VIOLENCE

The Right Kind Of Violence

The National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV) has named Empire of the Sun, The Last Emperor, and Full Metal Jacket as the most educational commercial films of 1987. According to a report by NCTV, each of these films “deals with the issue of violence, but portrays it realistically as a human tragedy.”

NCTV named The Running Man, Fatal Beauty, and Death Wish as the worst films of 1987 and called Arnold Schwarzenegger the most violent actor of the year. Masters of the Universe, a PG-rated takeoff of the Mattel toy series, was rated the most violent film directed specifically at a children’s audience.

Psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, research director of NCTV, says his organization will concentrate more heavily on Hollywood films as opposed to television. “While we have seen viewers of prime-time television starting to turn away from violence, we have seen little improvement in the intense violence of Hollywood films or in the public’s reception of it at the theater.”

ACCOUNTABILITY

More Scrutiny For Nonprofits

A new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulation allows individuals to have instant access to nonprofit 501(c)3 organizations’ financial information. The new ruling forces such organizations to provide at their offices, upon request, their three most recent Form 990 information returns. The Form 990 usually provides a much clearer picture of an organization’s finances than the usual published financial statement, and includes salaries of top officials.

Before the ruling, copies of this document had to be ordered from the IRS, resulting in long delays. Often the IRS could not locate the information. Some observers credit the new regulation to post-PTL ministry-reform efforts.

POLITICS

Passing The Plate Protested

Jesse Jackson will keep on raising money in churches for his Democratic presidential campaign, despite criticism that he is crossing the line between church and state.

On January 31, hundreds of black churches around the country reportedly took part in the Jackson-organized “bonus Sunday.” Collection plates were passed around as parishioners were urged to contribute to Jackson’s presidential bid.

Responding to a protest from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Gerald Austin, manager of Jackson’s campaign, declared the contributions were not illegal because the donations came from individuals, not churches. The Internal Revenue Service prohibits churches from participating in political campaigns on behalf of individual candidates.

YOUTH

Teens Want Parents’ Values

Today’s teenagers enjoy their families, want good marriages, and believe in a strong military. These and other conservative values were affirmed by teenagers in a study published by Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU). Based on interviews with more than 2,000 persons aged 12 to 19, the study also reported 61 percent of those surveyed consider religion the most important part of their lives.

“Today’s teens share many of the attitudes and aspirations usually attributed to adults,” said TRU Executive President Peter Zollo. Even on such controversial issues as abortion, living together before marriage, and sex and nudity in movies, conservative values were reflected. More than half of those interviewed felt there is too much sex in movies and disapproved of living together before marriage, while about half opposed abortion.

SUPER BOWL

A Match Made In Heaven?

The Washington Redskins won the Super Bowl, but both coaches knew it was only a game. Joe Gibbs of the Redskins and Dan Reeves of the Denver Broncos are outspoken Christians, and together helped organize a joint-team pregame chapel service.

Players and their families from both teams attended the service held the night before the game in a San Diego hotel. Popular radio preacher Charles Swindoll, who was the featured speaker, says both coaches spoke, then each introduced one of his players to give a testimony. “It was thrilling to see a guy like Darryl Green [Redskin defensive back] say his only goal was to exalt Christ,” says Swindoll.

Both Gibbs (Southern Baptist) and Reeves (Evangelical Presbyterian) are active in their churches. Gibbs spoke at an Athletes in Action prayer breakfast the day before the Super Bowl, and chapel services for guests were held at other hotels on the morning of the game.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

Named: George Hill, as senior pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, replacing William Sloane Coffin, who resigned last year. Hill was former pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and is presently associate minister at First Baptist Church in Los Angeles.

Retired : as pastor of Philadelphia’s Zion Baptist Church after 37 years, Leon Sullivan. Author of a set of antiapartheid guidelines to bring racial equality to South Africa’s workplace, Sullivan plans to devote more time to Self Help, an agency he developed to train and feed the poor of South Africa and the United States.

MIDDLE EAST

Arab Christians Seek Support

The Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) has challenged Western fundamentalist Christians to reconsider their “unconditional support to the State of Israel,” asking for donations of money for food, medicines, and relief for needy Palestinian families.

In an appeal issued from the church council’s headquarters in Limassol, Cyprus, general secretary Gabriel Habib called on Christians to express “solidarity with the Palestinian people.” He also urged Jews to “break the ideology of fear and trauma,” which he says underlies Israel’s current policy of military actions against Palestinians.

Arabs living in Israeli-controlled territories in the West Bank and Gaza have been demonstrating for more autonomy. Israel’s military response has sparked worldwide controversy.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and United Church of Christ were among the first U.S. denominations to respond to Habib’s appeal, urging their conference and regional ministers to spread the word to local pastors.

PROSTITUTION

Children Sold For Sex

Children around the world are being sold at an alarming rate, according to a detailed report in South magazine, a British publication. While poverty appears to be the culprit, the preferred trade is prostitution.

For example, in Hong Kong and Bangkok, girls are sold to pimps for a few dollars and are then locked into prostitution. Many mothers sell their children to local prostitution rings where a child brings in five times more money than adult prostitutes.

In Paris, 5,000 boys and 3,000 girls work as prostitutes, and in Latin America a girl of 12 can earn from prostitution more than ten times the amount an adult can earn from a day’s factory work. Organized child prostitution also exists in Brazil and Peru.

LEBANON

Missionaries Protest Ban

Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board President R. Keith Parks has asked Secretary of State George P. Schultz to lift his ban on missionaries in Lebanon. Last year, the U.S. government ordered all U.S. citizens, including missionaries, to leave Lebanon because of continuing strife there.

Parks says several of his 24 missionaries to Lebanon want to return. “If they lift the ban, we’ll be on the first boat back to Lebanon,” vowed Pete Dunn, currently on furlough. Some missionaries have tried to continue the work in Lebanon by transferring to Cyprus and working in radio and literature production. And in an ironic twist, some were reassigned to Gaza, another Middle East area stricken by violence in recent weeks.

In his letter to Schultz, Parks asked that missionaries be allowed to take risks for their faith, just as Schultz and other government leaders have for “those ideals in which you believe.”

AUSTRALIA

Door To Door Down Under

Christians in Australia plan to use their country’s bicentennial as a springboard for personal evangelism. With church attendance in Australia lagging at only 18 percent of the population, church leaders there admit they face a daunting challenge.

The Australian Evangelical Alliance hopes to rely on prayer and house-to-house visits with a bicentennial gift of a New Testament. It will also sponsor 100 days of prayer between Lent and Pentecost, culminating in a Pentecost Sunday of Prayer for the evangelization of Australia.

VENEZUELA

Paper Attacks Evangelicals

In a front-page article appearing in the leading Venezuelan newspaper, El Nacional, prominent writer Rosita Caldera reported criticism from Roman Catholics that evangelicals are guilty of aggressiveness and fanaticism. But according to evangelical leaders in Venezuela, rapid growth among Protestants has put the Roman Catholic establishment on the defensive, thus the public attack.

Quoting the Roman Catholic Episcopal Council of Bishops, the article charged evangelicals with proselytizing and constantly attacking Catholicism. By doing so, it said, they are “causing confusion, defaming the church and its hierarchies, and attacking Catholic worship, Mary, the saints, even God.” It also accused evangelicals of imposing a foreign culture on Venezuelans.

According to Bill Taylor, World Evangelical Fellowship missions committee executive secretary, Protestant growth in Venezuela has nearly doubled within the past two years. Late last year, the Venezuelan government closed a New Tribes Mission school because of its “non-Venezuelan orientation.”

THE VATICAN

Modern Scholarship Panned

The Vatican’s chief theologian, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, traveled to New York and delivered a 50-minute attack on modern biblical scholarship.

The prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith chided modern scholars of the Bible for inserting their presuppositions into their study of Scripture. He blamed contemporary biblical scholarship for diluting the teaching of the church.

Unlike some Protestant conservatives, the cardinal endorsed the use of the “his torical-critical method” of Bible study. But he said that method was not as “scientific” as its exponents claimed.

Anyone who has yearned for talent, beauty, and self-expression will identify with Polly Vandersma, a lovable klutz who works as a “Person Friday” in an art gallery. In a new, low-budget film, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Polly learns to take risks, to weigh critically the judgment of others, and eventually to confront authority.

What this film says about self-worth and beauty is touching and authentic. On a deeper level, however, it reveals disturbing and tragic ideas about God and absolute standards in life as well as art. The film is the work of Patricia Rozema, a 29-year-old graduate of Calvin College. It won her a young artist’s award, Prix de la Jeunesse, at Cannes in 1987. Its title is taken from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”

The film opens with Polly explaining “what happened” into the eye of a video camera. She is afflicted with a terrible self-image, describing herself, at age 31, as “a spinster and an unsuccessful career woman.” Others have noted that she is “organizationally impaired.” She wistfully recalls watching people through restaurant windows, “inter-you know-facing” with one another. Then her dreams appear to come true: she is hired by Gabrielle St.-Pere, the sophisticated curator of The Church Gallery. Polly develops a full-blown crush on Gabrielle: her French accent, her knowing remarks about “whose work shows talent and whose doesn’t,” and the seemingly undeserved affirmation she gives to Polly.

Polly learns that Gabrielle keeps her own paintings hidden, just as the uncertain Polly conceals the results of her first love—photography—confining it to the walls of her apartment. Moved by Gabrielle’s confession that her life goal is “to make something breathtakingly beautiful that will last forever,” Polly smuggles one of the curator’s paintings to an art critic. A lavishly favorable review is in the newspaper before Gabrielle can retrieve the picture.

This gives Polly an idea: she mails Gabrielle some of her photos, using a “pseudo name.” Gabrielle dismisses them instantly as “the trite made flesh,” and Polly plunges into depression. But events take an unusual twist, and Polly’s assessment of what is “true” and “beautiful” is shaken to the core. Her triumph over phony art expertise, and a renewed belief in her own work, end the film.

Allegorist At Work

A religious allegory seems to hover over this film like an insistent descant. Gabrielle St.-Pere (the name is French for “Holy Father”) is the Creator, presiding imperiously over The Church Gallery. Her relationship with her lover, Mary Joseph, may be an allusion to the Trinity, and Polly represents every klutzy human being who tries to impress God with his or her pitiful “works.”

Polly’s discovery of self-worth apart from her works—her photographs—is concurrent with her discovery of Gabrielle as a weakling and a deceiver. The Creator’s judgment does not really count, Rozema appears to be saying. What matters is how we value our own life and work. There are no absolute standards, in art or in life, this film suggests, and no absolutely correct authority. All is relative.

In the end, however, Rozema stops short of making the curator/Creator completely irrelevant. She opts instead for a vulnerable God. Gabrielle eventually sees Polly’s photographs in a totally new light. I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is exquisite, comical, sad, and thought provoking. Although it presents a diminished portrait of God, it does emphasize an important truth about God: that relationships matter more than mere image.

By Beth Spring.

The radio host nodded as the “on the air” sign flashed, and the seventy-fifth interview of my book tour began. Outside the studio’s floor-to-ceiling windows the gleaming clusters of Dallas’s glass skyscrapers competed for attention, monuments of a proud and confident city.

This was one of Dallas’s most popular interview shows, and a great opportunity. I was primed to talk about the loss of spiritual values in American life and the need for Christian involvement in the public arena.

“We have with us Chuck Colson, author of Kingdoms in Conflict,” the interviewer began. “But first,” he chuckled, “let’s hear what ‘God’s little goofballs’ have for us today.” He flipped a switch and a prerecorded phone message from Jim and Tammy Bakker filled the airwaves. In the control room I could see sound technicians laughing and rolling their eyes. The message ended—mercifully—and my host turned toward me. “And now,” he smiled, “let’s hear what Mr. Colson has to say.”

His introduction wasn’t the shock it might have been. Most of my tour interviews had started with questions about Jim and Tammy or other well-publicized religious excesses. Christian bashing is in high fashion these days, and I was at first defensive. But soon I got angry, as I did this day.

“There have been some dreadful mistakes,” I said, “but why judge all Christians by the few who abuse their position? There are 350,000 churches across America where people’s spiritual needs are being met. Thousands of missionaries are living in conditions you or I couldn’t. Thousands of volunteers are working in prisons, soup kitchens, and rescue missions. That’s the church in action!” I was almost shouting into the microphone.

The interviewer smiled. Reason, after all, is no match for ridicule.

After finally digging out of the Bakker rubble, I was able to get into my material: the kingdom of God and how its citizens transform the kingdoms of man by living in obedience to Christ. But even as I spoke, I wondered if my words could even begin to alter the stereotypes they were up against. As critic Neil Postman has written in his insightful book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, we are fast moving from a word-oriented society to one that is image oriented.

Values are no longer formed by rational discourse; in fact, we have nearly discarded the vocabulary necessary to do so. Instead, an image is transmitted—the grinning faces or gushing voices of Jim and Tammy, for example—and the caricatured message is complete. Mascara and money manipulation become emblems for the church at large—and nothing more need be said.

By the time I had finished in that Dallas studio, the book tour had taken its toll. I’d squared off against scoffers, skeptics, and secularists until I was hoarse. But to what avail? Could anything really change the image of Christianity so entrenched in the public consciousness?

As it happened, only a few days after my dismaying encounter in Dallas I was scheduled to break ground for a prison chapel in Delaware and attend a Prison Fellowship dedication service.

Georgetown, Delaware, is a small town surrounded by chicken farms and corn fields. The closest thing to a skyscraper there is a grain-storage silo.

The town’s dignitaries and Delaware’s lieutenant governor were waiting inside the gates of the state prison when I arrived for the groundbreaking. The chaplain, an open-faced Baptist named Larry Lilly, introduced each of us for brief remarks. The most eloquent came from Jim, a heavyset inmate serving life without parole. He told how volunteers had ministered to him, what Jesus had come to mean to him, how he and his brothers were free, even in prison. Jim struggled to control his emotions as he thanked the local churches for supporting the project.

The 275-seat chapel, which is to be built by volunteers and inmates with local funds, will stand in the center of the prison yard, surrounded by drab cell blocks and razor wire. As we concluded the groundbreaking by turning over shovelfuls of black soil, I thought of the miracle before us: a church, planted in the middle of humanity’s hell on earth.

We adjourned to Grace United Methodist Church, where supper would be served before the evening service. It was to be a celebration concluding Prison Fellowship’s Community Service Project, a program in which five prisoners, furloughed to the care of Christian host families, had worked for two weeks restoring a senior citizens’ center and the home of an elderly retired couple.

Mennonite farm families, the women’s hair tucked neatly into white net caps, the men wearing suspenders over their plaid wool shirts, served steaming platters of roast turkey, bowls of crisp home-grown vegetables, hot baked buns, and homemade pumpkin ice cream. I’d been to White House state dinners that could not top this feast.

The sanctuary soon grew warm as we all crowded into the old oak pews for the evening service. In the last row sat Delaware’s commissioner of corrections, wide-eyed as his prisoners spoke movingly about their experience. Men who wouldn’t dare cry in prison choked up as they described how much it had meant to live with Christian families, to accomplish something useful for society, and to grow in their faith.

As the service closed, the chaplain asked each of the host families to stand at the altar with “their” inmate. As they lined up before the congregation, one little blond girl—maybe six or seven—took the hand of the prisoner who had lived in her home, looking up into his eyes throughout the concluding prayer. His eyes were misty. So were mine.

I needed to be in Georgetown for that simple Sunday service; it put my book tour experiences into perspective. Yes, there is a wide gulf between Dallas and Delaware, between the image and the reality of Christianity. It is a gulf so wide, in fact, that maybe it can’t be closed. But does that really matter so much after all? The image may reign, but beyond the caricatures of television and radio stations, the reality lives on.

“The only music that hasn’t appeared at the church is my style—Bach,” laughs the pastor of Fleischmann Memorial Baptist Church in Philadelphia. In fact, the Juilliard-trained pianist who has been pastor of the inner-city church for 14 years, cheerfully admits that when the church’s black pianist plays “There Is a Fountain” and “Rock of Ages,” they do not sound at all “like when this white brother plays.”

James Correnti was a senior studying piano on scholarship at the well-known New York City music school during the sixties when he met God—and reordered his life. Though preparing for a career as a professional musician, he left music after completing his studies. “Music was my god,” he says. “I didn’t know how to worship only a little bit at the foot of an idol.”

Seeking a foundation for his newfound faith, Correnti pursued theological training at Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia, graduating magna cum laude. To his surprise, he was shortly called as interim minister of the oldest North American Baptist congregation in the U.S., located in Philadelphia’s inner city. At the time, the church was about ready to expire. Today Fleischmann Memorial is experiencing steady growth, and Correnti long ago became its full-time senior pastor.

The church’s outreach into a multiethnic community heralded as the city’s cocaine capital—where as much as $150,000 worth of the drug has reportedly been sold daily—has attracted the attention of the news media: Fleischmann Memorial has been the focus of local TV coverage, and was described in the Reader’s Digest (Mar. 1987).

Situated in the midst of a community that is largely Puerto Rican and black, with lesser numbers of Filipinos, Southeast Asians, and a few whites, the church is now beginning to reflect the racial mix—an enormous change for what began 144 years ago as a German-speaking congregation. Outreach programs have included a thrift store, food bank, and highly regarded antidrug campaigns. It is, in Correnti’s words, a genuine spiritual counterculture in the midst of one of Philadelphia’s least desirable areas.

Once More With Meaning

In the midst of all this, Correnti got back his music.

James Correnti, concert pianist, appears regularly in concerts on the campuses of colleges, universities, seminaries, and Bible schools, and in churches. For 11 years he also taught on the summer faculty of the French School of Music in Plainfield, New Jersey.

On one particular day, the audience is rapt as Correnti sits at the keyboard, discussing a favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. Drawing on his extensive study of the great German composer and his faith, the music that follows is infused with meaning. For the audience, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” becomes more comprehensible: a German chorale familiar to Bach’s congregation, laced with the composer’s own, new melody as accompaniment. Then, because it is the Christmas season, Correnti discusses not merely the music, but the rich theology of a familiar Christmas hymn.

One couple, admittedly uninterested in music, later confess their difficulty in tearing themselves away to keep a dinner date.

Pianist In The Pulpit

Perhaps there are two James Correntis: the one, pastor of a church at the center of urban ministry; the other, the consummate musician.

When wearing his ministerial “hat,” Correnti does not stray from the pulpit to the keyboard. In fact, until a full-time assistant arrived to share the preaching, he never played the piano at Fleischmann Memorial services. Because the church was so inert when he arrived, he says, “I was the pastor, the preacher, the visitation committee, the evangelism committee—and, for the sake of the congregation, I would not be the pianist!”

When he reentered the arena of music performance, Correnti’s biggest problem was what to do with the kind of repertoire he had learned at Juilliard. Concerned about the spiritual insight of Christians into their music, he began by restructuring the way he performs. He looked for what was most accessible for his audience, particularly pieces under five minutes in length. And he studied how others—like Victor Borge and composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein—have made the music of the ages come alive for contemporary audiences. What evolved was a well-articulated and easily understood approach, which he has discovered makes his programs equally useful for evangelism.

However reluctant to mix keyboard with pulpit, James Correnti, pastor, and James Correnti, musician, do coexist at Fleischmann Memorial. To try to understand his congregation better, he joined an all-black church choir—the “token white,” he laughs. “I think I really began to learn from the inside a little bit of what made them tick,” he says, “and how they enjoyed making music.”

There is now at the church what he describes as a well-worked mix. It includes the singing of psalms, historic hymns, Scripture songs, and gospel-era hymns, which, he says, in black hands have taken on a whole new life for him. He confesses to having had a “very heavy hand” in all of this in an effort to maintain balance; there is no one style that dominates. And although Bach is not part of the mix, Correnti has done some seminars to introduce that music.

In fact, what he now does in concerts in analyzing music—and hymn texts in particular—he developed first at the church. He saw a distinct need since many in the congregation struggle with reading skills; and because there is so much dense theology in a hymn like “A Mighty Fortress,” people simply do not understand what they are singing, he says. So he takes a stanza at a time and sets them up for it, explaining words they do not know, or changing them to contemporary language if necessary. The laboratory at Fleischmann Memorial has resulted in concerts and tape recordings that make great music understandable to his audiences.

James Correnti appears to have the best of two worlds: an effective ministry in one of the country’s neediest urban areas; and an effective music performance and teaching endeavor that makes the great music of the past come alive for Christian audiences. Not a bad way to live with a split personality.

By Carol R. Thiessen.

“Be Prepared to Cry”

Peace and Hope in the Corner of the Dead, by John Maust (Latin America Mission, 189 pp.; $5.95, paper). Reviewed by Andrés T. Tapia, a Peruvian journalist working in North America, and author of The AIDS Crisis: The Facts and Myths About a Modern Plague, to be published this summer by InterVarsity Press.

Silent, skeptical evangelical leaders sat before Christian journalist Esteban Cuya as he nervously played the first of two cassette tapes smuggled from Ayacucho, the vortex of Peru’s guerrilla violence. Their skepticism soon gave way to grief, however, as they heard the survivors of two separate attacks against believers recount their stories.

One atrocity involved a terrorist grenade and machine-gun attack on a Pentecostal church in Santa Rosa that left six believers dead and fourteen wounded. In another, more serious incident, a navy captain was implicated in the cold-blooded killing of six Presbyterians in Callqui. Despite the poor quality of the tape, the listeners understood enough to know that government soldiers had hauled the men out of a church and shot them dead just 25 feet from the sanctuary.

John Maust’s Peace and Hope in the Corner of the Dead chronicles the impact the Santa Rosa and Callqui killings had on the leadership of Peru’s CONEP (Pern’s equivalent of the National Association of Evangelicals). Before Cuya’s presentation, CONEP had been theologically averse to most social action. But now a grisly four-year-old guerrilla war between the fanatical Khmer Rouge-inspired group called Shining Path and Peru’s brutal armed forces had spilled over into the church. The situation demanded quick action.

Two days after hearing the taped testimonies, CONEP released an unprecedented and courageous statement denouncing both the terrorists and government forces for their indiscriminate use of violence. The next day, on August 24, 1984, CONEP gave birth to a relief group that would provide for the immediate needs of evangelicals caught in the crossfire of Peru’s ugly war.

The group’s president, Presbyterian pastor Pedro Arana, christened the organization Paz y Esperanza (Peace and Hope), based on the promises in Romans 15:13. Arana, former International Fellowship of Evangelical Students general secretary for Latin America and a former member of the body that drafted Peru’s current constitution, immediately went to work. In its first year of operation, Paz y Esperanza directly assisted 634 widows and 1,321 orphans with food, clothing, and/or shelter, helped free from jail several believers wrongly accused of being terrorists, and resettled 25 families from Ayacucho in unoccupied government land far from the violence.

The work proved to be extremely painful. “Be prepared to cry,” a Paz y Esperanza volunteer was told. Among those found in mass graves or decapitated on the roadside were Christians who often encountered no-win situations. Even taking church offerings—considered by the Marxist revolutionaries as “exploitation of the poor”—could be punished with death. Ayacucho had become what its name means in Quechua: “The Corner of the Dead.”

Sick Guerrillas

Independent news reports confirm Maust’s dismal picture. Yet his book is laced with hope. As Maust writes in the book’s preface, “This story transcend[s] man’s suffering and point[s] to hope in a God of peace.” Throughout Peace and Hope, he relates dramatic stories of God’s divine intervention—such as making a band of guerrillas sick or making their guns malfunction at crucial moments.

Maust, editor of the Latin America Evangelist, provides the reader with a better understanding of the political, economic, and racial issues surrounding the rise of Shining Path. While the book accurately describes the Peruvian evangelical response to injustice in the eighties, its most valuable contribution to the U.S. church is its explicit call for North Americans to put themselves in their brothers’ and sisters’ shoes. Maust asks, What if “terrorists or soldiers burst into our church?” “What if we heard about the persecution of Christians the next state over.… Would we help?” The Peruvians in this book wrestled with that question: “The Bible demands more from us because it has given us more,” Paz y Esperanza president Arana explains to Maust.

And for journalist Cuya, the answer is simple but potentially deadly. When advised for his own safety to stop writing about human-rights abuses in Ayacucho, Cuya replied, “I can’t remain indifferent. Out of obedience to the Lord, I have to keep writing.”

“All Have Need Of Tolerance”

Religion & Republic: The American Circumstance, by Martin E. Marty (Beacon Press, 391 pp.; $25.00, cloth). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and a columnist for Copley News Service.

Religion, long dismissed as one of the quieter and safer dimensions of national existence,” writes Martin Marty, a professor of Christian history at the University of Chicago, “has suddenly reappeared as a factor in American political and social dynamism.” Evangelicals, Catholics, and mainstream Protestants have all become politically active; their religious faith has animated a civic consciousness that was largely absent just a decade or two ago. Yet even the passions excited by the presidential aspirations of Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson do not threaten the kind of divisiveness that has beset many other nations—Northern Ireland and Lebanon being extreme examples.

In this we are fortunate. As Marty describes, America’s spiritual tradition is one of tolerance. Most of the nation’s founders were religious, but their individual faiths differed. Not surprisingly, then, they consciously structured the national government so that no one sect could use state power to dominate the others. As the number of denominations multiplied over time, peaceful pluralism became a practical necessity. “If there were but two religions, we should cut each other’s throats,” Congressman John Canfield Spencer explained to Alexis de Tocqueville: “But no sect having the majority, all have need of tolerance.”

In Praise Of Pluralism

Religion & Republic is dedicated to explaining and praising religious diversity in all its forms. “Pluralism, especially religious pluralism, suffers everywhere today,” writes Marty, “but it deserves celebration.”

In fact, the more heterogeneous religious America has become, the happier Marty seems to be. The U.S. “is not the first country to include more than one religious grouping, to be sure,” he observes, “but nowhere before or elsewhere has there been variety on the scale experienced here.”

Yet to believe in the virtue of tolerance—in essence, the willingness to leave the job of perfecting sinful human beings up to God rather than to entrust the task to government—does not mean one should exalt the religious divisions that naturally result.

It is true that in two ways, at least, pluralism has arguably strengthened the body of Christ, encouraging the development of denominations that are both more serious and vibrant. First, experimentalism may have made the church more responsive to moving of the Holy Spirit. “There is always room for testing, for trying again, for changing,” Marty writes.

Another important aspect of America’s tradition cited by Marty is voluntaryism. Because people are not forced to profess a spiritual commitment and support an official church, religion in the U.S. has not turned into the lifeless formalism evident elsewhere.

Hostile Pluralism

However, pluralism is not limited to Christians exploring slightly different paths toward the same goal. The development of religion in the United States has been affected by what Marty refers to as the “American Enlightenment.” Deists like Benjamin Franklin advocated a “Publick Religion,” one that was “grounded in social process, in a reason and nature that were both accessible to all people of thought and good will or good intentions.” This deistic philosophy has overlapped the different Christian faiths, often muting the sharp, uncompromising challenge posed by the gospel.

Moreover, some would say, the tolerant deistic impulses of the past have increasingly given way to a new, hostile religion, “secular humanism.” Preaching pluralism—and not, notably, tolerance—this movement has increasingly used the state to banish Christianity from public discourse. Though Marty does not deal with this phenomenon, it is an integral aspect of modern American pluralism.

If the Inquisition and unending religious warfare in Europe proved anything, it is that imperfect human societies require tolerance. And the U.S. has performed well on this score, involving, in Marty’s words, “the record of a people that has grown ever more pluralist and has still found reasons to develop enough common spirit to have creative arguments—and has survived.” But while Christians should ever promote tolerance, they should never treat the variety of human error they encounter as they struggle to discover and implement God’s truth as anything other than error.

A Highly Religious, Intensely Secular Society

Unsecular America, edited by Richard John Neuhaus (Eerdmans, 160 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Robert K. Johnston, dean and professor of theology and culture, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

This collection of essays moves from a presentation of the overwhelming evidence for an “unsecular America” (for example, 95 percent believe in God; 85 percent pray; 79 percent find strength in religion) to a discussion of the problems of articulating the sacred in a democratic and pluralistic public square.

Arguments are not sustained long enough to prove definitive at any point, but then they are not meant to. Instead, a number of provocative questions are allowed to surface.

Unsecular America asks, for example, can we not value secularization while at the same time opposing secularism? How is America unique in the West because of its continuing belief that it is a highly favored nation? Does America’s high degree of religiosity help or hinder real Christianity? Is our individualized religion not the functional equivalent of European secularization? Why were clergy consistently more conservative than laity in the 1950s, but now are most often found left of their congregations on the political spectrum? Is the discussion today on abortion the latest public expression of a religious awakening (as were controversies over slavery, women’s suffrage, and temperance)? Why did the New Testament writers not see their secular culture as a threat to be challenged?

The book’s general thesis—that America is “a highly religious, intensely secular society”—would be confusing to non-American observers. But no other description can explain our history, our passionate pursuit of both religion and prosperity, our grassroots support of prayer in schools, or our present debate over abortion. According to historian Paul Johnson, it is wrong to see America’s tolerance in faith and voluntaryism as part of a spirit of secularism; rather, it grows out of piety. In America, as Tocqueville observed, the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom join.

American Values

In this second volume in Eerdman’s Encounter Series, editor Richard Neuhaus provides four essays and the extended discussion that followed when 27 theologians, ethicists, historians, and sociologists met at the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society in 1985.

The participants were all students of “American values” and advocates in varying degrees of American democracy. The tenor of the discussion reflected the neoconservatism that we have come to identify with Michael Novak, Edward Dobson, Ed Hindson, Peter Berger, and Neuhaus himself. Evangelical historians Mark Noll and George Marsden were among the discussants. Despite this unrepresentative mix, the volume provides a fascinating window into wider American life and religion.

Neuhaus laments “the naked public square,” arguing instead for the “resacralization of democracy.” He desires religious and moral debate to be put again into the center of American life so the nation might act with purpose. Marsden, on the other hand, suggests “the naked public square” is what is right with America. We can have morally informed discussion without the church being at the center where the lure of power is so strong.

The participants wrestled with why America is religious and whether such a situation is desirable. Is America still religious because religion has conformed to the materialistic and individualistic values of society? Is America’s religious core not a constant in its experience? Do not polls measure only a shallow religiosity? Could it not be that America’s secularization has not become a “godless” secularism because church and cleric never ruled here and thus no anti-Christendom sentiment needed to be evidenced as the Enlightenment unfolded? Readers will find the discussion stimulating, even when they disagree.

A few months ago it was impossible to purchase the album Shelter from the Storm. But no more, thanks to the surprising popularity of its most popular song, “Dear Mr. Jesus,” a prayer for abused children, which took the country by storm late last year. During one span in December, New York radio station WHTZ received 3,000 requests a day for the song sung by six-year-old Sharon Batts (she is now nine). And over a six-week period, KSCS in Fort Worth averaged over 500 requests daily.

Though demand for the album has waned, it has not ceased. In some smaller radio markets, the plaintive ballad is still making its debut, according to Jan Batts, Sharon’s mother and the founder of Gospel Workshop for Children, the nonprofit ministry that produced the album under the label PowerSource. Batts said PowerVision, the for-profit organization that distributes the albums, still fills about 50 orders a day. The album is also being sold in record stores.

Batts estimates that 100,000 albums or cassettes have been sold to date, adding that PowerVision is too busy filling orders to keep an accurate count. The workforce at the organization consists mainly of volunteers, mothers of some of the 21 members of the singing group, also called PowerSource. These women typically work 14-hour days filling orders and responding to letters.

PowerVision could have met the demand for the album more quickly, Batts said, had it accepted one of several contract offers from major record companies. But, she said, “in a world where everybody thinks that big is better, God was telling us to stay small.”

Jan’s husband, Jim Batts, a board member for Gospel Workshop lor Children, said the record companies had a short-range view in mind. “We’re in this for the long haul,” he said. “Child abuse is not the only issue we have in mind.” Other songs on the Shelter from the Storm album address topics such as depression and material need. Profits from sales will go toward producing more records, cassettes, and videos.

The Batts family also turned down offers of recording contracts for Sharon. The girl has appeared on several local and national television shows, at an NBA basketball game, and at a Nashville fund-raiser for child-abuse prevention with country music star Randy Travis. But her parents have limited her schedule to one or two appearances a week. “She just needs to be a normal little girl,” said Jan.

Several of the radio stations that broadcast the song also announced a hotline number from which people could receive help. One abusive parent, in a letter to a Dallas radio station, wrote, “I will never be the same after hearing ‘Dear Mr. Jesus.’ The cycle [of abuse] stops with this letter.”

The Oral Roberts University School of Medicine will abandon its program to provide scholarships for all its students in favor of what officials described as “the tent-maker concept.”

Dr. Larry Edwards, dean of the medical school, said the $8 million given last year by Oral Roberts’s prayer partners to finance the scholarships will be used for that purpose, but the school will not try any more massive drives to give medical students a free ride.

Instead, under the tent-maker concept, students will travel to Third World countries to become medical school faculty members, thus paying their own way while they practice medicine.

Oral’s Plea For Help

The medical missionary program was announced in March 1986. Students were to receive full scholarships in return for four years of service abroad. Roberts, president of ORU, told students and television audiences in January 1987 that he had been given an ultimatum from God “to turn the medical school around” and to succeed in getting its graduates into healing mission teams.

The evangelist raised more than $8 million in a campaign that captured the national spotlight after he declared that his failure to raise the money would mean “I have failed in my mandate from God … and He will call me home.” The publicity generated by that statement was one of several events that focused national attention on fund-raising methods used by religious organizations.

Edwards said the tent-maker concept makes more sense because 80 percent of the population in Third World nations is centered in urban areas. “When we set out to send healing teams into the rural areas we weren’t recognizing that we would be missing the majority of the people who have needs,” he said.

ORU medical school officials also hoped to place their graduates in hospitals and medical clinics built by missions organizations, but found a shortage of such facilities. “The fact is, missionary societies have had difficulties for years in doing that [building hospitals],” said Edwards.

Dispensing Faith

School officials also believe the tent-maker concept makes sense because Third World countries have demonstrated their desire to train their own physicians. “But one of the most difficult problems facing these nations is how to get the qualified faculty to instruct their medical students,” Edwards said. “The majority of the instructors generally are from the Second World communist-bloc nations.”

The dean said he believes that those medical schools could greatly benefit from faculty members who have “a Christian respect of God and a Christian respect for man—God’s creation.”

According to Edwards, the donations generated from Roberts’s public plea will go to some 117 medical students who are committed to medical missions. He said many of those students will serve in urban ghettos in the United States or in rural areas of the nation where medical care is frequently unavailable. “This isn’t to say that none of the medical students will go into rural areas in Africa or other undeveloped parts of the world,” Edwards said. “Some of our students have come to us and said they believe they have been called by God to do that. We could certainly help them to achieve that goal.”

When Roberts unveiled the medical missionary program nearly two years ago, he said his medical school had failed to send doctors to places where there was no medical care available. Roberts said graduates from his school reported they were unable to do missionary work because they had amassed large debts while paying their school expenses.

Edwards said he knew some people would question the new plan in view of Roberts’s past appeals for scholarships. “The answer to that is simple,” he said. “Oral Roberts never claimed he was wedded to a particular methodology. He said he was wedded to the purpose of God. I believe our new plan is an expanded vision of that purpose.”

By Cathy Milam, Religious News Service.

The fastest church growth in North America has reportedly been taking place among the French-speaking people in Quebec, according to William Phillips, secretary of the Fellowship Baptist French Canada Mission Board. “Because it’s a first-generation movement, there is a zeal for evangelism.”

Although some say the church in Quebec is experiencing “phenomenal growth—just like the Book of Acts all over again,” other church leaders caution that it would be an overstatement to describe the current situation as large-scale revival.

Pierre Bergeron of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada states that his organization, the fastest-growing Protestant denomination in Quebec, “sees an opportunity to preach the gospel like never before.” Of the estimated 30,000 evangelicals in Quebec, about one-third are Pentecostal. An equivalent number are members of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptists, while the remainder represent the Union of French Baptist Churches in Canada, Plymouth Brethren, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and other smaller denominations.

Although 88 percent of Quebec’s 6.7 million population claim Roman Catholic religious affiliation, many are nonpracticing. French-speaking evangelical congregations are primarily composed of former nominal Catholics, with the average age being 30.

Until recently, Pentecostals and Fellowship Baptists were each establishing one new church every month. According to Fellowship Baptist spokesman Phillips, “The major factor in church growth has been the one-on-one witness of new believers to friends and family. Most of our French-speaking churches have developed two or three branch works by the time they’re five years old, and most of our pastors are recruited from within the churches.”

“Graveyard Of Evangelicals”

Even the provincial capital, Quebec City, nicknamed “the graveyard of evangelicals” due to past failures to penetrate this Catholic stronghold, now has thriving churches with aggressive outreach programs.

“Quebec is a lot like California, filled with people selling new religions,” observes John Gilmour, general secretary of the Union of French Baptist Churches in Canada. “We have many home-grown sects and cults, such as ‘The Knights of the Emerald’ and ‘The Gospel of the Year 2000.’ ”

Although the number of evangelicals in Quebec has tripled since 1970, some feel the pace is still too slow. “The church is just not keeping up with urban growth or cultural and demographic changes,” says Timothy Ernst of Christian Direction, an interdenominational mission that assists local churches in developing lay ministry skills. “For example, Montreal has a large contingent of ethnic peoples, including 20,000 Vietnamese, who are not being effectively reached.”

The New Evangelicals

The fact that evangelical churches in Quebec must cope with growing pains is remarkable, given the history of Protestantism there. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the situation in Quebec was unlike any other in North America.

Missionaries were arrested and jailed for activities such as door-to-door visitation, distributing Bibles, and holding open-air meetings. “At that time, to be French was to be Catholic, and anything to upset that balance was considered subversive to the state,” Phillips recalls. Eventually, adverse publicity across Canada pressured the provincial government to stop interfering in Protestant evangelistic efforts.

The “quiet revolution” of the sixties and seventies is another key factor in current spiritual renewal. In one generation, the Roman Catholic Church’s power declined dramatically as Quebec society became secularized. The radical transformation from an intensely religious world view to a humanistic one left a spiritual void. While interest in the occult, Eastern religions, and New Age mysticism escalated, so did personal Bible reading. Evangelical campus ministries recruited many converts among young Quebecers looking for a cause to join, including ex-radical separatists (proponents of political autonomy for Quebec).

“You must remember that evangelicalism and crusade evangelism are both relatively new phenomena in Quebec culture,” explains Walter De Sousa, a Quebec-born associate evangelist with Barry Moore Ministries. “It is still revolutionary to see 1,500 Francophones crowded into the arena, hearing the gospel in their own language.”

By Wendy Elaine Nelles.

Is conversion the same for Asians as it is for Americans? Some say it is not, due to a shift in the evangelical center of gravity.

In 1970, two-thirds of the world’s evangelical Christians lived in the West. Concepts such as regeneration and sanctification had a typically Western context. Today, however, the majority of the world’s evangelicals live in the Third World where Christianity often counters local culture and traditions. Thirty-five scholars recently met in Hong Kong to determine how this change affects world evangelism.

Billed as a Consultation on Conversion, the event was sponsored by the World Evangelical Fellowship and the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism (LCWE). Its purpose was to integrate viewpoints on conversion from three broadly defined academic areas: biblical/theological, cultural/anthropological, and psychological.

“From these viewpoints represented by Christians from several continents, we began addressing new questions about which evangelicals need to think,” says David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, who will summarize the group’s findings in a book next year.

According to Wells, the consultation affirmed the basic Christian tenet that all people are alienated from God and need salvation that comes only through the grace of God. But one of the recurring questions faced by the scholars was, “Is there a normative experience of conversion?” Wells says Westerners have tended to limit their understanding of conversion to the particular moment a decision is made.

“The consensus was that there are normative truths but we cannot identify a type of religious experience that should be the same for everybody. How people come to faith differs according to the context and culture in which the gospel is presented.”

The consultation also wrestled with the ethical dilemmas surrounding conversion in Islamic cultures. When Muslims become baptized, they often lose their jobs and are rejected by family. “We looked at the ethical responsibility of the evangelist in that setting,” says Wells. “If the church seeks to make converts, should it also provide economic assistance and become a surrogate family to the convert?”

Wells feels that while much of the consultation was aimed at Third World concerns, Westerners could benefit from at least one area of discussion. “We looked at how much culture a Christian can hold onto and how much should be shucked off. It seems this is an area of constant challenge to North American Christians as well.”