What’s happening to Christianity in America? Why is there so much controversy in the churches and so little effective proclamation of the Gospel? How can American evangelicals be mobilized to take better advantage of spiritual opportunities?
These are some of the important questions that will be up for discussion when 8,000 persons meet in Minneapolis September 8–13 for the first interdenominational U. S. Congress on Evangelism. It promises to be a historic assembly, and many are hoping and praying that God will use it to challenge the American Christian community to a great new offensive.
“Lay men and women are waiting for leadership,” says Billy Graham, honorary chairman. “They are ready to become involved.” Sensing the acute need for leadership development, congress planners have put the teaching function prominently in the purpose. Dr. Victor B. Nelson, executive secretary, states that prime emphasis will also be given to youth and ethnic-group representation.
“Lutheran Hour” speaker Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, chairman of a 53-member national committee, has said, “We desire at this time to bear a solid demonstrable witness to the central fact that personal faith in Jesus Christ is the way of salvation to all who will believe and receive him. We are seeking a more urgent declaration of the Gospel to our generation and reestablishment of the original strategy for universal evangelism—the witnessing church.”
Hoffmann also called for stimulation of Christians “to mount a vigorous attack upon the Satanic forces which produce misery, inequity, emptiness and all other evils in our society. Our goal is to lift both the spiritual and temporal burdens of man.”
More than 100 American denominations will be represented at the Minneapolis meeting, including virtually all the leading communions. These proportions have been set: one-third lay members of congregations, one-third parish pastors, and one-third evangelists, executives, educators, and seminary students.
Dr. Harold Lindsell, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and the Most Rev. Marcus L. Loane, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, will be “Bible Hour” speakers for the congress. Graham and Hoffmann also will be delivering major addresses. Position papers will be presented by the Rev. Leighton Ford, Dr. Paul S. Rees, the Rev. Richard C. Halverson, Senator Mark Hatfield, and Dr. Harold Ockenga.
Graham and Hoffmann have issued a special call for prayer for the congress, which is an outgrowth of the World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin in the fall of 1966. That congress was sponsored by CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Follow-up regional congresses in evangelism have already been held in Nigeria, Kenya, and Singapore. Three others1In Kinshasa, Congo, August 11–18, 1969; in Bogotá, Colombia, November 21–30, 1969; and in Deolali, India, January 4–8, 1970. have been scheduled in addition to the American. There has also been talk of a second World Congress.
The Rev. Paul Fryhling, chairman of the U. S. Congress executive committee, said, “Delegates to the Berlin congress went back to their home countries with a desire to move forward to evangelize a spiritually barren world. This is the goal that takes priority above all others, and it is the heart and core of the future of Christianity and all mankind.
Around The Churches
The New York State Council of Churches, which previously urged broadening of grounds for abortion, now wants outright repeal of the strict abortion law, and a similar easing has been recommended by the American Lutheran Church’s Commission on Research and Social Action.
As Muskegon’s Walker Arena reverberated with the Gospel in folkrock, 4,200 persons turned out on the first night of a two-week western Michigan crusade led by Leighton Ford, Billy Graham’s associate evangelist.
A bill authorizing a five-year, $65.8 million attack on alcoholism problems has received bipartisan support in the U. S. Senate.
In what appears to be a new tactic to force a showdown on the question of celibacy, thirty-eight Catholic priests of the Detroit Archdiocese told John Cardinal Dearden they no longer feel bound to the 800-year-old law, a stand also taken by thirty-one Brooklyn, New York, priests.
A Roman Catholic priest’s application for a liquor and beer package store outside Louisville, Kentucky, has been approved by the local Alcoholic Beverage Control administrator. The Rev. Theodore R. Sans said the store was a family venture and had nothing to do with his clerical duties.
Campus Crusade for Christ International has picked Miami as the site of a pilot program to aid the needy in their own homes. Crusade is working locally through the Metropolitan Fellowship of Churches and is involving young people of Miami’s Youth for Decency movement.
Hamburgers and soft drinks may be used at holy communion if they have religious significance for the communicant, according to Methodist Bishop James Thomas of Des Moines, Iowa.
Narramore Christian Foundation in Rosemead, California, has announced establishment of a graduate school of psychology, offering the Ph.D. in counseling psychology. And in New York, Buffalo Bible Institute will merge with Houghton College to establish a Buffalo campus for Houghton this fall.
The noise from three trumpets, two cow horns, a sax, a trombone, two kazoos, one recorder, and three hundred protesting students failed to shatter the walls of the Minnesota Reserve Officers Training Corps building, though they circled it seven times. ROTC proponents carried placards that read: “If the walls don’t fall, then God is on our side.”
The ministry of reconciliation as defined in the “Confession of 1967” is to be considered as “the basic purpose of every congregation’s life” when new churches are built in the Washington City Presbytery of the United Presbyterians in the nation’s capital.
Wheaton College Graduate School will replace its bachelor of divinity degree with a master of divinity beginning next year. The college also plans to begin a master’s program in Christian communications.
Roman Catholics in the United States last year numbered 47,873,238, a gain of 404,903 over 1967, the smallest in a quarter of a century. The 1969 official directory also reported marked decreases last year in the numbers of priests, nuns, teachers, schools, and places of worship. But the upward trend in Catholic colleges continued for the sixteenth straight year.
Christ Memorial Southern Baptist Church in St. Louis is believed to be the first of its denomination to join the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Incorporated. The pastor of the white church said affiliation with the Negro group implements an SBC statement adopted last July asking an open-door membership policy and racial equality.
The three predominantly Negro Methodist denominations—African Methodist Episcopal, AME Zion, and Christian Methodist Episcopal—are moving toward merger in 1972, according to Religious News Service, which said the three have announced a joint publishing venture to produce church-school material, a combined hymnal, and an “official organ.”
A politically and religiously active coalition to be called “Concerned Christians” was formed by one hundred conservative Presbyterians and Catholic laymen in Louisville.
DEATHS
WALTER R. BOWIE, 86, former Episcopal rector and professor of theology, and author; in Alexandria, Virginia.
OTTO SOHN, 74, editor of Der Lutheraner; in St. Louis.
HAROLD J. SCHACHERN, 56, Detroit News religion writer and Religious News Service correspondent; in Detroit.
WATKIN R. ROBERTS, 83, missionary and founder of the Indo-Burma Pioneer Mission; in Boca Raton, Florida.
World Parish
The Far East Broadcasting Association says a powerful $480,000 missionary radio station is nearing completion in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.
United Press International says 2.5 million Indonesian Muslims have converted to Christianity in the last three years, mostly in areas of former Communist strength where Muslim fanatics slaughtered suspected Communists in 1965.
The only Christian monastery in Muslim Morocco and North Africa, the Benedictine Community at Toumliline, has been closed. Financial and political troubles had dogged it since its founding in 1952.
With 5.7 million sterilizations and 2.7 million loop insertions, India has now equaled the total achievement of all other countries in these types of birth control, according to Indian officials.
Twenty-one conservative Protestant organizations hosted a study conference on literature, broadcasting, and correspondence-course ministries in the Arabic-speaking world at a recent Beirut gathering organized by the Muslim World Evangelical Literature Service, an outgrowth of the 1966 Berlin Congress on Evangelism.
In Johannesburg, South Africa, the Rev. Arthur Sexby declared sexy miniskirts work for the devil with a “flagrant and provocative display of the flesh,” and held up his sermon until five short-skirted women left his Anglican church. Most of the teen-age choir walked out.
Churches of the English-speaking world are being asked to consider a new version of the Lord’s Prayer that would include such changes as replacing the phrase “Hallowed be Thy name” with “Glorify Your name.” The version was prepared at a London meeting of the International Consultation on English in the Liturgy, representing Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, and Roman Catholics from twenty countries. The group also suggested replacing archaic pronouns in other prayers.
Personalia
Professor and Mrs. Joseph Baker were excommunicated from Iowa City’s First Presbyterian Church under an ecclesiastical law written in 1643. Presbytery action came after a sixteen-month study concluded the couple had disrupted the church by insisting the old building was safe.
Controversial Dr. Nathan Wright has been appointed professor of urban affairs at New York State University. The black-power theoretician recently resigned as head of urban work for the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.
Dr. Julius Mark, for nearly twenty years spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El, New York City, the world’s largest Jewish congregation, has been named Clergyman of the Year by Religious Heritage of America. Mormon George Romney, who is Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was named Churchman of the Year.
Lillian Block, managing editor of Religious News Service, has been named a vice-president of the National Conference of Christians and Jews in “recognition of vital contributions to intercreedal understanding.”
Fernando Chavez, 20, son of grape strike leader and union organizer Cesar Chavez, received the “symbolic bread of social justice” from a Catholic priest in front of the Fresno, California, Army Induction Center after the youth refused to be drafted. Saying he was “against violence in any form,” young Chavez charged he had been denied a hearing by his Delano draft board “because of my poverty.”
Dr. Milo C. Ross, president of George Fox College (Quaker), Newberg, Oregon, has been named chancellor of the Associated Christian Colleges of Oregon beginning July 1.
Succeeding Dr. Harold John Ockenga—now president of Gordon College and Divinity School in Massachusetts—C. Davis Weyerhaeuser was named chairman of Fuller Theological Seminary’s board of trustees at a biannual meeting on the Pasadena campus.
Miss Catherine McConnachie, 66, a deaconess of thirty-seven year’s service, has been ordained as the first woman minister in the Church of Scotland. She will pastor a church near Aberdeen. And in New Orleans, Mrs. Leontine Tucker, whose husband is a Vietnam serviceman, recently joined Temple Baptist Church. She is believed to be the first Negro to be baptized by a Southern Baptist church in the city.
Socially active E. Ezra Ellis resigned after eight years as pastor of large First Friends Church, Whittier, California (most famous member: Richard M. Nixon), over unspecified “difficult situations” and “divisive concerns.”
