Election night, 1980. The Washington Hilton was awash with blue balloons, white streamers, and red-faced evangelicals floating through the ballrooms, sipping ginger ale, and savoring victory. Men and women more accustomed to singing “Nearer My God to Thee” now cheered lustily to “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Between the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan, revival was on its way to the U.S.; “Welcome to the Great Awakening of the 1980s,” enthused one commentator.

Now, nearly eight years later, the sun is setting on the Reagan years—and on the hopes of once-euphoric evangelicals as well. Despite unprecedented access to the Oval Office, most items on the evangelical social agenda have been either defeated or shelved.

Prayer-in-school advocates have been left with nothing but the dubious comfort of the President’s assurance that “as long as there are math tests, children will pray in schools.” Courts have struck down even modest efforts to gain a moment of silence.

Hopes for a quick reversal of Roe v. Wade were dashed when Judge Robert Bork was chewed up by the pit bulls of the U.S. Senate; a powerful liberal coalition simply outgunned conservative lobbying groups. Though some progress has been made in curbing federal funding, abortions continue at the horrifying rate of 1.5 million per year.

On other fronts, the results have been no less frustrating. The antipornography campaign can claim a study commission, but no legislation. Despite zealous antidrug campaigns, crack and cocaine continue to kill our youth. Government grants subsidizing 7.1 million children a year—nearly one-half born out of wedlock—erode the traditional family, while long-promised welfare reforms languish in the bureaucracy.

The ACLU has bested us on the judicial front. We may have a Christian in the White House, but that does not mean we can hang the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall. The process of expunging Christian symbols from public places—in the name of pluralism—continues unabated in the courts.

Perhaps the most shocking failure of these past eight years has been the near tripling of the national debt. Conservative Christians have been either unwilling or unable to exert the influence needed to restrain our nation’s binge at the public trough—immorally saddling future generations with our debts.

But the real test of political influence is often at the grassroots. And there we have seen an alarming erosion. Recently, Christian groups in Texas aggressively organized to oppose pari-mutuel betting; in Virginia, they united forces to defeat the lottery. In both Bible Belt states the referenda passed overwhelmingly.

Such defeats have sobered many Christian leaders. One conceded, “Ten years ago many of us had the mistaken idea that we could turn the country around quickly.…” In the ultimate symbol of the changing times, Jerry Falwell, shrewd architect of the conservative Christian political resurgence, announced that he was leaving politics to return to his “first love: the pulpit.”

Many attribute the evangelical decline to self-inflicted wounds: excesses like those of the televangelists have soured public attitudes, undoing in a few months all the influence gained in the past decade.

Others note that perhaps there just are not as many evangelicals as once was thought—or if there are, they are far from a monolithic voting bloc, as Pat Robertson has discovered.

Some question whether there ever was a political mandate for the social change we sought. Theologian Elwood McQuaid has argued that the issues that elected Reagan were the economy and inflation; abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment influenced only a tiny minority of voters. The much-bally-hooed “moral revolution” of 1980 was largely the figment of wishful thinking: We made the classic mistake of believing our own propaganda.

But these are only partial explanations. The deeper reason for the evangelical movement’s decline, I believe, lies in its failure from the beginning to grasp a basic truth: It is impossible to effect genuine political reform through legislation without at the same time reforming individual—and eventually national—character.

The great nineteenth-century British statesman William Wilberforce well understood this. At the outset of his campaign for abolition, he wrote in his journal, “God has set before me two great objectives: the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” By the latter he meant not table etiquette, but reforms in the widespread attitudes and values by which his countrymen actually lived.

Wilberforce thus worked on both fronts, battling the slave trade for 20 years in Parliament, and at the same time campaigning for grassroots moral reform in decadent British society. He knew that the standards of a people have direct public consequences; thus, real political changes cannot take place unless a nation’s character supports them.

Such standards—keeping the law, respecting human life and dignity, loving one’s family, fighting and if necessary dying for national goals, helping the unfortunate, sacrificing for the common good—all these depend directly on such individual virtues as courage, loyalty, charity, compassion, civility, and duty. Paradoxically, while government depends for its success on these elements of individual character, it is virtually powerless to create them in its citizens.

If we continue to ignore this crucial truth we will continue to be frustrated. And conservative Christians will grow increasingly disillusioned; many, I fear, will pull out of politics and retreat to their cloisters, content with saving souls while the ship of state slowly sinks. That would be a consequence far more devastating than the loss of the Reagan revolution.

Christians belong in the political arena, working for both morality and justice in public policies—but without illusions. There are no quick fixes; politics alone cannot hope to change the character of a nation.

So we must dig in for the long haul—and along with our political activities work for a “reformation of manners.” That means influencing not just voting records on Capitol Hill, but the hearts and minds of people across this nation.

Since 1983, the cast of the Saltworks Theater Company has averaged 300 performances a year of their youth-oriented antidrug plays. While the company ranges well beyond its Pittsburgh base, the effects on that city alone have been substantial. According to Michael Flaherty, director of the chemical dependency program at Pittsburgh’s Saint Francis Medical Center, which has helped to underwrite the plays, the city’s drug-abuse problem declined measurably with the emergence of the plays.

The explanation for this success parallels the group’s philosophy of art: a play can move people in ways the most rational lecture by the best-prepared physician cannot. Youth know drugs are dangerous. But in the theater, they feel the power of drugs to shred a healthy family.

Saltworks’s artistic director, Kate McConnell, believes the arts occupy a unique place in God’s creation. After all, says McConnell, the first person in the Bible said to be filled “with the Spirit of God,” was Bezalel, one of the artists God chose to build the ark of the covenant.

She also believes that drawing closer to God through aesthetic experience has been forced to the back seat in an age when rationalism reigns supreme. “Just because something cannot be explained rationally,” she protests, “does not mean it is invalid.”

The perceived primacy of rationalism, she says, has produced a narrow view of Christian theater. To many, true Christian theater forthrightly presents a clear biblical message. But to McConnell, Christian theater is “Christians working out what it means to be faithful in the area of the arts.”

Three Plays, One Message

“Faithfulness in the arts” undergirds Saltworks’s attempt to address the problem of chemical dependency. The company began in 1983 as the brain child of Reid Carpenter, president of the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation and the city’s best-known “networker.” Carpenter linked Saltworks with the Saint Francis Medical Center, a pioneer in the treatment of chemical dependency. (Saint Francis was the first hospital to submit a diagnosis of “alcoholism” on an insurance bill. The bill, however, has never been paid.)

Pittsburgh playwright Gillette Elvgren immersed himself in the medical literature on substance abuse. For an intense month, he observed young patients at Saint Francis struggling with their families to overcome their addiction. He then produced three plays with essentially the same message for different age groups.

Say No, Max, a participation play for elementary students, is the story of 10-year-old Max’s struggle to find acceptance in a new neighborhood without drugs. He is mysteriously transported to a mystical land where he confronts a drug-dealing dragon. The young audience willingly reveals to Max the magic word that slays the deadly beast: No.

Finally Fourteen was written for junior-high students and I Am the Brother of Dragons was written for high-school young people. Each tells the story of a teenager who has succumbed to chemical abuse. Though the plays offer hope, their reality is brutal, as illustrated by Maxine’s soliloquy in Finally Fourteen:

“Mom says she doesn’t want to come home from work anymore because she’s scared of me. Of me! She used to call me her best friend. We used to tell each other secrets.… I’m scared … I thought that using would make me smarter or prettier or more fun. I thought using would make them like me. And now I don’t know if I can stop.”

The five-member cast that performs the three plays samples this reality during a required week of observation at Saint Francis, where young patients wear signs such as “I will self-disclose” and where street clothes, as opposed to pajamas, denote progress.

Is This Christian Theater?

Still, the question remains: Is this Christian theater? The performers are free to share their faith in response to questions after the show. But nowhere in the plays is Christ proclaimed, and this has limited the theater company’s support from the local church community.

Says McConnell, “I don’t like the term ‘Christian theater.’ I think in terms of faithful or unfaithful art. Art either loves and serves the truth, the light who is Christ, or it does not.”

In McConnell’s view, faithful art inevitably moves people closer to God. “Jesus healed people first,” McConnell says, “then he forgave their sins. We hope that through our plays, people see where they are. We hope they can identify the pit and realize there is hope.”

By Randall Frame.

The Mystery Of Grace

Hector Babenco’s film Ironweed is, like Christopher Marlowe’s play Faustus, a tale of pride and rejected forgiveness.

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus made a Satanic pact to receive power and wisdom. When the Devil came to call, friends urged Faustus to repent. But his pride was so great he considered his sins beyond God’s reach. Faustus rejected grace and went to hell.

God’s grace is a mystery: All receive the offer, but only some accept the divine gift. The Father’s chosen ones inevitably come, though sometimes reluctantly.

As in Faustus, pride and grace are key elements in Ironweed, William Kennedy’s adaptation of his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel. Francis Phelan, a bum on the streets of Albany, New York, in 1938, does not make a pact with the Devil, but he has made some fatal errors—fatal to other people. As a boy caught up in the emotions of a teamsters’ strike, he had mortally wounded a scab. As a young father, he had dropped his infant son, who died of a broken neck. Unable to forgive himself, Francis left his family and took to the streets. Now he is haunted by visions of those he has killed.

We join Francis (Jack Nicholson) one cold morning as he sets off to find food, work, and Helen (Meryl Streep), his lover. Helen, a professional singer, has fallen on hard times. We follow them through two pivotal days.

Ironweed is promoted as a love story, and certainly Helen might not have remained alive so long without Francis’s love. They cling to each other as the only remaining bits of meaning in their wasted lives. But love is insufficient to overcome their despair or their enslaving addictions to alcohol.

Francis’s inability to forgive himself drove him from his family. Now he spends much of his time at the local mission where he refuses to respond to the altar call. Like the other bums, he is there for the soup, not the sermon.

Beyond Forgiveness

Francis places himself beyond tangible aspects of grace. On a visit to his family, his wife offers him his old home. But he tells his daughter he is “beyond forgiveness,” and he refuses to consider what a sober family life might mean.

Unlike Francis, Helen is open to grace. She enters a Catholic church and prays before the statue of Saint Joseph. Her confessions is laced with self-justification. “You call them sins. I call them decisions,” she says. Yet somehow, without really understanding grace, Helen receives it. God does not suddenly turn Helen’s life around. But he lays $10 by her knee—money she uses to rent a room where she spends her last hours clean, warm, and listening to the music she loves.

Ironweed is too powerful for casual family viewing. You won’t leave uplifted. This is first-rate American drama, somewhat on the order of Death of a Salesman or The Glass Menagerie. It is more entertaining and palatable than either of those plays, but it is equally incisive.

As Francis rides alone in a boxcar, clutching his bottle of whiskey, a vision appears to him. Sitting on a crate, pouring tea, his wife asks, “What do you need, Francis?” He needs grace—but he asks for a turkev sandwich.

By David Beard, a writer and Christian education director at Trinity Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Bothell, Washington.

Subversive Communication

“IPredict 1990,” the latest album from iconoclastic Christian rocker Steve Taylor, was controversial as soon as it was released. The cover design was mistaken for a tarot card, and the lead song was not understood as satire. Taylor had to telephone 160 Christian bookstores to set the record straight, ct talked to Taylor and asked how he copes with a market that doesn’t understand him.

I grew up in a very conservative church, so I understand the mindset. The problem is that people take things literally. They forget the satirical things Jesus said—like “Take the log out of your own eye before you remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.”

Os Guinness gave a brilliant talk on subversive communication, on how Jesus and the prophets would lead someone one way and then introduce a twist taking another direction—like Nathan telling David a story and then saying, “You are the man.” I hope to carry on that tradition with my music.

Taylor’s lyrics are full of content.

He credits his rational approach to reading Francis Schaeffer and Josh McDowell while a freshman at Biola. At the radical Boulder campus of Colorado University, he put what he had learned to the test.

People in the U.S. no longer have a basic regard for the Bible and what it says. When you’re dealing with people who have contempt for the church, the art forms you use have to be subversive.

Taylor is a conscience for his listeners.

Music is the language of our generation. We listen to musicians where we have stopped listening to politicians and sports figures. Since that’s how it is, music that has something to say can affect the way people think.

Despite his youthful image, Taylor is maturing. We asked the unaskable.

I just turned 30, and I think I should be getting a “real job” sometime. When you look at recording as a career, I believe it will affect the types of things you write; you’re always wondering about commercial acceptance.

I don’t have a contract beyond this record. In six months I can decide if I want to do another record or if it’s time to be a janitor again. I did that while I was a youth pastor and going to school. I actually made more money. So, there is a financial security aspect to falling back on that job. I’m darn good at it.

By David Neff.

Erasing The Missionary Caricature

Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions, by William R. Hutchison (University of Chicago, 227 pp.; $24.95, cloth). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.

Beginning in the 1970s, American historians began to pay attention to a long-neglected subject: missions. Sometimes, as Harvard’s William Hutchison reports, they got a surprise when they did. The caricatures of missionaries presented by modern novels and movies had obscured the thoughtful, able, energetic individuals who led the missions movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Why did historians ignore such an important movement for so long? Embarrassment, answers Hutchison. “The problem has been that the missionaries’ stated purposes, while expressive of service and sacrifice, bespoke a supercilious and often demeaning attitude toward religions that the recipient peoples considered integral to their own cultures. The missionaries … have seemed too admirable to be treated as villains, yet too obtrusive and self-righteous to be embraced as heroes.” Their unremovable offense, kind-hearted and intelligent as they might seem, was that they intended to change others’ religion.

Admiring Portrait

Hutchison’s picture of missionaries is largely an admiring one. He acknowledges that, novels like Michener’s Hawaii to the contrary, nineteenth-century missionaries were often the best and rightest of the American educated elite. The “sensitivity that some mission theorists brought to the dilemmas of cultural interaction was more than just enlightened for its time,” he writes. “Often it was enlightened for any time, our own included.”

In fact, many modern issues were anticipated 100 years ago—debates about imposing American culture, fascination with statistics, and tensions between Europeans and Americans. And missionaries generally were critical of the exploitative political and business interests that went with them throughout the world.

For example, Rufus Anderson, senior secretary of the American Board of Commissionaries for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who Hutchison says dominated American missions in the 1800s, worked tirelessly to persuade missionaries and their boards to proclaim “Christ, not culture.” As soon as local converts could be ordained, he wanted missionaries to pack up and leave.

Such ideas went against the grain of an America that thought of its “Christian culture” as a gift to the world. After Anderson had forced the closing of several mission schools because their purpose seemed to be “civilizing” rather than “evangelizing,” even the New York Times complained. After Anderson was gone, missions returned enthusiastically to the “civilizing” emphasis of schools, hospitals, and agriculture.

Into The Twentieth Century

Hutchison’s history brings us nearly to the present with an account of twentieth-century controversies between evangelical and ecumenical Christians. He recognizes that evangelicals have become the dominant force in missions, largely because leaders in the mainline churches reinterpreted “missions” to mean something earlier Christians would never recognize. They had “effected a decisive break with the past. They had announced, far more distinctly than most of their evangelical counterparts, an unwillingness any longer to work with the rubrics and terminology of the classical era.”

The author makes clear, however, that evangelical missions are not a holdover from the nineteenth century. He credits evangelicals with a genuine concern for building and respecting an indigenous church, and with accepting social action as a partner to evangelism. In the seventies, “an attitude of penitence … modified the triumphalism of a decade earlier.”

Still, Hutchison appears to find the original missionary “offense” troubling: sincere Christian beliefs become a “crusade” to change others’ religion. He seems to vacillate between a wish that this crusade could be humbler and more sensitive to others (as most evangelical missions leaders would say), and a feeling that determination to spread our faith is as inherently offensive to Christ as it is to pluralistic America.

He also fails to consider two important developments: the emergence of a vital worldwide church, and the development of mission agencies within non-Western countries such as South Korea, which heard the gospel from missionaries in the past century. The very existence of these churches is a comment on the effectiveness of the missions movement Hutchison describes. And American mission leaders have received both developments enthusiastically, suggesting they are less interested in American dominance than one might expect from Hutchison’s account.

Evangelicals will not share all of Hutchison’s concerns, but they will feel that they are fairly treated. And most will find, in reading this short, lively book, that they have learned a great deal about their heritage.

What Kind Of God Do You Get From Science?

Cosmic Joy and Local Pain: Musings of a Mystic Scientist, by Harold J. Morowitz (Scribner’s, 303 pp.; $18.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Bill Durbin, Jr., a free-lance writer specializing in issues of science and religion.

Harold Morowitz is a biophysicist with a poet’s heart. Striving to make science accessible and visionary, he compares favorably with other successful popularizers. His latest book is a genuine attempt to “bridge the gulf between religion and science,” to offer a description of God, purpose, and hope by pondering a wide range of scientific knowledge.

To accomplish his task, Morowitz placed himself on an academic’s dream sabbatical: in splendid isolation on a sailboat off the Hawaiian islands. Surrounded by dramatic natural beauty and a personal library—along with just enough mundane goings-on to give his meditations a folksy tone (like loose wires in the engine room and “harbor rats” on the docks)—the scientist shares with us his “spiritual odyssey,” a conceptual search to find “meaning within science.”

The result is a well-arranged tautology. At the outset, Morowitz “goes on record as a pantheist.” He has rejected the personal God of his Jewish heritage in favor of the god of nature described by seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza—a boyhood hero for Morowitz. In the end he finds, predictably, god in nature. He confirms thereby an initial hope: “An intuitive feel that these studies will end up with a friendly view of the universe.”

Interconnected Cosmos

In between, the author provides a good deal of basic science, in terms generally accessible to the lay reader: from principles of thermodynamics to the intricacies of molecular biology; from galaxy formation to weather forecasting; tectonic shifts and quantum leaps; photosynthesis and electromagnetism. Morowitz paints a picture of an “exquisitely” unified cosmos of interlocking “geospheres”—lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and noosphere—which he lyrically compares to the ancient categories of earth, air, water, and fire. His analysis indeed reveals an aweinspiring “interconnectedness” of all things, a “fitness” of the environment, an obvious design in nature.

The physicist finds religion. In the process, he provides the answer to a prevailing question: What kind of god do you get from science? Clearly it is a god of theory, as detached from real life as a musing philosopher on idyllic sabbatical. Ironically, Morowitz recognizes the impersonal character of his personal vision. He attempts to include the “harbor community” in his story. But the nameless sailors, fishermen, tourists, and acquaintances come in and out of his treatise like shadows—as a means to make the technical a bit more palatable, but never a part of his religion of “cosmic joy.”

Inconsistencies

This disjointedness of theory and life characterizes a spate of popular books that now find purpose in evolution, intelligence in the atom, and mysticism in nature. Inconsistencies emerge in these arguments and are evident in Cosmic Joy and Local Pain. While Morowitz warns of the “tentativeness” of all scientific knowledge, he nevertheless concludes that practicing science is equivalent to becoming “partners with god in making the future.” While he warns of the moral dangers of reductionism (of seeing life and man as “nothing but” physical process), he builds an entire natural theology on just such a frame of reference. And a self-effacing style cannot hide an elitism in which the scientist knows best the mind of God.

The book ends with Morowitz literally and figuratively getting stung by a bee, tripping, and skinning his knee. The “local pain” leads him to consider the ethical side of faith. His conclusions here come across as an afterthought and smack of a familiar secular utopianism (“having the power within us to move the local world toward more cosmic joy and less local pain”). The resolution is not likely to satisfy the average reader, to say nothing of the harbor rat. Morowitz leaves his island retreat—to “return from cosmic concerns to the responsibilities ahead”—stung by the philosopher’s desire to reduce religion to science and tripping against an old stone that assumes knowledge is virtue.

Culture Shock

Conflict and Context: Hermeneutics in the Americas, edited by Mark Lau Branson and C. René Padilla (Eerdmans, $13.95, 323 pp.; paper). Reviewed by Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

How does our cultural setting affect our interpretation of the Bible? What impact does this have on our views of Christ, salvation, and the church? How can we transfer our views helpfully to another culture? Is there danger in allowing for cultural influence on Bible study? What checks and cautions would be helpful?

In November 1983, a multicultural group of 35 pastors, missionaries, and scholars met in Tlayacapan, Mexico, using a mix of theological papers and Bible studies to discuss the interpretation of the Bible in context. The results of their meeting are found in Conflict and Context.

The conference’s deliberate political-economic focus makes this collection constructively disturbing, as it opens our assumptions to needed, challenging examination.

“Toward a Contextual Christology from Latin America,” a presentation by René Padilla, general secretary of the Latin American Theological Fraternity, is a case in point. There is no doubt his views are congruent with classical orthodoxy, yet out of a Latin American context he insists, “Because the Word became flesh, [Christians] cannot but affirm history as the context in which God is fulfilling his redemptive will. The historicity of Jesus leaves no room for a dualism in which the soul is separated from the body, or for a message exclusively concerned with salvation beyond death, or for a church that isolates itself from society to become a ghetto.… One can hardly exaggerate the urgency that questions related to religious oppression and legalism, in justice and poverty, wealth and power have for the mission of the church.…” In short, Christology carries social ethics with it.

Balanced Discussion

The responses to Padilla provide balance. Douglas Webster of Ontario Theological Seminary and Emilio Nuñez of Central American Theological Seminary in Guatemala City are concerned that an emphasis on the historical Jesus who sides with the poor may slide into an easy identification with socialistic liberation theology. Notre Dame’s John Howard Yoder points as a caution against violent change to the example of Jesus as one who loved his enemies.

Padilla’s reply and the subsequent discussion further refine our grasp of the truth.

“The Truly Spiritual in Paul: Biblical Background Paper on 1 Corinthians 2:6–16,” by Aida and William Spencer, asks, “What is a ‘spiritual person’?” The answer (“one who lives out Christ crucified … in imitation …”) is developed both from the passage in question and from an examination of chapters 1–4 of Paul’s letter.

In this passage, spiritual does not mean “immaterial” or “charismatic,” say the Spencers, both of Gordon-Con-well Theological Seminary. Rather, to be spiritual means to serve—Paul’s and Apollos’s word—to preach Christ crucified, or to live “sentenced to death,” weak, in hunger and thirst. Attention is drawn to parallels between Paul’s list of his experiences in 1 Corinthians 4:9–13 and concepts in Jesus’ sermons on the mount and plain. “Paul’s life of suffering in imitation of Christ was his ‘power’,” according to the Spencers.

We must be willing to be thought foolish for the sake of the gospel and for the well-being of others, they say, without denigrating either the material world or spiritual gifts. Paul asserted his right to food and drink and spoke in tongues. But, “living a ‘crucified’ life does entail turning away from a life of excessive wealth and being ready to be despised or thought irrelevant if necessary to promote God’s reign.” Oppressed Christians in whatever culture may be more spiritual than those considered successful because they more nearly imitate Paul and Timothy when they undergo suffering for Jesus.

Readers will find that some participants make concessions to current views of authorship and literary-theological tradition (e.g., three Isaiahs, parts of Exodus formulated during the days of Elijah). However, most of these bones can be trimmed and thrown aside, leaving the theological and social meat developed by the papers. As might be expected, there is divergence of social, political, and economic agendas in the volume. No one could be expected to approve all that is here. But the sorting process is stimulating and keeps one from swallowing anything whole. And all in all Conflict and Context is a useful tool for studying the Bible in context.

INTERVIEW

Stephen Hayner, vice-president for student affairs at Seattle Pacific University, has been chosen to serve as the next president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the U.S.A., an interdenominational college ministry that serves nearly 25,000 students on 750 campuses. Hayner will begin his duties as president on August 1.

After the June 1987 resignation of Gordon MacDonald, following public revelations of an extramarital affair, InterVarsity’s board of trustees began a comprehensive search for a new president. “We looked at more than 100 people,” says InterVarsity board chairman James Kay, stressing the thoroughness of the search process.

Hayner calls himself “both a pastor and an academic.” He believes his education (including graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity School, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland) and his work experience (university pastor, teacher, and university administrator) combine to give him an understanding of both the calling and the context of IVCF.

Please describe your vision for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

I am concerned that we consistently work toward building leadership of character for the kingdom and focusing on the needs, concerns, and struggles of American college students.

How do you see InterVarsity’s place in campus ministry changing?

Students on college campuses are getting older and more diverse. And we have to deal with the importance of working with the multiple ethnic groups. We are also dealing with more and more students coming from dysfunctional families, as well as students who are dealing with the cultural baggage they carry—the individualism, relativism, and materialism of our culture—struggling with relational difficulties, problems with relationships, sexual confusion, and so forth.

In light of InterVarsity’s recent history, and recent calls for accountability structures for Christian leaders, how do you plan to protect yourself from pressures and temptations?

I rejoice that I am partnered with a wife who is deeply supportive and has really been a part of my ministry ever since I started in college ministry. She has had a deep sense that this is our ministry, not just mine.

In addition, the InterVarsity board and others at InterVarsity have really committed to walking with us to make sure that my schedule doesn’t get out of hand. And for the last 20 years, I have had a small group of people who consistently know what is happening in my life. I don’t know that I could function in the Christian life without that kind of fellowship.

Among evangelical institutions, InterVarsity has perhaps one of the broader statements on the nature of Scripture. How do you plan to apply doctrinal standards, and particularly the issue of the inerrancy of Scripture, to the selection of campus staff?

I believe strongly that the Bible is the Word of God and that it is the absolute authority for my life. I intend to continue to hold Scripture as the guide for what we do and how we practice our organizational life—as well as make it the standard for the personal lives of the staff. I’m very concerned that we continue to walk forward in a strong, biblical tradition.

At the same time, it’s important that we make sure the subtleties of how people define their view of Scripture don’t end up becoming the thing that divides us. While some would make them the issues of the church, those are not the issues that Scripture makes key to our understanding of what it means to be Christians.

How do you feel about InterVarsity Press publishing controversial books? Does that fit in with a campus ministry perspective?

InterVarsity always needs to be careful that parts of the overall ministry do not do things that will jeopardize the campus ministry. On the other hand, InterVarsity Press has always had a reputation for being one of those publishers that was willing to publish books of conscience. And I hope that it always will. I think that’s a vital ministry to the cause of Christ on college campuses.

One of the biggest opportunities for changing student lives is through the triennial Urbana missions convention. With a change in presidents and IVCF mission directors, what is the future of Urbana?

Urbana has a very positive future. This last Urbana was probably one of the finest that has ever been held. And apart from InterVarsity, there is a resurgence in the university world of interest in missions, concerns about questions of vocation, and learning about what it means to be a world Christian. InterVarsity is already strategizing about Urbana 1990, which will be our fiftieth anniversary. It should be an exciting time.

By David Neff.

latin america

Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church is generating more money than members in Uruguay, with his business ventures building visibility, particularly in the capital city, Montevideo.

The Uruguayan news media have reported the group’s acquisitions of the major publishing firm, Impresora Polo; Montevideo’s finest hotel, the Victoria Plaza; most of Uruguay’s candy-producing sector; and the majority of stock in one of the nation’s oldest banks, Banco de Credito. The church has also launched the afternoon daily newspaper Ultimas Noticias. Like other Moon-owned publications around the world, Ultimas Noticias has not engaged in church polemics. All this has happened just since 1975, when the Unification Church entered Uruguay.

According to Unification missionary Steven D. Boyd, economic success is an intentional ministry of the church. “We would like our businesses to become examples of [good] business ethics.” The businesses have earned a reputation in job-depressed Montevideo for paying employees promptly and well.

Yet despite its commercial ventures, the Unification Church has taken a relatively low profile. Its defamation suit filed against Christian-owned Radio Centenario and its negotiations with authorities for permission to build Uruguay’s first five-star hotel have sparked about the only public controversy.

Letters To Pastors

The Unification Church has only about 50 members in Montevideo, according to Boyd, who said he came from an evangelical family but joined the Unification Church as a university student in Kansas.

To gain a hearing in Montevideo’s evangelical community, Boyd sent a letter to pastors in which he presented himself as a “brother in Christ” and requested a personal interview largely to overcome alleged “disinformation campaigns” against the Unification Church. Despite its sprinkling of Scriptures and evangelical language, the let-lován, head of the Bible Society of Uruguay and a Baptist pastor, has extensively researched Moon’s teachings. He led a well-attended workshop on “The Missionary Strategy of the Unification Church” at last November’s COMIBAM missions congress in Brazil.

Insights From The Spirit World?

The Unification Church has been rocked internally by recent reports of a Zimbabwean church member who claims to speak for the spirit of Moon’s late son. The Washington Post has reported that Moon accepts the Zimbabwean as the “reincarnated soul” of his son Heung Jin Nim, who was killed at age 17 in a 1984 auto accident.

According to several accounts, the Zimbabwean, whose real name is not known, has visited the U.S., Europe, and Asia preaching and delivering insights from the “spirit world.” The Post reported that the Zimbabwean holds “confessionals,” during which he physically strikes church members.

The Unification Church has maintained it does not believe in reincarnation. Dietrich Seidel of the Unification Seminary in New York portrayed the Zimbabwean’s appearance as “spiritual cooperation without reincarnation,” which he said is consistent with Unification beliefs. In an interview with a representative from the group Jude 3 Missions, which opposes the Unification Church, Seidel said the Zimbabwean “is a brother with his own personality, but he has had his own spiritual connection of oneness with Rev. Moon’s son, and so he receives teaching and spiritual inspiration and guidance, and passes it on to the members.”

Church officials say the Zimbabwean is creating a “revival.” Non-Unificationists with ties to Moon’s business ventures, however, are less enthusiastic. Ron Godwin, a vice-president at the Moon-owned Washington Times and a former Moral Majority executive, told the Post, “From the bottom of my navel, I don’t want to know about this.”

In his COMIBAM presentation, Milován noted that Moon affirms his Divine Principle is based on biblical principles.

“However,” asserted Milován, “any reader with a simple understanding of the Bible will immediately find that it is an eclectic mix of Taoism, Buddhism, Metaphysical Spiritualism, Messianic Christianity, numerology, the occult, and anticommunism.”

Influence In Latin America

Across Latin America, the Unification Church has sought political influence through its organization AULA, the Spanish acronym for Pro-Latin American Unity Association, according to Milován. AULA members include ex-presidents of Latin nations and others who “have had and continue having a great influence on the political map of the continent,” Milován said.”

The Unification Church entered Uruguay in 1975 during the military government’s crackdown on the leftist Tupamaro movement. And Moon’s strong anticommunism and prospective financial investments scored points among Uruguayan leaders of that time. (In 1985, Uruguay returned to an elected, civilian government.)

“My biggest battle [in Uruguay] is just getting people to listen … to get people to realize we’re not a strange group,” said missionary Boyd. So far, he has made little headway.

By John Maust in Uruguay.