Church in America. In addition, mainstream theological seminaries remain uninfluenced by and critical of the evangelical movement. This fact alone bodes ill for the evangelical future vis-à-vis the mainstream denominations who continue to train and persuade men and women to enter church vocations in the years ahead.

Evangelicals are also beset by internal problems that may lead to grave disaffection in coming years. Many are moving away from belief in biblical inerrancy. Their views about the mission of the church differ substantially—not about evangelism, but about whether social justice and social action are intrinsic to the church’s mission or a byproduct of it. Some disagree strongly over feminism, simple lifestyle, capitalism and socialism, the ordination of women; others show an obvious softness on homosexuality. The emergence of the Moral Majority and its reception or lack of it by numbers of evangelicals has heightened the tensions among them. What the outcome will be nobody can predict.

Looking Ahead

Evangelicals will play an increasingly important role in the events of the next quarter century for two reasons. First, evangelicals today are at the forefront of a “burgeoning spiritual renaissance,” a phrase used by social scientist John Crothers Pollack to de scribe a moral activism among the “highly religious” in America.

“The re-emergence of America’s religious strain,” Pollack added, “symbolizes nothing less than a determined effort to revitalize essential American self-confidence in the face of adversity, an enduring optimism and faith that have sustained so many newcomers to this land for so many centuries. The religious current running through America is far, far stronger than what has been tapped by the Moral Majority—so far.” Clearly the sentiment of which he speaks derives from evangelical sources, for the most part.

Second, the evangelical surge may continue to increase because the mainstream denominations have, in effect, a sort of death wish. Two things are happening: a hardening of the ecclesiastical arteries over the question of church order, and a softening of denominational commitment to theological orthodoxy.

For example, the United Presbyterian church continues to major on minors. It insists on the ordination of women and refuses to ordain or permit the transfer of ordained ministers who do not believe in women’s ordination. It is moving speedily to secure constitutionally possession of all property of the churches in the denomination. In the now-famous Kaseman case, the United Presbyterian church’s highest judicial body has ruled that any presbytery may admit to its membership those who do not believe that Jesus is God. Moreover, the UPCUSA is proceeding with plans to reunite with the Southern Presbyterian church. All of these moves are likely to cause an exodus from the UPCUSA.

Yet while the Book of Order is tightened and complete conformity demanded, members of the UPCUSA are permitted to believe virtually anything they wish. No holds are barred. Theological individualism and totalitarianism in church government are reigning simultaneously. This same tide is rising in most of the other mainstream denominations.

A final factor to consider regarding future growth of evangelicalism is the role of parachurch groups. They have been a positive development, showing that when channels are blocked in existing churches, God moves outside them and does new things. However, there is also a tendency for them to replace the local church. These groups will add greatly to their ministries as they stress the necessity for church membership among their adherents and as they support local congregations and strengthen their work. Faith missionary organizations do represent a wholesome approach to this problem. Their missionaries come from local churches and are supported by them. But radio and television broadcasters, for example, find it more difficult to make sure their listeners get involved in a local church.

Conclusion

There is a rising tide of evangelical input and influence around America. It promises to increase in the years before us. It has helped some of the flagging denominations to stay alive, and it conceivably may bring renewal to the mainstream churches. Evangelicals certainly should pray for such renewal, but it appears unlikely unless a spiritual awakening comparable to those led by Jonathan Edwards in the U.S. and the Wesleys in England takes place. Otherwise, we can expect further deterioration among the mainstream groups. But there is a remnant in all of these groups that remains faithful to historic orthodoxy even as some leave these churches to unite with other churches or to form new denominations.

At the last, either the ideology spawned by the Enlightenment or that of historic Christianity must prevail so far as Western culture is concerned. Europe has given way to the Enlightenment and needs to be reevangelized. America has not yet reached that place, but unless the Judeo-Christian tradition regains its dominance over American life and culture, our country will further deteriorate into a vast moral and spiritual wasteland.

Harold Lindsell was CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s second editor, serving from 1968 to 1978. Now living in Wheaton, Illinois, Dr. Lindsell continues to write and speak widely. He is author of Battle for the Bible (Zondervan, 1978) and The Bible in Balance (Zondervan, 1979), and the recent Lindsell Study Bible (Tyndale, 1980).

Carl Henry surveys today’s theological landscape for the hazards and guideposts that lie between here and the kingdom.

Theology speaks to me first of silence—silence in heaven and earth, silence that only God can shatter. Above that silence we hear his voice: “Elohim said, ‘Let there be!… and there was …” (Gen. 1:3ff.); “Hear the word of Yahweh, O nations, and declare it … afar off” (Jer. 31:10).

We need to tune our spirits, battered by today’s mass media barrage, to God’s heavenly talk show: to the God who speaks his own word, and who supremely shows himself in Jesus Christ. This divine Speaker is waiting for people to converse with him, to spend unhurried time with him. This God of the Ages, this Eternal One, wants more than just a three-minute long-distance call, or a five-minute parking stop for a “hello” and “goodbye.”

Activism today so hurries evangelical worship, prayer and Bible reading, theological study and reflection, that we risk becoming practical atheists steeped in this-worldly priorities. Theological renewal is a farce apart from time for God in his Word. Is it too much to ask Christians in favored North America, in their struggle to be evangelically authentic, to do their theological homework once again? We must feast on mighty truths that can rebuff the blows of an ungodly age, to learn biblical lessons before the sword and dungeons overtake us. “Be still,” says Yahweh. “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).

Let us consider five living and abiding “words,” words of the Word become flesh, and apply them to the eighties.

A Word About Christ

Counterfeit theologies inundate our earth. Theologians of the absurd espouse paradox. Mix-master theologians entangle the Creator in space-time. Cataclysm theologians trust violence to turn the world right side up. These modern theologians, however, retain too few biblical components to speak to our deepest needs.

But does this modern proliferation of nonbiblical faiths differ greatly, after all, from the plethora of mystery religions, strange philosophies, and exotic cults that haunted the ancient world of Christian beginnings? Did not Jesus himself warn: “I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive” (John 5:43)?

“I am come,” Christ declares (John 10:10), calling all mankind to acknowledge the Messiah who was to step into fallen history. Christianity centers in Christ’s person and work. But it is, of course, more than Christ, though without Christ there can be no Christian and no Christianity. One is left simply with the itty-bitty: promise without fulfillment, sacrifice without atonement, death without resurrection, godhead without triunity. “I am come!”

If Christ is excised or moved to the margin, theology fails both Christianity and the eighties. The eternal Christ alone supplies history’s midpoint and will return to define its endpoint. All who search for a constant in this age of relativities—relative to power, to time, to culture—can be assured, can know that I am has come and that he who has come endures: “Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

A Word About The Church

Perhaps evangelicals just now need most to hear Christ’s word, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). It is true that many evangelical churches have shown marked growth; their members are biblically literate, they support evangelism and overseas missionary causes, are devoted to humanitarian programs of world relief, development assistance, and prison reform; their members have become increasingly active in politics.

There is, however, something disconcerting about the growing stress on local superchurches and superpastors. This stress often neglects the organic unity of the whole family of believers. Do evangelicals really care what Jesus Christ says about the church? Does it matter as much to us as what he says about evangelism? Can a church divided and subdivided and subsubdivided truly be Christ’s church? Does merely rejecting or absolving oneself of an ecumenical institutional badge justify the lack of evangelical interrelationships and of coordinated fellowship? Does not a society succumbing to secularism demand a comprehensive local and national witness? More important, does not the biblical ideal of the church demand more of us?

Why do some clergymen who are disenchanted with pluralistic ecumenism, and also some conservative evangelical young people, seriously consider a return to Rome? In more instances than we admit, it is because evangelicals do not seem to take seriously the unity of Christ’s church. We feel privately that a united evangelical orthodoxy would not only move mountains but could perhaps even rescue a spiritually mired planet. But how do we translate this conviction into ecclesiastical reality?

Every appeal to an inerrant Bible should humiliate us before the inerrant Christ’s insistence on the unity of his church. When at Caesarea Philippi Peter affirms Jesus to be the Christ, Jesus says: “On this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18)—not many but one. As Sheldon Vanauken remarks, Christ spoke of his church “in the singular” and not in “the 10,000 sect plural.” When Jesus prays for the Holy Father to keep his disciples “one as we are one” (John 17:11) he bars our easy escape to fragmentation. Does the degree of unity current among evangelicals truly reflect the unity of the Godhead?

I am in no way suggesting that organizational conglomerates or institutional megadenominations fulfill Christ’s requirement. But do we support a deeply united ecclesiastical entity? Do we in principle oppose the endless proliferation of splinter groups? Is it any gain for the Bible’s view if we reject pluralistic ecumenism but at the same time approve pluralistic evangelicalism? And we do. In Washington, D.C., for example, 3,000 active ministries spending over $1 billion annually have little to do with each other.

And at the local level, does the sense of evangelical family and the treasure of Christian fellowship prevail? Do not millions of Protestants, many evangelicals among them, choose and change their churches as they do their airlines—for convenience of travel, comfort, and economy? And what of multitudes who have made crusade decisions but have not become members of local congregations? Must we not address with new resolve the question of the character of the one regenerate family that constitutes Christ’s church? Can we transcend the perception of evangelical chaos and rivalry by laying hold of something more identifiable as brotherly love?

The early church was known for continuing steadfastly “in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42). Do we fully mirror this Pentecostal model? Would the apostles give us a passing grade? Will we allow Christ’s own word to interrogate us? Will we let the Holy Spirit melt our irresolution? Will we make ecclesiology a chief item of theological concern in order to show more of what it means to be Christ’s one church?

A Word About The Bible

Another mighty word for this decade is Jesus’ pronouncement, “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35).

Neither social activism, nor evangelical world congresses, nor charismatic experiences will gain much in the long run if the Bible is forsaken or neglected.

The focus of the Bible debate has shifted beyond inerrancy to interpretation and to the issues of revelation-and-culture. For some scholars, Scripture functions authoritatively not by conveying fixed doctrinal truths, but only by changing believers internally. We are indeed to be “doers” and not simply “hearers” of the Word (James 1:22); our profit-oriented society flinches at Jesus’ disconcerting question: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). But even these truths we know simply because Scripture is a body of revealed information about God and his purposes and deeds; it is profitable, among other things, for doctrine. For others, the Bible represents but the thought-forms of ancient cultures. Bruce Nichols, however, properly insists in his Contextualization: A Theology of Gospel and Culture that all the revealed transcultural truths are nonnegotiable: those about God himself, his creative and redemptive work, his cosmic and historical purposes, his mighty commands and Great Commission.

We are too much preoccupied with the Bible’s existential impact and the private encouragement it affords us in times of personal crisis. To be sure, the preached Word must intersect human life at its most critical moments. But instead of channeling the biblical text only into internal congregational response, we must relate it also to nature and history, and to conscience. We need an expository ministry that brings forward into the crisis of our civilization the lessons of God’s actions in the biblical past. We need to hear of God’s truth and power for our age. We must not blur the emphasis on God’s external providence in history and the cosmos, nor fail to stress that naturalistic science, philosophy, and ethics rest on false assumptions about the real world.

The preached Word must speak to society in general, to great modern cities whose clichés about urban renewal are fading into discouragement. Beset by crime and vice, callous to death, trapped in poverty, aching with joblessness, besieged by inflation and taxation, our cities look to lotteries more than to the Living Word. Who dares to suggest that the Big Apple may be rotten at the core, that proud centers like Seattle, Toronto, and Philadelphia may meet the fate of Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Almost no one today speaks of these metropolises as Jesus spoke of Tyre and Sidon; almost no one weeps over them as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Almost no one seems aware that they may be but hurried whistle stops on God’s judgment trail. Who today trumpets the theme that God is sovereign in the city, that the great universities and fearless mass media are answerable to him? Who declares that the Judge of all the earth requires just judges, impartial law enforcement officers, fair news reporters and editors?

Biblical truth—transcultural as it is—proclaims the gospel to a generation that is intellectually uncapped, morally unzipped, and volitionally uncurbed. Biblical ethics boldly addresses the abyss of immorality engulfing our technological civilization; it speaks to greed for money, to lust for sexual pleasure, to crime, murder, terrorism, arson, and other hallmarks of our warped society. It confronts all of modern life with its mythology of technocratic utopianism, its triumphal evils.

Our evangelistic courage dare not be broken by the immensity of these problems. We are entrusted with proclaiming the inviolable Word of God, so we must constantly reinforce both the ineradicable sense of God, and also the surviving basic sensibilities of ethical decency. The gospel must remain central.

Consider the subject of death. Can evangelical deathstyle perhaps witness to this generation about God as much as evangelical lifestyle? As portrayed in the Bible, death is a transition from life to life—that is, from creation life to resurrection life. The quality of that life, moreover, depends on redemption.

Scripture cannot be broken, says Jesus: the apostolic message is what the Bible teaches. We need a generation devoted to biblical priorities, not to personal predilections; we need to banner the apostolic message, not the trendy come-ons of our age. The latest fads will all be shattered, but Scripture has timeless durability.

A Word About Public Duty

Christ said, “Occupy till I come.” This leads us to missiology. Some will think at once of the Great Commission. A church without evangelism invites extinction; it raises doubts, moreover, about its spiritual vitality. Recruiting, replacing, and supporting missionary forces is of prime urgency.

Too often, however, the church’s mission has been limited to preoccupation with personal evangelism at the expense of public concerns. In the parable of the nobleman, the servants are instructed to carry forward the master’s business during his absence in the far country. The Greek term is pragmateúomai: to do his thing, that is, to be about the master’s affairs. All of us know the King James translation: “Occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13). The idea accommodates the conception of an army of occupation that challenges the power of Satan, who is really a squatter. We think too seldom of the cosmos and of human history as arenas where God’s people are to resist satanic forces and to advance God’s truth.

The eighties may erupt into a decade of supercrises involving crippling energy depletion, ecological polution, military aggression, and political enslavement, moral and spiritual decline beyond imagination. As Peter writes, men will “promise … freedom” while “they themselves are slaves of corruption” (2 Peter 2:19).

We must address the world’s skepticism over moral norms, its distaste for work, the soaring crime rate, the need for prison reform, mushrooming pornography, and weak obscenity laws. The fact that two billion people attend porno films weekly curdles the soul. Advertising sells its wares by titillating envy, greed, and lust. The grey mist of secularism stupefies the sense of holiness. In the words of Barbara Nauer, it has become good to be bad.

Modern learning is powerless to challenge this beguiling mood. Most college classrooms now deny God equal or any time, and disavow the idea that he will reward good and punish evil. The positivists in anthropology say the values of all cultures are equal, and process theology thinks all that happens is streaked with divinity, while scientism can validate no moral norms whatever.

Most are oblivious to how fixed moral values are menaced by the growing notion that a truly democratic society must allow, even require, ethical diversity and a tolerance of immorality. Those who promote this theory argue that moral judgments are a private matter only, that an emphasis on ethics in public affairs represses democratic attitudes and processes, and that ethical absolutism is the handmaid of totalitarianism.

Our Christian duty includes a public proclamation of the standards by which the Coming King will judge all men and nations. If Christ’s church does not publicize the criteria by which Christ will judge the world, how will the world know them? If Christians are to be politically relevant, they must support useful legislation, even if such bills are less than ideal and may require early revision. And we must guard against dividing the church body over political issues that Scripture neither requires nor prohibits.

Yet the evangel does have obvious implications for public life and public affairs. We are confident that God works providentially in the history of nations and that we are to seek a good conscience in fulfilling our duties. So we should feel impelled to greater responsibility. If Christians fully recover and carefully balance their evangelistic mandate and their public duty, they may help turn the rumors of endtime into the realities of springtime.

What of poverty and oppression? To say that “rich Christians” hold the solution is an exaggeration. But should we, unlike the Bible, never excoriate profligate politicians or the greedy or the worldly wise? We may fail here because we secretly have too much in common with them, or because we enjoy the status symbols of a disordered society, or because we spend too little time in the company of Jesus. God is calling evangelical Christians to a fulness of love and action that will not freeze in winter.

In his recent autobiography, Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who also was chief prosecutor for the Nazi war crimes trials, says, “The Church militant is the only antidote.” He emphasizes that “without a militant membership … the church cannot fulfill its God-given responsibilities.” “Occupy till I come”—that is Jesus’ word to us.

A Word About Preparedness

Finally, Jesus exhorts us to be ready (Matt. 24:42). The parable of the one who comes like a household thief begins with the householder’s sudden return.

In our materialistic age of scientific advance and moral retreat, millions protect their possessions behind triple locks and costly security systems. No society in history has lived in such constant fear of the household thief as does modern America. There is no reason or excuse, therefore, to miss the point of Jesus’ warning: “Watch therefore; for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” He continues, “If the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched.… Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh” (Matt. 24:42 ff.).

Those who ask no eschatological questions because they think the divine answering service is dead are in for a surprise. Our interim age is not open-ended; it carries an expiration date. There is hard news ahead for those who regard inflation or sexual impotence or Communist expansion as the most frightening thing in life. While eschatology is good news for the Christian, it is a doomsday message for the rebellious and ungodly.

No one can negotiate or determine his or her rites of passage into the world to come. On the judgment seat, at the portal between this life and the next, sits one whose hands have borne the uncomely nail-prints of crucifixion for 2,000 years. His eyes are “like a flame of fire” (Rev. 1:14). “Behold … every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (Rev. 1:7). All the nations—united nations and divided nations, developed nations and developing nations, free world nations and totalitarian nations—will gather for judgment before the Coming King. All races will be held accountable for their doing or undoing of God’s will. All the hostages will come home; Christ the Risen Lord will vindicate the good and the godly.

For Paul and the other apostles, Christ’s second coming is the heart of the future. I agree with those who insist that the Book of the Revelation centers not in dates or places but in the risen and returning Lord, in the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world for sinners, in the One Sovereign over space and time. The apostolic core-message still gives us the best perspective for preaching on the edges of eternity; it emphasizes Christ’s incarnation, sinless life, substitutionary death, bodily resurrection, and personal return in judgment of men and nations, and his glorious kingdom.

“I am come,” “my church,” “Scripture cannot be broken,” “occupy,” “be ready!” These themes take us from here to eternity. Even on a cloudy day, they enable us to see forever.

Billy Graham recounts the origins of Christianity Today

Evangelist Billy Graham’s inspiration and leadership gave birth to CHRISTIANITY TODAY 25 years ago. For this silver anniversary issue, the editors asked him to recount the story of the magazine’s founding. Current readers and those who have used the magazine since its inception will find this interview full of interesting historical anecdotes. Graham also makes clear his own vision for the magazine’s purpose and place in the theological and ecclesiastical climate of the day.

Why did you think a magazine like CHRISTIANITY TODAY was needed?

During 1953, I was beginning to be attacked from both the left and the right. The crusades, however, were showing that a great number of clergy in the so-called mainline denominations throughout the country were evangelical in their convictions. To the amazement of most fundamentalists, they were cooperating with us. Also, there was a tremendous vacuum in religious publishing. The Christian Century was about the only Protestant magazine being quoted in the secular press. It had the field to itself, and it was considered quite liberal in those days.

How did you first get the idea of the magazine? Did you just see the need and decide what had to be done?

Well, it was something like that. Late in that year of 1953, I was awakened one night at about 2 A.M. I went to my desk and wrote out ideas about a magazine similar to the Christian Century, one that would give theological respectability to evangelicals. I even named it CHRISTIANITY TODAY and drew up various departments. I thought the articles should appeal especially to men who were open to the biblical faith in the mainline denominations, but the magazine had to be thoroughly evangelical. I felt it should also show that there was concern for scholarship among evangelicals. I even wrote down a budget.

Who did you let in on your idea?

I shared these thoughts first with my wife, Ruth, the next morning. She said, “Let’s make it a matter of prayer.” A few days later, I talked with my father-in-law, Dr. Nelson Bell. He was a busy surgeon, but on several occasions we talked about it for hours at a time. He was deeply involved in his denomination and had founded the Presbyterian Journal. He was a prolific writer and contributed to all kinds of magazines. The more we talked, the more enthusiastic he became.

What did you see as the basic purpose of the magazine?

I believed it should be the type of magazine without which a minister would feel he was not well read and which, until he had read it, could not possibly preach a sermon. Also, evangelicals needed a rallying point: perhaps a dynamic magazine could help. An evangelical voice was needed not only in this country, but throughout the English-speaking world.

Is that why you decided to give it free to all clergymen?

Yes. In order for it to become fully established with them, we felt we ought to give the magazine for at least two years to every minister in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and also to the missionaries on the foreign field. We had become convinced that clergymen would read a magazine on the basis of its contents alone, whether or not they personally subscribed to it. Many church members subscribe to magazines for their pastor; he may not even know who is sending it to him, but he will read it for its content.

Did this determine your editorial stance?

It did. We were convinced that the magazine would be useless if it had the old, extreme fundamentalist stamp on it. (The word “fundamentalist” at that time perhaps had a different, more negative connotation than it does today, on both sides of the Atlantic. I have always strongly accepted the fundamental doctrines of the faith and wanted the magazine to reflect this, but not to have a strong separatist or negative attitude.) It needed to avoid extremes of both the right and the left. We felt that as much as possible editorials should discuss all issues objectively and not from a biased viewpoint, and articles should present both sides of every issue and argument, but with an evangelical twist.

Starting a new magazine of the sort you planned is no small affair. How did you propose to finance it?

I knew a number of influential business leaders and tried to enlist their support. They were interested but noncommittal. But I felt I could raise at least $100,000 a year toward this project.

I told one of the businessmen, Howard Pew, that I was giving more thought to the possibilities and potentialities of this magazine than to any single thing in my life. Let me quote from a letter I sent him on April 13, 1955:

“The Lord seemingly has given me the vision for this paper and I’m desperately afraid of its getting out of hand. Dr. Bell is not getting any younger and has already had one coronary. You are getting along in years. While we pray that both of you may be spared for many years, yet we never know. We watched great universities that started out to train young ministers for the gospel degenerate into secular, pagan institutions, due to the fact that the founding fathers lost control. Their ideals and original visions were thrown to the wind. I am a relatively young man and I am determined to see this vision, that I believe is from God, carried out and properly controlled. I would suggest that we form a board of trustees immediately, consisting of the following people: Dr. Nelson Bell, Howard Pew, Billy Graham, Paul Rees, Harold Ockenga, Gerald Beavan, Walter Bennett, George Wilson, Maxey Jarman, and Howard Butt. This gives us a board of ten.”

Then I outlined exactly what each person on the board would contribute to the magazine.

Harold Ockenga was chairman of the board from the very beginning. How did you enlist his counsel and support?

I felt very strongly that he had to be part of this project, because we needed someone who was both an outstanding pastor and church leader, someone who had the respect of evangelicals and could give the magazine academic credibility. In January 1954, even though I was heavily occupied with plans for the forthcoming London crusade, I wrote and told him of my vision to start something like Christian Century, discussing the same issues, but from an evangelical viewpoint. I said we should have seminary professors and the top intellectual men in evangelical circles as writers.

But he wasn’t enthusiastic. In fact, he didn’t like the name we were talking about. More than a year later, in April 1955, I wrote him again and told him I had decided to do a little less evangelistic work for the next few months in order to give time to getting this project started.

I told him of Mr. Pew’s interest in giving financial support. But I warned him—let me quote again—“Harold, if you join us in this magazine project, I hope you will do it with your eyes open … it is going to take some sacrifice and time from all of us.”

He agreed to serve with us and has been indispensable in giving strong support and encouragement to the ongoing work over the years.

Why did the board decide to locate in Washington, D.C.?

At the time, I was a friend of President Eisenhower, and we had held a major crusade in Washington in 1952. I also had many friends in the Senate and House. I felt a magazine coming from Washington would carry with it an unusual authority.

We also wanted our editor to mingle with congressmen, senators, and government leaders so he could speak with firsthand knowledge on the issues of the day.

We understand you first asked Wilbur Smith to be editor? Is that true?

Yes, I had earlier gone to see him in Pasadena, and asked him if he would be willing to edit such a magazine. Amazingly, he pulled out some notes he had made on December 24, 1926, in which he proposed a “journal of biblical studies.” He had some of the same ideas the Lord had given me.

Dr. Smith wrestled with my invitation for about six months, then declined. He felt he had to stay on the West Coast. He said it was too late in life to move, and he didn’t want to move his library, which he had willed to Fuller Seminary where he was teaching. However, in a letter he assured me he believed “a periodical such as you have in mind is more necessary than ever before.”

It was Carl Henry who became the first editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and he served until 1968. How did he enter the picture?

Harold Lindsell, then a professor at Fuller Seminary, wrote to me and suggested Dr. Henry, after Wilbur Smith had declined. In his letter, Dr. Lindsell said, “Via the grapevine, following my return from Denver, Colorado, I heard that Wilbur Smith had been giving consideration to accepting the editorship of a projected paper that would be the counterpart of the Christian Century on an evangelical level. I hear that he has refused this opportunity. I am convinced that if you wish to launch this type of a national and international paper, you should need the highest type of leadership. May I be bold enough to express a deep conviction that our mutual friend, Carl Henry, is the most logical candidate for the position.”

What did you think of Dr. Lindsell’s proposal?

Carl Henry’s name had been mentioned before. I knew he had many of the qualifications we were looking for in an editor of the proposed magazine. He had journalistic experience, intellectual and theological perception, and in one sense, worldwide experience.

On the other hand, I wondered if Carl would be ready to take a certain amount of criticism that would come from both left and right: would he recognize that there were good elements—God-fearing people and devout ministers—in the mainline denominations? At that time I was moving in wider denominational circles than Carl, due to my crusades, although he was certainly aware of larger issues. Would he be willing to use strategy during the early months while we were establishing the magazine as a top religious periodical?

I mentioned my questions to Dr. Lindsell and said we would have to talk long and fully with Carl about them. Of course, we did. We also raised the question of his willingness to move to Washington from lovely Southern California.

My own reservations were satisfactorily resolved. I talked with Nelson Bell, Howard Pew, and Marcellus Kik, the only ones involved up to that time. When we called the first board together, there was general agreement that Carl Henry was the man.

Who really shaped CHRISTIANITY TODAY in the early years?

During those first two years I couldn’t get very many people to go along with my idea for the magazine. I didn’t have time; I was preaching all the time. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Bell, there would never have been a CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and if it hadn’t been for Carl Henry, it would not have been quite what it became. Carl Henry was God’s man for it.

When Dr. Bell saw that Howard Pew would back us financially, he became seriously interested. He said, “I’ve got to give up something. I will give up my surgical practice and go into this thing full-time.”

Well, he was able to pull the whole thing together. He got Marcellus Kik, a Presbyterian minister, to come in to help him. He was a tremendous help in the beginning, before the magazine ever came out. Carl Henry was brought into a situation that had been pretty well established by Dr. Bell and Dr. Kik.

In my judgment, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a combination of the thinking of not only the board, but also of Carl Henry and Nelson Bell. Dr. Bell really ran the magazine in the first few years, from both a business point of view and a theological point of view. He was the executive editor for 18 years. He went over nearly all of the articles. If he didn’t like an editorial, he would discuss it with Carl. Sometimes Carl would win and sometimes Dr. Bell would win.

With strong personalities like Dr. Bell, Dr. Henry, Mr. Pew, and the CHRISTIANITY TODAY board, what problems did you have?

Once the magazine was launched, our greatest problem in the first year was getting enough money to support it. But money wasn’t the only problem. We were afraid Mr. Pew might try to dominate it because of his heavy financial involvement. We worried about keeping Carl Henry from going back to Fuller Seminary, because he had agreed to come for only a year. It took the first year or two to get adjusted—for him to get adjusted to us, for us to get adjusted to him—because he had some definite ideas; but he was very gracious in the way he put them over.

What effect did Carl Henry’s leaving in 1968 have?

It was a tremendous blow to me personally. I didn’t think we would ever recover the high standards that he had set, and we did not know who to call as our second editor. But one night while I was lying awake in bed, thinking and praying, my wife suddenly said, “Why not Harold Lindsell?”

I thought and thought, and then I called Dr. Bell on the phone and said, “What would you think of Harold Lindsell?”

He said, “Well, I hadn’t thought of him.”

I said, “I think I will call him and just see,” which I did. He didn’t say no and he didn’t say yes. He said he would be glad to pray about it. Later, of course, he accepted the board’s invitation. He guided the magazine’s direction for the next decade, until his retirement in 1978.

How would you summarize the magazine’s ministry over 25 years?

Looking back, I think CHRISTIANITY TODAY has helped bring about an evangelical revolution in America. It gave intellectual respectability to evangelicalism. It has gone far beyond anything that I, or Dr. Bell, or Wilbur Smith, or Carl Henry, or any of us ever envisioned.

Graham’s freewheeling comments reflect the character and charisma that have spurred his career as a Christian crusader.

Surveying a quarter-century of U.S. church life would not be complete without the insights of evangelist Billy Graham. As readers reflect on major trends since the fifties, they will want to study Graham’s insights on evangelicals and the churches. In this interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY editors, he also stakes out his position on a number of current issues, including those of both a personal and a controversial nature.

What are some of the most significant changes on the American church scene in the last 25 years?

There are a number of things that come to mind. First is the emergence of evangelicalism as the most significant religious movement throughout the world, as well as in America. You could almost say that its growth has been explosive, and that its force continues to increase.

Second has been the emergence of numerous parachurch organizations. They have had a tremendous impact. Their influence has been felt in many ways, including on the so-called mainline denominations.

Third is the new understanding between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Twenty-five years ago we could hardly speak with each other openly. In our crusades today, thousands of Catholics feel free to attend. I have preached in Roman Catholic schools, and have even received honorary doctorates from them. This could not have happened 25 years ago.

Another thing is the emergence of television evangelism and Bible teaching. This has already had a wide effect, and will probably grow in significance in the future.

Along with this has come the emergence of large numbers of evangelicals taking strong political positions. This has probably already made a historic impact on American life, whatever the future holds for such movements.

Finally, I would mention the charismatic movement. The words “Holy Spirit” and “Pentecost” no longer belong exclusively to the so-called Pentecostal denominations. The charismatic impact has now become widespread among many denominations, including the more liturgical churches.

Do you foresee an evangelical resurgence in the mainline denominations?

Yes, there is definitely such a movement in all the major denominations. Certainly there are more evangelicals in mainline denominations now than there were 25 years ago, especially laymen. Evangelical seminaries have grown greatly and are full, whereas, on the whole, the more liberal ones do not have as many students. Pulpits in many denominations increasingly are being filled by students from the more evangelical seminaries. Surprising statements are now coming from many denominational leaders, who are admitting they must take a closer, more sympathetic look at the evangelical revival.

What have been the most serious shortcomings of evangelicals?

There has been an unhealthy tendency toward individualism—a tendency on the part of some individualists to go their own way. Also, I think we have failed to communicate to the “world church” some of the positive things evangelicals are doing, such as in the area of social work. I have also been concerned because too often we have tended toward superficiality—an overemphasis on easy-believism or experience rather than on true discipleship. We have sometimes offered cheap grace and cheap conversions without genuine repentance. In addition, evangelicals have not tried to capture the intellectual initiative as much as we should. We haven’t challenged and developed the minds of our generation. Though there are many exceptions, generally we evangelicals have failed to present to the world great thinkers, theologians, artists, scientists, and so forth.

Where have evangelicals been strongest?

In evangelism. In 1960 a small group came together in Montreux, Switzerland, to discuss the possibility of unity among evangelicals. After listening to several days of discussion and debate—and after much time together in prayer—I became convinced that evangelicals today would never get together except around one word: evangelism. That was the beginning of seed thoughts that led to the 1966 Berlin Congress, which in turn led to many regional congresses on evangelism (such as Amsterdam, Bogotá, Singapore, Minneapolis), and later the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism.

Where do you stand on the issue of Christian unity?

We must take seriously our Lord’s prayer in John 17, “that they may be one as we are one.” Someone has said the closer we get to Christ, the closer we get to each other. But already there is an ecumenism throughout the Christian world. Everyone who truly knows Christ is a member of the body of Christ—regardless of denominational label. When our Lord spoke through John to the seven churches of Asia, he rebuked them for their sins, but he did not tell them all to join the same church—that wasn’t one of their failings. I have no problems working with anyone, under any label, as long as he knows the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior and is living the life of a Christian disciple.

You seem to have taken a more “liberal” stance on some issues, while some evangelical leaders appear to be getting more conservative. How do you explain this?

I do not agree with that observation. The majority of evangelicals are not going in opposite directions. In fact, there is far more agreement among evangelicals today than possibly at any time in my lifetime. There are, perhaps, some differences on social and political questions that are more evident today because of our visibility. The pendulum swings back and forth on some of the social, economic, and political issues. But most evangelicals recognize they have responsibilities in these areas in certain contexts. I have been called “liberal” in some areas because of my stand on certain social issues; I have been called “conservative” theologically. I accept both labels, and believe that I stand in the mainstream of evangelicalism.

How do you assess the impact of the charismatic movement?

As I said, it has made a great impact on virtually all denominations. It also has brought together in a new way many Christians from various backgrounds and persuasions. Of course, there have been extremists in some places who have given it a bad name. I am encouraged to see many charismatic leaders stressing the need for deeper Bible study and balanced biblical doctrine. By and large it has been a positive force in the lives of many people.

What counsel do you have for maintaining financial integrity in religious ministries?

Many years ago I decided that one of the greatest testimonies we could ever have in our own ministry was total integrity in everything, including the reporting of numbers of those attending our meetings, and in financial matters. We therefore formed a strong board of directors and turned all finances over to them. It was only a few years ago, however, that we began to make our finances public—there simply was not the interest before. If I had any advice to give to my brethren in parachurch organizations, it would be that they have total integrity, strict accountability, and public disclosure of finances. I think we see all these in the way Paul handled the money he collected for the Jerusalem church.

How would you compare yourself to Jerry Falwell? Is the Moral Majority a help or hindrance to the public’s understanding of the gospel?

On the whole, I have never heard him say anything theologically that I did not agree with. I am thankful for all who proclaim the gospel and seek to win people to faith in Christ. We need to remember that God has called people to different ministries and has given us different gifts.

There may be a danger in getting too involved in partisan politics—there are many potential snares. I am somewhat concerned when we get specific political issues intertwined with the gospel (such as SALT treaties or the Panama Canal issue); this confuses people about the essence of the gospel. It could also have the tendency to dilute the gospel. I think this was one of the errors I made in my early ministry, and it is one I am seeking to correct. I am trying desperately to stay out of partisan politics, although sometimes it is rather difficult. The whole matter, of course, is a complicated issue. Christians have always debated exactly how they should relate to secular and political issues, and there certainly are many social and political issues that have a moral dimension. We need great wisdom to know where our responsibilities are in this area.

Which is more important, mass evangelism or one-on-one evangelism?

One-on-one evangelism. In my judgment, there is no such thing as mass evangelism—that is a misnomer. If you speak to two people, you are speaking to a group. All so-called mass evangelism must be built on a foundation of one-on-one evangelism to be effective.

You hare said that the world won’t be won from a stadium. Have you given too much emphasis to stadium rallies?

No, I don’t think so. God called me to this particular segment of the field where the seed is to be sown. He has raised up scores of methods of evangelism that are very successful, probably more successful than ours. But the concept of crusade evangelism has also been used of God. Often a great deal happens as a result of crusades, far beyond the immediate meetings. Dr. Robert Evans was recently telling me that he has uncovered more than 25 evangelical organizations in Europe alone that started as a direct or indirect result of our crusades in Europe.

Recently the Lord has opened up a whole new ministry of evangelism for us. For our April telecast, we tested call-ins for spiritual counseling, and had counselors standing by in three cities. With our limited number of phones and counselors, we were able to talk to over 1,000 people on each of four nights; many thousands attempted to call. An average of 375 made commitments to Christ each evening. We did not have a toll-free number—people had to pay for their own calls. We are planning to go nationwide with this ministry. Of course, some ministries (like the 700 Club) have already used this method effectively. It is an indication to me that there is a far greater spiritual hunger among the American people than crusade reports would indicate.

What can you tell us about your recent meeting with Pope John Paul II?

I spent about a half-hour with the Pope in very private, intimate conversation. He was extremely warm and interested in our work. I had just been to Poland, and of course he wanted to know my impressions. We discussed the Christian faith, both our agreements and some of our differences. I have great admiration for the Pope’s moral courage, and sent him a cable as soon as I heard he had been shot to assure him of my prayers for his recovery.

Do you feel your meeting with him helped or hindered the evangelical church in Catholic countries?

It helped our meetings in Mexico, because Catholics felt free to attend them. They saw that I was not a bigot or intolerant. Things are changing rapidly in Latin America. The differences between Protestants and Catholics remain very deep and very great, but in many instances, the two groups are at least beginning to talk to each other.

What trends do you see in the Catholic church?

Certainly there is a trend toward greater diversity. Many of the diversities we have seen within Protestantism are now evident in Roman Catholicism. In fact, fragmentation is seen as a great danger by many Roman Catholics. On the practical side, many Catholics in many parts of the world are rediscovering the Scriptures in a very real way. I also sense a new openness to new approaches, including borrowing music and methods we have been familiar with in evangelical circles. When I was at the Vatican I spoke at a vesper service at the North American College, which is a seminary for students from North America. I understand I was the first Protestant to speak there. It was a very inspirational and Christocentric service, with much contemporary music.

Are you speaking out as much as you used to on controversial issues?

I am preaching the same gospel I have always preached. If anything, I am stressing more and more the cost of discipleship. I do not know of a single moral issue that I have not spoken out on at one time or another—everything from racism and apartheid to nuclear armaments and peace. However, I do not feel it is my calling to get out in the streets and lead demonstrations. Nor am I singling out one sin from the scores mentioned in Scripture and riding a hobbyhorse—although I have had a lot of pressure across the years to do so.

I have often denounced the kind of gambling that goes on among speculators in stocks and commodities. Though the exchanges represent legitimate enterprise, some of the business transacted there is motivated by a desire for quick profits. The type of gambling done in Las Vegas is of a different kind: it tends to bring with it all kinds of evils that are recognized even by the leaders of the gambling industry. It’s very interesting, however, to find so many devout Christians working in Las Vegas hotels. The mayor is a believer. There is a Las Vegas that is rarely seen, the Las Vegas of churches and Christians and prayer groups.

There is a difference between sin and sins. There is sin (singular), which is the heart of our spiritual disease, and there are sins (plural), which are the fruit or signs of the disease. If I spent all of my time on sins (plural) I might never be able to get at the root cause, which is sin (singular). The Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross to deal with sin, and not just individual sins.

Do you intend to speak out on other issues of the day?

As I have said, I have probably touched on virtually all issues, at least to some degree, although these are not always carried in the national press. I am concerned about human rights violations; my position is what you would expect from any Christian who takes the Bible seriously. I am against the violation of human rights. But I also have to accept that we are living in a complicated world dominated by evil. If we condoned only those who adhere strictly to human rights (as we define them in North America), we would be severely limited in our international contacts.

I also am concerned about the economic disparity between rich and poor nations. Again, this is not an easy question. It is interesting that some of the OPEC countries are the richest in per capita income. America, I understand, now has the fifth highest per capita income in the world, with four of the Middle East oil-rich nations ahead of us. But Christians must do some hard thinking on this, and on the related matters of world hunger and disease that are so prevalent in some parts of the world.

You are universally regarded as a man of great faith. Have you ever battled with any doubts?

I have never had a doubt about God’s existence since I came to Christ. I did go through a period in the late forties of doubting the infallibility and authority of Scripture. That was settled on my knees in August 1949, in California, when I accepted by faith the Bible as the authoritative and infallible Word of God. That decision has had a profound effect on my life since then.

Have materialism and affluence affected the lifestyle of evangelicals?

I assume you are referring especially to evangelicals in America. We should remember that many of our brethren in other countries know firsthand the reality of poverty.

Yes, it has affected us. On the positive side, our relative affluence has meant we have been able to support missionaries and ministries in many parts of the world. On the negative side, we have sometimes become too preoccupied with our lifestyle, both as individuals and as organizations. The Bible speaks of “the deceitfulness of wealth” (Matt. 13:22) and how it chokes the Word in our lives. Many of the great people of the Bible (like Abraham or David) had great wealth, but God was first in their lives. It is a person’s attitude toward his affluence that makes the difference. God has raised up throughout the years wealthy individuals who sees their riches as a stewardship from God—men like Count Zinzendorf, Lord Shaftesbury, and Lord Dartmouth who gave George Whitefield money for his evangelistic work.

Of course, affluence is a relative thing. Someone we might consider impoverished may be looked upon as wealthy in his own culture. An Indian, for example, who may be getting $600 a year, is considered wealthy by Bangladesh standards, where the income may be $50 or $100 a year. But I believe those of us in the affluent countries must move toward a more simple lifestyle, because we are citizens of the world community and the world church.

This is a concern throughout our whole organization. We all feel a simpler lifestyle is God’s way for us. My wife and I are getting rid of some of the things that we may have held too closely. We have great discussions on this subject.

How have the Old Testament prophets influenced your ministry?

Tremendously! At one time I took prophetic passages and tried to force them into meaning or relevance for today, but I came to see that this was not wise or necessary. I’m referring to things like trying to coordinate what these passages said with current events in the Middle East. But over the years, the prophets have influenced me in several ways. For one thing, the themes of their messages are still tremendously important—the justice of God, the need for repentance, the love of God for his people, and so forth. Also, I have been especially influenced by their lives and their example. I have been challenged by their courage and boldness, and their willingness to swim against the stream. I have been challenged by their devotion to God and their closeness to him. I also have taken heart from their discouragements and failures, because I have also known those times. That is why I read Psalms every day, for in them I see the heart of David and the psalmists.

The Christian life is not a constant high. I have my moments of deep discouragement. I have to go to God in prayer with tears in my eyes, and say, “O God, forgive me,” or “help me.”

You have written on Armageddon, and a lot ofpopular new books are about how to get ready for hard times. Do you have a personal word for evangelicals about how they might get ready for the hard times?

That’s what my book was about—how to prepare both for the great Armageddon that will come some day and for the little “armageddons” we each face in our own lives. The book is not mainly about prophecy or Armageddon; the title was slightly misleading. But each of us faces problems—an illness, a family problem, an economic reversal—and we need to prepare for those times now. Also, we need to realize that God can bring great blessing to us through suffering and difficulties. I do not agree with those who say our lives should be trouble free if we are following Christ.

But to answer your question more directly: the most important thing we can do is grow in our relationship to Christ. If we have not learned to pray in our everyday lives, we will find it difficult to know God’s peace and strength through prayer when the hard times come. If we have not learned to trust God’s Word when times are easy, we will not trust his Word when we face difficulties. And I am convinced that one of the greatest things we can do is to memorize Scripture. The Scriptures speak to us in those moments when we look to the Lord for sustenance and strength.

I have sometimes wondered what would be the most important thing I could do if I knew I were going to be held hostage or go through some very difficult times. I believe the best preparation would be to saturate myself with the Word of God, including memorization. That was the case for Jeremiah Denton (who is now a U.S. senator) when he was a prisoner in Vietnam. We met him and other POW’s when they came back, and learned from them that it was their spiritual strength and their knowledge of the Scriptures that sustained them.

All of us are painfully aware of family breakdown and divorce, even in the Christian community. What would you say to college students and young people? What spiritual foundation can they lay that would help their marriages?

A marriage should be made up of three people: you, your spouse, and God. Christ should be the foundation of a Christian marriage right from the beginning.

A lasting marriage starts during courtship. I would say to a young person who is beginning to think about marriage: “Yield this whole area of your life to Christ, and trust him. Don’t take your cue from the world: realize that marriage is a lifetime commitment. You shouldn’t go into it with the idea you can always get out of it if things don’t work out. And realize that true love is not selfish.

Many marriages end by the fifth year because couples haven’t learned how to adjust. Differences can be settled amicably if both are really seeking the Lord’s will. One of the things Ruth and I have found helpful is that when we kneel to pray together, she prays for me and my problems and I pray for her and her problems or concerns.

A man especially needs to learn to be extremely gentle. A woman must have tenderness from her spouse; she can love him and respond to him if he is tender—no matter what he looks like or whether or not he is successful. We have found that marriage should be made up of two forgivers. We need to learn to say, “I was wrong; I’m sorry.” And we also need to say, “That’s all right; I love you.”

One of the things that has been difficult for you is your very busy schedule. What priority does the family have?

The priority ought to be the home. Many churches are demanding too much time of their people. Some churches also demand too much of their pastor; he shouldn’t be at meetings seven nights a week, and neither should the church members. There is no substitute for time at home—time spent in discussion, or having fun together. However, our purpose is not to watch television together, but to read out loud, or play games, or have family discussions. Some happy families are run in a democratic way: everybody’s point of view on the problems of the family is considered. Family members feel like they belong. And that child in the home needs to know he is loved and he is important, and that he can count on the undivided attention of his father or mother sometime during the day.

Ruth and I will celebrate our thirty-eighth anniversary soon. All our children are now away from home, and sometimes they have said, “We feel so sorry for Dad and Mother there in that house all by themselves.” But we are having the time of our lives! It is a marvelous period of our lives. Ruth has said, “You know, all my life I wanted to travel with you and be with you, but I stayed home with the children. Now that I am able to travel, I find I get too tired.”

“Well,” I said, “I get tired, too, and we will just have to pace ourselves a little bit, because I want you with me.”

We have 15 grandchildren, and we really try to schedule time for them. I think this is a part of our ministry at this stage of our lives.

You have mentioned hyperactive churches. What are some problems you see in so-called super churches?

Churches can be too large and impersonal. They are not really able to minister to their members. Many illustrations of this have come to my attention in the last year. There are church members who tell us they can’t get to their pastor or another person on the staff. Recently a man told me that he had been going to his church for over a year. He said, “I don’t believe there are five people there who know my name.” That is a tragedy. Of course, some very large churches have broken the church into smaller groups, so that all the people may be ministered to personally.

Somewhere along the line we need to study carefully how many people a clergyman can minister to. Clergymen are among the most susceptible to nervous breakdowns, and even to attacks of Satan, simply because they are too busy to take time for their devotional life and their families. In many churches we probably need to learn more about the ministry of the laity. The minister shouldn’t be doing everything—he should “prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Eph. 4:12).

I have a friend who is the pastor of a large Presbyterian church. When he went there, he told the elders that his family came first. There would be times when he would be gone, he said, and he didn’t want them asking where. He has a marvelous Christian family, which is a great witness for him.

Does it bother you that so many evangelicals seem to be theologically illiterate?

It bothers me terribly, as much as anything I can think of. One of the great needs in America is Bible teaching in depth. Unless this happens, I fear we will see many distortions and errors creeping into evangelicalism in the future. I think, incidently, that CHRISTIANITY TODAY can have an important role here.

Why are evangelicals so reluctant to ordain women?

I certainly don’t want to get into this particular fight—there are enough battles to be fought without that one. I don’t feel it is my calling as an evangelist to take sides on an issue like this. There are, of course, many evangelicals who take a strong stand on either side, and we need to look carefully to see what the Bible really teaches. But as an evangelist, I try to appeal to a wide audience, so I don’t like to get sidetracked.

You have written a number of books. Would you rather be a writer than a preacher at this stage in your life?

I enjoy both. I find I often need help in writing. I am able to get my thoughts down all right, but I am not able to put them together as well as I would like. Now I am trying to take off two months a year for writing—nothing but study and writing. I am currently working on a new book.

You have preached a lot on the sexual revolution. Suppose a young lady tells you that she has been living with a man and she really enjoys it, and wonders what is wrong with it. How would you reply?

We cannot take our Christian values and force them on the world. Christians have to realize that, morally, we live in a different world.

Anyway, I would tell the young lady—if she were not a Christian—that from a long-term psychological point of view she is making a tragic mistake. From the standpoint of a future marital relationship, I would tell her that what the Scriptures teach is for her best. For example, how can there be real trust and security in a married relationship, or any lasting commitment, if marriage is not taken seriously?

On the other hand, if she were a Christian girl, I would tell her frankly that she is sinning. It is displeasing to God. Our fellowship with him is broken when we tolerate sin in our lives.

Have you set a limit on the number of crusades you will be taking in the future?

No. Some years ago I had thought that by the time I was 62 or 64 I would not have the physical strength to carry on and would have to give up crusades. And I didn’t think there would be that much interest. But we have more invitations from all over the world than we could take in two lifetimes. In fact, wherever we go, it seems that more invitations follow. This happened recently in Japan and Mexico: the pressure is tremendous to go back and hold crusades in many cities we did not visit. And I want to go to some of the cities we have never been to in the United States—like Boise, Idaho, for example.

How old will you be on your next birthday?

Sixty-three on November 7, 1981. I really feel better now than I did in my forties, when I tried to do too much. So long as God gives me strength, I will continue—maybe I can continue until I am 70. But it is all in God’s hands.

Hey, Diddle, Diddle!

Congratulations, CT! You’ve made it. After a quarter of a century, evangelicals have arrived, and can be numbered with the mortal majority. No doubt you will agree to become Christianity Tomorrow and adjust your subscription rate accordingly.

To cheer you on, I want to hail one of the accomplishments of this century, the Christian Mother Goose. This is fine for children, but what about churchmen? In this group are many connoisseurs of the genre. Let’s encourage a Mother Goose renewal. Charming rhymes can replace the “Murphy’s Law” signs that are now invading church offices. (“The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an approaching train.”)

Organize a contest, CT, and you will be amazed at the response, especially if you offer sweepstakes prizes in 1956 dollars. Here are a few entries to get the juices flowing:

Here is the church and here is the steeple; / Look through the glass at the beautiful people. / Here is the parson going up the stair—/Phone in your offering; keep him on the air!

Twinkle, twinkle, twice-born star, / What a super champ you are! / Welcome, brother, to our staff—/Could I have your autograph?

See-saw, Margery Daw, / We shall have a new pastor. / Mr. Amos was sent on his way; / His politics were a disaster.

Old Pastor Hubbard went to the suburb / To get his black church a loan. / But when he got there / The churches were bare; / He raised all the cash on his own!

Little Ms. Muffet / Sat at the buffet / Eating dessert number ten. / Along came Ron Sider / Who sat down beside her—/She never indulged so again!

Of course, you should consider asking for contemporary idiomatic translations of Mother Goose, using the principle of dynamic equivalence. For example:

Exceptional Simon met a bakery delivery person / Outside the supermarket. / Said exceptional Simon to the bakery delivery person, “How about a Tasty-Kake?”

Said the bakery delivery person to exceptional Simon, “No food stamps for parking lot sales. Where’s your buck?” Said exceptional Simon to the bakery delivery person, / “I just got gas. I’m out of luck.”

But don’t accept contributions from philosophers or theologians. Otherwise you might get samples like this one from Eugene Ivy:

Little jack Horner sat in a corner—/His context for eating a pie. / He stuck in his thumb, / Was quite overcome, / and said, “What an alien am I!”

I told Gene that I didn’t get it. What happened to “What a good boy am I?” His answer was another rhyme:

Jack’s old self-satisfied elation / Did not survive the realization / Of existential alienation / In subject/object separation.

Even Mother Goose isn’t safe from the new hermeneutic.

Nostalgically,

EUTYCHUS I

To The Point

Your May 29 editorial was one of the most lucid presentations of the evangelical view of inerrancy and infallibility that I have seen in some time; at least one that does not require 200 or so pages. Either the Bible is the Word of God, or it is not. There can be no middle road. I for one would be afraid to choose what is or is not the Word of God in the Bible.

REV. DAVID L. MCDANIEL

Quincy Assembly of God

Quincy, Mich.

I read your editorial on how one should really look at inerrancy and find to my amazement I could call myself an inerrantist! Since I cannot imagine I have become so malleable to suddenly embrace what I thought I eschewed, I suspect your editorial represents an evolved position on this subject. Maybe even Bratcher will like it!

A single sentence fairly demolishes much of what I thought other inerrantists were saying and, in my view, even pales some of the rest of your own comments. You state cogently, parsimoniously, historically: “The Bible may speak in figures or literal language: but rightly interpreted (my italics) it is true in all that it says.” As the saying goes, “This is where it’s at!”

H. WADE SEAFORD. JR.

Carlisle, Pa.

This whole discussion—yours and the Southern Baptists’—seems to me “wrangling about words.” It also seems that both sides (and going by your definition there ought to be two sides) of this whole disgusting episode are carried by adult and mature Christian believers! Whatever happened to the other cheek and the second mile? Do evangelicals and the Southern Baptist quarrelers espouse these teachings of the Holy Scriptures? Your editorial, it seems to me, “Confuses Away Clearing.”

REV. REA MANGUM

First Baptist Church

Blountstown, Fla.

Effective Education?

Tom Minnery’s “Short-cut Graduate Degrees Shortchange Everybody” [May 29] highlights an increasing danger in our “immediate gratification” culture.

The article avoids, however, the central issue in any educational process: Does it work? Many of the best students of Greek I have known did their translations from a well-thumbed interlinear New Testament. They have received and display various fully accredited degrees from respectable institutions.

Did their certified schools actually educate them? Or is advanced education sometimes an exercise in mimicry, requiring only short-term retention of by-rote data? A committed Christian student who desires to be educated may well achieve that goal at an “unofficial” school. We must guard against disdain for the different, and evaluate our enshrined patterns.

DAVID L. FRISBIE

Overland Park, Kans.

Minnery’s statement concerning a “marked preference for the practical aspects of ministerial training at the expense of academic work” is incorrect. I have had my share of the purely academic, and it did not prepare me for the pastorate.

Many of us are not interested in simply hanging a diploma on the wall. We are interested in learning more about the practical aspects of ministry we did not get in college and/or seminary. I need no more academia. What I needed, and still need, is the practicality of what Luther Rice offered me at a time when it would have been impossible for me to go back to a seminary campus.

REV. HARVEY NOWLAND, JR.

Oakwood Baptist Church

Oakwood, Ga.

The Association of Theological Schools does not and has never had any theological tests for membership and accreditation. This is well demonstrated by the fact that the membership spans the entire spectrum of theological positions from the most conservative to the most liberal. Judgments are based solely on quality of educational program and adequacy of resources. Those who interpret ATS accrediting actions on theological grounds are simply uninformed about the facts or unwilling to accept them.

MARVIN J. TAYLOR

The Association of Theological Schools

Vandalia, Ohio

We wish to commend Minnery for his exposure of true “diploma mills” and bogus accrediting associations. However, one would get the impression that all “home study” higher education is inferior to the traditional classroom brand. Also, one would gather from the article that unless a Bible college or seminary were accredited or approved by a secular state and/or regional agency it would be by definition inferior and suspect of motives. Some objections and observations:

• Many “accredited” private and state undergraduate and graduate schools offer “home study” (external, directed) courses for credit.

• Much of graduate education is of the independent research nature.

• Many fundamental colleges and seminaries have serious philosophic prohibitions regarding state or regional approval or accreditation by secular authorities.

• Who decides what is quality education? Doesn’t it come from COPA [Council on Postsecondary Accreditation], which is controlled by a secular, humanistic, evolutionary philosophy?

• There are bona fide accrediting associations of Bible colleges that are seeking to improve their academic standards, although not recognized by COPA.

HAROLD E. BARNETT, HARRY E. WILLIAMS

Antietam Bible College

Hagerstown, Md.

The Unifying Spirit

I appreciated “Opening the Church to the Charismatic Dimension,” by Clark Pinnock [June 12]. I am a Pentecostal Christian by willing choice as a result of the ever-patient Lord of Glory. It is refreshing to see the freedom in the Spirit treated so openly. If Christians could see that the Holy Spirit was given not to embarrass individuals or divide Christianity but to give power, guidance, and comfort to all children of God, we could have the same ease of fellowship the early church enjoyed, and the increased addition of souls to the kingdom.

JERRY L. BROUGHTON

Springfield, Mo.

Pinnock’s article was a shocker not because of the insight of his premise, but his error in historical analysis! He states, “I have in mind the charismatic dimension of the apostolic teaching. To grasp it, let us look at Paul’s essay on spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 to 14. There we glimpse a congregation alive in the Spirit and abounding in gifts and manifestations.” Historically, the church at Corinth was split, morally in error, and doctrinally confused. One must only read the entire letter to this church to establish clearly the spiritual weakness and instability there. Because of his error of analysis and failure to exemplify the New Testament teaching of the power and maturity expected in the ministry of the Holy Spirit, his defense of charismatic dimension lacks validity.

DR. DALLAS E. SHAFER

Christian Church of Security

Security, Colo.

Knowing And Doing

The “tell them what’s right” teaching method Larsen critiques, “Listening to Our Children, that They Might Believe” [May 29], is reflective of the philosophy of education evangelicals have adopted: to know right is to do right. While many in evangelical education would deny embracing that philosophy, the educational methods of those very persons and the classroom structures they most often employ repudiate their denial. The question is, when will evangelical educators translate what they profess to know about Christian education into methodology? O well, to know right is not to do right after all, is it?

JAMES P. BOWERS

Cleveland, Tenn.

This issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY celebrates the magazine’s silver anniversary. While a 25-year span is but a brief moment when set against two millennia of church history, for evangelicalism, these years were filled with breath-taking movement.

In the wake of World War II, the U.S. Supreme Court could identify Americans as a Christian people. Now we are a pluralistic society, dominated intellectually by secular humanism. Then, Time magazine and other oracles of American culture snidely labeled all evangelicals as fundamentalists and couldn’t tell the difference between evangelicalism and evangelism; now, they speak of the “Year of the Evangelical,” and in our last election, the three best-known candidates all professed to be evangelicals. Then, evangelical seminaries were seen as tiny hold-outs for the faith; now they have so far outproduced the more liberal schools, that the under-30 group of ministers is today the most theologically conservative. Then, separatistic Covenant Seminary split off a split-off of a split-off; now, it is a focus of union for four Presbyterian and Reformed bodies. Then, charismatics were still “holy rollers” and unknown outside Pentecostal denominations; now, they represent a major force in evangelicalism, and every major denomination claims them.

For one who has lived his adult life through these years and participated actively in these events, it is difficult to appreciate the radical nature of changes on the American and world religious scenes. And it is nearly impossible to assess their permanent significance for evangelicalism.

For our twenty-fifth anniversary, we have drawn together articles that will help you to assess not only from where evangelicalism has come and where it is now, but also the direction in which it is headed for the immediate future. Some of these articles appear in this current issue; others will come in later issues.

One feature deserves special note: that king of humor, Edmund Clowney, president of Westminster Theological Seminary, reascends his throne as Eutychus I to poke us with his gentle jibes and rouse us from our stodgy ways. In spite of letters to the editor. I still have hopes that evangelicalism has matured, because I think I hear us laughing at ourselves more—as I am sure the good Lord does.