Starting its second half-century, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) gave prominent roles to minorities at its fifty-first convention held in Orlando, Florida, last month under the theme “Help for a Hurting World.” African-Americans Kay Cole James and John Lewis were highly visible: James addressed delegates at the first evening session, and Lewis led the convention’s music. The music especially delighted the mostly white audience, with participation by Lewis’s own Baltimore-based Joy and Devotion, a racially integrated group of singers, and Hispanic soloist Aurora Morabito.

James, who served in both the Bush and Reagan administrations, told the convention she was one of the Republicans who left messages on White House desks on Inauguration Day: “Rent, don’t buy. We’ll be back in four years.” She came away from her job, she says, convinced that the role of Christians in government had been “simply to keep government from doing any harm. Most of our time was spent putting out fires: stopping something here, blocking something there.”

A former assistant secretary for public policy in the Department of Health and Human Services and later associate director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, James knows well the problems facing government leaders and has strong opinions concerning solutions. “It is up to us to shape the public-policy debate,” she said. People need to come face to face with Jesus Christ and change their hearts. “If we can change that,” she said, “then we can change the direction the public policy goes.”

An outspoken opponent of abortion, James believes it is useless to talk about other rights if the right to life is not protected. That right, if taken away, she said, makes all other rights vulnerable.

While applauding the visibility of minorities at this convention, the Social Action Commission workshop heard discussion concerning the general make-up of NAE as evidenced by those in attendance: few minorities and few younger delegates. The National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA), which met later in the month in Jackson, Mississippi, by contrast claims about 30 percent white representation. It was felt that diversity must be modeled by NAE, and executives of both NAE and NBEA will continue ongoing discussions on racism at a meeting in June.

Myron Augsburger of the Christian College Coalition commented that coalition members are reporting a high degree of biblical illiteracy among students enrolling in the nation’s Christian colleges. He sees reconciliation as the great need of the church today.

In other convention action:

• Delegates worked at length on wording for a resolution calling on President Clinton to withdraw his initiative to lift the current ban on homosexuals in the armed forces. At the urging of NAE’s Chaplains Commission, the resolution included wording that, while strongly affirming the military mission, would not undercut the continuing presence of chaplains in the armed forces: “The courts have confirmed that there is no inherent right to serve in the armed services. The armed services may subordinate some rights to the primacy of the mission. However, this does not mean that members of the service forfeit any constitutional rights, such as the right to vote or the right to free exercise of religion.”

Resolutions were adopted concerning the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and pledging continued efforts to resettle refugees who have come to the United States from around the world.

• Acknowledging the work of Grady and Evelyn Mangham, World Relief, NAE’s international assistance arm, announced that this year it expects to have resettled 100,000 refugee families. The Manghams helped initiate the relief agency’s ministries to refugees when Grady signed a contract with the U.S. State Department in February 1979. Arthur Gay, director of World Relief, said many of the children of the earliest refugee families have won top scholastic and other awards. Looking to raise funds for World Relief’s budget, Gay offered to sell a copy of his annual report for $ 1,000—on which he had obtained the autograph of Shaquille O’Neal, the Orlando Magic’s rookie.

• The Layperson of the Year Award was presented to Nancy DeMoss, widow of the late Arthur DeMoss. She was particularly commended for her work in making possible the airing of the prolife TV commercials with the tag line “Life: What a beautiful choice!”

By Carol R. Thiessen in Orlando.

VATICAN

Clinton Names Ambassador

President Clinton’s decision to appoint Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn to be the next ambassador to the Vatican drew sharp criticism from evangelical and church/state separation groups that had urged an end to official diplomatic relations with the Holy See.

“Such a decision by any President is bad, but coming from a Baptist President, it is even worse,” said Richard Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention Christian Life Commission, citing the “cherished Baptist heritage” of the separation of church and state. In February, the CLC, the National Association of Evangelicals, Church of the Brethren, Seventh-day Adventist Church, and Presbyterian Church (USA) joined in a letter calling on Clinton to break diplomatic ties to the Vatican. The National Council of Churches also opposed the appointment.

Also condemning Clinton’s decision was Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who said the continued “official relationship between the United States government and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church” violates the First Amendment. Noting that Flynn, like his three predecessors, is a Catholic, Lynn raised concerns that the United States is establishing “a de facto religious test for this office.”

Flynn, a prolife Democrat, says he hopes to be a bridge between the White House and Pope John Paul II on the concerns they share on “social and economic justice.”

KENYA

Minister Charged with Sedition

A Kenya minister affiliated with the Presbyterian Church of East Africa has been charged with sedition after publishing a magazine article critical of the government of President Daniel Arap Moi.

Jamlick Miano, editor of The Watchman, was arrested February 15 after his magazine printed “Moi, Devil’s Whip on Kenyans.” A state prosecutor said the article sought to incite “hatred, contempt, and disaffection” against the 69-year-old Moi, in power since 1978.

Police raided newsstands February 13 and seized copies of The Watchman. Miano, who remains in jail without bond, will be tried separately for writing an earlier story in another magazine, Jitegamea.

POLAND

Strict Antiabortion Law Enacted

A new antiabortion law in Poland is the toughest in Eastern Europe, allowing the procedure only in tightly regulated situations and calling for up to two years imprisonment of doctors who violate the code.

The legislation permits abortion only if the mother’s life is endangered or her health is seriously threatened as determined by a panel of doctors; if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest as certified by a prosecutor; or if the fetus is seriously and irreversibly malformed as shown through medical tests.

The new regulations reverse Poland’s virtual abortion-on-demand policy that had been in effect since 1956. Even before the new law became official, gynecologists had been targeted with verbal threats and property vandalism by antiabortion crusaders. Still, some antiabortion campaigners say the new law does not go far enough. Before passage, lawmakers deleted a provision that would have imposed jail terms on women who received illegal abortions.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

Sterling College President Roger Parrott has been elected chairman of the U.S. Board of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. He replaces Paul Cedar, who now is chairman of the United States Committee for Lausanne. The U.S. board also has changed its name to the Lausanne Communications Council for World Evangelization to reflect its work more accurately.

• Two issues of a new Russian journal, Pilgrim, have been published with assistance from Christianity Today, Inc. The publication, which shows readers the religious situation in Russia as seen by Russian scholars, is edited by Mikhail Morgulis.

• A lack of funds could mean a delay in the next Lambeth Conference, scheduled for 1998. The proposed meeting, traditionally held in England every 10 years for Anglican bishops, has a price tag of $10 million. Church officials say the cost is prohibitive in light of world recession and financial commitments to other projects. Instead of delaying the meeting, the denomination may limit the number of invitations.

• Peter Ball, Church of England bishop for less than a year, has resigned after an investigation into allegations that he was involved in sexual misconduct with a 17-year-old novice monk in December. Ball admitted his resignation was in connection with a “police caution” issued against him on a charge of gross indecency. “I regret,” he said, “with great penitence and sorrow, the circumstances that have led to this police caution.”

• Mongolian State Television has agreed to broadcast at no charge CBN’s “Superbook” cartoon series beginning in the fall. The English-language videotapes will be translated into Mongolian, along with follow-up materials for children who write in response to the programs.

• Brother Andrew, founder of Open Doors, will present a Bible to Albanian President Sali Berisha and other high government officials in a ceremony May 14 in Tirana. It will be among the first Albanian translations of the Bible in the country, which in 1967 declared itself “the world’s first totally atheist state.”

Evangelicals differ on the way to bring peace to the former Yugoslavia.

The controversy surrounding Peter Kuzmic, ex-Yugoslavia’s most prominent Protestant theologian, symbolizes well the political tension between evangelical groups in Croatia and Serbia. At the beginning of the year, Kuzmic proposed military strikes by the West against Serbian positions. A month earlier Gunnar Staalsett, general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, had proposed a similar course of action.

Though the Pentecostal theologian’s comments enjoyed virtually unanimous support in Croatia—he resides in Osijek, Croatia—he reaped a storm of protest in Serbia. He was attacked by the secular Serbian press, but one of the sharpest retorts came from Lazar Stojsic, a minister in Belgrade’s flourishing Pentecostal congregation Hram Svete Trojice (Temple of the Holy Trinity). Stojsic said, “Kuzmic reminds me of a person with bombs in one hand and prayers in the other.”

Baptist Prof. Alexander Birvis, a former colleague of Kuzmic’s at the Pentecostal seminary in Osijek and now a pastor in Belgrade, adds, “I wonder whether Kuzmic would be demanding the same if his daughter were living in Belgrade.”

During an interview, Kuzmic explained his position, saying, “I have never asked for military action against Serbia or Belgrade. These [military] groups only understand the language of power. I would love to be a pacifist. This demonic power can only be stopped by resolute action of the Western community.”

Who’s attacking whom?

Croatian believers support the tightening of international sanctions against Serbia as well as recommendations that the Serbian Orthodox Church be banished from the World Council of Churches. On both of these points, Serbian evangelicals take the opposing view. Croatians are convinced that war guilt is primarily Serbian. The Protestants of Serbia, though, are equally certain that both sides share equal blame for the recent warfare.

Superintendent Martin Hovan, the highest-ranking Methodist in all of the former Yugoslavia, advocates views more radical than most. Hovan, who resides in Serbia, insists, “The Germanic race is attacking us. It wants to divide us up, so we can be defeated. Today the Vatican is attacking Orthodoxy, but tomorrow it could be us, the Protestants.”

Relations with the state

Distance from government policies is greater among Serbian Christians, yet, in both cases, the churches have taken positions that do not endanger their relations with the state. Serbian Pentecostals and Seventh-day Adventists hold overtly pacifist positions, but they do not take public issue with political policies of the Serbian state.

Pressure to conform is extremely harsh in both states. According to Peter MacKenzie, a Zagreb-based missionary from Scotland, Baptists in Serbianheld territories who differ with their state defend themselves with “other-worldliness.”

“I think they’re right,” adds MacKenzie, “not because Christians who get involved in politics are carnal in principle, but because in such a difficult situation it is the best means available to glorify God and to promote the advancement of the gospel. Croats think Serbs should stand up and condemn their own leaders, and Serbs think Croats should do the same. But at this point, neither is prepared to do that.”

In Serbia, multi-ethnic congregations with Serbian majorities enjoy the greatest political leeway. The Baptist church in Novi Sad, for example, sports seven different nationalities. Ethnically monolithic churches such as the Slovak Lutheran or the Hungarian Reformed are under much greater pressure. Bishop Andrej Beredi of the Slovak Lutheran church explains, “It would be highly problematic if all Lutherans or Slovaks would refuse to carry weapons. The government would immediately interpret that as an anti-Serbian step.”

Though the evangelicals of ex-Yugoslavia are not equipped to play a role as political mediators, they do possess other means for promoting peace. In places such as the destroyed city of Pakrac, Croatia, multi-ethnic congregations are being formed, including both Croatian and Serbian converts. “The fact that Serbs are joining our churches means they regard us to be peacemakers,” concludes MacKenzie. “In fact, we are on occasion accused of being Chetnik [a derisive term for Serbs] churches.”

Humanitarian aid is an additional means for promoting the concern for peace. The 1,500 Baptists of Croatia administer two of ex-Yugoslavia’s largest church relief agencies. In Serbia, the most widely respected church relief agency, ADRA, is run by the 9,000-member Adventist church. Because it has small congregations spread throughout the entire country, it was able to develop a distribution network unrivaled by any other church. “Our network is in place everywhere,” says Adventist president Jovan Lorencin proudly. Even the national Serbian Orthodox relief agency, Dobrotvor, needed to resort to Adventist channels to ship aid into all sectors of Sarajevo.

Especially in Serbia, economic hardships abound. Though Serb-held territories contain nearly as many refugees as Croatia, they are receiving no more than a fourth of all church aid directed toward Yugoslavia. Inflation is running as high as several percentage points daily: An average monthly salary in December was valued at $44; in January, it was down to $25.

Dragoslav Strajnic, a Pentecostal pastor who returned to Serbia from France in 1989, states in desperation, “We’re here, and we’re ready to work; but we’re not being given the financial means to do our job. We believers are not making the war, and we should not be punished with sanctions. There is no justification for ignoring us, because we are not responsible for this war.”

For the first time since World War II, the churches in all of Yugoslavia are free to do social and youth work without government intervention. Yet present economic restrictions have kept most projects from being realized.

Despite feelings of desertion among Serbian evangelicals, mission work appears to be flourishing in Belgrade. The city is host to nearly 15 North American missionaries, including Southern Baptists and Campus Crusade. Greater Europe Mission is planning to move its seminary there from Vienna.

By Bill Yoder in Croatia.

The prolife movement continues to confront the fallout from the shooting last month of an abortionist in front of a Pensacola clinic. Antiabortion demonstrator Michael Griffin has been charged with the murder of David Gunn, a doctor who performed abortions at a new abortion clinic.

On Capitol Hill, Gunn’s murder has been the catalyst for swift action on three major pieces of abortion legislation: the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would create a federal statutory right to abortion; the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which would make it a federal crime to obstruct access to abortion clinics; and the reauthorization of federal funds for family-planning clinics that counsel for abortion. President Clinton has also advocated overturning the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds in performing abortions.

Within weeks of the murder, each of the bills had been advanced by key congressional panels, with the clinic funding bill already clearing the full House of Representatives. Ironically, in the case of FOCA, just a week before the shooting the bill was reportedly stalled amid proabortion and congressional bickering. Marcy Wilder of the National Abortion Rights Action League says, “I think the murder highlighted the need [for abortion legislation] for the entire country [including] Congress.”

Susan Smith, public-policy director for the National Right to Life Committee, accuses the abortion-rights movement of “shamelessly exploiting” Gunn’s murder to further its own interests. “Using this tragic act of violence to promote FOCA is another attempt by proabortion leaders to deflect attention from the radical effects of the bill.”

She admits, however, that the murder has complicated her job of leading opposition to abortion legislation. “Responsible prolife citizens have to be unequivocal in their condemnation of this act of violence, as well as the violence against unborn children.” Indeed, the entire antiabortion public-relations arena has taken a major hit as a result of the murder. Columnists and talk-show hosts have been making much of the incident. University of Texas journalism professor Marvin Olasky says, “The proabortion propagandists have been hard at work.”

Still, many prolifers acknowledge that some in their own movement have done little to help the situation. While virtually all major national prolife groups denounced the murder, some individuals appeared publicly to offer some justification for it. In a statement to the media, Don Treshman, director of Rescue America, called Gunn’s death “unfortunate,” but added that “the fact is that a number of mothers would have been put at risk today, and over a dozen babies would have died at his hands.”

What strategies work best?

Such statements—coupled with the fact that the murder occurred during a rescue-style protest—are prompting some in the prolife movement to call for a re-examination of the whole rescue strategy, which has never been fully embraced by the prolife community. Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson told United Press International that while he believes in the value of “peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience” on the abortion issue, he also believes that the rescue movement “sometimes goes too far.”

Operation Rescue National (OR) spokesman Patrick Mahoney says his group has been unfairly tied to the murder and to acts of “graffiti, arson, and bombing, all of which we denounce.”

“If we were the dangerous group that everyone says we are, if our rhetoric and our actions would lead to this kind of senseless killing on the part of Michael Griffin, why did it take 20 years to happen?” Mahoney says OR will not be deterred, either by the negative press or by proposed legislation aimed at stopping rescue protests.

It is still too soon to assess the impact the murder will ultimately have on efforts against abortion. Olasky divides those efforts into three sectors: the political/judicial, the direct action, and the compassion services, which include crisis pregnancy centers and adoption ministries. He says the first two face strong challenges in the near future, while the third wing will likely feel the least fallout from the murder. According to Olasky’s research, in the nineteenth century, “it was the compassion services sector of the movement that succeeded in drastically reducing the numbers of abortions, in fact, cutting the number to half.”

By Kim A. Lawton in Washington, D.C.

Historian Robert P. Evans first met Billy Graham when the future evangelist came to Wheaton College as a transfer student. As founder of Greater Europe Mission and its European director for 36 years, Evans helped start 14 Bible colleges and three evangelical seminaries. He has been closely associated with Graham’s European work for many decades. He spoke with David Neff in Germany:

What has been the lasting impact of Billy Graham’s crusades?

First, it has stimulated evangelism. German leaders did not do evangelism like this until Graham came along. Their usual way was not to give public invitations; they did not even want any hands raised. At first they criticized Graham for calling people forward, but then they saw that it worked, and some German evangelists began doing it as well. Second, it has strengthened the pietistic wing of the church. Graham reassured them and gave them international standing. Third, leading officials [at the tax-supported church headquarters] in Hanover recognized the need for Graham’s kind of work here. The lower-level clergy have been critical, but these top men have held the welfare of the total church in view—and thus they backed Billy Graham.

What has drawn Billy Graham to Germany so many times?

The sheer number of Protestants. Just under half the country professes to be Protestant. There is nothing like it anywhere else on the continent. Wherever Billy Graham holds a campaign, he requires a large group of helpers, an infrastructure of thousands of people to be trained as counselors, to usher, to publicize the meetings.

What aspects of German culture make evangelism more difficult here than in the United States?

The formality of religion. They believe religion is supposed to be a private thing. That makes it difficult to call people out when they are all supposed to be baptized Christians already.

“I’m going to ask you to do something you may never have done before,” evangelist Billy Graham told his Essen, Germany, audience on the opening night of ProChrist ’93 in March. “But it is something your grandparents and parents, your relatives and friends may have done many years ago.” As he continued to give the “invitation,” 333 seekers crowded to the front of the auditorium.

It was 1960 when Graham first preached in Essen in Germany’s industrial Ruhr valley. The chair of the local committee took his advance team to visit the venue for the crusade, a soccer stadium in ruins from bombing raids during World War II. There were no seats there, no electric power.

Aghast at the prospect, the advance team arranged for a tentmaker who supplied Germany’s famed autumn beer festivals to sew several beer tents together. And when the evangelist pitched his outsized canvas tabernacle and switched on the power generators, a nightly average of 22,000 persons came to hear him preach the gospel.

Now, 33 years later, the aging evangelist has returned to a modern exposition center with a 7,000-seat auditorium with an overflow capacity.

Evangelistic bean-counters should not jump to conclusions about this year’s opening night attendance of 10,500. In 1993, Essen serves as a “studio” for ProChrist ’93—a made-for-satellite evangelistic crusade aimed at 317 venues across German-speaking Europe. The live, opening-night broadcast had an audience of 193,000. And when combined with the satellite transmission of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Mission World effort to 55 countries in 42 European, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages, the estimate of the first sermon’s congregation was close to 1.8 million—perhaps the largest audience Billy Graham has ever addressed.

ProChrist audiences are to be found listening attentively in cinemas, city halls, shopping centers, military bases, an airport, and even in prison. The video aspect of the mission may, in a way, help to personalize the message. A 28-foot screen lends an overwhelming sense of the evangelist’s presence.

Big hearts for evangelism

Billy Graham’s German hosts are clearly excited by ProChrist ’93. International crusade director Larry Turner says, “They have a heart as big as you can imagine, which is equalled by their mental capacity to make the gospel relevant.” And, Turner says, they are “theologically precise”—perhaps to a fault. But this is not only the land of Luther and Melanchthon, but also of modern theologians Bonhoeffer and Küng and Moltmann as well.

Graham may be partly responsible for the heart for evangelism. “American Christians have no idea how much events like the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization [convened under Graham’s leadership in 1974] have influenced us to value evangelism,” ProChrist director Ulrich Parzany told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Graham’s influence may be responsible for the introduction of mass evangelism into Germany. (See “Evangelism in the Land of Luther.”)

But despite such enthusiasm, the hour of decision regarding this particular German crusade was slow in coming. Two major issues dominated—and nearly paralyzed—the discussions: leadership and finances.

“All the major church leaders in Germany agree to the importance of evangelism,” says Hartmut Steeb, the general secretary of ProChrist and of the German Evangelical Alliance. “But none of them would step forward and head a mission.” This created a situation in which, if plans for a Graham crusade were to move forward, it was not clear who would have the authority to make decisions. Eventually, representatives from 60 church and parachurch organizations decided to re-extend an earlier invitation to Graham and to form the ProChrist organization to plan and coordinate the mission. The working leadership was drawn from such organizations as the German YMCA and the Evangelical Alliance.

While mainline churches have not taken the lead, they have opened their checkbooks, contributing $1.1 million from church tax revenues. Another $119,000 came from England and Scotland. “We haven’t had such support for evangelism from England,” says Steeb, “since they sent monks here to Christianize us in the seventh century.”

The official support, but lack of leadership, from mainline churches has probably been a blessing, for ProChrist has brought about an unprecedented level of interchurch cooperation in Germany. “We must not forget the spiritual value of all the churches working together,” says Johannes Neudeck, “and also the picture it presents to the public.” Neudeck, who has traveled across Germany to coordinate the local committee, adds that the Graham mission is the first occasion for joint church efforts in many cities.

While ProChrist’93 is Graham’s first crusade in a united Germany, it is being held in that country’s far West. Many would have liked to hold the crusade in Berlin or another major eastern city, both for symbolic value and as a way of encouraging the long-oppressed churches there. But the churches of Berlin could not agree among themselves on key aspects of hosting an evangelistic mission, and the rest of the East lacked sufficient numbers of active Christians to do the necessary work.

Down a block-long corridor and past three security checkpoints from the hall where Graham preaches, beats the human heart of the technical effort that sends the evangelist’s face and message far beyond the borders of Germany. Here are 42 booths, each holding two translators, who re-preach Graham’s message each night. They watch his image on video monitors and hear his English, but their audio signal blocks out the German translator’s voice, and in those pauses a jumble of voices breaks forth, as each translator places Graham’s message into his own mother tongue for his own people. This tumult is, however, not Babel, but Pentecost.

Further crusades are scheduled (Columbus and Pittsburgh this year; Tokyo next January). During ProChrist, Graham told his Essen audience that physicians say he probably has five to ten years of active ministry ahead.

However long he chooses to continue, what remains constant is Graham’s message of grace and the call to decision. Ultimately for Graham, all problems are sin problems: rain forests are destroyed because of greed, and ethnic tensions arise because of pride. Salvation and renewal through Christ are the only solutions. That, for Billy Graham, has not changed—and will not change.

By David Neff in Essen, Germany.

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,by Randall Balmer. A three-part series, airing nationally onPBSMay 11, 18, 25. Check local listings for time. Reviewed by John G. Stackhouse, Jr., associate professor of religion, the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

It is not news for evangelicals to be on TV. What is noteworthy is a three-part documentary on public television that teaches a general audience about evangelicalism. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Columbia University and author of the popular book of the same title, hosts “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” a personal journey into the evangelical subculture.

The series is a vivid and extensive travelogue. Balmer takes viewers from Chicago to rural Mississippi, from California to West Virginia, from the Pacific Northwest to the Iowa heartland, and from upstate New York to deep, southern Georgia. He visits a colorful range of institutions: a rock concert, a Hispanic church, a summer camp, a film studio, and the Christian Booksellers Association convention, among others. And he narrates some illuminating background on evangelicalism, from the eighteenth-century Great Awakening to the Scopes “evolution” trial of 1925.

Balmer is an attractive host. He listens carefully—indeed, among the highlights of the series are the interviews with people who have been filled with the Spirit and then recount that experience with disarming lucidity and sincerity. Balmer appears to be a trustworthy guide, and we want to believe that the powerful images he presents do, in fact, combine to form a portrait of American evangelicalism.

But do they? Early on, Balmer offers common descriptors of evangelicalism: conversion experience, belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, codes of conduct, concern for end times, and populism. But in the rest of the series he points to these themes too rarely to draw together the whirl of sights and sounds. If the program wants to emphasize the uniformity in “evangelicalism,” then it needs to show how all of these institutions in fact fit together in some sociologically significant way. Yet, if diversity is the theme, then it must explain why it characterizes all these varieties as an identifiable subculture.

While the series covers considerable ground—and no presentation can be exhaustive—it leaves out elements that ought to round out the picture. While mention is made of the importance of preaching, for instance, the only preachers we see are from the “ranting” school, whether white or black, whether slick TV evangelists or down-home amateurs.

The quest for personal holiness comes across in this presentation as a joyless legalism. No one testifies to the common evangelical discipline and delight of the daily “quiet time.” And no appreciation is expressed for the mission-oriented rationale for such self-denial. Indeed, the typical evangelical concern for personal evangelism appears only rarely and usually as an example of reprehensible religious chauvinism. Moreover, the entire foreign missions enterprise, so crucial to evangelical self-understanding, does not appear at all.

Balmer is interested in the unusual, but that interest also creates distortion.

Balmer’s acerbic criticism, furthermore, seems to vary directly with the degree to which the institution in question is significant in his own experience of evangelicalism. Thus he marginalizes what are at least important constituents of mainstream evangelicalism. He is most appreciative of southern black Pentecostals, of West Virginia camp meeting attendees, and of the evangelical Pentecostal Episcopalians in Georgia. He is hardest on northern, middle-class evangelicals.

The show, then, is ambitious and engaging. But, regrettably, it does not completely satisfy. In the last scene, Balmer is remarkably candid about his desire to remain faithful to his background. Had Professor Balmer explained better what evangelicalism is, we might resonate better with his ambivalence toward it. Without more attention to and interpretation of the mainstreams of American evangelicalism, though, his portrait remains a kaleidoscope. What is “the glory” that Balmer’s “eyes have seen?”

Churches struggle to overcome racial tensions, poverty, and inner-city violence.

Los Angeles is a city on edge. Police helicopters patrol nightly, circling buildings, shining their searchlights into dark corners. The ominous sound of helicopter blades along with the firing of handguns and automatic weapons makes sleep difficult for residents in neighborhoods where gangs battle each other.

Yet sleep may be difficult for all of Los Angeles’s 12 million inhabitants. The tensions that led to last year’s riots remain unresolved. Two court cases, the retrial of police officers in the Rodney King beating and the three teenagers accused of beating Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots, uncanny in their parallels, have unfolded in the California court system in the glare of intense media coverage.

In the meantime, committees, coalitions, task forces, prayer teams, and watchdog organizations gather in board-rooms, church basements, and city hall council rooms to ponder how Los Angeles will face its future, asking themselves: Why has so little of the promised federal money come in? How will it be distributed among the various ethnic communities? How well has the Los Angeles police force prepared for the possibility of more rioting when the trials are over? Should Korean liquor store owners whose businesses were burned be allowed to reopen their stores in black neighborhoods?

In all these discussions, the 7,000 churches of Los Angeles play an important role. Churches are often mentioned in the same breath with community and civic organizations when participant lists are drawn up. However, despite the church’s visible efforts immediately after the riots, those outside the church community perceive the church as marginally effective in its impact on the city’s tense social issues. “The city has not felt the church’s presence,” says Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center. An experienced urban minister, John Perkins, says, “The church is no farther than before the riots.”

Yet Los Angeles churches are not the only group whose effectiveness is in doubt. Cynicism abounds about organized relief efforts. Of the stores destroyed during the riots, only 18 percent have reopened. Community groups seem trapped in race politics as they compete with one another for scarce funds. The highly publicized Rebuild L.A. effort, headed by former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth, has produced meager results and has been accused of not fairly representing all ethnic groups.

Aside from the effects of the outcome of the trials, the systemic injustices that have the different communities seething are not being addressed.

“What happened in L.A. was not a riot, but a rebellion,” says Franz Schurmann, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Jesse Miranda, a Latino educator, says, “Desperate people do desperate things.”

L.A.’s complexity seems to defy the best of intentions. As civic and church groups meet frequently to wrestle with Los Angeles’s future, and as more than 50 candidates vie for mayor in the coming elections, they must all grapple with the region’s complex dynamics.

“I wish I could be hopeful about the church’s ability to effect change,” says Michael Mata, director of the Bresee Institute, a leadership-development and resource center for urban ministry.

Few churches in Los Angeles have purposefully undertaken the role of becoming a means for mediation and racial peacemaking. Some urban church leaders fault the Los Angeles-based church-growth movement and its emphasis on growth through creating homogeneous groups. This trend, some have pointed out, has moved churches away from the reality of cultural and ethnic diversity in American life today.

Some of the largest Los Angeles churches have joined with several hundred others in well-attended and earnest prayer gatherings to seek God’s mercy and healing for the city. But so far the results are mixed. The risks some key church leaders are taking to cross racial barriers do not seem to have translated into substantive change. Perkins says, “These coalitions are just shells that are not doing much to address structural problems.”

Not just a black and white issue

The real Los Angeles routinely clashes with the six o’clock news in L.A. The media’s continual packaging of the conflict in black/white terms ignores the reality that half or more of South Central, Watts, and Koreatown is Latino. This explains the little-reported facts that more Latinos than blacks were arrested for looting, that one of the areas hardest hit by the rioting was a predominantly Central American barrio called Pico Union, and that the “all-white jury” that acquitted the four officers in the Rodney King case included one Latino and one Asian.

“The Kerner Commission Report’s conclusion in 1968 that there were two nations in the U.S., one black, one white, separate and unequal, simply does not fit L.A.,” says Richard Rodriguez, a leading California writer. The racial landscape has changed, but few seem to have noticed. “Some of the demographic changes predicted for the year 2000 set in in 1989,” says Mata. One-hundred-forty nations are represented in L.A. County. By the end of the 1980s, 40 percent of Angelenos were foreign born. Fifty percent spoke a language other than English at home.

Latinos will soon be a majority in South Central and Watts, areas long assumed to be primarily black.

Despite their larger numbers, Latinos remain largely invisible to the Los Angeles mainstream. Although there has been a long-standing Mexican-American presence, much of the Latino population consists of newly arrived immigrants representing 16 different nationalities. It is nearly impossible for them to build a cohesive political base and have clearly identified spokes-people, which leaves them poorly represented.

Korean dilemmas

The Koreans are wrestling with dilemmas of their own. Bob Oh, pastor of the Oikos Community Church, a Korean congregation, says, “Some Koreans feel God is punishing them for opening up liquor stores in the black communities; that they were making a living off tainted money.” Some also believe Korean business owners need to repent of abusing their black and Latino workers.

For Koreans who have emigrated from a largely homogeneous country, the multicultural nature of Los Angeles is tough to handle. Though Koreans are the most Christianized ethnic group in the United States, Oh says he knows some Korean pastors who refer to blacks in clearly racist terms.

“But I also have been stopped by blacks demanding I give them money because they say I have exploited them.” Some feel that Koreans have become scapegoats in the ongoing conflicts between blacks and whites.

“The white dominant society has pitted minorities against each other,” says Tom Wolf, pastor of the Church on Brady in East Los Angeles. Kim says, “Blacks deal with daily injustices. They have in front of their faces a hungry, ambitious, college-educated immigrant community that left everything behind to come realize the American Dream.”

Whites seem to have abandoned large parts of Los Angeles. They were nowhere to be seen during a recent three-and-a-half hour ride through different L.A. neighborhoods. “What I’m not sure about is what white America is going to do,” says Kim. “Is it going to build walls higher or realize that they have a stake in the outcome? As long as they run away from the problem, it’s going to increase despair.”

L.A.’s churches are simply ill-equipped to deal with the city’s complex racial mosaic. Many pastors have not known a single person from another ethnic group and so have not developed the cross-cultural skills necessary to address L.A.’s conflicts.

Of immediate concern to Angelenos is whether the simmering racial anger will escalate into violence. The verdicts in the two beating trials might be muted due to the extraordinary security measures established by police chief Willie Williams.

Yet, L.A. residents are preparing for the worst regardless of whether the four white officers accused in the Rodney King beating are acquitted or whether the three black men on trial for the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny are convicted.

After the 1992 riots, gun sales skyrocketed. Oh says, “Next time, Korean shop owners will not hesitate to use them if people threaten to loot their stores again.”

Church success stories

The church is having much more impact taking care of its own. Counseling has been offered to countless church members to deal with posttraumatic stress disorder. “We were captives of a military state for several days,” says Mata. “Here was the National Guard patrolling the streets with M-16s.” To help church members heal, a group of Latino Assemblies of God pastors recently organized a seminar to help parents articulate their fears for their children’s future.

Churches such as the Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene and the Church on Brady have been successfully working on reconciliation for many years. The First Church of the Nazarene has four congregations—Korean, Spanish, English, and Filipino—which are jointly administered by a multicongre-gational council. The English congregation is quite mixed with whites, Africans, African-Americans, Belizeans, and second-generation Latinos and Asians who feel more at home in an English-speaking service than in one conducted in the language of their parents. Quarterly joint services among all the congregations are held to affirm the different groups’ oneness in Christ.

The congregations see their cross-cultural mission going beyond their church structure. The Nazarene church’s dozens of programs are offered to a community representing more than 40 different languages. The church’s doors are open all day, providing daycare, schooling, food, youth programs, and referral services to over 1,800 people weekly. A few months after last year’s riots the church sponsored a multi-ethnic fair that drew 2,000 people who celebrated differing heritages through food and music. “The fair reassured people that we can come together and enjoy life—that we can eat kimchee as much as we can eat salsa,” says Mata. “The community was appreciative that the church took the lead.”

In contrast to the First Church of the Nazarene, the Church on Brady, pastored by Tom Wolf, has only one congregation, which serves a mixture of people that is 60 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian, and 20 percent white. The church’s home groups, in which 87 percent of the church participates, are just as integrated. This comes so naturally to members that “having ‘integrated’ groups is a foreign concept,” says Wolf. “We just have groups.”

Do coalitions work?

“When I saw a black church pastor tell his flock to stop destroying the stores in the neighborhood and instead hit those in Simi Valley, I knew I had to do something,” says Billy Ingram, the black pastor of the Maranatha Community Church. A few days later Ingram had gathered 100 leaders from churches throughout the area to pray and develop a response.

They formed the Coalition of Religious Leaders of Southern California. The fruits of their efforts have included multiracial unity services. At the first one, 3,000 people gathered in the hard-hit Crenshaw neighborhood soon after the riots for a time of mutual repentance and forgiveness. Another service was presided over by David Yonggi Cho of Korea last October with 5,000 in attendance.

Crime And Punishment In The City Of Angels

In Los Angeles County, there are approximately 150,000 people in 411 known gangs.

There are two police officers for every 1,000 Los Angeles residents, the lowest ratio in the nation Over the past five years, 466,453 handguns were sold legally in Los Angeles County, one for every 19 residents.

SOURCES: Detective Paul Glascow, Gang lnfonnation Section, LAPD California Justice Department figures reported in the Christian Science Monitar; Atlantic

The coalition has spawned one-to-one interracial relationships among pastors that have been developed throughout the year in pulpit and choir exchanges. Currently the coalition is focusing on more structural efforts, such as setting up a credit union for small businesses and providing an entrepreneurs’ seminar. Another significant coalition is Love L.A., involving up to 1,800 pastors who come together on a quarterly basis to pray. These include leaders from urban and suburban churches such as Lloyd Ogilvie, Jack Hayford, and Fred Price.

“Some feel prayer is not a program,” says Bryce Little, pastor of mission and community outreach at Ogilvie’s church. “We feel otherwise.” On their own, some Korean churches have sponsored trips to Korea for black pastors to get firsthand exposure to Korean culture and establish understanding.

“The riots did provide a mixed blessing,” says Oh, who is part of Ingram’s coalition. For the first time, “it has gotten many of us pastors to establish significant relationships with church leaders of other races.”

Watchdog group in action

The group of 20 gathers slowly, members greeting each other warmly as they find their usual seats around a rectangular table and on sofas along the wall. This multiracial group, called the Community Conversation, led by African-American pastor Madison Shockley III, meets weekly to monitor the city’s response to the Christopher Commission’s findings on what led to the riots.

A young couple with a newborn attends. So does a Christian psychologist, some retirees, and a few lawyers. They painstakingly try to find their place in the effort to rebuild Los Angeles. They actively participate in hearings sponsored by the city and the police department, trying to hold them accountable to their promises to the citizenry. As they learn about confronting the city’s political realities, they also address the differences within their group. Some whites feel threatened by plummeting property values. In contrast, some blacks see an opportunity finally to be able to afford a house. Their quiet work has been effective—the group has remained together for a year now and has sponsored some community-development efforts, such as helping local businesses reopen.

The very suburban Azusa Pacific University is opening a campus in South Central. Spearheaded by Jesse Miranda, assistant director for Urban and Multiethnic Concerns, the university’s vision for this campus is to provide education to inner-city leaders and to provide suburban students with a real live opportunity to be in an urban context. The program is innovative in that the faculty is organized by ethnic group, with each of the major groups having its own dean and faculty, and classes especially tailored to its unique contexts. Plans provide for classes to be offered in theological studies, nursing, and business schools on this urban campus.

Miranda says, “These plans were already in the works last year, but the riots put them into high gear.”

World Impact is focusing on younger students, with an elementary and middle school that has been operating in South Central for ten years.

The African-American and Latino kids attending the school’s peaceful environment blossom as they participate in innovative science projects, such as building a model space shuttle. Their SAT test scores consistently are significantly above the national average for other urban schools.

A Promising Example In Pico Union

Two shots ring out. Jon rushes out of his apartment. “What was that?” he asks the boys standing silently in the darkened stairwell. Heads peer carefully out of windows and doorways and look out on the street. There is a collective sigh of relief as it becomes clear that no one got hurt in another drive-by shooting.

During the L.A. riots, Jon and Karin Primuth, John Shorack, and Jude Tiersma saw the destruction firsthand. They are part of a group of five whites who deliberately moved into Pico Union to do their part in reversing white flight and to show that whites can care. They are currently part of Innerchange, a church-planting ministry.

Parties, outings, and Bible studies fill out the week for these transplanted whites who are so rare in the neighborhood that police stop them to ask if they are lost.

Sixteen-year-old Valerie Vazquez, a Latina living in the neighborhood, felt initially suspicious. “When I first saw these white people move in I thought they were weird. ‘What do they want?’ we wondered.” At the time, Valerie was pregnant, had dropped out of school, and was in a severe depression. After a few months, she and another Innerchange member, Birgit Funck Shorack, struck up a friendship.

It was a life-changing relationship. Through counseling and encouragement, Valerie and her boyfriend married, she is finishing high school, and is very devoted to her two-year-old child.

“We’ve come in as neighbors, not saviors or providers,” says Shorack. “By moving into the neighborhood it is no longer us and them—it is we,” says Tiersma, as she ticks off a laundry list of problems with her tiny apartment: electrical outlets don’t work, water leaks from the ceiling, gas leaks from the stove. By living in the Cambria Apartments, Innerchange shares their neighbors’ struggles.

A second chance

Many L.A. Christians are asking themselves: Why did God allow the riots to happen? “It’s a wake-up call for the church to be the church,” answers Oh. “It shows us that we need to find a way for 140 different groups to live together. The problem is so big that the only alternative is God. He will allow the violence to happen again if we don’t learn this lesson.”

In the riots and their aftermath, the L.A. churches’ lack of relevancy was seriously exposed. Somehow there was not enough of the church’s leaven to hold together the city’s moral fiber during the crisis. This failure is not only a lesson for churches in Los Angeles, but also for churches nationwide.

As the spreading of the rioting across the nation demonstrated, Los Angeles is a preview of America’s future. Multiculturalism and economic struggles are a harbinger of what is coming.

L.A.’s churches have a unique opportunity to be a prophetic voice to the rest of the nation.

On the morning after the riots, Michael Mata, his wife, Kristina, and their three children put on their hiking boots and walked the one-mile stretch of broken glass and debris between their home and their church.

During their walk, they passed block after block of ransacked stores. In some, shop owners, with shotguns across their laps, stood guard over whatever was left of their life’s work. In others, the merchants wore white bandannas around their foreheads, a Korean sign of peace.

As Mata’s family offered exhausted National Guardsmen orange juice and distraught shopkeepers a word of encouragement, they were overcome by the realization that reconstruction and healing would require extraordinary efforts. They also understood that the city’s churches are sitting on the power, hope, and spiritual energy needed to rebuild for the future. The Matas intended their walk to be a demonstration of the church’s commitment to stand in the breach and help rebuild the city. Los Angeles now skeptically waits fulfillment of that promise.

By Andrés Tapia in Los Angeles, with a grant from Religious News Service.

The Masculine Mystique

Men at the Crossroads,by Jack Balswick (InterVarsity, 218 pp.; $9.99, paper);The Real Man Inside, by Verne Becker (Zondervan, 206 pp.; $15.99, hardcover);Father and Son, by Gordon Dalbey (Nelson, 208 pp.; $14.99, hardcover);Men Under Construction, by Donald M. Joy (Victor, 204 pp.; $8.99, paper);The Hidden Value of a Man,by Gary Smalley and John Trent (Focus on the Family, 180 pp.; $17.00, hardcover). Reviewed by John Wilson, an editor and writer in Pasadena, California.

Here are the titles of books either just or soon-to-be released by secular publishing houses: American Manhood, Being a Man, Fatherhood in America, In a Time of Fallen Heroes: The Re-Creation of Masculinity, In the Company of Men, Men and the Water of Life, Reinventing Fatherhood. Publishers know a good thing when they see it. But this mere recitation of titles—a sampling only, not an exhaustive list—provides a surprisingly accurate outline of the recurring themes that have brought men’s issues to national prominence.

Foremost is the unsettling discovery that masculinity—what it means to be a man—is not an unchanging essence. If manhood is (at least in part) historically and culturally conditioned, how do we distinguish between discardable roles and vital imperatives that we violate only at great cost? While some of the titles listed above hint at the anxiety provoked by such questions, there is a prevailing tone of utopian optimism: masculinity is being re-created, no less.

Evangelicals have been quick to respond to the growing interest in men’s issues; the five books under review here are a representative selection. Jack Balswick’s Men at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional Roles and modern Options is the best starting point. With clarity and balance, Balswick provides the context necessary for understanding the current debates over gender roles. Offering a critique of traditional conceptions of masculinity as well as contemporary secular alternatives, he seeks a distinctively Christian perspective that synthesizes the best from these divergent viewpoints.

“Imagine the anxiety of an actor who walks out on the stage and discovers that he cannot remember vital lines that belong to his role. Changing definitions of masculinity [and femininity, Balswick would add] have brought many men a similar anxiety in their daily lives.” In fact, the problem is not so much that men have forgotten their lines but rather that they have become self-conscious and uncertain about what they are saying.

The “early men’s movement,” as Balswick calls it, writing from the perspective of a participant, developed in the 1970s as a sympathetic response to feminism. The men who took part in this movement—which was small, and largely restricted to academia—were burdened with guilt. In repudiating the oppression of women and the self-destructive behaviors that were built into traditional definitions of masculinity, they “unfortunately failed to see the strengths and positive qualities in the traditional male.” Moreover, they accepted the notion, then dominant in the social sciences, that gender roles are almost entirely socially constructed. (Much of the current academic work on men’s issues is governed by this paradigm.)

In contrast, the “new men’s movement”—in today’s parlance, simply the men’s movement—strongly emphasized the reality of “fundamental deep structures of the human self, both masculine and feminine,” according to Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. While the new men’s movement, which developed in the 1980s independently of the early men’s movement, was rooted in Jungian depth psychology, it found corroborating evidence in studies that suggested a biological basis for many of the differences between men and women.

In 1989, the Bill Moyers/Robert Bly PBS production, “A Gathering of Men,” introduced the men’s movement to millions of viewers. This was followed by the 1990 publication of Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men, which enjoyed a long run on the best-seller list and spawned a host of imitations, parodies, and lengthy analyses, pro and con. With his books, videos, and audiotapes, in addition to men’s gatherings conducted throughout the United States, Bly has done more than anyone else to bring men’s issues to the surface and to frame the terms of the discussion.

Wounded and passive

Verne Becker’s The Real Man Inside makes it clear why Bly’s message struck a chord. A firsthand account of pain, confusion, and healing, Real Man combines an autobiographical narrative with an exposition of the teachings of Bly, Moore and Gillette, Joseph Campbell, and others. Like Balswick, Becker seeks to adapt and Christianize the masculine “archetypes” popularized by the men’s movement.

Becker was a self-described “passive man” (in Bly’s terms, a “soft man”) until his first wife unexpectedly left him, a shock that ultimately prompted him to re-evaluate his life. In his thirties at the time, Becker had been a sensitive, caring husband and a good provider. What was wrong with him?

Even before the separation and divorce, Becker had been aware of a seemingly unaccountable dissatisfaction, a sense that he had been “sleepwalking” for years. Inspired by a broadcast of “A Gathering of Men,” and guided by his therapist, he began to dig deeper. He saw that he was alienated from his body (“From an early age I learned to live in my head”), from his deepest feelings, and from other men.

How did this come about? Becker repeats the standard men’s-movement diagnosis (shared in essentials by Balswick, Dalbey, and Joy). Gradual changes in Western society have progressively weakened the transmission of masculine identity from generation to generation. The father is distant, off at work most of the time (or out of the picture entirely), leaving sons vulnerable to excessive mothering. The breakdown in community has left boys without clear markers as they move into adulthood. Finally, the women’s movement, while necessary and long overdue, has nevertheless further eroded men’s sense of identity.

For Becker, recovering his masculine identity meant opening himself to risk—in his case, the risks entailed by forgoing the security of a regular pay-check for the life of a freelance writer.

Becker’s book is weakest when he is trying to put his experience in a Christian context. Arguing that “the unconscious houses our spiritual side, or our soul, including the stamp of God’s image”—an astonishing statement, which unwittingly reveals the overweening authority of psychology in the evangelical community—Becker implies that only through therapy and the introspective “work” encouraged by the men’s movement can we “bring our inner and outer selves into harmony with each other and with God.”

More serious confusions are afoot in Gordon Dalbey’s Father and Son: The Wound, the Healing, the Call to Manhood. Dalbey’s point of departure is the masculine “wound,” a key theme of the men’s movement: “That wound is caused by an epidemic alienation from the father, who is every man’s masculine root in this world.” This “epidemic” is a product of specific historical circumstances; here Dalbey’s summary parallels Becker’s.

Dalbey’s next move, however, is to take this specific problem of contemporary American society and theologize it to the limit. Suddenly he is asserting that the “need for healing the father-son wound is the key to understanding the biblical faith.”

There are more problems with that claim than can be sorted out here. It ignores the fact that centuries ago, long before the onset of “epidemic alienation from the [human] father,” men and women needed God just as much as they do today; by the same token, sons today who are not alienated from their fathers nonetheless need God just as much as any of their wounded contemporaries. And what of daughters?

Dalbey provides an interesting twist for explaining why men are not as active in church as women: “Men avoid and often ridicule church because they want true and not false religion. Men want relationship with the Father, not a list of do’s and don’ts among pompous leaders and mindless underlings.” In other words, real men don’t heed the Ten Commandments.

Captains and kings

It is refreshing to turn from Dalbey to Donald Joy’s Men Under Construction, a revised and expanded edition of his 1989 book Unfinished Business. True, Joy repeats an error that seems to be endemic to the genre—inflating the influence of fathers to near-omnipotence. (Yes, fathers are important in shaping the lives of their children, but so are many other factors.) When Joy asserts that “both our culture and our genes combine to give us a sense that our fathers make and control our destinies,” some readers may be moved to respond: “Speak for yourself!”

Despite this reductionism, Joy provides an energizing and insightful guide to issues that men are grappling with: father-son relationships, sexuality, the need for intimacy and trust in friendships with other men. A gifted storyteller, Joy draws frequently on his own experience as a therapist and marshals an impressive range of sources, from studies of fetal development to the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan. Each chapter comes equipped with “Do-It-Yourself Notes” (to facilitate individual study) and “Contractor’s Crew Notes” (for use in a men’s support group). In addition to source notes, Joy has included a useful annotated bibliography of men’s resources.

Gary Smalley and John Trent’s The Hidden Value of a Man stands a bit apart from the other books reviewed here; unlike them, it is not significantly influenced by Bly and the men’s movement. Through their work with the men’s organization Promise Keepers, Smalley and Trent have sought to address the crisis in fatherhood that contributes to so many of the problems we face as a nation.

The Hidden Value of a Man is written in a maddeningly simplistic style. The authors are excessively fond of military metaphors; not surprisingly, they present a strongly hierarchical model of male headship in marriage. Since “the absence of clear goals is one of the biggest problems … in families around the world,” Smalley and Trent advise couples to “write out their goals in a family constitution.” Hidden Value of a Man also includes checklists, questions, and other workbooklike material.

Missing ingredients

While these five books on men’s issues represent diverse viewpoints from within the evangelical community, they nevertheless have much in common. What they omit or take for granted is in some instances as important as what they say.

In these books countless assertions are made about manhood and masculinity, and so it is striking to note the almost complete dominance of psychological perspectives and the virtually complete absense of anthropological, cross-cultural perspectives. (There are piquant exceptions; Joy, for example, devotes a page or so to penis rituals around the world.) At a time when race and ethnicity are factored into every conceivable discussion, even to the point of obsession, it is strange to read five books about men and men’s issues without encountering an extended reflection on the intersection between masculinity and race and ethnicity. (Balswick, to his credit, acknowledges the issue, though he does not pursue it.)

Another pattern is even more striking. If earlier writings about manhood are epitomized by the excesses of Norman Mailer, with his lurid fantasies of violence and abasement, these books go to the opposite extreme. Joy tells us that the “macho façade is a thin disguise of toughness that many men wear to protect themselves and keep others from discovering what empty and hurting people they really are.” In a chapter titled “Competition, Aggression and War,” Balswick castigates the “warped vision of manhood” reflected in the gala “victory celebrations” after the Gulf War. Fine, but what about violence that cannot be reduced to Ram-boesque posturing? Violence in these books, when it is not ignored altogether, is treated as a subject to be psychologically and sociologically analyzed and deplored, rather than as an unpredictable reality that always lies just beneath the surface of civility.

Historically and cross-culturally, one of the fundamental tests of manhood has been the capacity and willingness to defend oneself and one’s family—even at the cost of one’s own life. How does that play in the 1990s? Where does violence fit in with what Joy calls “full-spectrum masculinity”? In his conclusion, Joy approvingly recalls Bruce Barton’s revisionist portrait of a virile Jesus, The Man Nobody Knows, but then observes that Jesus became the supreme exemplar of nonviolent resistance to evil. That leaves the question of violence and Christian manhood in the here and now very much up in the air: a worthy subject for another book.

The Politics Of Dominion

Heaven on Earth? The Social and Political Agendas of Dominion Theology, by Bruce Barron (Zondervan, 238 pp.; $10.99, paper). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, author of Beyond Good Intentions.

Bruce Barron’s Heaven on Earth? explores one of the more important, yet controversial, influences on Christian political activists: Dominion theology. Robert Billings, a leader of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, reportedly said that “if it weren’t for [Rousas John Rushdoony’s] books, none of us would be here.”

Although Rushdoony is largely unknown not only to the general public but also to most churchgoers, he, along with his estranged son-in-law, Gary North, and a handful of other so-called Reconstructionists, represent an important theological current. Most simply, Dominion theology posits the duty of Christians to capture every institution for Jesus Christ. Among the more controversial applications of Reconstructionism is that today’s nominally secular state should enforce Old Testament law.

However, the movement is more divided than has been commonly thought. Barron, the author of The Health and Wealth Gospel and currently a congressional aide, provides concise, understandable explanations of the roots of Dominion theology and related perspectives-particularly Pat Robertson’s Regent University and the Kingdom-Now Pentecostal movement.

What makes Barron’s book so valuable is its objectivity. Not all Reconstructionists take criticism well, and some of its critics have been equally uncivil. Barron presents a fair description of the movement, followed by his own critique. He rightly disagrees with Dominion presuppositions: Reconstructionism can, he writes, “at times go overboard in its unyielding antagonism to non-Christian cultural forces” as well as evidence “a discomforting triumphalism.” Still, he argues, “these two defining dominionist characteristics, cultural distinctiveness and optimism, also offer a positive contrast to the inconsistency and passivity that mark so much of both Christian and secular thought.”

Barron advocates a larger government than most Reconstructionists-and I-would like, but he nevertheless does a good job of eliciting some general biblical principles to be applied in the public sphere. Heaven on Earth? is a rarity amongst the literature on Dominion theology-an objective, informative account of a controversial subject. It belongs in the library of anyone interested in assessing the prqper role of Christians in politics.

Prayer for leadership

Tennyson observed, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice rise like a fountain for me night and day.”

So why aren’t more people praying and fewer posturing? Maybe they believe criticism raises more money for their organizations than prayer. Perhaps, but do they achieve their stated objectives?

Bill Clinton’s public policies should be critiqued. But … the chances of his doing the right thing are improved when he knows that people are praying for him.

—Cal Thomas in the Tampa

Tribune-Times (Jan. 17, 1993)

Now what, God?

In the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew’s devastation, as my grandson, Stephan—Nelson, was working night and day helping the survivors to get water and food, he noticed a sign on the roof of one house which read: “Okay, God. You’ve got our attention. Now what?”

I see storms of apocalyptic proportions on the horizon. God is beginning to get our attention. Now what?

—Billy Graham in

Storm Warning

Meeting needs or meeting God?

As the church today gets more and more hip—more and more need-oriented, responding to the buttons that people push in their pews—I find myself longing for more of a historical faith. I find myself not wanting to have everything explained to me in simple terms.…

I’m not even sure I want all my needs met as much as I want to meet God, and sometimes I wonder if he’s really interested in the noise of our contemporary clamoring. Like my dog who can’t seem to get anywhere because he keeps having to stop and scratch his fleas, I wonder if we are so busy scratching where everybody itches that we aren’t taking anybody anywhere significant.

—John Fischer in “Longing for Something Old” (Covenant Companion, Oct. 1992)

The wisdom of foresight

Foresight is the beginning of holiness. If you learn this art of foreseeing, you will be more and more like Christ, for his heart was sweet and he would always think of others.

—Mother Teresa in Heart of Joy

Burning the ties

Our lusts are cords that bind us. Fiery trials are sent to burn and consume them. Who fears the flame which will bring him liberty from intolerable bonds?

—Charles Spurgeon in The Quotable Spurgeon

Acid test

You can tell whether you are becoming a servant by how you act when people treat you like one.

—Gordon MacDonald at a Mastering Ministry Conference (January 1993)

Giving back the gift

People have often said, “You could have made it in the secular music world—why didn’t you pursue that?”

But I’m not interested. Something my dad said to me years ago settled that question for me: “Whatever gift you have been given, it is your responsibility to burnish it, shine it, and make it the best it can be; then give it back to the One from whom you received it.”

—Kurt Kaiser in notes accompanying a recording,

Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs