Page 5379 – Christianity Today (2024)

Television evangelists have gained considerable prominence in our society. Their faces and names are familiar to TV viewers everywhere, the unchurched as well as the churched. Who doesn’t know who Robert Schuller or Pat Robertson is? People who rarely or even never attend church services can name at least a few famous television evangelists. In fact, they have probably watched at least part of a religious program at one time or another.

When television evangelism first came on the market, its promoters claimed that the new age of communicating the gospel to those outside the reach of the institutional church had arrived. Now, after at least a few years of observing viewing patterns and behavior, questions are being asked. Does television evangelism actually contribute to a deepening of our society’s religious character? Is society today more religious because of religious telecasting? Or has television evangelism robbed something from local church bodies? Is the electronic church thus more a secular or religious influence in today’s media-saturated world?

Sociologists study the origins and development of human society. One of the tasks of sociologists of religion is monitoring and interpreting religious changes in a society. Secularization is a term they use to describe long-term changes in religion and its position in contemporary society, a term the mass media have made synonymous with religious decline. Thus, for the lay person, a totally secular society is a society without religion. But for sociologists, the issue is much more complex.

First, sociologists are not sure that a totally secular, or religionless, society is possible. Second, adequate measures of how secular a society is becoming are difficult to establish. What behavior patterns adequately reflect the religiosity of a society? Likewise, what behavior patterns indicate the secularization of a society? Studies have shown that overt religious behavior may not get at the heart of the religious nature of man. Church attendance and membership patterns, and participation in religious activities, are visible measures for the sociologist, but they may tell more about the shifting popularity of particular social forms of religion than about how religious the society actually is. Television and the recent widespread popularity of religious personalities is a case in point. What is the electronic church telling sociologists about religion and its place in the twentieth century?

The late 1970s and early 1980s brought a surge of religious activity through the use of modern communications media, such as television. Through the tube, preachers like Jerry Falwell could potentially reach people who had no outside contact with the church. Television evangelists multiplied; the electronic media were heralded as the new way to communicate the gospel to a generation that was growing up without the influence of the church.

Using the electronic media for religious purposes is actually nothing new. What is new about much of contemporary religious telecasting is that it is not sponsored by particular denominational bodies, nor is it operated by sustaining time provided by the networks. Church comes to the viewer, who may purposely tune in Charles Stanley of First Baptist, Atlanta, or who may just happen to find himself watching, even if he has never entered a Baptist church in his life.

However the viewer finds himself watching the religious program, he does so in the privacy of his own home, free from the social constraints of church attendance or membership and the responsibilities that go with it. Through television a personality image of the evangelist is created. Computerized correspondence adds an aura of intimacy between the viewer and the preacher. The pseudo-intimacy of communication and interaction that results fits the anonymity and privatized nature of our age.

The largest audiences for religious telecasting are obtained by aggressive entrepreneurs who buy air time and pay for it from money solicited from the viewers themselves, regardless of the viewers’ denominational loyalties (or lack of them). Electronic evangelists and their organizations have experienced dynamic growth. Their high public visibility implies enormous public support.

Is the electronic church a substitute for the local church? Is the electronic church viewed largely by an unattached audience of occasional or regular viewers? Is it actually a further measure of secularization?

Research suggests that telecasting programs usually attracts viewers who already identify with the message, who are already connected with a church or denomination. The unreached masses are not the ones who support or listen to religious television. Females watch more than males; older people watch more than the young; the audience is largest in the South. These viewers all supplement their regular church activities with the electronic church. Denominational bodies have reacted frequently to the electronic church as though they were in competition.

The support base of television evangelists is thus largely those who are already converted. What sociologists don’t know is how much of the audience actually substitutes media religion for the local church. Evangelists themselves often exaggerate this segment of the audience; sociologists have no idea how big it is.

The electronic church has the potential of serving as a convenient television altar for a society of isolated individuals wary of commitment and involvement. If shopping and banking are soon to be done from a home video terminal, why can’t religion be adapted in a similar fashion? Whether the electronic church can actually serve the religious needs of people as effectively or more effectively than the local church remains an intriguing question for sociologists. And the answer may help modify our understanding of secularization.

Dr. Hiller is chairman of the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

In December 1982, the San Francisco—based organization Jews for Jesus launched the most ambitious evangelistic campaign in its nine-year history. It placed full-page ads highlighting the word Y’shua, the Hebrew name for Jesus, in 25 major metropolitan daily newspapers.

Had no one responded, the campaign would have been worth the effort, said Sue Perlman, the organization’s information director. “The ad is a self-contained statement of the gospel,” she said. But some 12,000 people did answer the ad, wanting to know more about Christianity. Almost 50 percent of the respondents were Jewish.

In 1983, Jews for Jesus constituents donated nearly half a million dollars for the second Y’shua campaign. The ad received greater exposure, running in nearly 100 metropolitan dailies—including nine of the nation’s ten largest—during the Hanukkah season. It appeared nationally in the Wall Street Journal and in U.S.A. Today. A magazine version appeared in Time and Newsweek.

A few publications, however, were hesitant about running the ad. And U.S. News and World Report rejected it altogether. In a letter to Jews for Jesus, publisher William G. Dunn said the ad was not acceptable for publication. Dunn would not discuss the matter further in a telephone interview except to say, “The ad was rejected because I rejected it.”

U.S. News & World Report does not, however, reject all advertising from religious organizations. The magazine published an ad sponsored by the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation that offered free Christian literature. And it ran an ad featuring Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation.

The Y’shua ad hit rough waters at other publications. Newsweek at first informed Perlman that the ad was “not appropriate.” However, after passing the advertising deadline for its December 12 issue, the magazine reconsidered. Newsweek persuaded another advertiser to drop out, and the magazine ran the ad a week after it appeared in Time.

Newspapers offered only minor resistance. After running the ad in 1982, the Chicago Sun-Times received letters of protest from the Chicago-based Jews for Judaism, which alleges that Jews for Jesus is a cult. A Sun-Times advertising acceptance committee examined the ad and researched the sponsoring organization. The committee determined that Jews for Jesus is reputable and “has a right to buy advertising space to portray its views,” a Sun-Times spokesman said.

The ad is clearly targeted for a Jewish audience. It contains such statements as “He [Y’shua] is very Jewish, you know. After all, where do you think he spent Hanukkah, in Rome?” and “He can brighten our lives more than any Hanukkah menorah or Christmas tree.”

When Jews for Jesus encounters friction, the organization turns the matter over to its legal counsel, Jay Sekulow. But Sekulow said little can be done to investigate the possibility of religious discrimination when the ad is refused. He said publications have the legal right to reject any advertisem*nt without giving a reason.

At Last, Nestlé Satisfies Some Of Its Church Critics

The Switzerland-based Nestlé Corporation makes candy bars, baby foods, instant tea and coffee, powdered chocolate, wines, cheeses, cosmetics, and lots more. Nestlé is also the world’s biggest producer of infant formula, a product that has given it corporate headaches for nearly a decade.

Since 1977, Nestlé has been the target of an international boycott. Church and health organizations charge that its aggressive marketing of infant formula causes mothers in the Third World to abandon breast-feeding, at some risk to infant health.

Recently, three major American marketers of infant formula—Ross (Abbott) Laboratories, Mead Johnson (Bristol Meyers), and Wyeth Laboratories (American Home Products)—announced their intentions to comply with the World Health Organization’s 1981 code of ethics for the marketing of breast-milk substitutes. Nestlé announced in 1982 it would comply, but the boycott continues.

While infant formula has saved lives in some instances, breast-feeding is almost always desirable. Critics say Nestlé has increased artificially the market for the formula. They paint a picture of an ignorant Third World mother “hooked” on the expensive formula. To make it last longer, she dilutes it, sometimes with unsanitary water. Her baby contracts diarrhea and dehydrates. They cite UNICEF’s estimate that at least a million deaths per year are directly attributable to bottle feeding.

Moderates regard this sequence of events as a caricature, and such newsletter headlines as “Nestlé Kills Babies” as misleading. But they maintain the problem is real.

The boycott was initiated by the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT), which in 1977 consisted of 20 people with a $500 budget. Today the movement is spearheaded by the International Nestlé Boycott Committee (INBC). It is endorsed by 85 national organizations in the U.S. (including the National Council of Churches) and has roots in nine foreign countries.

Whether the boycott has hurt Nestlé financially is arguable. Nestlé sales have grown, but not as much as projected.

Rafael Pagan is president of the Nestlé Coordination Center for Nutrition, the office Nestlé set up to deal with the boycott. He says Nestlé had begun to address questionable marketing procedures before the boycott. But he describes the advice of church groups, especially a task force of the United Methodist Church, as “very necessary and very helpful” in expediting the reforms. “Nestlé has introduced refinements that are very much along the lines of what the WHO code calls for,” Pagan says.

Boycotters acknowledge that Nestlé has made some substantial changes. Mass-media advertising has ceased, as has direct contact between sales personnel and mothers. Formula labels now contain clearer warnings on the potential dangers of misuse. Such marketing tactics as baby pageants, in which the winners received a six-month supply of formula free, have been discontinued.

As a result, some boycotters have reconsidered. Wesley Seminary’s J. Philip Wogaman, who supported the boycott as chairman of the UM task force, now believes it should be ended. “We carried out our discussions in good faith,” Wogaman says. “Nestlé has done an about-face. If we don’t acknowledge that, there’s a question of good faith on our part.” American Baptist Churches are expected to review their position at the church’s biennial meeting next June. The Church of the Brethren already has pulled out of the boycott.

But staunch boycotters are not likely to relax behind a cold glass of Nestlé’s Quik in the foreseeable future. “We congratulate Nestlé on the changes they’ve made,” says Doug Clement, INFACT’s international director, “but we feel they have a long way to go.”

The INBC, chaired by Roman Catholic Sister Regina Murphy, has the authority to end the boycott. “We are waiting to see if and how Nestlé’s new policies will be implemented,” Murphy says. And, like Clement, she is not satisfied that Nestlé has gone far enough. She notes that Nestlé, in violation of the code, still plans to provide hospitals with free samples of the formula.

Wogaman concedes that Nestlé’s response is “not perfect,” but he fears that not to acknowledge Nestlé’s response will weaken the witness of the church and that Nestlé will lose its incentive to respond to public sensitivities.

But boycotters are determined to follow through. Their goal is to get Nestlé to comply fully with the WHO code. “As long as the boycott continues to be a menace to them,” says Clement, “Nestlé will continue to make changes in the right direction.”

RANDY FRAME

Eternity Magazine Hires Its New Executive Editor From National Public Radio

Thirty-year-old Ken Myers has been named executive editor of Eternity magazine. He succeeds Stephen Board, now the director of youth/adult publications at David C. Cook Publishing Company in Elgin, Illinois. Since 1975, Myers has held a number of positions with National Public Radio, a system of some 290 noncommercial radio stations. Most recently, he edited “The Sunday Show,” a five-hour weekly program on the performing arts. Before that he helped produce the 90-minute nightly news program “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” a two-hour news show.

Eternity editor William J. Petersen said it was unusual for the magazine to hire someone with a background primarily in broadcasting. But except for a lack of print journalism experience, Petersen said, Myers met all the qualifications. “He has experience in interviewing, reporting, and editing, and in putting programs together,” Petersen said. “He also has managerial background and a broad theological education.”

Myers earned a master’s degree in religion at the nondenominational Westminster Theological Seminary in suburban Philadelphia. Eternity is an evangelical monthly with a circulation of about 45,000.

Personalia

James Powell has succeeded Youngve Kindberg as president of the International Bible Society (IBS). Powell came to IBS in 1982 after five years as executive secretary of the Christian Bible Society in Nashville, Tennessee, which merged with IBS in 1982. Kindberg leaves IBS after 21 years as chief executive officer.

The Board of Trustees of Washington Bible College and its graduate school, Capital Bible Seminary, in Lanham, Maryland, has announced the appointment of Harry E. Fletcher as president. Fletcher, senior pastor of York Gospel Center in York, Pennsylvania, will assume presidential duties May 20. Meanwhile, William Shoemaker has just completed his first semester as president of William Tyndale College (formerly Detroit Bible College) in suburban Detroit. Shoemaker came to William Tyndale after serving as the first director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton (Ill.) College.

Starting in June, Tetsunao Yamamori will assume the presidency of Food for the Hungry, an international Christian relief agency with U.S. headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona. For several months, Yamamori has shared the leadership role with Larry Ward, founder of Food for the Hungry. Yamamori is best known for his work in the area of church growth.

Carl Horn III, a U.S. Justice Department lawyer and former counsel at Wheaton (Ill.) College, will run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives this year. He will compete in North Carolina’s ninth congressional district, which includes his home town of Charlotte. Horn is a special assistant to the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, William Bradford Reynolds.

Eugene Stockwell, a former United Methodist missionary and mission executive, has been named director of the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. Stockwell, who has directed the Division of Overseas Ministry of the National Council of Churches since 1972, succeeds Uruguayan Methodist Emilio Castro.

Theologians From North, South, And Central America Gather In Mexico

North American theologians journeyed to Cuernavaca, Mexico, late last November to meet with their South American counterparts and grapple with knotty issues surrounding liberation theology. They also discussed relationships between North and South, and the Latin Christians expressed complaints about attitudes of the North American church.

Five themes dominated the discussion.

First was the fact that abstract intellectual issues and degree requirements seem to dominate the church, at the expense of proven ability and “life-oriented ministry.”

Second, the Latin Americans attempted to describe the dangers of a “middle-class” gospel being exported by middle-class North American missionaries. Pedro Savage, of Monterrey, Mexico, listed specific concerns: American missionaries who control the purse strings and so control key decisions on the field; Latin voices not heard well enough because they do not have sufficient formal training; Latin books that are not published because they do not contain the right evangelical “code words”; Latins often deemed less efficient than North Americans and as a result often excluded from executive positions; and the fact that relatively large salaries of North American missionaries allow them to live on a much higher plane than the poor to whom they minister.

Three other topics were dealt with as well: gender and equality in ministry; the dominance of Western epistemology that inhibits foreign cultures in their patterns of expression; and the lack of love for alienated and oppressed people that is sometimes exhibited by their “liberators.”

The conference was organized by the Latin American Theological Fraternity and the Theological Students Fellowship, an affiliate of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

GRANT OSBORNEin Mexico

Churchgoers Opposed To U.S. Policy Hold ‘Peace Vigils’ In Nicaragua

Teams of American churchgoers who disagree with U.S. government policy in Central America are staging peace vigils on the border of Nicaragua and Honduras.

Their presence there, during two-week stints between Advent and Easter, is less important than the impressions of war they plan to bring home and share. Swaying opinion and eventually changing U.S. policy is their goal.

Among the organizers of the “Witness for Peace” is Sojourners editor Jim Wallis. He visited Nicaragua with the first team of “vigilers” before Christmas, and reports finding “a country under siege.” He objects strongly to U.S. military backing of the counterrevolutionaries, or “contras,” who oppose Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Participants in the peace vigil find themselves walking a fine line, however, because they do not want to appear to endorse the Sandinistas. The first team of vigil holders had to fend off efforts by the revolutionary government to escort them everywhere.

The Sandinistas face serious opposition from the Reagan administration, which is concerned that Cuba or the Soviet Union may gain a foothold as Marxist ideology catches on. Wallis and others involved in Witness for Peace discount a Communist threat, and prefer to give the government there the benefit of any doubt.

“There simply is not the kind of [Communist] presence that our government alleges,” Wallis says. “Our government is the outside power fomenting a war against Nicaragua.”

The visitors stayed in Jalapa, a town near the border where the impact of guerrilla fighting has been great. Young teenagers tote rifles as part of a civilian militia developed by the government.

Members of the Witness for Peace advisory committee include Vernon Grounds, president emeritus of Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary, and Ronald Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action.

Church members who make the trip are responsible for raising their own financial support. The first group of 14 included four Roman Catholics, three Presbyterians, two Quakers, two members of the Sojourners Community, one Mennonite, one Episcopal priest, and one Southern Baptist.

If material is proven to be obscene, it no longer falls under the protection of the First Amendment. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of citizens to decide what is obscene according to community standards.

Capitalizing on that right requires community-wide effort, but it can work. Just ask the citizens of Washington County, Tennessee, where public pressure brought about the demise of a Playboy cable television channel.

American Cablesystems, of Johnson City, Tennessee, began broadcasting the channel August 1 and voluntarily cancelled it December 1. General manager Robert Crowley said his company dropped the channel under pressure from local groups, primarily Tennessee Roundtable, a state affiliate of a national organization of conservative activists.

“I’ve never seen such a media focus across the country,” he said. “The religious group [Tennessee Roundtable] went at this like a politician would.”

After American Cablesystems began offering the Playboy channel, Tennessee Roundtable surveyed more than 3,000 citizens and found that 85 percent were opposed to the programming. The survey—shown to Washington County commissioners—was substantiated when a crowd of 800 attended a commissioners’ meeting to protest the channel. The county commissioners passed a resolution that said the programming was detrimental to the community and asked American Cablesystems to withdraw it. The company refused.

Next, Tennessee Roundtable videotaped Playboy programs and showed them to key businessmen, pastors, and citizens throughout the county. The viewers didn’t like what they saw. Richard Taylor, Tennessee Roundtable state director, said community response was remarkable. By November the company had lost almost half of its 800 Playboy subscribers. In addition, cable subscribers who weren’t receiving the Playboy channel threatened to cancel as well, although Crowley said few of them did.

Tennessee Roundtable publicly accused American Cablesystems of selling obscenity and said the company should be prosecuted. Because cable television does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission, its content is practically unregulated. However, if a court rules that program content is obscene, the material cannot be broadcast. But without going to court, American Cablesystems voluntarily dropped the Playboy channel—an unprecedented and surprising move.

“The market would not bear that kind of product here,” Crowley said. “That’s free enterprise. We were becoming known as the company with the Playboy channel, and not as the company that offers 27 products. We have to listen to the community. If people don’t want a product, it comes off the shelf.”

Citizens have successfully challenged the Playboy channel elsewhere. Last spring a grand jury in Hamilton County, Ohio, charged a Cincinnati cable television company with possessing and pandering obscenity after it began broadcasting the Playboy channel. In an out-of-court settlement, the cable company agreed to stop broadcasting X-rated films on the channel.

The singer’s response to an Olympics ministry opportunity might settle the matter once for all.

The debate has raged for nearly two years. Is rock singer Bob Dylan—who reportedly became a Christian in 1979—still a Christian? Has he returned to Judaism, the religion of his childhood? Or is he simply a seeker of truth who doesn’t fully commit himself to any one religion?

Dylan might put an end to such speculation during this summer’s 1984 Olympic Games. He has been asked to participate in an Olympics evangelistic outreach. The singer has not given a firm answer. But according to Paul Emond, a former pastor who is a friend of Dylan, the singer is considering the invitation. As entertainment chairman for the Olympics Outreach Working Committee, Emond asked Dylan to be a part of the mass evangelistic effort.

“He had a thousand opportunities to say, ‘Look, Paul, that’s just not my bag anymore. Don’t you get the hint?’,” Emond says. “That’s not where he’s coming from at all.”

Emond says he helped lead Dylan to Christ in 1979, the year Dylan’s songs took a decidedly Christian turn. The album he released later that year, Slow Train Coming, contained a clear Christian message—as did his 1980 and 1981 releases.

The Christian proclamations were significant because of Dylan’s reputation as a musical prophet to the sixties generation. He burst into stardom during the mid-1960s with songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Many of his songs were critical of American society and U.S. government policy. The singer’s music helped shape the world view of American youth entering a period of public protests against the Vietnam War.

Because his fans were unaccustomed to hearing him praise God, Dylan’s statements of faith in 1979 immediately came under fire. After Slow Train Coming was released, Rolling Stone magazine said the album’s biblical references were nothing more than a continuation of Dylan’s familiar use of religious imagery. In 1982, New York magazine quoted an unnamed source who said Dylan had never forsaken Judaism for Christianity. Time and Newsweek last year published a photograph of Dylan—wearing a yarmulke, prayer shawl, and phylacteries—at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. (The rock singer was in Israel for his son’s bar mitzvah.)

Emond says Dylan is regularly misrepresented in the media. For example, he says it is wrong to conclude that Dylan’s participation in a bar mitzvah means he is embracing Judaism. According to Emond, Dylan’s bar mitzvah appearance merely underscores the singer’s understanding of the proper relationship between Old Testament faith and New Testament faith.

“I don’t think he ever left his Jewish roots,” Emond says. “I think he was one of those fortunate ones who realized that Judaism and Christianity can work very well together, because Christ is just Yeshua ha’Meshiah [Jesus the Messiah]. And so he doesn’t have any problems about putting on a yarmulke and going to a bar mitzvah, because he can respect that. And [he] recognizes that maybe those people themselves will recognize who Yeshua ha’Meshiah is one of these days.”

Others interpret Dylan’s ties with Judaism differently. His meetings last year with Hasidic Jews caused some to wonder if he was returning to Judaism.

“He’s been going in and out of a lot of things, trying to find himself,” says Rabbi Kasriel Kastel, of the Brooklyn Lubavitch center. “And we’ve just been making ourselves available.” The Lubavitch movement tries to renew the commitment of inactive Jews through education. Dylan studied with Lubavitch members while he was in New York to record his latest album, Infidels.

Kastel says he doesn’t believe Dylan ever forsook his Jewish faith to become a Christian. “As far as we’re concerned, he was a confused Jew. We feel he’s coming back.”

Emond acknowledges that Dylan has met with Hasidic Jews. But he says it wasn’t out of a desire to return to the Jewish faith. Emond says the meetings took place at the request of members of the Lubavitch movement.

“They can’t take the fact that he [Dylan] was able to come to the discovery of his Messiah as being Jesus,” Emond says. “Jews always look at their own people as traitors when they come to that kind of faith.… When one of their important figures is ‘led astray,’ they’re going to do everything they can to get him back again.”

But Kastel denies that his group is trying to take advantage of Dylan. “We don’t want anyone to feel that he’s being used in any way, which he’s very sensitive to. So we’re keeping this very, very low key.”

For his part, Dylan isn’t doing much to quell the debate. He does not grant many interviews, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY was unable to contact him. When he does grant interviews, his statements often are ambiguous.

The Los Angeles Times last year quoted him as saying he did not regret “telling people how to get their souls saved.” But he added, “Now it’s time for me to do something else.… Jesus himself only preached for three years.” The Washington Post quoted him as saying he believes in reincarnation.

In those articles as in others, Emond says, Dylan was misrepresented. “I know he doesn’t believe in it [reincarnation], so it must have been taken out of context or misinterpreted. They [writers] can take what he says, if they want, and make it sound pretty bad, depending on what questions they’re asking and how many words they leave out.”

Dylan has said he lets his songs speak for him. But his latest album doesn’t shed much light on his spiritual loyalties. The songs on the album make generous use of biblical imagery, but they make no clear declarations of faith. The absence of a Christian message leads some to wonder if the singer’s spiritual commitment has waned.

Such speculation leads Emond to criticize the church for passing judgment on Dylan. “If the Christians spent as much time praying for guys like Bob as they do talking or speculating on him, then we wouldn’t have these Christians like Bob that don’t come out as boldly as we might like them to.

“I’m not saying that he’s right in everything, because if I was in his position I would want to really capitalize on [his reputation as a vehicle for the gospel]. And maybe that’s in fact what he is doing, and he just has a different way of going about things.” If Dylan uses his musical talent to share the gospel during this summer’s Olympics, the speculation of the skeptics may be quieted.

North American Scene

A 14-year veteran of the Ku Klux Klan says the Klan plans to spark a major race war by assassinating a “prominent minority individual.” Tommy Rollins, a former grand wizard of the White Knights of America, told a “700 Club” audience last November that he fears for the life of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. Since becoming a Christian last April, Rollins says the Klan has made three attempts on his life.

Roman Catholic bishops have made opposition to nuclear arms part of a new, national campaign against abortion. Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernardin says he will spearhead an effort to fuse these issues in the public debate. His action officially removes abortion as a single issue for the bishops and places it at the heart of their advocacy of peace and social justice.

By a 59-to-38 vote, the U.S. Senate defeated a bill that would have made tuition tax credits available to parents of private-school pupils. In turning back the measure, the Senate overcame pressure from the White House and private-school organizations. The bill surfaced without warning as an amendment to an Olympics appropriations bill just before Congress adjourned for 1983.

A federal appeals court in Cincinnati has overturned the conviction of a 23-year-old Mennonite who refused to register for the draft. Convicted in October 1982, Mark Schmucker was fined $4,000 and sentenced to three years probation. In throwing out the conviction, the court ordered an evidentiary hearing to give Schmucker a chance to prove that he was selectively prosecuted. He contends that although hundreds of thousands of draft-age Americans have failed to register, only those who publicly opposed the law have been prosecuted.

Two out of three black pastors say they have not been influenced by liberation theologians such as James Cone, DeOtis Roberts, and Major Jones, according to a survey funded by the Lilly Endowment. Based on interviews with 1,894 black clergy, the study is the largest ever of black churches to be conducted by a nongovernmental group, says Lawrence Mamiya, the sociology of religion specialist who directed it. Only slightly more than half of the clergy surveyed feel their ministries are “essentially different” because they are in black denominations. Some 70 percent say it is important to use the terminology and concepts of black pride in their sermons.

The state of Utah cannot receive $500,000 in federal grants unless it stops requiring minors to notify parents when birth-control counseling is sought. The ruling was handed down by Federal District Court Judge David Winder. It arose from a suit filed by Planned Parenthood of Utah and the Park City Clinic on behalf of four teenagers who objected to the procedures.

The U.S. Supreme Court will not review a lower court ruling that forbids a moment of silence in New Mexico’s public schools. The state’s legislature passed a law in 1981 that called for a time of silence at the beginning of each school day. But last February, a federal district judge ruled that the law violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

A military judge has convicted the former commanding officer of a U.S. Navy frigate of engaging in hom*osexual acts with a member of his crew. Michael Vanderwier is believed to be the first commanding officer in the U.S. military ever to face such charges, although 12 officers and 1,115 enlisted personnel have been dismissed from the navy in the last year because of hom*osexuality. The 42-year-old Vanderwier denied the charges. The crew member involved in the hom*osexual acts, John Rainville, was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony.

Seminary enrollment in 1983 increased nearly 5 percent over the previous year, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) announced. For the last several years, the growth rate of seminary enrollment has exceeded that of colleges, universities, and other professional schools. ATS reported that women and minority students are largely responsible for the increase.

One Last Note on The Day After

Did you catch that tune? Many who watched ABC’s movie The Day After did. An attempt at depicting the horrors of nuclear war, the television drama opened and closed to the strains of an old church favorite—“How Firm A Foundation.” When film director Nicholas Meyers discovered that Virgil Thomson’s musical score “The River” described Kansas—where the story in The Day After took place—he decided to use the music. But Meyers insists he didn’t know that the melody he used at the beginning and at the end of the film was the music of a hymn, with words significant to the story.

When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,

My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;

The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design

Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.

The film began with a sweeping view of Kansas farmland, as the music to “How Firm a Foundation” invited the viewer to sit back and watch. When the drama ended, the screen went black and a voice echoed: “Is anybody there? Anybody at all?” But as the voice died out, the music was heard again, this time resounding with strength. For those familiar with the words of the hymn, there was still hope, if not in man then in God.

A bleak picture of the Roman Catholic church in the Canadian province of Quebec has been given to the Pope by the Quebec Assembly of Bishops. In that province, where there are 5,618,365 Roman Catholics, only 25 percent now attend mass regularly, down from 60 percent in 1960.

A recent survey of 1,263 Roman Catholic high school students in Quebec found that only 18 percent attend church regularly, yet 92 percent believe in God and 84 percent believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

The bishops’ report reminisces about the glorious past when the church possessed awesome power, authority, and wealth. It refers to the social revolution of the 1960s as bringing an end to an era of tranquil assurance, of prestige, and of unanimity. During that decade, many Catholics “took their distance from the church” said Charles Valois, Bishop of Saint Jerome. But the church has been purified by the ordeal, it has refound its soul, and Bishop Valois feels optimistic about the future.

According to the report, the disaffection with the church does not necessarily reflect “an absence of a spiritual quest” by the people. In fact, Quebec is experiencing “an invasion of sects and cults which find here a fertile field for their propositions.”

French-speaking Quebec citizens are well prepared for sects, said Bishop Valois. “There is religious education in the schools so the children learn about God and Jesus, and when they grow up some feel it would be important to pray to God. So if somebody from another sect arrives at their door, they welcome that person,” he said. He also lamented that atheism is gaining ground.

The church needs to redefine its role and be open to change, the report urges. It must use the mass media, television in particular, to remind people of their baptism in the Catholic church, and ask that they investigate their own church first before turning to another. “We have to help them find their roots,” said Bishop Valois.

The report emphasizes that the Catholic church in Quebec is “an old house under renovation,” although at times it resembles “a house in ruins.”

The Christian Broadcasting Network goes out on a limb to reach America’s living-room mission field.

Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) takes a giant leap of faith into the mission field of the American living room this month with a luminescent prime-time television special, “Don’t Ask Me, Ask God.”

Complete with catchy theme song, celebrity cameos, and Scripture quotations marching up the screen à la Star Wars, the hour-long program is being broadcast across the country by cable television outlets and major network affiliates. The program will be aired during the first two weeks of January by stations that reach more than 90 percent of American television viewers (check local listings for time and date).

“Don’t Ask Me, Ask God” features five topics identified in a 1981 Gallup poll as chief concerns of the day: the future, suffering, evil, war, and life after death. Posing these as questions people would like to ask God, the show presents a kaleidescope of observations on each theme.

Hollywood stars—Vincent Price, Ben Vereen, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, Doug McClure, and Ned Beatty—introduce each subject. A dramatization filmed at CBN’s Virginia Beach studio follows, alternating between comic and sober portrayals.

On the subject of suffering, a basset-hound-faced Norman Fell portrays a twentieth-century Job whose car falls apart, house burns down, and wife runs away, while his friends conjecture it all happened because he cheated on his income tax.

Robertson, the show’s host, brings the audience back to reality after the skit, and introduces film clips of Mother Teresa reflecting on suffering and Joni Eareckson discussing how her life changed after her diving accident. Robertson admonishes the viewers that they should “ask God,” not anyone else, about why people suffer, and he quotes John 10:10 and Job 13:15 to give God’s perspective.

At the end of the program, Robertson turns the tables on his audience and asks what they believe. “We offer the audience an opportunity to pray to receive Jesus; that’s the bottom line,” says Warren Marcus, the show’s executive producer and CBN’s director of special projects. If it is well received by critics as well as by viewers, Marcus said CBN will produce two or three prime-time specials each year.

“It is very important that the secular press accept the vision of this thing. That would be a victory, because it would open up the marketplace,” Marcus said. Broadening its market has been a long-standing goal at CBN, reflected in the changing emphasis of the network’s flagship show, “The 700 Club.” In recent years, it has moved toward the mass appeal of a “PM Magazine” and away from strictly religious talk and music.

This commitment does not come cheap: “Don’t Ask Me” production costs totalled $700,000, and publicity and station time added another $1.1 million.

The program spends most of its energies on disarming and entertaining viewers who would most likely tune out “The 700 Club” or any other religious programming. Character actors portray ordinary people who recite comments actually recorded by Gallup. The comments do not tilt toward an evangelical belief in God, but reflect a genuine cross section of opinion.

As Robertson summarizes the answers offered by the Bible, he sticks to safe theological ground and does not stray from major common-denominator tenets of belief that all Christians share. In addressing “What does the future hold for me and my family?” Robertson uses three Bible verses. He summarizes Matthew 24:7–8 by saying trouble is a normal part of human existence.

From Luke 17:26–28, he assures viewers that life will go on until Christ’s second coming, and he rules out the possibility of human extinction through nuclear holocaust. Finally, he says the “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation 21:1–5 offers an “absolutely glorious” vision of what lies ahead, even though the particulars are beyond human discernment.

The celebrities in the show were recruited by Hollywood talent agent Jackie Brown. No test of faith was applied to the actors, and many of them are not professing Christians. Marcus said this was a matter of prayer at CBN, and “the Lord gave us the wisdom to use the stars only to ask questions, not give answers. You can use anyone to prove the point of who God is, just as the Bible does.”

Many of the celebrities were leery of CBN to begin with, Marcus said, “but they left as friends. And when we asked them to do publicity spots, they all were willing to help.”

One actor watched in amazement as the CBN film crew joined hands and prayed at the beginning of the day. Another, Marcus said, was troubled by career setbacks. CBN staffers prayed for him and advised him to turn the problem over to the Lord. He experienced a change in fortunes and told Marcus, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Keep praying for me.”

CBN hopes to generate similar enthusiasm among the show’s viewers so they will consider Christ’s claims when they contemplate the “big questions.”

There was a time when the hierarchy didn’t know what to do with spirit-filled Episcopalians.

Since the 1960s, The Episcopal Church has been sliding steadily in membership. The trend bottomed out last year, when the denomination gained 27,000 new people.

But that long-sought turnaround came much quicker, and much stronger, in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. There, a fertile mixture of evangelical preaching, charismatic renewal, and liturgical worship is producing steady growth.

Led primarily by three robust parishes, Episcopal reinvigoration has flourished there more than anywhere else in the country. Nationwide, about 400 of the 7,200 Episcopal parishes are experiencing spiritual renewal.

The churches attract people by encouraging lay ministry, spiritual discipline, and free expression in worship. In addition, they provide expository Bible preaching. Their congregations contain a rich diversity of faith backgrounds.

The Church of the Apostles, an exuberantly charismatic parish in Fairfax, packs a local high school auditorium with up to 2,000 worshipers at its two Sunday services. Its astonishing growth from the mid-1970s—when attendance averaged about 50—has been shaped primarily by the ministry of H. Lawrence (Renny) Scott. He left the Washington area in September to accept a call to Charleston, South Carolina.

Founding member Ken MacGowan says the church decided to “go the charismatic route” in 1976. At about the same time, its mother church, Truro Episcopal, also in Fairfax, invited Graham Pulkingham, a popular Episcopalian speaker from Houston, to teach a seminar on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. This brought both spiritual and congregational shakeups to Truro. Traditional Episcopalians fled to other area congregations. And Truro called a new rector, John Howe.

“What I perceived as the need in 1976 was to give systematic, biblical undergirding to what was happening,” Howe says. “They had had a lot of superstars come through, but no consistency, no careful exposure to the whole counsel of God.

A third growing northern Virginia parish is The Falls Church, in the community of the same name. The church building is a historic landmark where George Washington once served on the building committee. When Rector John Yates arrived in 1979, he was asked by the church board to emphasize outreach, evangelism, and renewal.

“When we started moving in that direction, it was very difficult for a number of the traditional people in the church,” he says. “They resented Bibles in the pews and a new emphasis from the pulpit.” Nevertheless, Falls Church’s attendance doubled to 700 in three years.

Charismatic renewal is often the most visible characteristic of expanding Episcopal churches. But it is among the least important, according to these pastors.

“I hate the label and don’t think it is helpful,” says Howe. “There is no other kind of Christian than a charismatic Christian.… How you choose to express the gift of the Holy Spirit is between you and the Lord.”

As the charismatic movement floods a church’s life, it can leave in its wake a decided identity crisis. That is the problem the Church of the Apostles is facing. In Renny Scott’s absence, the congregation is struggling with the question of whether to define itself primarily as an Episcopalian or a charismatic parish.

In his preaching, Scott developed a theme of “three streams, one river”—Protestant (Bible-based), Catholic (liturgical and sacramental), and Pentecostal (Spirit-filled). He says all three streams are indispensable to the life of a thriving church.

The three churches are enjoying numerical growth as well as producing spiritual maturity in their members. Paradoxically, The Episcopal Church’s structure and hierarchy give these priests the freedom to involve lay people in ministry. An unexpectedly active laity emerges as a result.

This is most apparent in the myriad “shepherd groups” and home Bible studies that meet weekly. At The Falls Church, such groups have increased from 2 to 20 under Yates’s gentle prodding. Even more significant, to him, is the number of men assuming spiritual leadership through several men’s Bible studies. At Truro, 36 shepherd groups meet, involving about half the church’s 2,000 active congregants.

The level of financial giving by members of these congregations, as well as by the churches to their diocese, is remarkably high. Truro, Apostles, and Falls Church are among the four top contributors to their diocese, each adhering to the principle of tithing.

In 1976, Truro set a goal of giving half its income for social projects. The church increased the amount by increments of 5 percent each year. “At that point lots of things took off for Truro,” Howe recalls. “When you begin to make outreach a priority, it’s remarkable how the rest of the act comes together.” Once the momentum was established, it took five years instead of the anticipated seven to reach the 50 percent goal.

With such a commitment to outreach, community involvement takes a variety of forms. The Church of the Apostles sponsors a residential program for mentally retarded adults. It also sells record albums of its own Praise Band, donating all the proceeds to a ministry in Washington, D.C. Truro held a day-long training seminar for people interested in inner-city ministries. Howe travels around the country to encourage parish renewal. And lay leaders organize spiritual renewal weekends. The Episcopal Church hierarchy welcomes the growth despite some wariness over charismatic renewal.

Churches in northern Virginia don’t appear to be threatened by the mushrooming growth in their midst. Several of them are expanding rapidly as well. Rector David Jones, of the Church of the Good Shepherd, says of nearby Truro: “The nice thing is that both churches are clear about their vision, and God has called both into being. It’s not a question of competition. We’re not appealing to the same market, to use the world’s term.”

Such ready acceptance has not always come easy for Spirit-filled Episcopalians. “There was a time when the hierarchy in New York wouldn’t touch us with a 10-foot pole. That is long gone,” recalls Everett L. (Terry) Fullam, president of Episcopal Renewal Ministries. “The churches that are really moving ahead, almost without exception, are churches that are open to the renewing work of the Holy Spirit—are recovering the Bible and biblical preaching and teaching. They emphasize personal relationship rather than simply ritual, and they are very mission-minded.”

Traditionally thought of as the bridge between Protestantism and Catholicism, The Episcopal Church is in the process of adding a new dimension to its identity. As parishioners take their faith more seriously, and a second and third generation of evangelical priests begin to lead, changes are taking place that could alter the course of the entire denomination.

World Scene

Former President Gerald Ford is one of the founders of a new organization formed to promote religious rights in Eastern Europe. Senator Charles Percy (R-Ill.); Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, of Chicago; and former secretaries of state Alexander Haig, Dean Rusk, and William Rodgers are also numbered among the initial members of the Advisory Council on Religious Rights in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The council will organize action on such issues as anti-Semitic campaigns in the Soviet Union and the harassment of Catholic priests in Lithuania.

The Salvation Army, based in London, has designated 1984 as the “Year of Outreach and Evangelism.” Members worldwide are being urged to make use of open-air meetings, home visitation, radio, television, and Bible distribution. The Army’s commander, Jarl Wahlstrom, has called upon all Salvationists to “take the message of hope to as many of our fellow men as possible.”

An extended drought in the Andean highlands of Peru has helped unite evangelical pastors there for the first time. The drought wiped out 60 percent of last year’s crop, including most of the main staple, potatoes. In September, 38 pastors, representing six denominations and some 200 churches, formed the Evangelical Emergency Committee of Puno (southeastern Peru) and began to assess their role in the crisis.

More than 2,000 Brazilian evangelicals attended Brazil’s first National Congress on Evangelization in early November. The meeting was a direct outgrowth of the 1974 Lausanne, Switzerland, congress on world evangelization. There are more than 15 million evangelicals in Brazil, according to World Evangelization Information Service.

Two Chinese Christians are among the victims of the crackdown on crime in the People’s Republic of China. John Li, a former doctor, and his coworker, Lin Zerong, were executed in September as spies. Some Chinese Christians at first alleged that the charges against the pair were false. But after the executions, Taiwan officials admitted that the two had been working for the overthrow of the mainland Chinese government.

Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has alleged that Ethiopia’s Marxist government is oppressing churches. According to a 2,500-word LWF report, the military government is closing churches, arresting Christian leaders, and confiscating church property without compensation. The major victim is the 500,000-member Evangelical Mekane Yesus (Lutheran) Church, which has seen more than 280 of its 350 churches closed. The LWF says the Ethiopian government also is working to eliminate Baptist, Mennonite, and Pentecostal churches.

Women in India are voicing their displeasure at the growing number of p*rnographic films being shown in Calcutta and in other major Indian cities. The films attract more viewers than the award-winning movie Gandhi. And according to Far Eastern Economic Review, the stars of the films have become cult heroes. Although Indian movies portray murder, torture, rape, and sadism, on-screen kissing is taboo, presumably because it is un-Indian. Feminists in India—noting that it is usually males who object to the filming of physical intimacy such as kissing—say violence and sadism have become forms of sexual communication that symbolize male dominance.

Polish government authorities have ordered Roman Catholic Primate Jozef Cardinal Glemp to silence 69 “antisocialist” priests. Church officials say the order came with a threat that the priests were facing arrest. The warning heightened the tension between the Communist state and the Catholic church, many of whose priests are openly associated with Poland’s outlawed Solidarity labor union.

Former Guatemalan chief of state Efraín Ríos Montt is now missed by many who once were his critics. Various diplomats and church leaders say that violence, including military violence and urban crime, has increased substantially since his departure. Ríos Montt, an outspoken evangelical, was deposed last August in a military coup led by former defense minister Oscar Humberto Mejía Victores. Recently, Victores accused some Catholics of “cooperating with subversives.” Some say the charge led to the killing of Augusto Ramirez, a Catholic priest.

DEATHS

Julian C. McPheeters, 94, president emeritus of Asbury Theological Seminary, where he served from 1942 to 1962, nationally known member of the United Methodist Church; October 31, in Lexington, Kentucky, of complications following a stroke he suffered last April.

Paul J. Carlson, 78, former national commander of the Salvation Army (1972 to 1974), recipient of the Army’s rarely awarded 50-year service medal; October 30, at the Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune, New Jersey, of heart complications.

Edmund Musgrave (E.M.) Blaiklock, 80, theologian, Bible scholar, newspaper columnist, author of 78 books, editor of the Atlas of Bible Lands and the Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology, archaeological editor of the five-volume Encyclopedia of the Bible; late in October, in Auckland, New Zealand, of cancer.

A growing number of professional football players are finding the pinnacles of athletic success unfulfilling.

For a few hours on Sunday, January 22, millions of Americans will postpone their concern about the world’s problems. The eyes of the nation will be focused on Tampa Bay, Florida, site of Super Bowl XVIII. On the gridiron at Tampa Stadium, two teams of 49 men will compete for the right to be called world champions.

“I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort in my profession to become the best and to continue to be the best,” says Mike Webster, the sturdy anchor of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ offensive line. “But each time I was the best, and we were the best as a team, I was left with a very empty feeling.” The owner of four Super Bowl championship rings, Webster knows what he’s talking about.

Fortunately for Webster, the void he felt has been filled. He is one of a growing number of professional athletes who is proclaiming Christ—not football—as King.

“When we first started holding chapels, we were lucky to get two or three guys to come,” says Webster’s teammate Mel Blount. Now at least half of the Steelers attend regularly.

What is happening in Pittsburgh is happening throughout the National Football League (NFL). Shortly after he arrived in Chicago, Jimbo Covert, the Bears’ top draft pick in 1983, was invited to a team Bible study. In Dallas, some 40 players and staff members regularly attend the Cowboys’ weekly Bible class. The teacher in Dallas is Howard Hendricks, a professor of Christian education at Dallas Theological Seminary.

“The NFL is in the midst of a spiritual awakening,” says Jim Brenn, who leads chapels and Bible studies for the Washington Redskins. “It has spread to athletes at the college and even the high school level. These guys are searching for something deeper than they’ve found in football.”

The burgeoning NFL chapel movement was pioneered by Ira Lee “Doc” Eshleman, a retired minister. In the late sixties, when America’s young people were rebelling against traditional authority, Eshleman believed professional athletes could reach them.

“I’ll never forget those first chapels,” he reflects. “There was one in Detroit. Hardly anyone came. But after it was over, a little bald-headed fellow came up to me and said, ‘Doc, all my life I go to church in de old country. I go to de alter. I sing in de choir. But I never know what it means to be a Christian until today. Today I pray. Today I invite Jesus into my life.’”

The bald-headed foreigner, Garo Yepremian, went on to become one of the best kickers in NFL history. Today he is a successful businessman and an active member of Saint John’s Armenian Apostolic Church in Miami. “That chapel changed my life,” he says. “It showed me Christianity had meaning. Before it was just a duty.”

In 1968 Eshleman got the okay from Rams’ coach George Allen to start a chapel in Los Angeles. At a meeting of general managers after the season, Allen was accused of using anything, even religion, to win games. He replied that no coach could teach love and respect among players as chapel was doing. And he wondered aloud whether a team could become a champion without it.

“That statement by Coach Allen did more to popularize the program around the league than any one thing that was ever done,” Eshleman says. By 1970, almost all NFL teams were holding chapel services. In the early days, the emphasis was on evangelism. But soon many began to understand the unique problems that accompany life in the fast lane, and various discipleship ministries emerged.

In 1974, Athletes in Action (AIA), an arm of Campus Crusade for Christ, began a ministry in five cities to meet the spiritual needs of professional athletes. AIA’s Hollis Haff moved to Pittsburgh. Says Blount: “Hollis has been at least as big a part of the Steeler organization as [coach] Chuck Noll.”

In a society that makes sports heroes into demigods, Christian athletes have expressed a desire to be treated as ordinary people. Covert grew up in a steel town near Pittsburgh. His father and grandfather “went into the mill and worked as hard as they could,” he says. “That’s what I do on the field. There’s no difference. I love football, but for me it’s a living.”

Webster says exposure of the drug problem among NFL players “has helped society see that superstars are people, vulnerable to sin, hardship, pain, and failure.”

Those who minister to athletes have come to understand that life in the spotlight can be lonely. “Sometimes it’s hard to decipher whether someone wants to be with you because you’re a person or because of the title you hold,” says quarterback Vince Evans, who last year led a team Bible study for the Chicago Bears.

Henry Soles, president of the Chicago-based ministry Intersports Associates, notes that the divorce and separation rate among professional athletes is much higher than the national average. “With everyone enthralled with her husband, a wife feels like a nonperson, an accessory,” he says.

And athletes are under constant pressure to perform. At Chicago’s Soldier Field, it takes just three bad passes to turn the fickle crowd. “It can be a very cold business because of the emphasis on winning,” says the Bears’ Evans.

“We’re all used to being criticized,” adds AIA’s Haff. “But not in the morning paper or on the 11 o’clock news in front of millions of people.” In addition, Christian athletes face the prospect of being labelled “hypocrites” if a television camera catches them swearing, throwing a clipboard, or starting a fight.

“People see us in emotional and pressure-filled situations,” says the Steelers’ Webster. “When you see Billy Graham on TV, he’s at his best. You see the highlights. You don’t see the other 59 minutes of the game. People have to realize that becoming a Christian does not mean instant perfection.”

However, for many athletes, living with fame is not as difficult as living without it. “After it’s all over,” says Yepremian, “when a guy is out looking for a job, nobody cares that he used to play football. The people who were saying how great he is are gone. And a lot of guys are not prepared for the inevitable.

But eventually, the energy of youth gives way to tired bones. Name recognition fades. Autograph seekers and news reporters disappear. The athlete must consider who he is, haunted by the memory of who he was. A major part of the sports minister’s role is preparing athletes, spiritually and practically, for life after football.

After the final whistle blows on January 22, 49 men will be awarded championship rings, which moth and rust will consume. That’s why Webster says “there’s only one Hall of Fame that anybody should ever want to be in—the kingdom of heaven.”

To that, hundreds of athletes around the NFL are learning to say, “Amen.”

The following excerpted chapter is taken from Charles Colson’s new book, Loving God. The story, as are the others in this volume, is true; but, as noted at the book’s beginning, in some instances “editorial liberties have been taken to combine certain events for the purposes of clarity or illustration.… In all instances the events underlying the stories are true. Background details have been researched as thoroughly as possible, although at times inferences were drawn from the limited facts available. Where that is the case, it is made evident in the text.”

No reporters have visited the prison camps of Soviet Russia, unless they have gone as prisoners. So to this day we have little information about the millions who have lived, suffered, and died there, especially during Stalin’s reign of terror. Most will remain nameless for all time, remembered only in the hearts of those who knew and loved them. But from time to time, scraps of information have filtered out about a few. One of those few was Boris Nicholayevich Kornfeld.

Kornfeld was a medical doctor. From this we can guess a little about his background, for in postrevolutionary Russia such education never went to families tied in any way to czarist Russia. Probably his parents were Socialists who had fastened their hopes on the Revolution. They were also Jews, but almost certainly not Jews still hoping for the Messiah, for the name Boris and the patronymic Nicholayevich indicate they had taken Russian names in some past generation. Probably Kornfeld’s forebears were Haskalah, so-called enlightened Jews, who accepted the philosophy of rationalism, cultivated a knowledge of the natural sciences, and devoted themselves to the arts. In language, dress, and social habits they tried to make themselves as much like their Russian neighbors as possible.

It was natural for such Jews to support Lenin’s revolution, for the czars’ vicious anti-Semitism had made life almost unendurable for the prior 200 years. Socialism promised something much better for them than “Christian” Russia. “Christian” Russia had slaughtered Jews; perhaps atheistic Russia would save them.

Obviously Kornfeld had followed in his parents’ footsteps, believing in communism as the path of historical necessity, for political prisoners at that time were not citizens opposed to communism or wanting the czar’s return. Such people were simply shot. Political prisoners were believers in the Revolution, Socialists, or Communists who had, nevertheless, not kept their allegiance to Stalin’s leadership pure.

We do not know what crime Dr. Kornfeld committed, only that it was a political crime. Perhaps he dared one day to suggest to a friend that their leader, Stalin, was fallible; or maybe he was simply accused of harboring such thoughts. It took no more than that to become a prisoner in the Russia of the early 1950s; many died for less. At any rate, Kornfeld was imprisoned in a concentration camp for political subversives at Ekibastuz.

Ironically, a few years behind barbed wire was a good cure for Communism. The senseless brutality, the waste of lives, the trivialities called criminal charges made men like Kornfeld doubt the glories of the system. Stripped of all past association, of all that had kept them busy and secure, behind the wire prisoners had time to think. In such a place, thoughtful men like Boris Kornfeld found themselves reevaluating beliefs they had held since childhood.

So it was that this Russian doctor abandoned all his socialistic ideals. In fact, he went further than that. He did something that would have horrified his forebears.

Boris Kornfeld became a Christian.

While few jews anywhere in the world would find it easy to accept Jesus Christ as the true Messiah, a Russian Jew would find it even more difficult. For two centuries these Jews had known implacable hatred from the people who, they were told, were the most Christian of all. Each move the Jews made to reconcile themselves or accommodate themselves to the Russians was met by new inventions of hatred and persecution, as when the head of the governing body of the Russian Orthodox church said he hoped that, as a result of the Russian pogroms, “one-third of the Jews will convert, one-third will die, and one-third will flee the country.”

Yet following the Revolution a strange alignment occurred. Joseph Stalin demanded undivided, unquestioning loyalty to his government; but both Jews and Christians knew their ultimate loyalty was to God. Consequently, people of both faiths suffered for their beliefs and frequently in the same camps.

Thus it was that Boris Kornfeld came in contact with a devout Christian, a well-educated and kind fellow prisoner who spoke of a Jewish Messiah who had come to keep the promises the Lord had made to Israel. This Christian—whose name we do not know—pointed out that Jesus had spoken almost solely to Jewish people and proclaimed that he came to the Jews first. That was consistent with God’s special concern for the Jew, the chosen ones; and, he explained, the Bible promised that a new kingdom of peace would come. This man often recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer, and Kornfeld heard in those simple words a strange ring of truth.

The camp had stripped Kornfeld of everything, including his belief in salvation through socialism. Now this man offered him hope—but in what a form!

To accept Jesus Christ—to become one of those who had always persecuted his people—seemed a betrayal of his family, of all who had been before him. Kornfeld knew the Jews had suffered innocently. Jews were innocent in the days of the Cossacks! Innocent in the days of the czars! And he himself was innocent of betraying Stalin; he had been imprisoned unjustly.

But Kornfeld pondered what the Christian prisoner had told him. In one commodity, time, the doctor was rich.

Unexpectedly, he began to see the powerful parallels between the Jews and this Jesus. It had always been a scandal that God should entrust himself in a unique way to one people, the Jews. Despite centuries of persecution, their very existence in the midst of those who sought to destroy them was a sign of a Power greater than that of their oppressors. It was the same with Jesus—that God would present himself in the form of a man had always confounded the wisdom of the world. To the proud and powerful, Jesus stood as a Sign, exposing their own limitations and sin. So they had to kill him, just as those in power had to kill the Jews, in order to maintain their delusions of omnipotence. Thus, Stalin, the new godhead of the brave new world of the Revolution, had to persecute both Jew and Christian. Each stood as living proof of his blasphemous pretensions to power.

Only in the gulag could Boris Kornfeld begin to see such a truth. And the more he reflected upon it, the more it began to change him within.

Though a prisoner, Kornfeld lived in better conditions than most behind the wire. Other prisoners were expendable, but doctors were scarce in the remote, isolated camps. The authorities could not afford to lose a physician, for guards as well as prisoners needed medical attention. And no prison officer wanted to end up in the hands of a doctor he had cruelly abused.

Kornfeld’s resistance to the Christian message might have begun to weaken while he was in surgery, perhaps while working on one of those guards he had learned to loathe. The man had been knifed and an artery cut. While suturing the blood vessel, the doctor thought of tying the thread in such a way that it would reopen shortly after surgery. The guard would die quickly and no one would be the wiser.

The process of taking this particular form of vengeance gave rein to the burning hatred Kornfeld had for the guard and all like him. How he despised his persecutors! He could gladly slaughter them all!

And at that point, Boris Kornfeld became appalled by the hatred and violence he saw in his own heart. Yes, he was a victim of hatred as his ancestors had been. But that hatred had spawned an insatiable hatred of his own. What a deadly predicament! He was trapped by the very evil he despised. What freedom could he ever know with his soul imprisoned by this murderous hate? It made the whole world a concentration camp.

As Kornfeld began to retie the sutures properly, he found himself, almost unconsciously, repeating the words he had heard from his fellow prisoner. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Strange words in the mouth of a Jew. Yet he could not help praying them. Having seen his own evil heart, he had to pray for cleansing. And he had to pray to a God who had suffered, as he had: Jesus.

For some time, Boris Kornfeld simply continued praying the Lord’s Prayer while he carried out his backbreaking, hopeless tasks as a camp doctor. Backbreaking because there were always far too many patients. Hopeless because the camp was designed to kill men. He stood ineffectively against the tide of death gaining on each prisoner: disease, cold, overwork, beatings, malnutrition.

Doctors in the camp’s medical section were also asked to sign decrees for imprisonment in the punishment block. Any prisoner whom the authorities did not like or wanted out of the way was sent to this block—solitary confinement in a tiny, dark, cold, torture chamber of a cell. A doctor’s signature on the forms certified that a prisoner was strong and healthy enough to withstand the punishment. This was, of course, a lie. Few emerged alive.

Like all the other doctors, Kornfeld had signed his share of forms. What was the difference? The authorities did not need the signatures anyway; they had many other ways of “legalizing” punishment. And a doctor who did not cooperate would not last long, even though doctors were scarce. But shortly after he began to pray for forgiveness. Dr. Kornfeld stopped authorizing the punishment; he refused to sign the forms. Though he had signed hundreds of them, now he couldn’t. Whatever had happened inside him would not permit him to do it.

This rebellion was bad enough, but Kornfeld did not stop there. He turned in an orderly.

Galilee

The time shall come

when the prayerful gaze,

once left upon the Galilee,

will return upon a wave

and touch you.

The time shall come

when the tearful spray

of every new storm

will begin to pass

and the whispering calm

will carry His voice,

His voice from the Galilee,

and it shall heal you.

The sea of living waters,

warm waves of love,

sweep shoreward to consume

the broken crust of life

and to revive what remains,

if our heart and mind

will seek and drink

of the faith of Galilee.

—Miranda

The orderlies were drawn from a group of prisoners who cooperated with the authorities. As a reward for their cooperation, they were given jobs within the camp that were less than a death sentence. They became the cooks, bakers, clerks, and hospital orderlies. The other prisoners hated them almost more than they hated the guards, for these prisoners were traitors; they could never be trusted. They stole food from the other prisoners and would gladly kill anyone who tried to report them or give them trouble. Besides, the guards turned a blind eye to their abuses of power. People died in the camps every day; the authorities needed these quislings to keep the system running smoothly.

While making his rounds one day, Kornfeld came to one of his many patients suffering from pellagra, an all-too-common disease in the camps. Malnutrition induced pellagra which, perversely, made digestion nearly impossible. Victims literally starved to death.

This man’s body showed the ravages of the disease. His face had become dark, one deep bruise. The skin was peeling off his hands; they had to be bandaged to stanch the incessant bleeding. Kornfeld had been giving the patient chalk, good white bread, and herring to stop the diarrhea and get nutrients into his blood, but the man was too far gone. When the doctor asked the dying patient his name, the man could not even remember it.

Just after leaving this patient, Kornfeld came upon a hulking orderly bent over the remains of a loaf of white bread meant for the pellagra patients. The man looked up shamelessly, his cheeks stuffed with food. Kornfeld had known about the stealing, had known it was one reason his patients did not recover, but his vivid memory of the dying man pierced him now. He could not shrug his shoulders and go on.

Of course, he could not blame the deaths simply on the theft of food. There were countless other reasons why his patients did not recover. The hospital stank of excrement and lacked proper facilities and supplies. He had to perform surgery under conditions so primitive that often operations were little more than mercy killings. It was preposterous to stand on principle in the situation, particularly when he knew what the orderly might do to him in return. But the doctor had to be obedient to what he now believed. Once again the change in his life was making a difference.

When Kornfeld reported the orderly to the commandant, the officer found his complaint very curious. There had been a recent rash of murders in the camp; each victim had been a “stoolie.” It was foolish—dangerously so at this time—to complain about anyone. But the commandant put the orderly in the punishment block for three days, taking the complaint with a perverse satisfaction. Kornfeld’s refusal to sign the punishment forms was becoming a nuisance; this would save the commandant some trouble. The doctor had arranged his own execution.

Boris Kornfeld was not an especially brave man. He knew his life would be in danger as soon as the orderly was released from the cell block. Sleeping in the barracks, controlled at night by the camp-chosen prisoners, would mean certain death. So the doctor began staying in the hospital, catching sleep when and where he could, living in a strange twilight world where any moment might be his last.

But, paradoxically, along with this anxiety came tremendous freedom. Having accepted the possibility of death, Boris Kornfeld was now free to live. He signed no more papers or documents sending men to their deaths. He no longer turned his eyes from cruelty or shrugged his shoulders when he saw injustice. He said what he wanted and did what he could. And soon he realized that the anger and hatred and violence in his own soul had vanished. He wondered whether there lived another man in Russia who knew such freedom!

Now Boris Kornfeld wanted to tell someone about his discovery, about this new life of obedience and freedom. The Christian who had talked to him about Jesus had been transferred to another camp, so the doctor waited for the right person and the right moment.

One gray afternoon he examined a patient who had just been operated on for cancer of the intestines. This young man with a melon-shaped head and a hurt, little-boy expression touched the soul of the doctor. The man’s eyes were sorrowful and suspicious and his face deeply etched by the years he had already spent in the camps, reflecting a depth of spiritual misery and emptiness Kornfeld had rarely seen.

So the doctor began to talk to the patient, describing what had happened to him. Once the tale began to spill out, Kornfeld could not stop.

The patient missed the first part of the story, for he was drifting in and out of the anesthesia’s influence, but the doctor’s ardor caught his concentration and held it, though he was shaking with fever. All through the afternoon and late into the night, the doctor talked, describing his conversion to Christ and his new-found freedom.

Very late, with the perimeter lights in the camp glazing the windowpanes, Kornfeld confessed to the patient: “On the whole, you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially, it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have not received this blow.”

Imagine! The persecuted Jew who once believed himself totally innocent now saying that every man deserved his suffering, whatever it was.

The patient knew he was listening to an incredible confession. Though the pain from his operation was severe, his stomach a heavy, expansive agony of molten lead, he hung on the doctor’s words until he fell asleep.

The young patient awoke early the next morning to the sound of running feet and a commotion in the area of the operating room. His first thought was of the doctor, but his new friend did not come. Then the whispers of a fellow patient told him of Kornfeld’s fate.

During the night, while the doctor slept, someone had crept up beside him and dealt him eight blows on the head with a plasterer’s mallet. And though his fellow doctors worked valiantly to save him, in the morning the orderlies carried him out, a still, broken form.

But Kornfeld’s testimony did not die.

The patient pondered the doctor’s last, impassioned words. As a result, he, too, became a Christian. He survived that prison camp and went on to tell the world what he had learned there.

The patient’s name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

On her shoulder, Mary Slessor carried her adopted baby. Clinging to her skirt was her five-year-old, and with her right hand she coaxed along her three-year-old. Two older children sloshed behind. Sloshed, because they were trudging through a mangrove swamp in West Africa. It was night, for their boat had reached its destination late. They could not see any snakes that might lie across the path or drape from trees above. But they could hear leopards. To keep the big cats at bay, Mary belted out hymns. The children chimed in. “Our singing would discourage any self-respecting leopard,” Mary wrote to a friend later. On this night, no other adult was within miles.

Because no missionary had the time, or, perhaps the courage, to go, Mary Slessor and her children were moving in to live with the fierce Oyokyong people in what is now Nigeria. The year was 1888.

Today women are faced with multiple role possibilities and struggle with their identities: “What are my priorities?” “How assertive should I be?” “What dare I do?” In this quest, Mary Slessor is a worthy addition to our gallery of role models.

Mary was born in 1848 in Scotland. Population had boomed in the early 1800s. Crops, however, had failed. On the non-agricultural front, the steam engine was squelching cottage industries. Desperate for jobs, families migrated to cities. Many lived, begged, and died on the streets. The Slessor family of nine lived in one room.

Mary’s father was a shoemaker, and her mother a weaver who earned ten shillings a week for 58 hours of labor. Because weaving required nimble fingers more than strength, and because a woman’s wage was nearly half a man’s—and a child’s wage only one-fourth—there was almost no work for men in weaving mills. Boys could work until they became men; then they were sacked. In this grim setting, and after three of the children died, Mary’s father became an alcoholic. On payday Saturday nights he would bluster in, ready for violence or sex, small children notwithstanding. To protect her mother, Mary many times drew his anger to herself.

One wonders what Mother Slessor thought of God’s goodness when—on top of marital loneliness, beatings, the inevitable squabbles of children cooped up in one room, children’s sicknesses that led so quickly to death, and nearly 60 hours of work outside the home every week—she waddled after her fifth, sixth, and seventh pregnancies to the stone-cold communal bucket outhouse located beside the manure heap.

In fact, we know what she thought: A speaker had captured her imagination, and she dreamed that one of her sons would be a missionary to West Africa. So she checked the Missionary Record out of the church library and read missionary stories to her brood. She encouraged them to “play missionary.”

Yet all her sons died.

Was that the end of a dream? No: Mary stepped forward. Her sisters were horrified. “Can’t you volunteer to go to some safer field, like Jamaica or India?” they begged. But Mother Slessor was thrilled.

Out of this background, Mary Slessor went to West Africa to become known among her own countrymen as the first woman vice consul of the British Empire, and to be known among Africans as Eka Kpukpro Owo, “the mother of all the peoples.” As James Buchan observes in his excellent biography, The Expendable Mary Slessor (Seabury, 1981), “The squalor, the poverty, and the hunger of a Scottish slum taught her how to share the squalor, the poverty, and the hunger of the West Africa of her day.”

What did mary find in that new continent? Two centuries earlier, before the slave trade with the West, the people of Calabar had lived in self-governing villages. Economically they had specialized: fishing villages traded with farmers, pottery villages traded with canoe makers, blacksmith communities traded with weavers.

Big-time slave trading exploded this simple lifestyle (Buchan, pp. 35–36):

“The West African tribes soon realized that to trade in human beings was the way to power and wealth and those which did not have an anchorage already migrated to the coast and occupied one. Soon too, by bartering slaves for guns, they had the fire power to keep other tribes back and to set themselves up as middlemen between the tribes of the interior and the Europeans. All along the Guinea Coast the tribes fought to keep their anchorages and the monopoly of the trade.…

“As the trade developed and they needed more warriors and more labour the coastal tribes began to keep back more and more of the captives for their own use. A small House, slave and free, could number up to a thousand. But a large one, like those of the Calabar towns, owned thousands of slaves and hundreds of trading and war canoes.…

“Between 1720 and 1830 about a million slaves were shipped out of Calabar, while thousands more died in the anchorage or were butchered there. The chiefs grew accustomed to looking on human beings simply as merchandise. But because they shared the same human life, the cheapening of the lives of the sold cheapened the lives of the sellers.… By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Calabar life … was a squalid travesty of what it had once been.…”

Life was cheap. Torture was imaginative. Slaves, women, and children especially were expendable. Here Mary stepped in. Besides preaching, teaching, and nursing, she rescued women and hundreds of babies thrown into the jungle. Rarely did she have fewer than a dozen such children living in her makeshift house. Each infant was suspended in a cradle hammock made from a wooden crate. Tying a string to each crate, Mary would lie in bed at night and pull strings as each baby needed soothing. To bathe her babies, Mary put four big milk cans on the stove to warm the water, plopped in four babies, pulled them out and dried them, plopped in four more—all the time discussing points of African law with those who sought an audience with her.

As we have noted, Mary’s knowledge of indigenous law eventually propelled her into being the first woman vice consul of the British Empire. This knowledge was gleaned as she lived “not only like an African, but like a poor African”—in native houses, sleeping beside big, sweating native bodies, eating native food, going barefoot, suffering local diseases—but awake, aware, curious, asking questions, categorizing information, applying it.

Mary’s participation in local councils could be feisty. One day, a British government officer remembers, when an African showed up who had been forbidden to come to court because he had been rude (Buchan, p. 146):

“Suddenly she jumped up with an angry growl, her shawl fell off, the baby (which had been on her lap) was hurriedly transferred to somebody qualified to hold it, and with a few trenchant words she made for the doors where a hulking overdressed native stood. In a moment she seized him by the scruff of the neck, boxed his ears, and hustled him out into the yard, telling him quite explicitly what would happen to him if he came back again without her consent.… Then as suddenly as it had arisen the tornado subsided, and (lace shawl, baby and all) she was gently swaying in her [rocking] chair again.”

In spite of unorthodox methods, Mary’s genuineness, courage, and true concern made her welcome at councils.

Mary slessor was not the only tough Anglo-Saxon Mary in the West African jungle in those years, however. Mary Kingsley, intrepid explorer, journalist, naturalist, amateur anthropologist, and society’s darling, also trekked through. When she recounted her perilous exploits in Travels in West Africa and other books, and in articles such as those that appeared in The Spectator, she became an acknowledged African authority.

Kingsley came in velvet hat, buttoned-up jacket, and knee-high boots. Slessor had long since discarded the Victorian missionary’s hat, gloves, boots, bustle, long curls—and sometimes even her dress. Kingsley secreted a revolver and dagger in her clothes. Slessor went unarmed. Kingsley was glamorous. Slessor, due to malaria, looked scrawny and washed-out. Nevertheless, when Kingsley came to visit Slessor, the two took an immediate liking to each other, and they continued to correspond for the rest of their lives.

Both Marys modeled strong, creative women. Fashionable Kingsley, however, was subordinated to the scientific philosophy of the day. Slessor was subordinated to the Word and Spirit of God. Because of this, poorly educated Mary Slessor was liberated to have broader views and a much wider impact for justice and wholeness than Mary Kingsley.

Social Darwinism was widely believed in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Races were ranked on an evolutionary scale. Mary Kingsley swallowed this, according to Jon Bonk in his article “All Things to All Persons: The Missionary as Racist-Imperialist 1860–1918” (Missiology, July 1980). Therefore Kingsley could write, “The difference between the African race and the white [is not] … a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.… The African is analogous to the [dodo] bird in being, like him, a very early type, whom Nature, in her short-sighted way, has adapted to the local environments, with no eye on [the] future.” As well, according to Bonk, Kingsley was “irked by [missionaries’] willful ignorance as to the true nature of the African mind, which manifested itself in the ‘difficulty [they experience] in regarding the African as anything but a Man and a Brother’ and in the misguidedly dogmatic conviction of ‘the spiritual equality of all colors of Christians’” (p. 300).

Mary Slessor, however, was not bound by contemporary scientific philosophy. She took her marching orders from the gospel. For her, every slack-mouthed slave was made in God’s image, and was someone for whom Christ died. It was never inconvenient, then, to go rushing off in the middle of the night, or of a full agenda, or of a malaria attack, to rescue one more insignificant, threatened person.

Of Mary Slessor, Mary Kingsley said, “This very wonderful lady[’s] … abilities, both physical and intellectual, have given her among the savage tribes a unique position and won her among many, white and black, a profound esteem. Her knowledge of the native, his language, his ways of thought, his diseases, his difficulties, and all that is his, is extraordinary, and the amount of good she has done no man can fully estimate.… This instance of what one white can do would give many lessons in West Coast administration and development. Only the type of man Miss Slessor represents is rare … Miss Slessor stands alone” (Buchan, p. 148).

For women today, what are the priorities? How assertive dare we be? Let us be strong, creative, goal-oriented women. But not only that, let us also be liberated beyond the confines of the philosophies of our day, liberated as was Mary Slessor to the Word and the Spirit.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).