It was a relaxed dinner party. Over coffee, the discussion ranged from movies to Boris Yeltsin to election issues. Then we got to the topic that can turn polite dinner parties into shouting matches: abortion.

One person excused himself, then another. Soon it was just another guest and me—and he looked very unhappy.

“Chuck, this will surprise you,” he said, leaning across the table, “but I can’t buy your arguments.”

I certainly was surprised; this man is a generally conservative evangelical.

“I think your position is cold and heartless for the people involved,” he said.

“Not very heartless for the babies,” I replied.

“Don’t get off on that,” he said. “Think about the practical ramifications. Look at our inner cities. Kids having kids. On welfare. Most of the fathers in prison, AIDS babies. Crack babies. My wife works with those kids. It’s horrible to bring them into that kind of world …” He trailed off.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Abortion is legal now. And these babies are still being born.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “Birth control, abstinence—they don’t really work. Abortion is the only way to stop the cycle.”

“Don’t you see?” I continued. “Those women are already having babies. They aren’t having abortions, even though they could. Changing the law won’t affect that. How many welfare women do you see marching at prochoice rallies?”

He paused. “Well, it’s a cultural thing. They need more education.”

“Education?” I said. “This country has one of the most liberal abortion policies in the world, legal abortion available for the last 18 years. And you’re telling me that poor blacks need more education so they’ll know to choose abortion?”

His mouth tightened in a thin line. “It’s the only answer to the crisis of the inner cities.”

“What if they don’t choose it? What’s next?” I asked. “Forced abortions? Don’t you see what you’re saying?”

Mercifully, other dinner guests reappeared. My friend turned to his now-cold cup of coffee. The conversation shifted to more genial topics.

Noble Motives, Terrible Deceptions

Once home, however, I could not sleep. Maybe it was all that coffee. But maybe it was the awful specter his words had conjured. For unwittingly, his best intentions intact, this friend had drifted far beyond his Judeo-Christian moorings or even his liberal social conscience. He had floated, without even realizing it, to the next logical port: aggressive social engineering.

After all, if abortion itself is no offense against an absolute moral law or God-given human dignity, then who is to say that it is wrong to use it to rid a culture of its woes? The Third Reich instituted a similar notion, lebensunwertes Leben—“life not worthy of life”—to evaluate and dispose of unhealthy newborns, the mentally ill, the handicapped, the aged, and entire ethnic groups, like Jews and gypsies.

Prochoicers hate the inflammatory comparison with Nazi Germany. But when their campaigns come to social planning, as they will if carried to their logical conclusion, they deserve it.

Many do not see the intrinsic illogic of their position. We can be thankful that many abortion advocates have opposed abortion for purposes of sex selection, as is illegally practiced in India. But here, at a pleasant suburban dining room table, a Christian brother had, with a passion surpassed only by his lack of discernment, argued for an equally shocking notion—abortion on the basis of economic condition, which would boil down to abortion by race selection.

Margaret Sanger, the late but still-revered founder of Planned Parenthood, toed a similar line, arguing for “more children from the fit, less from the unfit.” To that end in the 1930s and ’40s she attempted to launch the “Negro project,” employing “colored ministers” to promote birth control among America’s “undesirable” minority.

There’s another factor today that accelerates this debate. Some believe that the recession and the reality of our out-of-control budget deficit could spawn drastic tactics. What happens when welfare costs go up and government revenues go down? Tougher measures may well be advocated—like “public education” and pressure for abortion, perhaps, for welfare mothers.

Extremist scare talk? We hope so. But maybe not.

When an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Poverty and Norplant—Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass” drew protest, the paper later apologized. But the debate was in the open. A few months later, a Princeton professor argued for a policy “to prevent as yet unborn citizens from becoming homeless.”

At the other end of life there is a low-profile movement afoot to conserve medical resources. Passed last year, the Patient Self-Determination Act requires all health-care providers receiving government funds to ask patients if they have an advance-health-care directive (e.g., living will). While the act has some worthwhile consequences, one purpose is to save money: allowing a patient to die is a bargain compared to costly life-sustaining procedures.

This isn’t new. Living wills have been recommended in the past as the ideal vehicle for trimming the federal budget: In 1977, an internal government memo noted that “cost-saving from a nationwide push toward ‘Living Wills’ is likely to be enormous.”

Few will forget when, in 1984, former Colorado governor Richard Lamm reportedly told a group of senior citizens, “You’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way. Let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” The resulting storm of protest helped euthanasia enthusiasts restructure their tactics. As one commentor wrote, “The only way to save money and maintain elected office is to convince voters that they are getting, not giving up something.”

So if urging the ill or elderly to loose their feeble grip on medical resources is a way to save tax dollars, why not argue for abortion as a way to reduce our staggering inner-city welfare costs?

Frightening thoughts for a summer evening. But perhaps many evils begin as conversations at elegant dinner parties—even among Christians, who can, with the most noble motives, fall prey to the most terrible deceptions.

The first half of 1992 has been a tumultuous time for Christian book companies, highlighted by possible ownership changes at two of the largest publishers of evangelical titles, Word Inc. and the Zondervan Corporation.

Zondervan is currently mounting a management-led buyout attempt to gain independence from HarperCollins Publishers, which acquired the Grand Rapids, Michigan, company in 1988. Zondervan’s president, James Buick, told the Grand Rapids Press the buyout is meant to “return the direction and control of the company into the Christian community.”

Buick voiced no complaints about HarperCollins’s management, but said he is seeking a more secure future for Zondervan. HarperCollins is owned by newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch.

George Craig, president and CEO of HarperCollins, also was upbeat about the buyout attempt. He said HarperCollins does not plan to offer Zondervan for general sale.

By contrast, the decision to sell Word originated with its parent company, Capital Cities/ABC. “Because the core of Capital Cities/ABC is television, radio, newspapers, and magazines, most revenues are generated through advertising sales,” said Ann Gray, president of the Diversified Publishing Group of Capital Cities/ABC. “Word is not a strategic fit for the long term.”

ABC bought Word in 1984 and merged with Capital Cities in 1986. Word president Roland Lundy also offered no complaint about the parent company. He said he expects the sale to take two or three months.

In other publishing news:

• John Van Diest left and two months later returned to Multnomah Press as publisher and interim chief operating officer. Van Diest resigned in March, and Multnomah announced it had hired Jim Burkett, Jr., as publisher. However, Van Diest returned last month, and, according to a Multnomah representative, Burkett had been hired only as a consultant.

Michele Tennesen said 17 employees left during Burkett’s six-week tenure. While other Christian publishers showed interest in buying Multnomah in recent months, Multnomah School of the Bible president Joe Aldrich said the school has no plans to sell the publishing house.

• Baker Book House last month purchased the Fleming H. Revell Co., Chosen Books, and other imprints from Gleneida Publishing Group, owned by Guideposts Associates, Inc.

• David C. Cook Publishing has purchased Lion U.S.

• Moody Press has launched North-field Publishing, and NavPress has released two new titles on Piñon Press, both aimed at reaching “seekers”—non-Christians and nominal Christians hungry for practical, self-help books.

By Doug LeBlanc.

Debate over women in leadership forces para-church groups to rethink their unwritten policies.

Campus Crusade for Christ staff member Pamela Miller was in for a surprise when she arrived at a ministry Christmas conference in 1982. Unlike previous years, she was not assigned to lead a discussion group. The reason: Miller had been married earlier that year. “I assumed it was an oversight,” she says, “but the leadership responded as if they just didn’t know what to do with me, a married woman with no children.”

During her seven years with the ministry, Miller also grew disturbed by Crusade’s “wife days.” In her view, the weekly half-day off seemed “blatantly sexist.” And when she asked if she and her husband could alternate taking the time off, or share a half-day off every two weeks, the suggestions “were not taken seriously,” she says. “The attitude this policy promotes is that wives are dispensable, but husbands are not, and that wives are expected to do the housework on these days off.”

Miller’s experience is typical of the tightrope that ministries such as Campus Crusade, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), and the Navigators walk when dealing with sensitive “secondary” doctrinal issues. But the topic of women’s roles, which has sparked intense debate among evangelical denominations and other institutions, is one the nondenominational ministries find even harder to avoid.

All three campus groups have tried to maintain an official “no policy” approach. But insiders say that undeniable, unspoken policies exist. And in the past two years, all three have formally or informally re-examined their policies on women’s roles.

Politically Correct?

If Miller’s experience represents one side of the coin, David Green’s might be the other. For six years, Green successfully nurtured a regional InterVarsity ministry to 17 campuses in Pennsylvania. But in late April, he was fired.

Green says disagreement between him and his two immediate superiors over his “more conservative” views on the role of women in ministry, as well as the proper way to ensure ethnically diverse student groups, contributed greatly to his dismissal. His superiors say that while gender and ethnic policies were involved, the larger issue was Green’s insubordination to authority.

However, part of a mediated agreement between Green and his regional director (which was forged just before his firing) said that Green, who had an all-male staff of seven, must hire two women staff members by June 1994. The agreement also said Green must “select women and people of color to speak at area events, affirm female speakers at InterVarsity events, and attend area and regional events regardless of the speaker’s gender.”

Green’s analysis is frank: “I have experienced some difficulties that would be considered in the realm of politically correct issues.”

Bob Fryling, IVCF vice-president and director of campus ministries, explains such requirements by pointing to the fact that 56 percent of all college students are female. IVCF needs to reflect that, he says. “They are asking questions in terms of role models in terms of [the] place of women.”

Five of IVCF’s estimated 46 area directors are women; one of 13 regional directors is female. The organization’s 480 campus staff are encouraged to seek out and promote female leaders.

In fact, IVCF’s history indicates that women have always had freedom to minister, says Linda Doll, former director of InterVarsity Press and former IVCF staff member. “This … has been going on since the beginning of InterVarsity,” she says. While a minority of IVCF staff are, like Green, resisting a more solid, working policy that promotes women to all levels of leadership, some women involved with Navigators and Crusade say their groups operate with predominantly male leadership structures.

Currently, only 2 of Campus Crusade’s 164 campus directors are female; both oversee all-female colleges. This is despite the fact that Campus Crusade has 791 women compared to 660 men on its staff on U.S. campuses. (It allows a woman to serve as associate campus director, who answers to the male campus director.) Campus Crusade has no written policy regarding women in leadership, though its Family Ministry division teaches that men are to be “servant/leader[s]” and women “helper/homemaker[s].”

“We are not saying [women] can’t do anything, and we aren’t saying that they can do everything,” says Steve Sellers, director of Campus Crusade’s U.S. campus ministries. “We felt like trying to address the issue, and coming out with something totally definitive is a limitation, as opposed to a solution.”

Sellers says Campus Crusade does not discourage women from becoming campus directors. “We don’t have a lot of women clamoring to be campus directors, so it’s not that we are saying, ‘No, you can’t be.’ ”

But Karen Masters, who worked 12 years overseas with Crusade, says female staff members are not encouraged to aspire to such leadership. “I think a lot of women come in and they haven’t studied the issue, and so they just assume [they cannot be a campus director] and they don’t knock down the door.”

Authority Of Position

A recent restructuring of the Navigators organization has helped allow women to use their gifts more freely, some of its staff members say. The Navigators U.S. campus ministry division has 182 couples, 40 single men, and 25 single women serving on 130 campuses. Leadership now rests with a ten-member national collegiate leadership team (eight men and two women), says Bill Tell, associate director campus ministries. Because the Navigators started among military personnel, the ministry historically has been predisposed toward male leadership, he says. Under a new leadership model, however, women and men alike now serve according to their spiritual gifts and abilities, based on a biblical understanding of Christians working together in community, rather than a culture-dictated hierarchy. Still, there are limits to what women staff members can do.

“I think a woman can teach the Bible, and based on the Scriptures, they could say something like, ‘We should do this,’ ” Tell says. “But we would probably hesitate to say a women can say, ‘We will do this’ in terms of leadership over men.… So women can teach with the authority of the Scriptures but not necessarily with the authority of position.”

Becky Brodin, who has served about ten years with the Navigators in its community division (one of 13 ministry divisions, with campus ministry being another), still thinks the Navigators are “fairly male-dominated.… There are more restrictions for women on Navigator staff than there are opportunities,” she says. But she and another female Navigator staff member told CT they are encouraged that the ministry’s new structure, which removed a lot of midlevel leadership, has helped open new opportunities.

Vulnerable Position

The cautious way in which the campus ministries have approached the issue of women in leadership reflects a general dilemma that many nondenominational ministries encounter: They desire to promote strong, biblical teaching, while avoiding doctrinal positions more indicative of a denomination.

“Parachurch agencies are vulnerable in terms of taking a particular [doctrinal] stand,” says Joel Carpenter, program director for religion for the Pew Charitable Trusts and a historian of parachurch ministries. Because of their dependence on donations, they are “incredibly sensitive to their constituency.” To come down on one side or the other of controversial doctrinal issues is to risk losing support. “So they really try to take a mediating role if they can.”

That approach seems to satisfy many women in the campus ministries. Within Campus Crusade, even those women who express frustration with the unwritten policy praise the ministry’s overall work. And they acknowledge that more than one responsible, biblical interpretation exists concerning women’s roles.

Still, women in all three organizations say they would benefit from more precise statements concerning what women can and cannot do. Without a clear policy, women’s roles are sometimes left to the convictions of campus or regional directors, who may not have worked out a solid stance on the issue. Or women may face a succession of different directors and views.

In fact, Crusade and IVCF have considered creating policy statements in recent years. IVCF’s Fryling confirmed to CT that IVCF senior women leaders recently asked the top leadership to start developing a policy affirming a woman’s right to minister on equal ground with a man. He says that leaders are working on a paper outlining “our biblical reasons” for advancing gifted women into leadership.

IVCF area director Jeanette Yep says she expects that a policy statement will eventually evolve. “Some people in the fellowship would say we are leaning toward an interpretation of Scripture that allows women to participate in a full range of ministry,” she says.

Currently, Campus Crusade—like the Navigators—is initiating a massive restructuring plan, though it is not clear what effect that will have on women’s ministry roles.

One thing is clear, however: As the issue of women in ministry continues to fuel denominational debates, campus parachurch ministries will find it harder and harder to plot a middle road.

By Joe Maxwell.

Hostilities between Christians and Muslims escalated last month in northern Nigeria, where some 300 people were reportedly killed during inter-religious fighting. According to international press reports, several Christian churches were also destroyed in what is being characterized as some of the worst rioting in nearly a decade of tensions.

In the midst of the conflicts, some Christian leaders are pushing reconciliation efforts. However, according to one prominent Nigerian pastor, the prospects for peace and nonviolence are growing more distant. Nigerian Anglican Bishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon reports that Christians in the Muslim-dominated areas of his country are “starting to fight back with violence.” “More Christians are seeing Muslims as their enemies,” the bishop said during a brief visit to Washington, D.C., in May.

Nigeria’s long-standing religious tensions stem in large part from the demographic factors that divide the West African nation of some 118 million. Idowu-Fearon says population patterns have created “three countries in one”: a Muslim-dominated north, a religiously mixed middle belt, and a predominantly Christian south.

Idowu-Fearon serves in the northern Sokoto diocese, a region believed to be 93 percent Muslim. Most of the violent clashes have occurred in the north, where Christians frequently are denied education privileges, public preaching is forbidden, and churches are often targeted for destruction by radical Muslims.

Fighting Back

Idowu-Fearon believes a turning point in the conflicts occurred late in October last year when German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke attempted to stage a crusade in the Muslim-controlled city of Kano. As a Muslim protest erupted into a violent rampage, the bishop says Christians for the first time began to fight back.

“The Muslim attacks stopped as soon as Christians started defending themselves,” he says. However, after the Muslims regrouped, the violence escalated and spread to outlying areas, leaving about 2,000 people dead, according to estimates by Christian observers. In March, 15 people were reported killed in religious rioting sparked by a dispute over the use of a water reservoir.

The military government of Africa’s most populous nation has been slow in addressing the tensions. Officials have never updated their early estimate of eight dead and 34 injured in the October incident. At the United Nations Human Rights Commission hearings in February, Nigeria denied that religious freedom was a factor in the conflict.

Religious Rights

In light of the heightened tensions, religious leaders are uniting to call for increased efforts toward reconciliation and social reform. Idowu-Fearon serves on a special committee of Christians and Muslims appointed to study the situation. That committee has released a detailed report accusing the government of a less-than-satisfactory response to the religious crises.

The report calls for religious property rights and freedom of worship for religious groups “anywhere in the country.” It also advocates that government policy be disseminated to all religious groups, a move that might help clear up confusion about the jurisdiction of Islamic courts.

The 1989 Nigerian Constitution includes some provisions for strict Islamic law, or shari‘a, and the bishop claims many Nigerian Christians are being held subject to the Islamic courts, even in the middle region, which is nearly 50 percent Christian. The report, however, does not delve into fundamental legal questions of religious discrimination.

Nigeria must find a consensus on religious pluralism, says Idowu-Fearon, in order to survive as a state. “Nigeria is not an Islamic country, and it is not a Christian country,” he asserts. Nor is it a secular state, “because religion plays a very vital role in the life of our country.” Peace, he says, can only come when the genuine religious convictions of all Nigerians are respected.

By Randy Tift, News Network International.

Christians may sing the old hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth” with fervor, but they have shown considerably less enthusiasm over the years for maintaining that beauty, according to many Christian environmentalists. “Up until now, [evangelicals] have dealt largely with how the Christian life should be lived apart from an understanding of the Lord’s creation,” says Calvin DeWitt, director of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies in Michigan and professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin.

But DeWitt and other advocates for the environment are optimistic that such evangelical apathy may be fading. “There is a growing sense of concern and commitment [about the environment] spreading across the evangelical community,” agrees Roberta Hestenes, president of Eastern College. That growing concern has been evident on several fronts of the environmental movement. For example, earlier this month several evangelical delegations joined representatives from around the world to discuss environmental problems at the United Nations-sponsored Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Last month several evangelicals were among a group of religious leaders and scientists that issued an appeal for united action to protect the global environment. “We are people of faith and science who, for centuries often have traveled different roads,” the declaration said. “Our two ancient, sometimes antagonistic traditions now reach out to one another in a common endeavor to preserve the home we share.”

Those who signed the declaration included the nation’s top scientists and representatives from Catholic, Jewish, and mainline Protestant organizations. Evangelical signatories included DeWitt, Hestenes, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, and Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action. The declaration was issued after two days of meetings on Capitol Hill called by U.S. Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), with Sen. Tim Wirth (D-Colo.), John Chafee (R-R.I.), and James Jeffords (R-Ver.).

Land noted that the gathering included strong representation from New Age and other “ecotheological” philosophies. But, he said, that is all the more reason for evangelicals to be involved with environmental issues.

In fact, Land and Sider did influence the outcome of the declaration: They convinced the drafters to drop a phrase about “the planet, on which all life depends.” (“As evangelicals, we believe all life depends on God,” Land said.) They also obtained clarification for the record that a statement affirming the rights of indigenous peoples was not meant as a criticism of missionary activity.

Yet another aspect of environmental concern was explored earlier in May when World Vision convened a meeting of 150 of the organization’s donors and special guests in Washington. Through a series of presentations, slide shows, and video clips, participants were given detailed accounts of the extent of environmental deterioration and what that means for the poor, particularly in Third World areas. “[World Vision] can no longer do development work without sitting down and discussing the environmental implications,” said Tom Getman of the group’s Washington office.

Among the speakers was space scientist astronomer Carl Sagan, who called for an “uncommon marriage between science and religion” to help solve the environmental crisis. Acknowledging his own lack of belief in a Creator, Sagan asserted, “It is possible to have very different views about such items as the origin of the world and still to share a deep, even a profound concern for the well-being of that world.”

World Vision president Bob Seiple conceded that Sagan’s participation was controversial among some World Vision supporters, but he defended it by saying he wanted the group to hear from “the best and the brightest” on this issue. “I do think that the Christian faith should be viable enough that you can enter dialogue with anybody in the room.”

Other thorny issues were raised by former Interior Secretary Donald Hodel, who cautioned against inflicting damage to the current global economy in the name of preventing future environmental problems. “We should recognize that it is our industriousness and productivity which permit us to help the poor of the world,” he said.

Seiple said he was pleased with the forum, which World Vision paid for with the help of an anonymous donor. World Vision’s contribution, Seiple said, “is to make sure that people see human beings in this arena of environmentally induced poverty, and to challenge the Christian community to do something about it as we look at a holistic view of the gospel.”