The Case Of The Vanishing Victim

As any faithful reader of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series knows, most successful police work is based not on spectacular new scientific devices nor on brilliant flashes of insight but on a patient, painstaking process of going from door to door, making countless inquiries, asking all sorts of questions, gathering seemingly irrelevant details, until finally the background of the crime becomes clear to the investigator and he recognizes whodunit and why.

Unfortunately, the way crime has developed in the United States, few police departments can afford that kind of patient attention to the details of every crime. And the various scientific devices that we have developed, which were such a success at the 1974 World Police Fair in Moscow, are much more helpful for gathering personal conversations of newspaper and television reporters than for finding out who has committed crimes. (The problem, you see, is that one has to know the identity of the person in order to hook him or his surroundings up to the sophisticated devices. But if one knows the identity of the criminal, one needn’t investigate him with sophisticated devices.) According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (the one business indicator that looks consistently “better” every year), crime continues to flourish. But finances are forcing cities to cut their police forces. Mayor Became of New York City has calculated the increased time it will take for police to get to scenes of crimes for every million dollars in extra money the city doesn’t get from banks or the federal government. (Protection racket? Surely not.)

There seems to be one promising way to deal with the rising crime statistics. Legislators and criminologists have hit on the concept of “decriminalization.” If fewer types of action were declared crimes by laws, there would obviously be fewer crimes. The first targets for “decriminalization” are the offenses that a person commits supposedly against himself. Marijuana use, for example, is a “victimless crime,” in the eyes of some, and so would drunkenness be, as long as one isn’t too disorderly at the same time.

However, the limit of crimes that can properly be called “victimless” is rapidly being reached. Therefore a bold new step is called for: “devictimization.” If we can declare that many whom we have considered “victims” are not in fact such, then many more crimes can be considered “victimless,” hence “decriminalized,” and our crime statistics will drop rapidly. We might begin with murder, inasmuch as the “victim,” being already dead, need no longer concern us. If nothing else works, devictimization is one sure way to bring down the crime figures (and perhaps reduce population pressures as well).

Happy Renewer

Your May 23 issue had so many good articles in it that you made me very happy that I had renewed my subscription.

Dave Llewellyn’s excellent article on the death penalty reminded me of the discussion of the institution of slavery as practiced in the Bible by Angelina Grimke in her “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South.” (By coincidence Miss Grimke was mentioned in the Daytons’ article on women preachers.) Like Miss Grimke, Llewellyn has pointed out that many Christians often claim biblical support for an institution or a practice … without thoroughly examining (or being willing to practice) all that the Bible has to say on the subject.

Minneapolis, Minn.

Comment Contrast

I mentally composed several letters in rebuttal to Ruth Graham’s views on women’s ordination (Others Say …, June 6). And then I realized that the contrast between Virginia Mollenkott’s and Letha Scanzoni’s scholarly, thoughtful comments and Mrs. Graham’s unbelievably naïve remarks had effectively and already said it all!

La Jolla, Calif.

Misquote

In the June 6 news story, “United Presbyterians: A Clash of Polity and Doctrine,” I was quoted by James Boice. Let me say first that I have not talked to Mr. Boice. Any quote attributed to me came to him second-hand at best, and this one is not accurate. Second, I am not chairman of The Covenant Fellowship. While I held this position in the past, and am presently on the board of this organization, the present leader is Dr. M. Douglas Harper, Jr., of Houston, Texas. Third, I did not say I intended to have “my group” write an open letter to the “Southern churches” to discuss the issues. The Covenant Fellowship has a publication, The Open Letter, which goes to many Southern Presbyterians (PCUS).… Fourth, I did not say that the action of the UP Church was “an offense to decency,” nor did I say it “might kill the union plan.”

I did say that I thought it ironic that a minister in the United Presbyterian Church could disbelieve the virgin birth, bodily resurrection, vicarious atonement, and personal return of Jesus Christ—along with other cardinal doctrines—and be accepted, while at the same time he could be refused acceptance because of a conscientiously held view that the Bible does not teach the ordination of women. I did say that the action of the United Presbyterian Assembly will make it much more difficult for the plan of union with the PCUS to pass.

The Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians

St. Louis, Mo.

Additional Editions

Thanks for the mention of my book, I Once Spoke In Tongues, in Donald Tinder’s survey (“The Holy Spirit: From Pentecost to Present,” May 9). I always find it surprising when someone interprets my book in the same way that I do. Just a note of information: Forum House, the hardback publisher, ceased operation as of September, 1974. Also, Pyramid Books is coming out with a mass paperback in August, and the Spanish Evangelical Literature Fellowship is publishing a Spanish-language edition.

Oklahoma City, Okla.

On The Contrary

C. Peter Wagner and some Fuller Seminary colleagues to the contrary (Eutychus and His Kin, May 9), I remain unpersuaded that one should correlate Scripture with some ideology—Marxist or otherwise—in the interest of relevance. To be sure, no interpreter lacks assumptions, but the Bible itself supplies the presuppositions on which it is properly understood. Scripture speaks clearly enough on the burning issue of social justice without our having to socio-politicize all it says.

Arlington, Va.

ERRATA

The name of the new president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada is Charles Seidenspinner, not Bidenstinner as we said in News, “Optimism in Canada,” June 6 issue.

Good Preaching, Good Prose

What can be said from a layman’s viewpoint on the topic “the sermon as art form”? There are, obviously, certain things that would be patently inappropriate—such things as how to construct a sermon, or what the particular task of the preacher is. Nor is it entirely fitting for laymen to inform the clergy what we wish to hear. That question is, in a sense, already settled for us all, clergy and laity alike: it is the Word of God (as distinguished from mere high thoughts, noble sentiments, or worthy maxims) that is the subject of preaching.

This last observation may open onto the path by which the layman may reflect on the topic. The Word of God is the subject of preaching, and its proclamation is the task of preaching. There is nothing else to be done. That’s simple enough. But of course that is the threshold to the edifice. How do preachers proclaim it? How do they go about their task? Where shall they find their cues? From St. Peter? Augustine? Dominic? Decolampadius? Simeon? Wesley? Spurgeon? Phillips Brooks? Fosdick? Where?

The tradition of preaching in the Church is, to say the least, an ancient and noble one. It has been no random, off-the-cuff activity—no question of one Christian’s merely “sharing” spontaneously some thoughts that the Lord has been speaking to him about lately. Sharing is, of course, a legitimate sort of thing in its place, as a snack of potato chips is in its place; but we do not want the chef in the palace serving up potato chips when we come for roast lamb. Similarly, the tradition has been that preaching, like the administration of the sacraments, is an activity distinct from other worthy activities in the Church, and is one to which sober attention and preparation are to be given. It has never been a question of a person’s merely keeping himself open to the immediate promptings of the Holy Ghost. That may be what occurs in the ministry of prophecy in the Church. But the act of preaching has, from the earliest epoch of the Church, been seen as one that asked sustained and painstaking preparation.

No one sector of Christendom has a corner on the activity of preaching. All traditions—Latin, Orthodox, Reformed, Anabaptist—would claim to take their cues from apostolic precedent, of course. But that does not mean that all sermons in all churches have been modeled directly on Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, or Paul’s address on Mars Hill. The notion at work in the art of preaching has been always to take the Scripture and, by shaping and articulating it by means of rhetoric (logic, exemplum, expositio, peroratio, and all the other tools of the orator), to deliver it to the faithful as truthfully, clearly, and forcefully as possible, the end being the nourishing and building up of the Body of Christ.

On a hasty view, it might appear that all this craft—this preparing and shaping and elaborating of things—will somehow quash the vital influence of the Holy Ghost. It is a notion perennially appealing to the zealous religious imagination that all forms of structuring and institutionalizing and pre-casting are somehow inimical to the work of the Holy Ghost, who operates (on this view) via the spontaneous, the ebullient, and the random.

But this opinion, appealing as it is, would not seem to have quite come to terms with the obvious. It is by no means usual for God to disclose himself to us in the whirlwind, or in the chariots of fire, or in the angelic trump, or even in visions and ecstatic voices. Effective as these methods are, the oddity is that ordinarily that disclosure—the disclosure of the Ultimate, of the Unconditioned, if you will—comes to us in the commonplace: in Scripture, in circumstances, in advice and counseling from pastors and other Christians. Our very progress in holiness itself, certainly an activity of the Holy Ghost, is a thing we “work at.” The saints are people who have cultivated habits of holiness.

By the same token, the Church has understood this very central activity, the business of preaching, to be so important that it is not to be left to impulses or to private and immediate revelations. The pastors of the flock, from the apostles on down, have recognized that the preacher must do his homework: he has to know what the Bible says, for a start, and that takes lots of plodding work. It’s much more than merely dabbing at isolated and exciting texts. The preacher has to learn to think, and to speak (and Balaam’s ass, to whom be praise, is not the model), and to organize, and to vivify and articulate the Divine Word in terms that people can understand.

To vivify and articulate. That, doubtless, is the point at which we may speak of the sermon as “art form.” Not art form in the sense of mere objet d’art—a little gorgeous and brittle thing held up for our delectation. Rather, art form in the sense of something carefully constructed so that there is clarity (instead of blur) and force (instead of limpness). There are plenty of analogies from the merely human realm, if we doubt the validity of carefully constructing things. A Mozart symphony is carefully put together, with all the resources that Mozart could muster, and it is better than any random tootling and improvising we can come up with spontaneously. A Rembrandt “Holy Family” is painstakingly constructed, and the effect of clarity and force is achieved far better this way than by my (untrained and ad hoc) sketch of the same subject. Again, a spontaneous testimony from some blundering Christian is a worthy thing, and has its place in the life of the Body; but it is not what the faithful gather to hear when they come for the ministry of the Word.

All sorts of expository and persuasive arts have been marshalled by the preachers in the Church down through the centuries. The Fathers were brilliant and powerful rhetoricians: Augustine and St. John Chrysostom (“Golden-mouth”) are formidable names. The preachers of medieval Europe got to using highly histrionic techniques, some of them becoming virtual one-man dramatic troupes as they enacted for the people the biblical stories. In the Renaissance, with the general intellectual return to Ciceronian categories for all of public discourse, the great preachers in England were men whose sermons show the effects of years of drilling in the art of rhetoric. And the tradition of orthodox preaching in England and America, on through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continued to be one of—of fervor, yes; and of fidelity to Scriptures, yes; but also of eloquence.

But it was eloquence in the service of truth, never for its own sake. And Christian imagination would suppose that this eloquence (that is, this capacity to shape ordinary speech into something beautiful and forceful) is a gift from God, as are all capacities (Mozart’s, Milton’s, the cook’s, the counselor’s, the hostess’s).

Not all preaching is “art,” in the sense of eloquence. But, like any other activity in the Church, or in ordinary human life for that matter, if it is worth doing at all, it is worth working at; and, as we test our cooking, say, against some ultimate cordon bleu standard, or our tunes by some Mozartian criterion, so we may look to the practitioners of the art of preaching as worthy models of this activity.

Of ten thousand examples of preaching that exhibit the sermon as “art form” to us, here is one that, besides speaking clearly and forcefully to us of something in Scripture, has, taken its place in the annals of art. It is from a sermon of John Donne, the seventeenth-century dean of St. Paul’s cathedral in London, and you can find it in any anthology of English prose. It is about damnation:

When God, who is all blessing, hath learned to curse us, and, being of himself spread as an universal honeycomb over all, takes an impression, a tincture, an infusion, of gall from us, what extraction of wormwood can be so bitter, what exaltation of fire can be so raging, what multiplying of talents can be so heavy, what stiffness of destiny can be so inevitable, what confection of gnawing worms, of gnashing teeth, of howling cries, of scalding brimstone, of palpable darkness can be so, so insupportable, so inexpressible, so unimaginable as the curse and malediction of God [Sermon xxvi, folio of 1649; in Witherspoon, A.M., and Warnke, F. J., Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, 1963, p. 105].

That is good prose, on anybody’s accounting. Of course, it is three hundred and fifty years out of date; and of course, not all preachers will choose such daunting imagery and syntax! But it is a case in point, from its own era, of the sort of thing that does us good when we encounter it: good preaching that is also good prose. The sermon, in other words, as an art form.

THOMAS HOWARD¹Thomas Howard is associate professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.

To Grapple With Pain

Gospel Films has released two superior thirty-minute color films produced by Mel White and available for rent at $25 each. Grappling with suffering in the Christian experience, both films portray true stories of families confronted with hard circumstances.

In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a first-person account of the capture and imprisonment of Howard Rutledge during the Viet Nam war. During the interminable days of solitary confinement, Howard finds himself groping to recall Bible verses learned in his childhood but long since forgotten. His hitherto nominal Christian faith grows rapidly, tested by torture, illness, and lonely years of waiting.

From Howard the camera jumps to Phyllis, his wife, who relates that the family back home is being tested in a different way. Not knowing whether her husband is dead or alive, Phyllis follows her children to church, attracted by the warmth and compassion of local believers.

The pastor prays regularly for Howard from the pulpit and encourages the congregation to continue interceding throughout the week. During this time, John Rutledge, the fifteen-year-old son, is paralyzed in a freak diving accident and relegated to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

After seven years of praying and alternately doubting and trusting, the Rutledge family is joyfully reunited. The first Sunday after his release Howard publicly affirms his faith at the altar of his church. Exuberantly the pastor announces, “We knew God would answer our prayers!” This raises the question: Is God not answering prayers in the case of thousands of POWs who have not returned?

In both this film and the second, Though I Walk Through the Valley, the camera moves from character to character drawing from each a highly personal reaction to suffering. This technique lends texture to the thematic fabric as no two characters respond to their suffering in the same way.

Though I Walk Through the Valley will doubtless elicit ambivalent reactions. The viewer is at once horrified and humbled as the brazen camera intrudes on the intensely private suffering of a family watching the husband and father die of cancer.

This film came about when producer Mel White watched four close relatives and friends die in quick succession. In no way prepared for the shock, he determined to film a Christian family confronting death with hope and realism. In this way he hoped to help Christians across the nation prepare for death with greater confidence and understanding.

After six years, he found the Brouwer family, who agreed to let film crews record their suffering over the last six months of Tony Brouwer’s life. At the time of the filming, Tony Brouwer was chairman of the economics department at Calvin College. Throughout the entire story, he is a bastion of hope and down-to-earth realism. From him, the wife and two articulate daughters draw strength, though the daughters in their reactions differ markedly from their parents and from each other.

Filmed at the shore, in the home, at the hospital, and at the cemetery, Though I Walk Through the Valley barely escapes morbidity in some scenes, though as a whole it is infused with life and hope.

The viewer is constantly amazed at the willing vulnerability of the family members to the camera’s harsh eye. The film makes one wonder if perhaps death along with birth and sex should be protected from the ubiquitous lens. And is it possible to prepare for death by viewing the experience of others, or does a film of this nature encourage a type of sanctified voyeurism whereby one attempts to alleviate his own sufferings though a vicarious experience?

This film would best be screened to a small, mature audience where it can be properly introduced and followed with discussion.

CAROL PRESTER MCFADDEN²Carol Prester McFadden is a consultant and free-lance writer living in Arlington, Virginia.

Short-term versus career, testing versus “letting the Lord lead,” missionary versus national, professional missionary versus self-supporting witnesses. How we recruit and use our human resources in missions today presents a complex picture.

While there is increasing cooperation in many areas, there is still fragmentation and duplication in much of what the evangelical churches are trying to do in missions. On the whole, however, the progressive spirit and innovation in many quarters give us a positive picture.

Missions are trying to come to grip with the world of Alvin Toffler—the world of transience and changing career structures. In addition to the cultural and moral revolution in North American society, the missions executive is faced with rapidly changing structures in the Church around the world: the emerging national church and its leadership role in planning, strategy, and implementation; the relation between missionaries and national leaders on the field; the changing composition of the missionary job market as generalists and a rural orientation give way to specialists and the reality of universal urbanism; the shift of money from denominational and more traditional organizations to new agencies, often independent in purpose and style.

How long the prospective candidate is going to serve is a question that is shaking the foundations of missions recruitment and management. The “new job every few years” mentality in North America flies directly in the face of the “commit your life to South America” view that was so typical of the past in missions. Short-term missionaries now take many forms. There is the student who goes for the summer, the professional who goes for a specific project, the person who signs a contract for two years for a certain field. A number of evangelical boards have moved to arrangements where missionaries cannot “sign on” for more than one term at a time—say, four or five years. At the end of each term, their performance is up for review. In some cases the nationals with whom the missionary work may be asked to evaluate the missionary: do the national leaders want him or her back? Sounds radical to some, but the approach, in various forms, is being used in a number of quarters.

For many missions executives the problem of short-term workers can be summed up by this comment: “Many short-term people on the mission field, particularly the students, are just observers who hopefully have a positive experience. The other kind of short-term person is the specialist—the individual who can immediately make a contribution whether he knows the language or culture or not.”

Administrative structures for short-term service are a headache. Field personnel are often called off their normal assignments to supervise the short-termer who needs help. Most agree that this is bad, and it has soured many field personnel on the short-term idea. Some agencies have provided detailed orientation before students go out for a summer or other short-term period. Others have sent a supervisor with the group—someone who already knows the country and who can provide liaison with existing missionaries.

Despite the problems, short-term service is a valuable source of career missionaries. Having seen the field, taken part in the real thing, many short-termers return for longer assignments. Programs like Operation Mobilization, Youth With A Mission, and Practical Missionary Training (a division of Central American Mission) are seen by some candidate secretaries as practical, field-related orientation and screening processes.

Where the candidates come from presents another rapidly changing picture. Many major evangelical mission groups are decreasing their effort on Christian liberal arts campuses, choosing to focus instead on the Bible institutes. According to one candidate secretary, “The Bible institute student is more likely to be prepared for our kind of mission.” Quite often this means “more likely to fit into the traditional missions administrative structures—at home and on the field.”

It is generally conceded that many of the well-known Christian liberal arts schools no longer emphasize missions as they used to. Some say it is a “crisis in identity” for the Christian liberal arts schools as they try desperately to recruit students and stay solvent. Others see it as simply an acknowledgement that the committed Christian will be a “missionary” wherever he is, in whatever job he takes.

At times there is consternation among prospective candidates when they find that opportunities loudly discussed by some mission boards are, in fact, “paper” jobs. The “give us 400 men and we’ll win Asia for Christ” often rapidly fades when administrators are asked, “When do you want 400?” The simple truth is that, typically, the administrative structures, both on the field and in North America, are not geared up for major expansion. Add the dilemma of funding and the potential candidates may see a pretty bleak picture.

Increasingly, laymen are quitting their jobs or retiring early and investigating overseas Christian service. Often these people are self-supporting and can make a contribution quickly since they often have a specialized technical background. But these people too present a problem for the mission board—a willingness to serve but little cross-cultural experience and rarely a usable foreign language.

Major youth gatherings like Inter-Varsity’s Urbana student missionary conference and Explo have always been seen as prime recruiting ground. It is felt that Urbana has been one of the major sources of professional missionaries, and, having heard the “I got my vision of the world at Urbana—years ago” many times around the world, one has to believe it. Inter-Varsity hopes to follow the actual action taken by students from Urbana ’76—following them for three to six years. This may be the first major effort at detailed research on what effect these large conferences really have.

Increasingly the missions agencies are trying to do a better job in evaluating the incoming missionary candidate. In many, testing of aptitude and personality traits is standard procedure. However, testing is highly controversial; some think it conflicts with the traditional position that “the call of God” is the main standard for acceptance. The Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (EFMA/IFMA, comprising about 40 per cent of all North America’s missionaries and a large share of those typically classed as “evangelical”) have begun a joint program to develop testing and evaluation techniques—for use both before the candidate goes to the field and for “on the job” evaluation. Started two years ago, under the direction of Dr. Ted Ward of Michigan State University and Sam Rowen of Missionary Internship, the project will not conclude for several years.

Intercristo, an international Christian communications group, has developed its own Vocational Interest Questionnaire in cooperation with consultants from Seattle Pacific College and the University of Washington. It is designed to help a Christian student see himself in light of specific Christian types of vocations.

Many feel that basic theological issues often crop up when you question recruitment techniques. Many missions agencies take the position that the candidate has to come to them, the mission—that the mission cannot aggressively “recruit” people. Again, it is the question, “Has this person been ‘called’ to our mission, our field? Or is he just ‘shopping’ the Christian service market?” Yet indications are that the agencies that are expanding most rapidly, such as Wycliffe and Campus Crusade, do aggressively go after people—particularly after there has been an initial contact.

The “non-professional” missionary, working for Shell Oil, UNESCO, the U.S. military, or some other secular organization, is often seen as an outsider—not a real part of the true missionary picture. Yet, for every missionary overseas from the United States today, it is estimated there are 105 other Americans serving in these self-supporting positions. In some countries the self-supporting person moves in a sphere that is completely different from that of the professional missionary. He can often influence the indigenous power structures in ways the traditional missionary cannot. Further, these people are able to provide contacts and help badly needed by their fellow Christians, the professional missionaries. And, as has been said, the best thing is that “this guy doesn’t have to raise his support!”

But the fact remains: when did you last hear from the pulpit, “Let’s pray for Jack Marshall, our missionary with Monsanto Chemical in Belgium”? Often, in this environment, the non-professional goes out with high hopes for Christian service in his key position only to become disillusioned as he finds himself ineffective in witness. Some have become spiritual derelicts in the often jet-set, amoral international communities overseas.

While the multi-national company may be seen as a threat by some governments, it obviously provides a major new frontier for church missionary strategy.

In Seeing the Task Graphically, Ralph Winter pulls the picture into focus. There are only 45,000–50,000 missionaries to reach 3.8 billion people. Among these 3.8 billion are some 2.4 billion “unreached” in Asia and Africa. Of this 2.4 billion, nearly two billion have fewer than 2,000 missionaries working among them! To give the same effort to these nearly two billion as we have to other groups we would need 212,000 new missionaries—100 times more than we are now sending! Staggering implications? Indeed!

To complete the Great Commission of our Lord, we badly need a radically new, unified strategy—a comprehensive view of how we are to recruit and use the human resources God has given us. Here are some elements that seem essential.

First, we must work with the existing structures—enlarging, encouraging, and improving where possible. New administrative procedures are needed, as is an infusion of forward-looking leadership—men and women of great faith and vision. But present structures are not enough.

Second, we must radically reshape our views on what constitutes Christian service. Like the professional missionary, the Christian who is a Shell Oil worker overseas needs orientation, prayer support, and local in-country Christian contact to make him effective. Every one of the positions held by the 2.5 million Americans overseas needs to be seen as a target for infiltration.

Third, we need to encourage new agencies that will meet the specialized needs and opportunities present. Proliferation without duplication is what is needed. I recently met a man who asked, “When did you last think of the men at sea in the merchant marine who are without Christ?” I had to admit that I had never thought of them—but thank God that man had. This is an example of the kind of proliferation we need—new agencies to meet new needs.

Fourth, we need to help develop “sending” and missionary counterparts throughout the national churches around the world. Existing national ministries must be encouraged and strengthened with our vast financial and technical resources. Further, foreign Christian structures of value to North America must be implemented here; pollination should work both ways in the Church.

Finally, we must call for sacrifice and a new awareness of God’s competence at all levels. We must realize that there are no “supermen” in God’s economy, and that the same level of radical, Spirit-born dedication and faith is needed in the Church in the United States as is needed for “missionary” service overseas. Plainly, if we were recruiting more of those J. B. Phillips calls “God’s picked representatives of the new humanity,” the Church at home as well as “missions” abroad would be different.

THE LEADER

He comes The Leader with much applause

and turning of heads and scraping

and bring out the candles and celebrity damask.

(Color the carpet red,

the ride first class,

the bills paid.

Color His face smiley in the morning papers.)

For He’s here our great our only

our venerated Christian VIP!

So spread the banquet rich and pungent

and politely munch and listen

to His poised and perpendicular words

on world poverty the whole man

healing helping loving feeding

(please pass the shrimp cocktail).

Render to Him His due acclamation.

And meanwhile gently ignore the other—

the servant the sufferer the lowly lamb

watching in sorrow from behind

the potted geraniums.

NANCY THOMAS

Lord,” Jojo began, “we thank you so much for sending Ron and Linda to us …

While the bamboo trees creaked like doors on rusty hinges, nineteen Filipinos and three foreigners sat around a large open shed, praying. Tonight we were concentrating on one another’s needs. “… for their careful Bible teaching. Their beautiful personal lives. Their warm home. Their enthusiasm and energy in serving you.” Ron and Linda and I were the only foreigners on the staff. “And now, Lord,” Jojo continued, “we beg you to deliver them from tensions …”

I was a little surprised. Tension? In their capable, efficient ministry? Well, yes, I suppose I had seen them tense, when they were weak from hepatitis, tired of wading around dead rats floating through the flooded market, charged full of adrenalin for a dozen meetings crammed into the week ahead and then let down when people forgot to show up for a crucial planning session. Yes, maybe they could relax a little more.

A gecko swiveled down the roofbeam. The prayers murmured on. Then I heard Arturo praying for me.

“… and, our Father, we ask you to deliver her from tension …”

Tension—again! What was this all about? Were we foreigners so much more tense than everybody else?

As a matter of fact—yes. We liked efficiency. So sometimes we got uptight about lagging schedules, while the Filipinos adjusted calmly to a land where natural or political typhoons could demolish any system. As a result, peace characterized pagan Filipinos more than it did many of us missionaries.

This was rather discouraging. Hadn’t we been sent out to teach them a better life? And now we were discovering that here the recipients of our generosity were superior to us. People on the mission field were in some ways more Christ-like than the missionaries.

What an unamerican discovery. After all, don’t we assume (maybe unconsciously) that our culture is superior? We led the struggle toward a democratic form of government. We pioneered in science and technology. We Westerners gave modern medicine to the rest of the world.

And all these great undertakings have been enriched by our Christian heritage. Our democracy began with the belief that “all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Science and technology blossomed in Europe because men believed this world was the creation of an orderly God. Modern health care and education spread to isolated cultures through Western Christians. Doesn’t all this give us some right to see our culture as the best?

This problem of attitude isn’t limited to overseas missionaries. Americans at home face it, too. White Americans may face it when they find their children adopting the speech patterns of their black schoolmates, or when they think that “incompetent” minorities are getting hired ahead of whites. Parents face it when they discover that their children live in a different world, with different tastes, interests, values. Hard-working, traditional church members face it when they encounter seemingly indolent counter-culture Jesus people. In these and similar situations we confront the question: “What does God think about different cultures? Isn’t there really one best life-style if we follow the Bible?”

Certainly Christianity changes culture. It was a missionary, David Livingstone, who first aroused Englishmen against slavery, for example. It was a Christian, William Wilberforce, who organized a Christian lobby that led to the abolition of slavery in England. It was “evangelical public opinion, working through the English delegate to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, [that] was able to bring about the outlawing of the slave trade by most European states,” according to historian Earl Cairns. In America, Christian abolitionists helped bring an end to slavery.

But, even with the good points brought about in part by the influence of Christian teaching, has Western culture “arrived” at a point where it can look down on cultures that lack a Christian heritage?

The superiority of Western culture was hardly apparent to Africans in the holds of slave ships. Or to the Australian aborigines for whom white settlers scattered poisoned meat around. Or to the Tasmanians, against whom the whites enjoyed regular open hunting seasons. (Nothing is apparent to the Tasmanians now: they are extinct.) The West’s superiority was not evident when Europeans fought a war to introduce opium to China, while China’s pagan rulers fought to keep it out. And it has hardly been evident to the American Indians. Today in all Native American Studies courses at the University of California Berkeley campus, students are taught this description:

The white man is a colonizer who early developed an advanced technology; he is an exploiter of human and natural resources; he has destroyed almost every alien culture he has come in contact with; and he has imposed an iron rule on the remnant of these cultures through his social, political, economic, and religious attitudes.

Right now such things as pollution, inflation, ghettos, rampant crime, U. S. intrigues in foreign countries and the still fresh memories of Watergate make it hard for us to call our culture superior.

On the other hand, some cultures with little Christian heritage do seem outstanding in some areas. When I looked around at my Filipino neighbors, for example, I saw strong families. Warm hospitality. Lots of time lavished on children. Enduring loyalties. The ability to live graciously on little money. A heritage of economic freedom for women. Creativity in music. Sauces that deliciously extended a little meat to many people. A delight in sharing. Skill in the art of relaxation. Lithe, limber bodies. The ability to enjoy being with a large number of people continuously.

Since every good gift is from above and since all wisdom and knowledge come from Jesus Christ, these beautiful qualities of Philippine culture must be gifts of God. It seems that, just as our Creator delights in a vast variety of colors and smells, just as he has brought millions of unique personalities into being, so he has ordained an amazingly wide spectrum of cultures. He has programmed into man a capacity for cultural variation that enables us to explore our potential in all its complexity, to increase the richness of His world.

The early Christians accepted different cultures. When they preached to Jews, their framework was the law of Moses and the prophets. But when their audience was pagan, they dropped that emphasis and talked instead about how God provides for our physical and spiritual needs, and how God is stronger than idols. Peter learned to accept all peoples, including their food that was repulsive to him. Paul learned to be “all things to all men.” Timothy was circumcised; Titus wasn’t. Both were Paul’s key men. The Epistles show that churches from different cultural backgrounds had different kinds of problems. So when the mother church in Jerusalem set standards, she decided not to ask new Christians in other cultures to conform to her ways, since there was “no difference between us and them” (Acts 15:9).

But in spite of biblical examples, we white American Christians have lagged behind in acknowledging that different life-styles may be equally acceptable to God. We don’t consider ourselves prejudiced. But in fact, we often don’t even recognize the existence of other life-styles until forced to—until dozens of blacks or Jews or Chicanos confront us in the neighborhood or school, or until an overseas trip brings us into contact with incomprehensibly backward natives. We pride ourselves on having Chinese or black or other “ethnic” friends—so long as they’ve adapted to our white American culture. It’s groovy to have friends whose ethnicity extends just far enough to be interesting, to give us a chance to try unusual dishes and exotic music. But if ethnicity extends much further—to different ambitions, political goals, moral values, family patterns, spending habits, language—how many of us can maintain empathy? People who are that different confuse us. So we tend to use them when we need them but otherwise leave them alone. They function as a part of our environment rather than as fellow human beings.

For example, a Polish sociologist who studied white farmers in the Pacific Northwest found that they tended to think of the main categories of life as (1) people, (2) machinery and other useful things, and (3) scenery. And this sociologist discovered that many farmers unconsciously classed Indians as “scenery” and Chicano migrant laborers as “useful things.” Are we much different?

Recently I did some research on what kinds of stories magazines carry about American Indians. I found that most stories focused on either exotic traits or poverty. When I interviewed Indians about this, they answered vehemently, “Why do magazines always write about us like we’re all drunks? Why do they always say we’re poor?” They have found that to be only the object of an anti-poverty campaign is degrading. After all, people aren’t just problems. Even amid squalor and stabbings, there are family warmth and children’s games and gaiety and dancing and loving sacrifice. The needy still have some pride.

But we white Americans can’t easily envision poor people’s having a valid way of life. To be poor is wrong. It indicates failure. So when we encounter other ethnic groups (who are often poorer), we see mostly their economic problems or a few stereotype traits, rather than their cultural richness. We may even magnify their problems by ignoring their cultures’ redeeming features.

What a loss! Learning to accept people of another ethnic group may be somewhat scary. But it is also invigorating. It adds freshness (and who doesn’t get stale sometimes?). In fact, our ethnic strengths can be mutually complementary. Maybe that’s the way God intended it. The anthropologist Eugene Nida has suggested that even churches from different cultures may balance each other.

A friend of mine spent a summer in the Philippines, sharing his American Christian strengths. In return, Filipino Christians shared theirs. He became newly aware of this on the way home, when, passing through Hawaii, he saw a girl in a bikini and wanted to laugh. He suddenly realized how Philippine Christian girls had taught him the loveliness of modesty.

Have you ever thought about how the ethnic distinctives of black or Chicano Christians might enrich you?

Finally, what kind of reports do we expect from our missionaries? Exotic thrillers? Accounts of terrible need? Not long ago I read an article in a major Christian magazine about a proud African tribe who kill lions with only a spear, who compose poetry, and who have developed complex socio-economic patterns. But none of this was mentioned in the article. Only their educational and medical backwardness and the eternal mud and dust of their environment appeared. Presumably this was what the American Christian audience wanted to read about missions. But what we should be hearing about is the young church in action—people with a setting as complex as ours, with a heritage as cherished as our own, and with ordinary human problems and victories.

Foreign students find Americans remarkably ignorant of what’s happening in the rest of the world. But Christians should be different. Our missionary concern should have stimulated us to seek not emotional highs but solid contextual information about how our brothers live. For Christians, currency devaluations, revolutions, earthquakes, and talks with Peking should mean something special because of the way these things will affect the brothers we have learned enough about to empathize with. And, as charity begins at home, when did you last give an informed thought to Christ’s Body among the American Indians?

Yes, praise God for our culture. Praise God for our lovely, big, clean, unscarred bodies resulting from plenty of wholesome food and good health care. For our frankness, friendliness, energy, confidence, determination to succeed. For our belief that every man has the right to his own lousy opinion. Praise God for cheap ice cream, hot running water, painless dentistry, and atomic energy.

At the same time, let’s remember that every culture is the lifeway of people made in the image of God, regardless of their standard of living. Most people with whom God has communicated throughout history have lived in cultures far different from ours. Was Noah literate? Did David believe in democracy? Did Mary have indoor plumbing? Yet their lives were as valid as ours. They dominated nature less. Fewer alternative products, customs, and ideas were available to them. But they experienced friendship, love, parenthood, creativity, learning, responsibility, choice, dignity, adventure, and relationship to God. They had as many significant experiences as any modern Western man.

Sin is present in other cultures. But it’s in ours, too. And so are God’s gifts. So let’s share them. Maybe we have something to teach about hygiene or individual responsibility. Maybe we have something to learn about being delivered from tension. Let’s investigate how to praise God as a community of diversity.

As all historians recognize, time elapsed is a major asset for objectively evaluating events. Twelve months is not a great deal of time, but it may be sufficient to permit a somewhat relaxed backward look at the International Congress on World Evangelization, held July, 1974, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Not only is the congress itself history, but so are the organization of the Lausanne Continuation Committee for World Evangelization (LCCWE) and its first official meeting in Mexico City last January.

I am among those who all along have understood the phrase “world evangelization” in its narrowest and most literal sense. My attendance at the congress, my participation on the LCCWE, and this evaluation itself are all based on the conviction that God brought these events to pass for the chief purpose of leading multitudes of unbelievers all over the world to faith in Jesus Christ and into responsible membership in Christian churches. Those who have understood the congress differently will, of course, evaluate it within other frames of reference.

Three Torpedoes

Only narrowly did the congress escape a strong attempt by some participants to divert the emphasis from world evangelization to other (and perhaps equally commendable) aspects of the total mission of the Church. If I may be permitted a rather crassly military analogy, these diversionary tactics remind me of torpedoes fired from a warship. Any one of them was powerful enough to have destroyed the central evangelistic nature of the congress had it made a direct hit. Only after the LCCWE had met in Mexico City six months after the congress did it become reasonably certain that none of the torpedoes had struck the target and that evangelism had emerged intact.

Specifically, what did these attempts look like? A letter written to Billy Graham after the congress expresses the attitude as clearly as I have seen it. The writer, a Lausanne participant, said in part:

We want a center for evangelism but evangelism must not be narrowly conceived. The center will, of course, distribute famine relief, aid evangelical theological education, and encourage missions to turn authority over to Third World churches. It will plunge into the battle for liberation of the oppressed, and champion the nations of the Third World as against the superpowers. It will conduct research into the nature of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, so that these can be more effectively won to Christ. It will help reconcile Jews and Arabs. Of course, it will do some actual evangelism as well.

While this letter alludes to them all, the first “torpedo” as I see it was an attempt to confuse evangelism with social action. So as not to be misunderstood at this point, I want to reiterate my own strong conviction that social involvement is an important component of the total mission of God’s people and that it is unquestionably related to evangelism. Notice, however, that to say this is roughly analogous to asserting that the circulatory system is an important part of the human organism and that it is intimately related to the reproductive system. This does not preclude cardiologists, for example, from holding a meeting on their specific concerns and obstetricians and gynecologists from holding meetings on theirs.

Not only did the Lausanne program build in what I consider a disproportionate emphasis on social aspects of the Christian mission for a congress “on World Evangelization,” but many influential media reports even exaggerated this, thereby diluting the evangelistic component. It seemed that to some of the reporters it must have been a new thing to hear evangelicals expressing social concern, and in many cases social issues, rather than evangelism, made the headlines.

For those who might have wished Lausanne to be a congress on social concern, Article 5 of the Lausanne Covenant (“Christian Social Responsibility”) was not sufficient. They held a separate caucus and drafted a covenant of their own called “A Response to Lausanne” that extended to 2,000 words, almost twice the combined length of the six articles on evangelism in the official covenant. Partly because he himself agreed with its content but partly also in order to prevent chaos from breaking loose in the plenary session, the spokesman for the covenant drafting committee, John Stott, asserted in public that he would sign both.

The social-concern “torpedo” did not hit. In a report of the congress, Peter Beyerhaus commented that “socio-political concern as such is no new evangelical discovery at Lausanne.” He, as I, was relieved that Lausanne avoided the danger of ascribing soteriological significance to political involvement, thus correcting what some perceived to be the emphasis of the World Council of Churches’ meeting at Bangkok in 1973. The covenant states that “social action is not evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation” (Article 5).

The second “torpedo” was an attempt to confuse evangelism with Christian cooperation. Christian unity is such a clear biblical principle that some are inclined to postulate a cause-and-effect relation between cooperation and evangelism. The underlying premise is that if somehow Christians can develop vehicles and structures for cooperation, one of the results will be the emergence of spontaneous and effective evangelism.

For a significant number of Lausanne participants, the congress as koinonia was its outstanding characteristic. To witness so many evangelicals of all colors and sizes and costumes and languages talking together, praying together, eating together, and rooming together was a peak experience for many. It truly was “good and pleasant to see brethren dwelling together in unity.”

But to suppose that such unity always promotes evangelism is naïve. For example, to some extent Key 73 in the United States sacrificed evangelistic power by overstressing unity. Its charter document, a CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial, betrayed the subsequent confusion of cooperation and evangelism by its very title, “Somehow Let’s Get Together.” Enough empirical evidence has now been accumulated to indicate that at times cooperation in evangelism may even be counterproductive.

Setting Lausanne up as a worldwide competitor to the World Council of Churches became a favorite angle of some journalists. Nine of eighteen paragraphs in the Time report, for example, stressed a supposed Lausanne-WCC confrontation. And this was perpetuated when Time later reported the Mexico City meeting of the LCCWE under the headline “Evangelicals Unite.” All this was done despite persistent denials by Lausanne leaders that such a confrontation was neither intended or permitted.

Again, the cooperation “torpedo” did not strike. The covenant states that unity is indeed a biblical goal, but recognizes that cooperation “does not necessarily forward evangelism” (Article 7). Evangelism and cooperation were not unduly confused.

The third “torpedo” could be described as an attempt to confuse evangelism with Christian nurture. Helping Christians to grow in all aspects of obedience and discipleship is, of course, a very important component of Christian responsibility. It undoubtedly should be mentioned at a congress on evangelism. But in some cases Christian growth was stressed so strongly at Lausanne that it gained precedence over winning lost men and women to the Christian faith.

To refer again to the prominent Time article, the only direct reference to a Third World speaker reported that this person “cautioned Evangelicals to resist the temptation of trying to make the maximum number of converts. Though conversions are wanted, ‘faithfulness to the Gospel should never be sacrificed for the sake of quantity.’ ” Several others, particularly those whose primary ministry places them with university students and better educated people, reinforced this emphasis.

The covenant was not as precise on this issue as on the previous two. It properly confessed that at times “we have divorced evangelism from Christian nurture” (Article 11), but it did not go on to assert that Christian nurture or growth in discipleship, when rightly achieved, will invariably promote more effective evangelism, and that as a result the quantity of Christians and Christian churches will increase worldwide. The biblical data indicates that as this happens the angels will rejoice.

Three Boons

The three issues described through the analogy of “torpedoes” are crucial ones for effective world evangelization, but I mentioned them in a negative vein. On the other side, I see three positive consequences of Lausanne in areas that are crucial for evangelistic and missiological advance. As I followed the Lausanne media reports, these three were not mentioned very prominently during the first couple of months, but more mature reflection is now giving them the exposure they merit.

The first was a new awareness of the amazing progress of world evangelization to date. While some may decry this as “triumphalism,” today’s spread of Christianity worldwide has no precedent in human history. To the glory of God, missions and evangelism have been encouragingly successful. Christ is building his Church. Laborers are being thrust into the world’s ripened harvest fields. Every week, for example, more than 1,400 new Christian churches are being established. The lost are being found and brought into Christian discipleship.

As Eternity magazine colorfully reported, “the Third World flexed its muscles at Lausanne.” The breathtaking array of so many Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans at the congress was “Exhibit A” testifying to the amazing success of Christian missions in our generation. Their substantial contributions on every level from plenary sessions to corridor debates attested further to successful Christian nurture within their own communities. Just to experience Lausanne was enough to impart a new God-inspired optimism to the discouraged and to give a fresh measure of courage to the fainthearted.

The second positive consequence was a new awareness of the challenge ahead. Lest the encouraging news of progress become an opiate to make Christians inappropriately comfortable with the status quo, Donald McGavran shattered any potential complacency with a battle cry to move forward to the 2.7 billion people of the world who have not yet heard of Jesus. The population clock in the corridor ticked inexorably away, drilling this responsibility into every mind by sight and sound. The valuable surveys of unreached peoples prepared by World Vision reinforced all of this with a strong empirical data base.

But how is the challenge to be met? To me, the third positive consequence of the congress was a new awareness of the complexity of the task. I agree with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, which said in an editorial, “At the Lausanne congress, missionary theoretician Ralph Winter delivered a paper on this subject that may well become a standard treatise of the needs of this new age.”

Now that the dust of Lausanne has cleared, I would like to argue that there is no more important fact for the planning of a strategy for world evangelization than the statistical discovery that a full 87 per cent of the world’s unreached peoples cannot be adequately evangelized by their Christian near neighbors. This is to say that the masses of our planet’s unreached peoples will become disciples of Jesus Christ only through cross-cultural missions, technically known as E-2 and E-3 evangelism.

One direct result of this is to contradict any thought that the age of cross-cultural missions is over. No longer may we rather complacently say that since churches now exist in every land the natives can finish the job of evangelization. More, not fewer, missionaries are and will be needed, although we must not make the mistake any longer of equating “missionaries” with “Westerners.” Missionaries from the Third World as well as those from the Western nations will staff God’s future labor force for the unreaped harvest fields.

Mexico And Onward

By the time the LCCWE met in Mexico City, the above facts had become fairly evident. However, a lastditch attempt was made by some to reverse the course of events and once again constitute the LCCWE as an agency designed not just for evangelism but for all aspects of the total mission of the Church. In fact, an ominous survey of the committee members before Mexico City indicated that a majority felt the LCCWE should add to evangelism further concerns such as mass-media involvement, social-aid programs, and theological education in all its dimensions.

Indeed, the committee spent much time discussing the pros and cons of what came to be called the “narrow view” (evangelism) as over against the “wider view” (the total mission of the Church), and finally agreed that evangelism should be its central task. The statement of purpose reads:

The aim of the committee is to further the total biblical mission of the church, recognizing that in this mission of sacrificial service, evangelism is primary, and that our particular concern must be the evangelization of the 2,700 million unreached peoples of the world.

This, in my judgment, is a clear and accurate view of what was originally intended by Lausanne. Equally wise was the decision to avoid developing a heavy administrative bureaucracy by keeping a low profile and giving the regional committees direct responsibility for carrying out the aims of the LCCWE. This decentralized structure holds great promise, since those ministering in a given area are the ones who can best assess their own evangelistic challenges and opportunities, adapting styles of administration and promotion to their own cultural context.

A significant paper presented by Stanley Mooneyham at Mexico City challenged the committee to keep its focus on the world’s unreached peoples and to continue the research begun by World Vision. A subcommittee there further refined those ideas and delineated the precise target of the LCCWE task, namely, both the 2.7 billion “unreached peoples” and many within the scope of nominal Christianity who are not yet converted. Together they are now recognized as the world’s “unevangelized peoples.”

Never before has there been greater reason for hope that these unevangelized peoples will be effectively reached with the life-transforming Gospel of Jesus Christ in our generation. It is too early to judge, but it does seem that some vibrations congenial to this “spirit of Lausanne” are emerging from Geneva and even from Rome. If so, there is much for which evangelicals should be thankful.

In conclusion, I see three especially promising signs: (1) a growing number of younger theologians developing skills for the contextualization of theology, (2) a growing number of research centers dedicated to providing the data necessary for maximizing church growth, and (3) a growing number of Third World agencies already tooling up to send out a new task force of cross-cultural evangelists to “let the earth hear His voice.”