NEWS
A giant tidal wave of witness rolled onto the nation’s shores from Daytona Beach, Florida, to the Kona coast of Hawaii during the Easter vacation break. And in between, there were heavy sights and sounds of other Jesus happenings.
More than 6,000 young Christians hit the beaches and streets in personal witness, and thousands more provided backup in concerts, festivals, and other public meetings. Recorded decisions for Christ exceeded 3,000. Mass baptisms of new converts took place in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and a Seattle-area lake. There were large witness marches in Honolulu, Seattle, and Santa Barbara, California.
Beer, drugs, and sex flowed freely among the hundreds of thousands of vacationing young revelers at scattered resort beaches. But so did the Gospel.
Campus Crusade for Christ fielded 1,000 students from eighty-two colleges to circulate among the 100,000-plus at Daytona Beach. The workers spent mornings in Bible studies conducted by Crusade evangelist Josh McDowell, afternoons in sharing their faith on the beach, nights in outreach to street people, motel parties, and the hundreds who showed up for the twice-nightly performances of Crusade’s New Folk singers at the Rap Room—a beach facility loaned by city fathers.
Crusade leader Roger Vann said half the workers came from Christian colleges—a record. Each paid his own way. In addition to transportation it cost an average of $65 each for six days’ motel lodging, meals, and program cost-sharing. Most, said Vann, had no previous beach evangelism experience, yet they led more than 1,200 to Christ. Each convert, he explained, will be followed up by a letter from the worker, a computerized headquarters correspondence series, and personal contacts by Crusade staffers back at the campus.
Also on the beach were 300 Southern Baptist students sponsored by a local church, and an undetermined number of church groups and street-Christian evangelists. Area disc jockeys kept transistor radios occupied with Jesus music.
Crusade also had 250 workers at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (where a record throng of more than 50,000 gathered), and 300 at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Crusade’s magician-evangelist Andre Kole outdrew a folk-rock festival at Myrtle Beach. “The students are more spiritually open than I’ve ever seen before,” said Crusade’s Myrtle Beach coordinator David Jones.
Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship sent 275 students and staffers to Fort Lauderdale, and featured two Christian rock bands—the Exkursions and the New Wine—at the city-sponsored bandstand. The bands were kept busy singing and rapping about Jesus to thousands who crowded around from afternoon until midnight. Action was also brisk at coffeehouses operated by IVCF and Crusade. Street evangelist Arthur Blessitt preached on the beach—then baptized dozens. One innovation: IVCF’s “floating forums” aboard a yacht. Twice a day it went out with forty kids and six local clergymen who rapped with them about Christ.
Crusade also had a contingent at Bermuda. And at Port Isabel, Texas, 100 Children of God street Christians witnessed among the 60,000 bathers there.
Nearly one hundred young Christian activists from the mainland took the Gospel to Hawaii beaches, shopping centers, and parks from Hilo to Honolulu. They included turned-on Lutherans headed by David Anderson of Van Nuys, California, twenty Seattle street Christians led by ex-doper Tiny Carper, and others. A Seattle film crew followed them around and made a movie called Hallelujah Hawaii.
The campaign, organized by youth leader Bob Turnbull and other Hawaiian evangelicals, concluded with concerts on Waikiki Beach. The performers included Pat Boone and his family, the Andre Crouch Disciples group, and others. One concert attracted 6,500, and nearly 150 were baptized afterward. At another, Boone’s wife Shirley gave a testimony that brought tears to many of the 2,000 listeners—mostly young people—and hundreds said they wanted Christ.
Music was central to outreach elsewhere in the land. The two-day Faith Festival at an Evansville, Indiana, stadium drew an aggregate of 15,000 to hear street-Christian singer Larry Norman, recording artist Reba Rambo of Sweet Charity, the Sound Generation, and many others. Everybody clapped in time as the Kandels sang “Put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee,” a Top 40 favorite. The stadium became still as Kit Field Kruger, a recent Miss Indiana, warned against superficial belief and urged listeners to turn to Christ. Then she sang “Amazing Grace,” another recent Top 40 song—and everyone stood and sang with her: teen-agers, gray-haired adults, street people, and straights together.
On the second night mod-composer Jimmy Owens led the Spurrlows in a premiere of Show Me, a now-sound Christian musical he and his wife wrote.
The festival’s spirit was caught by a CBS television network news team and transmitted to the nation. Another film crew made a two-hour movie of the spectacle to show in commercial theaters.
Faith Festival was organized by Tri-State Youth for Christ, but, observed the Evansville Courier, “the one most responsible for the mood and sentiment expressed at Faith Festival, and who was the most welcome, had his own typical Hollywood director’s chair set up on the stage, bearing his name in big capital letters: JESUS.”
In Dallas, Texas, a higher-keyed week’s Festival of Christian Arts was sponsored by Jerome Hines’s Christian Arts organization of New York. A packed house at the State Fair music auditorium heard Hines’s opera, I Am the Way. Other meetings featured nationally known evangelists including Tom Skinner, Bob Harrington, Lane Adams, and Bill Bright.
Publisher Duane Pederson of the Hollywood Free Paper held a Christian rock concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Easter Sunday featuring the Philharmonic (a former acid group recently baptized by Pat Boone in his backyard swimming pool), Larry Norman (still puffing from a hurry-up trip back from Faith Festival), and others, along with Blessitt. The place was so charged up, reports one youth, that more than one hundred streamed to the front to receive Christ—within minutes after the concert began, and before Blessitt had a chance to preach.
The mood was the same in outreach meetings at Melodyland Christian Center across the street from Disneyland. During the final song of Show Me one night, more than one hundred of the 2,000 young people attending left their seats and knelt at the front. No invitation to receive Christ had been given. Another hundred joined them when an invitation was given at the conclusion of the musical. Daytime seminars on ecology and eschatology drew large crowds. More than 800 youths jammed in to hear author Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth) on the second coming of Christ.
Santa Barbara was the scene of a large “One Way” outreach campaign involving 3,000 young Christians, including 2,000 from out of town. They witnessed on the streets, beaches, and campuses, and held forth in coffeehouses and nightly in a large auditorium at the Earl Warren fairground. And they backed up IVCF and Campus Crusade in “Spiritual Revolution Day” activities at the once-troubled Isle Vista campus of the University of California (where the quarter-term system did not permit an Easter vacation break). Westmont College students conducted sidewalk Sunday-school type sessions every day for 800 children. The week’s outreach was sponsored jointly by a number of churches and youth organizations under the direction of Baptist minister Tom Collins and Lutheran youth worker Jerry Liebersbach.
“Spiritual Revolution Week” in Seattle was declared by Jesus-people leader Linda Meissner (see January 29 issue, page 34) and her street-Christian friends. More than a thousand attended nightly gospel rock concerts and rap sessions, and 150 were baptized in a nearby lake.
The outpouring of witness throughout the land took on an international flavor when more than 200 southern California high schoolers teamed up with Mexican evangelicals in Tijuana to proclaim Jesus in that city. The mayor welcomed them and said he was glad they were not coming to town for immoral reasons. One public meeting attended by 5,000 featured testimonies of American and Mexican youths and the Billy Graham film, For Pete’s Sake.
One incident on Waikiki Beach sums up the week for many. After a beach concert a young Christian activist approached a mustached youth and said: “I want to talk with you about Jesus.” Replied the youth: “I’ve been waiting for you.”
So were thousands of others.
Colombian Seminar: Whose Mission?
A strongly critical statement—and a swift refutation of its charges—came to light last month over a controversial seminar on mission and development sponsored by the National Council of Churches in Bogota, Colombia, last February.
The statement blasted the NCC for, among other things, trying to “establish a missionary position for Latin America without considering the positions of Latin Americans who represent the thought of Latin American churches.” It was written by five Colombian Protestants who participated in one discussion at the seminar. Their statement was later published by the executive committee of the Council of the Evangelical Confederation of Churches in Colombia (CEDEC) and prepared for presentation to all Protestant churches in Colombia at the CEDEC General Assembly April 22–23.
The lengthy critique of the mission seminar was distributed internationally through the press service of the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia. The NCC’s Latin America department in New York was not aware of the statement until a copy was provided by CHRISTIANITY TODAY after an editor sought a response to it from NCC staff.
The statement charged that neither the CEDEC nor the Presbyterian Church in Colombia had been officially informed of the seminar, nor had either been permitted to send observers. Listed under “impressions” of those who did attend one afternoon session (after some insistence, according to the press release): “It would appear that the speakers consider it is possible to create an appropriate climate for the development and ‘humanization’ of man only through Marxist principles and practices … and that the speakers did not consider the spiritual work of the Church to be important or necessary. There was disillusionment regarding the ‘lack of power’ of the Church in the present time.”
William Wipfler, acting executive director of the NCC’s Latin America department, said in a statement to CHRISTIANITY TODAY that the allegation the meetings were secret “is a serious misrepresentation of the nature of the seminars, suggesting that the content was secret and the discussion sinister.” The local Protestant group was invited to attend the same day its request was received, not “after some insistence,” according to Dr. Lewistine McCoy, Latin America secretary of the United Methodist Church and seminar codirector with Presbyterian missionary James E. Goff of Cuernavaca, Mexico.
McCoy, who with Wipfler drafted the rebuttal statement for the NCC, called the CEDEC charges “either deliberate misrepresentations or the impressions of someone unable to hear the discussion against the background of the social context of Latin America today.”
He said references to Marxist principles were made “in pointing out that even Christian groups have discovered the usefulness of Marxist theory in socio-economic analysis.” And he added that “at no time was the spiritual work of the church denied.… Rather, there was insistence on going back to Christological foundations.”
Concerning the CEDEC’s accusation that the seminar imposed on Colombia’s churches views not representative of Latin American churchmen, McCoy and Wipfler retorted: “No one who participated in the seminar presumed that he was speaking for the churches (nor could any of those who belong to the confederation).… Those who spoke represented a sector of the church that is thinking about development.”
The CEDEC release concluded with a protest against the NCC’s “lack of courtesy” in not informing the confederation and the Colombian Presbyterian, Church “of its purposes in holding such a seminar” and in not permitting observers from these bodies. “We take note of the irony of the seminar: ‘the liberation of the Latin American man’—studied, discussed, and planned by foreigners who are concerned that the ‘Latin American man be the lord of his own destiny.’ ”
The NCC spokesmen answered by saying that participation in the thirteen-day seminar was interdenominational and interfaith. “Why was only the Presbyterian Church of Colombia singled out for this observation?” McCoy and Wipfler asked rhetorically. “Is it possible local tensions over the choice of certain ‘unacceptable individuals’ as resource persons has been lifted unnecessarily to an international level?”
RUSSELL CHANDLER
