What have HMOs to do with reducing the number of abortions in a given community? Plenty, says Shari Plunkett. She has begun a chain of pregnancy-help centers (called First Resort) in the San Francisco Bay area that operate under a special arrangement with one of the largest HMOs in the country: When the health-care providers of this health maintenance organization have patients who are ambivalent or negative about their pregnancies, they refer them to First Resort for counseling. More than 40 percent of First Resort’s clients come from those referrals, says Plunkett. “We’re a medical and counseling service for women who are at the point of making a decision about carrying to term or having an abortion. About 70 percent of our patients fall into that category, while for most pregnancy care services, it’s 20 to 35 percent.” Plunkett spoke with CT columnist Frederica Mathewes-Green about this “mainstream medical” approach to abortion intervention—a model Plunkett hopes will be used across the country. (Plunkett may be reached at sp1rst@dnai.com)

How did you arrive at this “mainstream medicine” model?

It grew out of my frustration in trying to reach women contemplating abortion. It’s not like they’re all listening to the same radio station or reading the same newspaper. Two years ago I worked with an ad agency to put together radio spots targeting this group of women, and I learned two things. First, that we were trying to reach half a percent of the population. Second, that a four-month series of ads would cost almost as much as my whole budget for the year. It didn’t make sense.

One of my donors said, “You need to have a big HMO to refer all their patients to you.” I realized that that is where pregnant women are congregating, and we needed to reach them there. We began talking to physicians, asking if this was a service they would be interested in. One of the first we talked to, a pro-choice physician, said, “Absolutely, because I see women like that all the time. I can spend 20 minutes with them, but I can do nothing in comparison with what you do.”

How did you describe the service you were offering?

We told doctors, “We know that you regularly see women who are pregnant and don’t want to be, and who are struggling with what to do. We know that you’d love to educate them on their options and hold their hands as they struggle through all their thoughts and fears and circumstances. We also know you don’t have that kind of time—but we do. We’d like you to see us as specialists and refer those patients to us. We will provide them unbiased, compassionate, nonjudgmental pregnancy consulting. As soon as that woman makes her decision, whether to carry to term or to terminate the pregnancy, she’s coming back to you.”

How does your relationship work with the HMO?

Twenty-four hours after a patient drops off her urine sample, she phones the advice nurse who tells her if the test is positive. Then the nurse asks, “Is that good news or bad news?” If it’s good news, the nurse tells her how to establish prenatal care. If she says “bad news” or that she’s not sure, the nurse says, “Let me give you the phone number of the agency we use to do our pregnancy consulting.” If the woman says, “I’m having an abortion,” the nurse tells her that we will provide preabortion counseling for her. All we’re doing is spending time with them at the point of their decision, and our hope is that ultimately they will make a decision to carry to term.

How did you get the HMO to agree to this?

This HMO did a study of women having repeat abortions and found that the rate declined if women received counseling. One of our volunteer rns works at this HMO office, and she knew that there was frustration over women having abortion after abortion. It was wearing the staff down. She told them about our organization, and they invited us to do a presentation. At the end I asked, “If you were to refer patients to us, which would you refer?” I expected they would say the ones that were confused or ambivalent, and that’s what one nurse said right away. But as soon as she said that, the chief of obstetrics said, “But what about the ones that are having abortions? Do they really know what they’re doing?”

“Some women go into an ultrasound talking about abortion and come out saying, ‘I’d better start thinking about names.'”

From that point on, we prayed for the whole enchilada. We didn’t want just the undecided women, but every single one, including the ones that wanted abortions.

Why do you think they agreed to this? If the woman chooses childbirth, it costs an HMO a lot more than an abortion would. Absolutely. When they refer out their first-trimester abortions, it’s going to cost $250 or less; for those who carry to term, the HMO has to pay for prenatal care, labor, and delivery, and maybe 18 years of pediatrics. So this is not a decision based on money, and that is what gives me hope. I sensed that these health-care providers really wanted their patients to take more time to think through their decisions. They have a real sense that abortion is not a good thing, and if women could make other choices, it would be good for them.

Do the doctors accept that your orientation is pro-life?

We’ve been very honest that our goal is to build the Bay Area into an abortion-free community. One of the first questions people ask us is, “Where do you stand on the issue?” I tell them, “I’m not going to jump into one of the two boxes, because they are political boxes loaded with stereotypes, and I don’t know what your stereotypes are.” Then I say, “Every day we go to work to reduce the desire for abortion in our community.” The minute we say that, they know where we stand, but I’ve been careful to frame it in a way they’ve never heard before, and that has made all the difference.

They know, too, that we’re a Christian organization. I tell physicians that this is a decision of life and death, and that often when women are making such decisions they want to look at it from a spiritual perspective. Because we are a Christian organization we can say, “Let’s talk about this based on your faith background.” I can show doctors the evaluations that patients have made of our counselors, stating that the counselors were compassionate and nonjudgmental. In everything we do we are exhibiting Christian principles.

What would a woman walking into your clinic receive?

Like other crisis-pregnancy staffs, we talk with her about the circumstances in her life, what pressures cause her to be contemplating abortion, who in her life is heading her in that direction, and who is supportive of carrying to term. We ask her, apart from these circumstances, what does her heart tell her to do?

I think every woman’s heart is telling her to carry to term, because God has placed truth in her heart, and the truth is that abortion is never the right answer. So our job is to help a woman to see that, during a time of crisis, there’s a lot of pressure to make a decision that doesn’t align with her values and principles. We try to provide the support structure for her to carry to term.

Besides our screening and referrals from mainstream medicine, we have a full-time registered nurse who can offer ultrasound and has the same training in it as an ob-gyn. It’s amazing to me, but virtually 100 percent of women want to have an ultrasound, even if they plan on abortion. We’re very clear with them about what they can expect to see, and tell them they don’t have to look at the screen. We let them know that having an ultrasound will merely give them more information, and information is power. It also tells us what her due date is, whether the pregnancy is in the uterus or ectopic, and whether the pregnancy is viable or demised. In the process, the patient confronts the reality of another human being that exists.

What are the results?

Sixty percent of the women we work with who were seriously contemplating abortion decide to carry to term. Ultrasound plays a big part in this. Some women go into the procedure talking about having an abortion and come out saying, “I’d better start thinking about names.”

Over the 14 years I’ve been doing this, we’ve seen 15,000 to 20,000 women, and I’ve never seen one come back and say, “I’m so angry that you helped me carry this baby to term.” We’ve seen fathers and husbands that were pressuring very hard for an abortion. I remember one who said, “You have to have an abortion because I have a car payment to make”—when the baby was born he brought it back in as proud as he could be. If we can only get women to slow down and listen to what their hearts are telling them, and then empower and support them during that time, miracles can take place.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

No Melody

One frequently meets passersby with music emanating from transistor radios on their persons. Lacking music in our hearts, we carry it in our pockets!

—Vance Havner inThe Vance Havner Quote Book

Be Patient

Jesus went to Jerusalem one Passover holiday and met a man who had waited thirty-eight years at the Bethesda pool for a healing. Tradition had it that every so often an angel of the Lord would stir the waters and whoever stepped in first would be cured. For thirty-eight years, this man had reached out for a healing only to be muscled aside by someone bigger and faster.

Some folks say this man didn’t want to be healed, or else he would have pushed other folks aside and hustled into that pool himself. I say true patience is so scarce, we’re apt to confuse it with apathy. There’s a load of difference between the two. Apathy curls up into self-pity when times get hard. Patience quietly waits its turn, trusting that God will get around to making things right in his perfect time.

—Philip Gulley inHome Town Tales

Vain Search

Those who seek happiness too intensely will have little of it.

—Calvin Miller inThe Taste of Joy

The Sin of Self

Christians do not see themselves as wicked; they do not see their righteousness as filthy rags; they do not see themselves as needing to be in a state of ongoing confession and repentance. The result is that the body of Christ is, in large part, suffering from the power-draining effect of a universally unconfessed sin … the vanity of self-righteousness!

—Jim Russell inAwakening the Giant

It Starts with One

But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I know best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No: my home. No: my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.

—Elie Wiesel inSouls on Fire

Forget the Past

It is a mistake to be always turning back to recover the past. The law for Christian living is not backward, but forward; not for experiences that lie behind, but for doing the will of God, which is always ahead and beckoning us to follow. Leave the things that are behind, and reach forward to those that are before, for on each new height to which we attain, there are the appropriate joys that befit the new experience. Don’t fret because life’s joys are fled. There are more in front. Look up, press forward, the best is yet to be!

—F. B. Meyer inOur Daily Walk

“Junk Food”

Today we often tend to treat the Lord Jesus something like a convenience food—handy to have around in case of unexpected need.

—Margaret Clarkson inAll Nature Sings

Father of Evil

It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.

—Ronald Knox inLet Dons Delight

Where God Lives

Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. God’s residence is next to mine, His furniture is love.

—Emily Dickinson inPoems

Time’s Value

Time is what we want most, but what, alas, we use worst, and for which God will surely most strictly reckon with us when time shall be no more.

—William Penn inFruits of Solitude

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

At a prayer meeting last year at Missionary Baptist Church in Carlisle, Iowa, Kenny McCaughey asked fellow members to petition God on behalf of his wife, Bobbi, that fertility therapy would be effective. Upon learning that the prayers for his wife to conceive had been answered sevenfold, McCaughey turned to pastor Robert J. Brown with questions on how he could handle such a brood. Brown prayed that God would be glorified by whatever happened.

Since that time, life has not been the same for the McCaugheys, Brown, or Missionary Baptist Church. The birth of the world’s first surviving septuplets on November 19, 1997, changed the dynamics of the church immensely. Besides living through periods of intense media scrutiny, the 100-member congregation has rallied to become a model of what the church is designed to be: a support in time of need, even if the circumstances are overwhelming.

“When Bobbi and Kenny found out they were expecting seven, we said, ‘You don’t have to do this by yourselves,’ ” says Brown, 49. “The response from families in the church has been to commit ourselves to do anything we can do, no matter how long the haul may be.”

Preparation began long before Kenneth, Alexis, Natalie, Kelsey, Brandon, Nathan, and Joel came into the world. Church members began bringing meals three times a week when a doctor ordered bed rest for Bobbi McCaughey in her ninth week of pregnancy—21 weeks before delivery. There have been 70 volunteers from their church to aid in caring for the septuplets—and their two-year-old sister, Mikayla—as well as in cleaning the home and preparing meals. Many on-site helpers take one shift a week, ranging from four hours in the morning to eight hours overnight.

Compassion not coincidental

Such devotion is not a new phenomenon at Missionary Baptist Church. “Their giving attitude did not start with Bobbi’s pregnancy,” says her father, Robert Hepworth. “It’s a natural extension of what had been going on before. They are very giving to anyone who has need.” Hepworth and his wife, Peggy, both 53, attend the church, as does Kenny McCaughey’s father, Kenneth George, 53, and his stepmother, Val, 42.

“It’s not unusual for people in this church to help people in need,” Val McCaughey says. “Of course, there’s never been a need like this before.”

Indeed. Bobbi McCaughey prepares 45 bottles of formula herself every day, but the task of feeding, bathing, and changing diapers for seven babies around the clock—while trying to attend to other household chores—is beyond any one person. Although the McCaugheys have many relatives in the area, it has been their extended family—the church—that has seen them through.

Even if the McCaugheys feel a bit awkward relying on the assistance of others to raise their family, they know it is part of God’s plan. “The help has been simply outstanding,” Bobbi McCaughey says. “If it was just me, the laundry wouldn’t get done and the meals wouldn’t be made.”

The church in Carlisle, a town of 3,400 people 10 miles southeast of Des Moines, has been at the center of the lives of Kenny and Bobbi McCaughey both before and after the birth of the septuplets. Before the big event, they had been active at Missionary Baptist Church, which is affiliated with the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, by working in the children’s ministry and singing in the choir. Both Kenny, 28, and Bobbi, 30, attended Bible college before he became a billing clerk at the local Chevrolet dealership and she became a seamstress.

The McCaugheys continue to attend Sunday school, morning worship, and Sunday evening services faithfully, with their eight children in tow. Church members are there to help them unload and load the safety seats in the van. Friends often hold the septuplets during services.

The day of delivery, Brown led intercessors in prayer at the hospital. McCaughey chose the church sanctuary as the site of a press conference to announce the births. A prayer chain formed when newborn Joel came perilously close to death and needed a blood transfusion.

At times, Brown has been enamored with the adorable septuplets. “If I had my druthers I’d be at their house almost every day,” Brown says. “But that’s not my calling. I’m the pastor.”

Before the births, a three-woman church committee that includes Brown’s wife, Ginny, 47, formed to organize a volunteer schedule to meet the practical day-to-day needs of the McCaugheys. They initially identified three paramount needs: housing, transportation, and income.

But generous American individuals and companies have taken care of many of the needs, including free diapers, clothes, and baby food. A consortium of area businesses is putting the finishing touches on the most amazing gift: a 5,000-square-foot house being constructed with donated labor and materials. The ten-member family has lived in a 770-square-foot house the first year. Chevrolet bestowed on them a 15-passenger van to take care of transportation.

That left basic at-home needs, and two-thirds of the families from the church have helped. A volunteer is at the McCaughey home overnight for an eight-hour shift, seven days a week.

“Pastor Brown and Ginny are the right people for this,” says Val McCaughey. “They are great organizers and they know how to handle the media.”

Managing the publicity

Maintaining equilibrium has not been easy. While the birth of the septuplets has provided a marvelous opportunity to demonstrate to the world that God can work miracles through a faithful church, the attention heaped upon the McCaugheys at times has been consuming. “This is a whole new dimension of ministry we’ve never had before,” Brown says.

Brown and his six-member deacon board have been careful to make sure other congregants are not slighted because of the immense attention that has been showered upon the McCaugheys. After much agonizing, Brown and the deacons decided to allow crews from NBC’s Dateline and ABC’s PrimeTime Live to film in the church. Concerns about disturbing the holiness of God’s house and invading the privacy of members dissipated when the news programs both portrayed church members as loving and devoted.

The births have had a unifying effect on the congregation, according to Ginny Brown. “This has enabled other people to grow,” she says. “Other people are being blessed by helping out.”

Brown appreciates his faithful flock. “These people are really committed,” Brown says. “Many have jobs 40 hours a week. But they see this as ministry.”

One such volunteer is Ken Bailey, a 47-year-old commercial artist in West Des Moines. “I like to take care of these babies,” Bailey says. “It’s neat to see them grow and how their personalities develop.”

For 40-year-old Craig Milligan, a farmer nine miles south of Carlisle, helping the McCaugheys is a way to thank Bobbi McCaughey, who brought his wife, Joy, meals when she broke her arm while eight months pregnant.

“It’s our turn to give back,” Milligan says. “God has watched over this family. Every one of these children is so precious.”

Bobbi McCaughey hopes the volunteer shifts at their home will be phased out by early next year. “We don’t anticipate having help forever,” she says.

Nevertheless, Brown vows that assistance will continue as long as it is needed. “We’re just a local church trying to do what God has told us to do,” he says. “Two years ago we never dreamed we would be a part of something like this. It humbles us and causes us to be in awe.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Gestures of collective repentance have become popular in recent years. In 1994, the pope offered an apology for past sins committed against non-Catholics. In the summer of 1995, the Southern Baptists, who number over 15 million, voted to express a resolution of repentance that read in part, “We lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest.” Last year, President Clinton apologized to the African Americans who were the unwitting subjects in the infamous Tuskegee study of syphilis, and he seriously considered the possibility of apologizing for slavery in general.

Reactions to Clinton’s proposed mea culpa varied. Ward Connerly, an African-American entrepreneur, regent of the University of California, and architect of the California antiaffirmative action referendum, Proposition 209, pronounced this verdict on the idea: “Apologizing for slavery is probably one of the dumbest things anyone could do.” Conversely, civil-rights leader Julian Bond maintained that an apology for slavery would be a good and important symbolic gesture.

Last summer, in between Little League baseball games in a largely white Minnesota town, I did some informal polling of my own. Though none of the people I talked to took the President’s proposed apology to be an urgent matter, about half expressed mild support for the idea. Others scoffed at repenting for what they took to be ancient history. The wife of a professor commented, “Why should I apologize for something done to blacks more than a hundred years ago?” A fair question, which might be restated: “Why should I apologize for a crime that I had nothing to do with?” Or more to the point, “By what authority can I apologize for someone else’s actions?” It would, after all, be hubristic for me to think that I could repent for a mugging that I did not participate in.

As a professor of philosophy, I have encountered many white students over the years who accurately or out of paranoia believe that they are constantly being asked to feel guilty and repent for racist institutions and actions in which they themselves had no hand. When it comes to race and repentance, these students are of the Aristotelian opinion that we should only be praised or blamed for our own voluntary actions. Oddly enough, many of them feel no qualms about taking pride in the accomplishments of the various communities with which they identify—their college, church, country, or for that matter, their local major league baseball team.

This minor inconsistency aside, many of those who sneer or snarl at the suggestion of apologizing for deeds from the deep past need to consider the possibility that we may bear a moral connection to actions that we did not ourselves commit. In this regard, it would be useful to distinguish between actions that one neither commits nor profits from and actions not committed but profited from.

Suppose, for example, that unbeknownst to me, a friend of mine robs a bank and makes off with $7 million. Clearly, I am neither responsible for the robbery nor am I in a position to apologize for it. However, if after telling me about the theft, my friend offers me a million dollars of the stolen loot, and I accept it, then I am no longer innocent of the robbery, despite the fact that I had nothing at all do to with the heist. It could be argued that white people have profited from our racist past, and thus, relative to slavery, we are more like receivers of stolen goods than innocent bystanders who just happen to bear a physical likeness to slave owners.

Paradoxically enough, Americans do not shy away from admitting that we profit from access to cheap foreign labor, and yet whites find it hard to believe that we have benefited in any way from hundreds of years of free labor. Obviously, this lack of awareness would be exculpatory if, in fact, slavery and discrimination did not serve the interests of whites. However, if ignorance of being privileged is an ignorance we ourselves are responsible for producing, then we become morally reproachable receivers of stolen goods. And to be psychologically realistic, whites have a strong investment in blinkering their assessment of the broad effects of racism.

Let’s return to my earlier example: assume that when I accepted the gift of a million dollars, I had no reason to think that the money had been stolen. Years later I came to understand that the funds upon which I had built a comfortable and respectable life had been pilfered from the accounts of your great-grandparents. Would the fact that many years had gone by cover the sin to such a degree that I would not bear any responsibility to the descendants of my great grandparents’ victims who, thanks to my ancestors, now led a distinctively unprivileged existence?

Individuals who benefit from a crime are mistaken in thinking that they have nothing to do with the crime. If responsibility does not extend from the robber baron to his children, then the material benefits of his wrongdoing can be passed along with impunity to future generations.

Once again, it is essential to distinguish between cases in which one generation is entirely innocent of a transgression committed by an earlier generation and those in which the sins of the father continue to bear fruits of advantage for his descendants. Although I am not sure that a presidential apology would have the healing effects that some anticipate, I do know that white Americans have profited from slavery and discrimination. In a competitive society, whites have always had a leg up on African Americans, whether it be in hunting for a job, loan, house, or a position in a corporate firm.

Consider the Texaco scandal in 1996, when unsuspecting white corporate executives were caught on tape espousing racist sentiments. Or consider a story that a friend recently shared with me. My friend, who is about 35, recently returned to his hometown in a Detroit suburb for a class reunion at his richly integrated public high school. After the reunion, four of his old school chums convinced him to go out and play a few rounds of golf. All were corporate executives and registered Democrats. And yet, when the issue of race came up, all of them swore they would never “take the risk” of hiring an African American to fill a leadership role in their respective companies. In other words, any white applicants who sought employment in one of their firms would have a decisive advantage over all African American applicants.

Apologies are becoming all too easy to make today. But abuse is no argument against use.

I was not involved in the civil-rights struggle of the sixties. While I have huffed and puffed and shaken my head about racial injustice, I have made no significant sacrifices for the cause of racial justice. I have no special authority to preach on the matter, and yet I have lived long enough in this country to recognize by whose sweat and on whose backs this country has been built and why. Because of slavery and discrimination, African Americans have provided an endless supply of cheap labor. They still work the fields, wash white babies and white octogenarians, shake drinks in country clubs, and mop floors in the classrooms in which white folks debate about race. It was not by chance that a black woman closed my dead father’s eyes. It was no accident that a black woman was there when my child first opened his blue eyes.

As a result of institutionalized racism, African Americans have been cornered into doing more than their fair share of protecting, building, and preserving this land. For that reason, I suggest that even white Americans who have cursed racism have unwillingly and perhaps unwittingly benefited from it. Thus, whites are in no position to slough off the call for an apology by insisting that they have no connection to slavery.

The Hebrew scriptures ring with intimations that blessings and blandishments can be passed on from generation to generation. The children of Abraham are blessed because of Abraham’s faith. On the other side, there was clearly a time when the Israelites believed that the sins of the fathers would be punishable unto the fourth generation.

The revolutionary prophet Ezekiel inveighs against the notion of cross-generational responsibility. Attempting to focus his people’s attention on their individual actions, Ezekiel proclaims that if a man “has a son who sees all the sins that his father has done, considers, and does not do likewise, … he shall not die for his father’s iniquity” (Ezek. 18:14, 17, NRSV). When we refuse to acknowledge the harm that our community has inflicted upon others, when we the unoppressed refuse to acknowledge that, at least for a time, oppression benefits those who are not forced to walk on the other side of the street, then we fail to turn away from the sin of oppression.

By turning a blind eye, the sins of the father become the sins of the more passive son. By refusing to acknowledge who has been doing what for the last four hundred years, we fail to turn away from the grievous sins of our forefathers.

There is some sense today that apologies are becoming all too easy to make. Perhaps so. But as the philosopher Stephen Toulmin has pointed out, abuse is no argument against use. If Americans ought to feel sorry that people in our community ever permitted slavery, then we ought to be willing to say that we are sorry for slavery. Clearly, it is a sorry character who does not regret our slaveholding past.

Gordon Marino is associate professor of philosophy at Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Nelson Malwitz was having a midlife crisis. At 50, he was at the top of his game. As corporate director of chemical research for Sealed Air Corporation in Danbury, Connecticut, the company that invented Bubble Wrap, Malwitz achieved seven patents for plastic foam technology. He served as an adult Sunday-school teacher at Walnut Hill Community Church, a congregation he helped found. He had a wife, Marge, and two teenage sons, Jonathan and David, who loved him. But something was missing. Then he remembered Urbana.

The year was 1967. Raised in the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination, Malwitz was 21 when he attended the InterVarsity student missions conference in Urbana, Illinois. Reflecting the idealism of the time, Malwitz wanted to change the world, so he committed his life to missions. But family, career, and mortgage payments soon got in the way.

Now with a view from middle age, Malwitz decided to revisit his dream and pursue a second career in missions. But he quickly found missions agencies were unprepared for a skilled professional in his fifties. “It was so difficult to get in, and I had no idea where the point of entry was,” Malwitz says.

Gene Shackelford, a friend from church, had a similar experience. At 59, he retired as a vice president of Union Carbide. He and his wife were active in Bible Study Fellowship and participated on his congregation’s missions committee, but it took them three years to find a position in missions. “I thought, That’s way too long,” Malwitz says. “The task is way too difficult for people to get a significant second career if the missions infrastructure is not ready to take people.” So Malwitz decided his contribution to missions would be to encourage others from his generation to consider second careers in missions and to help them through what he calls “the missions minefield.”

Malwitz founded Finishers Project in 1996 (finishers@compuserve.com). “As you hit 50, you no longer count your years from the time you were born, but you count the amount of time you have left,” he says. “The big idea has to do with finishing well.” The concept has captured the attention of more than 30 missions agencies, which are joining with Finishers Project to host an “Urbana-like” conference in Chicago October 1-3. Finishers Forum is addressing financial, health, and family concerns, and connecting an anticipated 600 boomer participants with 150 missions agency representatives.

Like Malwitz, who calls himself “the generic evangelical baby boomer sitting in the pew,” millions of boomers, identified as those born between 1946 and 1965, are approaching retirement with their nests empty and their 401(k)s full. In 2001, the leading edge of the 82 million-strong group turns 55, for an estimated total of 21 million boomers 50 years or older. Malwitz has determined that 4.6 million of them are evangelicals. If 1 percent is interested in missions, 46,000 individuals could be available for ministry.

They are the healthiest, wealthiest, and best-educated retirees ever. These evangelical boomer “finishers” (or “second-halfers”) may want to return to their Urbana roots and start second careers in missions. They have already achieved success in their careers; now they want to achieve significance. Their idealism—as well as their skills and money—could help revive flagging North American missions.

SEARCH FOR SIGNIFICANCE: Michael Darby, a senior vice president at Shearson Lehman, had been a stockbroker for 30 years, and his wife, Elizabeth, had owned a retail store for 13 years when they started feeling burned out. “We didn’t have the joy of going to work like we used to,” Michael says.

A teaching cassette by television preacher Charles Stanley about discovering God’s will and a job offer from a friend at Focus on the Family prompted the Darbys to consider career opportunities in ministry. A visit with friend Bruce Wilkinson at Walk Thru the Bible confirmed their call to missions.

But panic quickly set in. They had a business to liquidate, a house to sell, and a career to conclude—but at least their children were grown and they had no financial debt. The Darbys decided to let God take care of the details. “If it’s his calling, we’re not supposed to worry about those things,” Michael says. “We’re just supposed to obey.

In 1991, Michael retired early at 54 and Elizabeth, then 49, sold her store so they could work with CoMission, a cooperative effort by 80 organizations to teach Christian values in Russian public schools. After short trips to the country, the Darbys joined a team from Navigators to live in Rostov, Russia, for a year to disciple new believers. The Darbys exchanged a home on the Florida coast for university housing with no hot water, infrequent heat and electricity, and a view of a garbage dump; but they considered themselves blessed to have rediscovered God’s purpose. Now living in Georgia, the Darbys are working with Navigators on a new program to help other finishers determine their giftedness.

Ken and Pat Kingston assumed they would retire one day and move to Florida or Arizona. But retirement came sooner than they expected when Ken, a middle-school teacher in Crystal Lake, Illinois, for 29 years, had an early retirement option at age 59. In 1991, they seized the opportunity to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators.

The Kingstons believe God orchestrated the timing. Pat’s mother, who had been living with the Kingstons, had died a month earlier. Their youngest son married the previous summer.

But credit card debt concerned them, along with leaving their four grandchildren, all of whom lived within two blocks of their home. Ken’s pension helped, but the Kingstons still had to raise support.

The Kingstons “adopted” many new grandchildren in Lima, Peru, where Ken used his experience as an educator to start a school for missionary children while Pat served in the Wycliffe office. After six years, the Kingstons returned home for a year, but they now are packing for a three-year assignment in Kenya. “[Retired] people are traipsing around the country in rvs,” laughs Pat. “I think that would be the most boring life I could ever imagine.”

Both the Darbys and Kingstons achieved success in their careers, but they wanted something more. Bob Buford would say they sought significance. Buford, whose book Halftime (Zondervan, 1994) is the unofficial guidebook for finishers, says that for retirees who choose service over leisure, “the payoff is blessedness.”

A recent survey of 600 evangelical boomers, sponsored by Finishers Project, indicates 61 percent would like to retire early and pursue a second career. Fifty-four percent say they would consider a second career in missions. Eighty-one percent want to be able to serve with their spouse. “They want to leave a legacy,” says Rod Beidler, director of international recruitment for Navigators.

MISSIONS DILEMMA: As early retirees search for significance in the second half of their lives, some missions leaders are wondering whether self-absorbed boomers are willing to make the costly sacrifices necessary to serve in overseas ministry. But with the leveling off of church commitment to foreign missions, agency leaders may have few alternatives to draw in a significant number of fresh missions candidates.

The Mission Handbook (MARC, 1997) indicates that by 2000, more than 1 billion people still will not have heard the gospel message. Yet as the world’s population increases, North American mission efforts have not.

“Basically, we’ve plateaued,” says Jim Reapsome, founder of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, commenting on the current numbers of full-time North American missionaries. By contrast, the number of short-term missionaries—on assignments as short as two weeks—continues to rise.

There are more available missions positions than qualified candidates to fill them. TEAM is recruiting for 700 positions. Wycliffe has 1,500 openings. Servant Opportunity Network, a computer matching service for retirees, lists more than 6,000 available jobs with more than 200 missions agencies.

Ralph Winter, general director of Frontier Mission Fellowship, estimates non-Western missionaries will outnumber Western missionaries in the next few years. Missions experts point to the new ranks of cross-cultural missionaries from developing-world congregations as the result of centuries of missionary commitment from the Western church.

But in North America, the church’s financial support of missions is steadily declining. According to Money Matters: Personal Giving in American Churches (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 10-15 percent of Protestant church budgets goes to foreign missions, roughly half the amount of what it was in the 1950s. The State of Church Giving Through 1992 (empty tomb, inc., 1994) estimates that Protestant church members each gave only $20 to foreign missions in 1991, compared to $164 spent on soft drinks and $103 for sporting goods.

“[The church] is losing its zeal,” says Larry Walker, southwest regional director for ACMC, which assists its 1,000 member churches with their missions programs. “The older generation understood missions more.” He says pluralism and materialism have changed the missions climate.

Christina Accornero, a board member of InterServe and Finishers Project, believes the church needs a missions revival. “We’re going through a crisis in missions,” she says. “Especially Americans, we’re pretty comfortable with our things. There are many missionaries coming home on furlough who don’t want to go back.” Finishers Project could be the catalyst for revival. “I think it’s a test—a God-directed test—to see if we are open to a new movement of the Spirit,” Accornero says.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES: Missions agency leaders agree that they need to update their processes to accommodate boomers. Malwitz, as a test to see how agencies would respond to a finisher, forwarded the name of Indiana financial consultant David Ober to two dozen missions agencies. Sixteen of the agencies made no effort to contact Ober. Eight sent standard information packets—data geared to recent college graduates, not older professionals with concerns about health insurance and financial planning.

Navigators’ Rod Beidler says that when he started receiving calls from finishers looking for second careers, “we didn’t know what to do with them. We were caught very much by surprise.”

Ed Lewis, a recruiter with International Teams, says finishers know the primary need to spread the gospel worldwide. “They are up to the challenge and want to get involved,” he says. “We don’t want to put unnecessary obstacles in their path. And I think maybe, right now, we’re doing that.”

Mike and Linda Green, of Jupiter, Florida, shared a desire to use their skills in communications technology to further world evangelism. In 1994, Mike retired early at 58 from a 30-year career as a nuclear engineer and started his own business as a software consultant. Linda, then 49, worked as an editor of an online financial publication. Their passion for missions had been fueled by Urbana, which Mike first attended in 1957 and they both attended in 1996. But the missions agencies they approached would not accept them because they both had earlier been divorced—twice for Linda and once for Mike, while he was a Christian.

Mike and Linda applied at six agencies, all of which turned them down. Most agencies terminated their applications early in the process. “Some just come right out and say, ‘Sorry, we can’t have divorced people as part of our organization,’ ” says Mike. One agency said they “had to limit their damages, so to speak,” he says. The Greens’ worst experience involved a missions agency that accepted them after numerous interviews, but later retracted their offer after a staff member threatened to leave if the organization hired a divorced couple. “It was painful at times,” Mike says.

CULTURE CLASH: Both boomers and missions agencies are anticipating a clash of cultures. The attributes of boomers that make them so appealing—spiritual and emotional maturity, professional skills, and financial security—may also create problems that could hinder missions objectives.

The largest cross-cultural adjustment a boomer may have to make is between the corporate and nonprofit worlds, especially if the boomer has left a leadership position. “If a finisher is a high-powered, CEO-type, he’s not going to be prepared to sweep the halls,” says Winter.

Some finishers may expect a leadership position in missions, Lewis says, but it will take time for them to gain credibility with career missionaries who may feel threatened by finishers who seem to use missions as a hobby. He believes more finishers such as Michael Darby—who had no qualms about leaving a management position in finance to work as part of a discipleship team in Russia—are looking for a respite from the responsibilities of leadership.

Others, such as the Kingstons and the Greens, may want to use their professional skills in missions, but it may mean they will have to serve in a support role. If they are not wealthy enough to support themselves on retirement income alone, they may have a difficult time raising support. “We view missionaries as people going into hardship posts, maybe wrestling with cockroaches,” says Art McCleary, a finisher who left a career in human resources to work for Senior Ambassadors for Christ. “But when they are in an office setting in the West, it is difficult to see them as missionaries.”

Mike and Linda Green finally found computer positions with the Caleb Project in Littleton, Colorado, but they recently had to withdraw their acceptance because they could not raise enough support. After 15 months of raising funds, the Greens had only 15 percent of their $70,000 combined first-year support. By contrast, Mike’s oldest daughter and her husband, who are leaving to plant a church with a Mennonite missions team in Albania, have raised their full support. Mike and Linda Green sold their house in August in anticipation of their move to Colorado. “We’re back at square one in many ways,” says Mike.

Another potential area of frustration is recruitment and training. Finishers say the hiring process is too slow, taking several months to several years before a candidate is accepted, trained, and has raised support.

In most cases, finishers are mature in their faith but have not had the formal Bible training required by most agencies. TEAM, for example, requires 30 semester hours of Bible classes for its full-time missionaries. Finishers Project is looking to develop a “Bible sat” to accommodate those who are biblically literate but may not have the college transcripts to prove it.

The lack of a foreign language could also hinder a finisher’s effectiveness in missions by limiting options to support roles in the United States or reliance on an interpreter.

But altering the training requirements to meet the needs of boomers is an area of serious concern for Winter, who sees a growing “amateurization” in missions. “I don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in marketing, [a finisher] still needs to know what missions is,” he says. Otherwise, they will just be “sand in the machinery.”

DRIVE-BY-MISSIONS? Despite the eagerness of missions agencies to retool their processes to attract finishers, some missions experts are skeptical. They fear finishers could change the focus of missions by demanding short-term options, disregarding indigenous leadership, and posing a threat to career missionaries.

Winter believes finishers will not want to spend their last years of life overseas, instead choosing “drive-by missions projects.”

“For the most part, short-termers have given up trying to make a contribution to missions,” Winter says. “It’s kind of an expensive education, and almost a futile way of conducting missions.”

But short-term missions opportunities could help finishers verify their commitment to longer-term assignments, says Paul McKaughan, president of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association.

Missions experts herald the growth of indigenous leadership in missions and express concern over whether a new corps of Western finishers may be counterproductive to internationalization. “The role we played in the past is not the role we will play in the future,” says McKaughan. “We will not be calling the shots from the West.”

Ruth Tucker, visiting professor of mission at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, says, “Our fix-it-upper mentality—that we can do it—it’s passe.” Finishers Project is “wrong-headed,” she says, if nationals are not consulted first.

Bill O’Brien, director of the Global Center at Samford University, says finishers need to know the church in the Two-Thirds World is prospering, with an estimated 1,000 sending agencies and more than 40,000 missionaries. North American Christians still have a pivotal role to play in missions—especially in the training of national leaders—but O’Brien says finishers need to understand they are the students in this process.

The agencies’ eagerness to court finishers could be perceived as a slap in the face to career missionaries who bypassed opportunities for profitable careers. “Oftentimes, missionaries are a little bit offended by the fact that these people come in and ‘haven’t paid their dues,’ ” acknowledges Malwitz. “However, they’re just going to have to get over it.”

HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY: Despite the concerns, Finishers Project is taking advantage of a historic opportunity. Plans are under way for an adult educational video, a toll-free number with information on job availabilities, and a finishers magazine. The idea is spreading around the globe: Malwitz has received calls from boomers in Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and Taiwan who want to start their own Finishers Project.

Thousands of boomers are approaching retirement and want a second chance to make a difference in their world; but a problem could arise if significance, not service, becomes their goal.

O’Brien warns that boomers’ desire to become finishers should have more to do with meeting missions goals than their personal goals. Missions is “not just a flash-in-the-pan that gave me a warm, bubbly feeling because I felt significant for a minute,” he says.

North American missions needs the energy that comes from a new corps of impassioned missionaries. Finishers need to find significance in their retirement years. But finishers must move from the pursuit of personal fulfillment to fulfillment of the Great Commission—sharing the gospel with a world desperate to hear —if they want to use their life skills to nurture a young, but growing, church.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Belle Metcalfe stood on the steps of her cabin at Rocky Look Bible Camp and looked toward the dropped-down sun. A blue pickup shimmied along the valley road far below, fishtailing here and there on the loose gravel. Though she couldn’t see the truck, Belle heard it coming. She knew that her niece Jeanette was finally home from an all-day trip with Drew Parks, and she knew, too, that they’d been up to no good. About the only thing she didn’t know was that a hitchhiker sat in the back seat of their pickup, wondering what kind of weird fate had brought him here. The mountains to the east had turned dark purple. You could still smell dinner, though dinner was all done and the dining hall staff had finished washing up.

“What do you think about Jeanette and her boyfriend?” Belle asked her husband, Dean, who sat beside her on the steps having his after-dinner pipe before vespers. Belle was grey-headed, but Dean and his brother, Gratian, both had shiny curls of hair, black as you please. It grew down the sides of their faces like tree bark, and Fansher, the camp cook, liked to tell them they had African blood.

“There’s a Afro-American in your woodpile,” she’d say.

Could be true or could be not true. Most people said that Gratian looked like Abraham Lincoln, but poor Dean was too fat for that.

“I think it’s about time little Jeanette found herself a husband,” Dean said calmly. “She don’t seem to have nobody else interested in her.”

“That’s because she’s already dated every other man who set foot here! She’s run through most of the counselors, none’s good enough.”

“I can understand that,” said Dean. “The counselors are a little young for Jeanette, ain’t they? She’s past college age, she don’t want a younger man.”

“She’s not past 30,” said Belle. “She’s only 26, and that Drew Parks is younger than she is.”

“Oh, what you so worried about, Mother?”

“I’m worried about the way they act together.”

“How do they act together?”

Belle whispered something to her husband, something that had the words “tight clothes” and “temptation” and “desperate” in it. He looked around warily, then knocked the ashes out of his pipe and stuck it in a clean brass spittoon beside the door.

“Well,” he said, “she’s not the beauty in the family; you can’t blame her for trying to reel one in while her sister Delphi’s off to college. This is a Christian boy we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

“Dean, do you hear what I’m saying? I’m trying to keep Jeanette out of trouble. She’s so crazy for the boys. She reminds me of her mother.”

“Oh, don’t let’s get started on to that.”

“Get started on to what? Tell me your brother doesn’t need help raising two girls alone. I think you should say something to him about this.”

“I’m going down to the chapel. I’ll see you at vespers.”

“I wonder why God brings all these rascals our way,” she mumbled. “Can’t he bring just one decent fellow?” She watched her husband—so innocent, so trusting, too godly for his own good—pick his way down the hill toward the campground. When he was well out of sight she hurried jauntily after him. She slung past the pretty log cabin that belonged to his brother, Gratian—the cabin where little Jeanette and Delphi had been raised without a woman’s guiding hand (other than her own) since their mother ran off so long ago.

She took a trail that did not lead to the chapel. This trail cut off through the woods toward the playing fields. It was ferny and damp, strewn with boulders and pine straw. Down near the softball field lay Jeanette’s cabin, beside a row of pecan trees and a small parking lot with a sign thrusting up from the middle of it that said

ROCKY LOOK BIBLE CAMP
THREE FORKS, TENNESSEE
EST. 1955 FOR THE GLORY
OF GOD AND THE SALVATION
OF YOUNG AMERICANS

There sat the blue truck, empty, in front of Jeanette’s cabin. The hood made a clacking noise as it tried to cool. The air smelled like burning oil. Belle looked this way and that to make sure her husband didn’t come out of the trees and catch her snooping. Then she waved at some girls pitching a ball a hundred feet away and darted past the empty truck to the cabin.

She pulled slightly at the screen door, trying to be quiet, but it had swollen tight shut in the heat. She clenched her teeth and yanked the door open with a loud screech. “Jeanette girl, you home?”

“Huh?” A bare-chested boy jumped about a foot from a folding chair behind the door.

“Excuse me, ma’am!” He stood up, covering his white stomach with his elbows.

Belle’s mouth dropped open. “Son, what you doing in Miss Jeanette’s cabin? Don’t you know the rules? No male campers in the girls’ cabins.”

“Well, ma’am, I’m not exactly a camper.”

“No excuses. Come on out right now. And get you a shirt!”

The boy came outside as quickly as he could, smiling in what she thought was a stupid way. His jaw stuck out from his head; his face was red either with sunburn or shame.

“What is your name?” Belle asked, putting her head back through the door, “and who is your counselor?”

“My name’s Cecil Howard. I’m not a camper, ma’am. I got a ride out here from Georgia, see. These folks picked me up back on the road and I don’t mean to stop long, neither. I’m on my way to New Mexico.”

She had her mind on other things. “Do you happen to know exactly where my niece went?”

“Jeanette? I think she went thataway.” Cecil pointed to a path that led into the woods beyond the pecan trees.

Belle straightened up. “Was she with him? Drew Parks?”

“Yes, she sure was.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Well go on to vespers, son. Don’t be hanging around Miss Jeanette’s cabin any more.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t. Have no intention of it.”

“Good.” Belle hurried over to the path.

Cecil took a breath as he watched the trees close around her. She might have been a rabbit, the way she bent forward, her round tail sticking up. He looked back at the truck, figured there was no chance of getting any farther on the road tonight, and sat down on Jeanette’s porch to think about his plans.

In his back pocket was a letter from the girl he intended to reach before the end of the week:

Dear Cecil,
I am not very happy in this place, but when I think about you and how you are so kind, it is enough to make me cry with happiness. It is very hot and dry here. Even if I could have a garden I couldn’t bend over far enough to plant things but they don’t let us garden since there is not enough water and we already have to take three minute showers.

I’m getting out on June 1 if everything comes out all right (ha ha) and the address of the new place is Sunshine House, 145 Eureka Trail, Albuquerque. So come as soon as you can and I will be waiting for you, sans baby, since it will be in foster care. I promise I will not sign anything final until you get here.

All my love,

Maria

Cecil had never laid eyes on Maria, only written to her c/o the Branton, Georgia, Public Library Pen Pal Program, but he pictured her as a beautiful person about his age sitting beside a cactus in a hot desert garden, one soft hand across her swollen stomach. Now he was on his way to rescue her and her child. That was his plan, at least, though he’d already come out of his way just by accepting a ride to Tennessee. What would their meeting be like? He saw himself stepping in between Maria and the sun and saying, “I’m here. I’m going to take care of you and that baby of yours, and you won’t have to worry about a darn thing.”

“I really am coming, Maria,” he thought as he sat on Jeanette’s porch, “I really am coming, but this was the only ride I could get and now I’m stuck here for tonight.”

A bell began to ring. “Vespers!” shouted the softball players across the field, and they crowded together and began walking in the same direction. Cecil watched them go, then stood up and started after them.

He brushed against a shaggy apple tree, its leaves a mix of deep green and pale yellow, no fruit on its branches. Must not be any other apple trees about. Straight in front of him, right beneath a big hill shooting up from the ground like a man’s head, sat a little chapel.

“Hey you! Where’s your shirt?” asked a young man standing by the chapel bell. He wore a whistle around his neck. “You can’t go in to vespers like that.”

“I reckon I got it too dirty to wear.”

“Then go on get another shirt, boy. Don’t be coming down here half naked. Which cabin you in?”

“I—” Cecil gestured back toward the hill.

“Oh, up there in Enoch. Where’s your sense? Go in my cabin—it’s the one behind the latrine. Borrow a shirt from my dresser. Not my Vols shirt. And give me the shirt right back after vespers!”

Cecil moved through the crowd to the cabin. It sat in long shadows, under oaks and more pecans. He opened the screen door and slipped in quickly.

The bunks were simple mattresses on metal frames. Each one had a sleeping bag rolled up at the foot. Each one had a striped grey and white pillow. On a trunk at the far left end of the cabin sat a transistor radio playing something religious, and next to the radio lay a pile of T-shirts, size X-tra large, three pairs of rolled-up socks, and a pair of black sports sandals.

There were some pictures, too. One was of a girl. Cecil couldn’t see her well in the shadows. He hesitated for a second, then picked it up and walked back into the light. The girl was pretty. She had long blond hair and heavy bangs. Her eyes were sort of turned up, her teeth white. Could Maria look like this? On the back was written, “To Franklin, Love Delphi.” Cecil smiled at the girl and hated to set her back down alone in the dark on that guy’s trunk in this place. He put the picture in his pocket next to the letter from Albuquerque and went on to vespers wearing a plain white T-shirt he’d found at the bottom of the pile.

The chapel was a huge, dark, wood-paneled room with big screens for windows and a stone fireplace at the front. He sat down on a wooden folding chair near the back, next to a blond boy with a red face and cracked lips. You could see that he’d recently grown about a foot. The skin on his knees was pink and smooth. His hands looked too large for him.

“You like this camp?” the boy asked.

“Guess so. Never been to another.”

“This is the best I been to so far. What cabin you in?”

“Well, Jonah, I guess. I just got here.”

“I’m in Ezekiel.” The boy cracked his knuckles. “I’m glad I’m not in Jonah, ain’t y’all’s counselor that Franklin over there with the big stupid whistle? I heard y’all take those 4:30 a.m. hikes most every day.”

“Sounds nasty,” said Cecil.

“I’m in the Scouts. You in the Scouts?”

“Used to be,” said Cecil. “I hate the Scouts.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

The boy sighed, then looked around and started a similar conversation with the girl on his other side. While they waited, it turned dark outside. No light remained but the big hanging light inside the chapel, shaped like a globe.

“All right, young people,” said a pudgy black-headed man standing up to the polished wooden pulpit. “Brother Gratian’s going to deliver the Word of the Lord tonight. I’m just going to open with prayer. I want each and every one of you to pray that the Lord will speak something to your heart tonight, something that will change you forever. Pray with me now.”

A quiet fell across the room, a quiet like first sleep. The man prayed. Cecil didn’t really listen, except when the man said, “Lord, forgive our wandering hearts. Draw us to you, O Lord.”

“I ought to get on my way,” thought Cecil. “I ought to be getting on my way out West.” Outside, the frogs sang loudly.

The prayer stopped and the man raised his head and sat down. Then, from the back of the room came another man, just as black-headed but much taller, with broad, thin shoulders and a long neck and low-hanging belly.

“Thank you, Dean,” he said when he got up to the pulpit. “You know, it’s a little funny sometimes to hear Dean call me ‘brother’ and reflect on the fact that he is indeed my brother, my earthly brother, and yet that you all are my brothers and sisters. Am I right? Yes, I am right. Folks, young people, am I a good man?”

There was a nervous pause. “Yes, Brother Gratian,” said a girl in the front with braces on her teeth. “You are.”

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Kenna Drender.”

“Kenna, why do you think I’m a good man?”

She said something in such a low voice that Cecil couldn’t hear.

“Well!” Brother Gratian practically shouted the word. “That’s nice of you to say so, Kenna, but what if I was to tell you I’m a murderer? I killed a man. You still think I’m nice? No, I reckon you don’t. In fact, you want to run out that door, don’t you, so you can call your mama and tell her to climb in her automobile and come after you? Don’t want to be friends with me no more. Because I am a dangerous man. Am I right, y’all?”

Some of the boys laughed, but Brother Gratian paid no attention. “It happened quite a few years ago, you see. I killed a good man, tortured him and watched the breath and blood slowly ebb, ebb, ebb, ebb from his pain-racked body. I looked on without mercy, I turned away from him without regret. I thought I was innocent, but his blood is on my hands.”

Everyone in the room hushed. “I killed a man,” said Brother Gratian. His hands shook as he lifted them. “But so did all of you kill him. Kenna Drender and”—he pointed to a boy in the front—”that young man there, I don’t know your name yet, son, but I’ll learn it, and John Evan over there, and even my own two sweet baby girls, Jeanette and Delphi. We all killed him, every one of us. Drove spikes through his hands and feet. And the blood ran down his cheeks from the thorns of his mock crown.

“You say, ‘How, Brother Gratian? I was not there the day that Christ Jesus died.’ But I say to you, young people, we were all there. With our sin we nailed him to a cross. And with his death he paid out our debt to God for all that filthy, disgusting, murderous sin.

“You say, ‘How, Brother Gratian? I haven’t sinned that much.’ But listen, young people, you got to look in your heart. What’s there? What’s behind the face you show to the world? Is there rage? Is there jealousy? Is there lust? Is there a desire to be your own savior, to do works of righteousness in order to save yourself or your sister or your brother—when really we’re all doomed to perish without Jesus there to snatch us from the Devil’s jaws?

“Yes, there is, because we all have sin in our hearts. And when Jesus filled his burning lungs to gasp, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,’ who do you think he was talking about?

He looked around, raised his eyebrows for a second, and sighed. “And all you in this room. We all killed him. He forgave all of us.”

There was a sharp smell in the chapel, pine wood and young sweat. Cecil felt a pain at the back of his neck, as though someone had yanked him up like a cat. He stared at the preacher’s lips, which kept opening and closing, and for another moment all he could hear in the room was the slow whine of a girl beginning to cry.

Outside, an owl hooted. At the back of the chapel a door opened and Brother Gratian stopped in the middle of his sentence and took a deep breath. All the young heads in the room, those baby faces on grown bodies, turned to look. Belle came in, her short grey hair sticking up and her mouth set straight. Behind her walked Jeanette, staring at the floor. Where was Drew?

“Have a seat, honeybun,” said Brother Gratian. “Glad you finally decided to join us.” Jeanette nodded at her father and slipped onto a back row across from Cecil. She didn’t look at him, but he knew something was wrong. Her long hair was kinky and wet. She had grass on the backs of her bare calves and heels. She stared straight down, her mouth as tight as a seam in her white face. Cecil watched her until the sermon was over and the singing started. “This World Is Not My Home,” “Jesus, Name Above All Names,” “Beautiful Savior,” “We Are One in the Spirit.”

Jeanette didn’t sing. She sat as still as the dirt dug from a grave. Then suddenly she got up and walked to the front alone. She walked right to the pulpit all by herself and stood before her own father.

He pulled a piece of grass out of her hair and said something to her in a gentle voice.

Cecil felt a terrible, terrible need. He hardly knew Jeanette, he’d only met her that afternoon, and yet he couldn’t bear to see her alone up there kneeling. It was the loneliest sight he’d ever seen, her with her shoulders shaking and her daddy leaning over her. “Come!” something said. He stood up and jumped forward as if somebody had pinched him. He practically pushed Jeanette sideways to kneel beside her. She smelled like wet grass and crushed mint leaves. Their bare arms touched.

“Son,” said Brother Gratian hastily, looking down at him with lifted eyebrows while Jeanette began to sob and moan—”It’s all my fault! I drove my precious Drew away.”

“Son,” said Brother Gratian, beginning again, “do you come today to repent of your sins and accept the Lord Jesus?”

Cecil stammered. “Mostly, uh, yes sir, I believe I do.”

“Then pray this prayer with me.” Two heavy weights fell upon Cecil then, one pair of hands on his shoulders and another on his head. He closed his eyes and repeated Jeanette’s father’s words, and then he heard feet shuffling up behind him. Others had come to be saved.

After a few seconds the burden of hands lifted from his head and shoulders and he opened his eyes again. But Jeanette was no longer beside him. He twisted around and saw that the back door of the chapel stood open. She had slipped away, but he was trapped by the small crowd and couldn’t escape to reach her.

Even when the singing and praying had finished and he could go out in the dark to search for her—well, then he couldn’t get to her! He found her cabin windows lit, but the shutters were drawn and others were already inside talking. He heard snatches of their conversation: “By their fruits ye shall know them,” Jeanette’s aunt said, and Brother Gratian said, “It’s a good thing we found out about that Drew before it was too late, before he got our little girl in real trouble.” Below their voices he heard Jeanette’s soft crying.

Cecil figured he’d find a place to sleep, not far away, and help Jeanette in the morning. So he settled down on the ground again, next to a creek that cut its way down the hill above her cabin. All night he slept soundly, no longer thinking about Maria, not wondering when he’d reach Albuquerque, not remembering the photograph in his pocket nor even considering that he might now be bound for heaven. Yet Brother Gratian had said that he was—right after that brief prayer in the chapel: “Son, you have been redeemed and justified, signed, sealed and bound up for glory. Amen.”

Betty S. Carter is the author of two novels, I Read It in the Wordless Book (Baker) and The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave (Harold Shaw), and has just completed a third, from which this story is taken.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Muriel Sparks’s third novel, the macabre but sharply witty Memento Mori (1959), has three epigraphs; the first two by Yeats and Traherne are about old age, while the third from The Penny Catechism is as follows:

Q. What are the four last things to be ever remembered?
A. The four last things to be ever remembered are Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.

Sparks, who was 39 before she published any fiction, had converted to Roman Catholicism five years before, calling the church “something to measure from” rather than a direct source of inspiration. But the “four last things” are not listed as such in Scripture, as eschatology had been developed by that very church out of Jesus’ references to apocalypse (largely in Matthew 24-25), bits of Isaiah and Daniel, and especially the Book of Revelation.

Sparks might well have added an epigraph from the psychology of C. G. Jung, for in this novel all her characters are not merely old, but some are senile; and Jung held the view that anyone in old age who did not focus on the goal of death was probably neurotic. By Jung’s definition, most of Sparks’s characters are.

This aging circle of old friends and rivals lives in the quarrelsome past; they prolong old literary arguments and jealousies, jockey to inherit wealth, snipe at society and one another, employ silly substitutes for former sexual vitality, collect encyclopedic but insignificant research on the process of aging, and when blackmailed, either keep or reveal secrets the reader judges to be trivial. In short, these elders meditate on everything except their own imminent deaths.

Besides this cluster of superficial friends and kin in the 75 to 85 age bracket, 12 old ladies (called by nurses “the Grannies”) survive but wet their beds in the government-subsidized Maud Long Medical Ward. The dozen includes Miss Jean Taylor, formerly a maid-companion and acquaintance of that larger senior group still able to live independently outside old-age institutions. Both Taylor and retired Chief Inspector Henry Mor-timer receive the whispered fears of the rest as, one by one, they begin receiving phone messages from an anonymous caller who says only, “Remember you must die!” and then hangs up. To every person, the caller reveals a different tone, accent, apparent age, or class.

After Dame Lettie Colson is bludgeoned to death during a random robbery, police try to link these spreading telephone calls to some actual stalker preying on the elderly, but wiretaps and detective work fail. Both Mortimer and Taylor decide the strange caller must be Death himself, or else a personification rising from the subconscious of each victim on whom death is persistently laying claim, despite their denials of mortality.

During his own conscientious investigation, policeman Mortimer remarks that if he had his life to live over, he would “compose himself every night by practicing the remembrance of death,” because that practice intensifies life. “Without it,” he adds, “you might as well live on the whites of eggs.”

And when one visitor to the old ladies’ home, who is also plagued by the unknown caller, suggests that Jean Taylor’s quick mind with its history of sophistication must hate to be remanded by arthritis to this collection of drooling, incoherent wards of the state, she calls those other 11 grannies her own “memento mori—like your phone calls.”

Supernatural into natural

However gloomy this plot summary may sound, Memento Mori is an amusing novel in Evelyn Waugh style, affirming life by showing this last stage either deepened or wasted, produced by a writer who has always been preoccupied with metaphysical questions of good and evil.

Sparks often introduces the supernatural into everyday settings, as if (since the two planes coexist side by side) sometimes the membrane between them would be bound to break—a premise applied by Flannery O’Connor in her own fiction. Sparks, for example, brings Satanism into the suburbs in The Ballad of Peckham Rye. In one of her stories, as cynics are conducting a tawdry Nativity play, a real and irritable angel bursts in.

This intrusion of supernatural into natural seems, once permitted at all, to become recurrent with writers, and not simply in Frank Peretti’s sagas of demonic warfare. In my novel Souls Raised from the Dead, once I had written one scene in which a possible “ghost” (the dead Miss Lila Torrido) appears while Mary Grace Thompson is dying, it became inevitable that the restless spirit of Tamsen Donner should haunt many pages of the next novel, The Sharp Teeth of Love, as it is inevitable that death and love are every serious writer’s primary subjects. Ghosts themselves are contagious scene stealers, appearing, for example, in the novels of Reynolds Price, entire story collections by Alison Lurie and Edith Wharton, in Voltaire’s Semiramus, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, and the work of Toni Morrison, Randall Kenan, and many other African-American writers, even as a sense of the revitalized presence of the late Joy Davidman in C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed.

Whether readers decide such ghosts are actual spirits or only psychological projections matters less than the intended light the real as well as fictional death casts back onto life itself. Though one of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims warns that “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily,” Socrates did not flee Athens despite Crito’s advice, and Jesus moved straight ahead to Jerusalem and Gethsemane. Jung’s opinion about confronting one’s own impending death is shared by Kierkegaard, who—finding an advantage in our normal death-fearing despair with all its risk of meaninglessness—suggests that from that precipice man might “leap” and “fall into the open arms of God.”

Two local deaths

On one Sunday in the spring of 1993, I was driving home from church down the narrow rutted road in Chatham County, North Carolina, that we shared with neighbors, when I was stopped by my husband’s waving arms. “Frank died,” he said tersely. “Can you sit with Lib till the undertaker comes?”

This couple had been our good neighbors ever since we had bought land here a decade before, land that had once been part of a larger tract owned by Lib’s father. When we moved into an existing small house on those acres of pasture and forest, we must have seemed helpless city folks; but their natural kindness embraced us nonetheless, advised us on well pumps and feed dealers, sent our loose dogs home, shared garden produce.

Lib and Frank, then in their seventies, had lived through a long marriage with its good and hard times. During these later, harder days, his emphysema sometimes frustrated a once-active Frank; nursing him while coping with her own ailments had also made Lib weary. When his condition worsened, I served as witness on the day he signed his living will to reject extreme resuscitation measures. On that day he seemed irascible, mistrustful, as if the paper gave permission for spouse and hospice to rush him to the grave.

Now he had died at home as he preferred. I went indoors to where Lib sat like a guard by the hospital bed, watching the sheet-covered features of her husband. Although as a child I had said farewell to grandparents who then died overnight, had hugged my recuperating father only to learn by phone that he did not survive to the next dawn, I had by now reached the age at which burgeoning cancers and waning hearts were killing my own former schoolmates; this was my first experience of sitting with the widow and the newly dead—a vigil that for a generation earlier had been commonplace.

For an hour or so we talked about Frank, who had “died so easily,” just between spoonfuls of Jell-O being slipped into his mouth. There were memories of early marriage, golf games, other houses and jobs in other cities, baseball, their inability to have children, special vacations, his love of chocolate, and his fatal love of unfiltered cigarettes.

Gone from this history was any recollection of how illness had lately made him cross. If the dying are said in the end to review their own lives, so survivors also sort through the years, and favorably, as if the corpse might overhear. Selectively, the slate is wiped clean, the sum of good increased. At one point, Lib suddenly leaned forward, pulled down the sheet, and kissed Frank’s cooling forehead.

We Christians still meditating on the last things draw comfort when we remember that Jesus himself was no stoic on the cross.

Then she said softly, “I have always loved you,” and covered his face again.

Afterward, in a buzz of crowded activity, the undertakers came to wheel out the body, hospice workers to flush prescription pills down the commode into the septic tank, men to roll away the rented bed and oxygen equipment, until the room was suddenly empty of the whole experience. Frank would be cremated, his ashes retained until the urn eventually could be propped between Lib’s embalmed hands—I do not know if this was done when she died 18 months later.

Neither had a dramatic death; neither took a stirring nor quotable departure toward Rabelais’s “great perhaps,” but they had left for me a local parallel to Goethe’s Baucis and Philemon, and a reminder of his words in Elective Affinities, “The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be charged through all eternity.”

How to die now

Montaigne once wanted to produce a book of real and literary deaths that “in teaching men to die should after teach them to live.”

In 1980, Norman and Betty Donaldson compiled 300 real deaths in How Did They Die?—an alphabetical chronology stretching from Socrates to Elvis Presley. Their pages primarily make readers contemplate the contrast between pre-antibiotic deathbeds at home versus today’s choices of high-tech hospitals (where 50 percent of Americans died in 1949 and 80 percent do now) or Dr. Kevorkian’s oxygen-stealing machine; choices among extreme unction, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages, or Raymond Moody’s near-death experiences (familiarly known now as ndes); between the mossy country churchyard and today’s perpetual-care parks where flat headstones make grass cutting easy for power mowers; between those who have died accepting God’s mystery and those others accepting some other metaphysic—reincarnation, New Age karma, whatever.

During the nineteenth century, physicians encouraged to prescribe narcotics for the dying were said to engage in “obstetrics for the soul”; today lawyers and doctors more typically argue over how much more humanely we euthanize dogs and cats.

Death and church

Let it be said straightaway that we children who grew up among Associate Reformed Presbyterians had memento mori impressed on us officially every seventh day and subliminally during nightly prayer: “if I should die before I wake.” We were admonished young to work, for the night is coming, to remember our Creator in the days of our youth, and so on. Although in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had not one word to say about death, and although our radio heroes regularly escaped death to fight crime again in next week’s sequel, Sunday school made vivid to us how Stephen went down under stones, made clear to us also that the head of John the Baptist could not be reattached.

My lifelong “remembering” since then has run the gamut. I tried the American Society for Psychical Research, but lost patience with Ian Stevenson and those reincarnated (previously wealthy) children in India. Bridey Murphy and the Fox sisters proved fake. Every photo of ectoplasm always looked like damaged film. Even now, when insomniac, I listen to Art Bell’s wee-hours broadcasts from Nevada, on which he frequently interviews time travelers, witches, ufo witnesses, Big Foot survivors, and alien abductees; but I do not phone in for details. Neither Houdini nor those whom I loved, once deceased, have ever come back bearing news. Of course, kin and old friends appear in my dreams, where they always seem healed, whole, and happy while they walk along tropical beaches—but so what?

No, after transmigration and Freud’s Thanatos; after the crystal balls, Ouija boards, hellfire preachers, eternal recurrence, Buddhist reabsorption, automatic writing, magnetic lees, druid monoliths, table tipping; after Hades, Sheol, and Gehenna; beyond J. B. Rhine, Colin Wilson, Edgar Casey, Hal Lindsey, and Shirley MacLaine; after Camus’s weary Sisyphus gives up; after Marcus Aurelius plus the stoicism of Ecclesiastes wears thin (these being the most appealing alternatives), there is no place for this aging Death-Rememberer to go but home to the New Testament.

Koheleth or Christ?

Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, concludes, “I think it is very hard for secular men to die.” He did die, of cancer, shortly after the book was published.

So did Dostoevsky die three months after finishing The Brothers Karamazov, which opens with a New Testament epigraph and closes with an affirmation of hope for eternal life.

Ars moriendi—the art of dying—and its parallel, the art of mourning the dead, still seem in the end to rely on secular stoicism or religious faith. For example, Sherwin B. Nuland’s 1994 bestseller How We Die is careful, scientific, even ethical; but it is not religious. And when in 1997 professional poet and also professional undertaker Thomas Lynch published his essay collection about life, death, and faith, the book was criticized in the New York Times Book Review from the viewpoint of a secular humanist who preferred Jessica Mitford’s version.

But we Christians still meditating on the last things draw comfort when we remember that Jesus himself was no stoic on the cross. He felt despair and dread before and during the crucifixion; he cried out his challenging question to God as have King David, Job, Ivan Ilych, and millions upon millions. Stoicism is not required of believers, but hope is offered. Jane Kenyon, dead before fifty, ends one poem thus: “and God, as promised, proves / to be mercy clothed in light.”

If I cannot refute the stoics, nor shrug off cosmic indifference, if I cannot cheer up Beckett’s lonely characters waiting onstage, not concur with Freud about the infantilism of religion, discard it, and then advance bravely into “hostile life,” neither can these refute my sometimes wavering hope. And my emphasis is on hope, hope in God’s mercy rather than fear of eternal punishment, which worried even ancient Egyptian kings and made Virgil separate the good from the justly punished dead. It is our sadism, not evangelical Christianity, that relishes medieval and hellish visions of torment, and it is our hubris that in imagination tests and tunes the personal harp and mentally tries on well-suited wings. Only if ends justify means can we (on the far side of the veil) take pleasure in separating sheep from goats forever, after we have finished (on the near side of that veil) making war on infidels and burning heretics at the stake.

Spiritual journeys into the beyond were nearly as frequent in the Middle Ages as those taken now during flat ekg moments before a defibrillator blasts the heart into rhythm again. In their context, medieval soul travelers often saw on their journeys ample fire and brimstone; in ours, the dying patient typically rushes through some final birth/death canal toward light. Doubters, of course, dismiss testimony about nde as a subjective response to oxygen deprivation. To them, such anecdotal evidence is as unpersuasive here as in second-hand, multiple translations of Saint Paul. Even Hans KŸng, in Eternal Life, distinguishes death as the final destination from the process leading to it, dying cell by cell, and believes most of Moody’s nde samples have experienced the first stage of that process but not the last condition.

Remember you must live

Memento mori, then, commands me not so much to dwell on heaven, hell, or the millennium, nor to contemplate the whole world’s eventual death in apocalypse, but to value today’s immediate gift of life against the backdrop of transience and God’s eternity. Though Jesus acknowledged an end time, his emphasis was on daily forgiveness and hourly love.

The earliest Gospel, Mark, takes only 11 verses to summarize all postresurrection events—in the long version of the ending—and it ends with the apostles at work in this world. The earliest New Testament Easter story (1 Corinthians 15) says little about the mechanics of how Christ died and then came back, but concentrates more on what his overcoming of death should mean in human lives. And that elaborator Luke, who will double everybody else’s angels at every opportunity, relocates Jesus’ ascension to Bethany but closes by emphasizing the praise and worship of the 11 left behind. (Naturally, he cannot resist adding more angels plus a spread of clouds in Acts 1:10, but the heavenly message puts a quick end to sky gazing; clearly the coming Pentecost is more important.) And gospel writer John shows no interest at all in postresurrection space travel. Jesus at the end of the Fourth Gospel is far too busy to take airy flight because, by patient repetition, he keeps trying to make one thing clear to Peter: “Do you love me? Feed my lambs.”

Memento which dying, then?

For me, as for some characters in my fiction, memento mori is an order to take life as seriously as its Creator did, to apply urgency, to view each day in an eternal context, to live right now the abundant and loving life Christ commanded—and to fail at all these but still to trust in mercy.

Except for this heightened commitment and purpose provided by our sure mortality, I believe that in ways beyond my understanding God has in Christ defeated the former annihilating power of death.

Oh, that’s easy to say. Too easy. Vague. Facile.

Such trust comes harder when tested against real dying. When Bob, my Early American Literature colleague in the University of North Carolina’s English Department—a friend of 30 years—progressed downward by slow medical degrees from finding a lump in the groin to lymphoma, then up by way of successful chemotherapies and optimistic MRI reports, he experienced all that intensity of life measured against the risk of death. He was free to retire, to write more essays on the books he loved, to travel to Spain.

But before too long, in disguise and by sabotage, the cells in his lungs went malignant. When no more cure was available, he received at home old friends and kin and former students. There was time to laugh and talk, to share many good memories, to omit any pretense that he would long survive.

Those good times ran out. When last I came, he had turned into a skeleton thinly wrapped in yellowing pastry, eyes already closed, the breath whapping in and out with a great suck and labored release. Having been told that hearing is the last sense to shut down, I sat by his shell through which air slammed in and out, and reminded his ear of affections and blessings. It was like trying to talk to a bellows.

The next day he was gone, having told us no more about death than all the 300 recorded in the pages of How Did They Die? And at the memorial service in a bland campus auditorium, I swallowed hard and read aloud as he had wished Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death.” Cole Porter recordings were played, the Lord’s Prayer murmured. By the podium, Bob’s color photo—pink and precancer, young and already long ago—was displayed.

Not a churchgoer, Bob was perhaps not technically a Christian except in his behavior, but I have continued to remember his particular death (and the bravery by which an excellent teacher continued to teach us who would outlive him) in the context of Goethe’s Faust. The play opens with a God-Mephistopheles wager much like the opening of Job, and it ends with Faust, who richly deserves all punishment, being granted mercy instead. When Goethe was 82, he emphasized that this salvation came not because it was earned but “by the divine grace vouchsafed to us.”

“Say to the moment, ‘Stay!’ Thou art so fair!” Goethe’s line captures the intensity with which we transient mortals who know we are transient must surely seize the day. And “He who strives mightily we are allowed to save,” speaks to that final and mysterious grace that runs to meet all of us prodigal sons and daughters.

Say to the moment, Stay! Strive mightily. Memento mori.

Doris Betts is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of many novels, including most recently The Sharp Teeth of Love (Knopf). This essay is taken from Things in Heaven and Earth: Exploring the Supernatural, edited by Harold Fickett, Copyright 1998 by Paraclete Press. Used by permission of Paraclete Press, P.O. Box 1568, Orleans MA 62653.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

You’re in the hospital. Your spouse has gone home to take care of the kids; the room is dark; you’re disoriented and doped with painkillers. Medical personnel have been doing strange and inexplicable things to you all day. You wake up at 2 a.m. and find an unfamiliar white-clad figure injecting something into your iv line. Do you (a) close your eyes and drift back off in childlike trust, or (b) sit up and bellow, “Stop! Stop!”?

It depends on what you’ve been reading. If you are planning a hospital stay anytime soon, don’t put a medical thriller in your overnight bag. The doctor as compassionate healer, worthy of unquestioning trust, has been taking a beating ever since Robin Cook’s Coma hit the shelves in 1977, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.

“When a doctor does go wrong,” Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Watson, “he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” This view of the doctor as occupying a plane above common humanity (Holmes’s opponent in “The Speckled Band,” Dr. Grimesby Roylott, can bend a poker double with his bare hands) persists. But it is not the nerve or the poker-bending muscle that intimidates us layfolk; it’s the knowledge. Only doctors know all the secrets of the body, including the ones they aren’t telling us. We can only hope they put this knowledge to work for us instead of for themselves.

Greed: the great corrupter of the profession. Mainstream medical thrillers—those you are likely to find in what the book trade refers to as the “ABA market” (American Booksellers Association), in contrast to the “cba market” (Christian Booksellers Association)—are almost entirely centered on doctors who use their knowledge for gain. Cook, a physician who has been on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary since he hit the bestseller list, pops out a thriller every year or so, and his string of novels provides a useful sort of index to the depredations of greed.

In 1987’s Outbreak, hemorrhagic fever appears in three separate chains of hospitals that provide an innovative service: managed care. Widespread panic and a sudden drop-off in business follow. Eventually, we discover that a right-wing group of private practitioners is to blame; they have conspired to spread disease in HMOs in an attempt to protect their own patient base. Marissa, Outbreak‘s perky CDC investigator, looks at the head bad guy and sees his “expensive silk shirt, the heavy gold cuff links, the tasseled Gucci loafers. … It all represented the conspicuous consumption of a wealthy doctor, now fearful of the new medical competition, of changing times, of medicine no longer being a seller’s market.”

Greed is also central to 1995’s Contagion, which is practically the same novel in reverse. This time the good guys are the private doctors who’ve been driven out of business by the managed-care giants: specifically, one Jack Stapleton, who lost his ophthalmology practice to the huge for-profit chain AmeriCare. AmeriCare sweeps through Middle America, “gobbling up practices and hospitals with bewildering speed” and destroying the quality of patient care. When odd epidemics start appearing in AmeriCare facilities, Stapleton hunts down the villain: another managed-care chain, spreading germs to put the competitor out of business.

Medical thrillers go through fashions—fetal-tissue research, euthanasia, Ebola, genetic tinkering, managed care—and the current fashion appears to be illegal transplant organs. Take, for example, the most recent novels of doctors-turned-writers Tess Gerritsen and Leonard Goldberg. In Gerritsen’s Life Support, doctors grow genetically altered embryos in the wombs of hired prostitutes. The embryos turn into blobs of tissue studded with dozens of pituitary glands; the doctors abort the pregnancies and then transplant these glands (for a substantial fee) into rich elderly patients who want their youth back. This would work fine, except that Gerritsen’s greedy doctors eventually step over the line by killing a couple of adults, which leads to their detection by a perky female doctor named Toby. And in Goldberg’s Deadly Harvest, a perky female doctor named Joanna goes searching for a liver for her critically ill sister. Instead, she discovers an organization that grows babies for organ donation. “Oh, my God!” screams Joanna. “The children … are being kept like animals, to be sacrificed when needed?” The villain, a greedy doctor, shrugs: “It’s a moneymaker.” Fashions come and go; greed always remains.

Mainstream thrillers show little awareness of the spiritual dimension of greed; Christian thrillers make the spiritual dimension all too visible.

Medical thrillers have only recently appeared in the cba market, and the greater number are written by nondoctors. Alton Gansky’s By My Hands and Marked for Mercy (1996 and 1998 respectively) are billed as medical suspense. By My Hands revolves around the hunt for a mysterious Healer who performs several cures at a local hospital and then disappears; Marked for Mercy deals with physician-assisted suicide. Gansky himself is a pastor, not a doctor, and it shows. In By My Hands, the putative central character is Dr. Rachel Tremaine, a woman surgeon who finds nurses a “chronic annoyance” and treats her patients with “impatience and disdain.” One of those patients turns out to be pastor Adam Bridger. Despite his emergency appendectomy, Bridger visits parishioners in the hospital, convinces a Jehovah’s Witness to accept a blood transfusion, outargues atheists and New Age philosophers, and even convinces the antagonistic Rachel that a minister’s training is just as rigorous as a doctor’s. (“A theological education is not a cakewalk. … Most ministers with doctorates have a working knowledge of Hebrew … Koine Greek … and at least one modern language.” “What’s your point?” Rachel inquires.)

Gansky’s point is clear by the end of the book, when the villain is unmasked: he’s the manager of a traveling word-of-faith evangelist, determined to find the mysterious Healer and make a mint by organizing gigantic healing services. He is, in fact, the ecclesiastical equivalent of an ABA thriller-villain: a man who uses his calling for personal gain. But the novel is church-centered, not doctor-centered. Gansky’s Marked for Mercy makes several good and sometimes unexpected points about physician-assisted suicide, but it’s not a true medical thriller either (even though the central character is a perky female doctor with fawn hair and blue eyes). Rather, it’s a mystery that happens to involve doctors.

Sigmund Brouwer’s Double Helix (1995), on the other hand, features many of the markers of an ABA thriller—an evil doctor who grows babies in surrogate wombs, a maverick independent hero (Slater Ellis), and a perky female investigator named Paige (she isn’t a doctor, but she has spectacular red hair, and legs that go “to her shoulders”). But while the ABA bad guys want money, Van Klees is trying to create a superrace. As he explains to hero Slater Ellis:

“Any genetic change you make in an embryo will be passed on to the next generation. I was laying the groundwork for future scientists to evolve us into superhumans. … In the long run, we can mold the human species to our own vision.”

Van Klees is a more chilling villain than his mainstream counterparts; he’s an actual zealot, driven by something other than gain. But Brouwer is a writer, not a doctor, and Double Helix has more adventure than medicine in it.

Harry Lee Kraus, Jr., a general surgeon who practices in Virginia, wrote the first cba medical thriller, the unfortunately titled Stainless Steal Hearts (1994). The title is supposed to serve as a pun; the villain of the story, cardiothoracic surgeon Michael Simons, is literally “stealing” the hearts of aborted fetuses for his research. The fact that this pun made it into the title of the book points up a difficulty with all of Kraus’s books: He needs a strong editorial hand. His medical scenes are vivid, and he plots well, but his point of view swings wildly back and forth, he inserts large chunks of backstory in the middle of his action, he steps out of his characters to editorialize, and when his bad guys swear, they emit annoying strings of %$#*&.

But Kraus’s medicine (and his capacity for creative paranoia) rivals that of his ABA colleagues. In Stainless Steal Hearts, evil doctor Simons theorizes that hearts from late second-trimester abortions could be transplanted into infants born with congenital defects. To test this procedure, he teams up with a local abortionist to obtain fetal hearts. Together, the two of them encourage women to wait as late as possible before aborting; Simons then experiments on the still-living fetuses.

What’s behind the evil? Like Brouwer’s Van Klees, Simons isn’t driven by greed alone. In fact, he’s developed an interest in New Age writings.

At first he began with some meditation techniques that he learned at a local university seminar. Occasionally during a time of meditation, or when he was envisioning himself in a position of great influence, he would gain the impression of an idea or thought that seemed to originate outside his body. Later he began having a strong sense of guidance in some of his research.

Money considerations aren’t completely absent from Kraus’s thrillers. In Fated Genes, pediatric surgeon Weber Tyson rations care for retarded infants, justifying himself with the explanation that “debilitated infants won’t have to live on as needless burdens on an already overtaxed society.” But it turns out that Tyson is being manipulated by Lenore Kingsley, president of United Biotechnical Industries. Lenore is also a Satanist who worships with a local coven, even bearing several children for sacrifice in Satanic rituals, and Tyson is simply an instrument for a demonic plan.

In Lethal Mercy, the spiritual evil gets even more obvious. As Simons (making a repeat appearance) operates on the son of his enemy, a demonic creature clings to his back and whispers in his ear; overhead, an angelic warrior stands ready to protect the child. And in The Stain, Kraus’s latest book, a rich philanthropist hires doctors to create clones. But the intent behind this high-dollar project is purely spiritual: to clone dna found on the shroud of Turin, to prove that Jesus was simply human, nothing more.

Like all too many cba novelists, both Gansky and Kraus tend to insert “anchor” characters, ideal Christians who don’t doubt, and who serve as a “normative” voice. Belle, the praying grandmother in Fated Genes, Kerri, the trauma nurse in The Stain, pastor Paul Carpenter in Marked for Mercy—they are capable of explaining God’s will, too virtuous to be real (“With Kerri Barber, prayer was like breathing. … She enjoyed an ongoing spontaneous consciousness of God’s presence in her life that many believers yearn for”), and far too ready to supply mini-Bible studies on demand (“Find Philippians chapter one,” Paul Carpenter tells a character, in the time-honored tradition of Christian fiction. “Do you want to read it out loud, or shall I?”).

But these books are, after all, thrillers. The characters are no more exaggerated than Cook’s wicked managed-care providers, happily spreading 1918 flu virus acquired from a frozen Eskimo corpse; or Goldberg’s spectacularly brilliant, beautiful, and courageous medical examiner, Joanna Blalock. The true distinctive between mainstream and Christian medical thrillers seems to lie in the deepest motivations of the evil doctors. In the ABA, the dollar is the ultimate villain. In the cba, Satan always lurks beyond the dollar.

This is perfectly good theology. After all, in the medical-thriller villain, we see the reflection of the serpent’s face. “Know enough,” he whispered to Eve, “and you too will have the powers of a god. Know enough, and you can satisfy your own desires.” The self-serving doctor, using knowledge to acquire instead of to heal, responds to this same temptation. The greedy physician—like the greedy lawyer, ad executive, or church administrator—is, ultimately, the servant of the Destroyer.

But how is this theme best worked out in fiction? Mainstream thrillers show little awareness of the spiritual dimension of greed; Christian thrillers make the spiritual dimension all too visible. The battle with greed is a spiritual battle, yes, but the battlefield is not the coven down the road. The fiercest skirmishes are not fought between angels and demons, hovering in the air above the operating table. The battlefield is the human heart; the war is fought out with human hands; and any novelist ignores the human face of evil at his own peril.

Consider Kraus’s The Stain, which begins (like Cook’s Contagion) with a managed-care giant taking over a private practice. Dr. Seth Berringer lands himself in a mess, trying to protect himself in the face of managed care’s unreasonable demands. Is this a spiritual battle? Of course it is. But Kraus subordinates it to the novel’s central plot, the demonic attempt to clone Jesus and destroy Christianity. As a matter of fact, when Berringer becomes a Christian, his managed-care problems seem to dissolve. He has been worried about finding work outside the Coast Care system; after his conversion, he says confidently, “I’ll be returning to work soon. This town hasn’t completely abandoned me. You’ll see. Besides, God is in control now.”

But surely a Christian medical thriller should deal, at least in passing, with the hard question: How does a Christian physician operate day-to-day in a system that defines itself by profit? Such a medical system may not have Satanists lighting candles in the corridors, but the serpent is certainly slithering through its halls. The recognition that greed, whatever form it takes, is itself a demonic force—this, in the end, is what will separate the Christian medical thriller from its mainstream equivalent.

Susan Wise Bauer’s second novel, Though the Darkness Hide Thee, was recently published by Multnomah. She teaches literature at the College of William and Mary.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.