Jesus Festival British-Style
Climaxing a year of spiritual emphasis in Britain called “Land Aflame,” the Nationwide Festival of Light sponsored a London Festival for Jesus last month. The following report came from London correspondents Peter Meadows and David Coomes:
Traditional British reserve shattered last month when thousands of Christian young people joined hands to dance and leap in worship at three open-air events during the five-day London Festival for Jesus. The spontaneous act of worship cut right through denominational barriers—both Catholics and Protestants participated—and united the young people in simple, joyful, reverent praise.
The festival drew several thousand young people to Britain’s capital for teaching and evangelism. Yet even though more than 65,000 people were involved over the five days, press and television gave the Jesus happening only superficial—though sympathetic—mention.
Some observers reportedly were dissatisfied with the festival’s results, but the enthusiasm and creativity of the extravaganza were applauded. Gospel pop concerts, teach-ins, clean-ups, and open-air mass worship caught the eyes and ears of London’s less-than-Christian population. To arouse festival excitement a fleet of text-decorated river steamers carried 2,000 clapping, singing Christians down the Thames, past Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, to Tower Bridge.
Each morning other than Sunday, which was geared toward worship, teaching and training sessions were held at churches in the greater London area, with such subjects as “Jesus in my morals,” “Jesus in my marriage,” “Jesus in my church,” and “Jesus in my family.”
The evangelical morality movement, the Nationwide Festival of Light, this year shifted its emphasis to the Christian answer to life rather than concentrating on the problems of pornography, as it did at last year’s gathering.
During the afternoons the young people put the morning training into practice and showed their social awareness by spending time cleaning up the streets. Each evening in a different London park the group held a Jesus music festival.
A special afternoon and evening concert featured several top British show-business Christians, such as Cliff Richard, and the leading Jesus-music people, including American guests Larry Norman and Country Faith. The music event, however, was a “clan” gathering, attracting little interest from non-Christians.
Secretary Peter Hill admonished the participants on the last day, “Okay, you’ve enjoyed yourselves. Now make it count. Go back to your home towns and organize festivals for Jesus nationwide.”
A ‘Garbage’ Problem?
Concordia Seminary president John H. Tietjen, under fire for condoning doctrinal deviations, says his accusers are the ones who distort the Gospel. He warns that the theology underlying their charges “threatens our Synod with grave danger,” and “needs to be exposed and corrected lest it worsen, and in worsening, destroy the faith by which we live and which we are all given to confess.”
Tietjen’s counter-charges are in a thirty-five-page booklet in which he defends himself and his faculty against an exhaustive critique of the seminary conducted by Dr. Jacob A. O. Preus, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which owns and operates Concordia. In Preus’s 160-page report, prepared to comply with an order given him by the synodical convention in 1971, he contends that “some professors at the Seminary hold views contrary to the established doctrinal position of the established doctrinal position of the Synod” (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, September 29 issue, page 38).
Tietjen asserts that both the Preus report and a Fact Finding Committee study on which it was based misrepresent what Concordia faculty members believe, teach, and confess. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he said. “The slogan of computer programmers is a good commentary on what happened in President Preus’ investigation of Concordia Seminary.… The procedures the committee used ‘to ascertain the facts’ were so seriously flawed that the outcome of the committee’s work is completely unreliable.”
More important, Tietjen charges that “the views of Scripture interpretation which lie behind the investigation and shape its results are less than Scriptural.” He also states that the theology behind the inquiry is un-Lutheran.
Tietjen sent his report to pastors with a letter saying that “we have grave misgivings about the doctrinal positions of our adversaries.”
‘DO-GOODER’ NO GOOD?
A two-nation police hunt is on for an evangelical minister accused of absconding with more than $4,000 in federal funds earmarked for a program at an Illinois rescue mission.
FBI agents and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are looking for the Reverend John Cifelli, treasurer of the Rescue Mission for Alcoholics in Galesburg, about 200 miles southwest of Chicago.
The money was given to the mission to expand its detoxification program and start a drug-abuse program; it was part of a $72,000 Federal Safe Streets grant. Cifelli, known as a “do-gooder” in the small town, was charged by Donald C. Woolsey, state attorney for Knox County, Illinois, and president of the non-profit organization through which the funds flowed to the mission. Woolsey thinks he himself unwittingly aided the embezzlement by co-signing a check for the stolen amount.
Canadian police got into the act when it was discovered Cifelli spent a night at a plush Toronto hotel the evening he disappeared with the cash.
Galesburg police say Cifelli was connected with the infamous Purple Gang of Detroit in earlier years and had served thirty-two months in the Ohio State Penitentiary before studying for the ministry and starting the mission.
Truly …
Local churches have been asked to help formulate the COCU theological base, according to the COCU executive committee. The committee said the churches cannot unite without tackling basic theological issues. It also said that the union plan depends on COCU’s ability to “present Jesus Christ to those whose loyalties lie in a wide variety of diverse places.”
Stunned by but recovering from the withdrawal of the United Presbyterian Church last spring, the executive committee said that COCU was in a time of “testing” but that it expected the remaining eight denominations to form a “truly catholic, truly reformed and truly evangelical” church.
Preaching Ins And Outs
First, the Reverend Aaron Morgan was in as pastor of the 2,000-member Grant African Methodist Episcopal church in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Then he was out. And then he was back in again. The congregation, objecting to the bishop’s method of selecting the minister (he didn’t consult them), locked Morgan out of the church and demanded a replacement. The following Sunday they allowed Morgan to preach.
Now that he’s in again, Morgan is optimistic about settling the differences once he gets to know his congregation. He told church members in his first sermon that he had no intention of directing sermons at individuals but merely wanted “to worship with you our God.”
Burning The Way Of Escape
In June the Russian Christian painter Yuri Titov arrived in Rome, having obtained permission for himself and his wife to leave the U.S.S.R. After considerable difficulty he had also obtained permission to take with him sixty-two of his own paintings, which he had never been permitted to exhibit or sell in the Soviet Union.
In an interview with La Pensée Russe (France), Titov declared, “On our arrival in Rome, we found out what that Soviet permission was worth. When we opened the parcels containing my paintings, we found that all of them had been drenched with sulphuric acid [as determined by chemical analysis]. Almost all of them were destroyed.… The mystical-religious ideals which are reflected in my paintings reveal the essential nature of the Communist hell and point to the way of escape from that hell by a return to spiritual values and to God. That is certainly one of the principal reasons for this Satanic act. In addition, it looks to me like a pathetic act of vengeance against my wife and me for having lived, while still in the Soviet world, according to our own convictions, tastes, and inclinations—all of which is forbidden in the country we have just left, and punishable according to various degrees of cruelty.”
‘I Amness’
A quasi-religious philosophy espoused by the head of religious studies at the University of British Columbia has sparked a mini-revolt among faculty members. A book on “I AMness” co-authored by William Nicholls was featured in an article in the Vancouver Sun recently. In quick reaction, two of Nicholls’s colleagues told the Sun in lengthy letters that they were disassociating themselves, their colleagues, the department, and the university from his theories.
The letters reveal a simmering dispute in the faculty. Six months ago a letter asserting non-confidence in Nicholls was sent to the university’s dean of arts. Nicholls’s reaction reportedly was to tell faculty members to get jobs elsewhere.
The theory that rekindled the dispute calls for a freeing of the mind from prejudices created by religion. Nicholls says he tried all the religions—Eastern and Western, orthodox and esoteric—and found them all lacking. (Nicholls is a former Anglican and secretary of the Student Christian Movement.) In fact, he views religion as the basis of all man’s hatreds today. Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, he says, was supported by Christians because it brought to reality fantasies many of them had.
I AMness was described by one writer as a conglomerate of Eastern and Western mysticism, Marxist social theory, and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Suing Science
William Willoughby, religion editor of the Washington Evening Star-Daily News, is convinced the federal government is monkeying around with his children’s education. Under an act of Congress, the federally funded National Science Foundation is supplying $7 million for research into a series of textbooks that teach evolution.
Demanding fair play, Willoughby filed suit in U. S. district court in Washington challenging the biology text. The series, “Biological Sciences Curriculum Study,” is used in about 45 per cent of the nation’s school systems, Willoughby estimates, including Virginia, where his three children attend.
Arguing that school children should be taught both creationist and evolutionist theories of the origin of man, the suit asks that the series be withdrawn and that the Science Foundation donate a similar amount for research into creationist theories.
Black Baptists: A Thirty-Mile Gap
More than the thirty-mile stretch between Dallas and Fort Worth separated the two big black Baptist bodies that met simultaneously in the two cities last month. The spotlight for the ninety-second annual meetings of the 5.5-million-member National Baptist Convention of the U. S. A., Inc. (NBCUSA), and the 2.7-million-member National Baptist Convention of America (NBCA) fell much of the time on their conflicting views on national politics.
Veteran NBCUSA head Joseph Jackson of Chicago was booed by many of his usually acquiescent followers when he praised President Nixon and attacked George McGovern in his keynote address at Fort Worth. Jackson aides charged that the booing came from supporters of McGovern bused in from the NBCA meeting in Dallas, but press observers said much of it came from the delegates (10,000 attended). It was not a deep rift; Jackson—a theological and political conservative—was re-elected to his twentieth one-year term with only four dissenting votes. Adopted statements opposed drug usage, violence, and manipulation of the news by television newscasters.
Over at the NBCA, President James Carl Sams of Jacksonville, Florida, seemed inclined to stick to preaching and leave the politicking to assistants. Although both conventions stopped short of an outright endorsement of a presidential candidate (Jackson endorsed Nixon in a press conference), the 2,000 NBCA delegates unanimously passed a measure knocking the Nixon administration on racial issues. Therefore, the NBCA “cannot in good conscience support this administration for re-election,” it said. Additionally, the NBCA came out against a volunteer army (it would become a “bread-and-butter program for the blacks and poor”) and took a stand for busing.
There was an unsuccessful attempt to convene a joint session of the two conventions, and even a proposed breakfast meeting between the two presidents and their cabinets was turned down. A unity movement exists in the denominations; its leaders blame personality issues and presidential powers for the failure to achieve reunification (a breakaway group in 1915 organized the NBCUSA).
HELEN PARMLEY
